The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

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The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln Page 23

by Larry Tagg


  Dear Sir I voted for you thinking that in you the country would find a defender of its rights & honor. I am totally disappointed. You are as destitute of policy, as weak, and vassalating as was your predecessor … . Do you imagine your course is meeting the favor of republicans—even in New York? No Sir! Democrats rejoice over it, knowing that it will demoralize & overthrow the party, Give up Sumpter, Sir, & you are as dead politically as John Brown is physically. … You have got to do this thing Sir, else the country will do it without you. … As a republican I am sorry to have to say these things. But facts vindicate this statement, Either act, immediately & decisively or resign & go home.

  … and this plea from Cincinnati:

  Thirty days more of “Peace Policy” at Washington—and not only the Republican party, but the Government itself will be gone to destruction or placed beyond remedy! We have been beaten in our City election—the same in St. Louis—Cleveland—Rhode Island—Brooklyn—and lost two Members of Congress in Connecticut—all from the demoralization and discouraging effect produced by the apparent inaction and temporizing policy of the new Administration, and the impression that Fort Pickens was going to be given up also to the rebels!

  … The most fatal infatuation that ever did or can possess a statesman is the idea of a Peace Policy in the present emergency! It only encourages and strengthens the enemy, while it disheartens the friends of the Union in the seceded States, as well as the real friends of the Union every where!

  … Give not an inch—and dont be afraid of war! Do what you will—War, (to some extent) is inevitable!

  In the Senate, an enraged Lyman Trumbull turned up the heat on Lincoln, introducing a resolution that “the true way to preserve the Union is to enforce the laws of the Union,” and “it is the duty of the President to use all the means in his power to hold and protect the public property of the United States”—a hint at impeachment. The influential New York merchants, until now strong proponents of Seward’s “hands-off” line, finally saw the Confederate threat to New York trade and reversed themselves, printing a belligerent call for Lincoln to “shut up every Southern port, destroy its commerce, and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states.” Indeed, the worst thing for business, they agreed, was this damned uncertainty, and the Times reflected their mood, declaring, “A state of war would almost be preferable.”

  In the torture created by the drift of the administration, the exasperated New York papers indeed reached a rare note of unison. “Come to the Point!” demanded the Tribune—“If we are to fight, so be it; if we are to have peace, so much the better. … At all events, let this intolerable suspense and uncertainty cease!” Lincoln’s vacillation was no better than “the disgraceful policy of his predecessor,” howled the New York Evening Post. “Wanted—A Policy” shouted the Times, and devoted two columns to a broadside: “It is idle to conceal the fact that the Administration thus far has not met public expectations,” it scolded. “The Union is weaker now than it was a month ago. Its foes have gained courage, and its friends have lost heart.” Lincoln’s administration had exhibited “a blindness and stolidity without a parallel in the history of intelligent statesmanship.” Lincoln himself had “spent time and strength in feeding rapacious and selfish partisans, which should have been bestowed upon saving the Union,” and “we tell him … that he must go up to a higher level than he has yet reached.” Lincoln’s influential German friend, Carl Schurz, sent a warning from the Northwest:

  There is a general discontent pervading all classes of society. Everybody asks: what is the policy of the Administration? And everybody replies: Any distinct line of policy, be it war or a recognition of the Southern Confederacy, would be better than this uncertain state of things. Our defeat at the recent elections has taught us a lesson which can hardly be misunderstood. The Republicans are disheartened, groping in the dark, not knowing whether to support or oppose the Administration.

  * * *

  Seward, of course, had leaked his own Sumter policy to the press in the hope of bullying Lincoln’s into line. But while Seward waited for his will to be done—for the troublesome garrison at Sumter to file solemnly out and sail home—he still had the problem of what to do with the Confederate commissioners. By mid-March, he could stall a meeting with the rebel trio no longer. He knew he must reject their request for a meeting and that soon they must withdraw, that the signal would be given for the lanyards to be yanked on the Charleston guns, the shells would fly, the masonry of Sumter would be blasted into powder, the war cry would go up from a million throats, and his policy would end in failure. So, with a new recklessness born of desperation, Seward improvised yet again.

  On March 15, during a conversation with Alabamian Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell, Seward let fall that the reason he couldn’t meet with the commissioners was “because the evacuation of Sumter was as much as the administration could bear at one time.” Startled by this statement and realizing its implications, Campbell probed further. He was going to write a letter to Jefferson Davis, he said. “What shall I say on the subject of Fort Sumter?”

  Seward replied, “You may say to him that before that letter reaches him … how far is it to Montgomery?”

  “Three days,” answered Campbell.

  “You may say to him,” continued Seward—the man of audacity—quickwitted— self-possessed and equal to all occasions—“that before that letter reaches him, the telegraph will have informed him that Sumter will have been evacuated.”

  Campbell immediately rushed to see the commissioners, as Seward knew he would, and assured them in writing that Sumter would be evacuated in five days. After the five days passed and Sumter had not been surrendered as promised, Seward appeared unruffled. When the suspicious commissioners sent Campbell back for an explanation, Seward chided the judge in his most cheerful and buoyant manner—“after all, these things can’t be expected to move with ‘bank accuracy’!”—and pledged again that the fort would be given up. In Charleston, each successive day was now being named “Evacuation Day.”

