Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (34 page)

The “Corner-Stone” speech—it took its name from this masterful passage—was clear, direct, and logical, purged of the rant and sentiment of so much midcentury rhetoric. Lincoln was right to have admired the man who was capable of delivering it. Was Stephens then the towering genius, the new Napoleon that Lincoln had imagined in 1838? John Brown had been outside politics, a crackpot and a terrorist. Stephens was a statesman who had risen to new eminence in a new cause.

But Stephens was no Napoleon. He was hobbled, in the first place, by his office: a Confederate vice president, it turned out, would be no more potent than an American vice president. He would wield power only if his president died, and although Jefferson Davis was plagued with health problems, from malaria to eye trouble, he succumbed to none of them. Stephens could not even offer advice, for he served a president with whom he disagreed. He would clash with Davis on a range of issues, from economic policy to military strategy, and he
failed to get his way almost every time. He never imagined getting his way by impeachment or (Napoleon’s method) by a coup. He gave an inspired speech, and left it at that.

The conclusion of the “Corner-Stone” speech was desultory, touching on future prospects and the latest news. As of March there were still eight slave states in the Union, more than the seven that were out of it,
but Stephens expected North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri to join the Confederacy soon.

Stephens discerned the threat of “coercion” in Lincoln’s Inaugural Address, though he allowed that it had not been followed up “so vigorously as was expected. Fort Sumter”—a fort in Charleston Harbor, still held by US troops—“it is believed, will soon be evacuated.” In the meantime, he urged all good Confederates to “keep your armor bright and your powder dry.”

“Enthusiastic cheering” was noted by the reporter.

Lincoln had committed himself in the final draft of his Inaugural Address to holding such government property as was still in its possession. This included two forts on islands off the Confederate mainland—Fort Pickens at the mouth of Pensacola Bay in Florida, and Fort Sumter. Fort Pickens was the more defensible of the two; Fort Sumter could not hold out against determined enemies, and South Carolina was determined to take it.

The fate of Fort Sumter had been a theme of cabinet discussions since the lame-duck days of the Buchanan administration. Buchanan’s position on the slow-motion dissolution of the Union was that states had no power to leave, but neither did the federal government have any power to compel them to remain. As December 1860 wore on, however, unionist hardliners in his cabinet—including the new attorney general, Edwin Stanton, the Ohio lawyer who had snubbed Lincoln during the McCormick patent case—had convinced Buchanan to reinforce Fort Sumter. In January 1861 the administration sent an unarmed supply ship, which the South Carolinians drove off with shore batteries.

The problem became Lincoln’s with his inauguration. Stephens’s prediction, in the “Corner-Stone” speech, that Fort Sumter would soon be evacuated, was not unreasonable: he was responding to the uncertain mood of the new administration, which reflected the mixed counsels of the cabinet and Lincoln’s slowness in deciding what should
be done. (Well might Lincoln hesitate; any misstep, and maybe every possible step, meant war.) Seward, who thought a show of mildness would strengthen unionist sentiment in the Upper South and border states, was initially in favor of letting Fort Sumter go. The Blairs were for confrontation. The new administration was hobbled by ordinary confusion, magnified by the extraordinariness of the circumstances. The commander of a ship assigned to resupply Fort Pickens was reassigned to resupply Fort Sumter, but, disbelieving his order—it was signed by Seward, not Lincoln—he sailed for Fort Pickens anyway.

Seward added a political wrinkle with an April 1 memo to Lincoln complaining that the administration was “without a policy either domestic or foreign” and offering to shape one himself. It was Seward’s bid to be an American prime minister, a president-by-proxy. Lincoln in reply reminded Seward
who the president was, and the secretary of state never made such suggestions again. Perhaps Seward had unconsciously been looking for some sign of authority from the top.

Early in April, Lincoln decided to resupply Fort Sumter, simultaneously informing the governor of South Carolina that he was sending “
only provisions.” This had no more chance of success than Buchanan’s doomed attempt in January, but notifying the rebels ahead of time changed the political dynamics. If there was fighting, it would be on their heads.

On April 12, the Confederates bombarded the fort, which surrendered the next day. The only deaths had been caused by misfiring cannon on each side. “After all that noise,” wrote Mary Chesnut, a South Carolina diarist, “ . . . sound and fury
signifying nothing.” Admirers of
Macbeth
, like Lincoln, knew that after the “sound and fury” line is delivered, many things happen.

