by Bruce Catton
One thing was clear: the cabinet did not represent the famous planter aristocracy. Three of its members—Memminger, Mallory, and Benjamin—had been born abroad. All of the cabinet appointees, at one time or another, had been Unionists, and two had opposed secession until their own states seceded. For better or for worse, Davis had not tried the experiment Lincoln was trying, of bringing in the most forceful leaders the nation’s politics had to offer; none of these men had either the stature or the desire to take the reins away from the President and direct the government. The executive would be Jefferson Davis and no one else.12
Excluded from the top posts in the government, and living amid rumors that sooner or later the old Union might be put back together, the fire-eaters felt that they had ground for worry. The frantic effort to set off the guns in Charleston harbor may have represented a desire to put pressure on the Confederate government as well as on the government in Washington. Yet this worry was largely without solid foundation. The fire-eaters’ biggest maneuver had been successful: the new government was established and operating before Lincoln took office, and from the moment he took the oath, the Republican President would have to face the hard fact that the Union had actually been broken. Furthermore, although Davis was talking about peace, he was ready to fight and knew that he almost certainly would have to fight, and there was a great deal of iron in him. He had handled his first big problem, that of getting South Carolina under control, with deft speed; he immediately addressed himself to the second, which had to do with the Federal government at Washington.
On February 25 Davis named three commissioners to go to Washington and negotiate for the surrender of Federal forts and other installations in secession territory. He chose his men carefully: A. B. Roman, of Louisiana, an old-line Whig who had supported Bell in the presidential election, Martin J. Crawford, of Georgia, who had been a Breckinridge supporter, and John Forsyth, of Alabama, a Douglas man. Representing the three principal wings of Southern politics, these men, Davis felt, ought to be able to win “the sympathy and cooperation of every element of conservatism with which they might have occasion to deal.” The spirit of his inaugural address ran through his instructions to these commissioners: they were to go to Washington in the most friendly spirit and were to ask for the things to which the Confederacy obviously was entitled—recognition, surrender of forts, arsenals, and other public property, and a general settlement of debts and other disputed matters. Davis was assuming that the separation was permanent, and from this assumption he would not depart as long as there was the remotest chance that it could be made good.
His private opinion was that there would be a war, and his Congress swung around to this view somewhat reluctantly but fairly quickly. It empowered the Confederate President to summon and use the militia of the several states, and shortly afterward expanded this by providing for a Confederate army “to repel invasion” which would be composed of the militia and of at least 100,000 volunteers. It directed the Committee on Naval Affairs to consider the propriety of building iron-clad frigates and gunboats, it provided for the establishment of a general staff for the army, it passed elaborate regulations to govern the rank that might be given to former officers in the United States Army, and it devised a national flag. On March 4, 1861, this flag was formally hoisted to the staff over the capitol building in Montgomery.13
6: First Inaugural
There was a gale during the night, but it blew itself out before dawn and March 4 came in cloudy, raw, and gusty, with streaks of moderate warmth. The correspondent for Harper’s Weekly believed that there were 25,000 visitors in Washington and said that many of them had been unable to find sleeping quarters. Newspaperman Henry Villard remarked that although the city did not contain one good restaurant, it had “no end of bar rooms,” most of which were doing a fine business, and he felt that the city looked like an untidy overgrown village, indolent and unfinished but crowded and somehow vibrant with life. Most of the streets were unpaved and muddy, and the open plaza east of the Capitol was cluttered with castings and building blocks for the still incomplete dome. Beyond this litter, as day came in, a battery of regular artillery casually unlimbered and took position in full view of the temporary platform where Abraham Lincoln would presently take the oath as sixteenth President of the United States.
In this expression there was a trace of mockery, because the states obviously were no longer united. The man from Illinois was about to become President of something, but a precise definition was lacking. What drew so many people to Washington today, what kept the country’s attention centered on the place, was the hope that the impending ceremony, the man himself, and the words that he would speak might bring clarification. For good or for ill, today was likely to be a turning point.
