by Bruce Catton
Further thought was thrust upon him. At Harrisburg he was visited by young Frederick Seward, son of the Senator from New York from whom Lincoln had taken the Republican nomination and whom he had privately selected to be Secretary of State in his new cabinet. Frederick Seward brought impressive warnings from his father and from General Winfield Scott, both of whom had come upon the conspiracy story from sources independent of Pinkerton and both of whom believed that there definitely was substance to it. Like Judd and Felton, they were urging Lincoln to come down to Washington secretly so as to avoid the Saturday-afternoon transfer in Baltimore.7
A serious plot to kill Abraham Lincoln may or may not have existed. (Four years later an equally frothy situation did in fact produce a John Wilkes Booth, complete with loaded derringer; it would develop eventually that in a time of civil war the most grotesque improbabilities can be built on ugly facts.) Washington had been full of ominous rumors all winter. The War Department had gone to great lengths to build up a thoroughly loyal home guard in the District of Columbia to prevent a seizure of power by secessionist sympathizers, and Winfield Scott had remarked that the general tension was such that “a dog-fight might cause the gutters of the capital to run with blood.” Just before Lincoln left Springfield, a citizen visited the old general to ask whether precautions had been taken to make sure that Congress could formally count the electoral vote; it was being rumored that a mob would rise and prevent it, thus (presumably) making it impossible for Lincoln to take office.
“I supposed I had suppressed that infamy,” said General Scott. “Has it been resuscitated? I have said that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote for President and Vice-President of the United States should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of a window of the Capitol. I would manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body, were he a Senator or chief magistrate of my native state!” Subsiding a little, the general added: “While I command the army there will be no revolution in the city of Washington.”8
Both Scott and Seward, in any case, believed in the reality of the assassination plot, and Lincoln was persuaded that he ought to be cautious. Elaborate arrangements were made, and on the night of February 22 Lincoln and his close friend Ward Lamon—a muscular fighting-man type from the prairies, heavily armed with pistols and knives—quietly slipped away from the Harrisburg hotel, took a train to Philadelphia, changed there to a Washington sleeper, and got through Baltimore in the dead of night without incident. Lincoln wore a soft felt hat in place of his usual stiff topper, and Pinkerton accompanied the travelers and made certain security arrangements en route; and when the party reached Washington and Lincoln went to Willard’s Hotel, Pinkerton hurried to a telegraph office to send a wire in clumsy code to the people in Harrisburg: “Plums delivered nuts safely.” Whatever danger may have existed, it had been evaded. The long trip was over, and Lincoln had arrived at the capital city where he would spend the rest of his life.
This evasive action may have been necessary—may at least have seemed necessary, the state of the public mind being what it was—but it brought Lincoln much derision. There was something extremely undignified about a President-elect sneaking into Washington in the dead of night, and the uneasy drama of the trip from Illinois, bad enough at best, came to its end on this note of outlandish melodrama. (Why Pinkerton thought it necessary to send his plums-nuts wire is beyond explanation except that the man was an overgrown Tom Sawyer; once Lincoln had reached Washington, there was no earthly reason for mystery.) Lincoln’s act in wearing a soft hat was promptly magnified into the story that he had come into town disguised, garbed in a plaid Scotch cap and cloak, and the fact that this story could be printed and believed is simply another evidence that people were ready to believe anything at all: if Lincoln had encased his lanky six feet four in Scotch plaids, he would have been about as inconspicuous as the Washington Monument, an eye-catching target for the dullest of assassins. The whole trip had been mishandled, and the ending was the worst of all. The man on whom the nation’s fate was to depend had seemed to come to the capital like a clown.9
But it was what he had been saying that disturbed thoughtful men. Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, wrote of his misgivings in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, just before Lincoln arrived:
“As yet,” he said, “I can form no opinion of the character of the Chief. His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness. But he may yet prove true and honest and energetic, which will cover a multitude of minor deficiencies.”10
3: Colonel Lee Leaves Texas
This was a winter when Americans began long journeys, moving from the West toward the East, from the known to the unknown, going separately and independently but somehow making part of one great, universal journey. Jefferson Davis had set off on his travels, and Abraham Lincoln had started his; and before either man reached his goal, Robert E. Lee also began to move, pulled east by the same force that was pulling the other two. For a brief time all three men were on the road at once, each of them deeply troubled in spirit, knowing that duty might require him to do hard and painful things which he would prefer not to do.