PART THREE

Twelve

1861–1863: W
AR
, E
MANCIPATION

L
INCOLN HAD SAID WHEN HE LEFT
S
PRINGFIELD THAT HE
faced a task greater than George Washington’s. The fall of Fort Sumter had made his task greater still. Secession had led to an act of war, which would be followed by others. On April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation asking for 75,000 militia from the loyal states to suppress the rebellion.

Americans had fought wars before, against Britain, France, Mexico, and Indians, and they had fought each other in various domestic commotions (most recently in Kansas). They knew from Plutarch and Shakespeare of the civil wars of ancient Greece and Rome and medieval England. But an American Civil War—a rebellion of one-third of the country against the rest of the Union—was a new thing in American experience.

Yet even in this strange landscape Lincoln would look to the founding fathers—not for precedents, since there were hardly any, but for principles.

One founder who supplied a seeming precedent was George Washington, who had suppressed a rebellion in his second term.

In July 1794 distillers in southwestern Pennsylvania had balked at paying an excise tax on their whiskey. The crisis came when the federal revenue collector for that part of the state fought a gun battle with a company of local militia, in which several persons were killed. The countryside erupted. Angry westerners raised a rebel flag, robbed the mails, and held a protest meeting, 7,000 strong, outside Pittsburgh.

Washington gave the rebels time to cool off while simultaneously mobilizing the militias of four states. In September he sent more than 12,000 men over the Alleghenies. The passage of time and the show of force together stilled the uprising. When the troops Washington dispatched reached their destination, they found no one in arms. About a hundred men were arrested; two were convicted of treason and sentenced to death; Washington pardoned them both.

The affair acquired a faintly comical name—the Whiskey Rebellion. But Washington took it seriously—the force he sent over the mountains was four times larger than the one he had led across the Delaware for the Battle of Trenton. Sixty-seven years later, Lincoln took the Whiskey Rebellion seriously enough to
echo Washington’s language in his own call for militia on April 15. Washington and Lincoln defined rebellion in the same way: “The laws of the United States . . . are opposed and the execution thereof obstructed . . . by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” They both urged rebels “to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” These were phrases lifted from the Militia Act of 1792, which had defined when and how the president could summon state militias for federal duty.

More important was the similarity of what Washington and Lincoln thought was at stake and what they hoped to accomplish: Washington said he was acting to uphold “the essential interests of the Union” and “the very existence of Government”; Lincoln said he was defending “the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government.”

Yet the resemblances between Washington’s response and Lincoln’s only highlighted how unalike their respective rebellions were. Washington faced armed resistance in a corner of one state. Lincoln took office with seven states missing. In 1794 the passage of time had worked in Washington’s favor. In the spring of 1861 it seemed to be running against Lincoln. On April 17, two days after his call for militia, Virginia passed an ordinance of secession. Over the next month, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed, making eleven out of thirty-four states that had left the Union.

Lincoln would have to find his own way through an immensely greater problem than Washington’s.

Like any president, Lincoln brought a mixture of skills to the task before him.

Some thought he had no skills at all. After Lincoln won the Republican nomination, the New York diarist George Templeton Strong wrote that his only qualifications for high office seemed to be that “he cut a great many rails, and worked on a flatboat in early youth; all of which is somehow presumptive evidence
of his statesmanship.”

And who could say that Strong was mistaken? Lincoln was indeed one of the unlikeliest executives ever to reach the White House. Most of his predecessors had had some experience managing men before they became president: Washington, Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor had been generals; Jefferson, Monroe, Van Buren (briefly), and Polk had been governors; all the southern presidents were plantation owners. Lincoln’s few political offices had been legislative. He had never managed anything
larger than a two-partner law firm, and he had done that by stuffing papers in his hat. His aides and the mere pressure of business imposed some order on him, but he rebelled against every attempt to make him act with more system. “He would break through every regulation
as fast as it was made,” wrote John Hay, who devised many.

This style of management—or anti-style—suited a nature that was self-directed, self-willed, solitary. Everything Lincoln had learned, and much of what he had done, he had learned and done by himself. So why submit to the schedules and strictures of other men?

As with management, so with advice. Lincoln listened to everyone, then went his own way. “I have sometimes doubted,” wrote Leonard Swett, one of his Illinois cronies, “whether he ever asked anybody’s
advice about anything.” Humor and anecdotes helped him deflect anyone who became too pressing. Swett left a succinct description of how Lincoln turned people aside: “He told them all a story, said nothing, and sent them away.”

Lincoln’s political skills, however, were of the highest order, and the presidency is, after all, primarily a political office. The Constitution describes it as the repository of “the Executive power.” But politics is older than all constitutions and works its way into every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial.