by Bruce Catton
Consequently: “The power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”9 He hoped to do all that he proposed to do without having any trouble, and if there was going to be fighting, the people who considered themselves out of the Union would have to start it, but he would stand on this position. Between Canada and the Rio Grande there was just one nation; he was its chief executive, and he would behave accordingly.
This was the heart and center of the trouble. The crisis was not the fact that Major Anderson and eighty hungry soldiers occupied Fort Sumter, with black cannon staring at them and the pulse of coming violence beating steadily. That was no more than the symptom. The crisis came because seven states (for the most complex of reasons) had declared themselves out of the Union and had made it clear that they would willingly fight in order to stay out. Lincoln was saying now that they were not out and that everything he did would rest on the assumption that they could not possibly go out. All of the rest of his speech—his Constitutional argument, his offer of a flexible attitude in respect to the slavery problems, his plea for harmony, his soft-spoken appeal to “the mystic chords of memory” stretching from half-forgotten battlefields to the hearts of living men—might as well have gone unspoken. He could have peace by consenting to a division of the Union and he flatly refused to get it on that basis. The rest was in the hands of the unrelenting gods. Thirteen years earlier he had told the Congress, of which he was then a member, that “it is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both and make new ones.” Old lines and old laws had at last been broken, and presently everyone would see what came of it.
Lincoln was not in any sense occupying new ground. It had been clear enough for a long time, to anyone who cared to ponder on the man and his record, that he did not believe in and would never recognize the right of secession, and the men in the cotton states had never deceived themselves about the matter; in a queer way, it appears that the people of the Confederacy that winter had interpreted Lincoln better than many Northerners had been able to do. What this speech did was pin a general principle down to an exceedingly specific case: when Lincoln said that he would “hold, occupy and possess” the government’s property, he meant Fort Sumter, and everybody knew it.10
He did not necessarily mean that he was going to do anything in particular about it. The government already held, occupied, and possessed Fort Sumter. It would simply go on doing so, accepting the symbolism that made this one fort represent all of the material and spiritual values that were at stake between the two governments. Major Anderson would be completely passive. If he stayed where he was and kept his flag flying, that would be enough. When Lincoln told the secessionists: “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors,” he was simply reminding them about Major Anderson. If there was going to be a war, the Confederacy would have to start it.
The new President had chosen his ground with strategic intelligence. Unfortunately, he had also chosen it with incomplete knowledge. He was staking his whole policy on the belief that Fort Sumter could be held as long as need be; and two hours before he got up to make his speech, the War Department had received the major’s announcement that this was no longer true. Anderson could stay in Fort Sumter only a short time unless all the power of the government were actively used in his behalf. The key point in Lincoln’s plan had been knocked loose before he even took the oath of office.
The oath was taken, after the speech. Ancient Taney, black-robed and stooped, came forward with the open Book, administering the oath to a new President for the eighth time in his career; knowing, as he did it, that his Dred Scott decision and most of the policies he had stood for were fading out as this tall man from Illinois took the new office. Lincoln took the oath, bent and kissed the Book, and the Marine Corps band began to play, the crowd cheered, and the battery of regular artillerymen began to fire a salute. Haughty Senator Sumner remarked to the younger Charles Francis Adams: “Hand of iron: velvet glove,” the carriage and the cavalcade moved back down town, and Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States.11
Men construed the speech, as Senator Sumner had done, according to their own ideas. Bennett’s New York Herald remarked that it meant everything to everybody; “the most extreme Southern men regard it as meaning war … while the more conservative men of the border states view it as conciliatory.” The Herald’s man in Richmond reported that secessionists there “regard it as equivalent to a declaration of War” and said that Virginia’s Unionists, saying little, were disappointed. Northern Republicans, according to the Herald, were delighted, and Northern Democrats were worried. George Templeton Strong, the New York diarist, correctly noted that the speech had “a clang of metal in it,” and Henry Adams took a lofty look at the new President, pitied him because he did not know how to wear white kid gloves, and permitted himself to conclude that “no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.” Martin J. Crawford, one of the Confederate commissioners in Washington, wrote to Robert Toombs that everything would depend on what Lincoln thought the border states would swallow; “whatsoever the Republican party can do without driving out Virginia it will do, and such coercive measures as the new Administration may with safety adopt it will most certainly.”12
Southern newspapers and public men had many things to say about the inaugural, but T. R. R. Cobb, in Montgomery, expressed the inner fact of the matter when he wrote, on this same March 4: “We are receiving Lincoln’s inaugural by telegraph, it will not affect one man here, it matters not what it contains.” From the grim duelist Louis T. Wigfall, of Texas, who had stayed in Washington to hear what the new President had to say, came a wire: “Inaugural means war … Be vigilant.” The Montgomery Weekly Advertiser agreed that Lincoln’s speech meant that “war, war, and nothing less than war, will satisfy the Abolition chief,” and the Charleston Mercury was even more outspoken: “If ignorance could add anything to folly, or insolence to brutality, the President of the Northern States of America has, in this address, achieved it. A more lamentable display of feeble inability to grasp the circumstances of this momentous emergency could scarcely have been exhibited.… The United States has become a mobocratic empire and the Union of the States is now dissolved.”13
The speech undoubtedly disappointed men of the border states, who devoutly longed for peace and who had innocently supposed that Lincoln would insure it by basing his policy on a deliberate acceptance of the “sad events” to which Buchanan was referring. Thinking so, they had been hoping for an impossibility, failing to realize that the North as well as the South contained determined men who would fight rather than knuckle under—men who had already made up their minds, and who stood at the very center of the force that had made Lincoln President. Facing the mere threat of secession, these men might have been conciliatory enough; facing the actual fact of secession, they were not conciliatory at all, and they were men whose outspoken feelings Lincoln could by no means ignore.
