by Bruce Catton
In a sense all of this turmoil was unnecessary, because the War Department was not looking for a fight in Texas any more than General Twiggs was looking for one, and nothing but the bureaucratic habit of trusting to the mails and letting time take care of itself kept this from being known to everybody involved. On February 15, before McCulloch’s warriors had come trooping into San Antonio, the War Department drafted instructions for Colonel Waite, who would become Twiggs’s successor as soon as he could reach San Antonio. If Texas should secede (said these instructions), Waite must as quickly as possible “put in march for Fort Leavenworth, the entire military force of your department.” He was to use all army means of transportation, including camels—among the items of government property in Texas were several dozens of these beasts, imported by Jefferson Davis when he was Secretary of War as likely burden-bearers on the arid plains of the West—and any property that had to be left behind was to be turned over to selected quartermasters, who would have the stuff sent on to New York by steamer at the earliest opportunity. The only trouble was that it seems to have occurred to nobody in Washington to send these orders by wire. If Twiggs had received them by February 16, as he might have done, he would have had at last the clear guidance that had been denied him, and everybody concerned would have been spared a good deal of mental anguish. But the orders were sent along by mail, and they did not reach San Antonio until March 1, when they meant nothing to anyone.
The scattered army detachments were on their way by this time. The state of Texas turned over twenty-six teams and wagons (transportation it probably had acquired by means of the Twiggs agreement) to help the movement along, and by the end of the month most of the men were on their way to the coast. Not all of Texas thought that the troops should be allowed to leave. The Federal commander at Camp Mason, which Colonel Lee had left just in time, got a curt note from the commander of a contingent of Texas Rangers, who told him bluntly: “I think the commissioners on the part of the State of Texas are a set of jackasses in allowing the regular troops in leaving Texas with their arms; and, to be plain with you, if I had a sufficient force I would make all of you lay down your arms in short order, and if I can get men I will yet do it.” Most of the troops finally made their way outside of the state, but more than 800 of them, including Colonel Waite, were captured and held as prisoners, to be released on parole a bit later. A San Antonio newspaper estimated that the army property seized was worth $1,209,500, not counting public buildings.7
The authorities in Washington from first to last lagged behind the movement of events in Texas. Long after he was completely unable to do anything about it, Colonel Waite received orders from General Scott to establish an entrenched camp at Indianola, on the Gulf Coast, with from 500 to 1200 men and supplies; the purpose of which, he was told, was “to keep a foothold in the State until the question of secession on her part be definitely settled among her own people, and, second, in case of conflict between them to give such aid and support to General Houston or other head of authority in the defense of the Federal government as may be within your power.”8 This came much too late. The orders were signed on March 19, by which time Texas was gone beyond recall. There was not the faintest chance that Sam Houston would lead a counter-uprising, and even if he had done so, there was not by this time anything Colonel Waite could have done to help him.
Texas formally ratified the ordinance of secession on February 23, at a referendum election. The result surprised no one. Secession carried by 46,129 votes to 14,697—figures roughly the same as those by which Breckinridge had carried the state over Constitution-and-Union Bell in the presidential election. There may well have been more Unionist sentiment in the state than these figures showed, but it had been boxed in from the start. The secessionist leaders had acted with drive and determination, the state convention by early February had taken effective control of the state away from Governor Houston, and the movement had acquired an irresistible momentum. General Twiggs’s capitulation had been the final touch; in plain fact Texas was out of the Union before the election was held, and the voters did no more than ratify something that had already happened. Shortly after the election, the convention passed a resolution thanking Twiggs “for his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States, embracing the rights and liberty of his native South.” On March 2 Texas delegates reached Montgomery and the state was formally admitted to the Confederacy. Georgia’s Tom Cobb wrote to his wife that “the Texas members are a very conceited crowd and very little of enlarged statesmanship about them.”9
Now there were seven states in the Southern Confederacy, and the secessionist tide had reached its crest; as a matter of fact, it had for the moment expended all of its force. There would be no more departures based simply on the belief that the election of a Republican President embodied an unendurable menace to Southern institutions. Eight of the fifteen slave states remained in the Union, and none of them would go out unless and until the Federal government, or the Confederate government, or the two of them together, brought some new element into the equation. The South had not acted as a unit. Only the cotton states had broken away. The new “Southern nation” included only about half of the South.
Not even in the cotton states was the impulse to leave the Union as sweeping and unanimous as it came to seem. South Carolina had indeed been wholly united, but in the six states that followed her, there were fairly substantial numbers of people who, if they were not thick-or-thin Unionists, at least were not ready for immediate secession. Only Texas had submitted its ordinance of secession to a popular vote; in all the others the only thing resembling a referendum had been the election of delegates to state conventions, and here the figures make curious reading. A recent student of these elections has estimated that in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana at least 42 per cent of those who voted must be listed as opponents of immediate secession. Significantly, secession took place on a state-by-state basis, and the various efforts to have the matter considered by a general convention of Southern states all failed. Throughout, the leaders of the secession campaign had worked for speedy action, in order that the new government might be set up and in operation by the time the new administration took office in Washington.10
The Confederate government that was thus brought into being did not when it was established speak for the old South, and it was not in fact defending an old established culture. It represented rather the raw, bustling, new South which was making immense profits out of slave-produced cotton—basically a frontier society in which the acquisition of land and slaves stood as the visible symbols of prosperity and the ability to better one’s position in the world. This society saw in the growth of abolitionism not merely a stirring-up of profound racial antagonisms but also a direct threat to the boom times that enabled an energetic go-getter to make his stake. The new government might come to represent much more than this later on, but this was its original basis. It would take actual violence—the firing of great guns, with battle smoke drifting out to sea—to broaden the base.
Handicapped as it was by imperfect communications and an inability to make any move quickly, Washington may have had some dim awareness of this fact. It is mildly interesting to note that the Federal government actually had much more at stake in Texas than it had at Fort Sumter; 2600 soldiers and a whole chain of army installations, as opposed to seventy soldiers and one unfinished fort. Logically, it would seem that if a stand were to be made, San Antonio rather than Charleston would be the place to make it. But Washington was marking time. It consented to the loss of Texas, and the Federal government did no more than issue, on March 1, a formal order stating that by direction of the President, General Twiggs was dismissed from the army “for his treachery to the flag of his country.”
This infuriated Twiggs, who felt that he had properly followed a higher loyalty, and some weeks after Buchanan left office, the old general sent him a bitter letter: “Your usurped right to dismiss me from the
army might be acquiesced in, but you had no right to brand me as a traitor. This was personal, and I shall treat it as such, not through the papers but in person. I shall more assuredly pay a visit to Lancaster” [in Pennsylvania, where Buchanan made his home] “for the sole purpose of a personal interview with you. So sir prepare yourself. I am well assured that public opinion will sanction any course I may take with you.”11
In the language of Twiggs’s time and place that meant a duel and nothing less. But Twiggs did not, in the end, go to Pennsylvania, and the country was spared the grotesque spectacle of a personal encounter between two seventy-year-olds. On the day Twiggs was dismissed from the army, Robert E. Lee reached his home in Arlington.
4: Talking Across a Gulf
When Lincoln reached Washington on February 23, with derisive newspaper articles repeating untruths about a Scotch-plaid disguise, he had just nine days to prepare himself for the presidency. He needed more time. He had said, too easily, that nobody was being hurt, and although this was no more than a natural attempt to relieve public tension, it reflected a misconception of the situation. Lincoln overestimated the extent and power of Union sentiment in the South. He apparently failed to realize that the border states had by no means shelved the idea of secession for good and that what they did might in the end depend largely on what he himself did. He could see clearly that the Southern Confederacy had been created by a comparatively small group of expert operators, but he did not yet see that the Confederacy was much more than just the result of a smart conspiracy. It was a new nation which, even though it stood on very shaky legs, could not be talked out of existence.
His immediate problems were almost overwhelming. He had to finish making his cabinet, he had to talk endlessly with many important people, and he was under tremendous pressure from needy Republicans who wanted jobs under the new government and who believed in going to the man at the top to demand them. His rooms at Willard’s Hotel were no refuge. Everybody in Washington, seemingly, wanted to get into them. He would have very little time to think.
Congress was in session, grappling with such Republican platform planks as a new tariff bill, a Pacific railroad, and internal improvements, doing nothing whatever either to conciliate the offended Southern states or to enable the Federal government to deal forcefully with them. In Virginia a secession convention was meeting under circumstances that may have added to Lincoln’s confusion. The outright secessionists had been able to elect only about thirty of the 152 delegates, but at least seventy of the rest of the delegates were secessionists at heart—men who would vote the state out of the Union the moment the trend of events in Washington displeased them. The convention now was marking time, waiting to see what was going to happen farther north.1 And in Washington there was a peace convention, watched anxiously both by Congress and by the Virginians, meeting behind closed doors at Willard’s and showing few indications that it was going to accomplish anything.
