The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  Irony and tension permeated the swearing-in ceremony. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision, administered the oath to Abraham Lincoln, an outspoken critic of the ruling. Taney’s voice and hand quavered from his eighty-four years. Lincoln’s voice was high pitched but powerful and reached most of the thirty thousand listeners crowded before the Capitol.

  In his inaugural address, Lincoln faced his life’s most formidable oratory challenge. Somehow he had to walk a tightrope between appearing too tough or too soft with the rebel states. His foremost point was that “in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” Of the many reasons upholding this essential truth, the most important was “the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution.” Beyond America’s own past the history of humanity reveals “that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” He then exposed “the central idea of secession” as “the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions . . . is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.” Thus he held that “no State can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary.”

  Nonetheless, for now he foresaw the need for only modest defensive measures against the secessionists. He promised that 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; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against, or among the people anywhere.” Yet ultimately what he did depended on rebel decisions: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” He soon learned their decision.

  He starkly contrasted the differences splitting the nation: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” While acknowledging that he upheld the latter values, he tried to reassure the rebels that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to intervene with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe that I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no intention to do so.”

  Lincoln ended his speech with an eloquent appeal for national unity: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”15

  Lincoln no sooner settled into the White House than he faced the first of an unrelenting series of hard choices over the next four years. The day after the inauguration he read an urgent message. Maj. Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter’s commander, reported that his eighty-man garrison faced the exhaustion of supplies within six weeks and overwhelming rebel forces ringing Charleston Bay. South Carolina gunners had turned back the supply ship Star of the West on January 9. Fort Sumter was not the only imperiled federal garrison in the Confederate states. Fort Pickens guarded Pensacola Bay’s entrance but was less vulnerable since it was beyond artillery range of the surrounding shores and held several months’ worth of supplies.

  Lincoln turned to Winfield Scott, the army’s commanding general, and asked him to calculate just what was needed to mount a relief expedition for Fort Sumter. He learned to his dismay that the United States lacked the hard military power to do anything for now. On paper the American army numbered 17,133 men, but it was scattered in small detachments across the United States, including 3,894 in the Department of the East, 3,584 in the Department of the West, 2,258 in Texas, 3,624 in the Department of the Pacific, 685 in Utah, and 686 elsewhere.16 Desertion and disease brought the real figures much lower. Then there was the steady stream of southern officers who resigned their commissions and headed home as their states seceded. Eventually 313 of 1,108 officers joined the rebel cause.17

  After conferring with his staff, Scott reported to the president and his cabinet on March 9 that the mission would demand five thousand regular and twenty thousand volunteer troops packed aboard a vast flotilla of vessels filled with provisions and munitions and that would take months to assemble. As if mustering this expedition was not daunting enough, Scott pointed out that sending it against Charleston would most likely provoke the Upper South and possibly the border states to secede. In the short term, he could dispatch a vessel or two that could simply try to run past the rebel batteries to resupply Fort Sumter.18 The meeting broke up in indecision.

  Scott took the initiative to draft an evacuation order to Anderson that he submitted for the secretary of war’s approval. Cameron showed it to the president, who told him to put it away for now. The fading hope was that, having vented their passions and made their point, the rebels would come to their senses. Meanwhile the middle course of neither withdrawing nor reinforcing Fort Sumter’s garrison seemed the most prudent. The fort’s steadily dwindling supplies conflicted with this policy.

  Lincoln convened his cabinet on March 15 and posed the crucial question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, is it wise to attempt it?”19 Seward, Cameron, Welles, and Bates called for abandoning the fort. Chase wanted to send supplies if it did not provoke war. Only Blair supported a relief expedition no matter what. Faced with these divisions, they agreed to shelve a decision for the time being, hoping that reason might prevail with the rebels. Instead, to their chagrin they learned that South Carolina’s pressure on Anderson to surrender mounted as Fort Sumter’s provisions diminished toward the vanishing point.

  Scott submitted his latest plan on March 28, this time urging the abandonment of both Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens to “soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slave-holding states, and render their cordial adherence to the Union perpetual.”20 The following day Lincoln convened his secretaries to discuss this and other proposals. Now everyone but Seward rejected any notion of appeasing the rebels and instead called for resupplying Fort Sumter; Seward advocated leaving Fort Sumter and holding Fort Pickens. Lincoln came down on the side of holding the line. He asked Welles to ready the navy’s three most powerful warships—the Powhatan, Pawnee, and Pocahontas, then at the Brooklyn Naval Yard—to escort supply vessels to Fort Sumter.

