II
Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to pre-empt. This happened because most northerners refused to condone disunion. On that matter, if on little else, the outgoing and incoming presidents of the United States agreed.
In his final message to Congress, on December 3, 1860, James Buchanan surprised some of his southern allies with a firm denial of the right of secession. The Union was not "a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties," said Buchanan. "We the People" had adopted the Constitution to form "a more perfect Union" than the one existing under the Articles of Confederation, which had stated that "the Union shall be perpetual." The framers of the national government "never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution." State sovereignty was not superior to national sovereignty, Buchanan insisted. The Constitution bestowed the highest attributes of sovereignty exclusively on the federal government: national defense; foreign policy; regulation of foreign and interstate commerce; coinage of money. "This Constitution," stated that document, "and the laws of the United States . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . any thing in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." If secession was legitimate, warned the president, the Union became "a rope of sand" and "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics. . . . By such a dread catastrophe the hopes of the friends of freedom throughout the world would be destroyed. . . . Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government."29
Thousands of northern editorials and speeches echoed these themes. Fears of a domino effect were especially pervasive. "A successful rebellion
28. Wetumpka Enquirer, Nov. ?, 1860, quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 142; Jackson Mississippian, Nov. 14, 1860, quoted in Rainwater, Mississippi, Storm Center of Secession, 163.
29. James D. Richardson, comp., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (Washington, 1897), V, 628–37.
by a few States now," ran an editorial typical of hundreds, "will be followed by a new rebellion or secession a few years hence." This was not mere alarmism. Some Americans were already speculating about a division of the country into three or four "confederacies" with an independent Pacific coast republic thrown in for good measure. Several New York merchants and Democrats with ties to the South were talking of setting up as a free city. A prominent New York lawyer secretly informed railroad president George B. McClellan in December 1860 that "when secession is fairly inaugurated at the South, we mean to do a little of the same business here & cut loose from the fanactics of New England & of the North generally, including most of our own State." In January 1861 Mayor Fernando Wood brought this matter into the open with a message to the aldermen advocating the secession of New York City. The project went nowhere, but it did plant seeds of copper-headism that germinated a couple of years later.30
"The doctrine of secession is anarchy," declared a Cincinnati newspaper. "If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government." Lincoln too considered secession the "essence of anarchy." He branded state sovereignty a "sophism." "The Union is older than any of the States," Lincoln asserted, "and, in fact, it created them as States." The Declaration of Independence transformed the "United Colonies" into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any "free and independent States." "Having never been States, either in substance, or in name, outside the Union," asked Lincoln, "whence this magical omnipotence of 'State rights,' asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?" Perpetuity was "the fundamental law of all national governments." No government "ever had provision in its organic law for its own termination. . . . No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. . . . They can only do so against law, and by revolution."31
Neither Lincoln nor any other northerner denied the right of revolution. After all, Yankees shared the legacy of 1776. But there was no
30. Providence Daily Post, Nov. 19, 1860, in Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (New York, 1942), 183; Samuel L. M. Barlow to McClellan, Dec. 6, 1860, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; William C. Wright, The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Rutherford, N.J., 1973), 176–79.
31. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 6, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 828; CWL, IV, 264–65, 268, 433–37.
"right of revolution at pleasure," declared a Philadelphia newspaper. Revolution was "a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause," wrote Lincoln. But "when exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power." The South had no just cause. The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority. The "central idea" of the Union cause, said Lincoln, "is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose."32
But how was it to be settled? This problem was compounded by the lame-duck syndrome in the American constitutional system. During the four-month interval between Lincoln's election and inauguration, Buchanan had the executive power but felt little responsibility for the crisis, while Lincoln had responsibility but little power. The Congress elected in 1860 would not meet in regular session for thirteen months, while the Congress that did meet in December 1860 experienced an erosion of authority as members from the lower South resigned when their states seceded. Buchanan's forceful denial of the legality of disunion ended with a lame confession of impotence to do anything about it. Although the Constitution gave no state the right to withdraw, said the president, it also gave the national government no power "to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw."33
Republicans ridiculed this reasoning. Buchanan had demonstrated that "no state has the right to secede unless it wishes to," jibed Seward, and that "it is the President's duty to enforce the laws, unless somebody opposes him."34 But Republicans seemed unable to come up with any better alternative. Several options presented themselves: coercion, compromise, or allowing "the erring sisters to depart in peace." Although various Republican leaders sanctioned each of these approaches at one time or another, none of the options commanded a majority before April 1861. Instead, a rather vague fourth alternative emerged—described as "masterly inactivity" or a "Fabian policy"—a position of watchful waiting, of making no major concessions but at the same time
32. Philadelphia Ledger, Dec. 28, 1860, quoted in Kenneth M. Stampp, And the WarCame: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 34; CWL, IV, 434n.; Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 19.