  The President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, had been forgotten in all of this. He knew nothing of these conversations. Seward, in assuming Lincoln had been convinced by the Cabinet vote to surrender Fort Sumter, had erred. Even in the din of the shouting during the tense weeks of the Sumter dilemma, Lincoln was listening only to his most deep-seated political instinct. As his friend Alexander McClure put it, “In all political or administrative movements Lincoln played the waiting game. When he did not know what to do, he was the safest man in the world to trust to do nothing.” The President privately told his secretary, John Hay, “My policy is to have no policy.” He remained undecided and kept his own counsel. Running up the white flag was a conclusion he was not ready to accept.

  Instead, on March 21, he dispatched two trusted friends, Stephen A. Hurlbut and Ward Lamon, to Charleston by train to find out first-hand how much Union sentiment remained in the Deep South. Once there, Lamon, who had been Lincoln’s closest companion on the February train procession to Washington, played his part poorly. He met with all the principals, and convinced everyone, from the Governor of South Carolina to the loyal soldiers in the fort, that Sumter would be surrendered. While he was in Charleston he corresponded, not with the President, but with Seward. His message—“I am satisfied of the policy and propriety of immediately evacuating fort Sumter” —left no doubt that even Lamon had dismissed Lincoln and now swerved to the Premier. Hurlbut, fortunately, did his job quietly and ably. Once back in Washington on March 27, he handed Lincoln a decisive sixteen-page report: “Unquestionably separate nationality is a fixed fact,” it said. “They expect a golden era, when Charleston shall be a great commercial emporium.” He saw there “an unanimity of sentiment which is to my mind astonishing.” There was “no attachment to the Union.” At least five Cotton States were “irrevocably gone. … There is positively nothing to appeal to.” Reading this, the scales fell from Lincoln’s eyes. He saw clearly the stark s
cene before him. The Deep South would never come back peacefully. Forbearance and appeasement would never bring reunion.

  The next day, March 28, matters came to a head. On that day General Scott sent Lincoln a message advising him to abandon both forts—Fort Pickens as well as Fort Sumter—since “the evacuation of both the forts would instantly soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slave-holding states, and render their cordial adherence to the Union perpetual.” These were too obviously Seward’s words. This time the Premier had overplayed his hand. Sumter could reasonably be given up on the basis of “military necessity,” but Pickens never. Lincoln’s disillusionment with General Scott was complete. The military master on whom he had relied was unmasked as Seward’s shill. Lincoln called the Cabinet hurriedly into session that evening, and there told them, with strong emotion, Scott’s new advice. After a moment of amazed silence, there were curses against the now-obvious partisanship of Scott. A new vote was taken on Sumter, and the majority, which two weeks before had voted for surrender, switched sides. All but Seward and Smith now voted to send provisions and hold the fort. Lincoln had already made up his mind, however. If he had ever seriously considered evacuating Sumter, he had repented. He now prepared decisively to aid the fort. He had read a second opinion, prepared by naval officer Gustavus Fox, which said that small, fast tugboats, backed by warships, could run past the rebel guns under cover of darkness and land supplies at Sumter’s gate. On March 29, after pacing in his office through an entire sleepless night, Lincoln wrote a request that Fox go to New York and prepare his expedition.

  Seward saw immediately that, in order to remain the author of events, he would have to move boldly and fast. With only a few days to retrieve the situation before the Sumter expedition sailed, the Secretary of State improvised new schemes with frantic energy.

  First, in an eleventh-hour effort to prompt a withdrawal from Sumter, he put forward a new plan to reinforce Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor as a public show that, at the same time that Sumter was being evacuated by military necessity, “the possessions and authority of the United States” would be strictly maintained in the Gulf. On the 29th, the same day Lincoln’s orders for Fox’s expedition went out, Seward organized his own expedition—kept secret, even from the Secretaries of War and the Navy—to reinforce Pickens.

  In addition, Seward—now more than ever the man of audacity—prepared an amazing document, one that, in one stroke, would relieve the bumbling Lincoln from control of the administration and put himself in charge. He headed his fantastic paper “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration,” and laid it before President Lincoln on April 1. It began with a harsh indictment: “We are at the end of a month’s administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign.” It then provided a solution: “CHANGE THE QUESTION BEFORE THE PUBLIC FROM ONE UPON SLAVERY” to a question of “UNION OR DISUNION.” To accomplish this, Seward repeated his proposal to evacuate Fort Sumter, since it was associated with the slavery question, and substitute the defense of Pickens. Seward then recommended that Lincoln declare war on France and Spain, reasoning that the Cotton States would rush to join a trumped-up war rather than be left out of the long-sought land grab for the slave-rich Caribbean islands. Seward climaxed his startling “Thoughts” with nothing less than a quiet coup attempt, the culmination of his struggle with Lincoln for control of the government. He coolly suggested that Lincoln abdicate his constitutional authority and delegate him, Seward, to pursue and direct policy:

  Whatever policy we adopt there must be an energetic prosecution of it.

