Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (32 page)

A NERVOUS WHITE HOUSE WAITS

Civilian volunteers parade on the White House lawn in April 1861. In a vulnerable Washington, its telegraph lines cut by Maryland secessionists, a president fearful that the capital would fall was driven to near despair as he waited for the arrival of loyal northern regiments.

On the course of the northernmost tier of slave states would almost certainly hang the outcome of the war, and Lincoln recognized this. “These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once.”
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By absorbing Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, not only would the Confederacy gain some three million people and further material resources, but also Washington’s days as the Union’s capital would be numbered, the Ohio River would provide the South with a natural defense, the Union would be faced with recovering a landmass of intimidating dimensions, and the domain of slavery would stand undivided and energized in its life-and-death struggle with freedom. It seemed inconceivable that a Union reduced to nineteen million people would be able to subdue twelve million Confederates—even had Unionism run as strongly amongst the ordinary people of the South as Lincoln initially and overoptimistically believed. But which way would these states jump? Delaware, with its tiny slave population, was certain for the Union, but the same could not be said of the others. Their economic interests tugged them northward, yet they shared an interest with the South in the social arrangements of slavery. And to both sections they were tied by blood.

Lincoln’s immediate preoccupation after April 15 was to secure the safety of Washington. If he overestimated the capacity of the Confederates to launch an immediate assault, his anxiety over the unpreparedness of the capital was entirely understandable. To protect the city it was essential to control Maryland and its railroad routes to the north, but Baltimore was a hothouse of secessionism, as was the Eastern Shore. On April 19, as the first Washington-bound northern regiment made its way from one Baltimore station to another, pro-Confederate rioters shot dead several soldiers and wounded others. The depleted regiment made it to Washington, but for the next six days the capital was cut off from the north by rail and telegraph, and, in Hay’s words, prey to “feverish rumors.” Lincoln’s nervous tension did not affect his judgment in one crucial respect, however: he prudently resisted calls from cabinet members for retaliation and the use of force to bring further troops through the city. But he was equally determined not to yield to the Baltimore crypto-secessionists who sought a promise that he would send no more troops across the state. There was, he told them frostily, no other way of defending the capital. “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air.”
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But they could sail. When Ben Butler cleverly avoided Baltimore by bringing a regiment by boat down the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, and from there on April 25 by rail to Washington, Lincoln “smiled all over.” The balance now swung. As troops poured in and strengthened his grip on the capital, Lincoln was able to play a more confident game of cat and mouse with the Maryland secessionists. Rather than arrest the disunionists before the state legislature convened—as Butler and Scott wanted—Lincoln ordered them to hold off. A show of Union force on Baltimore’s Federal Hill and the limited suspension of habeas corpus on the military line between Philadelphia and Washington emboldened the state’s Unionists and gave Lincoln “to think that if quiet was kept in Baltimore a little longer Maryland might be considered the first of the redeemed.” It proved a realistic hope. Union candidates swept the board in the June congressional elections. That fall, with General John A. Dix’s troops firmly in control, a Unionist won the governorship, thanks to the strength of loyalist sentiment in the western and central counties, and to the arrest of some editors and disunionist members of the state legislature.
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Concern for the safety of Washington, together with Lincoln’s determination to encourage slave-state Unionism wherever it revealed itself, also shaped the president’s course in western Virginia. Loyalty was strong there, as it was in other parts of the Allegheny-Appalachian range, including eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, and was nourished by a long-standing antiaristocratic animus against the wealthier and politically dominant slaveholding areas of the Tidewater and Piedmont. When Virginia acted to secede, leading men from the western counties wrote to Lincoln asking for the administration’s help in resisting this “coercion” and establishing a loyal state government in their part of the state. Lincoln directed Nicolay to reply cautiously, while “leaving the door open.” Shortly afterward he promised them active military assistance. Control here would increase the capital’s security, provide a shield for the contiguous parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, support federal forces in the Shenandoah Valley, and offer protection to eastern Kentucky, a base from which the Union could pursue a project dear to Lincoln’s heart—the liberation of the loyalists of eastern Tennessee.
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In June, following George B. McClellan’s rout of the Confederate forces at Philippi, a Unionist convention at Wheeling moved to implement one of the two schemes before it. Members set up a “restored” state government as a rival to the secessionist government in Richmond, and elected as governor Francis H. Pierpont, a Wheeling coal dealer and lawyer. He in turn organized a legislature, which sent two senators and three representatives to Washington, where Congress admitted them. Lincoln duly endorsed this Wheeling administration, despite its resting on a modest vote in only one part of the state. “Those loyal citizens,” he told Congress, “this government is bound to recognize, and protect, as being Virginia.”
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The second proposal was even more controversial. It called for the loyal counties to be formed into a separate jurisdiction, the state of “Kanawha” (later West Virginia). After a protracted process of conventions and elections through the fall and winter, a constitution for West Virginia won popular approval in April 1862. In May, the “restored” legislature of Virginia agreed to the formation of the new state and so technically met the Constitution’s stipulation that the division of any state should occur only with that state’s consent. But given the very small numbers of voters who participated and the exclusion from the exercise of all areas under the sway of the Richmond authorities, the whole process was at best constitutionally dubious and extralegal. Congress, however, passed the bill to admit West Virginia, leaving Lincoln with a hard decision. He consulted a divided cabinet in which the attorney general and two others protested that the measure breached the Constitution. Alert to the argument that this was no better than secession, “and tolerated only because it is our secession,” Lincoln nonetheless chose what he admitted was the “expedient” course. Since the act tended “the more strongly to the restoration of the national authority throughout the Union,” he signed it, on the last day of the year.
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The mixture of firmness, clear vision, and delicacy of judgment that served Lincoln well in his handling of affairs in Maryland and West Virginia rather deserted him when he confronted the remote western border state of Missouri. He surely understood its strategic importance: the state was a tongue of slavery surrounded on three sides by a free population and a salient that commanded the river system of the Northwest. But he was handicapped by his ignorance of its complex and fractious politics. In his cabinet he heard two discordant Missouri voices: the moderate Edward Bates, spokesman for the state’s conservative Unionists; and, through Montgomery Blair, the arguments of the postmaster general’s influential brother Frank, tied to the radical camp.

The hard question for Lincoln was how roughly to handle the state’s disunionists, who were clustered in the Missouri River counties and around St. Louis. The incautious Nathaniel Lyon, commanding the pro-Union forces in St. Louis, had successfully removed the city’s federal arsenal across the river to loyal Illinois on April 25. He then forced the surrender of the pro-southern militia at Camp Jackson, just outside the city, on May 10. Riots followed and lives were lost. Conservative Unionists counseled a policy of moderation, to chloroform the secessionists, and found an ally in General William Harney, commander of the Department of the West. Radical Unionists, led by Blair and Lyon, and working through Montgomery Blair in Washington, successfully convinced Lincoln that the conservatives underestimated the depth of the rebel threat.
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Both Bates and Winfield Scott backed Harney, but Lincoln reluctantly gave Frank Blair discretion to remove the general in an emergency. In short order Blair replaced Harney with Lyon and sabotaged the truce that Harney had arranged with the pro-secession forces. By mid-June Lincoln’s miscalculation in giving discretionary power to Blair was clear enough: Missouri was in open warfare.

Historians have generally been less persuaded than the president’s secretaries that Lincoln acted wisely in his dealings with Missouri. Nicolay and Hay thought that Harney and the conservatives had been “blinded and lulled” by the smooth words of traitors: the reality of embryonic rebel companies and a threatened invasion from Arkansas compelled Lincoln and Blair to act.
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Most historians, however, conscious of the chronic terror, guerrilla raids, and feuding in wartime Missouri, have been more impressed by the thought that Harney’s caution would have served the Union better at this crossroads in the war and given time for the loyalty of the state’s majority to assert itself.
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This is a plausible criticism. Lincoln’s perception would certainly have been sharper had he been able to rely on a disinterested, locally based adviser. His judgment may also have been skewed by his reading of the presidential election result in Missouri, where Union sentiment looked stronger than in any other slave state. Douglas and Bell had taken the lion’s share of the presidential ballots, while the southern rights candidate, Breckinridge, had secured a very much smaller percentage of the vote than elsewhere in the South. On this reading, if the decisive use of force was to work preemptively anywhere against secessionism, then Missouri was the obvious place to employ it. However, we may reasonably ask—given the violence and frontier lawlessness of antebellum Missouri, its reputation as a political snake pit, and the opportunities presented by civil war for the settling of old scores—whether another policy in 1861, even Harney’s, would have secured the permanent pacification of the state for the Union.

Historians, by contrast, have given Lincoln high marks for his approach to the border state which he knew he dared not lose, Kentucky, where he adopted the patient waiting game he had chosen not to pursue in Missouri. The tenacity with which Lincoln chased the prize of Kentucky’s loyalty had less to do with emotional concern for his native state or his calculation of the state’s substantial resources in livestock, agricultural produce, and manufactures, important though these were, than with an acute awareness of its strategic significance for the whole border region. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone,” he argued, “we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland.”
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Kentucky
held,
by contrast, meant command of the south bank of the Ohio River, vital as a commercial artery, a defensive military line, and a bridge between the eastern and western theaters of war.

Lincoln, however, knew better than to force the pace of Kentucky Unionism, in which he had some reason to be confident. He had a far better feel for opinion there than in Missouri, thanks in part to the Todd family—divided in its loyalties—and especially to his old friend Joshua Speed, now of Louisville, and Speed’s brother James. He also arranged to receive the Lexington newspapers, the loyal
Observer
and the disunionist
Statesman.
When the pro-southern governor, Beriah Magoffin, indignantly refused Union calls for troops and warned both sides to keep out, Lincoln kept calm. He had “an unquestioned right at all times” to move federal troops across a state’s territory, he told a leading Kentucky Unionist, but “if Kentucky made no demonstration of force against the United States he would not molest her.” So, for the time being, he strengthened “the Ohio line” by attending to the other side of the river. Within days of the outbreak of war, the administration ordered the dispatch of federal troops to Cairo, Illinois, at the strategic junction with the Mississippi; but, respecting the Kentucky legislature’s proclamation of “neutrality,” Lincoln resisted pressure from the governors of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to send Union forces into the state. The occupation of Cairo was too much for some neutralists of the Bluegrass State. One state senator wrote a truculent protest against “an unwarrantable usurpation,” to which Hay composed a sarcastic response in Lincoln’s name. The president “would certainly never have ordered the movement of troops, complained of, had he known that Cairo was in your Senatorial district.”
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Lincoln’s waiting game—what Lowell called “the little Bopeep policy”—seemed cowardly and humiliating to many in the North. Tolerating neutrality meant tolerating only qualified loyalty, allowing merchants to trade with the Confederacy as well as the Union, and watching the secession-minded Magoffin charting a disunionist course. But it also meant giving the Whig Unionists of the Clay-Crittenden tradition time to organize against full-blown separatism and to secure a convincing victory in the June congressional elections. It meant using Sumter’s hero, Robert Anderson, a native Kentuckian, now located across the river in Cincinnati, to recruit Kentucky volunteers for the Union army; and it involved sending another native, the young navy lieutenant William Nelson, surreptitiously to help organize and arm the loyalist Home Guard in the state. By August the tide had so turned that Unionists easily dominated the legislature, and Nelson now began openly assembling four Union regiments on Kentucky soil. In response to Magoffin’s plaintive call for its removal, Lincoln declined to act against a force which, he noted, was made up exclusively of Kentucky volunteers and enjoyed popular support.
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