Virginia was responsible for this convention’s existence. On January 19 the Virginia General Assembly had adopted a joint resolution calling for a conference of all the states in Washington, and the business had got under way on February 4. It was off to an unencouraging start, sharply criticized by the press for meeting in secrecy, and its 131 members—distinguished Americans, but elderly, a little tired and shopworn—spoke for only twenty-one of the states. None of the seven states that had seceded was represented. Neither were the West Coast states of California and Oregon, the Southern state of Arkansas, nor the Middle Western states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. It was no better than a pale copy of the true national convention which had been proposed in Congress immediately after the election, and the chance that it would devise a program that could pull the sections together and harmonize their bitter differences was very slight. The New York Herald had remarked, perhaps with some injustice, that the delegates “are for the most part the emanations of the grog-shop and other low influences which direct the politics of their respective states. They are, moreover, many of them political fossils, who would not have been disinterred but for the shock given to the Union by the secession movement.” The Herald added that it was both “stupid and ungrateful” of the delegates to exclude the press from their sittings. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was equally pessimistic although less brutal, predicting that “the Border State compromise convention” could do nothing useful: “The seceding states have taken no part in it, and their most influential statesmen and journals have already expressed their contempt for any such attempt to patch up a truce between them and the United States.” Off stage, Michigan’s tough Senator Zachariah Chandler was muttering that some of the Northern manufacturing states were altogether too nervous about the prospect of a fight, and was saying that “without a little bloodletting this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush.”2
From the start the delegates had trouble. Former President John Tyler presided, calling upon the convention to achieve “a triumph over party”—which, he believed, would cause “a long, loud shout of joy and gladness” to resound across the country—but when the resolutions committee got down to work, it was clear that a triumph over party would be hard to attain. Republican delegates from the North were consistently obstructionist, some of Virginia’s representatives showed a substantial lack of enthusiasm, and it was three weeks before the resolutions committee could agree on a program—which, when it was unveiled, proved to be nothing more than a watered-down version of the compromise that Senator Crittenden had fought for so unsuccessfully in Congress. The old Missouri Compromise line would be extended to the West Coast, with slavery prohibited in territories north of the line and protected in territories south of it; Congress would be forbidden to interfere with slavery in states or territories, the fugitive slave law was to be stiffened (in a way no one quite understood), intricate restrictions were laid on the acquisition of additional territory by the United States—and, all in all, the program satisfied hardly anyone and was visibly inadequate to bear the load it would have to carry.3
Yet this conference was about all the hope that remained. The most anyone could say regarding the last four months was that war had not yet actually begun. No one had backed down or had a change of heart; it was just that the final shock that would produce explosion had not yet been delivered. As long as this peace conference remained in session, there might still be a chance to settle things. Men of good will were at least bound to make the effort.
Actually, the delegates were men calling across a wide gulf through an unquiet dusk. Misunderstanding was communicating with misunderstanding, and inadequate answers were being returned to meaningless questions. Lincoln met one evening, late in February, with a number of the delegates, but the conversations were not fruitful. When William C. Rives, of Virginia, told him soberly “Everything now depends on you,” Lincoln replied that he could not agree. “My course,” he said, “is as plain as a turnpike road. It is marked out by the Constitution. I am in no doubt which way to go. Suppose now we all stop discussing and try the experiment of obedience to the Constitution and laws. Don’t you think that would work?” Lincoln’s path might indeed be clear—to him, at least, if not to all of his fellow countrymen—but a general appeal for obedience to the Constitution meant nothing at all, because the Constitution meant such different things to different men.
From the sepulchral James A. Seddon, of Virginia, who would become Secretary of War in the Confederate government before two years were out, Lincoln in his turn got nothing to indicate that sectional understanding could yet be found if good men looked for it. Seddon, lean and pallid and intense, could do no better than lodge a broad bill of complaint against Yankeedom in general, as if Illinois and Massachusetts shared in one unshaded response to the intricacies of the slavery problem. The North (said Mr. Seddon) failed to suppress its John Browns and its William Lloyd Garrisons; it refused to execute the fugitive slave laws, and it nourished an incendiary press that advocated servile insurrection �
��and advises our slaves to cut their masters’ throats.” To this Lincoln replied that “a gentleman of your intelligence should not make such assertions,” adding that the North did indeed maintain a free press, considering it necessary in a free society; and the whole exchange proved nothing, except perhaps that tidewater aristocracy and northwest democracy had very little to say to one another.
When William D. Dodge, of New York, inspired by some conciliatory remark, asked hopefully if Lincoln would “yield to the just demands of the South” and would refuse to go to war over slavery, Lincoln replied soberly that it would be his solemn duty to execute the office of President and defend the Constitution, continuing: “The Constitution will not be preserved and defended until it is enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, let the grass grow where it may.”