  For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue it and direct it incessantly.

  Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it,

  or

  Devolve it on some member of the cabinet. Once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide.

  It is not my especial province.

  But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.

  If Lincoln was taken aback by Seward’s lunge for power, he never lost his temper, nor, even in the crucible of those fateful days, his equilibrium. To Seward’s suggestion of a transfer of authority, Lincoln replied in person, with elegant restraint and a simplicity that allowed no argument: “If this must be done, I must do it.”

  Even now, however, Seward could not bear to relax his grip on the shreds of his program. He summoned to Washington John B. Baldwin, a leading Unionist from Virginia, whose all-important state now teetered on the brink of secession, to sway Lincoln toward a surrender. Lincoln, however, would not be bent. His first words in his meeting with the Virginian were, “I am afraid you have come too late.”

  Meanwhile, Seward doggedly persisted in his elaborate minuet with the Confederate commissioners. On March 30, Judge Campbell arrived again at Seward’s door to inquire about the delay in evacuating Sumter. Seward put him off until April 1, when he wrote a note stating, “I am satisfied the Government will not undertake to supply Fort Sumter without giving notice to Governor Pickens.”

  “What does this mean?” Campbell asked. “Does the President design to attempt to supply Sumter?”

  Seward lied. “No, I think not. It is a very irksome thing for him to surrender it. His ears are open to everyone, and they fill his head with schemes for supply. I do not think he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”

  Campbell wrote to Jefferson Davis laying blame for the delay on Lincoln: “the President is light, inconstant, and variable. His ear is open to every one— and his resolutions are easily bent.” Over the next few days, Southern suspicions were raised by the bustle of activity in New York harbor. To Campbell’s new inquiry about the ships being prepared, Seward gave his last false assurance on April 7, when he scribbled off an enigmatic note without signature or date: “Faith as to Sumter fully kept. Wait and see.”

  The false pledges coming from Seward’s desk would have their terrible consequences in the days ahead. Meanwhile, as newspapers printed reports of “a large military expedition … fitting out in the Northern ports,” the nation held its breath. The New York Herald condemned Lincoln as a bringer of war, predicting, “the Lincoln administration will be compelled to succumb in disgrace amidst the execrations of the people and the curses of mankind.” As the Sumter-bound fleet left port on April 8 and 9, the Herald slashed at the “vicious, imbecile, demoralized Administration,” and called for Lincoln’s head, declaring, “Our only hope now against civil war of an indefinite duration seems to lie in the over-throw of the demoralizing, disorganizing, and destructive [Republican] party, of which ‘Honest Abe Lincoln’ is the pliant instrument.” Edwin Stanton wrote to Buchanan on April 11:

  The feeling of loyalty to the government has greatly diminished in this city. … The administration has not acquired the respect and confidence of the people here. Not one of the cabinet or principal officers has taken a house or brought his family here. Seward rented a home “while he should continue in the cabinet,” but has not opened it, nor has his family come. They all act as though they meant to be ready to “cut and run” at a minute’s notice. Their tenure is like that of a Bedouin on the sands of the desert. This is sensibly felt and talked about by the people in the city, and they feel no confidence in an administration that betrays so much insecurity. And besides, a strong feeling of distrust in the candor and sincerity of Lincoln personally and of his cabinet has sprung up. If they had been merely silent and secret there might have been no grounds of complaint. But assurances are said to have been given and declarations made in conflict with the facts now transpiring in respect to the South, so that no one speaks of Lincoln or any member of his cabinet with respect and regard.

  Shortly before dawn on April 12, as Lincoln’s relief expedition tacked into its final approach to Fort Sumter, rebel cannoneers opened fire on the fort with the forty-three guns ringing Charleston harbor. A day and a half later, after the boom, whistle, and crash of four thousand round
s of pounding shot and exploding shell, with its barracks on fire, with flames licking at its magazine, with choking smoke and cinders filling the casements, the exhausted defenders of the crumbling fort lowered their flag and sent up a white bed sheet.

  Southerners’ predictions that Virginia would rush to secede as soon as the first blow was struck at Fort Sumter, however, proved wrong. Although pro-Confederate mobs ran and shouted in the streets of Richmond, Union Party leaders there remained optimistic, and still expected the sitting Virginia secession convention to call a Border State conference on the crisis. Union Party men kept cool heads, according to letters written by several leaders shortly after Sumter, one of whom reasoned that it was “more incumbent than ever” for “Virginia and the other border slave states to maintain their mediatorial position.” By assembling promptly, insisted another, “they could yet command the peace between the two warring sections.” This was not a forlorn hope— only three months before, in January, Charleston guns had fired on the U.S. Navy ship Star of the West when it attempted to ferry supplies to Fort Sumter, and the incident had not sparked a wider war. Even Horace Greeley had then spoken of the hostile shots merely as “highhanded.” The forbearance of Major Anderson in not returning fire with the guns from the fort at that time had been applauded, and calm had prevailed.

 

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