by Bruce Catton
In deeply somber mood he told a New Jersey delegate that “in a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst”—a fairly grim sort of warning, considering the decisions Lincoln would have to make in the near future—and he went on (as one listener recalled it) to speak his mind on the underlying issue:
“As to slavery, it must be content with what it has. The voice of the civilized world is against it; it is opposed to its growth or extension. Freedom is the natural condition of the human race, in which the Almighty intended men to live. Those who fight the purposes of the Almighty will not succeed. They always have been, and they always will be, beaten.”4
In all of this there was very little oil for the troubled waters. At about this time Senator Charles Sumner was writing to Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, that he believed Virginia would certainly leave the Union. The peace conference, Sumner felt, could do nothing to restore harmony, and everybody very soon would have to face “the question of enforcing the laws or retaking the forts—in other words of our existence as a Govt.” If Lincoln stood firm, said Sumner, the Union cause could be saved; and, so far, “all that we see testifies to his character.” As if he realized the powerful influences that would push the new President this way and that, Sumner added darkly: “But he is a man!” Two days later Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote to Governor Andrew that Sumner was far too excitable, and that the important question just now was not so much what Lincoln would do as what Seward would do. Everyone in Washington, said Adams, was waiting for a lead, and if Lincoln would support the conciliatory efforts that Seward was making, it might yet be possible to “save us the country without the loss of anything save many fair words.”5
Seward was doing his best. He had spoken in the old days about a higher law and an irrepressible conflict, so that Southerners considered him an extremist who meant nothing but evil for the South. But the Seward who was about to become Secretary of State (and, as he then believed, the real leader and shaper of policy for an untried administration) was talking much more gently than the Seward who had been out to win a militant party’s nomination for the presidency. Whether he was busy on the Senate floor and in its cloakrooms or was talking confidentially in the drawing rooms of the homes of friends, he seemed leisurely and unworried, sure that the country could be led out of its dire predicament. He said openly, early in February, that he thought the danger was over, and the elder Charles Francis Adams wrote that Seward seemed to be the only Republican in the capital “who comprehends the nature and treatment of the present malady.” As Adams saw it, the important victory had already been won; “the slave question is substantially settled by the last election,” and the Republican leadership would commit an immense blunder if it let this be followed by an actual dissolution of the Union. The leadership must be moderate; instead of meeting the threat of secession by angry talk and threats, it must be ready to make the concessions that would encourage pro-Union men in the South and hold the loyalty of the border states, and if this involved giving the South a constitutional amendment with “safeguards” for slavery, what of it? Slavery itself was on the downhill road, and the important thing now was to deprive the secessionist movement of the support which it had to have in such states as Virginia. If this could be done, the movement would fail, “and we shall never again hear of secession as a legal remedy.”6
To this, or something like it, Seward was addressing himself. One night Senator Douglas gave a dinner for the French Minister, Mercier. When the table was cleared and it was time for toasts, Seward called on the guests to fill their glasses to the brim and to be prepared to drain them to the bottom; and then, raising his own glass, he offered his toast—“Away with all parties, all platforms, all previous committals and whatever else will stand in the way of the restoration of the American Union.” A little later, Senator Crittenden brought Seward into intimate conversation with Justice John A. Campbell, of the Supreme Court. Justice Campbell was a good Alabaman, born in Georgia, who would finally go with his state, once the sections came to a showdown; but he was a moderate on the slavery question, a man who still hoped to see the Union preserved, and now, in Senator Crittenden’s presence, he explained his position to Seward.
Slavery, said Campbell, ought not to form a cause for a breakup of the Union. Slavery was a transitory institution. It would inevitably be greatly modified or abolished altogether in the course of time. Modification, in fact, was already taking place; for many years slavery had been steadily receding from the upper south to the rich plantation belt around the mouth of the Mississippi. That was where slavery was really thriving, and it would probably be a quarter of a century before that area’s expanding needs for slave labor were fully met. Seward quietly interrupted: “Say fifty years.” Campbell accepted the correction: fifty years, then, not twenty-five—fifty years, in all, before the institution would have reached the final limit of its development. Meanwhile, the most the slavery group could hope for was the continued protection of slavery in the states. In the territories the battle was lost—New Mexico, well south of the Missouri Compromise line, had been open to slave immigration for a full decade, and only twenty-nine slaves had been carried there. (Again Seward broke in: “Only twenty-four, sir.”) Twenty-four: in ten years, under full protection of the laws. Was there any sense, asked the Justice, in letting the Union be destroyed over the question of slavery in the territories when slavery obviously was not going to establish itself in the territories in any case? Seward agreed that there was not.
