CHAPTER 17
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Lincoln ~ Fillmore ~ Tyler ~ Buchanan
In the Law Offices of Lincoln and Herndon, the two longtime partners reviewed their outstanding files. Lincoln had ideas about how to handle certain cases and clients, and Herndon patiently heard him out. When they were through, Lincoln spread his large frame across the old sofa, propped up against the wall to keep it from falling apart, laying for a moment in silence, staring at the ceiling of his office. “Billy,” he said, “how long have we been together?”
“Over sixteen years,” Herndon answered.
“We’ve never had a cross word during all that time, have we?” Lincoln asked.
“No, indeed we have not.”
Lincoln fondly remembered the colorful controversies that had made their way through their office. Herndon later said that he “never saw him in a more cheerful mood.”
On his way out, Lincoln asked Herndon to keep the old sign that swayed outside on rusty hinges. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” Lincoln said in a hushed tone. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the form of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” With that, Lincoln took one last look at the office, and headed downstairs, accompanied by Herndon. On the way down, Lincoln confessed that leaving Springfield was affecting him more deeply than anyone could imagine, a sadness felt more acutely because of a stubborn premonition that he would never return alive. As the two left the building, a number of people clamored for Lincoln’s attention. Turning toward Herndon, Lincoln grasped his hand warmly. “Goodbye,” he said, disappearing into the crowd.
The following morning, February 11, Lincoln, his family, and his friends gathered at the railway station. For the next half hour, Lincoln shook the hands of the people he had known for so many years, the people whose mail he had sorted as a postmaster, who lived on plots that he had surveyed, customers who had come to his general store. They were the people who had sent him to the Illinois General Assembly and to Congress, people whom he had represented in the courts of law, jurors that he had addressed, as well as his dearest friends. Those who knew him best had never seen him so emotional. In the rain and the snow they had gathered by the thousands to send him off, and his breast heaved as he said farewell to as many as he could, trying hard to avoid being overwhelmed by his feelings. With the presidential party finally on board the train, the crowd, despite the rough winter weather, refused to part until they heard from their friend one last time. What could he say, Lincoln must have wondered. He had nothing prepared. How could he possibly explain what he was feeling? Obliging the crowd, who stood silently while whipped by wind and snow, Lincoln stepped out on the rear platform. “My friends,” he began, “no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. 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 that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.” The crowd cheered as the door closed behind Lincoln, as the engine of the train geared up, the smokestack puffed, and the wheels began to roll. Abraham Lincoln looked upon Springfield for the final time, heading east toward an uncertain future.
Lincoln had been circumspect during the transition, knowing the power his words would have to impact the situation. The following day in Indianapolis, he argued that the government “should merely hold and retake its own forts and other property.” He denied that the South could leave at their pleasure, as if the Union were some “free-love arrangement, to be maintained on passionate attraction.”
Congress met on February 13 and certified the returns of the Electoral College. Lincoln was in Ohio that day, and learned the news late that afternoon. Under the Constitution, this special meeting of Congress was presided over by John C. Breckinridge, the vice president. “It was evidently an exceedingly unpleasant duty to Mr. B,” reported the Salem Register.
Millard Fillmore, preparing to host Lincoln in western New York, had received multiple letters attesting to Lincoln’s opinions of him. “He speaks of thee and the administration in the warmest terms,” said one, while another said he was “gratified to learn that Mr. Lincoln has, on several occasions of late, expressed very emphatically his respect for you.” These, it would seem, were too many to be accidental. Fillmore, a figure of national stature who was popular in the border states and the South, was the target of courtship by the president-elect.
At 4:00 p.m. on February 16, Lincoln arrived in Buffalo to absolute chaos. Ten thousand people were present at the depot. Lincoln stepped off the train and exchanged “a hearty grip of the hand” with Millard Fillmore. The “most terrific shouts were uttered,” and the crowd rushed the train. Soldiers stationed at the depot “were tossed about as though they had been so many small boys” amid “indescribable” confusion. Cannon greeted the presidential party on both sides of the depot, but the brass band could not be heard over the “wild shouts” of a crowd that encircled the president in a “whirlpool.”
