by Larry Tagg
I must have reached Washington about the 10th of March. I found my brother there, just appointed Senator, in place of Mr. Chase. My feelings, wrought up by the events in Louisiana, seemed to him gloomy and extravagant. About Washington I saw but few signs of preparation, though the Southern Senators and Representatives were daily sounding their threats on the floors of Congress, and were publicly withdrawing to join the Confederate Congress at Montgomery.
One day, [my brother] John Sherman took me with him to see Mr. Lincoln. … John said, “Mr. President, this is my brother, Colonel Sherman, who is just up from Louisiana, he may give you some information you want.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Lincoln, “how are they getting along down there?”
I said, “They think they are getting along swimmingly—they are preparing for war.”
“Oh well!” said he. “I guess we’ll manage to keep house.”
I was silent, said no more to him, and we soon left. I was sadly disappointed, and remember that I broke out on John, damning the politicians generally, saying, “You have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get them out as you best can.”
Lincoln was whistling past the graveyard, and William Sherman and other clear-eyed observers knew it. One was a fifty-five-year-old Polish émigré now living in Washington, Count Adam Gurowski, who summed up the alarm of many when he wrote a March 1861 entry in his diary:
Through patronage and offices everybody is to serve his friends and his party, and to secure his political position. Some of the party leaders seem to me similar to children enjoying a long-expected and ardently wished-for toy. … They, the leaders, look to create engines for their own political security, but no one seems to look over Mason and Dixon’s line to the terrible and with lightning-like velocity spreading fire of hellish treason… .
I am told that the President is wholly absorbed in adjusting, harmonizing the amount of various salaries bestowed on various States through its office-holders and office-seekers.
It were better if the President would devote his time to calculate the forces and resources needed to quench the fire. Over in Montgomery the slave-drivers proceed with the terrible, unrelenting, fearless earnestness of the most unflinching criminals… .
Nothing about reorganizing the army, the navy, refitting the arsenals. No foresight, no foresight! either statesmanlike or administrative. Curious to see these men at work. The whole efforts visible to me and to others, and the only signs given by the administration in concert, are the paltry preparations to send provisions to Fort Sumpter [sic]. What is the matter? What are they about?
Seward’s aura of authority now glowed even brighter in contrast with Lincoln, who appeared distracted and uncertain. As men in Charleston aimed their cannon at Sumter, as United States army and navy officers deserted daily and migrated south, as Southern leaders bade farewell to friends in Congress, as clerks in Washington offices boldly pinned on their lapels the blue cockades that were badges of secession, Lincoln appeared to be dithering, spending his daylight hours tending to the self-serving mob of wire-pullers lined up outside his office.
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But in fact, although his tussle with the tar-baby of practical politics tarnished the image of “Honest Abe,” his weeks of attention to patronage were vital, not only to make a government, but to make a party to support it. His infant Republican Party was patched together from miscellaneous elements which had until now been held together only by their opposition to the Democrats. Most Republicans were ex-Whigs, whose party had disappeared in the mid-1850s. But the party also included their adversaries, the ex-Democrats, stout anti-slavery men whose consciences had compelled them to risk their careers by deserting the party in power, and who regarded the ex-Whigs as mere opportunists. There were ex-Know Nothings, and also their foreign-born enemies. There were abolitionists, and men who hated abolitionists. There were those for saving the Union, and those for dividing it. There were conservatives and radicals, ideologues and money men, reformers and spoilsmen. Every Republican who had held office in the last decade was the enemy of some Republican faction, every man offensive to some other man. Until now, the Republicans could submerge all their internal rivalries in a common hostility to the Democratic administration. Now that the party had assumed responsibility for government, all the conflicting interests and objectives, all the dissensions between the different types of men, came to the surface.