As early as February 2 the legislators of the state of Michigan, refusing to send delegates to the unhappy peace conference, had resolved that the secessionist states were “in open rebellion against the government” and had pledged all of the state’s men and money to the government’s support, with a rider saying that “concession and compromise are not to be entertained or offered to traitors.” In Minnesota, a week earlier, the legislature had passed a similar resolution, asserting that secession amounted to revolution and would precipitate civil war and declaring that Minnesota would support “with men and money” the most vigorous effort Washington could make to assert its supremacy. In Wisconsin, Governor Alexander Randall had warned the legislature on January 10 that it might presently be necessary to vote men and means “to sustain the integrity of the Union and thwart the designs of men engaged in organized treason,” and even in Ohio, where th
ere were many Democrats deeply sympathetic to the South, the legislature that winter had voted that “the power and resources” of the state would be used “for the maintenance of the civil authority, Constitution and laws of the general government.”14
These were fighting words as grim as anything that had been said at Charleston or Montgomery. They came from men without whose support Lincoln could not have become President. These men expected him to do whatever he had to do to maintain the Union, and his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess” Fort Sumter and any other forts that had not already fallen was the absolute minimum he could have offered them. The pressure that was on him was as strong as the pressure that rested on Jefferson Davis, and it ran in precisely the opposite direction; and, like Davis, he shared in the inner convictions of the men from whom the pressure came. To suppose that he could admit the legality and the reality of secession and put the desire for peace above the desire for Union was, quite simply, to imagine a vain thing.
At any rate, the speech and the oath-taking and the rest of the ceremony finally ended. The crowd that gathered in front of the Capitol had been orderly enough, although one reporter felt that it had shown very little enthusiasm; but at least the vigilant riflemen had not been needed, and there had been no disorder. When Lincoln began to speak, and fitted steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose so that he could read his manuscript, some leather-lunged citizen had shouted: “Take off them spectacles—we want to see your eyes.” A little later there was a brief disturbance when some other witness fell out of a tree, with a loud cracking of branches.15 Otherwise all had gone smoothly, and by mid-afternoon Lincoln was in the White House, the duly qualified President of whatever might remain of the United States. He had stated his position flatly; he would make no overt acts but he would hold Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy would have to make the next move.
Waiting for him was the one bit of news he had not had when he took this position—Major Anderson’s message. Fort Sumter could not be held without an overt act. Presidential policy would have to be revised before it could be put into effect; the all-important next move would be made in Washington rather than in Montgomery. What Lincoln had just said might make interesting reading in the history books of some later day; what he would do in the immediate future would determine what sort of history was going to be written.
CHAPTER FIVE
Into the Unknown
1: Two Forts and Three Agents
Gustavus Vasa Fox was tall and stout, an energetic bearded man who presented a blend of the breezy sea dog of legend and the canny businessman of shore-side reality. He was just forty, an Annapolis graduate who had spent fifteen years in the navy; he had swallowed the anchor while in his mid-thirties to go into the textile business in Massachusetts, and as March began he was a behind-the-scenes figure of considerable importance in Washington. This was partly because of his political connections—his wife was sister to the wife of Montgomery Blair, the only man in the cabinet just now who believed that Fort Sumter ought to be reinforced no matter whose toes were stepped on—and partly because Fox himself had studied the matter and believed that he knew how to get supplies and men into Fort Sumter in spite of General Beauregard.
Men who believed that they knew exactly what to do and how to do it were rare. President Lincoln, who was still digesting the fact that the foundation stone for his whole policy had been removed overnight, was assuredly not one of them. His confidential advisers had had time for nothing more than a hurried glance around, and such a glance was not likely to show anything beyond the disordered concourse of office seekers. The President and his cabinet met, very briefly, on the evening of March 6, the day after the Senate had confirmed cabinet appointments, but the affair had been less a cabinet meeting than a simple get-together at which men shook hands and exchanged stereotyped cordialities. The fact that the perennial crisis at Charleston had at last entered the final stage—that the question of Fort Sumter had abruptly, by a monstrous twist of fate, become the only question that really mattered—was still a secret. The secret would be presented to the cabinet in due course. Meanwhile, Lincoln had to wrestle with two questions: Could Major Anderson be reinforced? If so, should he be reinforced? On the first question, at least, Fox could perhaps shed light.