The talk ended in nothing better than the glow of agreement between the Northerner and the Southerner. Seward walked over to a table and dealt himself a hooker of brandy, and Justice Campbell heard him tell Senator Douglas and Senator Crittenden that his latest information was that Governor Chase, of Ohio, would surely be in Lincoln’s cabinet, but that Seward had no real assurance he himself would be in it. The point of this was that Chase was an anti-slavery stalwart as unyielding as Senator Sumner; if his place was sure and Seward’s was not, the chance that the new administration would take a conciliatory position toward the South was slim indeed. Seward shrugged: What can I do? The Senators shook their heads and said they could see his situation.7
So the talk never led to anything: Seward and Campbell went their separate ways and the sections of the country did the same; yet there is a haunting, tantalizing quality to the report of this conversation, for it is one of the few lights of hope that comes down to us from the fated months that led up to the war. What Seward and Campbell were agreeing was that the slavery issue, considered rationally, had already gone past the flash point. Only in the Gulf states did slavery retain its old dynamic power, and even there it was beginning to live on borrowed time. It would inevitably come down to manageable proportions if men would only let it do so; Justice Campbell was saying that the anti-slavery men of the North had already gained what Lincoln said they wanted most of all—the assurance that slavery was inevitably on the road to extinction. It remained for reasonable men (in the quiet drawing room, between the intoned toasts and the final sip of brandy) to stop haggling over non-essentials and to agree on some way to make the institution’s demise as seemly and as inexpensive as might be.
But it was being said too late and too privately. Here is what many leaders of the North and South should have been saying publicly, in political conventions and on campaign platforms, for a year and more. No one had done it. The climate in which a politician might find the courage to talk sober sense about the most emotion-ridden of all issues had not existed, possibly because no one had seemed to want it to exist. Instead of the great debate which might truly have shown people that the cause of their dreadful quarrel was slowly but surely evaporating, unseen, there had been desperate appeals to pride, to principle, to all of the moral imperatives that have a way of riding down the wind just ahead of the fatal bugle calls. Now a Southern Confederacy existed, a beleaguered fort was surrounded by dozens and scores of shotted guns in the Carolina swamps, a hop
eless peace convention was consuming the last of its time with bumbling futilities … and off stage, unseen, not yet even in existence but surely fated to exist very soon, waited the terrible armies of unknowing boys who would presently be tramping their way across the bewildered country.
Seward and Campbell got nowhere. They were neither heard nor followed; and perhaps, when all is said and done, they could not have got anywhere no matter who might have heard or followed them. Perhaps it was not really possible for slavery to die peacefully and quietly, while everyone waited hat in hand for the mills of God to finish their grinding. Perhaps the essential fact about slavery was that it could neither be kept alive nor done to death rationally. Its foundations went far down into the pit, down to blackest wrong and violence, and when the foundations were torn out, wrong and violence would surely be loosed for a season. The institution’s defenders had both overplayed their hands and overstayed their time.
One of Lincoln’s troubles was the weight of the mechanical details which had to be borne by the first President elected by a new party. The Republican party on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration was less a political organization than an assemblage of separate factions each with its own leadership and its own shibboleths, loosely united by the requirements of a victorious campaign but enjoying only the vaguest basis for real unity. A great many of these men were much more concerned with party power than with the national crisis. They would cheerfully tear one another to shreds in the scramble for control, and to some of them, at least, secession was welcome because it got so many Democrats out of Washington. Altogether, with their intense rivalries, their hot ambitions, their driving attempts to win place and preferment, these men constituted the instrument through which Lincoln would have to try to govern a dissolving nation. If Lincoln felt that his first task was to get this instrument into some sort of order, so that when he took office he would at least have something to govern with, it is hard to criticize him. He may have failed to appraise the real temper of the South, but he at least knew the temper of his own party. He was undertaking now to bind the separate party factions together, and in this effort—for the first time since he left Springfield—he was beginning to show real statesmanship.
The first step of course was the selection of a cabinet, and here Lincoln was creating a coalition of antagonistic Republicans, trusting to his own powers of leadership and of decision to master the separate elements and to impose on the coalition his own policies. It was a daring step; he was going to surround himself with the very men who had fought against him at Chicago, and at least a few of these considered themselves stronger and wiser than he was and believed that they had more prestige and power in the party and with the voters. He would, for instance, have Seward for his Secretary of State, and his Secretary of the Treasury would be Salmon P. Chase: and these two men, so different in personality and outlook, were so bitterly opposed about the proper policy regarding slavery and secession that Seward a few days before the inauguration was doubtful whether he could serve at all and was considering a flat rejection of the cabinet post. (If Seward stayed out, the party would be split wide open, and the younger Adams was gloomily predicting that the party’s cause and principles would be set back by a full ten years.) Seward was working hard for conciliation; Chase—devoted, self-righteous, ambitious, spokesman for the unyielding anti-slavery faction—was arguing that the South must first of all accept the fact of the Republican victory. Once the new party was in office with the controls in its hands, there would be time enough (as Chase saw it) to see about a reconstruction of the divided Union.
