The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  * * *

  In the tense early weeks of his administration, however, Lincoln had closeted himself with Postmaster General Montgomery Blair’s hawkish father, Francis P. Blair, Sr. “Old Man Blair,” one of the elder statesmen of the nation, had become famous thirty years earlier as part of Andrew Jackson’s influential “Kitchen Cabinet” and editor of the Democratic Party organ, the Washington Globe. He had wielded influence ever since, and had founded the Republican Party in the 1850s.

  Lincoln’s friends William Herndon and Ward Lamon testified that Lincoln believed that “far less evil & bloodshed would result from an effort to maintain the Union and Constitution” than from allowing the South to go. Now, Old Man Blair pressed him with the wisdom of a quick, crushing stroke such as Jackson would have delivered, believing, as Lincoln did, that a war would be avoided by bravely confronting what they saw as a handful of fire-eaters who held a Union-loving Southern population momentarily in thrall.

  Recent history indicated that long, costly wars were obsolete. Napoleon had won many of his campaigns with one great victory. Mexico had been subdued with the loss of fewer than two thousand lives. The recent Swiss civil war had lasted three weeks and killed just over a hundred. Lincoln revealed his idea of the scope of conflict in 1859 when he told an audience that “if … you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with. … We hope and believe that in no section will a majority so act as to render such extreme measures necessary.” The “extreme measures” against John Brown that Lincoln referred to took a total of seventeen lives. As a worst-case example, back in 1856, Lincoln had seen the proto-civil war in Kansas die down after a loss of just two hundred.

  So now Border State Unionists were thunderstruck when, on April 15, newspapers nationwide carried the text of a proclamation by President Lincoln:

  I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, and to cause the laws to be duly executed.

  Southern Unionists who had stayed calm after the firing at Sumter now panicked. They called Lincoln’s proclamation summoning a hostile army of 75,000 men “villainous” and “disastrous.” North Carolina’s Jonathan Worth cried that, with the April 15 call for troops, “Lincoln prostrated us. He could have devised no scheme more effectual than the one he has pursued, to overthrow the friends of the Union here.”

  Worth’s friend John A. Gilmer, whom Lincoln had recently considered for a Cabinet post, told Seward, “The fight at Charleston had done us no harm.” A Virginia Unionist agreed, “the conflict at Charleston could not have carried us out,” as did a North Carolina congressman who thought that “Union feeling was strong up to the recent proclamation.” Now they were undone. Virginia Unionist John Botts called Lincoln’s call for troops “in many respects the most unfortunate state paper that ever issued from any executive since the establishment of the government.”

  Unionists throughout Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina pointed over and over to the proclamation as the crucial outrage. Tennessee Congressman Horace Maynard reported that in his state “the President’s extraordinary proclamation” unleashed “a tornado of excitement that seems likely to sweep us all away.” Men who had “heretofore been cool, firm and Union loving” had become “perfectly wild” and were “aroused to a phrenzy of passion.” In his opinion, Lincoln’s proclamation “has done more to promote disunion than any and all other causes combined.” William Holden, Unionist editor of the North Carolina Standard, wrote, “If Mr. Lincoln had only insisted on holding the federal property, and had called in good faith for troops to defend Washington City, the Union men of the border states could have sustained him. But he ‘crossed the Rubicon’ when he called for troops to subdue the Confederate States. This was a proclamation of war, and as such will be resisted.” Louisville Daily Journal editor George Prentiss, who had condemned the “revolutionists” in Charleston for attacking Fort Sumter and predicted that no “widespread fighting” would result from the Charleston incident, was incensed at Lincoln’s “hare-brained and ruinous” response. “We are struck with mingled amazement and indignation. The policy announced in the Proclamation deserves the unqualified condemnation of every American citizen,” he wrote, concluding that Lincoln was unfit to govern. Some Border State men even suspected that Lincoln, fearing that their Union Party attempts might be successful at keeping the peace, decided to “drive us all into rebellion” so he could carry out “the old John Brown business of freeing our slaves and punishing us for the sin of having held them.”

  Border State Unionists felt betrayed. Since the inaugural and throughout March, the Lincoln administration, through its spokesman Seward, had consistently signaled a peace policy toward the seceded states. The mid-April attempt to resupply Sumter now appeared to be a double cross, and the April 15 call for troops was seen as a blindside blow against the South. Judge Campbell, who had acted in good faith as Seward’s intermediary in March, wrote bitterly, “I think no candid man, who will read over what I have written and consider for a moment what is going on at Sumter, but will agree that the equivocating conduct of the administration … is the proximate cause of this great calamity.” Lincoln “allowed it to go forth to the world that Fort Sumter was to be evacuated,” was the charge. Seward’s assurances had been taken as pledges, and Lincoln had “basely falsified” those pledges. “This, to our apprehension, is rank usurpation, and as freemen, we cannot submit to it,” proclaimed one Carolina journal. “Toward the Union men of the border states this conduct is infamous. To the South as a whole it is a gross and intolerable wrong—to the Union Party, in particular, it is treachery and fraud.” The Alexandria (Va.) Gazette cried, “It is against the friends of the Union at the South, that the Administration has struck its hardest blows.” According to Worth in North Carolina, “Union men feel that just as they had got so they could stand on their legs, Lincoln had heartlessly turned them over to the mercy of their enemies.”

  In the Confederate view, the Lincoln government had begun with a fatal breach of faith. It was now widely believed in the Deep South that Lincoln had pursued a duplicitous course since he had taken the oath, that he had schemed since his inaugural to deceive the commissioners and lull the South with sweet lies while he prepared for war. The New Orleans Daily Delta on April 18 cursed “the disgusting baseness of the pitiable creature, this burlesque of a President.”

  But it was the assault on Lincoln by the Border States that was most devastating, coming from states that were still in the Union. The Louisville Journal judged harshly, “If Mr. Lincoln contemplated this policy in the inaugural address, he is a guilty dissembler; if he has conceived it under the excitement raised in the seizure of Fort Sumter, he is a guilty hotspur. In either case, he is miserably unfit for the exalted position in which the enemies of the country have placed him.” Revered Kentuckian compromiser John J. Crittenden felt “deceived by false assurances of a peaceful policy.” A loyal North Carolina editor complained that the Unionists had been “cheated, imposed upon, and deceived” by Lincoln and that “secessionists were right in their conjectures concerning him.” One Virginian hoped “the God of battles” would “crush to the earth and consign to eternal perdition, Mr. Lincoln, his cabinet, and all ‘aiders and abettors,’ in this cruel, needless, corrupt betrayal of the conservative men in the South.” Another warned that having “knocked away the props that have upheld the Union party in this county,” Lincoln would find “as sturdy a set of rebels” there as in any other part of the South. William W. Blackford, a Virginian who would ride with Jeb Stuart, wrote with the sorrow and sense of tragedy that was felt across the Border States: “I was opposed to secession. … I thought that Linc
oln, though a sectional candidate, was constitutionally elected and that we ought to have waited to see what he would do. But when he called for troops from Virginia and we had to take one side or the other, then of course I was for going with the South in her mad scheme, right or wrong.” The perfidy of the Lincoln government had given the Confederate cause a new moral strength equal to any number of military divisions. It now saw itself as a virtuous revolution, one necessary to save liberties from a scheming despot.

  The wires that carried the text of Lincoln’s call for troops soon carried telegrams to the governors of all the states notifying them of the number of troops each would be expected to furnish. The Border State governors’ replies to President Lincoln were scathing:

  Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky wired on April 15, the same day the request was received: “I say emphatically Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purposes of subduing her sister Southern States.”

  John W. Ellis of North Carolina also wired that day: “I regard the levy of troops made by the Administration for the purpose of subjugating the States of the South as in violation of the Constitution and a gross usurpation of power. I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina.”

  John Letcher of Virginia wired on April 16: “The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object … will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South.”

  Isham G. Harris of Tennessee, on April 17: “Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purpose of coercion, but 50,000, if necessary, for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brethren.”

  Claiborne Fox Jackson of Missouri, also on April 17: “Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”

  … and Henry M. Rector of Arkansas, on April 22: “The demand is only adding insult to injury. The people of this Commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity their honor, lives, and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation.”

  Two days after Lincoln’s proclamation came one of the most critical moments in American history. On April 17, 1861, the Virginia Convention in Richmond voted 88 to 55 to secede. Virginia, the “Mother of Presidents,” stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ohio River, whose Arlington Heights looked down from across the Potomac River upon the public buildings of Washington, left the United States. The Virginian Staunton Spectator, until now a Unionist newspaper, recalled the crucial moment in verse the next New Year’s Day:

  I told you last spring of old Abe’s “Proclamation,”

  That insulted the South, and united our nation:

  Virginia declared, tho’ opposed to secession,

  She’d never submit to a tyrant’s oppression.

  Since war is declared, no longer she waits,

  But hastens to join the Confederate States.

  Seizing the opportunity to emphasize the new loyalty of their sudden sister, the Cotton State rebels moved the capital of the Confederacy from Montgomery to Richmond. In the coming weeks, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas followed Virginia out of the Union, and the number of stars on the Confederate flag grew to eleven.

  * * *

  “It appears, we confess, to complete the character of Mr. Lincoln’s policy as including every known kind of blunder,” observed Britain’s Manchester Guardian. After six weeks of multiplying confusion by failing to provide a controlling will and a unified voice in his administration, the new President, with one stroke of the pen, had provoked the doubling of the size and population of the enemy nation. The four newly-seceded Border States’ foundries would roll heavy iron plate and cast cannon, and they would provide powder works and major factories to rival the Union where the Cotton States had had none. Material advantages were not the only ones transferred to the Confederacy: Lincoln had also multiplied the South’s hostility. It was now a nation that carried on its banners the fresh spirit of a crusade against the Usurper, the Tyrant: Abraham Lincoln, the “destroyer of peace.”

  Chapter 16

  The Capital Surrounded

  “Wanted—A Leader”

  Lincoln’s April 15 call to arms, at the same time it branded him a despot in the South, unified the entire North in a wild spasm of flag-waving zeal. There, the Babel of political tongues that had proliferated over decades of bitter debate was drowned out in an instant by the patriotic hurrah from twenty million loyal throats. Northern cities and towns rang with rallies. Militiamen paraded, fifes and drums evoked the Minute Men, prominent men speechified, and huge crowds frothed and cheered. Everywhere it was the same. “Fort Sumter is temporarily lost, but the country is saved. Long live the Republic!” cried the New York Tribune. On the day of the proclamation the New York Times reported that “On every corner, yesterday, in every car, on board every ferry-boat, in every hotel, in the vestibule of every church, could be heard the remark: ‘I am a Democrat, dyed in the wool; I voted against Lincoln, but I will stand by the Government of my country when assailed, as it now is, by traitors.’” An Illinois man wrote, “Secession, disunion, and even fault finding is done with in this City. We shall all stand firmly by the administration and fight it out.”

  The name “Abraham Lincoln,” however, had little magic for the people. It was missing from the speeches, letters, and articles that poured out during those explosive few days of patriotism known as the Uprising of the North. The people spoke instead against treason, or for the supremacy of law, or about religious righteousness, or the revenge of Sumter, or love of the old Union, or the flag. Duty was the impulse, not love of Lincoln.

  Even as the masses surged into town squares to show themselves for the flag, loyalty to Lincoln was tendered only on condition of a quick victory. The New York Herald adopted the view of the New York merchants: “The business community demand that the war shall be short; and the more vigorously it is prosecuted the more speedily will it be closed. Business men can stand a temporary reverse. They can easily make arrangements for six months or a year. But they cannot endure a long, uncertain and tedious contest.”

  Few worried. Prophecies for the war were that it would be brief. Many who applauded Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers, and perhaps Lincoln himself, believed the troops would bring the rebellion to an end merely by appearing, armed and ready. Seward was still sure the trouble would be over in ninety days. The New York Times and the Philadelphia Press predicted the “local commotion” in Dixie would be ended “effectually in thirty days.” The Chicago Tribune boasted that “Illinois can whip the South by herself,” and foresaw victory “within two or three months at the furthest.” The New York Tribune told its readers that “Jeff. Davis & Co. will be swinging from the battlements at Washington … by the 4th of July.”

  While the North entertained its romantic idea of a short, glorious war, Lincoln was well aware that, if the war became drawn out, disappointment— and criticism—would be sharp. Within days of Sumter, Harper’s Weekly put the responsibility for a short war squarely on him, declaring,

  [I]f ABRAHAM LINCOLN is equal to the position he fills, the war will be over by January, 1862… . The whole Northern people are of one mind on the subject, party divisions are obliterated, twenty millions of people place at the service of the Administration their lives and their money. With such support, and such resources, if this war be not brought to a speedy close, and the supremacy of the Government forcibly asserted throughout the country, it will be the fault of ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

  The Weekly ended with a finger-wagging: “We do not prop
ose to reecho the censure which the Administration has already incurred at the hands of its friends for its want of energy. We hope that in the future it will be energetic enough to satisfy everybody. But Mr. Lincoln must remember that this is no time for trifling. The rebels have appealed to the sword, and by the sword they must be punished.”

  The first glorious impulse of the Northern rush to the colors climaxed on Saturday, April 20, with a rally by 100,000 people in staunchly Democratic New York City. George Templeton Strong jotted down his impressions in his diary:

  Broadway crowded and more crowded as one approached Union Square. Large companies of recruits in citizens’ dress parading up and down, cheered and cheering. Small mobs round the headquarters of the regiments that are going to Washington, starting at the sentinel on duty. Every other man, woman, and child bearing a flag or decorated with a cockade. Flags from almost every building. The city seems to have gone suddenly wild and crazy.

  * * *

  Lincoln, however, did not hear the news. Already, in the four days after his call for troops, the flame of the rebellion that blazed across North Carolina and Virginia had overleaped the nation’s capital and spread to Baltimore. There, on April 19, the day before the New York rally, the train bearing the 800-strong Sixth Massachusetts militia, the first armed Northern regiment moving through Baltimore to the defense of Washington, was intercepted on the city streets by a howling secessionist mob whose members tore up the tracks and attacked the soldiers with paving stones when they climbed down from the cars. The terrified Bay State militiamen leveled their muskets and opened fire, and the mob responded with a hail of rocks and pistol fire. When the melee was over and the Sixth Massachusetts hurried onto the cars toward Washington, twelve Baltimoreans and four Massachusetts men lay dead or dying, with thirty-one soldiers and dozens of civilians wounded.