Early in February, while the unpleasant taste of the Star of the West fiasco was still fresh, Fox had been called to Washington by Winfield Scott, at Montgomery Blair’s suggestion, to devise some means for getting reinforcements to Major Anderson. As an old navy man, Fox distrusted the idea that the warships could simply hammer their way into the harbor whenever the administration nerved itself to make the attempt, and he had worked out a scheme which he believed would make a stand-up fight unnecessary. Send down your men and supplies (he said) by transports, with men of war for escort. In the thickness of a dark night, put men and goods into whale boats, landing craft, small barges, or whatnot, have shallow-draft tugboats to take them in tow, and get them up to the Fort Sumter wharf before South Carolina knows what is going on. If guard boats or soldiers in rowboats try to interfere, the warships can drive them off. By daylight the fort will have everything it needs, and the secessionist gunners can do as they please: Fort Sumter will be secure.1
In its essentials this plan had been accepted, and at Buchanan’s direction the War and Navy departments had set aside men and ships for a Fort Sumter relief expedition. But the expedition had never been sent, because—as Lincoln was learning on his first full day in office—Major Anderson himself had concluded that it was not needed.
The major had been most explicit. After the Star of the West had been driven away, he told the War Department that he hoped it would make no effort to put supplies into the fort, because it “would do more harm than good.” Early in February he wrote that although it was always possible for a small party to slip in by stealth—precisely the point around which Fox was building his own plan—the harbor defenses had been improved so that an entrance could be forced only by a substantial fleet.2 The War Department, in turn, instructed the major to send word if he needed anything, and in the absence of any further word assumed that everything was all right. Anderson had sent many reports since then, but none of them had indicated any especial change in his situation (except that a steady, ominous tightening of pressure was perceptible, as Beauregard gave South Carolina’s effort professional direction), and as far as Washington knew, Fort Sumter contained all the soldiers and rations it would need for a long time to come. Now, out of a clear sky, had come this startling report, which in effect said, or at least appeared to say, that it was impossible for Major Anderson to stay at Sumter and equally impossible for the government to help him.
Any ideas Gustavus Fox had, accordingly, would be considered. Yet before he could pass on these, Lincoln had to reflect that Sumter was not the only fort to be held, occupied, and possessed. Most Federal installations along the coast, from Charleston to the Rio Grande, had passed into Confederate hands, but Lincoln’s government still held four. There was Sumter, to begin with. There were also Fort Taylor, at Key West, Florida, and Fort Jefferson, a gloomy rock of a place far offshore in the Dry Tortugas—places which it was important for the government to keep, but so remote that the Confederacy was not likely to raise a fuss about them. And there was, finally, Fort Pickens, at the entrance to Pensacola harbor in Florida.
Potentially, Fort Pickens offered a case that was fully as explosive as that of Fort Sumter. It also offered the Federal government one advantage that was absent at Fort Sumter; it was permanently reinforceable. A United States warship, as a matter of fact, with a company of regulars aboard, was even now anchored within musket shot of Fort Pickens, and the regulars could be sent ashore in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, whereas Fort Sumter lay well inside of Charleston harbor, and so could be isolated as soon as enough Confederate batteries were in place—a matter to which General Beauregard had been systematically attending for weeks—Fort Pickens lay on the seacoast, out at the harbor’s
entrance. Confederate guns might conceivably pound it into submission, or it might be stormed if enough assault troops were put on Santa Rosa Island, the forty-mile expanse of sand and underbrush on which the fort had been sited; but the place could never be isolated as long as the United States had a navy.
Fort Pickens’s history during the last three months had been a good deal like Fort Sumter’s, the difference lying chiefly in the fact that the people of Florida were milder than the people of South Carolina, and that Fort Pickens was more remote than Fort Sumter. When 1861 began, Pickens, like Sumter, was empty. United States troops present in the vicinity included no more than forty-odd artillerists, commanded by middle-aged Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer, quartered on the mainland in barracks that were clustered about ancient Fort Barrancas, part of which had been built by the Spaniards in the long ago. When Florida seceded and prepared to seize all available government property, Slemmer took a leaf from Major Anderson’s book and got his men over to Fort Pickens—just in time, too, for the state troops seized Fort Barrancas, occupied the United States Navy Yard near by, moved into Fort McRee at the harbor mouth facing Fort Pickens, and began to build new batteries. Slemmer knew his case was hopeless if the Southerners made an all-out attack. His little company had been reinforced, after a fashion, by thirty sailors who got away when the navy yard was taken, bringing his total manpower to eighty-one, and he had plenty of supplies; but in its present condition Fort Pickens was vulnerable to an infantry assault and its tiny garrison would be overwhelmed if the Southerners used their available manpower in an all-out attack.
