by Bruce Catton
Eventually this would put it up to Abraham Lincoln, if he had the capacity to act. He had been extremely busy ever since the election, negotiating about cabinet appointments, talking to a stream of callers at Springfield, carefully guarding a little list of possible cabinet appointees. (Much later he remarked that the list he drew up the day after election was essentially the list that was finally submitted to the Senate for confirmation, but at this time no one knew what names this list contained.) Beyond the matter of cabinet appointments, he was considering two pressing matters of high policy—what to do about a projected compromise in regard to slavery, and what to do about the seizure of government forts and arsenals.
Lincoln was willing to give the slave states as much consolation as they could get out of a stiffening of the fugitive slave law, but he would listen to no talk about any possible extension of slavery in the territories. On December 10 he wrote firmly to Lyman Trumbull: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there is, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop. Sov. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than at any time hereafter.” In the same vein he expressed himself to William Kellogg a day later: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over.” Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, of Illinois, had written to Lincoln from Washington, warning him that “the secession feeling has approached proportions of which I had but a faint conception when I saw you at Springfield” and asserting that few Westerners realized “the imminent peril which now environs us.” To Washburne, in reply, Lincoln repeated the advice he had given Trumbull and Kellogg: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort upon ‘slavery extension.’ There is no possible compromise upon it … On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”2
He wrote in much more detail to Congressman John A. Gilmer, of North Carolina. Gilmer was known as a Southern moderate; so much so that Lincoln later tried to put him in his cabinet, both as a gesture of good will toward the South and as a means of enlisting at least a little Southern support for his new administration. Ten days before the South Carolina convention voted to secede, Gilmer wrote Lincoln with studied courtesy, asking if the President-elect could in advance of his installation “give the people of the United States the views and opinions you now entertain on certain political questions which now so seriously distract the country.” Gilmer went on:
“For one politically opposed to you, and representing a Southern constituency, who, together with myself, did all we could (I trust honorably) to defeat your election, I feel that I presume a great deal … but the danger of the crisis, and my desire to have allayed, if possible, the apprehensions of real danger and harm to them and their peculiar institution which have seized the people of my section, I respectfully ask whether as President you will favor the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia”—and, in fine, what position Lincoln would take on other aspects of the slavery controversy.
Lincoln was suspicious, not so much of Gilmer as of the use that might be made of any statement he might make. The same suspicion had kept him quiet during the campaign; in his anxiety to stand on his record he was refusing to utter any words of clarification or amity which might be misinterpreted. It was the caution perhaps of a lawyer rather than of a statesman. He marked his letter to Gilmer “strictly confidential,” and he asked:
“Is it desired that I shall shift the ground upon which I have been elected? I cannot do it. You need only to acquaint yourself with that ground, and press it on the attention of the South. It is all in print and easy of access. May I be pardoned if I ask whether even you have ever attempted to procure the reading of the Republican platform, or my speeches, by the Southern people? If not, what reason have I to expect that any additional production of mine would meet a better fate? It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness. To so represent me, would be the principal use made of any letter I might now thrust upon the public. My old record cannot be so used; and that is precisely the reason that some new declaration is so much sought.”
Then to the specifics: on such matters as slavery in the District of Columbia, “I never have been, am not now, and probably never shall be, in a mood of harassing the people, either North or South.” He would be flexible, in other words, on everything except “the territorial question,” and on that he would not yield. It seemed to him that that was “the only substantial difference” between himself and such men as Gilmer, and he repeated the brooding sentence he had used in his letter to Alexander Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” To this he added: “For this, neither has any just occasion to be angry with the other.”3
Wearily and without much hope, Congress was trying to work out some compromise, and committees from each house were considering the matter. No compromise plan offered any hope unless the Republican members would accept it, and Lincoln continued to advise Republican leaders that there could be no recession on the territorial issue. On all other points he was willing to be conciliatory. From Henry J. Raymond, of the New York Times, he was given a letter written by one William C. Smedes, of the Mississippi legislature. Mr. Smedes, reciting all of the abolitionist views which he believed the Republican nominee to represent, closed by remarking that if Lincoln were struck dead by lightning it could only be considered “a just punishment from an offended deity,” and Lincoln wrote to Raymond: “What a very mad-man your correspondent Smedes is. Mr. Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinction of slavery; does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white … and never did stigmatize their (i.e., the Southern states) white people as immoral and unchristian.” To the New York Republican manipulator Thurlow Weed, he wrote that he did not believe any state could lawfully get out of the Union without the consent of the other states; and he resorted to a favorite phrase when he added that it would be the duty of the President and other members of his administration “to run the machine as it is.”4
Secession, brought on by the great quarrel over slavery, was taking on more importance than its parent. In the face of what had been happening in Charleston, in the triangle neatly bounded in time and space by Secession Hall, the drifted sand dunes at Moultrieville, and Fort Sumter, it was perceptibly growing less and less important whether Northern states might yet agree to arrest and transport fugitive slaves, or whether the old Missouri Compromise line could be restored to life and driven west to the Pacific. Of greater immediate consequence was the question that was beginning to hammer insistently on the man in Springfield: What are you going to do about those forts? Governor Pickens and Major Anderson, between them, had immeasurably oversimplified the complicated issue that was dividing the nation. It was ceasing to be a far-ranging social and economic problem involving nations and races; now it could all be comprehended in a pentagonal enclosure of masonry containing fewer than fourscore professional soldiers, and in this perilous simplification it had become something so easy to see and so quickly identified with primitive emotions that it could pull men into war.
Lieutenant General Scott wanted very much to know what policy the next President was going to follow. Even before the South Carolina convention formally announced South Carolina’s secession, the old general had suspected that the surrender of the Charleston forts would be demanded, and he suspected also that what South Carolina demanded, Buchanan would give; so Scott talked to Francis P. Blair, Sr., and, a day or so later, to Congressman Washburne, to learn if he could what Lincoln was apt to do about all of this.
Lincoln heard from both Blair and Washburne and wrote his replies before Major Anderso
n got out of Fort Moultrie, so that what he put in his letters to these men must be read in the light of the fact that he was expressing an opinion formed before any overt act had been taken. To Blair, Lincoln was quietly blunt:
“Yours giving an account of an interview with Gen. Scott, is received, and for which I thank you. According to my present view, if the forts shall be given up before the inaugeration, the General must retake them afterwards.” To Washburne he wrote in similar words: “Last night I received your letter giving an account of your interview with Gen. Scott, and for which I thank you. Please present my respects to the General, and tell him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can to either bold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at and after the inaugeration.”5
These letters were dated December 21. Three days later Lincoln amplified his views slightly, in a letter to Lyman Trumbull, indicating that a surrender of the forts might make him do what the entreaties of friend and foe had not yet made him do—issue a public statement explaining what action he would take when he became President. His letter to Trumbull, dated December 24, said in part:
“Despatches have come here two days in succession, that the Forts in South Carolina, will be surrendered by the order, or consent at least, of the President. I can scarcely believe this; but if it prove true I will, if our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inaugeration. This will give the Union men a rallying cry, and preparation will proceed somewhat on their side as well as on the other.”6
An interesting field for speculation opens briefly just here. What would have happened—how would the ever-changing situation in respect to slavery, secession, and the preservation of the Union have been affected—if in December the South Carolina commissioners had won everything they had asked for? Suppose that Buchanan had given them the forts, on their demand, and that Lincoln thereupon had announced publicly that as soon as he took office, the government would fight to regain what had been given away: what then? Everything since would have been very different—perhaps better, perhaps worse, certainly different.
No matter. Buchanan stood his ground, and the business did not at that moment come to a clash of arms. Lincoln continued to reflect on the course the Federal government ought to follow, and on December 29 he gave a glimpse of the way his mind was working in a letter to James W. Webb: “Yours kindly seeking my view as to the proper mode of dealing with secession was received several days ago, but, for want of time, I could not answer it till now. I think we should hold the forts, or retake them, as the case may be, and collect the revenue. We shall have to forego the use of the Federal courts, and they that of the mails, for a while. We cannot fight them into holding courts, or receiving the mails. This is an outline of my view; and perhaps suggests sufficiently, the whole of it.”7
The letter revealed the danger point. The North could not make war over an abstraction, but it could easily make war to possess a fort or to hoist a flag on some disputed staff, and this actionable issue was coming nearer, like eerie footsteps coming down the empty corridor of a haunted house. The thing could really happen, now, and it could happen quickly.
Obviously neither Lincoln nor any other man at that hour could say with assurance just what his course would be three months later. The situation was not merely plastic; it had the smoky fluidity of molten ore, and good men were behaving like conspirators, plotting darkly just so that they could do their duty as they saw it. Until recently, an Assistant Secretary of State had been exerting himself in the interests of what he conceived to be a foreign power; an Attorney General on his first day in office had declared in cabinet meeting that the President was following a policy that looked like treason and might deserve hanging; the General of the Armies, by-passing both White House and War Department, was asking the President-elect whether there was likely to be a war after the present administration left office … and the Presidentelect was saying, clearly although not for publication, that there very probably would be one.
