Coming Fury, Volume 1 (46 page)

Lincoln’s cabinet did not think Sumter ought to be relieved. Of all the members, only Montgomery Blair was flatly and without qualifications in favor of sending provisions down to Major Anderson. Secretary Chase, to be sure, was for it, with encircling ifs and buts; he admitted later that just now he favored letting the seven seceded states “try the experiment of a separate existence rather than incur the evils of a bloody war,” and his endorsement of the relief plan was trimmed down until it was actually no endorsement at all. Even Gideon Welles believed that the administration had best let well enough alone. “An impression has gone abroad,” he wrote, “that Sumter is to be evacuated and the shock caused by that announcement has done its work. The public mind is becoming tranquillized under it, and will become fully reconciled to it when the causes which have led to that necessity shall have been made public and are rightly understood.” Secretary of War Simon Cameron recited the heavy weight of professional opinion which held that the only thing to do with Major Anderson was to call him home, and wrote that since “the abandonment of the fort in a few weeks, sooner or later, appears to be an inevitable necessity, it seems to me that the sooner it be done the better.” He went on to say that he liked Captain Fox’s plan and would support it except that he believed it would bring on a war.
⁸

In effect, all of the cabinet except Blair opposed the plan to send relief to Major Anderson, and Lincoln—still painfully new in the office, and surrounded by advisers most of whom believed that they on the whole were wiser and more experienced than himself—did not feel that he could go ahead in face of all that opposition. He was not, however, ready to give up. If his election and his own convictions meant anything at all, he had to make a stand somewhere. For the moment he would postpone a final decision. Meanwhile, he needed to know everything he could know about the exact situation, both in Fort Sumter and in Charleston itself.

As a first step, the President seems to have called on Mrs. Abner Doubleday, who was then living in Washington, to see what light the letters she was getting from her husband might shed. Of all of Major Anderson’s officers, Doubleday was probably the most
wholehearted in his belief that the fort ought to be held in spite of everything, but his letters could tell the President little except the condition of the garrison and the state of its preparations for defense.
⁹
Lincoln needed something broader than this, and he sent down three men to get the information he needed.

The first of these was Captain Fox himself. Lincoln talked to him on March 19, and two days later Fox reached Charleston. He went to see Governor Pickens, explained his mission, and said that he would like to talk to Major Anderson—not to give him any orders, but simply to find out what his situation really was. Governor Pickens agreed, and shortly after dusk a Confederate guard steamer dropped Fox on the wharf at Fort Sumter.

Anderson was pessimistic. He thought it was too late for the government to relieve him except by landing troops on Morris Island and storming the batteries there—an operation which, as General Scott had pointed out, would take a large army and a powerful fleet—and he made it clear that his supplies were getting very low. He and Fox agreed that Fox must tell the President that the troops could not stay in the fort after April 15 unless more supplies were received. While the men talked, the splashing of a rowboat’s oars could be heard somewhere off in the darkness, although no boat could be seen. Fox drew the major’s attention to this, indicating that small boats might reach the fort at night without damage, but Anderson felt that this was not good enough—Fort Moultrie had at least thirteen guns bearing on the wharf where the boats would have to unload, and he did not think the chances were very bright. Fox insisted that he did not actually tell Anderson about his plan, although Anderson apparently got a fairly clear idea of what was in the wind. (A little later the Confederates accused Fox of acting in bad faith, since he had assured Governor Pickens he was not bringing Anderson any orders. Fox insisted that he had lived up to the agreement, but said that it did not matter: he considered that a state of war already existed, and felt that it was entirely legitimate for him to deceive “the enemy” in any way he could.) In any case, Fox presently returned to Washington and prepared to tell Lincoln what he had learned.
¹⁰

