The Man Who Saved the Union (18 page)

The reaction made Lincoln think he should have kept quiet. Northern abolitionists called his indirect statement a surrender to slavery; Southern radicals condemned it as a declaration of war. “
This is just as I expected,” Lincoln said, “and just what would happen with any speech I could make. These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. Party
malice and not public good possesses them entirely.” Quoting Scripture, he declared: “They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.”

Lincoln took modest comfort from the attitude of
Alexander Stephens, who told his fellow Georgians he didn’t think Lincoln would do anything to endanger the South or slavery. Besides, Stephens explained to the Georgia legislature, even if Lincoln wanted to, he lacked the ability. “
The President of the United States is no emperor, no dictator. He can do nothing unless he is backed by power in
Congress. The House of Representatives is largely in the majority against him. In the Senate he will also be powerless.” Lincoln read of Stephens’s speech and requested a copy. Stephens responded that he had none to send, but he appreciated the interest and wished Lincoln well. “
The country is certainly in great peril,” he said, “and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibilities resting upon him than you have in this present momentous crisis.”

Lincoln extended the correspondence. “
Do the people in the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them about their slaves?” he asked Stephens. “If they do, I wish to reassure you, as once a friend and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.” Lincoln acknowledged, however, that the issue ran deeper than politics and economics. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended, while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That, I suppose, is the rub.”

It remained the rub as the crisis unfolded. “
The political horizon looks dark and lowering,” Lincoln observed the day after news of South Carolina’s secession ordinance arrived in Springfield. Yet he promised his supporters he wouldn’t budge from the Republican platform. “
Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” he told Lyman Trumbull. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is popular sovereignty. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now than any time hereafter.” To another ally, Republican representative
Elihu Washburne of Illinois, Lincoln wrote, “
Hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”

Lincoln began to realize he had underestimated the secessionists. Because Southern hotheads had been threatening to secede for decades and nothing had come of their threats, Lincoln initially supposed not much would come now. “
They won’t give up the offices,” he predicted,
referring to the federal postmasterships and customs agencies across the South. “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.” But as one state after another followed South Carolina’s lead, Lincoln was forced to admit that secession was more than a passion of a minority and the moment.

And so he answered a call from
Thurlow Weed, a New York Republican boss whose support had been crucial to his election, for a statement. Weed had gathered Northern governors in New York to coordinate their response to the South; what could the president-elect tell them of his views regarding secession?

“
My opinion,” Lincoln responded, “is that no state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union without the consent of the others, and that it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries, to run the machine as it is.”

Lincoln cautiously elaborated this view as his inauguration neared. He left Springfield for Washington in February 1861, making a circuitous journey across much of the North. En route he learned that seven Southern states—South Carolina, Mississippi,
Florida,
Alabama,
Georgia,
Louisiana and
Texas—had sent delegates to a provisional congress of the “Confederate States of America,” meeting in Montgomery, Alabama. The delegates elected
Jefferson Davis president and inaugurated him a few days later. Lincoln read accounts from across the South that state militias were seizing federal forts. At each of his many train stops he was asked to speak; at most of them he mumbled inconsequentialities or begged off entirely.

But at Indianapolis he asserted that the South wouldn’t get away with seizing the property of the nation. Southerners were warning against coercion by the federal government or an invasion of the South by federal troops; Lincoln responded with a question that connoted a threat: “
If the United States should merely hold and retake its own forts, collect duties or withhold the mails, where they were habitually violated, would any or all of these things be invasion or coercion?”

T
he last leg of Lincoln’s journey revealed that the secession dispute could get dangerously personal. The railroad company that carried Lincoln east hired a detective named
Allan Pinkerton to prevent any trouble;
Pinkerton asserted that proslavery thugs in Baltimore were planning to waylay the president-elect. Lincoln took the assertion seriously enough to revise his itinerary. He slipped through Baltimore in the dead of night, cloaked as an invalid. He reached Washington safe but slightly embarrassed, and his embarrassment grew when Southern and other critics called him a coward.

On March 4 he spoke for the first time as president. The capital was crowded and edgy; Grant’s old commander,
Winfield Scott, positioned federal troops conspicuously about the city. Republican “
Wide Awakes”—paramilitary volunteers marked by distinctive gaudy uniforms—watched suspicious-looking persons warily. Police pounced on anyone who appeared even mildly disposed toward disruption.

Lincoln emerged from the Capitol onto the east portico. Parts of the audience began to applaud, but his grim demeanor put them off. All strained to hear as he began to speak. He professed anew his peaceful intentions toward the South: “
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He wished he could report comparable tolerance in the South, but sadly the opposite obtained. “A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.” But it would not succeed. “The Union of these States is perpetual.” The arguments for secession were specious on their face. “No government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” Secession was
constitutionally impossible. “No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.… The Union is unbroken.” And it would remain unbroken. “To the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all of the States.”

The secessionists had pushed the country to the brink of armed conflict, and though Lincoln didn’t welcome conflict, neither would he back down from it. “In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in
mine
, is the momentous issue of civil war,” he said. “The Government will not assail
you
. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You
have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’ ”

Lincoln let his listeners absorb his resolve before he closed on a conciliatory
note. “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 battlefield 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.”

15

L
IKE
L
INCOLN
, G
RANT AT FIRST FAILED TO APPRECIATE THE SERIOUSNESS
of the
secession crisis. So did most of those he spoke to in Galena and on his business travels around the region. “
It was generally believed that there would be a flurry; that some of the extreme Southern States would go so far as to pass ordinances of secession,” he recalled. “But the common impression was that this step was so plainly suicidal for the South that the movement would not spread over much of the territory and would not last long.”

Grant had paid little attention to political theory, but he, with the rest of America, received a crash course in constitutionalism that winter. And he developed a fairly sophisticated view of what America’s founding framework allowed and required. “Doubtless the founders of our government, the majority of them at least, regarded the confederation of the colonies as an experiment,” he later asserted. “Each colony considered itself a separate government; that the confederation was for mutual protection against a foreign foe, and the prevention of strife and war among themselves. If there had been a desire on the part of any single State to withdraw from the compact at any time while the number of States was limited to the original thirteen, I do not suppose there would have been any to contest the right, no matter how much the determination might have been regretted.” But things grew more complicated after the
Constitution of 1787 supplanted the
Articles of Confederation and as the number of states increased. “If the right of any one State to withdraw continued to exist at all after the ratification of the Constitution, it certainly ceased to exist on the formation of new States, at least so far as the new States themselves were concerned. It was never possessed at all by
Florida or the States west of the Mississippi, all of which were purchased by the treasury of the entire nation.”
Texas was purchased, in addition, by American blood in the war with Mexico. “It would have been ingratitude and injustice of the most flagrant sort for this State to withdraw from the Union after all that had been spent and done to introduce her.”

Secessionists wrapped themselves in the Constitution, claiming that it was a revocable compact among states. Defenders of the Union cited the Constitution in asserting federal supremacy. Grant considered the arguments of both sides incomplete—and irrelevant. “The fact is, the Constitution did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to 1865,” he said. “Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring.” Grant acknowledged that if they
had
foreseen the sectional crisis, they might well have sided with the South. “The probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.” But the framers’ opinions didn’t matter. “It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.… The fathers would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.”

By 1860 the Union had become, to all intents and purposes, indivisible, Grant said. “Secession was illogical as well as impracticable; it was revolution.” He allowed the legitimacy of revolution under certain circumstances. “When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.” Grant didn’t consider the South oppressed in 1860, but even if it had been, it still had to fight its revolution. “Any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship, on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror, must be the result.”

T
he test of strength began, predictably, in
South Carolina.
Fort Sumter had long guarded the port of Charleston against enemy attack, but little guarded Fort Sumter from Charleston. Major
Robert Anderson commanded the federal garrison there; on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration Anderson informed
Winfield Scott that the fort’s provisions would
last no more than six weeks. By the end of that time, if the fort was not resupplied, he must surrender the place.

Scott forwarded Anderson’s message to Lincoln, who asked Scott’s expert advice on the feasibility of resupply. Scott said it would require 25,000 soldiers and a fleet of warships and transports. Since the army lacked the men and the navy the ships,
Congress would have to make a special appropriation. Outfitting the expedition would take six to eight months. In other words, Anderson was on his own.

Lincoln had no reason to doubt Scott’s judgment, although some others close to the president thought the general unduly pessimistic.
Montgomery Blair, a West Pointer who had left the army for the law and became Lincoln’s postmaster general, suggested that a night landing might keep Anderson’s garrison viable.

William Seward advocated another approach. Seward had received the State Department as his consolation prize for losing the Republican nomination to Lincoln, but he hadn’t yet reconciled himself to being merely first adviser. In early April he wrote an extraordinary memorandum suggesting a special role for himself. “
We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward chided Lincoln. “Further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.” Seward thought the president had foolishly allowed the secessionists to frame the debate, and he urged a new course. “We must
change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery
, for a question upon
Union or Disunion
. In other words, from what would be regarded as a Party question to one of
Patriotism
or
Union
.” Seward recommended evacuating Fort Sumter, which he considered indefensible, but reinforcing Fort Pickens in Florida and other positions in the South still in Union hands. This would ease the immediate crisis. It would also allow the administration to do something quite audacious: to foment war with
Spain,
France and perhaps Britain. A pretext could be found, as one had been found by
James Polk against Mexico. The result would be similar: an outpouring of patriotism by the American people, North and South, against a foreign foe. Seward saved the best part of his recommendation—best for
him
, at any rate—for the last. “Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. For this purpose it must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly. Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it, or devolve it on some member
of his Cabinet.… It is not in my especial province, but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”