Coming Fury, Volume 1 (57 page)

The moon came out to give light for the work. Captain Wright laid a mine to destroy the dry dock. The scuttled ships, which had touched bottom with their upper works still above water, were set on fire. Detachments were put to work throwing shell and solid shot into the water—a completely fruitless task, since the Confederates
fished them all out as soon as the Federals went away—and all of the shops and other buildings in the place were set on fire. Smoke went up to hide the moonlight, the black clouds streaked with red from the mounting fires; a correspondent for the New York
Times
remarked that the burning of the
Pennsylvania
made a spectacular sight, with flames twining masts and rigging and issuing from 120 gun ports. Poor old McCauley, moved by heaven knows what remnant of the tradition that a captain ought to go down with his ship, wanted to destroy himself, perishing in the conflagration that was destroying his command, but was talked out of it. Naval officer in charge of setting fire to things was a Captain Charles Wilkes—a lanky, thwarted genius, brilliant, opinionated, erratic and unlucky: a man who would in due time make his own strange contribution to this war. To Wilkes, as he moved through the smoky night, came a group of Marines asking him to refrain from burning the Marine barracks; the sergeant of the guard had a hen setting on twelve eggs in the guardroom and he hoped that the brooding fowl might not be disturbed. This was a homemade war, and all ranks of the professionals tended to be a bit confused.
¹¹

The Federals got away at last, leaving fire and embers behind them, and
Pawnee
and
Cumberland
moved down to Hampton Roads and anchored under the guns of Fort Monroe. As the Confederates moved into the smoldering navy yard, General Taliaferro complained bitterly that the burning of the buildings and the warships was “one of the most cowardly and disgraceful acts which ever disgraced the Government of a civilized people.” (One of the characteristic aspects of this utterly confusing war was the general feeling, among active secessionists, that it was somehow perfidious and unnaturally evil for the Federal government to resist when warlike measures were taken against it.) He grew less wrathful, presumably, when he learned that the act of destruction, although base, was incomplete. The mine that Captain Wright had planted had failed to explode, and the dry dock was intact. So was most of the important machinery and equipment elsewhere about the premises, and nothing that was really needed seemed to be hurt beyond repair. Nearly 1200 heavy-duty cannon had been captured; the Federals had tried to spike them but had worked in too much haste, and the
weapons could easily be restored to usefulness; they would arm Confederate forts all over the South, from Roanoke Island to Vicksburg. And
Merrimack
could be refloated and rebuilt; a matter that would presently be attended to.
¹²

During four years of war, Washington came to know many hours of despondency, but it never again seemed quite as lost and as helpless as it felt between April 19 and April 25. In retrospect it is clear that the situation was not really as bad as it looked, but at the time the Federal government appeared to be face to face with final disaster. Edwin M. Stanton, temperamentally fitted to see things at their worst, assured his good friend James Buchanan that he simply could not give him an adequate description of the panic—which, he added, “was increased by reports of the trepidation of Lincoln that were circulated through the streets.” Families were packing their goods and preparing to leave, women and children were being sent away, and the price of food stuffs (said Stanton, who liked to pick up his basket and do the family marketing) had risen to famine levels. Willard’s Hotel looked deserted, and the desolate calm of an out-of-season holiday descended on the capital. If this time of trial brought Lincoln little help, it at least gave him temporary relief from the swarm of hungry Republicans looking for government jobs.
¹

There were plenty of problems to occupy Lincoln’s mind even without the job hunters. The soldiers who were so desperately needed were on the way, but getting them would compel the government to take steps regarding the situation in Maryland. Many of these steps would be extra-legal, and before all of them were taken Lincoln would stretch the Constitution to the limit—beyond the limit, in the opinion of Chief Justice Taney—but there was no help for it. There were no rules now except the ancient law of survival. What had to be done would be done, and now and then some odd-looking instruments would be used.

