The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  The carriage approached the Capitol from the west, and Buchanan and Lincoln entered its north door through a protective 50-foot-long passageway enclosed by a high, boarded fence guarded by Marines. A reporter who saw Lincoln as he entered the building noted that he looked pale, fatigued, and anxious. A few minutes later the official party emerged from the east side of the Capitol onto the inaugural platform, and came under the gaze of dozens more of Stone’s riflemen, scanning the crowd in pairs from every window on that side of the building. Stone had received a warning the night before that there would be an attempt to blow up the platform, so directly beneath the boards under Lincoln’s feet were militiamen who had been there all night guarding the structure. They had been joined at daybreak by another battalion of Stone’s District volunteers, who formed a solid semicircular wall in front of the President between the platform and the gathering spectators. Finally, as Lincoln stepped forward to address the crowd and the nation, he could look to his left and see two batteries of artillery, ready and manned, their bronze muzzles lowered on the multitude from the brow of Capitol Hill, with the figure of Winfield Scott, in full plumed regalia, drooping in his buggy alongside.

  Thus, with the glints from hundreds of gun barrels playing over the somber crowd, Abraham Lincoln delivered his half-hour address, then took the oath of office from Chief Justice Taney. The passing of power was saluted by the booming of General Scott’s guns. That evening, a company of Virginia horsemen that, it was rumored, would dash across the Long Bridge and take Lincoln captive at the Inaugural Ball, failed to materialize. Clara Barton was able to write in her diary that night, “The 4th of March has come and gone, and we have a live, Republican President, and, what is perhaps singular, during the whole day we saw no one who appeared to manifest the least dislike to his living.”

  That much, at least, was true. But Southerners heaped contempt on a ceremony that saw, “for the first time in the history of this Country, the Chief Magistrate, in abject terror of his life, inaugurated into his high office under the countenance and protection of shining bayonets, gleaming swords and loaded cannon.” President Lincoln himself must have come away from the day’s ceremonies deeply disturbed by the sight of the grim army that had been assembled for a bodyguard—proof, visible at every hand, that his was an administration conceived in a crucible and installed under siege.

  * * *

  Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address was the most anxiously awaited official pronouncement in the history of the United States. Citizens North and South were eager to know what the incoming President would do to save the nation, and their eagerness was multiplied by the suspense of the year-long silence—it would be his first public utterance since his Cooper Union speech in February of 1860. The new president, painfully aware of the nation’s feverish expectations, had crafted the address for weeks to show jut-jawed firmness to mirror the mood in the North, precisely balanced by dulcet words of forbearance to pacify the South. He fully expected his remarks to act like a soothing oil poured over the troubled waters of the nation. Horace Greeley, who sat behind him on the inaugural platform, testified that Lincoln expected the speech to “dissolve the Confederacy as frost is dissipated by the vernal sun.”

  Lincoln fully expected the Union to be saved, and peace preserved, by holding the iron rod in one hand and extending the olive branch with the other. To satisfy the North and encourage Unionists everywhere, he affirmed at length that the Union was permanent and indissoluble: “I … consider that … the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care … that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. … The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.” Having demonstrated his resolve, however, he immediately waived all Federal jurisdiction in the South: “But beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. … While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of [Federal] offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating … that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices.” His policy, thus stated, faced both ways. He would perform his Constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be observed, but only “so far as practicable,” and “unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the … means, or … direct the contrary.” He would vigorously assert the Federal authority, but he would not exercise it.

  “A President-elect’s Uncomfortable Seat.” Old Abe: “Oh, it’s all well enough to say, that I must support the dignity of my high office by Force, but it’s darned uncomfortable, I can tell you.”

  It soon became evident, to Lincoln’s dismay, that his Inaugural Address had changed nothing and moved no one. Attempting to be all things to all people, it met the same fate as other attempts at conciliation during the previous months. Perhaps secessionist fire-eater T. R. R. Cobb in Montgomery, Alabama, got closest to the truth when he wrote: “We are receiving Lincoln’s inaugural by telegraph, it will not affect one man here, it matters not what it contains.” At the moment Lincoln was sworn into office, there were determined men in both North and South whose passions were already at such a fanatical pitch that the ghost of George Washington himself descending to the platform could not have made them put away the knives they had for each other.

  Even among those on hand to hear Lincoln’s address, those who were predisposed to like it liked it; those who weren’t didn’t. Senator Wigfall of Texas lounged in a Capitol doorway and pantomimed his contempt for Lincoln’s words in full view of the crowd. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., dismissed the affair as “A tall, ungainly man addressing a motley gathering … with a voice elevated to its highest pitch. … a somewhat noticeable absence of pomp, state, ceremony.” The Public Man commented:

  Mr. Lincoln was pale and very nervous, and did not read his address very well. His spectacles troubled him, his position was crowded and uncomfortable, and, in short, nothing had been done to render the performance of this great duty either dignified in effect or, physically speaking, easy for the President. The great crowd in the grounds behaved very well, but manifested little or no enthusiasm, and at one point in the speech Mr. Lincoln was thrown completely off his balance for a moment by a crash not far in front of him, followed by something which for an instant looked like a struggle … a spectator falling out of a tree.

  Henry Adams concluded, “The address has disappointed every one, I think.” The next day, Wall Street rendered its verdict: stock prices fell.

  Response from afar was strictly along party lines. The Republican papers— the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Democrat, the New York Evening Post and Tribune, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican—all applauded politely, but Henry Villard noticed that the inaugural message “was received with nothing like enthusiasm even by the Republicans.” Their opposites, the papers from the already-seceded states, all denounced Lincoln’s address as “just what was expected from him, stupid, ambiguous, vulgar and insolent, and is everywhere considered as a virtual declaration of war.” The voice of the Charleston Mercury was the shrillest of this choir, hearing in the address the “tocsin of battle” from “King LINCOLN—Rail Splitter ABRAHAM—Imperator!” the “Ourang- Outang at the White House,” who “staggers to and fro like a drunken man under the intoxication of his new position.”

  Democrats in the North also hissed the inaugural: “It would have been almost as instructive if President Lincoln had contented himself with telling his audience yesterday a funny story and letting them go,” shrugged the New York Herald. Under the headline “The Country No Wiser than it was Before,” it called the speech “weak, vacillating, unsatisfactory and contradictory.” The Philadelphia Morning Pennsylvanian called it a spectacle “to terrify the heart of every patriot,” with the President “surrounded and guarded not by the honest hearts of a happy people, but safely esconced [sic] out of the people’s r
each, within a military cordon bristling with bayonets.” It was “a sad disappointment to the country,” according to one Pittsburgh journal. “A wretchedly botched and unstatesmanlike paper,” agreed the Hartford Times. The Chicago Times concluded that the Union was now “lost beyond hope.” New York City’s Democratic mayor Fernando Wood signaled his reaction by refusing to fly the national flag over City Hall.

  Much depended on how the speech was received in the eight key Border States, the slave states whose loyalties were still hanging in the balance between their departed sister states to the south and the loyal Union members to the north. Privately, there was new confidence. Virginia Governor John Letcher thought Lincoln’s address strengthened the resolve of conservatives to remain calm. Jubal Early of Virginia and John A. Gilmer of North Carolina were similarly encouraged by its assurances.

  Their optimism, however, was expressed privately in letters to friends. More widely heard were the fiery blasts of the Border State editors. The Baltimore Exchange discerned in Lincoln’s message a promise of bloodshed: “If it means what it says, it is the knell and requiem of the Union, and the death of hope.” The Arkansas True Democrat announced, “If declaring the Union perpetual means coercion, then LINCOLN’S INAUGURAL MEANS WAR!” A North Carolina editor damned it as “deceptive. It coats with the semblance of peace and friendship what smells of gore and hate.” The Richmond Enquirer heard in it “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic… . Sectional war awaits only the signal gun. … The question, ‘Where shall Virginia go?’ is answered by Mr. Lincoln. She must go to war.”

  Since every reader was by now familiar with Lincoln’s lack of formal education, it was smart and fashionable to deride Lincoln’s perceived lack of literary style. The Jersey City American Standard found the address “involved, coarse, colloquial, devoid of ease and grace, and bristling with obscurities and outrages against the simplest rules of syntax.” The Davenport Democrat also graded it down: “a wishy-washy, unscholarly affair—unworthy of an undergraduate, to say nothing of a statesman.” The Philadelphia Evening Journal called it “one of the most awkwardly constructed official documents we have ever inspected. It abounds in platitudes, incoherencies, solecisms, illogical deductions, and is pitiably apologetical for the uprising of the Republican party.” Another Philadelphia paper presumed to rank it historically: “A lame, unsatisfactory and discreditable production inferior in every respect to anything that has ever emanated from any former President.” A New Orleans editor sneered at it as “mean, involved and inconclusive, evidently such as only persons of very imperfect education would employ.” “A loose, disjointed, rambling affair,” pronounced the Chicago Times. The Toronto Leader heard a “tawdry and corrupt schoolboy style.” Even ex-President John Tyler criticized Lincoln’s grammar in a letter to a friend.

  * * *

  Among those who did not criticize the language of the First Inaugural, most concluded that it must be the work of someone else. William Russell of the London Times told his readers that the President’s message “is generally attributed to Mr. Seward.” In fact, most informed onlookers, North and South, thought Abraham Lincoln was not the man in charge. They assumed the raw, inexperienced new Chief Executive was in the pocket of his smarter, abler Secretary of State-designate, New York Senator William Seward. They expected what savvy Springfield Republican editor Samuel Bowles expected: government by “the New Yorker with his Illinois attachment.”

  Chapter 15

  The Struggle with Seward, Then Sumter

  “A blindness and stolidity without a parallel in the

  history of intelligent statesmanship.”