By nine in the morning most of the visitors seemed to be crowding Pennsylvania Avenue near Willard’s Hotel, where the President-elect was staying, and within an hour the street was practically blocked. The procession would be elaborate, with decorated floats, including a huge wagon draped in bunting and labeled “Constitution,” bearing thirty-four pretty girls representing the several states that, it was hoped, would soon reassemble in sisterly affection. There would be marching delegations from this place and that, along with parade marshals, members of the Committee on Arrangements, and carriages for judges, diplomats, and other dignitaries who would presently be riding up to the Capitol. It was noticed that a good many soldiers were in evidence.1
Many of these were District of Columbia militiamen, called to duty because Washington had heard so many rumors of possible violence. It was whispered that someone would try to shoot the President, or that an armed mob would swarm out to break up the parade and prevent the inauguration, and the harassed government was doing its weary best to be on the alert. There were groups of riflemen on the roofs of buildings overlooking the line of march, and in the wings of the Capitol itself there were riflemen in every window that overlooked the platform where the oath would be taken; what might happen if these considered that they saw something subversive and opened fire on the dense crowd was something that, happily, was never put to the test. There were also regular troops—600 or more of them, all that the government could conveniently assemble—and squads of cavalry patrolled street intersections, with more cavalry ready to rise beside the presidential carriage and a detachment of engineer troops ready to march just ahead. Two days earlier James Buchanan had explained all of this to Congress. These troops, he said, had been called to Washington “to act as a posse comitatus in strict subordination to the city authority for the purpose of preserving peace and order in the city of Washington, should this be necessary before or at the period of the inauguration.” There was also a carriage to bear Lieutenant General Scott up to a command post by the artillery east of the Capitol.2
General Scott was disturbed and slightly confused—as, indeed, were most of his fellow countrymen. He had said, firmly enough, that he would manure the Virginia hills with fragments of the body of any person who tried to keep the ceremony from taking place, and this much he could infallibly do; beyond it, however, he was at a loss, and he had just made this fact clear in a letter to William H. Seward—who for his own part was at a loss also; he was not, as this day began, at all certain whether he would or would not take a place in Lincoln’s cabinet. Scott told Seward that it seemed to him the new government could do one of four things. It could adopt the Crittenden peace plan and wait for the dissident states to return to the Union; it could blockade the ports of the Southern states, collecting import duties outside the harbors and in general waiting for a break; it could raise huge armies and beat the Confederacy into submission, winning at last “15 devastated provinces” that would have to be garrisoned for generations at immense cost … or it could simply give up and say to the seceded states “Wayward Sisters, depart in peace!”3
This from the general of the armies. From the Congress there could come no immediate help, for after a winter in which it had done
little more than orate passionately, Congress had adjourned. It had refused to pass certain “force bills,” which would have authorized the President to call out the militia to recover or defend Federal property and which would also have empowered him to follow Scott’s second suggestion and close the ports in the Confederate states; in a final spasm of activity it had approved an amendment to the Constitution which would have outlawed any future Constitutional amendment empowering Congress to interfere with slavery—an amendment that would go forever unratified and would, in the crush of events, be quietly forgotten. The Senate had been summoned into special temporary session, so that the new President’s appointments could be confirmed, and it was busy this morning with some last-minute business; and President Buchanan, two hours away from his return to private life, had gone to the Capitol with his cabinet to attend to any final bills that might be offered for his signature.
Secretary of War Holt reached this meeting late. He had with him a new and highly disturbing dispatch from Major Anderson, in Fort Sumter, which he thought Buchanan and the cabinet ought to know about. Major Anderson was saying that he could not remain at Fort Sumter very much longer unless the government sent him more supplies; much worse, he was also saying that Beauregard had mounted so many guns around the harbor and had his defensive preparations so well in hand that the Federal government would need a force of 20,000 men if it tried to come in and reinforce its lost garrison.4 Obviously the status quo, which had wobbled so uneasily for months, was on the point of total collapse; equally obviously there was nothing the out-going administration could do with this unwelcome news but pass it along to Abraham Lincoln and let him make of it what he could. Buchanan returned to the White House to prepare for the inauguration parade.
He would be relieved to depart from Washington; before the day ended he remarked that if Lincoln was as glad to get into the White House as he himself was to get out of it, Lincoln must be the happiest man alive. Yet Buchanan was not oppressed by any great feeling that he had failed in a time of high crisis. He felt that he had done his best and he believed that his best had been fairly good, and he summed up what he had done with the statement: “I acted for some time as a breakwater between the North and the South, both surging with all their force against me.” He was turning over the government to Lincoln without having made a single admission of the right of secession and without having committed Lincoln to hold even an informal conversation with the commissioners from Montgomery. The border slave states were still in the Union. Anderson was still in Fort Sumter (even though his dispatch, read this morning, indicated he could not possibly stay there much longer), and Buchanan had firmly asserted the Federal government’s right to keep him there. All in all, the departing President felt that he had not done too badly. One week after his term ended he wrote to a friend that his administration had been successful in its foreign and domestic policy—to which, incredibly, he calmly added, apparently as an afterthought, “unless we may except the sad events which recently occurred.” No human wisdom, he added, could have prevented these sad events; he had done his best, and he believed that posterity would do him justice.5
