Throughout the secession period, Lincoln mistakenly believed that, according to the principle of necessity, the South would not secede when it came to the point. For it was not in the interests of the Southern states to become an embattled slave union cut off from the North. Many of the slaveholding states seemed to realize this, for as the Lincoln family leased out their house and packed up to leave Springfield, although many Southern states had gone through the motions of secession, Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina were still in the Union. Lincoln told Herndon that “he could not in his heart believe that the South designed the overthrow of the Government.” This belief may have been the greatest misjudgment of his political life.
In December 1860, while still in Springfield, Lincoln had started choosing his cabinet. Seward, “a slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw’s,” was to be secretary of state. Salmon P. Chase, the Republican Party’s chief ideologue, who had his eye on the 1864 election, became secretary of the treasury. Edward Bates, a squat Missourian in his late sixties who still considered himself a Whig, was invited to be attorney general. The fact that he came from a border slave state added to his attraction as a potential cabinet member. Gideon Welles, the former Democrat and latter-day Republican from Connecticut, who had encouraged Lincoln, was appointed secretary of the navy. A less reputable figure, Simon Cameron, a tall Pennsylvania businessman of questionable probity, had such party influence that he sought the treasury post for himself, but after much argument and with some distaste, Lincoln made him secretary of war. Lincoln said of Cameron that his “very name stinks in the nostrils of the people for his corruption,” and was reluctant to appoint him. The other promised cabinet post, secretary of the interior, went to Caleb Smith of Indiana.
Through this period of cabinet building and interest squaring, the garrison of three Union forts in Charleston Harbor was consolidated into one, Fort Sumter. Lincoln feared that Buchanan would surrender Sumter and, if this shameful course was taken, Lincoln intended to make a public statement that he would ensure the fort was retaken after his inauguration in March.
Even Lincoln’s future secretary of state, Seward, came up with a plan to buy off the South by admitting New Mexico as a slave state. Seward was also active in a Peace Convention, which met in Washington on February 4. He and other Northerners were busy with stratagems to thwart or delay the obvious manifestations of secession. Most of the gestures they wanted to make, however, involved extending slavery, and—as Lincoln put it—trying to buy for the administration the right, already earned, to take power in March. Despite his belief that ultimately the South wouldn’t secede, Lincoln kept a clear determination and a cool head, and dealt with the private manifestations of his depressive nature, the disabling dread that could creep up on him and destroy his rest.
On the final afternoon in Springfield, Lincoln organized a few last things at his office, ran over the books, and gave Billy Herndon instructions for the completion of unsettled and unfinished matters. He then crossed the room and threw himself on the office sofa, “which, after many years of service, had been moved against the wall for support.” He asked Herndon to let the Lincoln and Herndon sign go on hanging downstairs. “If I live, I’m coming back sometime, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” A little earlier he had been to Coles County to visit his stepmother, Sally. By the farmhouse fire, with the wind blowing at the windows, he held her hand. Some said he ordered a stone placed over Tom Lincoln’s grave, but credible others dispute it. But the distance between Springfield and Washington, between state legislator and circuit lawyer on the one hand, and chief magistracy and the White House on the other, was such as to make a man settle his affairs, just in case.
Having rented out their home, the Lincolns had spent their last days in Springfield in the Chenery House hotel. Although it was hard to believe in exultant and apparently cordial Springfield, there were many threats abroad against Lincoln. Aware of this, he wanted Mary to travel separately from him. Since Mary had her own strong opinions on this, the best Lincoln could do was to arrange that he and Robert would leave by one train, and that Mary, Willie, and Tad would meet them in Indianapolis by a later one.
So Lincoln and Robert and their entourage went off to the depot at the Great Western Railroad, where, that icy day, a thousand people had gathered, demanding a speech. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything,” Abraham said. “Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than ever rested upon Washington.” Then, since such a reference was necessary, he invoked the Divine Being, earnestly but in a somehow unspecific manner.
His traveling companions included John Nicolay and a more recently hired and adoring twenty-three-year-old secretary named John Hay. Besides the secretaries and Robert, Ward Lamon, heavily armed, also accompanied the president-elect, and Elmer Ellsworth, a young militiaman-law clerk for whom the Lincolns had a special affection. Orville Browning and Gov. Richard Yates intended to go as far as Indianapolis. Lincoln’s military escort consisted of officers who would have a large future in the coming conflict—Maj. David Hunter, Col. Edwin Sumner, Capt. John Pope.
At Indianapolis, Lincoln made a firm speech, asking, “If the United States should merely hold and retake its own forts and other property, and collect the duties on foreign importations, or even withhold the mails from places where they were habitually violated—would any or all of these things be ‘invasion’ or ‘coercion’?” For forts in the South had been occupied by Rebels, and post offices, treasuries, and customs houses taken over by secessionist states. Yet he still believed secession to be a mere foolish phase, a show of rebelliousness.
After Indianapolis he went through Columbus, then addressed the German Americans of Cincinnati. People remarked on how he “threw off his overcoat in an offhand, easy manner,” in a backwoods style that caused many good-natured remarks. But he was not at ease. At one stop he snapped at Robert in a hotel room when a draft of his inaugural address was temporarily misplaced. He had been working on it since Springfield and believed it might yet, with its sane, level tone, save the Union. Rolling into upstate New York, he heard that Jefferson Davis had taken an oath as president of the Confederacy, and the news, by giving a new solidity to the Confederacy, shook him so much that he apologized to the crowd at the statehouse at Albany for having neither the voice nor the strength for a longer address. In New York City, traveling in a barouche to the Astor House hotel, he saw banners pleading, WELCOME ABRAHAM LINCOLN. WE BEG FOR COMPROMISE. Walt Whitman, seated in a traffic-stalled omnibus, saw the president-elect pass through the reticent crowd and surmised that “many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurked in hip or breast-pocket there.” At City Hall, in reply to a welcome from the Democratic mayor, Fernando Wood, who called for “fraternal relations between the States,” he thanked New Yorkers for their kind reception, acknowledging that they “do not by a large majority agree with me.”
A hostile press ridiculed him for his pronunciation of the word “inauguration,” and for hanging his large hands over the edge of his box at the opera and wearing black kid gloves. Nonetheless he had met with many of the city’s financial leaders and had crucially impressed them.
Heading for Washington, he addressed the assembly and senate of New Jersey. In Philadelphia, where he faced a number of engagements, Lincoln had a meeting with Alan Pinkerton, the Scottish-born secret agent for the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad (later founder of the eponymous detective agency). Pinkerton told Lincoln that his detectives had uncovered a plot to murder him in Baltimore, where travelers to Washington changed trains. Baltimore was the chief city of Maryland, a border slave state, and was full of pro-Southern sentiment. Pinkerton suggested that Lincoln should go through Baltimore earlier than planned, but Lincoln refused to give up his engagements for the next day in Philadelphia and
Harrisburg. Meanwhile, Gen. Winfield Scott also reported from Washington that his agents had uncovered the plot to kill the president-elect in Baltimore, and that Lincoln must at all costs avoid the city.
Scheduled to leave for Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington the morning after his Harrisburg event, instead he left the town late that night on a special train. In case there were watchers, the telegraph lines were cut as he pulled out of the Harrisburg depot. At Philadelphia he donned a disguise, and a carriage took him to the Baltimore line. There Lincoln was ushered aboard a sleeping car that took him as far as Baltimore, where a fresh engine took over his car and drew it on to Washington. Lincoln, in “a brown Kossuth hat” and an overcoat (and accompanied by the heavily armed Lamon), arrived in the nation’s capital at 6:30 A.M. He had traveled separately from Mary, who would arrive by special train at the appropriate hour. Mary and their sons arrived safely, although their train had been intercepted in Baltimore by a pro-Southern mob that yelled insults about the “black ape.”
A story got around that he had crept into Washington disguised as a highlander, or even as a woman. Much derided for sneaking into Washington, he pledged never to be persuaded to skulk again. But even here at the nation’s heart he was not safe, since the city, across the river from Virginia, lived in daily terror—or, in some cases, hope—of a Southern invasion.
Lincoln went first to Willard’s, the famous and splendid hotel near the White House. Even that early, the city seemed a more frenetic place than he had remembered. Everything looked even more incomplete. The beams of the Capitol’s building apparatus sat on its skeletal dome like a confession of naked unreadiness. Similarly the Treasury, near Willard’s, was unfinished, and the Washington Monument, like the Republic itself, was a white unfinished shaft in the distance.
Tussles were already under way within the proposed cabinet. Seward tendered his resignation on Montgomery Blair’s appointment as postmaster general. Seward had a long-running grievance against Frank Blair, Sr., the leader of the powerful Blair clan of Missouri. And the bruised egos from the Republican convention had not yet been assuaged. Meanwhile, in the last days of his catastrophic administration, James Buchanan refused to surrender Fort Sumter to the forces of South Carolina.
It proved a harsh welcome for Mary. Many Tidewater aristocrats were still in town—Virginia had not yet seceded—and unaware of the Kentucky-Illinois class system, they lumped her and her husband together as boorish. To be a Todd of Kentucky meant nothing to the hubristic Virginians.
Lincoln was not hurt at all. He was used to being discounted—except as an orator. He paid enormous attention to what he would have to say on March 4, the day of the inauguration. It proved to be a characteristic late-winter day, steely and overcast. General Scott had stationed troops along Pennsylvania Avenue and around the Capitol with the specific instructions, for the first time in American history, to protect the incoming president’s life. Near the east portico of the Capitol, a rostrum had been built, with barriers to separate the inauguration party from the public, again for the first time in history. The old republican piety of the president’s being merely the first among citizens had come under threat of the assassin’s bullet, a threat that would never leave the American political scene.
This day above all validated Mary Todd Lincoln’s decision to marry Abraham. No security considerations could keep her separate from him, and she beamed as, after he was sworn in by Chief Justice Taney, Lincoln gave his inaugural address. In the face of secessionist frenzy, the president made as conciliatory a speech as anyone could have, or at least anyone who believed that the restriction, and not the extension, of slavery was a founding principle of the Union. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.” He quoted his former speeches: “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.”
He quoted the constitutional guarantee that no person who was a slave in one state could achieve freedom by escaping into another. “All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other.” He acknowledged that unlike previous presidents he entered his brief constitutional term of four years “under great and peculiar difficulty.” He argued that for one state to break the compact of the United States, all would need to rescind it lawfully. “I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and 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 the States.” The mails, “unless repelled,” would continue to go to all parts of the Union. He warned of the “so desperate a step” involved in secession. “If the minority will not acquiesce,” however, “the majority must, or the government must cease.” For if any state could secede when it liked, what was to prevent a minority of Rebel states from themselves further seceding from the proposed Confederacy? The Confederacy would itself resist such secession, just as the Union resisted secession now. In fact,
Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.
In the meantime he affirmed that the only way to change the Constitution and its guarantee of property in slaves was by the will of the people:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. 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.
10
THAT NIGHT, surrounded by many Todd sisters and cousins, Mary, in watered blue silk, was the queen of the inaugural ball at a temporary structure behind City Hall. She danced with Stephen Douglas.
Lincoln knew that Maj. Robert Anderson’s troops in Fort Sumter needed either to be resupplied or to surrender. So he had to leave the ball early, to attend to this first great problem of the new civil conflict. In the small hours of the following morning, at Lincoln’s office—“the shop”—at the White House, at the oak table used by previous chief executives, elderly and crotchety Gen. Winfield Scott advised the president that forcing the relief of Fort Sumter would require a third of the present standing army. Lincoln must consult his cabinet and high-ranking officers.
More of an appeaser, Seward was for evacuating the fort. Montgomery Blair advised Lincoln to hang on to it, and Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, had already stated that, though Sumter was difficult, the equally endangered Fort Pickens in Florida could be reinforced and held. But Sumter remained the test case. Stirring the pot were the radical Republicans, led by Senator Sumner, who condemned Lincoln for coming from the “old fogey” wing of the Whig Party and being hesitant.
Lincoln, oppressed by the potentialities of the season, the great risk of war, decided not to act until Sumter’s supplies ran out, rather than himself precipitate a civil war. So he devoted himself to diplomatic appointments, and to office seekers who came to him in increasing numbers. He felt “like a man letting lodgings at one end of his house, while the other end was on fire.”
Seward would chide him in a memorandum toward the end of the first month of his presidency that the administration was “without a policy, either foreign or domestic.” It was true enough, except for the fact that the ground kept shifting beneath the government’s feet. He had already rejected General Scott’s concept that he
should abandon Sumter as a concession. “He could not, consistently with his conviction of his duty, and with the policy he had enunciated in his Inaugural, order the evacuation of Sumter.” About the time of Seward’s complaint, Lincoln gave his cabinet his final direction on the matter of Sumter. He would send a supply and reinforcement fleet to Charleston Harbor to relieve the fort, and if the Rebels began firing, the choice would be upon their heads, not on the administration’s. Secretary of the Navy Welles applauded this policy, but Seward caused confusion by taking it upon himself to separate the resupply convoy from the military one. His motives were that he had already promised the South Carolinians, unilaterally, and in an attempt to stop them from attacking Sumter, that the fort would be evacuated. It was not within his portfolio to do so, but because he was such a notable Republican, they tended to believe that Seward’s promise was identical with the promise of that western clodhopper, Lincoln. Seward had clouded the waters considerably and given the South Carolinians grounds for feeling misled when Lincoln took a different line.
On April 6 Lincoln sent a message to the governor of South Carolina about the column of supply ships that was approaching Sumter. They would not open fire on any shore installations, he guaranteed. On April 12, with the resupply ships off Charleston Harbor, the artillery of South Carolina, the Palmetto State, opened fire on Sumter. On the thirteenth, the Palmettos permitted the withdrawal of Anderson and his men by the Union ships.