v1.1.1 / chapter 2 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* In late 1859 John Brown performed a raid on Harper's Ferry with the intent of starting a slave rebellion. The action was slapdash and a complete failure, its only real result being to set tensions between the North and the South to the breaking point. The breaking point finally came with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. His very election began the rush towards secession, and from the outset of his presidency Lincoln had a crisis on his hands.
* John Brown had kept a low profile from 1858 into 1859, moving around quietly to find backers for an ambitious project. He wanted to begin a slave uprising in the hill country of Virginia and set up a republic of liberated freemen that would grow as more converts came over to the cause. He got backing from a half-dozen prominent abolitionists, but all were white, and he was disappointed in the reaction from prominent black freemen. In August 1859 he met with Frederick Douglass to outline the scheme, saying that it would begin by seizing the Federal armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, which would provide weapons to arm slaves joining the insurgency. He wanted Douglass to provide leadership for the legions that would rise.
Douglass turned him down flat. With more perceptiveness than many others would show later, Douglass described Harper's Ferry as a "perfect steel trap", hemmed in by the confluence of two rivers and surrounded by high ground. Douglass told Brown that "you will never get out alive".
Brown made little more headway with promoting his scheme for the next few months and then finally decided to just go with what he had, making so few real preparations that it seemed as though he was expecting to fail. On the evening of Sunday, 16 October 1859, Brown led a band of thirteen white and five black men into the town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, along with a wagon full of guns, pistols, and pikes. His band occupied the town's Federal armory, arsenal, and engine house, taking hostages in the process.
The hoped-for uprising did not occur. The local slaves stayed quiet, but the townspeople surrounded Brown's men and began killing them. On Tuesday morning, a band of United States Marines arrived under the command of two Virginian US Army officers, Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart. The Marines quickly overcame the insurgents. Ten of Brown's men were killed, including two of his sons. Brown himself was slashed with a sword and seriously injured. Most of his backers fled to Canada; some would be investigated later, but by that time events would make their activities of little interest, and the investigations did not lead to any arrests.
John Brown's raid had been a complete failure, but in a backwards way it would prove a success. Brown had always been an unbalanced and violent man, but in the courtroom he discovered a spiritual transcendence, a dignity he had not had before. Henry David Thoreau wrote: "He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light." The only card he had left to play was martyrdom, and he played it to the hilt.
Brown was executed in Charleston, Virginia, on 2 December 1859. He was 59 years old. He went to the gallows quietly and calmly. His conduct in his trial and execution won widespread admiration all through the North, though most were careful to describe his action at Harper's Ferry as the act of a madman.
Such distinctions were lost on Southerners; they were as outraged, more outraged, over the praise given to Brown by Northerners as Northerners had been over the Southern applause for Brooks' assault on Sumner. Southerners were as angry as modern Americans would be at expressions of admiration for an international terrorist who had been caught trying to bomb a bus full of kids on a Christmas holiday trip. Brown's raid completely radicalized the South, with Northerners in the region treated with suspicion when they weren't run out of town or even assaulted. Rumors ran wild of other conspiracies of Yankees to provoke slave uprisings, with some of the stories printed in the papers. Moderate Southerners tried to speak out, one saying that the stories inevitably turned out on examination "to be totally false, and all of them grossly exaggerated." -- but the rumors went on.
Many Southerners began to seriously consider secession. There were those promoting the notion who believed it was a constitutional right; although there was absolutely no clause in the Constitution that discussed secession, the logic went that since the states had voluntarily joined together, they could voluntarily go their own way. However, the lack of any specific authorization of secession in the Constitution meant that this argument had no power to convince a skeptic. The skeptics replied that since the states had joined together by common assent, they would have to agree to disband by common assent, and so a state could not withdraw from the Union unilaterally.
There were even skeptics about secession among Southerners, Robert E. Lee writing in a letter some time later: "The framers of our Constitution [would have] never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation if it was intended to be broken up by every member of the [nation] at will." He was opposed to the notion, concluding: "It is idle to talk of secession."
However, he was a minority among Southerners of influence. Among those pushing for secession were those who cared nothing for the question of constitutionality, preferring instead to cite another precedent: the Declaration of Independence. After all, in response to British tyranny, hadn't the Patriots thrown off the old rules and then drawn up their own, to be praised as heroes by Americans from that time? In response to Northern tyranny, Southerners were just as justified in going their own way, and no more needed to convince the North of the legitimacy of the cause than the Patriots had needed to convince the British.
* As the presidential election of 1860 approached, the drive to secession completed the split in the Democratic party. The Democratic convention took place in Charleston, South Carolina, in late April, and ended with the Southern Democrats walking out. The Northern wing of the party nominated Stephen Douglas as their presidential candidate, while the Southern wing nominated Senator John C. Breckinridge of Tennessee. In reality, the Southern wing's true ambition was secession from the Union.
One of the men of influence at the convention had been Alexander Stephens, an ex-Congressman from Georgia. Stephens was the most dedicated of State's Rights men, but one who dreaded the idea of secession all the same. A friend asked him a short time later: "What do you think of matters now?" Stephens replied: "Think of them?! Why, that men will be cutting one another's throats in a little while. In less than 12 months we shall be in a war, and that the bloodiest in history."
Many of those pressing for secession thought all the talk of war in the air was just that, hot talk, some saying that a "single handkerchief" would be all that was needed to clean up the blood spilled by secession. When push came to shove, the greedy and spineless Northerners wouldn't fight. People like Stevens knew better: there would be war. What else could happen? When two sides have a fundamental disagreement and one side cuts off further discussion of the matter, the only choice left to the other side is to either give up or resort to force.
The Constitutional Union party, what was left of the old Whig party, nominated John Bell of Tennessee. In the splintered political landscape, the Republicans had every reason to believe they could put one of their own into the White House. The Republican convention was held in May in Chicago, Illinois, drawing an enthusiastic crowd of 25,000. The convention was held in a large warehouse-like structure called the "Wigwam" that had been thrown together in six weeks and could accommodate thousands of delegates. The structure was illuminated by gas jets, with decorations of paper streamers and dry evergreen boughs, a combination that would have shocked any proper fire marshal.
The front-runner for the nomination was Senator William H. Seward of New York. Other hopefuls were Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Judge Edward Bates of Saint Louis, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, and Abraham Lincoln. With his shrewd campaign manager, Thurlow Weed, Seward seemed unbeatable, since he was the most prominent Republican and had powerful backers. The problem was that such visibility also drew fire from every faction with an agenda. A less prominent man had some advantages, and Abraham Lincoln, taking his cues from his campaign manager, Illinois Judge David Davis, used them for all they were worth.
The final vote was called on 18 May, and Lincoln became the Republican candidate for president. Lincoln won the nomination because he was not too prominent and not too extreme, opposing the extension of slavery but taking pains to point out that he had no intention of interfering with it in the slave states. That distinction meant nothing to Southerners. South Carolina made it clear that if a free-soil Republican were elected to the presidency, it would be cause for secession.
The election campaign was excited and noisy, though Lincoln spoke cautiously about the explosive issues he would face as president. Senator Seward swallowed his disappointment over losing the nomination and campaigned energetically for Lincoln. The Republicans danced around the issues, as did the other candidates, except for Stephen Douglas. He denounced "treason" from the stump with his foghorn voice, saying in a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina: "I am in favor of executing in good faith every clause and provision of the Constitution and of protecting every right under it -- and then HANGING EVERY MAN who takes up arms against it!"
Election day was 6 November 1860. To no one's great surprise, Lincoln won, though with only 40% of the vote. He carried all the free states and none of the slave states. Republicans celebrated in the North, while Southerners railed at the new president-elect. The governor of South Carolina, William H. Gist, had been putting out feelers to other Southern states for the past month to see how much support South Carolina would have if the state seceded from the United States. The message was carried by his son, whose name, States Rights Gist, suggested the importance of the principle to his father. The response seemed positive enough, and on 20 December 1860, South Carolina unilaterally left the Union. Voices rose for other states to secede from the Union and form a "Confederacy" that would unite them in their common aspirations.