These differences were distilled in Lincoln’s Cabinet. For his closest advisors, Lincoln had selected men representing as many different Republican factions as he could. The high council included his three rivals for the nomination—Seward, Edward Bates, and Salmon Chase; two more to redeem promises his managers made at the convention to buy their states’ delegates— Caleb Smith of Indiana and Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania; and two regional choices—Gideon Welles from New England and Montgomery Blair from the Border State of Maryland. This official family roiled with loathing. Among its members was not one personal or political friend of the new President. The lack of harmony was no secret. Democrat Edwin Stanton, writing from Washington, gloated in a letter to Buchanan, “Every day affords proof of the absence of any settled policy, or harmonious … action, in the administration. Seward, Bates, and Cameron, form one wing, Chase, Welles, and Blair the opposite wing. Smith is on both sides, and Lincoln sometimes on one, sometimes on the other. There has been agreement on nothing.”
The Cabinet’s only common coin was distrust, and in this it mirrored the party that Lincoln sought to bind together. Its deep divisions foreshadowed the hostility he would face for the next four years whenever he proposed any broad national policy. From this seven-man Cabinet, no less than four Judases would rise in the months ahead to betray their chief. But the lines along which party opinion had fractured in the past, and would fracture in the future, had in March of 1861 suddenly disappeared. In Lincoln’s first month in office, the crucible of events unfolding in Charleston Harbor had boiled all differences down to one: whether to abandon Fort Sumter or resupply it.
With the sides on this vital question so sharply drawn, Lincoln’s allergy to routine had results in the Cabinet far more dangerous than the unseemly pushing and shoving in the swarming halls of the White House. His easy-going approach to leadership was an invitation for Seward, with his fully developed agenda, to step up and seize the scepter. While he treated the President, as Welles observed, “with a familiarity that sometimes borders on disrespect,” Seward took it upon himself to direct the heads of the other departments as if they were his clerks. Seward declared an end to regular twice-a-week “Cabinet days,” an institution observed since Washington’s time. He decided instead that the Cabinet would convene only by his invitation. When Seward did summon the Secretaries, Lincoln, having no idea how to conduct a Cabinet meeting, presided over formless sessions without dignity and without content. No seats were assigned, with one exception: Seward always sat at the President’s immediate right. Welles’ diary provides a view inside:
There was very little concerted action. At the earlier meetings there was little or no formality; the cabinet meetings were a sort of privy council or gathering of equals, much like a senatorial caucus, where there was no recognized leader and the Secretary of State put himself in advance of the President. The Secretary of State … from his former position as the chief executive of the largest state in the Union, as well as from his recent place as a senator, and from his admitted experience and familiarity with affairs, assumed, and was allowed, as was proper, to take the lead in consultations and also to give tone and direction to the manner and mode of proceedings. The President, if he did not actually wish, readily acquiesced in this.
Instead of convening Cabinet meetings he considered irrelevant, however, Seward preferred to spend his days alone at the President’s side. He moved into a house across Lafayette Park from the Executive Mansion, where he and Lincoln spent long hours chatting and trading stories in his private office. In public their heads were seen bent
together in conversation, walking, driving, and taking meals. Seward made it his business to know every detail of the workings of the other Departments, while always keeping State Department business behind a veil. This overbearing behavior aroused the deep resentment of the other Secretaries, but it also had the effect intended by Seward—it reinforced his popular image as the government’s master spirit.
That Seward had a definite program conferred an advantage over Lincoln, who during March was still searching for a policy. It allowed Seward to march straight to his goal, which in the urgent circumstances of March 1861 was to surrender Fort Sumter as soon as possible. The Secretary of State had been straining for months, through back channels and personal appeals, to accomplish the surrender of the fort, which was crucial to his program of avoiding a shooting war long enough to allow his Union Party constituents in Virginia to win their state elections in May.