In a singular way, Lee began his journey more in the mood of Lincoln than in the mood of Davis. Davis had fewer doubts than either of the others. He knew, broadly, what he was supposed to do, and he knew how to set about it, and he neither knew nor cared what it might cost him. Lincoln and Lee took more doubts with them—doubts not only about the future but about the precise parts they themselves might have to play. Each man would say things, in the early stages of this journey, that he would not have said later. Each man would find the dimensions of the crisis enlarging as he came closer to it, his own probable role growing as the crisis grew; and each man would grow with the crisis itself, shaped by it but at the same time giving shape to it, becoming finally larger than life-size, a different man altogether than the one who began the journey.
As lieutenant colonel of the 2nd regular cavalry, Lee was stationed at Fort Mason, Texas. The commander of the Department of Texas, Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs, had passed along orders just received from the War Department: Lieutenant Colonel Lee was detached from his command and was to report to the general-in-chief, in Washington, for orders. On February 13 Lee put himself and his worldly goods in an army ambulance and set out on the first leg of the trip, heading for San Antonio, site of department headquarters.
Lee’s orders were slightly out of the ordinary. A regular reassignment to routine duty would call on him to simply report to the War Department and would not involve a personal call on Winfield Scott. It seemed probable that the general-in-chief had a special assignment for Lee, and this would almost certainly have something to do with the government’s military plans regarding the Southern Confederacy. Lee frankly told a brother officer that if this were the case he would resign. Under no circumstances could he draw his sword against Virginia and her sons. (He was assuming, obviously, that Virginia would eventually find herself in the Confederacy.) To another officer who asked bluntly what Lee proposed to do, he replied: “I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty.” How he could bear arms in Virginia’s defense without bearing arms against the Union was not clear, but the situation itself was not clear either. Earlier, Lee had coldly written that “secession is nothing but revolution,” but he had felt obliged to add that he saw no charms in “a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets”; he apparently clung to a dim hope that he and his state could in some way manage to be neutral in the approaching conflict, and to an even dimmer hope that in the end there would be no war at all.1
This latter hope grew noticeably weaker before he even got out of Texas. If Virginia had not yet seceded, Texas had, and when Lee entered San
Antonio, the revolution that he disliked so much was visible all over town in the form of marching men, excited crowds, and an unmistakable air of general hostility to the government of the United States. Lee discovered, in fact, that he might be a prisoner of war before he left San Antonio, even though no war existed. General Twiggs had surrendered his entire department to the recently seceded state of Texas.
Twiggs was seventy, Georgia-born, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War; tall, red-faced, with heavy white hair and an ear-to-ear beard, possessor of a sword with jeweled hilt and golden scabbard voted him by Congress for gallantry in action. Twiggs was on the side of the South and he made no bones about it, and he had been trying for many weeks to get a clear set of policy instructions from the War Department. In this effort he had had no more luck than Major Anderson had had, in faraway Fort Sumter, but he lacked Anderson’s uncompromising sense of duty, and when armed Southerners invited him to give up, he obeyed without demur. In Twiggs’s behalf it must be said that he had done his best to give Washington fair warning.