For Attorney General, Lincoln would have Edward Bates, of Missouri, a stolid border-state Unionist, Missouri’s favorite son at the Wigwam. Also from the border-state tier came Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, son of the contentious old-line Jacksonian Francis P. Blair, a political feudist known irreverently in some quarters as “Death on a Pale Horse.” Montgomery Blair would be Postmaster General; his selection meant that “the Blair family” would have influence with the new administration—altogether too much influence, its numerous rivals would complain. New England would be represented by Gideon Welles, of Connecticut, an observant, petulant, but fair-minded former Democrat, who would be Secretary of the Navy. Welles knew little more about the navy than the average politician who finds himself called upon to run the Navy Department, but he would prove a capable executive once he found his way around the department; he would also show rather more of an instinct for loyalty toward the man who appointed him than some of his colleagues would ever display.
The remaining two places represented political bargains allegedly made by Lincoln’s managers at Chicago. Secretary of the Interior would be Caleb Smith, of Indiana, a party hack who represented a handful of votes at the Wigwam and nothing more; and the Secretary of War would be Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron, whom Lincoln appointed with deepest misgivings simply because the political heat which Cameron had been able to bring to bear seemed irresistible. Before the year was out, it would be clear that all of Lincoln’s misgivings had been justified.
This, then, was the group that would serve as the new President’s confidential advisers. It was a unique assortment. Five of the seven had been rivals of Lincoln for the party nomination; four of the seven had at one time or another been Democrats; not one of the lot came from Illinois or had enjoyed any intimacy with Lincoln before the campaign. Whatever else might be said of them all, it was at least true that they did represent the separate elements in the chaotic new party. If Lincoln could control them, he might have a strong government. Choosing these men, he had shown that he was either a complete political innocent or a man of such strength and subtlety that he felt no fear in surrounding himself with men as strong as himself.8
It would take time to see this. As February came to an end, men were trying to determine who was going to be the power behind the throne, taking it for granted that the new President was so weak that there would be such a power somewhere. Young Adams continued to hope that this power would be Seward, who was working constantly to keep Lincoln from falling under the control of the “iron-back Republican” combination symbolized by Chase. It was Adams’s belief that his own father was at one time slated to go into the cabinet, and that Seward had felt obliged to sacrifice him in favor of Cameron in order to build a proper fence around Chase. Congressman Sherrard Clemens, of Virginia, concluded that the Republican party was already demoralized and disrupted; its factions could never work together, and Lincoln himself—“a cross between a sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass”—was by all odds the weakest man who had ever been sent to the White House. Virginia, said Clemens, must presently secede because this President-elect was simply impossible: “He is vain, weak, puerile, hypocritical, without manners, without moral grace, and as he talks to you he punches you under your ribs.… He is surrounded by a set of toad eaters and bottle holders.”9
Everyone wanted to know what the new government was going to do, but first it was necessary to know what the new government was going to be. No one knew. The true center of power was not yet visible.
5: Pressure at Fort Sumter
The soldiers had not yet been called into action but they were busy, and the materials to force a decision were piling up—in Fort Sumter, and on the mud flats that surrounded it in Charleston harbor. Major Anderson was doing what he could to perfect his defenses, mounting additional guns on the barbette, making his walls more solid by bricking up embrasures that could not be manned, removing stone flagging from the parade ground so that shells that might be thrown into the fort would bury themselves in the sand before exploding. He was also running short of fuel, and his men were dismantling temporary wooden barracks to get firewood. He believed that he might yet avoid a fight, and to a friend he wrote expressing the belief that “the separation which has been inevitable for months will be consummated without the shedding of one drop of blood.” But the local papers kept printing reports that Federal reinforcements were on th
e way, and he feared this might lead hotheads to open an attack on him. Certainly the batteries that surrounded him were being strengthened day after day; under the circumstances he could do no more than hold on and, hoping for the best, prepare for the worst.1
The worst was taking shape before his eyes. South Carolina had put powerful weapons in position, its guard boats kept a night-and-day watch on the harbor, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that if Washington tried to reinforce him, it would have to mount a full-dress war expedition. Furthermore, the South Carolina authorities were becoming exceedingly impatient, and their impatience was almost as much a problem in Montgomery as in Washington. They wanted this fort captured, and they wanted it done before Abraham Lincoln should become President. South Carolina had forced the pace ever since the secession convention of December 20, and Governor Pickens could see no reason for a change in tactics.
Everybody but Pickens wanted to mark time. Washington could do nothing until the new administration came in, and whether it could do anything effective thereafter seemed an open question. Montgomery was in no better shape; it had to create a new government, and it did not want the first uncertain steps to be taken in the midst of a shooting war. But Governor Pickens wanted action, and he began demanding it before the Southern Confederacy even had a chief executive. On February 7 he sent a breathless telegram to Porcher Miles, at Montgomery: “There is danger ahead unless you give us immediately a strong organized government & take jurisdiction of all military defence we will soon be forced into a war of sections unless you act quickly it will be too late & reaction will commence which will inaugurate confusion & with it the most fatal consequences.” A day later he sent a “did you get my telegram?” follow-up, asking whether the new government was sending commissioners to Washington to demand surrender of the forts and repeating “Every hour is now deeply important.”2