33. Richardson, Messages and Papers, V, 634–36.
34. Stampp, And the War Came, 56.
avoiding needless provocation, in the hope that the disunion fever would run its course and the presumed legions of southern unionists would bring the South back to its senses.
When Congress convened in December several Republicans, especially from the Old Northwest, "swore by everything in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath that they would convert the rebel States into a wilderness." "Without a little blood-letting," wrote Michigan's radical, coarse-grained Senator Zachariah Chandler, "this Union will not . . . be worth a rush." The danger of losing access to the lower Mississippi valley may have accounted for the bellicosity of many mid-westerners. The people of the Northwest, said the Chicago Tribune, would never negotiate for free navigation of the river. "It is their right, and they will assert it to the extremity of blotting Louisiana out of the map."35
And how would customs duties be collected at southern ports? Whose customhouses were they—American or Confederate? In the nullification crisis of 1832, Andrew Jackson had vowed to use force to collect duties in South Carolina and to hang the nullification leaders. "Oh, for one hour of Jackson!" exclaimed many Yankee Republicans who developed a sudden retrospective affection for this Tennessee Democrat. If letters received by Republican congressmen were any indication, their constituents stood ready to "coerce" the rebels. "We elected Lincoln," wrote an Illinoisian, "and are just as willing, if necessity requires, to fight for him. . . . Little Boone [County] can be relied on for 500 Wide Awakes, well armed and equipped." Lincoln "must enforce the laws of the U. States against all rebellion," added an Ohioan, "no matter what the consequences."36
Lincoln seemed to agree. In December 1860 he told his private secretary that the very existence of government "implies the legal power, right, and duty . . . of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government." Lincoln quietly passed word to General-in-Chief
35. Henry Adams, "The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61," in Adams, The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61 and Other Essays, ed. George Hochfield (New York, 1958), 4; Chandler to Austin Blair, Feb. 11, 1861, in Nevins, Emergence, II, 411–12; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 558.
36. Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Dec. 17, 1860; A. W. Metcalf to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 12, 1860, in William E. Baringer, A House Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect (Springfield, Ill., 1945), 237; J. W. Whiting to Trumbull, Nov. 19, 1860, E. D. Mansfield to Salmon P. Chase, Nov. 26, 1860, in Stampp, And the War Came, 27.
Winfield Scott to make ready to collect the customs and defend federal forts in seceded states, or to retake them if they had been given up before his inauguration. In Springfield the Illinois State Journal, quasi-official spokesman for Lincoln during this period, warned that "disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards. . . . The laws of the United States must be executed—the President has no discretionary power on the subject—his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution."37
Republicans preferred to distinguish between "coercion"—which had a harsh ring—and enforcement of the laws. "It is not making war upon a State to execute the laws," insisted the Boston Advertiser. But to southerners this was a distinction without a difference. To "execute the laws" in a foreign country—the Confederacy—would mean war. "Why, sir," asked Louis Wigfall of Texas, "if the President of the United States were to send a fleet to Liverpool, and attempt there . . . to collect the revenue . . . would anybody say that the British Government was responsible for the bloodshed that might follow?"38
In any event the whole question was hypothetical until March 4, for Buchanan intended no "coercion." And even if he had, the resources were pitifully inadequate. Most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered over two thousand miles of frontier, while most of the navy's ships were patrolling distant waters or laid up for repair. The strongest armed forces during the winter of 1860–61 were the militias of seceding states. Moreover, upper-South unionists who had managed to keep fire-eaters in their states at bay made an impression on Republicans with warnings that anything which smacked of coercion would tip the balance toward secession. For a time, therefore, Republican opinion drifted uncertainly while other groups sought to fashion a compromise.
Buchanan's message to Congress set the agenda for these efforts. He first blamed the North in general and Republicans in particular for "the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question" which had now "produced its natural effects" by provoking disunion. Because of Republicans, said the president, "many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before morning."
37. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), III, 248; Lincoln to Francis P. Blair, Dec. 21, 1860, Lincoln to Elihu B. Washburne, Dec. 22, 1860, in CWL, IV, 157, 159; Illinois State Journal, Nov. 14, Dec. 20, 1860, in Nevins, Emergence, II, 356–57.
38. Both quotations from Stampp, And the War Came, 39, 44.
Buchanan stopped short of asking the Republican party to dissolve; instead he asked northerners to stop criticizing slavery, repeal their "unconstitutional and obnoxious" personal liberty laws, obey the fugitive slave law, and join with the South to adopt a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in all territories. Unless Yankees proved willing to do these things, said Buchanan, the South would after all "be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government." As an additional sign of northern good will, Buchanan also advised support for his long-standing effort to acquire Cuba, which would further placate southern fears by adding a large new slave state to the Union.39
Republican responses to these suggestions may be readily imagined. The printable comments included: "Pharasaical old hypocrite . . . bristling with the spirit of a rabid slaveocracy . . . wretched drivel . . . truckling subserviency to the Cotton Lords . . . gross perversion of facts . . . brazen lies." After the voters had just rejected the Breckinridge platform by a margin of 4,000,000 to 670,000 in the presidential election, Buchanan "proposes an unconditional surrender . . . of six-sevenths of the people to one-seventh . . . by making the Breckinridge platform a part of the Constitution!"40
Although few of the compromise proposals introduced in Congress went so far as Buchanan's, they all shared the same feature: Republicans would have to make all the concessions. Republicans refused to succumb to what they considered blackmail. Indeed, the possibility that a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Unionists might patch together a "shameful surrender" and call it compromise caused some Republicans to prefer the alternative of letting the cotton states "go in peace." Having long regarded the Union as a "covenant with death," Garrisonian abolitionists were glad that slaveholders had broken the covenant. Even non-Garrisonians agreed, in Frederick Douglass's words, that "if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders [and] a new drain on the negro's blood, then . . . let the Union perish." Several radical Republicans initially took a similar position. If South Carolina wanted to leave, said the Chicago Tribune in October 1860, "let her go, and like a limb lopped from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls." Horace Greeley's New York Tribune prominently advocated the go-in-peace approach. "If the Cotton States shall
39. Richardson, Messages and Papers, V, 626–27, 630, 638, 642.
40. Various Republican editorials quoted in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 154, 127, 137, 152, 146, 138, 147.
become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go," wrote Greeley in a famous editorial three days after Lincoln's election. "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets."41
A genuine desire to avoid war accounted in part for this attitude. But other motives were probably more important, for all of these Republicans subsequently endorsed war to preserve the Union. Greeley's go-in-peace editorials represented a dual gambit, one part aimed at the North and the other at the South. Like most Republicans, Greeley believed at first that southern states did not really intend to secede; "they simply mean to bully the Free States into concessions." Even after South Carolina went out, Greeley wrote to Lincoln that "I fear nothing . . . but another disgraceful backdown of the free States. . . . Another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured, will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads."42 To advise the North to let the disunionists go, therefore, became a way of deflecting compromise. Toward the South, Greeley expected his gambit to operate like the strategy of parents who tell an obstreperous adolescent son, after his repeated threats to run away from home, "There's the door—go!" By avoiding talk of coercion it might also allow passions to cool and give unionists breathing room to mobilize their presumed silent majority below the Potomac.43
Go-in-peace sentiment faded as it became clear that the dreaded alternative of compromise would not come to pass. To sift all the compromise proposals introduced in Congress, each house set up a special committee. The Senate "Committee of Thirteen" included powerful men: William H. Seward, Benjamin Wade, Stephen Douglas, Robert Toombs, Jefferson Davis, and John J. Crittenden. It was Crittenden who cobbled together a plan which he proposed as a series of amendments to the Constitution. In their final form these amendments would
41. Douglass' Monthly, Jan. 1861; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 11, 1860, quoted in Stampp, And the War Came, 22; New York Tribune, Nov. 9, 1860.