Here again Seward enlisted the help of his doddering old ally Winfield Scott. On the day before Lincoln’s inauguration, Scott had delivered written views on the new government’s options, not to Lincoln, but to his old crony William Seward, as if to indicate that he expected the Secretary of State to decide policy. Scott was notorious for being weak with a pen and for having his most important papers written for him by others. In this case, his choice of words and phrasing were remarkably like those of William Seward himself. Certainly Scott’s views coincided exactly with Seward’s, strongly opposed to the horror of a civil war and preferring a “hands-off” policy, even to the point of saying, “Erring Sisters, depart in Peace.” Seward made the most of the document, waving the paper all over Washington in the next few days to show his influence over General Scott and reinforce his claim as the new government’s prime mover.
On March 5, Lincoln’s first morning in office, Major Anderson’s revelation of the exhausted supplies at Sumter was followed by an endorsement by General Scott exactly in step with Seward’s design: “I now see no alternative but a surrender.” On March 9, Lincoln asked Scott for a more thoughtful reexamination of the military situation, and Scott replied two days later in the same pessimistic vein, insisting that evacuation was “almost inevitable,” and that holding it would take “a fleet of war vessels & transports, 5,000 additional regular troops & 20,000 volunteers”—a call for volunteers that would exceed the size of the entire U.S. army, require new acts of Congress to recruit, and take from six to eight months to train. As he read the note, Lincoln, perplexed, did not yet realize that he was reading the mind of William Seward in the hand of Winfield Scott.
On March 14 an anxious Cabinet held two three-hour meetings to discuss General Scott’s written opinion that evacuation of Fort Sumter was a “military necessity.” Each member was asked to answer the question: Was it wise to try to provision the fort? Seward’s reply was, of course, an emphatic “no.” Four more Secretaries—Caleb Smith, Gideon Welles, Simon Cameron, Edward Bates— fell into line behind Seward. Chase equivocated. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair stood alone against surrender. He insisted that giving up the fort would demoralize the North, and that firm action would do more than appeasement to end the rebellion and avoid bloodshed. But the sheer bulk of opinion against holding Sumter, from the highest military officers to a heavy majority of his experienced advisors, swayed the new President. It appeared in mid-March that Lincoln was willing to evacuate the fort. On March 18, he prepared a summary of his advisors’ opinions, writing that the weight was heavily “in favor of withdrawing the Troops from Fort Sumpter [sic].”
Once again, it seemed, William Seward had triumphed. Following on his victories through the Secession Winter and his recent success as ghostwriter of the Inaugural Address, his sweeping victory in the Cabinet vote on Sumter cemented his belief that he was directing affairs, especially in view of the public criticism of Lincoln’s balky start. Seward’s mail was crowded with letters from Unionists telling him as much. One from North Carolina reported that everyone there considered him “the Hector or Atlas of not only his Cabinet, but the giant intellect of the whole north,” while they dismissed Lincoln as “a 3rd rate man.” Prominent Washingtonian Benjamin Ogle Taylor told him, “Unionists look to yourself, and only to you Sir, as a member of the Cabinet—to save the country.”
Seward took this sense of himself as the Premier—the power, the man without limits—into the arena of negotiation, with tragic results. As Lincoln was being sworn in, a trio of commissioners from the new Confederate States of America had arrived in Washington. Martin J. Crawford, A. B. Roman, and John Forsyth had been sent from Montgomery as “ambassadors,” to bring about “the speedy adjustment of all the questions growing out of separation … of two nations,” starting, of course, with the transfer of Fort Sumter. They regarded Seward as the only leader with enough sway to manage a surrender. After all, Seward had told them so. Crawford and Forsyth reported that “a talk with Seward convinced them that he was to rule the new administration.”
The arrival of the commissioners, however, complicated Seward’s attempts to give up the fort. They warned him at the outset that if he failed to treat with them, Fort Sumter would be attacked and war would commence. If that happened, Seward’s grand design would be shattered. On the other hand, any official meeting with the ministers would imply recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. This would also be disaster, since recognition by the European powers could be expected to follow, and the permanent separation of the Cotton States would be more certain than ever.
