Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Upon learning of the attack on the Massachusetts Sixth, Lincoln was quite astounded, for he said that Maryland Governor Thomas H. Hicks “had assured him, the day before, that the troops would have no trouble in passing through Baltimore, and that if they wanted any troops from Washington he (Gov. Hicks) would telegraph.” When Hicks wired saying “Send no more troops,” the president mistakenly assumed that the governor meant that he wanted no help from the administration and that Hicks would “take care and see that the troops passed safely.”58 In fact, on April 18, Governor Hicks and Baltimore Mayor George W. Brown had written Lincoln ambiguously: “send no troops here.” They repeated that message in a telegram the next day.59 They meant to say “send no troops through here.”

  When the Massachusetts Sixth arrived in Washington, Lincoln shook hands with every member of the regiment and warmly greeted its commander, Colonel Edward F. Jones: “Thank God, you have come; for if you had not Washington would have been in the hands of the rebels before morning. Your brave boys have saved the capital. God bless them.”60 Seeing their shabby uniforms, the president directed that the troops be issued regular army shirts and trousers.

  After midnight, when a delegation from Baltimore arrived at the White House to make an appeal like Hicks’s, Nicolay refused to wake the president but called on the secretary of war, who indicated no interest in complying with their request. The next morning Lincoln encountered the Baltimoreans as he was about to confer with General Scott, who urged that reinforcements be sent around rather than through Baltimore. Temperamentally disposed to believe everyone fair and sincere, Lincoln agreed to this compromise solution, thus satisfying the committee. Half in jest, he told them that “if I grant you this, you will come to-morrow demanding that no troops shall pass around.”61

  At the urging of Henry Winter Davis, Lincoln then wired Hicks and Brown, summoning them to Washington for a consultation. Around midnight a telegram arrived from Brown stating that Hicks was unavailable and asking if he should come alone. At 1 A.M., Nicolay woke Lincoln, who had his secretary reply to the mayor: “Come.”62

  On April 20, Lincoln also met with Maryland Congressmen Anthony Kennedy and J. Morrison Harris, who repeated the message of previous Baltimore callers. Impatiently, Lincoln declared: “My God, Mr. Harris, I don’t know what to make of your people. You have sent me one committee already, and they seemed to be perfectly satisfied with what I said to them.” When Harris insisted that no more troops pass through his state, the president answered: “My God, Sir, what am I to do? I had better go out and hang myself on the first tree I come to, than to give up the power of the Federal Government in this way. I don’t want to go through your town, or near it, if I can help it; but we must have the troops here to relieve ourselves, or we shall die like rats in a heap.”63

  Sunday, April 21, was an especially anxious day at the White House. That morning, Brown and several of his fellow townsmen fulfilled Lincoln’s prediction by earnestly insisting that no troops pass through their state at all! The president at first balked, asserting emphatically that the protection of Washington “was the sole object of concentrating troops there, and he protested that none of the troops brought through Maryland were intended for any purposes hostile to the State, or aggressive as against Southern States.” The delegation left, reassured of Lincoln’s desire to avoid further bloodshed in the Free State. But upon reaching the depot to return home, they heard that Pennsylvania reinforcements had arrived in Cock-eysville, 14 miles north of Baltimore, throwing the Monumental City into a panic. Indignantly, the delegation returned to the White House to demand that those troops be called off. Fearing that renewed hostilities between militia and civilians might play into the hands of Maryland’s secessionists, Lincoln emphatically stated that “he had no idea they [the Pennsylvania troops] would be there today, and, lest there should be the slightest suspicion of bad faith on his part in summoning the Mayor to Washington and allowing troops to march on the city during his absence, he desired that the troops should, if it were practicable, be sent back at once.”64

  This decision outraged many Unionists, including some cabinet members. At a meeting soon after the Baltimoreans departed, Gideon Welles indignantly stormed out, remarking that “if that was their policy he would have no responsibility in the matter.”65 With characteristic belligerence, Seward “said the treason of Hicks would not surprise him—that the Seventh [New York regiment] could cut their way through three thousand rioters—that Baltimore delenda est [i.e., must be destroyed].”66 In Pennsylvania, former Kansas Governor Andrew Reeder observed that the “report made by the Mayor of Balt. of his interview with the Presdt I am sorry to say has excited a good deal of indignation and if he tells the truth, the bearing of the Presidt. was too weak and lowly for the commander in chief to use to the representative of rebels.”67 Henry Villard told his editors that Lincoln “shrinks from the responsibility of striking blows & is altogether of too lenient a disposition towards the rebels. I know this from my own conversations with him.”68 The New York Tribune scornfully called Lincoln’s decision to have troops avoid Baltimore “the height of Quixotic scrupulosity,” and the rival New York Times went so far as to suggest that the president be impeached.69 The New York Evening Post denounced the administration’s “fatal blunders” in failing to protect the capital and the Norfolk Navy Yard.70 A part-owner of that paper, John Bigelow, called at the White House and detected in the president “a certain lack of sovereignty.” To Bigelow, Lincoln seemed “utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States occupied that day in the history of the human race, and of the vast power for the exercise of which he had become personally responsible.” Strengthening that impression was the president’s “modest habit of disclaiming knowledge of affairs and familiarity with duties, and frequent avowals of ignorance.”71 On May 8, New York Senator Preston King declared that Lincoln was “weak and unequal not only to the present crisis but to the position he holds at anytime.”72 In Washington, the eminent ethnologist George Gibbs deemed the lack of confidence in the administration a “great calamity.” The president “seems to be signally unfit for such an emergency, wanting both in foresight, and in decision, and meddling in details which don[’]t belong to him.”73 Supporters of the administration “find themselves unable to justify its moderation,” Hiram Barney lamented. “The instant reopening of the usual lines of communication between Philadelphia & Washington at whatever cost, would be hailed with great satisfaction,” he predicted, while warning that “unless that is done the administration will be severely censured and its moral hold on the community will be lost.”74

  On April 24, Barney and other leading New York Republicans dined with Vice-President Hamlin; they agreed “that Lincoln & his cabinet need more energy & resolution—that their brains are not yet evacuated of the idea that something is to be done by compromise & waiting—that it is almost impossible in that atmosphere (Southern & sectional) to get a clear impression of the strength of the Northern feeling—& that unless they act with more promptness & vigor, they will be compelled to give way to some semi-revolutionary outbreak of Northern pluck & determination—perhaps a military head.”75 Lincoln “is yielding & pliable—with hardly back-bone enough for the emergency” and “dreads expense & all that,” complained Manton Marble of the New York World.76 Others accused the administration of pinch-penny timidity. A Cincinnati Republican exclaimed “there is nothing for which the Administration has been so much censured here from the beginning as an apparent reluctance to prosecute the war with vigor because of considerations of finance!”77

  Lincoln dismissed press critics, saying “we can afford to pass them by with the dying words of the Massachusetts statesman [Daniel Webster], ‘we still live.’ I am sure they don’t worry me any, and I reckon they don’t benefit the parties who write them.”78 Privately, he was less stoical, calling hostile articles “villainous” and intimating to Seward that the editor of the New York Times, Henry J. Raymond, should
receive no government office. (Seward had been hoping to appoint Raymond consul at Paris, for the editor had grown weary of journalistic drudgery and was eager to serve overseas.) Months later, when asked if he had read an editorial in a certain New York newspaper, Lincoln replied: “No, I dare not open that paper. I’d like now and then to see its editorials, for the fun of the thing, but if I do I’m sure to get seduced into reading its Washington dispatches—and then my sleep is gone for one night at least.”79

  To those protesting his decision to have troops detour around Baltimore, Lincoln explained that he had gone out of his way, “as an exhaustion of the means of conciliation & kindness,” to accommodate the municipal authorities who assured him that they had insufficient power to assure the safety of Union troops passing through their city but could guarantee undisturbed passage elsewhere in Maryland. He added “that this was the last time he was going to interfere in matters of strictly military concernment” and that “he would leave them hereafter wholly to military men.”80 (Eventually, he would change his mind about relying entirely on such men.) He also argued that it had been imperative to maintain the good will of the Maryland authorities lest they hinder troop movements via the alternate route through Perryville and Annapolis.

  On April 22, when yet another group from Baltimore called to demand that troops be forbidden to pass through their state and that the Confederacy be recognized, Lincoln lost his customary patience. With some asperity he scolded them: “You, gentlemen, come here to me and ask for peace on any terms, and yet have no word of condemnation for those who are making war on us. You express great horror of bloodshed, and yet would not lay a straw in the way of those who are organizing in Virginia and elsewhere to capture this city. The rebels attack Fort Sumter, and your citizens attack troops sent to the defense of the Government, and the lives and property in Washington, and yet you would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no manhood nor honor in that.” Lincoln insisted that he had “no desire to invade the South; but I must have the troops, and mathematically the necessity exists that they should come through Maryland. They can’t crawl under the earth, and they can’t fly over it. Why, sir, those Carolinians are now crossing Virginia to come here to hang me, and what can I do?” He added that “he must run the machine as he found it.” There would be no need for a clash as Union soldiers crossed Maryland: “Now, sir, if you won’t hit me, I won’t hit you!”

  But if those troops were forcibly resisted, he declared, “I will lay Baltimore in ashes.” When told that 75,000 Marylanders would resist the passage of Union troops, he promptly and decidedly “replied that he presumed there was room enough on her soil to bury 75,000 men.” As the delegation left, Lincoln remarked to one of its members: “You have heard of the Irishman who, when a fellow was cutting his throat with a blunt razor, complained that he haggled it. Now, if I can’t have troops directly through Maryland, and must have them all the way round by water, or marched across out-of-the-way territory, I shall be haggled.”81 Some fastidious members of this delegation thought Lincoln lacked dignity. The Rev. Dr. Richard Fuller, who was both a large-scale slave owner and a prominent Baptist leader, snorted that “nothing is to be hoped” from the president because he “is wholly inaccessible to Christian appeals—& his egotism will forever prevent his comprehending what patriotism means.”82

  (Lincoln’s anger at Baltimoreans persisted. In September 1861, when Mayor Brown was arrested for aiding the Confederates, a delegation from the Monumental City pleaded for his release. The president replied: “I believe, gentlemen, if we arrested Jeff. Davis, committees would wait upon me and represent him to be a Union man.” He recounted a conversation he had had with Brown in the spring during which that official had shown sympathy for the Rebels. “I have not heard of any act of mayor Brown since, which would lead to the belief that he was in favor of supporting the Government to put down this rebellion.”83 Two years later, when he hesitated to pardon young William B. Compton, who had been condemned to death as a spy, he was asked whether he “would receive a delegation of the most influential citizens of Baltimore, with the Hon. Reverdy Johnson at their head, if they will come in person and present a petition on behalf of Mr. Compton?” Indignantly the president exclaimed: “No! I will not receive a delegation from Baltimore for any purpose. I have received many delegations from Baltimore, since I came into office, composed of its most prominent citizens. They have always come to gain some advantage for themselves, or for their city. They have always had some end of their own to reach, without regard to the interests of the government. But no delegation has ever come to me to express sympathy or to give me any aid in upholding the government and putting down the rebellion. No! I will receive no delegation from Baltimore.”)84

  When Governor Hicks of Maryland suggested that Lord Lyons, Great Britain’s minister to the United States, be asked to mediate the dispute between the North and the South, Seward replied with a letter that may have been drafted by Lincoln. He explained that the troops would be used merely to defend Washington. Alluding to the War of 1812, he added that he “cannot but remember that there has been a time in the history of our country when a general of the American Union, with forces designed for the defense of its capital, was not unwelcome anywhere in the State of Maryland, and certainly not at Annapolis.” Firmly he insisted that “no domestic contention whatever that may arise among the parties of this republic ought in any case to be referred to any foreign arbitrament, least of all to the arbitrament of a European monarchy.”85 Many Northerners found this response excessively timid and insisted that Marylanders had to be warned that they must either cooperate or be crushed. A Hartford banker wanted to inform Seward that the letter “raised here one universal shout of execration.” Such “damned … wishy washy stuff does not ‘go down’ with us, not by a great deal. Why didn’t he say, ‘We propose to go through Baltimore & will lay your infernal city in ashes if a gun is fired.’ That’s the kind of talk the people want & they will back it up.”86 New Yorkers were also indignant; one said the letter “absolutely disgusts everybody; it is begging, mean, and truckling, instead of being as it should have been, firm, decisive and imperative.”87

  Baltimore’s reigning literary lion, John Pendleton Kennedy, accurately predicted that “this refusal of a right of transit will arouse the whole North.”88 Throughout the Free States, people declared that if troops could not pass through Baltimore, the “city and its name should be swept from the face of the earth.”89 In Ohio, a leading Methodist clergyman insisted that “Maryland must be kept open” even it meant that “we make it a graveyard.”90 Andrew H. Reeder predicted that if “Baltimore was laid in ashes the North would rejoice over it and laud the Spirit that dictated the act.”91 Thundered the Indianapolis Journal: “If any Governor or Mayor stands in the way, let him be extinguished. If any city or State offers to thwart or oppose the military operations of the Federal Government, let every gutter run with blood, and every foot of ground within the State be furrowed by cannon, if necessary to vindicate the supremacy of the constitution.”92

  On April 27, Lincoln explained to an old friend that “he could easily have destroyed Baltimore, but that it would have been visiting vengeance upon a large body of loyal citizens, who were the property-holders, for the sake of punishing the mob who had committed the outrage upon the Massachusetts troops, but which mob, as to property, had little or nothing to lose.”93

  Meanwhile, Washington had become isolated from the North. On April 20, Maryland officials ordered the destruction of railroad bridges on lines connecting the capital with Baltimore. Telegraph wires were cut, and mail service to the District ceased. Troops heading there, among them the Seventh New York and the First Rhode Island regiments, were held up for several days as they sought alternate routes. Later, the president remarked that a man “who strangles himself, for whatever motive, is not more unreasonable than were those citizens of Baltimore who, in
a single night, destroyed the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, the Northern Pennsylvania railroad, and the railroad from Baltimore to Philadelphia.”94

  One day, while nervously awaiting the arrival of reinforcements, Lincoln thought he heard cannonfire in the distance, signaling what he believed was a Confederate attack. Nonplussed by his aides’ insistence that they heard nothing, he walked over to the Arsenal, which he found unguarded, much to his surprise and dismay. All was quite still both there and along his route back to the White House. As he returned, he asked passersby if they had heard cannonading earlier. When they said that they had not, he assumed his imagination was playing tricks on him.

  By April 24, gloom and doubt seemed to infect everyone in Washington. Despairing, Lincoln told some of the Massachusetts soldiers who had survived the Baltimore attack, “I don[’]t believe there is any North. The Seventh [New York] Regiment is a myth. R[hode] Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.”95 Seward anticipated that “[a]ll Virginia, and all Maryland are to be upon us in mass.”96 Washingtonians not only feared a Confederate assault but also worried that a minor episode could touch off rioting or panic among the anxious populace. The 2,000 troops in Washington afforded some comfort, but it was thought that the 3,000-man District Militia might prove disloyal. Hence, despite criticism, Lincoln refused to call it up. Hotels emptied as people fled to safety outside Washington, while those who remained began girding for a siege. The threat of famine arose as flour supplies dwindled. Luckily, the moon shone brightly night after night, discouraging local secessionists who otherwise might have risen up against the city’s few defenders.