42. New York Tribune, Nov. 20, 1860; Greeley to Lincoln, Dec. 22, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
43. This analysis of Greeley's motives has been much influenced by David M. Potter's perceptive writings on the subject, especially "Horace Greeley and Peaceable Secession," and "Postscript," in Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge, 1968), 219–42, and Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 51–57. For a slightly different interpretation see Bernard A. Weisberger, "Horace Greeley: Reformer as Republican," CWH, 23 (1977), 5–25.
have guaranteed slavery in the states against future interference by the national government; prohibited slavery in territories north of 36° 30' and protected it south of that line in all territories "now held, or hereafter acquired" (italics added); forbidden Congress to abolish slavery on any federal property within slave states (forts, arsenals, naval bases, etc.); forbidden Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of its inhabitants and unless it had first been abolished by both Virginia and Maryland; denied Congress any power to interfere with the interstate slave trade; and compensated slaveholders who were prevented from recovering fugitives in northern states. These constitutional amendments were to be valid for all time; no future amendment could override them.44
Despite the one-sided nature of this "compromise," some Republican businessmen who feared that a secession panic on Wall Street might deepen into another depression urged party leaders to accept it. Thurlow Weed—and by implication Seward—gave signs in December of a willingness to do so. But from Springfield came word to stand firm. "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery," Lincoln wrote to key senators and congressmen. "The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter." Crittenden's compromise, Lincoln told Weed and Seward, "would lose us everything we gained by the election. . . . Filibustering for all South of us, and making slave states would follow . . . to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire." The very notion of a territorial compromise, Lincoln pointed out, "acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. . . . We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we' shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."45
Following Lincoln's advice, all five Republicans on the Senate Committee
44. CG, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 114. The Constitution contained a precedent for these "unamendable" amendments: Article V, which prohibits any change in the equal representation of each state in the Senate.
45. Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 10, 1860, to William Kellogg, Dec. 11, to Elihu B. Washburne, Dec. 13, to Thurlow Weed, Dec. 17, to William H. Seward, Feb. i, 1861, to John D. DeFrees, Dec. 18, 1860, to James T. Hale, Jan. 11, 1861, in CWL, IV, 149–51, 154, 183, 155, 172.
of Thirteen voted against the Crittenden compromise. On the grounds that any compromise would be worthless if opposed by the Republicans, Toombs and Davis also voted No, sending the measure down to defeat 7–6. Crittenden then took his proposal to the Senate floor, where on January 16 it was rejected by a vote of 25–23, with all 25 negative votes cast by Republicans. Fourteen senators from states that had seceded or were about to secede did not vote. Although Crittenden's compromise resurfaced again later, Republican opposition and lower-South indifference continued to doom it.46
Did this mean that Republicans killed the last, best hope to avert disunion? Probably not. Neither Crittenden's nor any other compromise could have stopped secession in the lower South. No compromise could undo the event that triggered disunion: Lincoln's election by a solid North. "We spit upon every plan to compromise," wrote one secessionist. "No human power can save the Union, all the cotton states will go," said Jefferson Davis, while Judah Benjamin agreed that "a settlement [is] totally out of our power to accomplish."47 On December 13, before any compromises had been debated—indeed, before any states had actually seceded—more than two-thirds of the senators and representatives from seven southern states signed an address to their constituents: "The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. . . . The honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found in a Southern Confederacy."48 Delegates from seven states who met in Montgomery on February 4, 1861, to organize a new nation paid no attention to the compromise efforts in Washington.
But it was significant that only seven slave states were represented at Montgomery. By February 1861 the main goal of compromise maneuvers was to keep the other eight from going out. The legislatures of five of these states had enacted provisions for the calling of conventions.49
46. Nevins, Emergence, II, 390–98; CG, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 409.
47. Reynolds, Editors Make War, 169; Davis quoted in Samuel C. Buttersworth to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Dec. 3, 1860, Benjamin to Barlow, Dec. 9, 1860, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library.
48. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America duringthe Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 37.
49. The legislatures of Kentucky and Delaware refused to provide for conventions and the governor of Maryland did not call his legislature into session.
