by Larry Tagg
After the Seventh New York, regiments came in an unbroken stream. In a few days Washington was crowded with the camps of 10,000 militiamen from the North.
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The near loss of the nation’s capital at the war’s outset reinforced the opinion of the press that Lincoln was feeble and overmatched by the crisis. Lincoln’s standing with the opinion-makers, already abysmally low, sank. Patience with Lincoln had run out even in the stalwart New York Times, as shown in three columns that Lincoln clipped from it, tied together with ribbon and saved, labeled “Villainous articles.” The first, headlined “Clear the Track!” praised a would-be dictator named George Law, a two-bit New York City demagogue the Times liked for his get-tough stance with the Maryland rebels:
George Law only speaks the universal sentiment of the whole community, without reference to party or to class, when he tells President Lincoln that the Government must clear the path to Washington, or the people will do it for them. There is a perfect unanimity among the people on this subject.
The second column, reacting to Lincoln’s appeasement of the Baltimore mob by detouring troops around the city, was headlined “A Startling Report,” and was even clearer in its threat to Lincoln:
We will simply remark that the President runs no small risk of being superseded in his office, if he undertakes to thwart the clear and manifest determination of the people to maintain the authority of the Government of the United States, and to protect its honor. We are in the midst of a Revolution, and in such emergencies the people are very apt to find some representative leader, if the forms of law do not happen to have given them one. It would be well for Mr. Lincoln to bear in mind the possibility of such an event.
The depth of contempt for Lincoln in the third Times article, dated April 25, is plain in its title: “Wanted—A Leader”:
In every great crisis, the human heart demands a leader that incarnates its ideas, its emotions, and its aims. Till such a leader appears, everything is disorder, disaster, and defeat. The moment he takes the helm, order, promptitude and confidence follow as the necessary result. When we see such results we know that a hero leads. No such hero at present directs affairs. The experience of our Government for months past has been a series of defeats. It has been one continued retreat. Its path is marked by the wrecks of property destroyed. It has thus far only urged war upon itself. It confidingly enters into compacts with traitors who seek them merely to gain time better to strike a fatal blow. Stung to the quick by the disgraces we have suffered, by the disasters sustained, by the treachery which threatens the annihilation of all order, law, and property, and by the insults heaped upon our National banner, the people have sprung to arms, and demand satisfaction for wounded honor and for violation of laws, which must be vindicated, or well may at once bid farewell to society, to government, and to property, and sink into barbarism.
Where is the leader of this sublime passion? Can the Administration furnish him? … From a dream of profound peace we awake with our enemy at our throat. Who shall grapple with this foe?
The same sentiments were heard in Washington. As soon as the mails were restored, men close to the President received letters such as the one sent to Treasury Secretary Chase: “For God’s sake get Mr Lincoln to quit telling anecdotes—and to go to work in earnest. Richmond, Va. should be in possession of the Government by 1st June at the farthest!” Count Gurowski wrote to Charles Sumner, “Neither pighead Lincoln nor the whole Cabinet have been elected with the view of crushing a civil war.” The count told his diary his disappointment at “the undecided conduct of the administration; at its want of foresight; its eternal parleying with Baltimoreans, Virginians, Missourians, etc., and no step to tread down the head of the young snake. No one among them seems to have the seer’s eye.”
Nor had Lincoln’s patience with the Baltimoreans done him any good there. On April 27, Baltimore Sun declared that, under Lincoln, the government had “become a vast consolidated despotism.” Even Reverend R. Fuller, one of a Baltimore delegation who had visited the White House in April, wrote to Chase his ungrateful opinion that “From Mr. Lincoln nothing is to be hoped, except as you can influence him… . I marked the President closely. Genial and jovial, he is wholly inaccessible to Christian appeals, and his egotism will forever prevent his comprehending what patriotism means.”
Another Maryland native, James Ryder Randall, after his friend was wounded in the April 19 Baltimore melee with the Sixth Massachusetts, scribbled down the words that would become the Maryland state song, “Maryland, My Maryland.” His lines were printed in the New Orleans Sunday Delta on April 26, put to the tune of “O Christmas Tree,” and soon became one of the marching songs of the new Confederacy:
The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland, My Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!
The “despot” of the song’s first line was Abraham Lincoln.
Chapter 17
The Hundred Days to Bull Run
“The imbecility of the Administration culminated in that catastrophe.”
Lincoln, in fact, had accomplished the failure of secession in Maryland. When the Maryland legislature met on April 26, it stormed and fumed, it protested solemnly against the war and gave its “cordial assent” to the independence of the Southern states, but it did not secede. Within a week, the Baltimore merchants realized their trade with the North was gone, and by the next week rebellion there was ended. On May 4, Hay wrote in his diary, “The Maryland Disunionists … called today upon the President. Their roaring was exquisitely modulated. It had lost the ferocious timbre of the April days. They roared as gently as twere any nightingale.” Baltimoreans hurried to restring the telegraph lines and rebuild the burned bridges, and normal traffic was restored by the middle of May.
When Lincoln drafted his proclamation of April 15, there had been the question of when to convene the Congress. In this decision he was influenced by Seward, who advised him not to hurry, saying, “History tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.” A confusion of voices among the leaders now could be deadly to the Union. Border State delegates might block urgent action. Radicals from the Northeast might alarm conservatives everywhere. Lincoln put the emergency session off until July 4, eighty days away.
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In the meantime, he took unto himself the powers of a dictator:
On April 19, the same day as the Baltimore massacre, he ordered a blockade on Southern ports—an act of war—without consent of Congress.
On April 20, he ordered the raid of every telegraph office in the North to seize copies of every telegram sent and received in the previous twelve months.
On the evening of April 21, Lincoln held a meeting of the Cabinet in one of the Navy offices—away from any White House spies—where he asked for and received a free hand to use illegal means if they became necessary in the emergency. Seward later referred to this as the Cabinet’s most thrilling meeting. It was there, he said, that Lincoln and his advisors “put in force the war power of the government, and issued papers and did acts that might have brought them all to the scaffold.”
Thus given carte blanche by his advisers, Lincoln signed war measures in a rush. He selected private citizens to purchase warships, and gave $2 million to three trusted New York merchants to buy arms and form new regiments, ignoring the legal requirement to seek approval of Congress when dipping into the Treasury.
He closed the mail to “disloyal” publications.
He called for an additional 42,000 volunteers to serve for three years, and augmented the regular army by 22,000 men and the navy by 18,000. Here again, Lincoln ignored the constitutional requirement that Congress “raise and support armies.”
None of these measures was much
criticized. The nation, after all, was still at a high pitch of patriotism, and Northern editors were daily encouraging high officials to use any means necessary to put down the rebellion. The phenomenal power Lincoln seized during these weeks was a source of wonder to European onlookers. After all, this was a country so suspicious of central power that, for fear of it, a civil war had just broken out. A German diplomat marveled, “One of the interesting features of the present state of things is the illimited power exercised by the government. Mr. Lincoln is, in that respect, the equal, if not the superior, of Louis Napoleon.”
The only measure that aroused controversy in these first weeks—and continues to do so today—was Lincoln’s suspension of the safeguard of civil liberties written into the Constitution: the writ of habeas corpus. It was this rule that, since Anglo-Saxon times, had prevented arbitrary imprisonment. Without it, the military could arrest anyone suspected of aiding the enemy and hold him indefinitely without bothering to bring charges. On April 27, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus on the military line between Philadelphia and Washington. It was a secret, however, and drew no outcry from Lincoln’s critics until, in the early morning of May 25, John Merryman, a wealthy secessionist and lieutenant in the Maryland militia who had had a hand in burning the bridges after the Baltimore riot, was dragged from his bed and thrown into prison at Fort McHenry.
Merryman sent a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the United States district court in Baltimore, which, as it happened, was on the circuit of the eighty-four-year-old Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney—the proslavery justice who had written the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Taney solemnly issued the writ, which was disobeyed by the commander at Fort McHenry, who produced, not the prisoner, but a short reply that he was under “instructions from the President.” The stage was set for a showdown, not only between Taney and Lincoln, but between the judicial and executive branches of the government. On May 28, 1861, in one of the greatest moments of drama in American judicial history, the ancient, dignified Taney approached the courthouse in Baltimore on the arm of his grandson as an admiring crowd opened a path before him. Inside, he slowly read an opinion known as Ex parte Merryman, which would serve for the rest of the war as the source document for all who opposed Lincoln’s repression of civil liberties. In it, he cited many precedents to argue that the President had usurped the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus from Congress, and usurped “judicial power also by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law.” Lincoln was taking, he said, “more regal and absolute power over the liberty of the citizen than the people of England have thought it safe to intrust to the Crown—a power which the Queen of England cannot exercise at this day and which could not have been lawfully exercised by the sovereign even in the reign of Charles the First.”
In speaking out, Taney worried that he himself might be imprisoned. Lincoln did not arrest Taney, but he felt he could not give in to the Chief Justice on this question, and he ignored Taney’s opinion—Merryman continued to languish in his cell in Fort McHenry. Taney’s opinion, however, was quickly published in newspapers and pamphlets in Baltimore and across the Confederacy. A few members of the Northern Democratic press also took up the issue. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, for example, protested that the Constitution “is an instrument whose powers can not be enlarged or abridged to meet supposed exigencies at the caprice or will of the officers under it… . Exigencies and necessities will always arise in the minds of ambitious men, anxious to usurp power—they are the tyrants’ pleas, by which liberty and constitutional law, in all ages, have been overthrown.” Complaining about Lincoln’s unconstitutional enactments and his suspension of habeas corpus, The Crisis borrowed Thomas Jefferson’s phrase for King George III from the Declaration of Independence, crying, “Is he not a President, ‘whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, unfit to be the ruler of a free people?’”
In these early months of the rebellion, however, with distrust widespread and fear of traitors rife, the protest lacked heat. In fact, Lincoln was so emboldened by the low political price he paid for this first repression of civil liberties in Maryland that, one month later, on July 2, he stretched the area of suspension of habeas corpus to “the vicinity of any military line … between the City of New York and the City of Washington,” and in October he stretched it all the way to Bangor, Maine. Along the line, due process of law was voided and military power ruled. And this new “line” was ill defined. It ran between places far apart on the map, and included a large percentage of the population.
It was only later in the war that the opposition press would voice sustained outrage over the loss of freedoms. For now, Lincoln’s most important critics on this issue were in Congress. They ratified Lincoln’s emergency orders grudgingly, on the last day of the special July 4 session of Congress. Even then, the ratifying provision had to be sugar-coated by tucking it away as a “rider” in a popular bill increasing soldier pay. Also, there was an important exception to Congress’ late show of support: despite a whopping two-thirds Republican majority in both Houses, Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was not mentioned in the approval. Opposition had come, not only from all the Democrats and Border State congressmen, but also from Republicans unwilling to concede Lincoln’s encroachment on what had always been a Congressional power. Senator Trumbull, from Lincoln’s own state of Illinois, spoke for many: “I am not disposed to say that the Administration has unlimited power and can do what it pleases, after Congress meets.”
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The controversy was muted, however, because while Congress debated, huge armies were gathering for battle—despite the fact that, in mid-July, when the three-months troops Lincoln had called up on April 15 were ready to go home, they were still little more than an armed rabble, woefully unready to attack.
From the beginning, Lincoln had been the Commander-in-Chief of a halting, creaking war machine. The unmilitary chief of an unmilitary nation, he had privately sworn on April 21—after the national humiliation of promising Mayor Brown he would detour troops around Baltimore—that it was the last time he would interfere in military concerns. He gave over army matters entirely to General Scott. Lincoln was open about his martial naiveté. At an early meeting with his generals, when Seward admitted that he and Lincoln didn’t understand the technical terms for fortifications, Lincoln piped up, “That’s so, but we understand that the rare rank goes right behind the front!”
Without leadership from Lincoln, military matters immediately became confused. On April 22, Hay overheard Chase telling Lincoln, “All these failures are for want of a strong young head. Everything goes in confused disorder. General Scott gives an order, Mr. Cameron gives another. Half of both are executed, neutralizing each other.” Indeed, Cameron was an unfortunate choice for Secretary of War. He was a weak reed—a poor administrator, easily overwhelmed. Visitors to the Secretary found him evasive, his office aimless and cluttered. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott was unsteady as well, immobilized by vertigo, gout, and chronic fatigue and edema from what was probably congestive heart failure—the inroads of age and gluttony on his sixfoot- four, three-hundred-pound body. He frequently dozed off at meetings, and could no longer mount a horse. When the old general rode to the White House for a conference, Lincoln frequently came down to the driveway and stood beside his buggy to spare him the pain of climbing the stairs.
Lincoln’s situation was further complicated by the poor financial condition of the national government. The treasury was empty. There was no national bank, no national currency. The sprawling economy, with its myriad local banks, was not suited for huge national projects. There had been no Federal taxes for thirty-five years. Americans were not used to paying them, and a new tax would have crippled the war spirit. Lincoln, without a treasury, without an army, and without laws adequate to create them, was forced to fall back on the vigor of the individual states to raise, officer, and equip the 75,000 troops he ha
d called up.
The troops that answered the emergency call of April 15 could, by an antique law, serve for only three months. Those months—May, June, and July—saw a jumbled, uncoordinated effort by the Northern governors to improvise an army many times larger than had ever been fielded in the nation’s history. They labored in the face of chronic shortages, waste, and delay, and with little help from Secretary Cameron and his miniscule staff. Soon-to-begeneral Oliver Otis Howard complained that during June and July “no one seemed to know what was to be done or what could be done.” Lincoln, in fact, made matters worse by authorizing, willy-nilly, new regiments pressed by ambitious men, with no thought for the War Department’s losing battle with logistics. James Wadsworth, a wealthy New Yorker who had come to Washington to seek an officer’s commission, bemoaned the confusion Lincoln wrought: “[T]he Government is weak, miserably weak at the head. The President gets into at least one serious scrape per diem by hasty, inconsiderate action. While I was there he accepted X______’s regiment and regretted it an hour later.”
The federal government was exposed for the poor power it was. Muskets, uniforms, blankets, tents, and medical equipment were in short supply. Even when orders had been written and contracts signed, arms and provisions were slow to arrive. Recruits were ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. Camps were improvised. There was a lack of facilities, equipment, weapons, kitchens, even military plans. Out of a desire not to provoke Southerners and Border State men, no warlike preparations had been made, not even for the security of the capital. Some recruits were installed in public buildings, others in camps located without regard for defense or drill.