Here Lincoln’s lax administrative style had its most damaging effect. His laissez-faire manner resulted in an official free-for-all where policy and rumor were indistinguishable, an imbroglio where Seward could make commitments without Lincoln’s knowledge. For the next few weeks, Seward, a man supremely at home in this murky world of backstairs negotiation, played a high-stakes diplomatic game with the rebel envoys through a coterie of gobetweens. For almost two weeks after his arrival in office, Seward dodged the attempts of the commissioners to parley, while at the same time confiding through third parties that, with the influence of himself and General Scott, Fort Sumter would be evacuated.
Simultaneously, Seward carried his whispering campaign to the Washington newspapers. On March 11, the National Intelligencer, a Seward mouthpiece, carried a passionate editorial pleading for withdrawal from Sumter. Even more startling was the announcement by the National Republican, another journal with close ties to Seward, that the Cabinet had decided to evacuate not only Sumter, but Pickens. The news rang like gospel to all corners of the continent. On March 12, two Charleston newspapers, the Courier and the Mercury, gleefully announced that Sumter would soon be turned over without a shot being fired. On March 13, the New York Herald’s Washington correspondent declared in its pages that “I am able to state positively that the abandonment of Fort Sumter has been determined upon by the President and his Cabinet.”
As Seward signaled evacuation, scores of prominent men across the North joined him, Scott, the Cabinet majority, and the millions who advocated a withdrawal. Democratic leader Stephen Douglas rose in the Senate to declare that Fort Sumter belonged to South Carolina and that “Anderson and his gallant band should be instantly withdrawn.” Neal Dow of Maine wrote that a Sumter evacuation would be “approved by the entire body of Republicans in this state” because it was “undoubtedly a Military necessity.” The national mood seemed changed. Even the New York Times reported “growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.” On March 19 the Associated Press reported that Sumter would be surrendered the following day. Seward sent secret runners to the Union Party in Virginia with the news that the evacuation of Sumter was imminent. George Summers, a leading Virginia Unionist, wrote to Seward that the news “acted like a charm” to Unionists there, and “gave us great strength. … A reaction is now going on in the State… . We are masters of our position here, and can maintain it if left alone.”
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While the South cheered the
news of Sumter’s imminent surrender, ironbacks in the North damned Lincoln. Even the pathetic Buchanan had not dared to surrender the Gibraltar of Charleston Harbor! It was nothing less than a folding of the tent, an admission that the Union was dissolved! The Columbus Daily Capital City Fact aired “a burning sentiment of contempt. … Shame upon the subterfuge, that would clothe cowardice in the unfitting garments of ‘military necessity’!” The Cincinnati Daily Times charged Lincoln with “stepping directly into the footsteps of his predecessor,” with “the same supineness, cowardice, imbecility, or whatever else it may be termed, which marked and damned the Administration of Buchanan. … Why, every honest Republican blushed at the infamous hypocricy [sic].”
Privately, too, there was bitter resentment at the humiliation. Henry Villard wrote that “Washington was full of indignant Northern men, in and out of Congress, giving vent to their wrath at the supposed blindness, incompetency, or cowardice … of Lincoln and his Cabinet.” A Springfield friend wondered, “Is it possible that Mr. Lincoln is getting scared?” Charles Francis Adams despaired of Lincoln: “The President is drifting the country into war, by [his] want of decision. Everywhere at this place is discouragement. … I see nothing but incompetency … the man is not equal to the hour.” The nib of George Templeton Strong’s pen bit the page of his diary where he wrote, “The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers. We have never been a nation; we are only an aggregate of communities, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock and without a centre of vigorous national life to keep us together.” Republican hardliners wrote to their man in the Cabinet, Salmon Chase, that Lincoln’s plan to evacuate was “submission to a band of traitors”; Lincoln’s would be “a blacker and more infamous name” than Buchanan’s; “the new administration is done forever”; “The South will proclaim [Lincoln] a Damned fool, and the North a damned Rascal.” Lincoln himself received letters like this blistering curse from New York:
