The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Events, however, seemed to confirm the wisdom of Seward’s patient policy. On February 4, Seward was rewarded with his first victory in the biggest prize of all—Virginia. Voters there showed their attachment to the Union by overwhelmingly electing Unionist delegates to their secession convention. A friend exulted to Seward, “The Gulf Confederacy can count Virginia out of their little family arrangement.” Henry Adams wrote hosannas to Seward in a letter to the Boston Advertiser, saying, “For more than two months the Seward republicans have been watching, hoping, praying for the signs of a break in the storm. Governor Seward’s reputation as a political prophet, his influence as a statesman … depended and was pledged on this result. He has gone on the principle that this was only a temporary fever, and now it has reached the climax and favorably passed it.” The tide, it seemed, had turned. For the next month, right up to the time of Lincoln’s inauguration, victories for Unionism in the Border States were as consistent as defeats had been in the Cotton States the two previous months. With Lincoln about to take office, seven slave states had left the Union, but the northernmost eight were still safely in.

  The young Adams sketched Seward in the glow of these triumphs: “The ancient Seward is in high spirits and chuckles himself hoarse with his stories. He says it’s all right. We shall keep the border states, and in three months or thereabouts, if we hold off, the Unionists and Disunionists will have their hands on each other’s throats in the cotton states.” The man who regarded himself as the guiding light of the coming administration had reason to boast. He had shepherded the national authority safely through dangerous days into the hands of the President-elect, and at the same time had not only avoided any aggression or hostility which would have wrecked his program of returning the Cotton States, but had held the majority of the slave states in the Union, and kept alive the hope that they would lure the departed states back into the Union. “Those who saw and followed Mr. Seward during all the anxieties and cares of this long struggle,” wrote Adams, would not forget his example. “Cheerful where everyone else was in despair; cool and steady where everyone else was panic-struck; clear-sighted where other men were blind; grand in resource where every resource seemed exhausted; guiding by quiet and unseen influences those who seemed to act independently on their own ground.” With this “armory of weapons, [Seward] fought, during these three months of chaos, a fight which might go down in history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.”

  The nation’s political chiefs would now weigh Seward’s triumph of statecraft against the tentative, halting steps of the anonymous President-elect, who “crept into Washington,” “cowardly and disgraceful.”

  * * *

  Seward made sure he was the first man to greet Lincoln when the buggy from the train station deposited the President-elect at the side door of Willard’s Hotel on the morning of February 23. From the hour of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, Seward took pains to be seen always at his side. On that first morning, Seward took breakfast with Lincoln, then squired him around the places of government. The first evening, Lincoln ate dinner at Seward’s house. The next morning Lincoln appeared on Seward’s arm again, for services at St. John’s Church. In the week before the inauguration, wherever Lincoln went—to meet with President Buchanan and his Cabinet, to meet with Congress, to meet with the Supreme Court—Seward was always there to introduce him, leaving the general impression that he controlled Lincoln’s schedule. “Seward has had Old Abe under his thumb every moment since his arrival,” grumbled one observer. Vice President-elect Hamlin, alarmed, asked Lincoln frankly what many were asking: was his administration to be a Seward Administration or a Lincoln Administration? Lincoln assured him he would be his own man, but Hamlin went away unconvinced.

  The first important test of wills between Lincoln and Seward was fought that week behind closed doors at Suite No. 6 at Willard’s over the makeup of the Cabinet. Seward insisted, as the “Premier,” on being consulted in the choice of members. He invoked Andrew Jackson, who had always maintained that the Cabinet should be a unit, and pointed to the fact that all recent Cabinets had been collections of like minds. Seward—an ex-Whig, a moderate, favoring compromise—wanted the Cabinet made in his image: men like Charles Francis Adams of New England, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, plus any of a number of Border State Unionists. Lincoln, however, wanted to cast the net wider, to have a “ministry of all the talents.” He wanted to include Salmon Chase of Ohio, Gideon Welles of New England, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland—all ex-Democrats, all “iron-backed,” uncompromising Republicans. The stakes of the Cabinet battle were enormous, and the campaign for the Cabinet’s soul was appropriately ferocious. For the next several days, for hours on end, dozens of business and political leaders from every faction came to Suite No. 6 pleading, wheedling, storming, and demanding. When, by March 2, two days before the inauguration, no dent had been made in Lincoln’s resolve to stand by his own choices, Seward took pen in hand and wrote out his resignation.

  The morning of Inauguration Day, before the parade to the Capitol for the swearing-in, Lincoln wrote his reply to Seward, the man who considered himself the leader of the Republican Party, the man without whom neither the party nor the nation could be saved. Lincoln’s was a blunt request that Seward take back his resignation—by nine o’clock the following morning. He handed it to his secretary to be copied, with the comment, “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick.”

  Lincoln had called Seward’s bluff, and the New Yorker yielded. His plan, he knew, could not be worked—he could not heal the nation—if he were cast into the outer darkness. In a letter to his wife, Seward wrapped himself in the flag. “A distracted country appeared before me,” he explained. “I did not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance.” The letter revealed a man who still regarded himself as the savior of the republic, and still was dismissive of Lincoln.

  For even at the moment of his capitulation on the Cabinet, Seward had more reason than ever to believe that he molded national policy. Seward had just heard Lincoln deliver an Inaugural Address that his own hand had guided. The Lincoln of the First Inaugural was much more conciliatory than the Lincoln of Springfield, and this had been due largely to changes written into the speech by Seward. After church at St. John’s on the day after his arrival, Lincoln had handed him a draft of the speech, and Seward had remained in his library for the better part of the day, going over the document word by word. He made scores of small changes, removing any hint of threat, rounding off any hard edges that would ruin his own program of appeasement of the Border States. Seward insisted on a softer stance, schooling Lincoln with the claim, “Only the soothing words which I have spoken have saved us and carried us along thus far. Every loyal man and indeed, every disloyal man in the South, will tell you this.”

  Besides crowding each page with softening phrases, Seward made a major change in Lincoln’s inaugural: he deleted the President’s promise to abide by the Republican antislavery platform. If Lincoln ignored his advice, Seward warned, the speech would “give such advantage to the Disunionists that Virginia and Maryland will secede, and we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty days, be obliged to fight the South for this capital, with a divided North for our reliance.” Lincoln conceded. He removed any mention of the Republican platform.

  And Seward re-wrote Lincoln’s ending. The inaugural, which had until now been a well-reasoned, logical, lawyerly dissertation like all Lincoln’s earlier speeches, was transformed by Seward’s addition of a noble and poetic finish. Lincoln reworked it into the powerful conclusion:

  I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the bett
er angels of our nature.

  Personally, too, the New Yorker had found a place in Lincoln’s heart. For in Seward Lincoln had met his “man of audacity”: quick-witted—cheeky and self possessed—never off his guard on any occasion. Seward was a man who had the nerve to lecture Edwin Booth on how to improve his acting, the temerity to hold forth on the art of dress to the meticulous Adamses. Lincoln was drawn to this man who shared his own lack of malice and added to it a boldness, a fearlessness, an ability to laugh while others’ teeth chattered. But, as Gideon Welles later wrote regretfully, “It was this almost implicit trust in Mr. Seward at the commencement which for a time caused serious embarrassment, and almost forfeited the confidence of the country in the ability and integrity of the President to administer the government.”

  * * *

  Lincoln’s “hands-off” inaugural policy was only possible in the era of weak government. It was the very feebleness of Federal power that allowed Lincoln to think that he could avoid a clash with the South. Here again, it is important to realize the immense difference between the bulk of the Federal government today—which, if withdrawn, would completely collapse any state, both socially and economically—and the tiny government Lincoln headed. At the time, Federal presence in the South was felt in only four ways: U.S. marshals and judges administered the few Federal laws; postmen delivered the mail; customs officers collected duties in Southern ports; and a handful of soldiers maintained forts and arsenals. If these meager agents suspended their activities, Federal authority would become an abstraction. Lincoln thought he could continue this limbo government indefinitely in the seceded states without sparking a conflict.

  In order to give the impression of authority but avoid a clash, he only needed to “hold, occupy, and possess” the four Southern forts that were still in Federal hands. They were Forts Jefferson and Taylor, two insignificant and isolated forts in the Florida Keys; Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay, out of range of rebel shore guns and not in danger; and Fort Sumter, nestled in Charleston Harbor, within easy cannon range and holding enormous emotional significance. It was Sumter to which all eyes were turned. As a loyal Union bastion nestled in the “Cradle of the Rebellion,” it was certain to become a symbol, a naked test of wills, a lightning rod that could spark revolt into war. Even so, Lincoln reckoned that Sumter and the others could be quietly held, as promised, with the status quo undisturbed.

  But in his first morning as president, Lincoln learned that his reckoning had been based on a false premise. For when he arrived at his office on March 5, he found on his desk an urgent message from Major Anderson, the commander at Fort Sumter. It told him that the fort, unless it was resupplied, must be surrendered by mid-April; there was only bread enough for twenty-eight more days, salt pork for slightly longer. The news meant that, on the first morning of its existence, the most eagerly awaited policy in the nation’s history—Lincoln’s exhaustively considered rule of action, shaped in his mind through four months of agonized thought and consultation and proclaimed in his Inaugural Address—had to be abandoned. Now, he must do one of two things: surrender the fort, the symbol of national authority, or supply the fort by force, breaking his vow of passivity and knocking the chip off South Carolina’s shoulder. This dilemma, trying to steer between the Scylla of national disgrace and the Charybdis of civil war, would consume him in the coming weeks.

  “Prof. Lincoln in His Great Feat of Balancing.”

  This knottiest of problems, however, came at a time when Lincoln was besieged at all hours by the inevitable horde of spoils-seekers. He was charged with the most sweeping removal of federal officials in the nation’s history—a complete turnover of appointees, from clerks’ assistants to foreign diplomats. He told Villard, “It was bad enough in Springfield, but it was child’s play compared with this tussle here. I hardly have a chance to eat or sleep. I am fair game for everybody of that hungry lot.” He had to reward the men who had “made” him, and still take care to distribute spoils to every side. He had to satisfy each geographical area and all men of eminence, while balancing the hazards of offending any of the squabbling factions in the Republican ranks. He had to consult with the Cabinet officers, bargain with the Congressional delegations, haggle with the editors. With all the rivalries, intrigues, and perplexities in the young party, pressure came from every direction, and everyone spoke in imperatives and pressed their favorites.

  Like a plague of locusts they came, forty thousand eager hopefuls, crowding into Washington from all over the North. Every man who had tacked up a banner at a rally or hired a hall for a meeting was convinced he had elected the President, and he came to claim his just reward—as a diplomat, a paymaster, a port collector, a marshal, a superintendent, a postmaster, an agent, a deputy, an assistant, a clerk. At Willard’s, two blocks from the Executive Mansion, one correspondent saw the hotel bulging with “more scheming, plotting heads, more aching and joyful hearts, than any building of the same size ever held in the world.” Office-seekers crowded the main corridors and overflowed the staircases and landings into the halls, reading-room, and barbershop, the writing-room, onto the porch and down the steps. A hotel clerk told the reporter that “two thousand and five hundred patriots” had recently dined in the main dining room. “Everybody wants a place and it must be found, or he’ll know the reason he’s not in Abraham’s bosom,” he quipped. Seward wrote to his wife, “Solicitants for offices besiege the President … . The grounds, halls, stairways, closets, are filled with applicants.” The crush was so bad, he told her, that it was difficult to get in and out of Lincoln’s office. Senator Fessenden of Maine wrote home, “I have been to see him two or three times, but stayed but a few moments each time, as I was pained and disgusted with the ill-bred, ravenous crowd that was around him.” In early April, Edwin Stanton wrote to James Buchanan, “Mr. Lincoln I have not seen. He is said to be very much broken down with the pressure that is upon him in respect to appointments.”

  The exhausted President was making things worse for himself by his own clumsiness at administration. He was a stranger to routine, an enemy of rules. He adopted no hours for business, but opened his doors to this solid press of bodies from nine in the morning until dark. Lincoln himself later admitted to a friend that when he entered office, “he was entirely ignorant not only of the duties, but of the manner of doing the business.” According to close friend Henry Whitney, “Mr. Lincoln had no method, system or order in his exterior affairs; he had no library, no clerk, no stenographer; he had no commonplace book, no index rerum, no diary. Even when he was President and wanted to preserve a memorandum of anything he noted it down on a card and stuck it in a drawer or in his vest pocket.” Those around him noticed his lack of system, and they shook their heads and complained to friends. Seward confided to Charles Francis Adams that Lincoln had “much absorption in the details of office dispensation, but little application to great ideas.” Senator Charles Sumner told Adams, “The difficulty with Mr Lincoln is that he has no conception of his situation. And having no system in his composition he has undertaken to manage the whole thing as if he knew all about it.” Agreed Adams, “He is ignorant, and must have help.” So too thought Senator Fessenden: “Our poor President is having a hard time of it. He came here tall, strong and vigorous, but has worked himself almost to death. The good fellow thinks it is his duty to see to everything, and to do everything himself, and consequently does many things foolishly.”

  The press, witnessing the spectacle of a historic stampede of pigs to the national trough, grew caustic at the alarming incongruity of a President preoccupied with presiding over this unseemly shoving match while showing no sign of a policy toward the growing national emergency in Charleston Harbor. In the New York Herald, Lincoln appeared as a Nero, fiddling while the nation tottered toward catastrophe. By mid-March, the Herald was publishing fresh insults in every edition, calling Lincoln “unconciliatory,” “ignorant,” “vicious,” “fanatical,” “mean,” “cowardly,” “fatal,” and “imbecile
” (a favorite epithet of the time, used in its former meaning of “weak,” or “impotent”). Even the usually supportive New York Times rebuked Lincoln, declaring that he “owes a higher duty to the country … than to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters.” Lincoln confessed to Times editor Henry J. Raymond, “I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning in the other.”

  * * *

  And he did not see how high the flames were rising. The new seven-state republic in the South pulsed with drumbeats and the rhythmic tread of thousands of recruits drilling. On March 6, two days after Lincoln took office, the Confederate Congress authorized President Davis to accept 100,000 soldiers. Southern state governors raised regiments and hurried them off to join the new army, aided by a ready militia that had been drilling intently for eighteen months, ever since the John Brown raid had raised the boogeyman of armed slave revolt. Galvanized by a combination of revolutionary zeal and the instinct to protect their homes, Southern men rushed into national service. By the beginning of April, the Confederate army was 45,000 strong, already three times the size of the United States army, which was spread out in tiny outposts watching Indians in the West. Five thousand Confederate troops poured into Charleston alone, which bristled each day with new artillery emplacements sighting their guns on Sumter.

  Lincoln’s almost mystical belief in the Union would be a powerful blessing to the nation in the coming war, but in March of 1861, his delusion that most Southerners shared his belief endangered the republic. While he waited in vain for loyal Southerners to rise, Confederate armies prepared for battle. It was a military advantage that would last deep into the second year of the coming war. Lincoln’s mistake was clearest to those who had been in the South, who had witnessed first-hand the unanimity and military excitement there, and then, coming north, found confusion and complacency. When they went to warn him, Lincoln had a too-easy way of talking about the national predicament, particularly a maddening habit of giving the glib reply, “I guess we’ll keep house.” Soon-to-be-General William Sherman was introduced to him during this time, and remembered later: