Lincoln (60 page)

A tidal wave of approval greeted his proclamation. “Cincinnati sustains proclamation great and universal enthusiasm,” wired William M. Dickson. “Nothing can exceed the enthusiasm,” two New York City merchants reported. Large Union demonstrations assembled in nearly every Northern city. Typical was a public meeting in Pittsburgh where thousands of citizens, disregarding all partisan feeling, vowed undying fealty to the nation and pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defend their country.

Democrats as well as Republicans rallied behind the President. On April 14 during a private two-hour conversation, Lincoln showed Douglas the draft of the proclamation he intended to issue the next day. The senator forgot their past differences. In a statement released to the press he announced that while he “was unalterably opposed to the administration on all its political issues, he was prepared to sustain the President in the exercise of all his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the government, and defend the Federal Capital.” Returning to Illinois a few days later, Douglas worked heroically to persuade Democrats in the West to support the President because “the shortest way to peace is the most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war.”

The only criticism of the President’s proclamation was that it called for too few men. Douglas told Lincoln that he should have asked for 200,000 men, and Browning thought he needed 300,000. But in calling for only 75,000 men on April 15, Lincoln was acting on General Scott’s advice. In addition, the President had to keep in mind the states of the upper South, still teetering between Union and secession. They would certainly regard the summoning of a vast army as proof that he intended to invade the South. And, most important of all, he recognized that the government was unprepared to arm, feed, transport, and train hundreds of thousands of new recruits.

Lincoln called for troops to serve only ninety days not because he believed that the war would be over quickly but because a 1795 law limited a call-up of militia to not more than thirty days after the assembling of Congress. With Congress called into session on July 4, the volunteer force would have to be disbanded by August 4. He could have convened Congress earlier, but that would have meant an even shorter term of service for the volunteers.

Promptly the Northern states began to fill their quotas of soldiers. Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, who had anticipated the outbreak of hostilities, instantly replied to Lincoln’s call: “Dispatch received. By what route shall I send?” Other governors used more words to convey the same message. From the far north Israel Washburn assured the President that “the people of Maine of all parties will rally with alacrity to the maintenance of the Government.” From the West, Governor O. P. Morton of Indiana pledged 10,000 men “for the defense of the Nation and to uphold the authority of the Government.”

They had no trouble filling their quotas with eager volunteers. There were thousands of men like Renewick Dickerson of Nashua, New Hampshire, who wrote to the President: “I have but one son of seventeen Summers, he our only child, a man in stature—We are ready to volunteer, to fight for the integrity of the Union—These rugged hills of New Hampshire overlook strong arms and brave hearts.” These volunteers, vowing “woe to the rebel hordes that meets them in battle array,” were, as one youthful soldier reported to his mother, “wound up to the very pinnacle of patriotic ardor.” “There are,” this lad continued, “but two contingencies both equally glorious, either to die, and be numbered among the martyrs to freedom, or live to pass victoriously through this strug[g]le for the right and be crowned with an aureole of glory.”

But the states of the upper South, still in the Union, gave a very different response. “I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people. You can get no troops from North Carolina,” Governor John Ellis responded to Lincoln’s call, and the governors of Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas echoed his words. All four states promptly seceded from the Union. Within weeks all joined the Confederacy, which moved its capital to Richmond.

In the border slave states initial reactions to Lincoln’s proclamation were also unfavorable. “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States,” Governor Beriah Magoffin responded, and Governor Claiborne Jackson of Missouri denounced the call for troops as “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical.” In Delaware, where slavery was a minor factor, the governor refused to comply with Lincoln’s requisition but permitted volunteer companies to offer their services for the support of the Constitution and laws of the country.

More important was Maryland, a state that nearly surrounded the national capital and controlled the only railroad access to the District of Columbia. “The excitement is fearful,” Governor Thomas Hicks and Baltimore Mayor George W. Brown telegraphed the President on April 18. “Send no troops here.” The next day the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, on its way to defend Washington, was attacked by a secessionist mob as it attempted to cross Baltimore, and four soldiers, along with some civilians, were killed. Lincoln
wanted
to
shore up the governor, a wavering Unionist who tended to collapse under secessionist pressure, and he agreed for the time that reinforcements would be marched around, rather than through, Baltimore.

Doubting that this arrangement would last, he said to the Marylanders half playfully: “If I grant you this concession, that no troops shall pass through the city, you will be back here to-morrow demanding that none shall be marched around it.” He was right. Shortly afterward Governor Hicks asked him to stop sending any troops through Maryland and suggested asking Lord Lyons, the British minister, to mediate the sectional conflict. That was too much for Lincoln. When a Baltimore committee descended on his office on April 22 and demanded that he bring no more troops across Maryland and make peace with the Confederacy on any terms, he had had enough. “You would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow,” he exploded. “There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no manhood nor honor in that.” He had to have troops to defend the capital, and they could only come across Maryland. “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air,” he reminded the committee. “Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us, we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and that severely.”

The threat was an empty one, because Lincoln did not have enough troops to defend Washington, much less to reduce Baltimore. After the firing on Fort Sumter the capital seemed almost deserted because of a steady exodus of pro-Confederate officials, including high-ranking army and navy officers. The most notable of these was Robert E. Lee, who declined an offer to head the Union armies because he felt he must go with his state, Virginia. To preserve some semblance of order in the national capital, Cassius M. Clay, wearing three pistols and an “Arkansas toothpick” (a sharp dagger), organized the Clay Guards, and Senator-elect James H. Lane of Kansas recruited the Frontier Guards from fellow Kansans who were in Washington looking for jobs. Lane’s group was quartered in the East Room of the White House.

For nearly a week Washington was virtually under siege.. Marylanders destroyed the railroad bridges linking Baltimore with the North and cut the telegraph lines. A Confederate assault from Virginia was expected daily, and everyone predicted that it would be aided by the thousands of secessionist sympathizers in the city. In the lonely hours, Lincoln paced the floor of the White House, gazing wistfully down the Potomac for the sight of ships bringing reinforcements and breaking out eventually in anguish: “Why don’t they come! Why don’t they come!” Every day there were rumors that additional troops, including the Seventh New York and a Rhode Island regiment, were coming soon, but none arrived. Chatting with the wounded soldiers of the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment, the President said with bitter irony: “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. R. Island
is not known in our geography any longer.
You
are the only Northern realities.”

On April 25 the arrival of the Seventh New York Regiment changed the picture. General Benjamin F. Butler had discovered an ingenious way of circumventing Baltimore by ferrying men down the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, where they could be entrained for Washington. Within days thousands of troops began pouring into Washington. There was still a danger that when the Maryland legislature met in Frederick on April 26 it would vote to secede. General Scott was ready to arrest secessionist politicians in advance of this meeting, but the President directed him to hold off, observe the proceedings, and, if it became necessary, then resort “to the bombardment of their cities—and of course the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.” Neither of these extreme measures proved necessary, but to make certain that Maryland remained loyal, General Butler occupied Federal Hill, overlooking Baltimore harbor, on May 13.

Meanwhile, on April 27, Lincoln did authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus along the route between Washington and Philadelphia. This meant that the military authorities could make summary arrests of persons thought to be aiding the Confederacy or attempting to overthrow the government. Such persons could be detained indefinitely without judicial hearing and without indictment, and the arresting officer was not obliged to release them when a judge issued a writ of habeas corpus. The President’s action at this time was of limited scope and did not attract great attention until the arrest of one John Merryman, lieutenant of a secessionist drill company, at Cockeysville, Maryland. Imprisoned at Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor, Merryman secured a writ of habeas corpus from Chief Justice Taney, which ordered that he be tried before a regular court or released. When the arresting officer, under Lincoln’s orders, refused to accept the writ, Taney felt he had no alternative but to rule that the Chief Executive had acted unlawfully. He reminded Lincoln of his oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and warned that if such usurpation continued “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws.” Unprepared at this time to make a general argument for broad presidential war powers, Lincoln ignored Taney’s ruling.

The situation in Kentucky was as critical as that in Maryland. Lincoln could not let his native state, which controlled the south bank of the vital Ohio River, fall under Confederate control. Ties of kinship and commerce, along with the institution of slavery, linked Kentucky to the South, but a long tradition, personified by Henry Clay and John J. Crittenden, bound the state to the Union. Lincoln’s call for troops aroused the pro-Southern elements in the state to bitter opposition. Fortunately he had sober and responsible friends in Kentucky, like Joshua Speed and his brother James, a prominent attorney in Louisville, on whose advice he could implicitly rely. When Kentucky adopted a policy of neutrality, “taking sides not with the Administration
nor with the seceding States, but with the Union against them both,” the President shrewdly avoided a confrontation. He had “the unquestioned right at all times to march the United States troops into and over any and every State,” Lincoln told former Kentucky Congressman Garrett Davis, but promised that “if Kentucky made no demonstration of force against the United States, he would not molest her.”

Ostensibly respecting Kentucky’s neutrality, both Union and Confederate authorities worked surreptitiously to strengthen their supporters in the state. Lincoln named Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter and a native of Kentucky, commander of the newly created Military Department of Kentucky, which embraced all of the state within one hundred miles of the Ohio River, and he authorized William Nelson, another Kentucky native, secretly to distribute 5,000 stand of arms to the Unionists in the state. But he avoided hostilities during the uneasy neutrality, recognizing that Unionism was growing faster in Kentucky than secessionist sentiment.

Less successful was Lincoln’s handling of Missouri, a border slave state of enormous strategic importance because it controlled traffic on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri river network so vital to the Northwest. Not familiar with the politics of the state, Lincoln had to rely on the Blairs, whose primary interest was in promoting the political fortunes of Frank Blair. The pro-Southern faction in eastern Missouri rallied at Camp Jackson (named after the prosecession governor) just outside St. Louis, while pro-Union forces organized inside that city under the command of the aggressive Nathaniel Lyon. When Lyon forced the men at Camp Jackson to surrender, fighting broke out in the streets of the city, and twenty-eight deaths resulted. Governor Jackson then formed a military force and put it under the control of ex-Governor Sterling Price. General William A. Harney, who commanded the Military Department of the West, worked out a truce with Price roughly comparable to the neutrality established in Kentucky. But Lyon, backed by the Blairs, undermined Harney’s support in Washington, and Lincoln failed to support the truce. Internecine war resulted.

Lincoln was less involved in attempts to hold Virginia in the Union. Delegates from the strongly Unionist western counties, outraged when the state convention voted to secede, returned to their homes resolved to secede from secession. A Unionist convention held at Wheeling in effect set up a rival government to the Confederate government of Virginia in Richmond and elected Francis H. Pierpont governor. The convention also called for the creation of a new state out of the western counties of Virginia. Since the Constitution provides that no state shall be divided without its own permission, the Pierpont regime was set up as a kind of puppet government that would consent to this proposed partition. Pierpont fulfilled his function. Ostensibly speaking for the entire state of Virginia, he approved the secession of the western counties, which then applied for admission to the Union as the state of West Virginia. The Pierpont administration left Wheeling and spent the rest of the war under the shelter of federal guns at Alexandria. The
whole process of partitioning Virginia was extraordinarily complicated and largely extralegal; and, at a time of great unrest when thieves, bandits, and desperate men roamed the countryside, neither the Pierpont regime nor the new government of West Virginia had the backing of more than a minority of the citizens. Lincoln could do little to shape the course of events. He extended formal recognition of Pierpont’s regime as the legitimate government of all of Virginia (though it controlled only a few counties behind the Union lines), and he looked with considerable skepticism on the movement for statehood for West Virginia.