“A little path had been kept open through the crowd, through which we got Mr. Lincoln,” wrote John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s private secretaries. “The crowd closed up immediately after his passage, and the rest of the party only got through by dint of the most strenuous and persevering elbowing. Major Hunter [a member of the President’s party] had his arm so badly sprained that it is doubtful tonight whether he can continue his journey.” The president took two hours to traverse one mile to the hotel, only to find a crowd similar to that at the depot.
At 7:30 that evening Lincoln held a reception at the American Hotel, where “for over two hours a dense mass of people passed him, all eager to catch a glimpse of the countenance of ‘honest old Abe.’” Lincoln briefly addressed the crowd, too hoarse to give much of a speech, before attempting some badly needed rest. From Lincoln’s window, he could see the Young Men’s Christian Union across the street, which had displayed a banner, promising WE WILL PRAY FOR YOU.
The next day was Sunday, and the weather “cold and blustering.” Lincoln and Fillmore attended the 10:00 a.m. services at the Unitarian Church, presided over by Reverend George W. Hosmer. Afterwards the two had lunch. Later in the day, Lincoln went to see Father Beason, a famed Indian preacher.
Lincoln’s pre-dawn departure the following morning was attended by hundreds of Buffalonians, determined to give him a proper send-off.
After Lincoln had taken his leave, Fillmore worried “everything looks dark and gloomy. The party which has elected Mr. Lincoln is already hopelessly divided, and perhaps after all this is the best symptom of the times. But every thing now depends upon the wisdom, discretion, and firmness of the incoming administration. If we can retain the border states, avoid a civil war, and offer an apology for the seceding states to come back, after they have tired of the folly of secession, I do not utterly despair of seeing the Union again restored.” While he professed to know nothing of Lincoln’s administrative ability, he thought that Seward and Bates would be capable advisers.
On February 22, troops paraded through the capital in celebration of Washington’s Birthday. Tyler had protested what he deemed the unnecessary show of force. Buchanan responded, “I find it impossible to prevent two or three companies of the Federal troops here from joining the procession today with the volunteers of the district, without giving serious offense to the tens of thousands of the people who have assembled to witness the parade.” Buchanan, of course, had more in mind than honoring his predecessor. He was determined to see an uneventful inaugural and to pass on a capital as secure as possible—if the president-elect could make it safely to Washington.
Fearful of an attempt on Lincoln’s life in Maryland, his handlers changed his travel schedule, and Lincoln arrived in Washington early on February 23. His transition headquarters were in the “spacious parlors” of the Willard Hotel, where the Peace Conference was hard at work. Lincoln’s secretaries recalled “the principal hotel, was never in its history more busy nor more brilliant.”
Lincoln called on President Buchanan, and spent a few minutes with him in general conversation. Lincoln also visited the House and Senate, as well as the Supreme Court, where he had argued a case twelve years earlier. Buchanan and his cabinet later came to see him at the Willard. The Peace Conference, Douglas, and Breckinridge all paid their respects.
From the moment of his arrival to his swearing-in, “every moment of the day and many hours of the night were occupied.” Meeting with the Peace Conference, Lincoln “created quite a sensation.” One southern member muttered, “How in the mischief did he get through Baltimore?” The delegates formed a receiving line in the hall, led by Tyler and Chase. The latter introduced the former president to the president-elect, who “received him with all the respect due to his position.” The members were introduced to Lincoln by their last names, but “in nine cases out of ten, Mr. Lincoln would promptly recall their entire name, no matter how many initials it contained,” wowing the room with his “most wonderful memory.” To James Brown Clay, son of America’s greatest compromiser, he said, “I was a friend of your father.” There was playful give-and-take. To William Rives, he said, “I always had an idea you were a much taller man.” The southern delegates “freely expressed their gratification at his affability and easy manner, and all joined in expressing agreeable disappointment at his good looks in contrast to his pictures. Nothing was said to any one in regard to the condition of the country or the national troubles.”
On February 24, Tyler wrote from Brown’s Hotel to President Buchanan. “I think you may rely upon tranquility at the south. Since you left me I have made particular inquiries. General Davis has been written to and will be written to. He is advised to send a commissioner, and to go to Charleston himself to represent and quiet all things.” Tyler believed that nothing would happen until a Confederate commissioner arrived in Washington.
On February 27, the Peace Conference concluded proposing a constitutional amendment, reminiscent of the Crittenden Compromise, which was referred to the House and Senate. Slavery would be prohibited above 36' 30" and permitted in the South; questions involving slave property in the territory would be resolved by common law. New states carved out of territory north or south would be free or slave as their constitutions provided at the time of statehood. John Tyler believed the slave interest was on the losing end. Through James Seddon of Virginia, Tyler introduced a measure to radically alter the Senate, requiring a majority of slave state senators before any action could be taken; for a majority of slave state senators to remove any officer of the executive branch; and for a method for states to formally leave the Union. As the conference drew to a close, Tyler urged the delegates to give his measures their support. When they declined, Tyler rejected the work of the conference entirely.
Despite Tyler’s dissent, newspapers greeted the proposal with tremendous but ultimately unwarranted fanfare. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported “much rejoicing here in consequence of the favorable termination of the action of the Peace Congress.” Headlines blared THE SKIES BRIGHT,GOOD NEWS FROM WASHINGTON, and THE PEACE CONFERENCE AGREE. One hundred guns were fired in Washington in celebration. But the New Orleans Daily Picayune realized “they cannot pass the Senate.”
Crittenden wasted no time in bringing the Peace Conference’s amendment before the Senate. But for all the work of the delegates, for all the high hopes invested in the conference, there was never even a vote. Crittenden attempted to strike out his own amendment and substitute the language of the conference, but was defeated 28–7. On final passage of his own resolutions, the count was 20–19, barely a majority and not nearly enough for a constitutional amendment.
The Peace Conference’s work met a similar fate in the House. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania joked, “I object on behalf of John Tyler who does not want them in.” Tyler, bemoaning the results, said he had to “address ‘stocks and stones’ who had neither ears nor hearts to understand.” The day after the Peace Conference concluded, Tyler was back in Richmond speaking to an anxious crowd of Virginians from the steps of the Exchange Hotel. Tyler defended what he believed he had done for peace. Now, he was confident that no compromise could be made, “that every hour’s delay was perilous, and that nothing remained but to act promptly and boldly in the exercise of state sovereignty.” It was after eight o’clock in the evening when Tyler could hear a band outside his suite. Stepping onto his balcony, Tyler called the compromise proposed by the conference “A miserable, rickety affair,” one that did nothing for the South. He called for its rejection.
Tyler had enjoyed a brief resurgence in the North, which this speech brought to an end. The Albany Journal reported “John Tyler is doing all he can to drive Virginia out of the Union, and it is believed that he will succeed in case Lincoln’s Inaugural suggests a coercive policy.” The Cincinnati Gazette jabbed, “John Tyler—The old reprobate!” With his initial speech at the Peace Conference, they assumed he “had risen from the grave of political infamy in which he had slept for so many years, that he might have an opportunity to reinstate himself somewhat in the estimation of the American people, by rendering service to a country once disgraced by his official trickery. But it is now plain it was for a different purpose altogether that he was called forth.”
On March 1, John Tyler arrived to take his seat in the Virginia secession convention.
In the minutes leading to Lincoln’s inauguration, the cabinet of James Buchanan met for the final time in the president’s room of the Capitol. Secretary of War Holt received a dispatch from Major Anderson, saying that without twenty or thirty thousand men to capture the batteries pointed at Sumter, the fort could not be sustained. The “dark and rainy” weather on the morning of March 4 matched the mood. Under the headline JAMES BUCHANAN A HAPPY MAN, one newspaper speculated, “We do not suppose there is a happier man on the American Continent than is James Buchanan today. . . . However much his enemies may be disposed to attribute of trouble to him and his policy, it cannot be denied that his Administration has been during a time of extraordinary difficulty and trial.”
Buchanan and the Committee of the Senate arrived at the Willard and walked with Lincoln to his carriage. Buchanan and Lincoln rode side by side. Winfield Scott had mustered every available soldier into the city. So many guards clustered around the carriage that one newspaper complained they hid its occupants from view. Platoons of soldiers, mounted and on foot, were there to preserve the peace. Marksmen adorned the rooftops. At the north entrance to the Capitol, Lincoln found a board tunnel created especially for the occasion, to shield him as he alighted from the carriage. Buchanan was not much for words on the ride, but is reported to have said, “My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.”
“Mr. President,” Lincoln is said to have responded, “I cannot say that I shall enter it with much pleasure, but I assure you that I shall do what I can to maintain the high standards set by my illustrious predecessors who have occupied it.”