In modern times there are those who insist that secession had nothing at all to do with slavery. The declaration of grievances drawn up by the South Carolina legislature justifying secession made no such distinction, making a case for the Constitutional right of the state to secede and citing at length the threats, both real and imagined, posed by the Federal government against the institution of slavery as the primary justification for secession. The word "tariff", incidentally, did not appear once in the declaration. The term "State's Rights" might not have been another phrase for "slavery", but the two were so intertwined as to be inseparable. After all, there was really only one state's right that people felt so strongly about that they were willing to risk war over it: the right to own slaves.
* While the South moved toward secession, the Federal Government began to consider what to do about it. The tiny US Army numbered only about 16,000 men, stationed mostly in the Far West to fight Indian tribes. It was currently under the command of Lieutenant General Winfield Scott.
By 1860, Scott had grown fat and increasingly feeble, but had not completely lost his edge. In early December, he had considered the military implications of secession and sent a somewhat rambling letter to President James Buchanan to suggest options. General Scott listed the military installations that would be at risk if the Southern states seceded, and pointed out that they were all unmanned or insufficiently manned. He suggested that they all be immediately brought up to full garrisons, though there were no forces available to do so. Scott further stated that if the Southern states seceded, there would be no hope of restoring the Union except by "the despotism of the sword".
This letter was remarkable in that it was unsolicited; totally outside the bounds of his authority as the commanding general of the Army; and in defiance of Scott's superior, Secretary of War John B. Floyd. President Buchanan was not happy with the advice. Buchanan was gentlemanly, not assertive and decisive, and he was confronted with a crisis that was far outside of his experience, or for that matter the experience of any previous president. His cabinet was split between Northerners and Southerners. Buchanan was a Northerner and a Unionist, but he was sympathetic to the South and found the idea of taking military action against other Americans repellent.
He was also a lame duck president. The election of Lincoln had put him into this fix, and it seemed perfectly sensible to maintain the status quo and let Lincoln make the big decisions, without the encumbrance of actions taken by a previous administration.
The secession of South Carolina stepped up the pressure on Buchanan. The South Carolinans, having declared their independence, were now exerting pressure on the Federal government to hand over Federal institutions in the state. The major issue of concern was the fortifications in Charleston harbor.
The city of Charleston sits at the confluence of the Cooper River from the northwest and the Ashley River from the west. The two rivers flow into a large bay which then empties into the sea. There were fortifications on both shores at the mouth of the bay: Fort Moultrie on the north, which was garrisoned, and Fort Johnson on the south, which was more or less abandoned and in a state of dilapidation. Between them, on an island, was Fort Sumter, which was still under construction and without a garrison. Deep within the bay, on another island at the mouth of the Cooper, was Castle Pinckney, also abandoned. Tensions had been rising over these fortifications for months, and in hopes of calming the situation, Major Robert Anderson had been sent to Charleston to take command of these installations.
Anderson was Kentucky-born, married to a Georgia woman, and basically pro-Southern and pro-slavery. He was also a loyal and efficient Army officer, with the demeanor of a mild-mannered college professor, and was judged not likely to antagonize the Charlestonians unnecessarily. The pressure still continued to build. On 26 December, Major Anderson concluded that an assault on his installations was imminent; in fact, one of Anderson's officers, Captain Abner Doubleday, believed that the only reason they hadn't been overrun was that the South Carolinans were waiting for the Federals to complete their work on Fort Sumter before seizing it. Anderson decided that he would have a better chance to hold out if he moved his command to Fort Sumter. That evening, he and his 68 men rowed quietly from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter past careless guard boats, spiking the guns left behind.
The South Carolinans were outraged and sent representatives to Washington to talk to President Buchanan and his people. There had been a series of such contacts over the previous weeks, and Buchanan had wavered from conciliation to outbursts of anger, but nothing was decided one way or another. However, there had been a general reshuffling of the cabinet as Southern cabinet secretaries resigned, and the result was that the cabinet had become more Unionist. The most prominent of the Unionists was the new attorney general, Edwin M. Stanton. Stanton was a prominent Washington lawyer, a fanatical Unionist with the personality of a noisy terrier. The cabinet meetings that followed the arrival of the latest representatives from South Carolina were chaotic. Buchanan was browbeaten from both sides and reduced to a state of complete muddle.
Winfield Scott, in contrast, was not muddled at all. He had been out of the loop over the past few weeks, mostly due to bad health, and was getting frustrated over it. On 28 December, he sent a memo to his boss, Secretary of War Floyd, and copied the President, suggesting strongly that Fort Sumter should not be abandoned, and in fact it should be reinforced and resupplied under the escort of armed vessels. General Scott was a Virginian by birth, a Southerner, but if the secessionists were talking about a fight, he was damn well willing to give them one.
The South Carolinans then managed to anger Buchanan by making further demands. He still held his judgement, and called a cabinet meeting the next day, 29 December, to discuss options. The result was a civil war in miniature, with Northerners and Southerners arguing loudly. Attorney General Stanton was outraged at the presumption of the South Carolina representatives, crying out stridently: "These gentlemen claim to be ambassadors. It is preposterous! They cannot be ambassadors -- they are lawbreakers! Traitors! They should be arrested!"
Stanton browbeat the President for dealing with the representatives, growing so wild that he told the President that if he gave up Fort Sumter, he would be the greatest traitor since Benedict Arnold and would deserve to be hanged. The Unionists in the cabinet finally won Buchanan over to their side. The President would not see the South Carolina representatives again, and he would not evacuate Fort Sumter. The representatives left Washington in a huff, leaving as a parting shot an overblown letter, which Buchanan officially rejected.
Winfield Scott was encouraged by Buchanan's shift to the Unionist position, as well as by his new boss, a die-hard Unionist named Joseph Holt. Floyd had got himself in trouble over some illegal business transactions with a government contractor -- the Buchanan Administration had suffered through a series of corruption scandals, with Floyd being one of the prime offenders, though some claim he was more incompetent than crooked -- and had been forced to resign his position as Secretary of War. Holt, who had been Postmaster General, took Floyd's place. On 30 December, Winfield Scott sent another letter directly to the President, politely suggesting the immediate reinforcement of Fort Sumter. Buchanan was now firmly against the secessionists. The US government began to seriously consider what needed to be done to relieve Fort Sumter.
* In the meantime, Congress was in a degree of chaos following the exit of many of its Southern members. There was talk of patching things up, which finally congealed into the "Crittenden Compromise", put forward by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden in mid-December. Crittenden proposed that Congressional resolutions and constitutional amendments be implemented that would extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way to the West Coast, provide guarantees for slavery, and further tighten up the Fugitive Slave Law. Furthermore, the constitutional amendments would be perpetual; there would be no way to repeal them later.
The Crittenden Compromise was a complete non-starter. To no surprise Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, saw it as a complete surrender to slaveowners, amounting to an extremely one-sided sort of "compromise". The idea of unrepealable amendments also seemed to be contrary to the spirit of the US Constition, and it was questionable that the Supreme Court would be agreeable. Southerners who still remained in Congress liked the compromise, but in the absence of their secessionist colleagues they were outnumbered by the Republicans. Both the House and Senate rejected the Crittenden Compromise by the end of the month.
There were other proposals for a compromise that weren't so objectionable to the Republicans, but by the same token they were less likely to be acceptable to Southerners. In any case the secessionists, having taken the plunge, were not looking back, and it highly arguable that any sort of compromise could have lured them back into the fold. Senator Crittenden failed in his attempt to save the Union, and the failure would split his family: both his sons would become generals, with one staying with the North and the other going South.
* By the new year, 1861, the Union was falling apart. Mississippi seceded on 9 January; Florida on the 10th; Alabama on the 11th; Georgia on the 19th; and Louisiana on the 26th. State legislatures passed resolutions generally along the lines of the South Carolina declaration of grievances, again prominently featuring Federal threats to slavery. Federal forts and arsenals, staffed only by caretaker detachments, were seized without a fight. Overenthusiastic citizens in North Carolina also seized two Federal forts but were bluntly ordered by the governor to return them immediately. North Carolina hadn't seceded from the Union and, for the moment, had no plans to do so.
On 21 January, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, long one of the arch-secessionists, gave his farewell address to the Senate. Davis was prone to violent headaches and had been ill with them for a week, but he delivered his speech, after a little faltering, with the directness for which he was well known. He said in essence that Mississippi had left the Union, and so he had no further business in Washington. He had loved the Union, but now matters had gone to the point where further discussion was useless. He hoped for peace, but said that if there were war, Mississippi's sons would stand "like a wall of fire around their state".
He wished his former colleagues well. His voice broke; women in the gallery wept; and then Jefferson Davis left Washington for Mississippi. His fellow cotton-state congressmen left along with him. With the Southerners gone, Unionists and particularly Republicans now dominated the US Congress. The first result of this was the admission of Kansas to the Union as a free state; they also quickly passed high tariffs.
The secessionist states were for the moment disorganized, and the border states remained undecided. A delegate from Mississippi addressed the legislature of slave-state Delaware, only to receive in response an "unqualified disapproval of the remedy for existing difficulties". There were few slaves in Delaware, the great majority of black folk living there being freemen, and there was no real interest in secession.
Proslavery elements in Maryland tried to persuade Governor Thomas B. Hicks to call a special session of the legislature to consider secession. The Unionist Hicks flatly turned them down. North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri were sympathetic to secession, but cool to the idea of leaving the Union for the moment. Arkansas secessionists took over the Little Rock arsenal after the Federal commander abandoned it to avoid bloodshed, but the state did not secede from the Union.
Virginia was the most prestigious and influential of the Southern states. If Virginia left the Union, it would be a great boost to the secessionist cause. However, there was substantial Unionist sentiment in the state, particularly in the mountainous western counties, and there was no immediate drive to secede -- though the state legislature warned the Federals that Virginians would not tolerate the use of force against their fellow Southerners.
In Texas, Governor Sam Houston told his secession-leaning legislature:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Let me tell you what is coming ... Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of a bayonet ... You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence ... But I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of States Rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction ... they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.
END QUOTE
Houston was deposed from the governorship and Texas left the Union on 1 February 1861.
* The states that had left the Union wasted little time in setting up a government. Delegates from the six breakaway states met in Montgomery, Alabama, on 4 February to discuss the organization of a provisional government, which was duly formed on 8 February 1861. On 10 February 1861, Jefferson Davis was working with his wife Varina in the garden of his plantation at Brierfield, below Vicksburg, Mississippi, when a slave gave him a telegram. Davis knew what it contained. Varina Davis later remembered: "Reading that telegram, he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes, he told me, as a man might speak of a sentence of death."
Davis had been appointed President of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America. Montgomery was selected as the capital of the Confederacy, and Davis left his home to travel there on the next day, 11 February. He was inaugurated on 18 February, with Alexander Hamilton Stephens becoming his vice-president.
The provisional constitution of the new nation was closely modeled on the old US constitution, though it explicitly gave the Confederate president a six-year term; granted each member of the president's cabinet a seat in Congress; and banned tariffs as a protective measure, though it allowed them as source of government revenue. Surprisingly, not much was said about State's Rights, but very significantly the constitution guaranteed slavery, in section 9.4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
Few thought this was an insignificant clause, either. Some jokers later suggested that the Confederate constitution only stopped short of making slavery mandatory, but in a sense it did, specifically stipulating that any state admitted to the Confederacy in the future would have to accept slavery. In blunter terms, the constitution defined the Confederacy as a slave nation. Stephens pointed out in an address in Savannah on 21 March -- what would be later called the "Cornerstone Speech" -- that while the Declaration of Independence had stated "all men are created equal", the Confederacy flatly rejected the idea that this included black people: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
There was bound to be clashes between Davis and Stephens. Davis was tall, handsome, cold to strangers, and though very intelligent in most respects, inclined to be rigid and uncompromising. Stephens was wizened and tubercular, extremely perceptive and much more balanced in his views than Davis. Stephens had been in Congress with Abraham Lincoln during the 1840s, and the two men were on close terms. However, Stephens also had a cynical and contrarian streak. It was unlikely that the Confederate president and vice-president would get along well.
Davis selected cabinet secretaries from all seven Confederate states to ensure that all the states would have a voice. The secretaries were prominent men from the well-bred, conservative, and respectable Southern power elite, most of whom had opposed secession. The noisy secessionist extremists, the "fire-eaters", were not going to be at the forefront.
Now the Confederacy had a government. It was, to be sure, a government that at the moment had few resources at its command and no bureaucracy to administer them if it had, and which no other government recognized as legitimate. It was still a proud moment for Southerners, as well as an occasion for endless rounds of political debate and controversy over matters large and small.
* On 11 February 1861, the same day Jefferson Davis had left for Montgomery, Abraham Lincoln had left his home in Springfield, Illinois, on a private train that would take him to Washington DC. The train made many stops on the way to show the president-elect to the nation, but Lincoln was careful to be noncommittal in the few short speeches he gave. Much would have to be decided and decided quickly, but he would have to set up office first. Public reactions to him were mixed or negative, particularly among the old elites of New York City, Boston, and other traditional centers of power. To them, Lincoln was a nothing but a crude hick from the backwoods, no person of substance.
The very last stage of the journey was to be a petty fiasco that did nothing to raise his stature. To get to Washington DC, Lincoln had to transfer trains in Baltimore, and to get to the station for the Washington train he had to travel through Baltimore's city center. A railroad detective named Allan Pinkerton had been collecting information on secessionist activities, and had uncovered rumors that secessionists intended to form a mob and kill the president-elect as he passed through the city. Lincoln had shrugged off the rumors, but then the same rumors were relayed to him from General Winfield Scott.
Two reports of conspiracies, one of them from such a respected source as General Scott, made Lincoln cautious. He went through the city anonymously during the night, wearing a cloak and a soft cap instead of his usual stovepipe hat, accompanied only by his friend Ward Lamon, a big prairie tough who was armed to the teeth. They took the night train and arrived in Washington in the morning, where he was quickly bundled off to Williard's Hotel, where he would stay until the inauguration. To this day nobody knows if there was really a conspiracy or not, but the press got wind of the incident and played Lincoln up as a coward, skulking through Baltimore in disguise. The story became inflated reports said he was dressed as a Scotsman or even as a woman. The Southern papers heaped abuse on him. Lincoln would later say he would never remember the incident without embarrassment.
Lincoln had only nine days to get ready for office and was very busy. He had to form a cabinet, deal with a horde of office-seekers, and most importantly consider what to do about the secession crisis. There was in fact a convention in progress on that matter at Williard's Hotel. None of the states that had seceded sent delegates, and those in attendance were respected but elderly statesmen. A newspaper unkindly described them as "political fossils".
It was an exercise in futility, but Lincoln gave them the courtesy of a visit in late February. He was direct, asserting that he intended to support "obedience to the Constitution and laws". When a Virginian delegate responded with the usual list of Southern grievances against the North, Lincoln responded with short patience: "A gentleman of your intelligence should not make such assertions." Finally Lincoln gave vent to a little righteous irritation: "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."
Lincoln's main efforts were focused on assembling his cabinet. Interestingly, he chose the most powerful men he could find, several of whom had been rivals for the presidential nomination. Senator William H. Seward was slated to become Secretary of State. Secretary of the Treasury was to be Salmon P. Chase. Though they were both prominent Republicans, it was clear that Seward and Chase would be adversaries: Seward was genial, moderate, pragmatic, and devious in political intrigue to the extent that sometimes it seemed his right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Chase was a hardcore antislavery man -- humorless, pious, self-righteous, and self-serving. One of his friends said of him: "Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound: he thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity."
The Attorney General would be Edward Bates of Missouri. The Postmaster General would be Montgomery Blair of Maryland, from the politically influential Blair family. The Secretary of the Navy would be Connecticut's Gideon Welles, a bright, competent, and irritable man who had defected from the Democrats to the Republicans. The other two members of the cabinet were only there through political deals: the Secretary of the Interior would be Caleb Smith of Indiana, and the Secretary of War would be Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania. Lincoln had little confidence in either of them, and had particular doubts about Cameron, who came into the administration with a reputation for corrupt dealings.
Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861. It was a cold, gray, windy day, and sharpshooters stood on top of buildings and at windows to ensure that there would be no trouble. There was none. By a famous accident, when Lincoln removed his stovepipe hat to take the oath from ancient Chief Justice Roger Taney, Stephen Douglas happened to be at his side; seeing that Lincoln had no place to put his hat, Senator Douglas chose to be gallant, saying: "Permit me, sir." Douglas held Lincoln's hat through the rest of the ceremony. A witness commented: "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."
In his inaugural address, Lincoln firmly rejected the constitutional legitimacy of secession:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination ...
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion 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, according to circumstances.
END QUOTE
As far as he was concerned, the Union was "unbroken", and he would continue to "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts." There are those now who would see the desire to "collect the duties and imposts" as the cause of the trouble, but Lincoln took a much different view of the matter:
BEGIN QUOTE:
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.
END QUOTE
He rejected the idea that it was a state's own business if it wished to withdraw from the Union; it was the business of the entire Union. He saw it as much like members of a household trying to wall off their part of the house against the wishes of the other members. The rest of the household had every legitimate reason to object: "Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them."
To Lincoln, secession represented the destruction of an experiment in democracy created by the Founding Fathers. It was the shattering of an America whose power over his own lifetime had been going from strength to strength, a nation that could increasingly look the monarchies of Europe in the eye, into a fragmentation of bitterly squabbling little states. He did end with a plea:
BEGIN QUOTE:
My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loathe to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords 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.
END QUOTE
The Capitol building behind him was incomplete, with no dome over the unfinished rotunda. Some had suggested that work be halted for the duration of the crisis, but Lincoln had ordered it to continue, and commented: "I take it as a sign that the Union will continue."
The inauguration over, Lincoln went to work in his new residence. Outgoing President Buchanan remarked that if Lincoln was as glad to get into the White House as he was to get out of it, he must be the happiest man alive. Buchanan retired to his home near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to passively watch events unfold, dying there in 1868.
Some had no doubt there would be war, a big one. Back on Christmas Eve, the supervisor of the Louisiana Military Academy, William Tecumseh Sherman, was eating dinner with one of his professors when they received news of the secession of South Carolina. Sherman was from Ohio, 40 years old, and an ex-Army officer. He was thin, wiry, hyperactive, and exciteable. He paced the room and then gave his southern colleague an earnest lecture:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!
You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it ... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth of pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth -- right at your doors.
You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
END QUOTE
They did not stop and think. In February, Sherman resigned his position at the academy in despair and headed north. In late March, he arrived in Washington to see his brother, Ohio Senator John Sherman. John Sherman introduced William to the President as a credible witness to events down South. Lincoln asked Sherman: "Ah. How are they getting along down there?"
Sherman replied: "They think they are getting along swimmingly. They are preparing for war."
Lincoln said: "Oh, well, I guess we'll manage to keep house." Sherman immediately judged the President a buffoon and left Washington in disgust to find work in Saint Louis. His brother tried to persuade him to stay and take a commission as an officer in the Army, but Sherman blasted him: "You have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get them out as best you can!"
