History of the Civil War, 1861-1865

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Copyright © 1999 by Dover Publications, Inc.

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Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1999, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York, in 1961, edited, with an introduction, by E. B. Long. The original endpaper maps by Barbara Long have been moved to pages xxx-xxxiii. A new Introduction to the Dover Edition by John Herbert Roper, Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia, has been added to the present edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rhodes, James Ford, 1848–1927.

History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 / James Ford Rhodes ; edited, with an introduction, by E.B. Long ; introduction to the Dover edition by John Herbert Roper.

p.   cm.

Originally published: New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1961.

Includes index.

9780486137780

1. United States — History — Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Long, E. B. (Everette Beach), 1919–1981. II. Title.

E168.R47   1999

973.7 — dc21

99-40604

CIP

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

40900703

www.doverpublications.com

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

Historian James Ford Rhodes (1848–1927), truly a man of his time, represented the privilege and prerogative of a patrician elite with the leisure time, the financial resources, the community respect, and the ego to render personal judgments about the present by writing a narrative of the past. Nevertheless, the passing of Rhodes’s era should not be lamented, for he was part of a very clubby set, and we are well rid of that set. Yet Rhodes’s work, a very fine study of the Civil War, continues to make vital contributions to the scholarship of today’s self-consciously democratic and egalitarian historians.

Presently, the dominant interpretation of the Civil War is that of James McPherson, who takes seriously the radical responsibility of the small Gideon’s Band of abolitionists and declares that their ideology was the harbinger of a mighty wave of popular demand for freedom and equality for the four million slaves. He calls it their Battle Cry of Freedom, referring to their often painful pathway to success the national Ordeal by Fire. McPherson, both in his own themes and in the way that readers receive his message, is unbent by decades of various revisions that note the lukewarm commitment to freedom in many important abolitionist political leaders. In addition, he is unswerved by the decades of study that detail the racism rampant even among that tiny group that was most intent on freedom for the slaves. What he presents, to Pulitzer Prize recognition (1989), is nothing less than a march toward a destiny of freedom and equality, with the Civil War and all of its unprecedented bloodshed as the tragic effect caused by those unwilling to get out of the way of history. What chiefly distinguishes him from the original abolitionists is his strictly secular humanist approach and his passionate regard for the sincerity and goodwill of the misguided-but-honest proslavery forces.

Current historical interpretation is focused on the grand quest for true freedom, and with such a focus, other things — personal ambitions, clashes of economic systems, and even the muck and mire of intransigent racism — become only so many movable barriers incapable of stopping irresistible progress. Eric Foner, the best scholar of the current generation, thus describes the Civil War as a fight for freedom and, like McPherson, he too focuses on the character of Abraham Lincoln as the deciding factor in the granting of freedom and the winning of the war. Of course, this interpretation is also central to the theme developed memorably by Ken Burns in his immensely influential television documentary series on the war.

Ironically, each of these points was made in 1916 in addresses delivered by Rhodes when the independently wealthy man of research and leisure was invited to lecture for a season at Cambridge University. Those lectures then became a multivolume history of the Civil War, and in 1917 he abridged his narrative to assume this current form. In 1918, this amateur found himself in a new era of professional scholars with university status, but he also found himself winner of that year’s Pulitzer Prize for his one-volume study. Without their German training, Rhodes yet could perform the same kind of careful search work in the voluminous primary sources that became the hallmark of the graduate student dissertation and the tenured scholar’s monograph. War for a moral end was, of course, very much on the minds of the judges who sat to consider Rhodes’s History of the Civil War, as the Great War entered its own final fall campaign.

Rhodes contrasted Lincoln with Theodor Mommsen’s version of Julius Caesar. Unlike Mommsen’s Caesar, Rhodes’s Lincoln is a man who stumbles and errs, but the wartime president learns by each misstep. Further, his Lincoln is a man fully representative of the common people. Often described as morally and mentally superior to the average citizen, Lincoln cleverly does not make a move until he has carefully prepared the voter to demand that very move that he had intended to make. Rhodes perceives the Civil War as a tragic set of chapters in a longer story that is filled with progress and improvement. He sees no real way for southern slaveowners to relinquish their slaves peacefully, and no way that Lincoln could tolerate slavery to the end of his own days. The war is thus both inevitable and moral, despite the carnage. It appears to be the only solution to end the evils of slavery, but even for that goal, Lincoln must bide his time, waiting for the right moment — the Battle of Antietam — to announce to the people that he is at last ready to declare that the fight is a fight for freedom and not merely for union. Maligned generals such as George Brinton McClellan and Ambrose Everett Burnside for the Grand Army of the Republic and Joseph Eggleston Johnston for the Confederates are treated equably, their mistakes noted without making devils or dunces out of them. Most importantly, Rhodes provides a perspective on the battles, refusing to let his wealth of detail drown the reader. Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Sherman’s March to the Sea — these are all set in context, the fighting explained clearly and the vital consequences spelled out. Grant and Lee, Rhodes’s Greek heroic antitheses, are shown as they were, much more important than anybody else, but still possessing human flaws.

Rhodes, then, is fully within the abolitionist traditions of Civil War interpretation, but he is far less judgmental than they. The result is a distillation of a life’s work. It is strong, heady, hearty, full-bodied, and, above all, nourishing.

1999

John Herbert Roper

Emory & Henry College

INTRODUCTION

My theme is history . . .

— James Ford Rhodes

The aim of history is to get at the truth and express it as clearly as possible. James Ford Rhodes thus set for himself and all those who would be called historians a standard and a guiding rule that in itself is history.

Self taught, stringently disciplined, and with profound integrity and judgment, Rhodes stands eminent in the ranks of those who have devoted themselves to the tedious, exacting, laborious, sacrificing labors of an historian. Born in Ohio in 1848, reared during the nation’s greatest ordeal, of which he had boyhood memories, Rhodes graduated from high school the year the war ended. Two years of university work preceded a trip abroad during which he dabbled in history, literature, journalism and metaphysics, embarking on his life-long habit of slow, painstaking, prodigious reading.

While in Europe he studied metallurgy in a desultory fashion and then returned home to enter business in his father’s coal and iron mining operations. Rhodes and Company prospered, but for Rhodes himself it was never more than a means toward his goal. There was an evening in 1877 of which Rhodes often spoke: . . . While reading Hildreth’s ‘History of the United States,’ I laid down my book and said to myself why should I not write a history of the United States. Finding that financially he could safely retire, he left business in 1885 at the age of 37. His travels, his business career, his awareness of the stress and turmoil of Reconstruction days were to stay with him, however, mellowing, tempering, influencing his future.

For three years he did nothing but read: Thucydides, Tacitus, Herodotus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay — all the great historians. This was his professional training; this was his real university — the realm of the historians who had been responsible for telling the story of his world. Now he would attempt to join them.

In 1891 the first two volumes of his History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 were accepted for publication and appeared in 1893. Rhodes had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where, despite his lack of the strict, binding qualifications then held necessary for a career in the world of letters, he was not only accepted, but, upon the enthusiastic response given his book, was taken as one with the literati of Harvard. Subsequently producing five more volumes, Rhodes’s immense work carried the story of the breaking and re-binding of the nation up to 1877. But his fame was to lie mainly with the first five volumes covering the war years. And such fame! Honors were his; be became a leading figure among historians to such an extraordinary degree that this nonacademic, former business man was given the accolade of being elected president of the American Historical Association in 1898.

A historian, to make a mark, must show some originality in his work. Rhodes met his own requirement, making his mark with true originality for his time. Achieving manhood during the post-Civil War years, he was a generation removed from the struggle, yet near enough to be affected by all its multitudinous reverberations. He further had the ability to remove himself from controversy through judicious reasoning and to strike out with a new history of those turbulent years. He gathered in enormous accumulations of materials, books, memoirs, newspapers, manuscripts, interviews. With uncanny discrimination for that era, he sifted, distilled and brought them down to usable size. The result was that for the first time the Civil War period as a whole was treated with fairness to both sides, with sensitive understanding and lack of extreme partisanship. No bloody-shirt radical of the North, no unrepentant fire-eater of the South, Rhodes presented the first objective treatment of the Civil War.

Abiding by his own tenet that a historian is bound to assert nothing for which he has not evidence; Rhodes unearthed the evidence, gave forth with the opinions of others, and then, with great preciseness and unmistakable lucidity, presented his conclusions. These might sometimes be tinged with bias, for Rhodes was human, but they were drawn not with heat, passion or demagoguery, but only after dedicated contemplation of the existing evidence. He believed unequivocally that slavery was the primary cause of secession and the war. But slavery to him was a calamity for which the South was not to blame. He rejected the theory that the war came from the conspiracy of a few. For the first time a northern writer had sympathy and understanding for the defeated South; to him the war was not all blue or all gray.

True, the greater number of his pages are devoted to the North but this does not imply lack of fairness when he does dissect the Confederacy. He was at home with the Northern sources, particularly those of the northeast, and concerned himself especially with political analysis. Yet his grasp of the military actions and social climate was more than sufficient to carry his narrative to a reasonably rounded conclusion.

No historian of the Civil War can neglect these volumes. No student of historiography can fail to learn much of historical method from them and from his published essays. His criteria for the historian were diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality, the thorough digestion of his materials by careful selection and long meditation, and the compression of his narrative into the smallest compass consistent with the life of his story. To this he added the student must also have a power of expression suitable for his purpose. Forecasting perhaps the beneficial influences of the skilled journalist on historical writing, he shunned prolixity, believing his narrative must drive consistently straight along the path of history, without deviating to the back roads of anecdote without purpose or a story for its own sake.

By the turn of the century the work of Rhodes had become a standard all its own; he had pointed out a new path for historical writing. His literary style can never be termed overly dramatic; there is an honest straightforwardness to it that avoids the purple phrase, too often used to camouflage lack of knowledge or perception. His influence is still at work. From the heritage of Rhodes have come some of the great Civil War historians of today, and from these men a new concept of the study and presentation of history has spread beyond the confines of the Civil War into the broad expanse of the entire American scene. This is history founded on the rocks of hard-mined research, compiled with editorial selectivity, illuminated by piercing analytical judgments and presented for the reader to grasp as he sees fit. And perhaps most important of all, reading of such history is no longer a tedious chore, but a joyful diversion. Literature and history have been entwined so that we may partake of the knowledge of the past more easily and more thoroughly than ever before.

There are those who feel that Rhodes’s treatment of Reconstruction and his later two volumes carrying through the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt lack the strength, power and retrospective balance of his previous books. Perhaps he was too near the events; he was too contemporary. But, with one exception, his fame rests upon these nine volumes and two volumes of lectures.

Up to the beginning of World War I Rhodes had seen the continual flow of a later influx of firsthand, primary printed sources of the Civil War. As he points out, the official naval records, diaries, reminiscences, letters and memoirs, biographies, studies of the military aspects of the war, all had added richly to the knowledge of the conflict. There was now a time for summation, for drawing up the annals for the general reader in a form that would give him the benefit of the ever enlarging mass of findings, but doing it so concisely that he would not be overwhelmed.

Thus Rhodes began in 1913, at the suggestion of his publisher, not simply to rewrite his early master work, but, drawing on it for sustenance, he constructed upon the terse, spare frame one of the finest single studies on the war. It was published first in 1917 as History of the Civil War 1861-1865. Avoiding the complicated and involved prewar period, Rhodes moves at once into his recounting of a dis-united nation and the political upheaval that brought dark tragedy to so many lives. Herein he preserves his crystal-like delineation, quickened into brevity by expeditious summations. He displays his overall knowledge of the military, both of campaigns and battles, but avoids constricting details and preserves only the germane without losing the smell of blood. He sees the war as it concerned the administration in Washington, as it affected and was itself affected by foreign powers, as it dragged the people of the North and the South through four wearying years.

What Rhodes achieved can only be discerned by reading this new edition of a book acclaimed at the time of its first publication as having a fresh approach, yet with the standards and preciseness of his longer work. Academically accepted, it has served as a grounding for all varieties of students of the Civil War to build their knowledge and whet their enthusiasm. Rhodes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1917 for the History of the Civil War. William Roscoe Livermore, distinguished military expert, in a review for the authoritative American Historical Review wrote, This very attractive volume is just what is now required to give to the general reader a clear outline of the Civil War, and to point out to those who are now especially interested in the art of war precisely where detailed accounts and comments can be found about any part of that great struggle. It is well worthy of the welcome it has already received. The New York Times said, the author’s notable faculty of summarizing without leaving the spirit, the life, and the color of events, and the fact that he wrote out of a reservoir of knowledge of just such intimate revelations of the life of the time infuse his narrative with unusual power to re-create the time of which he writes.

Rhodes has preserved his deeply felt sense of fairness and essential understanding of the South. It can be said, as in his larger work, that a greater portion of the space has been allotted to the North, particularly in the political coverage. The Confederate government and naval affairs are somewhat underplayed. Despite this a well-dimensioned portrayal comes forth, and readers of whatever political persuasion can feel proud of this undistorted history of our now united country. Lee and Jackson are among his major heroes, although to Rhodes the one transcendent figure in our history remains Abraham Lincoln.

One can pursue the Civil War through thousands of volumes, through the manuscripts, on to the battlefields themselves; can specialize in a chosen subject, but no historian, professional or amateur, can do without a few essential volumes which give him the refreshment of a carefully weighed, complete rendition of what happened and where. No student, even of the most intense variety, can do without such a stimulus to keep his balance.

A modest man had to write this book, but yet a man who had the experience of years of study, of years of talk with the other historians of his day. Bearded, of large build and mind, with a pleasant yet earnest countenance, Rhodes numbered among his friends many of the political and academic leaders of his day. His rewards were numerous, his influence widespread, but even in the days of adulation he remained independent in his politics, in his thinking, in his speaking.

Rhodes was of an era that had seen the flames of civil strife, had watched the awesome devastation of that war scourge the land, had seen the arrival and uneasy development of a reborn nation — and he had written history with his heart, his soul, and, above all, his mind. A historian should always remember that he is a sort of trustee for his readers, he wrote. James Ford Rhodes was one of those trustees.

E. B. Long

Oak Park, Illinois

December, 1960

PREFACE

THIS is not an abridgment of my three volumes on the Civil War but a fresh study of the subject in which I have used my work as one of many authorities. Whenever I have transferred sentences, paragraphs and pages, I have done so because, after a study of the original authorities, I found that I could give my conclusions no better than in my first work.

Since writing the three volumes, published respectively in 1895, 1899 and 1904, much new original material has come to light and valuable treatments of certain periods of the Civil War have appeared. I owe especial indebtedness to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies; Diary of Gideon Welles; Life of Rawlins, which J. H. Wilson kindly permitted me to read in manuscript before publication; the Letters and Diaries of John Hay; Miss Nicolay’s Personal Traits of Lincoln; Life and Letters of General Meade; W. R. Livermore, Story of the Civil War; J. Bigelow, Jr., The Campaign of Chancellorsville; W. R. Thayer, Life of John Hay; The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz.

I owe a literary revision of this volume to my son, Daniel P. Rhodes. I am indebted to D. M. Matteson for valuable assistance in historical research and for a careful reading of the manuscript with verifications. I acknowledge the aid of my secretary, Miss Wyman; that of Charles K. Bolton, Librarian, Miss Wildman and Miss Cattanach, assistants in the Boston Athenaeum.

BOSTON, 1917.

Table of Contents

DOVER BOOKS ON HISTORY, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Title Page

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES OF AUTHORITIES

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

NOTES

NOTES

INDEX

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES OF AUTHORITIES

HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER I

A

THE great factor in the destruction of slavery was the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860¹ by the Republican party, who had declared against the extension of slavery into the territories. The territories were those divisions of the national domain² which lacked as yet the necessary qualifications for statehood through insufficient population or certain other impediments they were under the control of Congress and the President. The Republicans were opposed to any interference with slavery in the States where it already existed, but they demanded freedom for the vast unorganized territory west of the Missouri river. How the election of Lincoln was brought about I have already related at length in my History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877 ³ and more briefly in the first of my Oxford Lectures.⁴ It was a sectional triumph, inasmuch as Lincoln did not receive a single vote in ten out of the eleven States that afterwards seceded and made up the Confederate States. Charleston, South Carolina, an ultra pro-slavery city and eager for secession, rejoiced equally with the Northern cities over the election of Lincoln, but the Charleston crowds were cheering for a Southern confederacy.⁵ Herein were they supported by the people of South Carolina generally, who saw in the election of Lincoln an attack on their cherished institution of slavery and cared no longer for political union with a people who held them to be living in the daily practice of evil. They regarded their slaves as property and believed that they had the same constitutional right to carry that property into the common territory as the Northern settlers had to take with them their property in horses and mules. Lincoln as President would deny them that privilege; in other words he would refuse them equality. In his speeches he had fastened a stigma upon slavery; believing it wrong, he must oppose it wherever he had the power, and he certainly would limit its extension. Could a free people, they asked, have a more undoubted grievance? Were they not fired by the spirit of 1776 and ought they not to strike before any distinct act of aggression? Revolution was a word on every tongue. The crisis was like one described by Thucydides when the meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things. . . . Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness. . . . Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. ⁶ The people of South Carolina amid great enthusiasm demanded almost with one voice that their State secede from the Federal Union. The authorities promptly responded. A Convention duly called and chosen passed an Ordinance of secession which was termed a Declaration of Independence of the State of South Carolina.⁷ This act, in view of the South Carolinians and of the people of the other cotton States, was based on the State’s reserved right under the compact entitled the Constitution. Martial music, bonfires, pistol firing, fireworks, illuminations, cries of joy and exultation greeted the passage of the Ordinance, which seemed to the people of Charleston to mark the commencement of a revolution as glorious as that of 1776.⁸

B

C

Meanwhile the United States Senate, through an able and representative committee of thirteen, was at work on a compromise in the spirit of earlier days. In 1820, according to Jefferson, the knell of the Union had been rung; the slavery question, said he, like a fire-bell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. But then the Missouri Compromise had saved the Union.⁹ Again, in 1850 when the South and the North were in bitter opposition on the same issue of slavery and threats of dissolution of the Union were freely made by Southern men, the controversy was ended by Clay’s Compromise.¹⁰ And now in 1860 the people of the Northern and of the border slave States, ardent for the preservation of the Union, believed that Congress could somehow compose the dispute as it had done twice before. The Senate committee of thirteen at once took up the only expedient that could be expected to retain the six remaining cotton States in the Union.¹¹ This was the Crittenden Compromise, called after its author, a senator from Kentucky; and the portion of it on which union or disunion turned was the article regarding territorial slavery. Crittenden proposed as a constitutional amendment that the old Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30’ should serve as the boundary between slavery and freedom in the Territories; north of it slavery should be prohibited, south of it protected. As phrased, the article was satisfactory to the Northern Democratic and border slave State senators, who together made up six of the committee. The two senators from the cotton States would have accepted it, had the understanding been clear that protection to slavery was to apply to all territory acquired in the future south of the Compromise line. The five Republican senators opposed the territorial article, and, as it had been agreed that any report to be binding must have the assent of a majority of these five, they defeated in committee this necessary provision of the Compromise. William H. Seward,¹² one of the thirteen, the leader of the Republicans in Congress, and the prospective head of Lincoln’s Cabinet, would undoubtedly have assented to this article, could he have secured Lincoln’s support. But Lincoln, though ready to compromise every other matter in dispute, was inflexible on the territorial question: that is to say as regarded territory which might be acquired in the future. He could not fail to see that the Territories which were a part of the United States in 1860 were, in Webster’s words, dedicated to freedom by an ordinance of nature and the will of God; and he was willing to give the slaveholders an opportunity to make a political slave State out of New Mexico, which was south of the Missouri Compromise line.¹³ But he feared that, if a parallel of latitude should be recognized by solemn exactment as the boundary between slavery and freedom, filibustering for all south of us and making slave States of it would follow in spite of us. A year will not pass, he wrote further, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they [the cotton States] will stay in the Union. Lincoln, therefore, using the powerful indirect influence of the President-elect, caused the Republican senators to defeat the Crittenden Compromise in the committee, who were thus forced to report that they could not agree upon a plan of adjustment. Then Crittenden proposed to submit his plan to a vote of the people. So strong was the desire to preserve the Union that, had this been done, the majority would probably have been overwhelming in favor of the Compromise; and, although only an informal vote, it would have been an instruction impossible for Congress to resist. Crittenden’s resolution looking to such an expression of public sentiment was prevented from coming to a vote in the Senate by the quiet opposition of Republican senators: the last chance of retaining the six cotton States in the Union was gone.¹⁴

D

Between January 9 and February 1, 1861, the conventions of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas passed ordinances of secession. Early in February the Confederate States was formed. Delegates from six cotton States ¹⁵ assembled in Montgomery and, proceeding in an orderly manner, formed a government, the cornerstone of which rested upon the great truth. . . that slavery is the negro’s natural and normal condition. They elected Jefferson Davis¹⁶ President and adopted a Constitution modelled on that of the United States, but departing from that instrument in its express recognition of slavery and the right of secession.¹⁷

When Lincoln was inaugurated President on March 4, he confronted a difficult situation. Elected by a Union of thirty-three States, he had lost, before performing an official act, the allegiance of seven. Believing 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. . . to run the machine as it is, ¹⁸ he had to determine on a line of policy toward the States that had constituted themselves the Southern Confederacy. But any such policy was certain to be complicated by the desirability of retaining in the Union the border slave States of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, as well as North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, whose affiliations were close with the four border States. All seven were drawn towards the North by their affection for the Union and towards the South by the community of interest in the social system of slavery. One of Lincoln’s problems then was to make the love for the Union outweigh the sympathy with the slaveholding States that had seceded.