  Seward was determined to stop the expedition by any possible means. Although he offered the proposal on April Fool’s Day, he could not have been more earnest in what he proposed. Under the title “Some Thoughts for the Consideration of the President,” Seward advocated reunifying the nation by provoking crises with Spain, France, and possibly Britain. The excuse would be Spain’s annexation, with France’s connivance, of Santo Domingo just a few days earlier and the threat the two nations posed to Haiti. Seward sincerely believed that the nation would reunite if the Lincoln administration evoked the Monroe Doctrine against such blatant European imperialism.21

  The utter absurdity of his most trusted advisor’s proposal was a shrill wake-up call for Lincoln. He realized that he had to firmly grasp and wield whatever power was available to act decisively. To yield to Seward would set a precedent that would make Lincoln’s assertion of power over subsequent issues increasingly problematic. He realized that “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick.” He politely asked Seward to shelve his proposal for now and urged Welles to redouble his efforts to mobilize the relief expedition.22

  Seward’s machinations revealed a challenge that Lincoln initially faced with his entire cabinet. Somehow he had to gain their respect and compliance when each thought himself superior in intellect and d
ecisiveness to someone so deficient in experience and formal schooling. Typical was Attorney General Bates’s belief that Lincoln was “an excellent man, and, in the main wise, but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he has not the power to command.”23 There was a measure of truth in this criticism, at least at first. But as Lincoln steadily grew into his role as president, one by one his secretaries came deeply to respect and follow him.

  Lincoln informed South Carolina governor Francis Pickens on April 6 that “an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumpter [sic] with provisions only. . . . If such attempt be not resisted no effort to throw men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice or in case of an attack on the fort.”24 He then notified the press of his decision. This posed a tough choice to the rebels. If they fired on unarmed ships carrying food to hungry men, they would not just start a war but do so inhumanely rather than honorably. Thus could a military defeat become an American propaganda triumph.

  Seward then undermined Lincoln’s policy by ordering the Powhatan to sail for Fort Pickens rather than Fort Sumter. However, he did so with the president’s unwitting approval. Lincoln signed the order without bothering to ask or read just what he was signing.

  The rebels soon rendered the administration’s confusion moot. Upon receiving Lincoln’s notice that he intended to supply Fort Sumter, Confederate leaders in Charleston and Montgomery agreed to capture the fort before the supply expedition arrived. On April 9 President Jefferson Davis authorized Gen. Pierre Beauregard to open fire as soon as his batteries were ready. On April 12 Beauregard ordered his artillery crews to bombard Fort Sumter. Anderson and his men valiantly held out until April 14, when the major agreed to surrender.

  The following day Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand three-month military volunteers and a special session of Congress to meet on July 4. He knew that the war would last much longer than ninety days but was advised that the 1795 Militia Act bound him to that narrow period. He hoped this stopgap measure would mobilize an army in time for Congress to pass a bill to organize a volunteer army for three years or the war’s duration. But why not convene Congress immediately? Here Lincoln may have deliberately sought a three-month interim whereby he could devise and implement policies through the bureaucracy without Congress tying his hands.

  The question was what to do with all those troops. On May 3 Gen. Winfield Scott proposed what was eventually dubbed the Anaconda Plan, which included a blockade of the rebel ports, capture of the Mississippi River Valley to split the Confederacy, and the massing elsewhere of armies to overrun and occupy the rest of the South. This, of course, would take a long time to implement. Meanwhile the Union would rest on the defensive in hopes that reasonable southerners would retake power from the radicals.

  Scott’s Anaconda Plan involved a tightening blockade of southern ports and the penetration of the interior by armies transported by steamships and protected by gunboats. This would be possible only with the steady expansion of the American navy. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles brilliantly fulfilled this mission. The first step was a massive naval buildup. The navy numbered 42 vessels when the rebellion erupted. By the end of 1861 he had brought the number of vessels to 260, with another hundred in construction.

  Lincoln endorsed the blockade but shelved the rest for now. He worried that Scott’s reticence to support an immediate effort to crush the rebellion reflected conflicted loyalties. Scott was a genuine American hero, having worn an army uniform for nearly five decades, fought valiantly at the head of a regiment during the War of 1812, and during the Mexican War, led an army in a brilliant campaign that defeated the enemy in a series of battles, culminating with Mexico City’s capture. But Scott was Virginia-born and his state would be among the first battlegrounds. Although he claimed old age and ill heath as to why he did not lead the army in the field, not wanting to war against his homeland may have been just as important.25

  Lincoln’s first constitutionally questionable measure came on April 19, when he declared a blockade of the rebel states. According to international law, a blockade is an act of war. According to the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. Lincoln would cite “military necessity” in fulfilling his role as commander in chief and his oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to justify this and other legally dubious acts: “It became necessary for me to choose whether, using only the existing means, agencies, and processes which Congress had provoked, I should let the government fall into ruin, or whether, availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution I would make an effort to save it with all its blessings for the present age and posterity.”26

  The first crucial task was to secure the nation’s capital. Lincoln ordered the volunteer regiments being formed to head for Washington as soon as possible. The Sixth Massachusetts was the first to embark. All went well until those troops tried to change trains in Baltimore on April 18 and a mob waving guns and rebel flags assaulted them. In the melee four soldiers and twelve rioters were killed and thirty-one on both sides were wounded. This was no isolated incident of rebellion. Elsewhere in Maryland rebels tore up railroad tracks, cut telegraph lines, and burned bridges to sever Washington from the rest of the United States. Rumors abounded that Maryland’s assembly was about to convene and secede.

  Yet these rebels represented a minority of Maryland’s population. Slaves accounted for about one of nine people living in the state, and most slaves worked plantations and smaller farms in the tidewater region. As in other eastern seaboard southern states, slavery thinned in the piedmont and all but disappeared in the mountains. Only 1 percent of Baltimore’s 212,418 inhabitants were slaves while 11 percent were free blacks. As elsewhere, gerrymandered electoral districts gave slaveholders far more power than they would have merited had the principle of one person, one vote prevailed.27

  Lincoln responded on April 27 by declaring the suspension of habeas corpus along the transportation and communication lines between Washington and Philadelphia, then on July 2 extended that to New York City. On May 3 he acted on new advice that he was not bound by the 1795 Militia Act after all, so he called for 43,034 three-year volunteers and the regular army’s expansion by 22,714 troops and the navy’s by 18,000 sailors.28 He also ordered Postmaster General Blair to purge the mails of any seditious literature. All along, he carefully referred to the “rebellion” or “insurrection” rather than a “war,” which might confer some legal status on the Confederacy.

  Nothing that Lincoln did as president was more legally controversial than suspending habeas corpus. He justified the act by pointing to the Constitution’s line that read, “The privilege of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” This clearly characterized the present with its insurrection and threat to public safety.

  The constitutionality of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was challenged in court.29 The first case involved John Merryman, an outspoken secessionist who led his militia company to tear down telegraph wires. Merryman was arrested on May 25 and held without charges. He petitioned the circuit court in Baltimore, presided over by Roger Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice. Taney ruled that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus and thus Lincoln was guilty of violating the Constitution. To this Lincoln rhetorically asked whether “all the laws . . . and the government itself” should “go to pieces, lest the one [habeas corpus] be violated?”30

  The measures Lincoln took after Fort Sumter’s surrender played into secessionist hands across the Upper South. Six of the eight slave states bluntly refused to render any support to the United States. Four outright seceded, Virginia on April 17, Arkansas on May 6, Tennessee on May 7, and North Carolina on May 20.

  Virginia’s secession was the most threatening. Richmond promptly had militia seize all federal property, including the Norfolk naval yard and the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Virginia invited the Confederate Congress to change the capital from Montgomery to Richmond. The rebel Con
gress approved the transfer on May 21. This transfer of power made sense. Virginia’s population and industrial production were the South’s largest; being just across the Potomac from the enemy capital gave the Confederate army an enormous advantage.

  Lincoln reacted swiftly to word of Virginia’s secession by ordering federal troops to occupy and fortify Alexandria, across the Potomac River and a half-dozen miles south of Washington. At this point the nation’s unfolding tragedy first struck Lincoln personally. Among the troops that marched into Alexandria was a New York regiment recruited by his law clerk and friend Elmer Ellsworth. Spotting a rebel flag flying defiantly above the Marshall Hotel, Ellsworth entered and tried to tear it down. The proprietor shot Ellsworth dead, then was killed by the New York troops. Lincoln wrote the young man’s parents that “promised usefulness to one’s country and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall.”31

  In his Fourth of July speech, Lincoln presented Congress and the American people with a stark choice: “This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men . . . to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life. . . . This is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend.” The rebel states sought to destroy all that. He condemned the notions of states’ rights and secession as unconstitutional and ahistorical: “The States have their status in the Union and they have no other legal status. . . . The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. . . . The Union is older than any of the States, and in fact created them as states.” He called on Americans to fulfill the vision of the founders to answer affirmatively “to the whole family of man, the question whether a constitutional republic or a democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” The southern state rebellion threatened these ideals. The only way to defend them and the government that upheld them was to crush the rebellion. To this end, he called for the “legal means for making this [war] a short, and a decisive one; that you place at the control of the government, for the work, at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars.”32