Among these was the eminent Massachusetts politician Benjamin
F. Butler. Gross, shifty, and calculating, Butler had been a prominent Democrat, and at the Charleston convention (so long ago, now, so irrevocably lost in the past) he had worked long, hard, and fruitlessly to win the Democratic Presidential nomination for Jefferson Davis. Now he was a brigadier general, leading troops south to fight against that same Davis; and on April 20 a steamer carrying Butler and the 8th Massachusetts Infantry dropped anchor at Annapolis, forty miles by rail from Washington.

Annapolis was the capital of Maryland and it contained Governor Hicks, who was thoroughly loyal to the Union but was almost distracted by the thought of what the dedicated pro-Confederates in his state might do if they saw any more Federal troops moving south on coercive missions. It seemed at the moment as if all of Maryland might go aflame, just as Baltimore had, and Hicks begged Butler to keep his men on their boat. He also sent an impassioned telegram to Lincoln, describing it in a companion message to Secretary Seward: “I have felt it to be my duty to advise the President of the United States to order elsewhere the troops now off Annapolis and also that no more may be sent through Maryland. I have also suggested that Lord Lyons [the British minister in Washington; a functionary whom Robert Toombs would have loved to see enmeshed in this war] be requested to act as mediator between the contending parties of our country to prevent the effusion of blood.”
²

This day was Saturday. Over the weekend, Hicks conferred extensively with Butler, while the Massachusetts soldiers lounged about in crowded idleness aboard their steamer. Governor Hicks discovered something that other men would discover later—that Ben Butler, however grave his deficiencies as a military man, was highly skilled in argument and negotiation; was also a man who never hesitated to use all of the authority that he believed himself to possess. By Monday morning, April 22, Butler had things settled his way, and he brought the 8th Massachusetts ashore. As the men were landing, another steamer came in with the 7th New York, and this regiment also came ashore. As a brigadier, Butler assumed command of everybody, after certain spirited protests from the officers of the New York regiment.

From Annapolis a branch line of the Baltimore & Ohio ran
twenty miles westward to intersect the Baltimore–Washington line at a point called Annapolis Junction. Track and bridges on the Annapolis branch had been sabotaged, and the only rolling stock at Annapolis consisted of one damaged locomotive; but the Massachusetts regiment was full of mechanics—one soldier discovered that he had actually helped to make the engine that needed repairs—and Butler put track and engine gangs to work, with two companies of infantry thrown out to guard against secessionist interference. Orders came in from the War Department by special messenger; Butler was to remain in Annapolis, assuming responsibility for keeping this route to the capital open, and troops were to come on to Washington. The 7th New York plodded along the track to the junction, got aboard a waiting train there, and went steaming on to Washington. There it detrained, formed ranks, and went tramping along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. The date was April 25, just ten days after Lincoln had issued his call for troops.

The 7th New York was a crack militia regiment, neatly uniformed, priding itself on the precision of its drill, the excellence of its brass band, the high social standing of its officers and enlisted men, and the general snap and sparkle of its military behavior. It had left New York after a two-mile parade down Broadway, and because of the emergency it moved in light marching order, leaving behind much camp equipment, including 1000 velvet-covered camp stools. One of its members wrote of the “terrible enthusiasm” with which New York sent its first regiment off to war—cheers so loud the regiment could hardly hear its own band, citizens pressing close to pound soldiers on the back, ladies tossing handkerchiefs from windows or, more bold, stepping out from the curb to tap a soldier’s wrist with a pair of gloves … “it was worth a life, that march.” (The soldier who wrote thus was a young man named Theodore Winthrop: he would die in battle before this spring was over, paying his own price for the march that stirred him so much.) Now the regiment was in Washington, knowing its supreme moment. It came down the great avenue under its flags, stepping along as if it were the finest regiment in the world, the advance guard of many more to come. Washington’s week of panic was over.
³

This was all very well, but the fundamental insecurity remained. The border states appeared to be exploding like a string of firecrackers, and if Maryland exploded with them—which, considering what had happened in Baltimore, seemed quite likely—the administration and the capital city and the war itself could be lost all in one lump. Ben Butler and the militia had merely opened a temporary road. That road now must be made permanent, broad enough to give every Northern state free access to the capital. The administration had to make certain of Maryland’s loyalty to the Union, or, if the loyalty proved inadequate, at least of Maryland’s subservience. President Lincoln and Governor Hicks would see about it.

Against them was the power of a blazing sentiment, built on an old fondness and raised now by violence to story-book intensity. The bond that pulled American states into the Confederacy was always more a matter of emotion than of cold logic, and from Baltimore to the Gulf the emotional response to the nineteenth of April was unrestrained. What the North saw as a mob scene looked in the South like a legendary uprising, with gallant heroes brutally done to death by the ignorant soldiers of a cruel despotism. All of the sense of romance that attached itself to the Southern cause was centered now on Maryland, and the state was pictured as a tragically beset heroine whose ultimate rescue must come if the world made any sense at all. James Ryder Randall, a Marylander-in-exile, wrote a passionate apostrophe—“The despot’s heel is on thy shore! Maryland!”—and the song was sung all across the South as an inspiring battle hymn. The Confederate Congress would, in time, vote that no treaty of peace would ever be signed that did not permit Maryland to enter the Confederate nation. To this welling forth of sentiment, there was a responsive reaction among all Marylanders who felt kinship with the South.

Maryland’s legislature was in adjournment at this time, and Governor Hicks was undoubtedly willing to have it stay that way, but now his hand was forced. Ardent and influential friends of the South were demanding that the legislature assemble at once in Baltimore, and a proclamation calling such a meeting had been issued over the name of State Senator Coleman Gellott. The proclamation had no legal standing whatever, but this was a spring in which
legalities meant very little; a rump session meeting in Baltimore, which in the days immediately following the riot seemed to be as pro-Confederate as Richmond itself, might do incalculable things and make them stick. Weighing all of the possibilities, Governor Hicks concluded that the best way to head off an uncontrollable, self-summoned and self-instructed rump session was to have a regular session called in the regular way, so he ordered the legislature to convene on April 26. Inasmuch as Annapolis, the capital, was occupied by Federal troops, he specified that the meeting take place in the city of Frederick, forty miles west of Baltimore. Frederick had been selected after careful thought; it was well over in western Maryland, where most people were Unionists and the legislators would not be meeting under pressure of a secessionist gallery.

When the legislature assembled, the governor assured it that “the only safety of Maryland lies in preserving a neutral position between our brethren of the North and of the South.” Maryland, he pointed out, had violated the rights of neither section, wished everybody well but still prized the Union, had done nothing to start the war, and hoped that the war would end as quickly as possible. In consequence: neutrality.
⁴

After some debate the legislature agreed with the governor. It passed a resolution asserting that it lacked the constitutional power to adopt an ordinance of secession, and it pointedly refrained from calling a state convention, which could adopt such an ordinance; in effect, it refused to go for secession, and the chance that Maryland would formally leave the Union was dead. The legislature named commissioners to discuss with the Federal authorities arrangements “for the maintenance of the peace and honor of the State and the security of its inhabitants,” and it named committees to visit both Lincoln and Davis. There were certain rumblings while this went on. The lower house urged Lincoln to make peace, and at length resolved that “the state of Maryland desired the peaceful and immediate recognition of the independence of the Confederate States.” Mere resolutions, however, the Federal government could take in its stride. The important thing was that Governor Hicks had kept Maryland in the Union.
⁵

In all of this, Governor Hicks had help from Washington, and the kind of help he got was clear indication that Lincoln was prepared
to be ruthless. It had taken the President a long time to make up his mind, after a winter in which he had seemed to sway uncertainly with varying breezes, but at last he had hardened, and now he had come to one of the fateful decisions of the Civil War. He would fight secession with any weapon he could lay his hands on, no matter what the weapon might be; facing what he looked upon as a revolutionary situation, he would use revolutionary means to cope with it. He had said, so recently, that all hope was not yet gone, but the hope that remained now (as a loyalist Northerner might see it) was nothing better than the hope that those who had risen against this administration might yet confess their error and submit. His answer to those who denied the power of the Federal government was simply to assert (backing the assertion by force) that that power could, in time of crisis, be wholly unlimited.