A second emissary was Stephen A. Hurlbut, an Illinois lawyer and Republican leader whom Lincoln had known for years. Hurlbut
reached Charleston March 24, shortly after Fox started back to Washington, concerned less with finding out about Major Anderson’s position than with ascertaining just how the people of Charleston felt about everything. He talked to old James L. Petigru, who by now was recognized as the only Union man in the state, talked also with businessmen and politicians whom he knew, and returned full of unrelieved gloom. He found in Charleston no vestige of attachment to the Union, and told Lincoln bluntly that “there is positively nothing to appeal to—the sentiment of national patriotism, always feeble in Carolina, has been extinguished and over-ridden.” Nothing the government could do short of unqualified recognition of South Carolina’s independence and complete surrender of Federal jurisdiction, he felt, would satisfy Charleston, and Beauregard would unquestionably stop even a boat containing nothing but bacon and hardtack. As far as Hurlbut could see, the case of Fort Sumter was hopeless; the only thing Lincoln could do was hold on to Fort Pickens—and “if war comes, let it come.”
¹¹

The third man Lincoln sent to Charleston was Ward Lamon, a close personal friend, newly appointed Federal marshal for the District of Columbia. Lamon and Hurlbut went south together, but parted once they reached Charleston. Lamon learned nothing Lincoln did not already know, but he did manage to muddy the waters slightly. He talked to Governor Pickens and to Major Anderson, and gave both men the definite feeling that troops at Fort Sumter were going to be withdrawn. Sympathetic to the South, Lamon almost certainly exceeded his authority; writing about it long afterward, he was notably reserved regarding the messages he had been supposed to give the governor and the major—if indeed he had been supposed to do anything more than take soundings—but he was looked upon in Charleston as the President’s authorized agent, and Anderson reported to the War Department that what Lamon told him led him to believe “that orders would soon be issued for my abandoning this work.” Whatever Lamon may have said, he at least brought back to Washington Governor Pickens’s flat warning that “nothing can prevent war except the acquiescence of the President of the United States in secession and his unalterable resolve not to attempt any reinforcement of the Southern forts.” In
substance, his report to the President was about like Hurlbut’s: even the arrival of a boatload of provisions would touch off a fight.
¹²

The three men returned to Washington separately, and Lincoln called a new cabinet meeting to consider the situation. Meanwhile, there were two additional complications. General Scott submitted a memorandum advising against the plan to reinforce and hold Fort Pickens; and Captain H. A. Adams, the senior naval officer at Pensacola, saw the orders the U.S.S.
Mohawk
had brought down and refused to honor them. Captain Adams pointed out that he was still bound by the January 30 orders from the Secretary of the Navy, which said he was not to put troops ashore unless the fort were under attack or clearly about to be attacked. What the War Department might write to Captain Vogdes was interesting, but it did not affect him. He would stand by the old orders, and he and the soldiers would remain aboard ship. In some anxiety, Captain Adams wrote to the Navy Department: “I beg you will please send me instructions as soon as possible, that I may be relieved from a painful embarrassment.”

For the moment, nobody in Washington knew about this. When the news did come, Secretary Welles wrote bitterly that Adams was technically justified, although Welles felt that “a faithful and patriotic officer would have been justified in taking a reasonable responsibility.” Meanwhile, President and cabinet would reconsider the Fort Sumter problem.
¹³

William Howard Russell, correspondent for the London
Times
, found Abraham Lincoln a more impressive figure than he had anticipated. He was long, craggy, strong, and awkward, as everyone said he was, but to study his “strange, quaint face and head, covered with its thatch of wild republican hair” was to get an impression of kindness and good sense, and although “the mouth was made to enjoy a joke,” there was plenty of firmness in it. Russell liked it when Lincoln told him that the
Times
was one of the greatest
powers in the world, and he also liked the President’s whimsical addition—“in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power, except perhaps the Mississippi River.” Greeting a convocation of diplomats at the White House, Lincoln apparently had to restrain an impulse to shake hands with everybody; smiling good-naturedly, he bowed instead, and his bow was ungainly, jerky, “a prodigiously violent demonstration,” as Russell felt, which “had almost the effect of a smack in its rapidity and abruptness.” All in all, Russell felt that by the standards of European society, Lincoln was hardly a gentleman, but no one who saw him could fail to take a second look at him.