E

It is difficult to see how he could have bettered the policy to which he gave the keynote in his inaugural address. I hold, he said, that the union of these States is perpetual. . . . Physically speaking we cannot separate. . . . The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the Government. This last declaration, though inevitable for a President in his position, outweighed all his words of conciliation and rendered of no avail his closing pathetic appeal to his dissatisfied fellow countrymen not to bring civil war on the country.¹⁹

During the progress of the secession, the forts, arsenals, custom-houses and other property of the Federal government within the limits of the cotton States were taken possession of by these States and, in due time, all this property was turned over to the Southern Confederacy, so that on March 4, all that Lincoln controlled was four military posts, of which Fort Sumter, commanding Charleston, was much the most important.²⁰ Since the very beginning of the secession movement, the eyes of the North had been upon South Carolina. For many years she had been restive under the bonds of the Union; her chief city, Charleston, had witnessed the disruption of the Democratic national convention,²¹ and the consequent split in the party which made certain the Republican success of 1860, that in turn had led to the secession of the State and the formation of the Southern Confederacy. Fort Sumter had fixed the attention of the Northern mind by an occurrence in December, 1860. Major Anderson with a small garrison of United States troops had occupied Fort Moultrie; but, convinced that he could not defend that fort against any attack from Charleston, he had, secretly on the night after Christmas, withdrawn his force to Fort Sumter, a much stronger post. Next morning, when the movement was discovered, Charleston fumed with rage whilst the North, on hearing the news, was jubilant and made a hero of Anderson.²² Lincoln recognized the importance of holding Fort Sumter but he also purposed to use all means short of the compromise of his deepest convictions to retain the border slave States and North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas in the Union. The action of these three turned upon Virginia, whose convention was in session, ready to take any action which the posture of affairs seemed to demand. The fundamental difficulty now asserted itself. To hold Fort Sumter was to Lincoln a bounden duty but to the Virginians it savored of coercion; and coercion in this case meant forcing a State which had seceded, back into the Union. If an attempt was made to coerce a State, Virginia would join the Southern Confederacy. The Confederate. States now regarded the old Union as a foreign power whose possession of a fort within their limits, flying the American flag, was a daily insult. They attempted to secure Sumter by an indirect negotiation with the Washington government and were encouraged by the assurances of Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State and most trusted counsellor. Had the President known of Seward’s intimation, which was almost a promise, that Sumter would be evacuated, he would have been greatly perturbed and would have called a halt in the negotiations to the end that the Southern commissioners be undeceived. On April 1 he was further troubled by a paper, Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration, which Seward had privately submitted to him as an outline of the fit policy to be pursued. This was briefly : the evacuation of Fort Sumter; the reënforcement of the other posts in the South; a demand at once for explanations from Spain and France and, if they were not satisfactory, a call of a special session of Congress to declare war against those two nations; also explanations to be sought from Great Britain and Russia. With that same rash disregard of his chief and blind reliance on his own notions of statecraft which he had shown in his negotiations with Justice Campbell, the intermediary between himself and the Southern commissioners, who had been sent to Washington by Davis, he gave the President a strong hint that the execution of this policy should be devolved upon some member of the Cabinet and that member, himself. The proposed foreign policy was reckless and wholly unwarranted. Our relations with these four powers were entirely peaceful; to use Seward’s own words less than three months before, there is not a nation on earth that is not an interested, admiring friend. ²³ Seward had got it into his head that, if our nation should provoke a foreign war, the cotton States would unite in amity with the North and like brothers fight the common foe under the old flag. Lincoln of course saw that the foreign policy proposed was wild and foolish but ignored it in his considerate reply to Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration; he kept the existence of the paper rigidly a secret; ²⁴ he did not demand the Secretary’s resignation; he had for him no word of sarcasm or reproach.

F

G

The President submitted to another drain on his time and strength in the persistent scramble for office. The grounds, halls, stairways, closets of the White House, wrote Seward, are filled with office seekers; and Lincoln said, I seem like one sitting in a palace assigning apartments to importunate applicants, while the structure is on fire and likely soon to perish in ashes.²⁵ When he ought to have been able to concentrate his mind on the proper attitude to the seceding States, he was hampered by the ceaseless demands for a lucrative recognition from his supporters and by the irrational proposals of the chief of his Cabinet.

The great problem now was Sumter. What should be done about it? On the day after his inauguration, the President was informed that Anderson believed a reënforcement of 20,000 men necessary for the defence of the post; ²⁶ after being transported to the neighborhood by sea, they must fight their way through to the fort. For the South Carolinians had been steadily at work on the islands