Upon the Altar of the Nation (6 page)

In his Cooper Union address, Lincoln made it clear that his brief extended only to the territories and fell well short of emancipation in the slave states:

To fellow Republicans, he insisted, “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.”
²¹

Lincoln’s belief in the Union and American prosperity was confirmed by his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, which had long since become his political bible. The Constitution might change, and indeed should change through amendments, but the Declaration on which it rested represented its eternal and immutable lodestone. Central to that Declaration, and to the Union, was the universal proposition that “all men are created equal.” Using the metaphors, respectively, of apples for the Declaration of Independence and a picture frame of silver for the Constitution, Lincoln argued in 1860 that “[t]he picture was made, not to
conceal,
or
destroy
the apple; but to
adorn
and
preserve
it. The
picture
was
made for
the
apple—not
the apple for the picture.”
²²

Lying at the heart of Lincoln’s embrace of the Declaration was the abstract
idea
of freedom in a nineteenth-century romantic context. As an idea, freedom would remain forever protean and unbound to time, boundaries, races, ethnicities, or gender. It transcended law and politics, and grounded a metaphysical republic for the ages. In an 1859 letter praising Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln conceded that the Revolution could have been waged without Jefferson’s paean to equality, but it would have been merely a political revolt. By including that phrase, Jefferson “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth.”
²³

Most Northern Republicans shared Lincoln’s hatred for the institution of slavery, yet, as he did, they accepted both Southerners’ constitutional right to own slaves and the obligations imposed on them by the Fugitive Slave Law to return, by force if necessary, runaway slaves. Most also shared racist assumptions regarding the inferiority of African Americans, slave or free. But beyond these concessions, they agreed with Lincoln on two points: slavery could not be allowed to spread any further into the territories, and secession was not a moral right but an act of unjust rebellion.

Like Lincoln, Confederate president Jefferson Davis did not expect war. Nor did he prepare for it. Much of his time was spent assembling a government and a military. The numbers of well-wishers and appointment seekers threatened to swamp him. Little around him portended war.
²⁴
Unlike Lincoln, he knew that Northern Union sentiments in the South were weak and ill equipped to spark a move back into the Union. From his vantage point in patriotic Richmond, Davis believed that once Lincoln saw that the Confederacy was intent on creating its own nation, he would have no choice but to let them go.

Throughout the early debates and saber rattling, few asked hard questions about the morality of war should it erupt. The word was constantly on everyone’s lips, either as a tragedy to be avoided or an adventure to be embraced. But few explored the moral meaning of war or the “laws of war” with reference to a potential civil war. Their failure to address issues of a just war before hostilities ensued effectively set the stage for Americans to ignore them after hostilities began. For such moral unpreparedness both sides would pay a horrific price.

W
hatever the expectations of Lincoln and Davis, South Carolina was itching for a fight and would not take its foot off Lincoln’s neck. The focal points of pressure were the Federal forts in Charleston Harbor. While Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, was more strategically important to Federal control of the Gulf Coast, the Charleston forts Moultrie and Sumter were more politically important. And so they became all-important.
¹

Better to defend his Federal forces, the commander of the Charleston forts, Major Robert Anderson, a Southerner and friend of Jefferson Davis, spiked the cannons at Moultrie and moved his forces to the more defensible Fort Sumter. Anderson hoped that war could be averted at any cost, but he remained loyal to his commander in chief. Immediately after Lincoln’s election, Anderson sent word that Sumter would be almost impossible to defend without substantial reinforcements; supplies were running low as well. Sooner or later the forts would have to be reprovisioned or abandoned. Either way, fateful decisions had to be made.

To South Carolinian sensibilities, reprovisioning of Federal forts in their new nation would constitute an act of war.
²
In fact, they were convinced that the first blow had already been struck when Major Anderson spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie. Neither did it help South Carolinian pride to know that, despite their leadership for secession, theirs was the only secession state besides Florida that failed to seize all Federal properties on its soil.

While loath to be the architect of civil war, Lincoln was not ready to vacate the fort peacefully, despite the advice of General Winfield Scott, the aging hero of the Mexican War. In his inaugural address, Lincoln asserted his intention to “hold, occupy, and possess” Federal properties wherever they be found.
³

Meanwhile, Major Anderson’s plight grew worse by the day. On March 29, after suffering a sleepless night with a migraine headache, Lincoln authorized an unarmed flotilla of supplies to relieve the fort. Most of his advisers pointed out that such an act would be interpreted as an act of war, but Lincoln was not to be deterred. The expedition set sail by April 6.
⁴
An additional expedition was ordered for Fort Pickens in Pensacola. Nobody knew what the outcome of these resupply missions might be, nor did anyone know what Lincoln would do should South Carolina’s response be hostile.

When President Davis received word that Lincoln intended to provision Fort Sumter with nonmilitary supplies, he declared the attempt an “act of aggression.” Davis knew that the only way to lend plausibility to a real national independence for the Confederacy in the eyes of England and the uncommitted border states was to make a strong response. Already the
Daily Richmond Enquirer
had responded to Lincoln’s inaugural with a vitriolic declaration of war: “Sectional war, declared by Mr. Lincoln, awaits only the signal gun from the insulted Southern Confederacy, to light its horrid fires all along the border of Virginia.”
⁵
To fail to act would be to concede defeat. And in any event, the outraged South Carolinians might attack the fort on their own if they sensed presidential timidity. Davis felt the extreme tension of an ultimatum and went to bed with a migraine of his own.
⁶

As the presidents agonized, the people of South Carolina clamored for military action. Their rage for war soon became a paradigm for citizens everywhere. Unlike President Davis and his cabinet, who contemplated armed conflict with trepidation, Charlestonians could scarcely contain their excitement and enthusiasm at the prospect of war. On April 10, the
Charleston Daily Courier
declared defiantly: “Let the strife begin ... we have no fear of the issue.” In the North, Frederick Douglass wrote an editorial in which he said: “Let the conflict come!”
⁷

Clearly, the
Courier’s
cry of “no fear” referenced manly virtues of martial valor. But it could just as easily have applied to ethics. There was no moral fear of “strife” anywhere. Instead, on April 11, crowds gathered to view the gallantry, only to be disappointed by quiet. A writer for the
Charleston Mercury
expressed the relish for war and sense of corporate disappointment at its delay:

At Davis’s order, Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker sent Confederate General Pierre G. T. Beauregard instructions to demand the immediate evacuation of the fort. Beauregard duly issued the demand. Despite his Southern friends, Major Anderson refused the order, maintaining his loyalties to the Union.

At precisely 4:30 a.m., on April 12, 1861, Confederate cannons opened fire on the fort. The surprisingly feisty Federal defenders returned fire and held out for hours. But with fires on all sides and depleted munitions, Anderson had no choice but to surrender. From the shoreline, Charlestonians rejoiced to see the Palmetto flag of South Carolina replace the Stars and Stripes over the fortress. In all, one horse was killed.

 

With the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, twenty years of accumulated frustration, occasional violence, and overheated rhetoric at last ignited a war whose outcome was unknown to everyone. Upon receiving word of the surrender, an uncertain President Davis confided that the bombardment would mark “either the beginning of a fearful war, or the end of a political contest.”
⁹
In fact, it brought about both.

Despite the prodigious bombardment of Federal property and the surrender of the U.S. Army, there was no certainty in the seceded South that this would actually lead to a full-scale war. Earlier acts of violence in Kansas and Missouri, to say nothing of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, had aroused fury but had not ushered in war, and nothing overly ominous occurred on April 12. Indeed, as “first shots” go, Sumter was a remarkably banal event, unlike the American Revolution’s “shot heard round the world” or a later generation’s Pearl Harbor:
no one
died in combat at Sumter. As the “act of aggression” that would eventually create a “just war” on both sides, Sumter was almost trivial. Yet, because the looming war was, like the Revolution, ultimately political and popular, the consequences were anything but trivial.

Following the capture of Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was not about to declare war on the Union. Davis knew that would be an act of aggression entitling the Northern states to take the defensive position. Rather, the Confederates characterized their actions as a simple removal of an unwanted foreign presence from their sovereign territory. As explained by the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, there were occasions when apparently preemptive strikes on one’s own territory were just. Offensive wars of conquest were not, he declared, determined by “he who strikes the first blow ... but the first who renders force
necessary.”
¹⁰

 

In Washington, D.C., President Lincoln refused to pursue peace at the expense of capitulation, but neither was he willing to call Congress to session for a declaration of war. Instead, he took matters into his own hands and, on April 14, issued a provocative call to arms. With cabinet approval, but without congressional assent, he authorized the procurement of seventy-five thousand volunteers from the free-state militias for a period of ninety days. Their mission was limited: to dismantle “combinations” in Confederate states “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
¹¹
Lincoln further called for a special session of Congress to meet two and a half months later on July 4. The following day, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for volunteers and declared that a state of “insurrection” existed, requiring an armed response.

President Davis responded in kind. On April 17 he issued a proclamation calling for thirty-two thousand volunteers. This was necessary, he claimed, because Lincoln “had announced his intention of invading the Confederacy with an armed force, for the purpose of capturing its fortresses, and thereby subverting its independence and subjecting the free people thereof to the dominion of a foreign power.”
¹²
Davis’s words and actions, like Lincoln’s, amounted to a declaration of war. In fact, both could fairly be charged with starting the war, since neither was at all inclined to back down.
¹³

Just as Lincoln wrongly assumed that there was a majority of antislavery Unionists in the South, so too the South was wrong about a majority of abolitionists in the North. In fact, the majority of white Southerners
were
proslavery, while the majority of white Northerners were
not
abolitionists.

Having issued orders for mobilization, both commanders in chief faced the question of whether they would have a viable army. The rage for war in the North and South ensured there would be no lack of volunteers. But who would lead them? For months before and after Sumter, both presidents looked anxiously to the United States Military Academy at West Point and its “long gray line” of graduates, for it would determine, in large measure, the success or failure of their national armies. Indeed, no military institution would be more critical than West Point.

Until 1860 West Point had been able to survive not only external threats but also internal divisions from a diverse corps that represented every state and section in the country, as well as every religion. Its mission was primarily to serve as an engineering school for American armed forces. The Military Academy’s location, on the west bank of the Hudson River, was decidedly “North,” but its culture was patrician and equally “South.” Honor and duty ruled at West Point and had the nation as their object of devotion.