After paying a more or less formal call at the White House, Russell was invited to a state dinner, held on the evening of March 28—the first affair of the kind for the new administration. The Englishman scanned the cabinet members with frank curiosity. Secretary Chase, clearly, was distinguished and intelligent, a man of power and energy; Cameron seemed able and adroit, with deep-set eyes over a thin mouth; Welles did not look like much, although Russell was assured that he was a man of ability even though he hardly knew one end of a ship from the other; and Blair was a hard, lean Scotchman, with a head that might be “an anvil for ideas to be hammered on.” Russell admitted he was agreeably disappointed in Mrs. Lincoln. She was pleasant, nicely gowned, and carried herself with dignity, and altogether seemed to be much more of a person than unkind secessionist ladies in Washington were saying she was. Russell noted that General Scott had come to the dinner but did not stay, having been compelled by some indisposition to retire.
¹

Scott’s retirement was perhaps advisable. He had just given Lincoln a memorandum that was about to raise a storm; it was so disturbing that when the party at last ended, Lincoln asked the cabinet members to remain and listen to it. As he read it, Lincoln seemed agitated, as well he might. Having previously urged that Fort Sumter be abandoned, Scott now was advising the same thing in respect to Fort Pickens, and was basing his advice, not on military considerations, but on straight political grounds.

It seemed doubtful, the general had written, “whether the voluntary evacuation of Fort Sumter alone would have a decisive
effect upon the States now wavering between adherence to the Union and secession. It is known, indeed, that it would be charged to
necessity
, and the holding of Fort Pickens would be adduced in support of that view. Our Southern friends, however, are clear that the evacuation of both the forts would instantly soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slaveholding states, and render their cordial adherence to the Union perpetual. The holding of Forts Jefferson and Taylor, on the ocean keys, depends on entirely different principles, and should never be abandoned; and, indeed, the giving up of Forts Sumter and Pickens may be best justified by the hope that we should thereby recover the State to which they geographically belong by the liberality of the act, besides retaining the eight doubtful states.”

Seward had assured Russell a few days earlier that “we will give up nothing we have” and had insisted that the line laid down in the inaugural (to hold, occupy, and possess) clearly expressed administration policy. Now the general of the armies was saying that this policy must be abandoned, and when the President finished reading the memorandum, there was a brief, stunned silence. Less than a fortnight earlier the cabinet had agreed, almost to a man, that Fort Sumter ought to be abandoned, but in the days since then the urge to “sooth and give confidence” to the slave states that remained in the Union had grown perceptibly weaker. Blair spoke up angrily to say that General Scott was far out of line; he was “playing the part of a politician, not a general,” and as far as Blair could see, there was no military reason to give up Fort Pickens. The meeting ended at last, with the understanding that the cabinet would reassemble the next day and that each member once more would submit in writing his ideas concerning what ought to be done.
²

By noon of March 29, when the cabinet came together, it was evident that there had been a change of heart. General Scott’s surprising pronunciamento about Fort Pickens seemed to have thrown the whole business into sharper relief. Secretary Chase, who had wavered uncertainly at the first meeting, had been purged of his doubts. If war would come from an attempt to provision Fort Sumter, he wrote, it would come just as certainly from an attempt to keep Fort Pickens. He himself was definitely in favor of retaining
Fort Pickens; by now he was “just as clearly in favor of provisioning Fort Sumter.” If the attempt to send rations to Major Anderson should be resisted by military force, Anderson should be reinforced: “If war is to be the result I perceive no reason why it may not be best begun in consequence of military resistance to the efforts of the administration to sustain troops of the Union stationed under the authority of the government in a fort of the Union in the ordinary course of service.”

Chase spoke for most of his colleagues. Attorney General Bates hedged slightly; he would reinforce Fort Pickens, but as to Sumter, his best judgment was that “the time is come either to evacuate or relieve it.” Caleb Smith still remained where he had been at the first cabinet meeting—he wanted the government to pull out of Fort Sumter—and in this he did no more than reflect the attitude of his politician guardian, Secretary Seward. For Seward, despite the firm words he had uttered to correspondent Russell, wanted Major Anderson withdrawn.