American Experiment (109 page)

At least the system did allow for a certain vital flexibility and potential—the coming to power of a strong President who could build his own presidential party and govern. As the southern states broke away from the Union, as the inauguration of a new President neared, eyes North and South turned toward the tall man in Illinois, and to another man in Mississippi, Jefferson Davis.

T
WO WESTERNERS LEFT THEIR
homes on February 11, 1861: Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. They had much in common. Both had been born in Kentucky. Both had prospered in the trans-Appalachian region as that region had prospered. Both had become famous throughout the nation; indeed, both had recently been elected Presidents, and they were now setting forth toward their posts. Davis and Lincoln had something else in common: Neither would live to come home again.

The day before, Jefferson Davis, as spare and erect as ever but with his light hair now turning gray, was helping his wife prune rose bushes on Brierfield, their plantation near Vicksburg, when a messenger rode in with a telegram. Her husband’s face turned so desolate as he read the message that Varina Davis feared news of a death in the family. Davis was silent for long moments, then told her that he had just been chosen provisional President of the newly formed Confederate States of America. As an old soldier he had expected at most a military command, but as a good soldier he immediately packed to leave. Early next morning the plantation bell summoned the slaves of Brierfield to hear their master bid them farewell. Then Davis and his black manservant walked to a nearby Mississippi landing, rowed out into the river, and flagged a steamer for the ride north to Vicksburg.

Davis was beginning his long trip to Montgomery at a critical moment for the seven seceding states. Spurred as always by South Carolina’s leaders, they had organized a new government with remarkable speed and efficiency. Their new charter, the Confederate Constitution, provided for the “sovereign and independent” nature of the individual states and protected slavery, though slave importation was barred to appease French and British opinion. Davis had been chosen provisional President over such fire eaters as William Yancey and Robert Rhett, with Alexander Stephens, an old Whig turned Democrat, as Vice-President. All this was in response to wild enthusiasm in the lower South, as orators called for secession, old soldiers formed military companies, women sewed flags, preachers
fulminated from the pulpit about the mortal peril to the South, and newspapers mirrored the intense feelings at the grass roots. But states of the upper South, so critical to secessionists’ hopes, were holding back.

Heading east, Davis could hardly ignore the geography of secession as he was forced to make a detour north into Tennessee—which still remained in the Union—southeast to Atlanta, and then doubled back southwest to Montgomery. Nor could he ignore the lower South’s shortage of east-west railroad links, ominous for a region heading toward war. Even this run had no sleeping cars, so the President-elect rested, fully dressed, on a camp bed set up in a regular coach. He was immensely buoyed, though, by the “approbation” of the people crowding into stations where he paused, by the booming guns and bonfires that marked his way. At each of his twenty-five stops Davis repeated that “no reconstruction” of the Union was now possible and urged his listeners to prepare for war.

Yet he could not forget the “cooperationists” who opposed separate secessions by the states, favored collective action by all the South, and in many cases were willing to negotiate with the Republicans in search of some kind of last-minute compromise, even while they insisted on southern rights and their determination to repel any Union assault. Rolling through Tennessee, he could not forget that two days before he left Brier-field the people of that state had voted decisively against calling a convention to consider secession; and that a few days before, Virginians had dashed secessionist hopes with their own foot-dragging. Without the prestigious Old Dominion little could be done; certainly a Gulf Coast Confederacy would not be enough.

In Montgomery a delegation from the Confederate constitutional convention waited to greet Davis. Yancey grandly introduced him to the station crowd: “The man and the hour have met.” Davis had only one day to prepare his inaugural address; then, as the strains of “Dixie”—played by a southern band for the first time—died away, he called the new nation the true embodiment of “the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed” and asserted that the southern people would preserve their political liberty at all costs. He hoped for good will between the Confederacy and the “Northeastern States of the American Union,” but warned that if “lust of domination should cloud the judgment or inflame the ambition of those States,” then the South would “maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth.”

“Upon my weary heart,” the new President recorded, “was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers.” But ahead he saw “troubles and thorns innumerable.”

Lincoln had left Springfield amid a cold drizzle and an atmosphere of gloom. Umbrellas raised against the rain, a small crowd gathered around the rear platform of the single coach that, with engine and baggage car, comprised the President-elect’s special train. The day before, Lincoln had grasped Herndon’s hand and said, “If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” But he added, “I am sick of office-holding already.” Now, standing on the rear platform, he looked down, his face wreathed in sadness, then looked up and spoke a few words of farewell. The wheels of the stubby little locomotive began to turn.

Lincoln’s train meandered back and forth along the whole route to Washington, so that people and politicians could see him, and he them. As though strengthening himself for the ordeal ahead, he drew sustenance from encounters with Indiana farmers, Cincinnati immigrants, even traveling slaveholders; from Pittsburgh miners and ironworkers; from Albany Know-Nothings, New York merchants and pro-secessionists. Using a dozen different railroads, he rolled slowly across the country, zigzagging through the prairies and the Mohawk Valley, and down the flank of the Hudson. Sometimes he escaped the deluge of advice, admonitions, and job soliciting by withdrawing to his private quarters. His occasional melancholy was not shared by Mary Todd Lincoln, already aglow at the prospect of being the First Lady, or by their two young sons, whose pranks bedeviled train crew and passengers alike.

News from Washington told of drift, indecision, and paralysis, of a confusion of voices, proposals, manifestos, diatribes. With his Cabinet rid of Southerners, Buchanan could act more freely, but he hoped that Congress could solve the crisis, or that a new constitutional convention could be called, in the spirit of ’87. Congress was too divided to do more than discuss attractive but Utopian compromises.

The eyes of Washington were on the man who was still tacking back and forth as he headed east. But Lincoln had no solution either, and at first he seemed to play down the seriousness of the crisis. Conscious that the Inaugural Address would be his first major statement, he kept a draft of it in his pocket. To the crowds along the way he spoke from the train platform, groping for words, experimenting with various phrases. He told
an Indianapolis gathering, “It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me.” In Cincinnati he promised to treat neighboring Kentucky’s slaveholders just as “Washington, Jefferson, and Madison” had treated them. He argued to a Pittsburgh crowd that no crisis existed except an artificial one created by designing politicians. In Freedom, Pennsylvania, he invited a towering coal heaver up to the platform, and they stood back to back for the audience to judge who was taller.

In Philadelphia the President-elect raised a flag at Independence Hall and said: “I have often inquired of myself, which great principle or idea it was that kept this nation together. It was…something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.…It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

The militant and vocal crowds seemed to stiffen Lincoln’s determination as he neared the capital. But Washington had little sense of this. It was boiling with contemptuous stories of Lincoln’s western gaucheries and with rumors that Seward or some other cabinet eminence would control the new administration. Nor did Lincoln boost his prestige when, to evade a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore, he abandoned his train and slipped into Washington unannounced. Ensconced in a fine suite in the popular Willard’s Hotel, he received border state delegations, giving them the pledges they wanted: that he would leave slavery intact and delay using force to bring the seceded states back into the Union. Acting in an atmosphere of heightened tension and polarization, Lincoln wanted to regain balance among the warring sides. But some Republicans in Congress were supporting a “Force Bill” to give the President full control over all federal and state troops—a measure almost certain to drive Virginia and other wavering states into secession with the lower South. Other Republicans, including Horace Greeley in his
Tribune
, were urging that the cotton states be allowed to “go in peace.”

In this supreme crisis Lincoln, however much he might talk about liberty and equality, was determined above all else to save the Union, as something precious in itself. The Union to him was more than an ideal—it was bone of his bone, the great protecting shield for his family, the legacy of his revered forefathers, the house for his home. To preserve the balances of union he had chosen a unity Cabinet, with the now moderate antislavery Seward of New York as Secretary of State; the forthright Chase of Ohio for the Treasury; a border state loyalist, Edward Bates of Missouri, as Attorney General; a New Englander, Gideon Welles, as Secretary of the Navy;
another border state man, Montgomery Blair—a son of the old Jacksonian—as Postmaster General; Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as Secretary of War; and an Indianan, Caleb B. Smith, as Secretary of the Interior.

But on March 4 he had a speech to give, an oath to take from Chief Justice Taney. A statue of “Liberty,” waiting to be placed on the unfinished Capitol dome, lay on the grass before him as Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address. He sought to reassure the South that neither he nor the Republican party threatened it. He quoted the Republican platform plank pledging not to interfere with slavery, and to enforce the fugitive-slave law rigorously. But secession he flatly rejected, for it was the essence of anarchy. “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations,” Lincoln said, was “the only true sovereign of a free people.”

Much of the address read like a lecture in constitutional law, but toward the end: “I am loth 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 battle-field, 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 nature.”

But the Richmond
Enquirer
echoed almost every other southern paper in labeling the address as “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic.” It continued: “Sectional war awaits only the signal gun.”

At half-past four on the morning of April 12, 1861, a shell rose from a mortar battery at Fort Johnson, arched in a fiery red parabola through the dark air as its fuse spat out flame, and burst over tiny Fort Sumter in the neck of Charleston Harbor. For the next thirty-four hours Confederate batteries poured shot and shell into the fort occupied by federal troops. From their rooftops Charlestonians watched the explosions. Well-dressed ladies—if the
Harper’s Weekly
artist was to be believed—lay prostrate in tears, holding one another in their arms. And well they might. That mortar shell was the signal for war.

It was a signal desperately feared by some, ardently sought by others, long expected by almost all. For months now Sumter had loomed as a symbol of southern determination and northern defensiveness, of the clash between state and national sovereignty, of the collision between two cultures. It seemed only fitting that a fort off Charleston should be the fulcrum of conflict. Federal arsenals and garrisons throughout the South had yielded to the secessionists, but Charleston was too important as a
port, and South Carolina too conspicuous in the leadership ranks of secession, for Washington to surrender Sumter. The pride of Unionists had been stirred when Major Robert Anderson of the regular army led his little force a mile across the water from vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Sumter, a half-completed square of masonry. Even Buchanan had summoned enough nerve to send an unarmed steamer in December with provisions for the garrison, but fire from the shore batteries drove it away. After that, the lame-duck President had been happy to leave the spiky problem to his successor.

By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration a South Carolinian “circle of fire” surrounded Sumter. Forty-three guns, manned by several hundred amateur cannoneers, supported by several thousand volunteer infantrymen, who in turn were backed by tens of thousands of militant Charlestonians, ringed the fort. But Sumter’s sixty cannons controlled the entrance to the harbor. Now time was running out for Anderson, as his provisions were low. Lincoln was torn between advisers counseling that the fort was indefensible and should be evacuated, or at least allowed to be honorably starved out, and others who urged that a relief expedition was both militarily feasible and politically necessary to back up the new President’s pledge to protect federal property and uphold the law.