The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (18 page)

The firing continued for thirty-six hours, strangely enough without loss of life on either side. On the second day, buildings
inside the fort were set on fire by incendiary shells. In order to prevent the powder magazines from exploding, nearly all the powder had to be thrown into the sea. With ammunition almost exhausted, the garrison agreed to surrender. On the next day, Sunday, April 14, 1861, the flag was hauled down, and the fort passed into the hands of the Confederates.

On that day, in quick answer to the attack on Sumter, Lincoln drafted with his own hand a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers and summoning Congress to meet in extraordinary session on July 4. Douglas visited him in the afternoon to pledge his active support of the Union in the war. The two men consulted on military matters—Douglas had an excellent strategic mind and might have risen high in the army. A few days later, the Little Giant left for Illinois to rally Northern Democrats to the Union cause. Hardly more than a month later he was dead; a mysterious malady, perhaps brought on by the physical exhaustion caused by his active pro-Union tour, cut short his life when he was only forty-eight years old. The stage was now clear for Lincoln to dominate the national scene.

News of the firing on Sumter was received in the North with incredulity at first—then with rage. Over the week end the war news spread across the land, running along the telegraph wires to far-distant places, radiating out from towns to villages and thence to isolated farms, to logging camps, to wilderness huts. Men gathered at railroad stations where the rapid stutter of telegraph-receiving instruments brought the latest information from Washington. The President’s call for volunteers, which was published on Monday, April 15, was responded to with enthusiasm—many more than 75,000 men came forward. Everybody felt that the war would be a short one; the rebellion of a few recalcitrant slaveholders would be put down quickly.

Men volunteered in the South as readily as in the North.
The South, too, expected to win quickly. She would have her independence and be able to lead her own existence as a new nation. Yet in neither the North nor the South were the people solidly united on the issue at hand. The great Appalachian mountain chain that runs down through the South was the home of people who held no slaves, who profited in no way at all from a slave economy. These people were fiercely individualistic, scorning plantation owners and city dwellers alike. They wanted no part in the War, and many of them were determined to stay with the Union—or in some cases—to remain stubbornly neutral.

In the North, along the edges of the border states, in the newer Middle Western sections where people from the South had settled in pioneer country, and even in such states as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, there were thousands of men who opposed the Northern cause, openly and secretly. In the capital city of Washington, there were hundreds of men in governmental positions who held allegiance to the South; the more honorable of them resigned from their posts immediately; others remained to send out information and to do all that they could to obstruct the Northern military campaign.

On the whole, the South stood together better than the North did, although most of the Southern people had nothing to gain from the war. Less than seven percent of the white population there held ten or more slaves—and only these large slaveowners had been able to make slave labor pay. Men who held a few slaves lived on the thin edge of bankruptcy. The poor whites who made up the greater part of the population lived at a low subsistence level. Yet all these disparate elements were by one means or another welded together to wage the war. Some men—the wealthier ones—joined the army because they were convinced that slavery was desirable; others joined because of the example set by their neighbors. The rallying cry of states’ rights was a potent force among the more intelligent; the slogan “Fight to keep the niggers in their places”
worked with the more ignorant. The real tragedy of the South was that so many of its people were willing to fight and die in a War that would benefit so few of them even if they won it.

In the South, only some of the people in the border states and in the mountain regions held out against secession after the shots fired on Sumter clarified the many counter issues and made war certain. In the North, for all its initial enthusiasm, there were men who fought the war policy of the Government through all four years of battle. For one thing, Northern men had been used to free speech, accustomed to violent controversy among themselves over political matters. The moral issue against slavery and anger against the South for breaking up the Union helped to unify the North, but there were still many Northerners who cared nothing about freeing the slaves or holding the Union together. Political ties formed during the Democratic party’s long reign served, too, to make Northern Democrats feel that perhaps the South was not entirely unjustified in her stand on slavery and disunion. Areas that had been solidly in favor of the Democrats were disloyal areas in the North. Copperheadism flourished there; treasonable activities of all kinds were prevalent in these sections. Naturally there were many loyal Democrats like Douglas in the North—but there were no Republicans at all in the South.

The South lost no time in following up her victory at Sumter. Virginia passed an ordinance of secession on April 17; several thousand hastily assembled volunteers moved on Harper’s Ferry to seize the arsenal there with its 15,000 rifles. On the eighteenth, the Federal officer in command of the arsenal had to set it on fire in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the insurgents.

Virginia’s secession immediately placed Washington in great danger. The city was open to easy invasion from the south; if Maryland also proved to be hostile to the Northern cause it would be almost impossible to hold the capital. Everyone in Washington waited apprehensively to see what
move Maryland would make. The only railroad leading into Washington from the north passed through Baltimore—if this railroad and the telegraph wires that paralleled it were cut, Washington would be isolated.

Troops were badly needed to defend the city. There were only 16,000 men in the regular United States Army at this time, and most of them were in far-flung outposts in unsettled territory. On the seventeenth a few hundred militiamen from Pennsylvania reached Washington safely. Then, on the morning of April 19, a long train carrying one thousand armed men from the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment and nearly as many more unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers, arrived at the northern terminal in Baltimore. The first eight cars were drawn through the city streets by teams of horses while a huge crowd of Southern sympathizers gathered. By the time the ninth car came along, the crowd was in an ugly mood. Someone threw a stone at the windows of the slowly moving car. The sound of breaking glass inspired the crowd to pelt the windows with more stones. Revolver shots were fired. The soldiers, at their officers’ command, lay down on the floor of the car and offered no resistance. The car managed to reach the southern terminal, but it was the last one to get through. The crowd piled stones and scrap iron on the right of way, making it impossible for any more cars to pass. The soldiers still left at the northern terminal had to march through the streets to force their way to the Washington station. The mob fell upon them; men on both sides started to fire—the militiamen, grimly fighting their way, reached the terminal only after they had left four of their comrades lying dead on the streets.

The train pulled out of the south station as a final burst of fire from the soldiers killed a prominent man in the crowd. The infuriated mob then rushed to the Philadelphia terminal, where the unarmed Pennsylvania volunteers were still waiting in the train. Some of these men jumped out of the cars and were attacked. The train was hastily backed out of the station
in order to escape the shower of stones and brickbats hurled at it. Baltimore was in a turmoil for the rest of the day. A huge secession meeting was held that night, at which it was made evident that no more troops would be allowed to pass through the city.

The train carrying the Sixth Massachusetts arrived in Washington during the late afternoon. The wounded were unloaded on stretchers, and the survivors were marched to the Capitol, where they were quartered in the Senate Chamber. Even the White House was used as a barracks that night—a group of Kansas men recruited in Washington were placed in the East Room to serve as a guard.

This was the beginning of a week of terror the like of which Washington had not witnessed since 1814, when the British had captured and burned the city. Each day that went by made Washington’s position seem more and more hopeless. On the nineteenth, Lincoln issued a proclamation of blockade, declaring that all commerce to and from Southern ports would be stopped. On the twentieth, the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk, Virginia, had to be burned to save it from the rebels. Most of the ships had already been scuttled by disloyal officers stationed there. The North was placed in the position of having issued orders of blockade without having a fleet adequate to enforce them. On this same day railroad bridges near Baltimore were destroyed; railroad traffic ceased, and then, on the evening of Sunday, April 21, telegraphic communication with the North was cut off. The last message to come through from Baltimore simply said that the insurgents were taking over the telegraph office there.

On Monday morning, Washington was entirely isolated, in immediate danger of attack from Virginia and without enough troops to be able to put up much resistance if invasion were attempted. The Lincoln administration seemed likely to be as short-lived as its enemies had predicted. The President paced anxiously up and down the silent halls of the White
House, occasionally going to a window to see if any relief ships were in sight. On the Virginia side of the river he could make out a flag flying from the top of a building there. It was a Confederate flag, and he had good reason to believe that a large body of men were gathering around it in preparation for an assault on Washington. As night fell, he could see the watch-fires of the Confederacy burning on the hills, twinkling brightly under the quiet April sky.

Washington slept on its arms. Men stayed at their posts in Government buildings lest an attempt be made to seize Federal property during the night. Sandbags were piled up around entranceways; barricades were erected inside the halls. There had been a general exodus of Southern sympathizers during the last few days, but no one knew how many of them might still be waiting in the city to rise and join a concerted attack on the capital.

News had been received that men from the Seventh Regiment of New York and troops from Rhode Island and Massachusetts had been sent by sea to Annapolis, and that they had arrived there on Monday. They were expected in Washington on Tuesday. The railroad had been put out of commission near Annapolis, but the troops had only to march twenty miles to Annapolis Junction, where they could meet the main line from Baltimore, which was still intact from this point to Washington. Tuesday, however, brought no sign of the expected troops. Nerves were overwrought from long waiting. The city streets were almost deserted; people stayed inside their houses not knowing what might happen; stores and business places remained closed. Even the President’s strong will was cracking. During the afternoon, after the day’s work was over, he resumed his worried pacing up and down the floor of the Executive office. Finally he went to the window, and oblivious of people still in the room, said out loud: “Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?”

The next morning, some of the men wounded in the Baltimore
riots paid him a visit. He received them kindly, making them at ease in the formal rooms of the White House. Before they left he said to them: “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities!”

On Thursday, April 25, the long vigil ended. The troops from Annapolis, who had waited there to put a damaged locomotive in order, so they could bring their cannon and equipment, finally arrived in the city at noon. An enormous crowd flocked to the station to greet them. The streets were lined with cheering people as the men of the Northern regiments marched triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue with bands playing and flags flying.

More men came through from Annapolis on the next day. The isolation of the city was over, and Washington again became the capital of the nation—or at least of that part of it which still held allegiance to the United States.

During the weeks that followed, more and more troops kept pouring into the capital until it finally became a huge armed camp. Tents were pitched in open spaces; cannon were dragged through the streets and mounted in positions where they would command the approaches to the city. As Washington thus fortified itself, and the determination of the Northern states to oppose secession became evident, resistance died down in Maryland. By the middle of May, the railroad through Baltimore had been opened, and a majority of the people of the state had made it clear that they had no intention of joining the South. Naturally a strong secession element still existed, but there were enough pro-Union men in the state to hold it in the Union throughout the war.

The Lincoln family now had their first opportunity to settle down in their new quarters in the White House. Mrs. Lincoln
was destined to be disappointed in her ambition to become the reigning social queen of the nation’s capital. The Southern families who had dominated Washington society withdrew from the city to return to their homes. The Northern ladies who succeeded them had no intention of accepting Mrs. Lincoln as their leader. To them she was a parvenue from the Middle West, unworthy of ranking among the great families of New England and New York. She had not been in Washington since her husband’s brief sojourn there as an obscure Congressman, so she had no acquaintanceship with important people in the city. And the fact that several members of her family in Kentucky joined the rebel army made her suspect not only in society circles, but among the plain people as well. She became exceedingly unpopular, and her own imperious manner alienated even those few who had been predisposed to be friendly toward her. Her life in the White House was an unhappy one. The wife of a war President can make a name for herself in history, but she is not likely to become a great social success. Only a woman impervious to public opinion would make the attempt to do so at a time when the best blood of the nation was being poured out in fratricidal strife.