The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (17 page)

I am loath 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 natures.

Shortly before noon on March 4, the carriage of President Buchanan stopped in front of Willard’s Hotel. The weak-faced old man, looking like a figure from one of Dickens’ novels, went into the hotel to meet his successor. The two men came out together and rode down Pennsylvania Avenue under a cavalry guard that kept close to the carriage. Riflemen were stationed on housetops; soldiers lined the broad square in front of the Capitol and stood under the speaker’s platform. Artillery pieces were drawn up in the streets around the Capitol, and a long covered wooden passageway had been built to protect the Presidential party on its way to the speaker’s platform.

The Capitol dome was unfinished; huge pieces of iron needed in its construction were standing around the square; scaffolding ran across the front of the portico. On the platform the great men of the nation were assembled to attend the ceremony. Abraham Lincoln came forward to the front of the speaker’s stand, looking very uncomfortable in his new clothes. He held his hat in one hand and a large gold-headed cane in
the other. He managed to put the cane away in a corner; as he tried to find a place for his hat, Douglas smiled, took it and held it for him. Then, reading from manuscript, Lincoln began his carefully prepared inaugural address.

There were about thirty thousand people assembled in the square. They heard Lincoln’s plea for peace and conciliation, and applauded without great enthusiasm when he finished. Chief Justice Taney, the eighty-four-year-old head of the Supreme Court, stepped forward in great agitation to administer the oath of office for the last time in his long career which dated from Jackson’s administration. He was the man whom public opinion held responsible for the Dred Scott decision; he and Buchanan and Douglas had been named by Lincoln as conspirators in the effort to extend slavery into the territories. The ancient black-robed figure was shaking as he held up the Bible on which the oath was to be sworn. Abraham Lincoln spoke the words that made him President of the United States. A signal was given to a field-battery stationed a mile away. The distant guns roared out in celebration; the smoke from their firing drifted over the city; the crowds in the square dispersed; and the new President drove to the White House to take over the responsibilities of office.

The Lincoln who entered the White House that day seems at first like a very different person from the Illinois politician who had left Springfield a few weeks before. He had mingled with the leading men of the nation and been treated by them as a person of high importance; he had been exposed to danger and the possibility of sudden death; he had the biggest job in the country to fill under conditions that were without precedent—no other President before or since has had to face the problems awaiting Lincoln when he entered the White House. It is a mistake, though, to feel that he had suddenly become transformed into another person. Actually he was the same Lincoln, the same melancholy country man fond of jokes and story-telling, the same clever politician and lawyer
who could hold his own in a debate or persuade a jury. The highest office he had previously occupied was that of Congressman and he had been not too successful in it. The great position of power that was now his was to call out of him all the ability that had so far been latent; he was to concentrate in the next four years what would amount to several lifetimes for ordinary men. He knew that he had reached the peak of his career; there could be nothing more ahead of him after the Presidency. No circumstances could be more favorable for testing the mettle of a man—strong men rise to the occasion and become stronger; the weak give way, as Buchanan had done, and become miserable failures. It was all or nothing now.

The first indication of strength that Lincoln showed was in the selection of his Cabinet. He surrounded himself with the best men he could get. The three most important men in his Cabinet had all been his rivals in the race for the Presidential nomination. His Secretary of State was William H. Seward and his Secretary of the Treasury was Salmon P. Chase. They were both far in advance of Lincoln in their attitude toward slavery; they were both positive men, strong-willed and ambitious. His Attorney General, Edward Bates of Missouri, was an elderly man with a great legal reputation. His Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, also was famous in the law—he had been the attorney for Dred Scott, and had made a national reputation for himself as a fearless advocate. All these men had been chosen by Lincoln; the other three Cabinet members were necessary compromise selections. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, had been selected by the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, for geographical reasons—he represented New England in the Cabinet. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, as Secretary of War, and Caleb Smith of Indiana, as Secretary of the Interior, had been given their places to fulfill the unauthorized promises made at Chicago by Lincoln’s campaign managers.

Someone from the Lower South was badly needed in the Cabinet, but Lincoln had found it impossible to get any prominent man to serve. This was a great disappointment to him, but he had done the best he could in selecting his Cabinet under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances of sectional dispute and political expediency. He had to work with the material he could get, and he had made his own selections without any fear of rivalry or any consideration of personal favoritism.

This willingness to work with the best man for the job was one of Lincoln’s greatest political virtues. When he was thinking of using Chase in his Cabinet, a friend in Springfield had warned him that Chase considered himself a bigger man than Lincoln. “Well,” said Lincoln, “if you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am, let me know. I want to put them all in my Cabinet.” When the time came for him to appoint a new Secretary of War to replace Cameron, he chose Edwin M. Stanton, despite the fact that Stanton had once treated him with contempt during a law trial in which they both served as attorneys on the same side, and had often shown that he had very small respect for Lincoln as President.

Lincoln showed his strength in his Cabinet appointments; he showed his weakness and vacillation in the policy—or lack of one—followed during his first month in office. There can be no doubt that he seriously underestimated the degree to which secession had proceeded in the South. Even though a new government had been set up there and a Confederate President inaugurated, he still felt that it might be possible to save the Union, to hold the South by peaceable means. The whole spirit of his first inaugural address shows this. He believed the South felt the same veneration for the United States that he himself did. Love of country was strong in the generation
of men that had followed the leadership of Jackson, Clay and Webster. But Lincoln did not take Calhoun, who had been the leading statesman of the South, into sufficient account. Calhoun had stood for his state rather than his country, and local attachments outweighed national patriotism among many Southern people.

A long controversy had been going on since the previous December between the Federal Government and South Carolina over the Federal fortifications around Charleston. The key to Charleston was Fort Sumter which commanded the entrance to the harbor. South Carolina was determined to take over this fort; the Northern Government was equally determined to hold it. An attempt had been made in January to send provisions to Sumter by steamer. This steamer, the
Star of the West
, had been fired upon by the Confederates and driven away from the port. Sumter had been holding out ever since. Its little garrison, under the command of Major Robert Anderson, was now nearly at the point of starvation. The fort either had to be supplied with provisions or surrendered.

General Scott had already given his opinion that it would be practically impossible to hold Sumter. On March 15, Lincoln asked advice from his Cabinet. Only Blair and Chase felt that an effort should be made to provision the fort. Nearly all the forts, navy yards and Federal buildings in the South were already in possession of the Confederates. Sumter was not of great importance, but the months-old controversy over it had given it an unduly prominent place in the news. The North could not afford to let the fort go because of the unfavorable publicity that would be incurred; South Carolina was eager to get possession of the key to her Charleston harbor—she could not be regarded as independent so long as the waterway to her major city was controlled by the North.

Lincoln still made no move. He could not decide just what should be done about the impossibly difficult situation. To
send supplies was to invite armed attack and war; to withhold them was to starve out the garrison and compel surrender. Time was working on the side of the South. The matter could not be delayed indefinitely. The Confederate Provisional Congress had already authorized the raising of 100,000 volunteers, floated an internal war loan, established an official navy and was even sending a commission to Europe to seek recognition as a nation.

On March 29, Lincoln again took a poll of Cabinet opinion on Sumter. There was some shift in favor of reinforcement, but the Cabinet was still not in agreement on taking a definite stand. Lincoln himself was, however, by no means convinced that the matter could be settled simply by letting the fort fall into the hands of the rebels. In fact he had already given orders to prepare an expedition which might or might not be used. Then on April 1, he received a document which, if it did nothing else, made him realize that he would have to fight to hold the Presidency just as hard as he had fought to obtain it. This was a confidential memorandum from Seward discreetly entitled “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration.”

This subtle bit of prodding indicated that the administration had not yet adopted a policy domestic or foreign; that it would be tactically desirable to “change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about slavery, for a question upon union or disunion.” Seward’s formula for accomplishing this very desirable end was to abandon Sumter but to “maintain every fort and possession in the South.” Then came one of the most breath-taking suggestions ever made by a high officer of the Government. Seward calmly proposed that the United States should deliberately provoke a war with Europe in order to unite her own antagonistic sections.

Someone, of course, had to do all this—either the President or some member of his Cabinet. Seward modestly closed by
saying: “It is not in my special province; but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”

This ingenuous advice must have been galling to Lincoln. His Secretary of State was not only suggesting that the country be plunged into an utterly unjustified foreign war, but was intimating that perhaps it would be better if he, the experienced and worldly wise Seward, take over the absolute control of its destinies.

Actually this was not all that Seward was doing to bring added trouble to an administration already overwhelmed with disaster. He had been in “indirect” communication with three men sent as commissioners by the Confederacy to sue for peaceable separation. These men had no official standing in the eyes of the United States which was certainly not ready to consider the Confederacy as a nation with the right to send agents. Nevertheless, Seward had let these men believe that Sumter would eventually be surrendered, although no such policy had been adopted. There were two unfortunate results from Seward’s rashness in dealing with the unofficial commissioners: a great deal of information leaked out and was transmitted to the South; when an attempt was made to provision Sumter, the South charged the Lincoln administration with bad faith, even though Seward, of course, had no right to make commitments of any kind.

Lincoln was probably uninformed as to how far Seward had gone with the Confederate commissioners, but Seward’s “Thoughts for the President’s Consideration” required an immediate and positive reply. Lincoln could not afford to antagonize his new and in many ways really capable Secretary of State, but he did have to put him in his place. The weakness Lincoln had displayed during his first few weeks in office immediately vanished. The answer he gave to Seward was a masterpiece of political strategy combined with unyielding firmness. He gently reminded Seward that his first inaugural address had been a statement of internal policy and that he meant to
stick to it—particularly to the pledge “to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” He said that he did not “perceive how the reinforcement of Fort Sumter would be done on a slavery or party issue, while that of Fort Pickens would be on a more national and patriotic one.” He ignored completely Seward’s suggestion about provoking a foreign war but said that whatever must be done would be done by the President himself. And then he very sensibly buried the whole affair so that no word of it ever came out while the two men involved were still alive. These tactics gave Seward a new respect for the President; the two men thenceforth drew closer to each other.

The problem of Sumter was more difficult than the one that had arisen with Seward, but it, too, had to be met and settled. Lincoln moved forward rapidly now. He determined to provision the fort, but he would send in no reinforcements or munitions unless the place was attacked. On April 6, he ordered a relief expedition to sail.
¹⁶
As a last-minute gesture of conciliation, he notified the Governor of South Carolina of his intentions. Instead of conciliating, however, this served only to warn. When the fleet arrived off Charleston in the early morning of April 12, the Confederates gave word to fire on the fort. At 4:30
A.M.
a shell rose from a mortar battery on the shore, curved high in the air and exploded over the walls of Sumter. The American Civil War had begun.