Early in December he had told the War Department that Texas would unquestionably secede before the winter ended, and he asked: “What is to be done with the public property in charge of the Army?” He got no reply, except for a vague statement that the administration had confidence that his “discretion, firmness and patriotism” would stand the test. He twice repeated his request for instructions, remarking early in January that “the crisis is fast approaching and ought to be looked in the face,” and on January 15 he wrote to Winfield Scott formally asking to be relieved from duty. On January 28 this request was granted, and orders were issued removing Twiggs from command of the Department of Texas and instructing him to turn the command over to Colonel Carlos A. Waite, of the 1st U. S. Infantry. The War Department, however, was in no mood to be precipitate, and instead of telegraphing these orders, it simply mailed them. Neither Twiggs nor anyone else in Texas knew that he had been relieved, and late in January, Twiggs bluntly told Washington that since he did not think that anyone wanted him to “carry on a civil war against Texas” he would, once the state seceded, surrender government property to the state authorities if the state authorities asked him to do so. He pointed out that he had asked four times for instructions without getting any answer.2
The orders relieving Twiggs and appointing Waite finally reached San Antonio on February 15. Waite unfortunately was sixty miles away, at Camp Verde, and Twiggs was conferring with certain commissioners from the state of Texas about the Federal government’s arms and military installations under his control. The situation was fluid, not to say confusing. A state convention on February 1 had voted Texas out of the Union, but the action was subject to ratification by a vote of the people in a referendum to be held on February 23. Technically, if anyone wanted to make a point of it, Texas was still in the Union, and there was at least a chance that the electorate would not ratify the act of secession. (It was not a very bright chance, and it would turn extremely dull if, by election day, the Federal government’s top military man in Texas had surrendered.) On the night of February 15—on muleback and on horseback and on foot, devoid of uniforms but armed and waving the Lone Star flag—Texas state troops began marching into San Antonio, converging on the plaza, orderly but determined; their commander was Colonel Ben McCulloch, a redoubtable frontiersman who had been friend and neighbor to Davy Crockett and who had fought brilliantly in the Mexican War. By morning of February 16 a thousand of these troops were in town, ready to underline the state commissioners’ demands on Twiggs. The meeting with the commissioners was abruptly broken off. Twiggs surveyed the situation, found armed Texans surrounding government installations, then with his staff went back into conference with the commissioners, who demanded that he give up all military posts and public property forthwith.
Twiggs made only a token resistance. He had been given no instructions, he was heart and soul with the South, to reject the demand would have meant bloody fighting in the streets of San Antonio, and in any case he was seventy and in poor health, not ideally fitted to become a martyr for a cause in which he did not believe. By the middle of the day he gave up, signing an agreement under which his troops would collect their weapons, clothing, and camp equipment and march out of Texas unharmed. Orders were prepared and sent out along the 1200-mile line where the army’s frontier posts and forts were scattered—there were more than 2600 Federal soldiers in Texas, dispersed in small detachments all along the frontier—and the troops in San Antonio got under way at once, moving out of their quarters with flag flying and band playing, to make their first camp that evening on the edge of town. San Antonio contained a number of Unionists, who watched the little procession in impotent indignation, but most of the people were enthusiastic secessionists.3
In the midst of all of this excitement the ambulance containing Colonel Lee came into town and pulled up in front of the Read House, where Lee was to stop. As Lee got out of the wagon he noticed that the street was full of armed men, some of them wearing strips of red flannel on their shoulders to show that they were officers. A friend met him, the Unionist-minded Mrs. Caroline Darrow, whose husband was a clerk in army department headquarters. Lee asked her who these men might be.
“They are McCulloch’s,” she said. “General Twiggs surrendered everything to the state this morning and we are all prisoners of war.” Lee stared at her, and she wrote afterwards that his lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears as he exclaimed: “Has it come so soon as this?”
Lee’s position was embarrassing. If Mrs. Darrow’s story was right, he himself might at this moment be some sort of prisoner, although technically, since he had been detached from his command and ordered to Washington, he was no longer on duty in Texas, and hence should not be included in any list of officers who had been surrendered. He entered the hotel, changed his uniform for unobtrusive civilian clothing, and went to department headquarters. There he found that the story was all too true. The state of Texas was in control, and its representatives intimated that Lee might not be given transportation to get out of Texas unless he immediately resigned his commission and joined the Confederacy. This proposal he instantly rejected. He was an officer in the army, his orders were to report in Washington, and those orders he would obey—and, on consideration, the Texans decided not to try to stop him.
