Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (30 page)

Amongst non-Republicans, too, the patterns of response proved far from predictable. Douglas’s patriotic praise for Lincoln’s inaugural marked a sensational and significant break with the Democrats’ assault on Republican fanaticism, though its effect was rather to complicate opposition politics, not to halt them. The Little Giant himself was involved in a mid-March Senate standoff with Republicans over how to interpret Lincoln’s speech. For Douglas it meant peace, and he wanted Republicans to shore up that policy with constitutional guarantees. They, however, read it to mean merely that Lincoln would not make war on anyone; it did not commit him to conciliation or appeasement. In some desperation, and afraid that any clash over the forts would alienate the upper South, Douglas began to develop a scheme of peaceful separation within the framework of a customs union. Many northern Democrats followed Douglas’s lead as they moved into these uncharted political waters, mixing some partisan criticism of the administration with evident anxiety over the future of the Union. Some Democratic nationalists, however, proved even harsher critics of Lincoln’s “weakness” than those of his own party: several Breckinridge men of the previous November now abandoned their southern-rights champion, and urged Lincoln not to cringe before “southern dictation” and “the phantom prowess of the boasting traitors.” And old-style Unionist Whigs, faced with either enforcing the Constitution and law or protecting the nation from the danger of war, fractured into those who criticized Lincoln’s “supineness, cowardice, imbecility” in confronting traitors, and others for whom enforcement “would be the greatest folly in this age of follies.”
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But for all the eddies and swirls of opinion, the wider current flowed in only one direction: there was an underlying and near-universal assumption that by one means or another the “holy cause” of Union must be sustained.
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Even those who urged peaceful separation mostly did so in the belief that the “Cotton Confederacy” would be ready to return to the Union within a few years. Lincoln’s task, then, was to shape his actions to present the Union as itself the victim of assault in any confrontation, not as the aggressor, and so harness the power of a deep popular patriotism. His likely final policy toward the forts was predicted by a perceptive Douglas Democrat several weeks in advance: acting defensively, the administration would “compel the seceded States to perform such acts of aggression or offense as should be resisted. Thus would the cause of war be cast upon the seceders.”
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And this, of course, was how the endgame at Sumter unfolded. Lincoln chose not to reinforce Anderson secretly, turned Fox’s expedition into an unarmed relief effort, and ensured that the world would see his pacific intent by notifying the governor of South Carolina of what he would do.

The guns at Sumter provided Unionists with a catharsis of action after weeks of suspense and anxiety. What Browning described as a “tempest of patriotic indignation” found expression in mass gatherings, religious meetings, state legislative chambers, and furious editorializing. Lincoln’s secretaries labored under a mountain of heartening mail. The bombardment of the fort had operated, declared an old Whig acquaintance of the president, “like an electric shock upon the Northern mind.” Local Republican leaders pledged the administration all resources necessary to “crush the head of the rattle snake.” “The North West,” Joseph Medill promised Lincoln, “will back you with their last man, dollar and bushel of corn.” “Men and money at this crisis, will be forthcoming to any amount,” insisted another. The administration could rely on an army of three, four, five hundred thousand men—perhaps three quarters of a million, if needed.
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Conscience and countinghouse appeared to rally as one in defense of the national government. A variety of individual Christians and church gatherings—Indiana and New York Methodists, Philadelphia Presbyterians, Welsh Congregationalists, New England clergy—rushed to tell the president of their resolve. Lincoln should understand, a New Hampshire correspondent told him, that “the friends of the Pilgrims are your friends.” At the same time, the caution of conservative financiers, merchants, and manufacturers vaporized in the intense heat of patriotism, leaving John Hay to rejoice that, while cotton had for too long shut northern ears “to every sound but the jingling of dollars,” the storm of outrage proved “that the voice of a Puritan conscience is louder than the hum of a thousand looms.”
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Everywhere, it seemed, common anger at the South’s perfidy welded together previous political antagonists. Chicago Republicans and Demo-crats were “a unit,” Isaac Arnold telegraphed Lincoln. In Wisconsin they stood “shoulder to shoulder.” Pennsylvania knew “no division of parties.” Democratic stalwarts and previous anti-coercionists in New York now “desire to know no party but the union party until the question is settled whether we have a Government or not”: “I did not vote for Lincoln,” said one, “but I would vote for him now, just as I would for Washington, Jefferson, Jackson.” Even the southern-rights Democrats of lower Illinois, Trumbull reported, had had to succumb to the strength of public sentiment. Fearing an attack on the offices of his southern-leaning
New York Herald
and stunned by the evidence of northern single-mindedness, the editor James Gordon Bennett enjoyed a Pauline conversion and declared, “There will now be but one party, one question, one issue, one purpose in the Northern States—that of sustaining the government.”
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PATRIOTIC UNIONISM,
1861

Typical of early wartime Union prints in its
exaltation of the flag, this illustration formed the
cover on sheet music for
a patriotic song dedicated
to Lincoln.

Whatever apprehension he might feel about the struggle ahead, Lincoln could at least savor this consolidation of opinion. He would later reflect to Orville Browning, who in February had advised Lincoln to keep “the traitors . . . constantly and palpably in the wrong” and make them the aggressors, that this was the very approach he had followed in dealing with the South Carolinians. “The plan succeeded,” he purred. “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.” Similarly, he told Gustavus Fox that the attempt to relieve Sumter, though unsuccessful, had still advanced “the cause of the country.” Friend and foe endorsed his verdict. “The loss of Sumter,” the Bostonian Oliver Ellsworth told Lincoln, “was the greatest victory the people ever realized; it has done its work effectually.” In New York, where the
Times
and
Tribune
saw in the circumstances of surrender “a most brilliant success” that had tarred the Confederates with “the entire responsibility of commencing the war,” the southern-rights
Evening
Day-Book
gloomily identified “a cunningly devised scheme” to achieve northern political unity. “And some Democrats,” it lamented, “have been just such dunderheads as to fall into this pit dug for their reception. Blind, deluded people!”
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STRATEGIES FOR A “PEOPLE’S WAR”

When, on Sunday, April 14, all Washington learned that Anderson had capitulated at Sumter, Lincoln’s immediate actions gave notice that he would himself take executive control of the war and devise its overall strategy. That afternoon he asked his cabinet to consider a proclamation in which he called on the states to raise seventy-five thousand militiamen to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding,” and to repossess the forts and other federal property then beyond Union control. Published in the next day’s press, the proclamation also summoned Congress into special session on July 4. The delay would allow the militia’s term of service to be extended to three months (by law it could serve for no more than thirty days after the opening of a congressional session), but just as important was the opportunity it gave Lincoln to establish his control unhindered. Before Independence Day he took further executive action, establishing a blockade of the ports of the rebel states, increasing the size of the regular army and navy, calling up over forty thousand three-year volunteers, and entrusting $2 million of Treasury funds to private individuals to buy arms. Most controversially, on April 27 he suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus along the corridor between Washington and Philadelphia, to allow the summary military arrest, without trial, of those who threatened the passage of troops to the nation’s capital. In all this he enjoyed public and informal congressional support, and consulted political figures who mattered most, but left no doubt about who was in command.

The steps that Lincoln took during the early stages of the war showed an impressive and instinctive grasp of strategic essentials. He had three main objectives. He must nourish and sustain northern political support beyond the narrow confines of the Republican party. He must do all in his power to strengthen the Unionist elements in the upper tier of slave states. And, while tightening a noose around the Confederacy, he had to prevent the war from becoming an international conflict. Policies or actions which undermined these goals would disable the Union cause and threaten defeat.

THE SECEDED STATES AND THE BORDER REGION

The secession of the seven states of the Deep South was followed, after the fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, by the secession of four more slave states. The remaining tier of slavery—the border states—became a political and military battle-ground. Farther north still, particularly in the southern counties of the midwestern states, Democratic and anti-administration sentiment remained potent throughout the war.

Lincoln knew that no one would be more important to advancing the goal of cross-party, inclusive Unionism, and building on its tentative appearance in March, than the titan of the northern Democrats, Stephen Douglas. On the evening of April 14, Lincoln spent two hours at the White House alone with his old rival. Douglas pledged his unstinting support in bringing about the restoration of the Union, now possible only through the bloodshed that he had worked himself to near-exhaustion to prevent. In the next day’s papers Douglas delivered to an attentive country an account of this cordial meeting, and in effect instructed Democrats in their patriotic duty. The two men, he reported, had spoken “of the present & future, without reference to the past.” While remaining “unalterably opposed to the administration on all its political issues,” he would “sustain the President in the exercise of all his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the government, and defend the Federal Capital.”
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Douglas proved true to his word, heading back to Illinois by train and along the way delivering urgent speeches designed to stiffen the backbones of waverers. At the capitol in Springfield he delivered an electrifying address, bitter toward those southern leaders he felt had conspired to destroy the Union, and explained why party must now give way to country. In what would be the final speech of his life, a week later in Chicago, he hammered home the same message to an enormous and admiring cross-party audience: “There can be no neutrals in this war,
only patriots—or traitors.
” As Republicans lionized Douglas, he met the deep skepticism of the Democrats’ peace wing, whose suspicions he tried to calm with a public letter. Denying that he was in Lincoln’s pocket, he insisted that Democratic ascendancy would come only by remembering “that a man cannot be a true Democrat unless he is a loyal patriot.”
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Acting as the voluntary agent of the administration at a time when many people were ready for political guidance, Douglas exerted real influence. In consulting him so promptly, Lincoln had seemed to promise an informal Democratic influence over administration policy. Douglas would shackle “Black Republicanism” and guarantee “the integrity of the Union,” judged a friend from Maryland, confident that for this reason the state would not secede. In Illinois, Douglas played a part in the complex of forces that converted dissident-waverers to committed Unionism, including congressmen John A. Logan and William Richardson, and the editor of the
Chicago Times,
Cyrus McCormick. Across the North leading Democrats who looked to Douglas took a prominent part in Union rallies throughout April and May. When Douglas, physically spent, met his premature death in early June, it deprived his weakened and disunited party of their only figure of genuinely national authority. But the likely effect on the Union seemed just as damaging. Lincoln’s White House and William Henry Seward’s State Department were draped in mourning. Government offices closed. “The loss at this crisis,” wrote the most influential Republican editor, “must be regarded as a national tragedy.”
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