Shortly after noon, two presidents walked through the tunnel and into the Capitol. For a time they waited in the President’s Room. Buchanan took Lincoln aside to a corner where John Hay was standing. Hay waited with “boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weather-beaten head.” In a moment like this, every “word must have its value,” Hay supposed.
“I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that at the left,” Buchanan told his successor, before moving on to “many intimate details of the kitchen and pantry.” Lincoln “listened with that weary, introverted look of his, not answering.” The next day he would admit to Hay that he “had not heard a word of it.”
They entered a crowded Senate chamber to watch the vice president sworn in. One observer noted, “Buchanan was so withered and bowed with age, that in contrast with the towering form of Mr. Lincoln he seemed little more than half a man.” Guests in the chamber “crowded and pushed [Buchanan] rudely by, without a word or bow, and all through the awfully trying two hours he bravely and manfully bore himself by the side of his overshadowing, unshapely successor.” From there, the party proceeded to a platform erected over the East Portico for the inauguration. “In a firm, clear voice,” Lincoln delivered his address.
He acknowledged his predecessors and the tumultuous times over which they presided. “It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our National Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have, in succession, administered the Executive branch of the government. They have conducted it through many perils, and generally with great success.” Originally, this line was “on the whole, with great success.” At Seward’s recommendation, Lincoln changed it to “generally.”
“Yet, with all this scope of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years, under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.”
If its hearers in the South were within the reach of reason, Lincoln’s inaugural could not have failed. “Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?
“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.’
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by Jackson, had sworn in every president since Van Buren. He arose to perform this task one final time. “The clerk opened his Bible, and Mr. Lincoln, laying his hand upon it, with deliberation pronounced the oath.”
With an artillery salute, Lincoln and Buchanan returned to their carriage, and back to the White House. At the threshold, “Mr. Buchanan warmly shook the hand of his successor, with cordial good wishes for his personal happiness and the national peace and prosperity.” At 1:00 a.m.,returning from the inaugural ball, Lincoln was handed a telegram regarding Fort Sumter—which would have to be “strongly reinforced or summarily abandoned” within “a few weeks at most.”
The new administration was buried in work from the minute they opened their doors. Lincoln’s secretaries would process two to three hundred letters in a given week, ranging from critical and time-sensitive missives to complete nonsense. There were two “big wicker waste-basket[s]” on either side of a desk where half the mail went. The other half were given “more or less respectful treatment,” generally sent to one department or another, perhaps with or without remarks. “It is lightning work, necessarily.” The rest, however, were “wildest, the fiercest and the most obscene ravings of utter insanity.” Many had advice for the president. One of his clerks remembered, “It is marvelous how they can, theoretically, swing troops back and forth about the country. It is plain that they all have played the game of checkers, and have learned how to ‘jump’ the Confederate forces and forts with their men.” Lincoln also saw visitors; well-wishers, job applicants, politicians, anyone concerned about an issue—all were able to access the president of the United States. Nicolay wrote, “some of us have work and annoyance enough to make almost anybody sick.”
On the evening of March 6, the new cabinet met, “for introduction and acquaintance,” a group of people who were mostly strangers to one another, who now had the biggest task before them of any cabinet in history. Gideon Welles recorded “doubts and uncertainty on every hand as to who could be trusted.” Lincoln wanted no southerners thrown out of office on account of party, and especially no one from Virginia. “A strange state of things existed at that time in Washington. The atmosphere was thick with treason,” Welles remembered.
On March 9, Lincoln wrote to Winfield Scott, asking him how long Anderson could remain at Sumter, if he could relieve him in that time with what he had, and what additional resources would make such relief possible. Scott responded that Anderson had provisions for forty days, but that “a single real assault” could take the fort. Scott argued that to resupply would require “a fleet of war vessels and transports which it would take four months to collect,” along with “5,000 regulars and 20,000 volunteers,” which Congress would need to approve and “from six to eight months to raise, organize, and discipline.”
For those reasons, Scott recommended shifting focus to moving Anderson and his men safely from South Carolina. Lincoln, whose military service was limited to a militia captaincy in the Black Hawk War, who had never seen combat, had been told by the senior soldier in his command that he would have to abandon Fort Sumter.