  In December, William H. Seward had been uncharacteristically subdued. His lack of vigor was due mostly to his lingering disappointment at having been refused his party’s nomination and replaced by an unknown. Wallowing in self-pity, on November 18 he had moped, “I am without schemes or plans, hopes, desires, or fears for the future that need trouble anybody, as far as I am concerned.” But Seward was also restrained by caution. As disconsolate as he was, he still had an eye to the future, and so was reluctant to take any step that might jeopardize a high post in the coming administration.

  The President-elect, for his part, had always considered Seward the obvious choice for first place in his Cabinet by virtue of his long history of leadership and ability. On December 8, 1860, Lincoln mailed his offer of the State Department to Seward, writing warmly, “It has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination … to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration.” In so doing, Lincoln’s aim was to deputize Seward—“Mr. Republican”—to keep party ranks straight and facing front on the political battlefields of Washington. Seward would carry the fight against compromise into the Senate chamber and House floor, into smoky hotel lobbies, parlors, and dining rooms, even the Buchanan White House, until Lincoln himself arrived for the swearing-in. What Lincoln could not know was how faithfully Seward would follow orders.

  * * *

  For, in the weeks following Lincoln’s election, as South Carolina hurtled toward secession and bitterness over slavery threatened to tear the nation in two, Seward saw political opportunity in a new national majority that was alarmed by the extremists on both sides and eager for compromise. This new majority needed a statesman to lead them and give them a voice. William Seward was the nation’s most intelligent, most seasoned, and most talented statesman-at-large. Nor were his talents bridled by any reluctance to switch his position when it was to his advantage. He was the canniest of politicians, always alert to the main chance, and he was especially alert now, so soon after seeing his presidential hopes smashed on the third ballot of the Republican convention.

  Seward did not say yes to Lincoln’s offer of the State Department immediately. Before he responded, he sped to Albany to huddle with his partner Thurlow Weed, just before Weed entrained to meet Lincoln for a consultation in Springfield. Looking for a way to gauge Lincoln’s susceptibility to a moderating influence, Seward and Weed collaborated over the weekend of December 15 and 16 on an editorial that appeared in the December 17 issue of Weed’s Albany Evening Journal, one that favored compromise with the South. They knew a copy of the article would reach Lincoln by the time he met with Weed three days later.

  When he read the editorial on December 20, an irritated Lincoln expressed his disapproval to Weed face to face. Lincoln didn’t see the need for compromise. Even on that historic day—the very day that South Carolina announced it had seceded from the Union, with its national Palmetto Flag raised and all of Charleston surging, drunken with delight, into the streets— Lincoln dismissed the secession movement, telling Weed it was just “some loud threats and much muttering.” The President-elect quickly changed the subject, sounded out Weed on Cabinet appointments, and apparently put the ugly business in the South out of his mind.

  But, if he had thought longer on the timing and the temper of the Evening Journal editorial, Lincoln would have realized that here was a window to the soul of William Seward. Seward’s appraisal of the situation differed from Lincoln’s. Seward was a man whose temperament fitted him for the give-and-take of the Senate. He was a student of the possible, distrustful of extremists, always willing to modify his position if it was necessary to buy action. Seward embraced only causes he thought could win. His unwillingness to tilt at windmills, his absence of idealism, and his lack of self-righteousness allowed him to have friends on both sides of the slavery issue, among abolitionists as well as slave-holders. Now, his keen vision—unclouded by strong feeling, in contrast to Lincoln’s— and his place at the center of the Washington scene allowed him to realize, before Lincoln did, that the fundamental problem that faced the government was no longer slavery, it was secession. As Northerners slowly became aware of the gravity of the threat to the nation, they would have time to wonder at the irony of the Republicans’ choice of a nominee. They had rejected, for his extremism, Seward, the man who now embraced compromise; and chosen i
nstead, for his moderation, Lincoln, the man who would never yield an inch.

  “The Inside Track.” Thurlow Weed to President Elect—“Trust to my friend Seward—trust to us. We’ll compromise this little difficulty for you. But trust to us. Gentlemen from the country are often egregiously swindled by unprincipled sharpers. (Impressively) Trust to us.”

  Many, perhaps most, Republicans at this time expected Seward to assume his rightful ascendancy over Lincoln in the new government. The lives of the two men, on a balance, weighed heavily in favor of Seward. He was eight years older than Lincoln. When Lincoln was still a boy attending irregular “blab schools” in log cabins, Seward was studying at stately Union College in Schenectady. When young Lincoln was wrestling, telling yarns and keeping store in New Salem, Seward was leader of the New York Senate. When Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer starting his Springfield practice, Seward was the thirtythree- year-old governor of New York. When Lincoln was quitting Washington after one term in the House, Seward was the New York senator guiding the hand of President Zachary Taylor. Since then, for the last dozen years, Seward had been senator from the most populous state in the Union, the man synonymous with the Free Soil movement and the Republican Party, while Lincoln plied his law practice in obscurity on the Illinois Eighth Circuit. It is no wonder that many Americans believed the fate of the nation rested, not with Abraham Lincoln, but with William Seward. And it is no wonder that Seward himself heartily agreed with them.