But thereafter the resemblance to events below the 35th parallel ceased. Voters in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri elected a majority of unionists to their conventions. Voters in North Carolina and Tennessee, given the choice of voting for or against the holding of a convention, voted against doing so. Although the Confederate states sent commissioners to the upper-South conventions with appeals to join their southern sisters, the Missouri and Arkansas conventions rejected secession in March (Arkansas by a narrow margin) and Virginia did the same by a two-to-one margin on April 4. The main reason for this outcome was the lesser salience of slavery in the upper South. Slaves constituted 47 percent of the population in the Confederate states but only 24 percent in the upper South; 37 percent of the white families in Confederate states owned slaves compared with 20 percent of the families in the upper South.50
This failure of secession in the upper South seemed to confirm the Republican belief in the region's basic unionism. But much of that unionism was highly conditional. The condition was northern forbearance from any attempt to "coerce" Confederate states. The Tennessee legislature resolved that its citizens "will as one man, resist [any] invasion of the soil of the South at any hazard and to the last extremity." To put teeth into a similar admonition by the Virginia legislature, the convention of that commonwealth remained in session to watch developments after initially voting down secession. Moderate Republicans heeded these warnings and trod softly during the first three months of 1861. This was the time of "masterly inactivity," of limited concessions to strengthen that silent majority of lower-South unionists so they could begin a "voluntary reconstruction" of their states. Seward in particular had abandoned the irrepressible conflict to become chief of the conciliationists. "Every thought that we think," he wrote to Lincoln on January 27, "ought to be conciliatory, forbearing and patient, and so open the way for the rising of a Union Party in the seceding States which will bring them back into the Union." Although less optimistic than Seward, Lincoln approved of this approach so long as it involved "no compromise which assists or permits the extension" of slavery.51
Republicans on the special House Committee of Thirty-Three (one
50. Calculated from the census of 1860.
51. Mary E. R. Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union (New York, 1961), 161–62; Seward to Lincoln, Jan. 27, 1861, Lincoln to Seward, Feb. 1, 1861, CWL, IV, 183.
for each state)52 had first demonstrated the possibilities of such a "Fabian policy." Charles Francis Adams sponsored a proposal to admit New Mexico (which included present-day Arizona) as a state. This maneuver had a deep purpose: to divide the upper and lower South and cement the former to the Union by the appearance of concession on the territorial question. New Mexico had a slave code and a few slaves. But everyone recognized that the institution would not take root there; as Crittenden noted, the ultimate consequence of New Mexico's admission would be to give the North another free state. Lower-South members of the committee scorned the proposal while several upper-South members approved it, thereby accomplishing Adams's intention. He persuaded nine of the fifteen Republicans on the committee to endorse this apparent violation of the party's platform. The measure therefore obtained committee approval on December 29. When it finally reached a floor vote two months later, however, a three-to-one negative Republican margin defeated it. Nevertheless, during those two months the New Mexico scheme had played a part in keeping the upper South in the Union.53
Two other recommendations from the Committee of Thirty-Three helped along this cause. Both received Seward's active and Lincoln's passive endorsement. The first was a resolution calling for faithful obedience to the fugitive slave law and repeal of personal liberty laws in conflict with it. This passed the House on February 27 with the support of about half the Republican representatives. Next day the House adopted a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing slavery in the states against any future interference by the federal government. This was too much for three-fifths of the Republicans to swallow, but the two-fifths who did vote for it in both House and Senate gave this Amendment the bare two-thirds majority needed to send it to the states for ratification. Before that process got anywhere, however, other matters intervened to produce four years later a Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.
Seward's conciliation policy also bore fruit in the form of a "peace convention" that assembled in Washington on February 4, the same day that the Confederate constitutional convention met in Montgomery. Called by the Virginia legislature, the peace convention further
52. Members from two of the seven seceding states refused to participate in any of the committee's sessions, and members from four others boycotted several of them.
53. Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 290–302.
divided the upper and lower South. The seceded states plus Arkansas refused to send delegates. Five northern states also failed to participate—California and Oregon because of distance; Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota because their Republican leaders distrusted the enterprise. Many Republicans in other states shared this distrust, but Seward persuaded them to support the project as a gesture of good will. Taking the Crittenden compromise as a starting point, this "Old Gentlemen's Convention" accomplished little except to mark time. Many of the delegates belonged to a past era, typified by the chairman, seventy-one-year-old ex-President John Tyler of Virginia. Debates were aimless or acrimonious; Republican participation was perfunctory or hostile. After three weeks of labor, the convention brought forth the Crittenden compromise modified to make it slightly more palatable to the North. Extension of the 36° 30′ line would apply only to "present territory" and a majority vote of senators from both the free and slave states would be required to obtain any new territory.54 When this recommendation went before Congress, it suffered an unceremonious defeat, mainly by Republican votes.
Six hundred miles distant the Confederate convention appeared by contrast to be a triumph of efficiency. In six days the delegates at Montgomery drafted a temporary constitution, turned themselves into a provisional Congress for the new government, elected a provisional president and vice president, and then spent a more leisurely month fashioning a permanent constitution and setting the machinery of government in motion. Elections for a bicameral Congress and for a president and vice president to serve the single six-year term prescribed by the Constitution were to be held in November 1861.
Although Barnwell Rhett and a few other fire-eaters came to Montgomery as delegates, they took a back seat at a convention that did its best to project a moderate image to the upper South. Befitting the new Confederacy's claim to represent the true principles of the U. S. Constitution which the North had trampled upon, most of the provisional
54. The key vote in the convention was 9–8 in favor of this territorial provision, as follows:
Free states: 5 yes, 6 no, 3 abstentions
Slave states: 4 yes, 2 no, 1 abstention.
For detailed accounts of the convention, see Robert G. Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, 1961), and Jesse L. Keene, The Peace Convention of 1861 (Tuscaloosa, 1961).
constitution was copied verbatim from that venerable document. The same was true of the permanent Confederate Constitution, adopted a month later, though some of its departures from the original were significant. The preamble omitted the general welfare clause and the phrase "a more perfect Union," and added a clause after We the People: "each State acting in its sovereign and independent character." Instead of the U. S. Constitution's evasions on slavery ("persons held to service or labor"), the Confederate version called a slave a slave. It guaranteed the protection of bondage in any new territory the Confederacy might acquire. The Constitution did forbid the importation of slaves from abroad, to avoid alienating Britain and especially the upper South, whose economy benefitted from its monopoly on export of slaves to the lower South. The Constitution permitted a tariff for revenue but not for protection of domestic industries, though what this distinction meant was unclear since the clause did not define it. Another clause forbade government aid for internal improvements. The Constitution also nurtured state's rights by empowering legislatures to impeach Confederate officials whose duties lay wholly within a state. After weakening the executive by limiting the president to a single six-year term, the Constitution strengthened that branch by giving the president a line-item veto of appropriations and granting cabinet officers a potential non-voting seat on the floor of Congress (this was never put into effect).55
Most interest at Montgomery focused on the choice of a provisional president. There was no shortage of aspirants, but the final nod went to a West Point graduate who would have preferred to become commander of the Confederacy's army. As the most prominent of the original secessionists, Rhett and Yancey had a strong claim for preference. But conditional unionists north of the 35th parallel, especially in Virginia, regarded them as no less responsible than the blackest of Republicans for the tragic division of the country that was forcing them to choose sides. Since the new Confederacy—containing scarcely 10 percent of the country's white population and 5 percent of its industrial capacity—desperately needed the allegiance of the upper South, Yancey and Rhett were ruled out. Toombs, Stephens, and Howell Cobb, all from Georgia, seemed to fit the bill better. But the Georgia delegation could not unite on one of them. Moreover, as a conditional unionist until the last minute, Stephens was suspect in the eyes of original secessionists, while
55. The Constitution is conveniently printed in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 307–22.
Toombs, a former Whig, suffered a similar handicap among the longtime Democrats who predominated at Montgomery. Toombs's heavy drinking—he appeared at a party falling-down drunk two nights before the balloting for president—also hurt his chances. Word from Richmond that Virginia's pro-secession senators Mason and Hunter favored Jefferson Davis proved decisive. Austere, able, experienced in government as a senator and former secretary of war, a Democrat and a secessionist but no fire-eater, Davis was the ideal candidate. Though he had not sought the job and did not really want it, the delegates elected him unanimously on February 9. His sense of duty—and destiny—bid him accept. To console Georgia and strengthen the Confederacy's moderate image, one-time Whig and more recently Douglas Democrat Alexander Stephens received the vice presidency. To satisfy geographical balance, Davis apportioned the six cabinet posts among each state of the Confederacy except his own Mississippi, with the top position of secretary of state going to the sulking Toombs.56
"The man and the hour have met!" So said a genial William L. Yancey as he introduced Jefferson Davis to a cheering crowd in Montgomery on February 16. It was on this occasion that "Dixie" began its career as the unofficial Confederate anthem. Perhaps inspired by the music, Davis made a brief, bellicose speech. "The time for compromise has now passed," he said. "The South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel." His inaugural address two days later was more pacific. He assured everyone that the Confederacy wished to live in peace and extended a warm invitation to any states that "may seek to unite their fortunes to ours."57 Davis then settled down to the heavy responsibilities of organizing a new nation—and of enlarging its borders.