… A fascinating “if” develops at this point. A few months earlier, in Twiggs’s absence, Lee had been acting commander of the Department of Texas. If the secession crisis had come to a head then, or if Twiggs’s return had been delayed past mid-winter, it would have been Lee and not Twiggs on whom the Texas commissioners would have made their demand for the surrender of government property. Without any question, Lee would have given them a flat refusal—in which case it might easily have been Lee, and not Major Robert Anderson, who first received and returned the fire of the secessionists, with San Antonio, rather than Fort Sumter, as the scene of the fight that began a great war. Subsequent history could have been substantially different.
However, it did not happen that way. Lee made his arrangements for transportation to the coast, where he could get passage for the East, storing his goods with a friend until they could conveniently be shipped. He was withdrawn and reserved in manner during these final days in San Antonio, and an army friend who talked with him at this time wrote that he had “seldom seen a more distressed man.” To this friend Lee remarked: “When I get to Virginia I think the world will have one soldier less. I shall resign and go to planting corn.” To another friend, he said frankly that nothing that happened in Texas could swerve him from the path of duty, but that he believed his loyalty to Virginia ought to come ahead of his loyalty to the Federal government. He would make this clear, he said, to General Scott, and in the end he would do what Virginia did. If Virginia stayed in the Union, so would he; if Virginia went out, he would follow her, “with my sword, and if need be, with my life.”4
He got to the coast, at last, on Febr
uary 22, took a steamer to New Orleans, and reached his home at Arlington on March 1.
In Texas, meanwhile, secession became complete and final. Colonel Waite reached San Antonio on February 19, to take over the command of a department that no longer existed. The city was full of armed men, not all of them under complete control; there was a good deal of excited firing at nothing in the streets, and Northern men were making hasty arrangements to get their families and themselves out of the state. Everything the government owned in San Antonio was in the hands of the Texas authorities, and some of the army’s outlying posts appeared to be in danger of attack by enthusiastic levies of citizen-soldiers. Colonel Waite, a Northerner with Northern instincts, found there was nothing he could do but accept the accomplished fact.
“No one at a distance can form a correct idea of the state of public feeling,” he wrote. “The troops in this department are stationed at different camps or posts in small garrisons, and spread over a very large extent of country. To concentrate a sufficient number to make a successful resistance, after the Texans had taken the field, was not practicable.… An attempt to bring them together under these circumstances would have, no doubt, resulted in their being cut up in detail before they could get out of the country. Under these circumstances I felt it my duty to comply with the agreement entered into by General Twiggs and remove the troops from the country as early as possible.”5
At some of the remote camps there was infinite confusion. The situation at Camp Cooper was typical. The probability that Twiggs would do whatever Texas asked him to do was recognized, even in advance of the surrender, and Captain S. D. Carpenter, of the 1st U. S. Infantry, commanding at Camp Cooper, warned his men on February 16 that the place would very likely be attacked “by the identical persons whose lives and property the Government have sent us here to defend.” In such case, he said, the garrison must defend itself to the death: “In a strife like this we have but one course to pursue, for each would rather lay his corpse to molder upon the plain he defends than to drag it hence to be the laugh and scorn of every honest lover of his country’s glory.” Three days later, however, Captain Carpenter found himself obliged to eat his brave words, and to the officer in command of the surrounding Texas troops he sent a message of submission. Guided by “a spirit of patriotism and loyalty to the Union, and by what I conceive to be the counsels of the most enlightened of statesmen of the nation, and also by what I understand to be the policy of the general commanding the department, after due consultation with the officers of my command, I have determined to surrender this camp to the State of Texas.”6