Or—was he, really? The words he was sending to Scott and to others would mean a fight, provided the people of South Carolina really meant the spirited things they were saying; provided, as well, that Lincoln himself did not between now and March come to some other point of view. For many months many men had been saying just a little more than they meant, doing so because over-statement is the universal language of politics, of salesmanship, of hard bargaining. The fact remains that it seemed to Lincoln at the end of December 1860 that the United States government must hold the forts it still had and regain the ones it had lost. In other words, he was saying that there was a point at which he, as President, would make war rather than consent to continuing dissolution of the Union; as he then felt and as the situation then looked, he would make war over the question of the forts. He might modify his position later, or the situation itself might change, but that was the way he was thinking ten weeks ahead of his inauguration. Whatever else it might do, the government at Washington was going to take a stand.
It was already taking it, as a matter of fact. Buchanan had come all the way around; Stanton and Black would not leave his cabinet, but would dominate it instead, and although the President would regard himself as little more than a caretaker, holding on in the White House until the new man came in, he would very definitely be a pro-Unionist caretaker.
Howell Cobb had left the cabinet, and now John B. Floyd was following him; and the South, which until recently had dominated both Buchanan and his cabinet, now had lost all but a trace of its old influence. Floyd left under the oddest circumstances, for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery, states’ rights, or embattled forts, but his departure helped to tighten the lines.
Floyd, by clumsiness, had got himself into a rousing mess. The War Department had had extensive dealings with a western transportation firm, Russell, Majors, and Waddell, which had furnished supplies and transportation for which it had not been paid. Badly overextended, and left shaky by the panic of 1857, this firm had faced bankruptcy; to stave off disaster it had persuaded Floyd to issue, in advance, signed acceptances, indicating sums that were now or soon would be due from the government. Since appropriations had been delayed, these actually were worth nothing much, but for a time Russell, Majors, and Waddell were able to discount them with the banks. In the summer of 1860 this would work no longer, and resort was had then to a complaisant clerk in the Interior Department, who gave the firm $870,000 worth of bonds belonging to an Indian Trust Fund, taking Floyd’s signed acceptances in return. The whole deal was of course grossly illegal, although Floyd personally profited not a penny out of it, and it had come to light just about the time when the crisis over Charleston’s forts was developing. Buchanan had asked Floyd to resign. He had not asked him directly, because the President simply was not up to forthright action, but he had passed the word through the friendly offices of Vice-President Breckinridge. Stanton referred to the matter bitterly, in a heated cabinet meeting on December 28, when the question of ordering Anderson out of Fort Sumter was up for discussion; to Buchanan, he said that “no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week.”8
Floyd at last sent in his resignation, going to elaborate lengths to show that he was quitting because he disagreed with top policy in regard to the forts. His departure was no great loss to anyone, but it did have the indirect result of giving Anderson solid backing in the War Department. To replace him, Buchanan appointed Postmaster General Joseph Holt Secretary of War, and Holt, a sourvisaged man of considerable force, was an all-out Unionist who stood unswervingly with Black and Stanton. Trescot realized at once what the shift meant, and on the last day of the year he sent a telegram to William Porcher Miles: “Holt is Sec War. That means civil War I do not know what reinforcements are sent but I believe the orders have been or will be sent immediately I have heard that the Harriet Lane light draught is under orders make every prepar
ation for preventing entrance into the Harbor.”9
As usual, Trescot was well informed. The Harriet Lane, a revenue cutter, would not be used, but action definitely was coming. Governor Pickens passed the warning along to Lieutenant Colonel Wilmot Gibbs De Saussure, commanding now at Fort Moultrie. To Colonel de Saussure, the governor sent a grim message:
“The authentic news from Washington not very favorable. Reinforcements may be on their way. I have ordered Capt. Cosle with his cutter to report to you, and to guard the outer entrance, to give you the earliest notice. All vessels to be stopped by him, if suspicious, or if supposed to have supplies or reinforcements for Fort Sumter— See him and give your orders. Be careful—and intercept all reinforcements if possible at all hazards.”10
On the same day, Major Anderson wrote a report to Adjutant General Samuel Cooper. South Carolina troops, he wrote, were erecting batteries on Morris Island, a sandy expanse of land on the south side of the entrance to the harbor, within easy cannon shot of Sumter itself: “I am at a loss what this means, unless it be that some armed vessel is expected here.” He added that he was more than ever convinced that he had done the right thing when he moved to Fort Sumter: “Thank God, we are now where the Government may send us additional troops at its leisure.” He was a little pinched for supplies. On moving to Fort Sumter, the troops somehow had failed to take along enough fuel, soap, or candles, “but we can cheerfully put up with the inconvenience of doing without them for the satisfaction we feel in the knowledge that we can command the harbor as long as our Government wishes to keep it.”11