Abraham Lincoln's chief concern was to prevent that enlargement. And part of the energy expended in building his cabinet was directed to that end. Putting together a cabinet gave Lincoln no end of trouble. The infant Republican party was still a loose coalition of several previous parties, of down-east Yankees and frontiersmen, radicals and conservatives, ideologues and pragmatists, of upper North and lower North and
56. Ibid., 37–66; E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America (Baton Rouge, 1950), 19–32
57. Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), 214–15; Rowland, Davis, V, 47–53.
border-state tycoons like the Blairs of Maryland, of strong leaders several of whom still considered themselves better qualified for the presidency than the man who won it. Lincoln had to satisfy all of these interests with his seven cabinet appointments, which would also indicate the direction of his policy toward the South.58
With an aplomb unparalleled in American political history, the president-elect appointed his four main rivals for the nomination to cabinet posts. Lincoln did not hesitate in his choices of Seward for secretary of state and Bates for attorney general. Cameron represented a more formidable problem. The Pennsylvanian believed that he had a commitment from Lincoln's convention managers. In any case, to leave him out would cause disaffection. But putting him in provoked an outcry when word leaked that Lincoln had offered Cameron the treasury. Many Republicans considered the "Winnebago Chief"—a derisive nickname Cameron had acquired years earlier when he had allegedly cheated an Indian tribe in a supply contract—to be "a man destitute of honor and integrity." Taken aback, Lincoln withdrew the offer, whereupon Cameron's friends mobilized a campaign in his behalf that distracted the party as the inauguration neared. Lincoln finally settled the matter—but not the controversy—by giving Cameron the war department. The treasury went to Chase, who had become a leader of the "iron-back" Republicans opposed to any hint of concession to the South. Chase's appointment so offended Seward that he withdrew his acceptance as secretary of state—an obvious attempt to make Lincoln dump Chase. This was the first test of Seward's ambition to be "premier" of the administration. "I can't afford to let Seward take the first trick," Lincoln told his private secretary. The president-elect persuaded Seward to back down and remain in the cabinet with Chase—though one more confrontation lay ahead before Seward was convinced that Lincoln intended to be his own premier.59
Paying a debt to Indiana for early support of his nomination, Lincoln named Caleb Smith secretary of the interior. The fussy, bewigged Connecticut Yankee Gideon Welles received the navy department. Lincoln
58. This and the following paragraphs on Lincoln's purposes and problems in putting together a cabinet are drawn from James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols. (New York, 1946–55), I, 256–72; Nevins, Emergence, II, 436–55; Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, III, 347–72; and Baringer, A House Dividing, passim.
59. Quotations from Nevins, Emergence, II, 441, and Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln, III, 371
wanted to appoint a non-Republican from the upper South as a gesture of good will to hold this region in the Union. He offered a portfolio to Congressman John Gilmer of North Carolina. But to join a Black Republican administration was too much of a political risk, so Gilmer turned down the offer on grounds that Lincoln's refusal to compromise on slavery in the territories made it impossible for him to accept. Lincoln thereupon rounded out his cabinet with Montgomery Blair as postmaster general. Though a resident of Maryland, Blair was a Republican and an "iron-back."60
Even more important than the cabinet as a sign of future policy would be Lincoln's inaugural address. Knowing that the fate of the upper South, and of hopes for voluntary reconstruction of the lower South, might rest on what he said on March 4, Lincoln devoted great care to every phrase of the address. It went through several drafts after consultation with various Republican leaders, especially Seward. This process began in Springfield two months before the inauguration and continued through Lincoln's twelve-day roundabout trip by rail to Washington, during which he made dozens of speeches to trackside crowds and official receptions. The president-elect felt an obligation to greet the multitudes who lined his route to catch a glimpse of their new leader. In effect, Lincoln was making a whistle-stop tour after his election, even to the point of climbing down from the train to kiss the eleven-year-old girl in upstate New York who had suggested that he grow the beard which was now filling out on his face.
This tour may have been a mistake in two respects. Not wishing by a careless remark or slip of the tongue to inflame the crisis further, Lincoln often indulged in platitudes and trivia in his attempts to say nothing controversial. This produced an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer. Second, Lincoln's mail and the national press had for weeks been full of threats and rumors of assassination. A public journey of this sort with all stops announced in advance greatly increased the risk of violence. Two days before he was scheduled to travel through Baltimore, a city rife with secession sympathizers and notorious for political riots, Lincoln's party got wind of a plot to assassinate him as he changed trains there. Indeed, warnings came from two independent sources—a Pinkerton detective force employed by the railroad
60. Daniel W. Crofts, "A Reluctant Unionist: John A. Gilmer and Lincoln's Cabinet," CWH, 24 (1978), 225–49.
and an agent of the war department—both of which had infiltrated Baltimore's political gangs. Lincoln reluctantly consented to a change in his schedule which took him secretly through Baltimore in the middle of the night. An assassination plot probably did exist; the danger was real. But Lincoln thereafter regretted the decision to creep into Washington "like a thief in the night." It embarrassed many of his supporters and enabled opposition cartoonists to ridicule him. The whole affair started his administration off on the wrong foot at a time when it needed the appearance of firmness and command.61
Lincoln put the finishing touches on his inaugural address during these first days in Washington. While he had been composing it, seven states were not only seceding but were also seizing federal property within their borders—customshouses, arsenals, mints, and forts. The first draft of the inaugural therefore had one theme and two variations. The theme was Lincoln's determination to preserve an undivided Union. The variations contrapuntally offered a sword and an olive branch. The sword was an intention to use "all the powers at my disposal" to "reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy, and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports." The olive branch was a reiteration of his oft-repeated pledge not "to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists" and to enforce the constitutional injunction for the return of fugitive slaves. Lincoln also promised the South that "the government will not assail you, unless you first assail it."62
Seward and Lincoln's Illinois confidant Orville Browning found the sword too prominent in this draft. The upper South, not to mention the Confederate government, was sure to regard any attempt to "reclaim" forts and other property as "coercion." And even the promise not to assail these states unless they first assailed the government contained a veiled threat. Seward persuaded Lincoln to delete "unless you first assail it" and to soften a few other phrases. He also drafted a peroration appealing to the historic patriotism of southern people. The president-elect added a passage assuring southerners that whenever "in any interior locality" the hostility to the United States was "so great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices," he would suspend government activities "for the time."
61. Randall, Lincoln the President, I, 288–91; Norma B. Cuthbert, ed., Lincoln andthe Baltimore Plot (San Marino, Cal., 1949).
62. CWL, IV, 254, 250–52, 261.
Most significantly, perhaps, Browning prevailed on Lincoln to drop his threat to reclaim federal property, so that the final version of the address vowed only to "hold, occupy, and possess" such property and to "collect duties and imposts."63
These phrases were ambiguous. How would the duties be collected? By naval vessels stationed offshore? Would this be coercion? How could the government "hold, occupy and possess" property that was under control of Confederate forces? The only remaining property in Union hands were two obscure forts in the Florida Keys along with Fort Pick-ens on an island at the mouth of Pensacola Bay and Fort Sumter on an island in Charleston harbor. Fort Sumter had become a commanding symbol of national sovereignty in the very cradle of secession, a symbol that the Confederate government could not tolerate if it wished its own sovereignty to be recognized by the world. Would Lincoln use force to defend Sumter? The ambiguity was intentional. Hoping to avoid provocation, Lincoln and Seward did not wish to reveal whether the velvet glove enclosed an iron fist.
There was no ambiguity about the peroration, revised and much improved from Seward's draft. "I am loth to close," said Lincoln. "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 battle-field, 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."
Contemporaries read into the inaugural address what they wished or expected to see. Republicans were generally satisfied with its "firmness" and "moderation." Confederates and their sympathizers branded it a "Declaration of War." Douglas Democrats in the North and conditional unionists in the south formed the constituencies that Lincoln most wanted and needed to reach. From these quarters the verdict was mixed but encouraging. "I am with him," said Douglas. Influential Tennesseans commended the "temperance and conservatism" of the address. And John Gilmer of North Carolina, though he had been unwilling to join Lincoln's cabinet, approved the president's first act in office. "What more does any reasonable Southern man expect or desire?" Gilmer asked.64
63. The final version of the address is in ibid., 249–71.
64. Douglas quoted in Providence Daily Post, Mar. 8, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 645; Tennesseans quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 192; Gilmer quoted in Randall, Lincoln the President, I, 308–9.
Lincoln had hoped to cool passions and buy time with his inaugural address—time to organize his administration, to prove his pacific intent, to allow the seeds of voluntary reconstruction to sprout. But when the new president went to his office for the first time on the morning after the inauguration, he received a jolt. On his desk lay a dispatch from Major Robert Anderson, commander of the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. Anderson reported that his supplies would last only a few more weeks. Time was running out.