In any case, he would not slink out of Washington as a broken and defeated weakling. When he returned to his home in Pennsylvania, the citizens of Lancaster would greet him with cheers and a brass band, with militia to escort an open barouche in a parade through the downtown streets, and he would respond with a graceful speech climaxed by the devout cry: “May God preserve the Constitution and the Union.” Many people in Washington would remember him with fondness. Mrs. Roger Pryor, wife of the erratic fire-eater from Virginia, would recall him as a regular visitor at Dr. Gurley’s Presbyterian church on Sundays: greeting him at the doorway, after services, she would always tell him: “A good sermon, Mr. President,” to which his invariable reply was: “Too long, madam, too long.” He was tall, with a pink complexion and silky white hair, and some defect in vision caused him to stand with his head cocked on one side, like an inquisitive bird. Like all presidents, he had found political job seekers a trial, and he had protested once that “they give me no time to say my prayers,” but he had kept a certain amount of serenity through all the pulling and hauling of the secession winter. In December, at the time South Carolina was cutting the silver cord, he had written to Publisher James Gordon Bennett: “I have never enjoyed better health or a more tranquil spirit than during the past year. All our troubles have not cost me an hour’s sleep or a meal’s victuals.” Now it was about over. Leaving the White House, he would pick up Lincoln at Willard’s, take him to the Capitol, see and hear the inauguration ceremonies, escort the new President back to the White House, and then start for home, hoping only “to perform the duties of a good citizen and a kind friend and neighbor.”6
Buchanan’s open carriage drew up in front of Willard’s some time after twelve o’clock. Lincoln came out, in top hat and frock coat, escorted by Senators Edward D. Baker, of Oregon, and James A. Pearce, of Maryland, and with cavalrymen for outriders and a company of regulars tramping just ahead, the party left for the Capitol. Lincoln had had a hard morning, with deserving Republicans desiring office clinging to him like leeches. Meeting correspondent Villard sometime that day, Lincoln confessed: “It was bad enough in Springfield, but it was child’s play compared with this tussle here. I hardly have a chance to eat or sleep. I am fair game for everybody of that hungry lot.” But his chief problem this morning was with a man who apparently did not want a job, rather than with the multitude who did want jobs. Seward had notified him, a day earlier, that on full reflection he found that he could not accept the post of Secretary of State which Lincoln had offered him—the real trouble being that Seward did not want to sit in the same cabinet with his rival, Chase. While the procession was forming, Lincoln dealt with this. He said: “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” and he scribbled a note for his secretary to copy and deliver. In this note he asked Seward to reconsider his withdrawal: “The public interest, I think, demands that you should; my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction.” The note was delivered, and that afternoon Seward had another change of heart and agreed to serve.7
None of the anticipated acts of violence took place. The presidential carriage got to the Capitol without trouble, and the preliminary ceremonies went off smoothly. Buchanan and Lincoln entered the Senate chamber arm in arm to see Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, sworn in as Vice-President; an observer said that Buchanan was pale and nervous, and that Lincoln, tight-lipped, was “grave and impassive as an Indian martyr.” Mr. Hamlin became Vice-President, and presently the party walked out to the platform that had been built over the east portico to the Capitol. Ancient Chief Justice Roger Taney, frail as a withered leaf, was waiting with a Bible to administer the oath. Stephen A. Douglas was in the group on the platform; by happy chance, when Lincoln took his seat and found that he had no handy place to lay his stovepipe hat, Senator Douglas stepped forward, said “Permit me, sir,” and took the hat from him, holding it throughout the rest of the ceremony. This gesture from the leader of the Northern Democracy, cherished by later historians, was observed by Murat Halstead, here to cover the inaugural for his Cincinnati Commercial just as he had covered the conventions, and in his story Halstead mused aloud: “Doug must have reflected pretty seriously during that half hour, that instead of delivering an inaugural address from the portico he was holding the hat of the man who was doing it.”8
A good omen, possibly—like the sunlight that came out brightly as Lincoln stepped up to deliver his inaugural address? Most welcome, if so, for other good omens were lacking. Lincoln was addressing a nation that had broken into two pieces, with additional fractures visibly indicated for the near future. No matter what he said, men would read their own hopes and fears into his speech. Hoping for peace, he was face to face with a crisis that could hardly be settled peaceably unless one side or the other went off in full retreat—a thing that was in the highest degree unlikely. Th
e deep shadow that hung over this first inaugural of America’s most eloquent President was the simple fact that Lincoln was trying, this morning, to do with words that which words could not possibly do.
The speech would be studied, analyzed, and taken apart sentence by sentence with devout care—by nervous Americans in that first week of March 1861 and by historians in every decade since then—and nobody ever found in it anything particularly surprising. There was not in it, either (there could not have been, by any possibility under heaven), the magical phrase that would quell the rising hurricane and, by the power of its logic, the beauty of its structure, or the nobility of its thought, bring a divided nation back to amity, understanding, and peaceful intent.
Lincoln’s first inaugural, in short, did not achieve the impossible. As a state paper, it was excellent; it contained moving passages, soft words of conciliation, closely reasoned appeals for forbearance and brotherhood—and these would have no effect whatever. Lincoln argued that secession was illegal, ruinous, and in the long run physically impossible; the argument meant no more than Jefferson Davis’s argument, in his own inaugural a few weeks earlier, that secession was legal, right, and completely inevitable. The gist of the speech, the part that set the pattern for the time that was to follow, was in a few sentences that constituted the new President’s statement of intent. He considered the Union unbroken, no matter what had been said and done at Charleston, at Montgomery, or elsewhere, and he would act on the assumption that the states that said they were out of the Union were eternally in it.
