Lincoln and the Decision for War

The Northern Response to Secession

Russell McClintock

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780807871546, 9780807831885
• eBook ISBN: 9780807886328
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

When Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 prompted several Southern states to secede, the North was sharply divided over how to respond. In this groundbreaking and highly praised book, McClintock follows the decision-making process from bitter partisan rancor to consensus. From small towns to big cities and from state capitals to Washington, D.C., McClintock highlights individuals both powerful and obscure to demonstrate the ways ordinary citizens, party activists, state officials, and national leaders interacted to influence the Northern response to what was essentially a political crisis. He argues that although Northerners' reactions to Southern secession were understood and expressed through partisan newspapers and officials, the decision fell into the hands of an ever-smaller group of people until finally it was Lincoln alone who would choose whether the future of the American republic was to be determined through peace or by sword.

Chapter 1: On the Brink of the Precipice

The Election of 1860

The dramatic confrontation of 1860–61 forced Northerners to make any number of momentous decisions, including, in the end, whether to engage in a civil war to prevent secession. It is ironic, then, that the conflict’s roots could be said to lie in a non-decision: the refusal of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to specify who within the new government would have final authority to decide constitutional disputes. Of course, it could be argued that the true origins of the crisis lie a century before that in an “unthinking decision”: colonial planters’ switch from white indentured servants to black slaves as their chief labor force.¹ Or perhaps its causes lie further back still, in the Spanish conquerors’ importation of African slaves to their New World sugar plantations—but that would draw us to Portuguese sugar growers’ first use of African slaves in the eastern Atlantic islands, or even to late-medieval traders’ introduction of sugar, and the coffee and tea it was meant to sweeten, to a new western market to begin with.

Whether or not the crucial decisions had been avoided or unthinking or lay (as a romantic nineteenth-century writer might phrase it) shrouded in the mists of history, their outcomes left Americans of 1860 to harvest the fruit of their forebears’ labor—or more accurately, of their reliance on slave labor. Slavery had profited the young republic greatly, had fattened the purses of Southern planters and Northern merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, but now the bill had come due, and fresh decisions must be made about paying it. The Deep South made its choice quickly. It had been a true slave society (both economic well-being and social order relying on the “peculiar institution”) for twice as long as it had belonged to the union of states; it would depart that union if remaining in it threatened its way of life. The Upper South was torn, slavery’s claws being dug not quite so deeply there as in the cotton states. Many of its residents strove to sever ties with the Union, but others struggled mightily to maintain them. Most huddled between, eyes northward, waiting to see whether the new government was indeed the menace that disunionists claimed.

It was with the citizens of the Northern free states, then, that the future of the republic lay. It would be a long, cheerless winter of decision for them, a time in which alternatives were hazy and vague, all roads looked evil, and resolving one dilemma generally only produced another.

Perhaps the first individual to appreciate the magnitude and maddening complexity of what was happening in 1860 was an obscure federal artillery officer named Truman Seymour, who on a mild Southern evening in early November faced the first great decision of the crisis. Somehow this son of a poor Vermont preacher found himself on a dimly lit wharf in Charleston, South Carolina, with his country’s future in his hands. Lieutenant Seymour had not gone to the wharf insensible of risk; before setting out on his mission—to load arms and ammunition from the city’s federal arsenal into a boat and carry them across the harbor—he and his handful of soldiers had dressed in civilian clothing and waited until nightfall. Their precautions had failed. A prosperous-looking man who claimed to own the wharf now stood before them threatening, if loading continued, to whip a sullen and growing crowd of onlookers into a violent mob.

Seymour was not new to danger; he had distinguished himself for bravery on the battlefields of Mexico. But no situation he had faced in Mexico could have prepared him for the devil’s choice that lay before him. If he defied the wharf’s owner and carried out his charge, the crowd was likely to attack, not only injuring and maybe killing some of his men, but in doing so sparking an incident that could easily escalate into civil war. But if he backed down and returned his cargo to the arsenal, the small garrison of troops across the harbor might be left dangerously weak and vulnerable to attack by zealous secessionists.²

It is unlikely that the unfortunate Lieutenant Seymour bothered to consider what forces had conspired to produce this moment, but if he did his thoughts would have been with neither the Constitutional Convention nor seventeenth-century planters, and certainly not with the late-medieval sugar trade. He would have known exactly what caused his encounter on the Charleston wharf: the national election the day before. Throughout election night the telegraph had hummed with reports from around the country, and news of Abraham Lincoln’s victory was confirmed by the time Charleston residents awoke. They greeted it with flag-waving, fireworks, and parades as enthusiastic as those in any Northern city. “The tea has been thrown overboard, the revolution of 1860 has been initiated,” prominent fire-eater R. Barnwell Rhett proclaimed grandly.³ The city’s U.S. District Court judge, district attorney, and customs officer all resigned their posts that day, the judge announcing, to the delight of the masses and the envy of the politicians, “So far as I am concerned, the Temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is now closed. If it shall never again be opened I thank God that its doors have been closed before its altar has been desecrated with sacrifices to tyranny.”

That same day, South Carolina’s state legislature called a special convention to meet in mid-January for the purpose of seceding; three days later, under force of public pressure and an ardent desire to force the hands of other, more cautious slave states, it would move the date of the convention up a month to December 17. Thus would the exhilaration that followed the election’s outcome lead to the assembling of the first secession convention just six weeks later, a full two and a half months before Lincoln was even inaugurated. What was more, the legislators began preparing for the possibility of war by adding 10,000 volunteers to the state’s defenses.

As Seymour would soon discover, though, it was not certain that fighting, if it occurred, would be done by organized forces. City and state leaders feared that the furious celebrations of coming independence could spin out of control. The likely flashpoint was obvious: a garrison of seventy-odd U.S. troops was stationed at Fort Moultrie, foremost among Charleston harbor’s four coastal fortifications, to guard the port from foreign threat and to recondition its worn and outdated defenses. With the U.S. courts and the customhouse shut down, that garrison was now the only remaining federal presence outside of the local postmaster. To city inhabitants intent on casting off their old allegiance and founding a new nation, the soldiers took on the alarming aspect of foreign occupiers.

Moultrie’s officers recognized the danger and had already urged their commander, Col. John Gardner, to safeguard the forts. The engineers in charge of renovations, particularly conscious of the fortifications’ weakness, requested that Gardner provide arms for the most loyal laborers working under them before they were overrun by a mob—an eventuality that seemed imminent after the previous Saturday, when a number of civilians sporting blue secession cockades boldly toured the construction area at Fort Moultrie to assess the progress of repairs. At first Gardner had rejected the request for more arms, thinking such a move unwise given the emotional state of Charleston and the questionable loyalty of the workmen. However, the jubilation that followed the election convinced him that inaction held more peril than action. He ordered Seymour’s small party to the arsenal to withdraw additional weapons and ammunition. But both Moultrie and the arsenal were under watch; before the nervous soldiers could finish loading their small boat, a hostile crowd had gathered and Seymour faced his lonely decision.

The lieutenant sensibly opted for discretion over valor. He ordered the crates back into the arsenal and returned to the fort empty-handed. In doing so he averted an ugly incident that would have roused Northern public outrage and placed enormous pressure on the lame-duck administration in Washington to respond with force. What impact his choice would have on the fort’s long-term safety remained to be seen.

The following day Seymour returned to Charleston to call on the city’s mayor, who, recognizing that he had no legal right to interfere, agreed that the arms could be transported. But now, perversely, Colonel Gardner refused to take the weapons. Officially, he protested that he needed no permission from local authorities to transfer federal arms from a federal arsenal to a federal fort, but in fact he feared—again, quite sensibly—the consequences of attempting to withdraw them. In any event, the weapons and ammunition remained in the arsenal, and the soldiers returned to their coastal stronghold.

That decision made, a new dilemma developed. Charleston authorities, fearful lest another such episode not end so happily, wired to Washington that unless the War Department revoked Gardner’s authority to procure arms, “collision was inevitable.” Upon being handed the message, Secretary of War John B. Floyd replied without hesitation, “Telegraph back at once, say you have seen me, that no such orders have been issued and none such will be issued under any circumstances.” (In fact, Floyd himself had absently authorized the withdrawal, but that was conveniently forgotten.)⁴

Thanks to Lieutenant Seymour’s judgment and Colonel Gardner’s decision to follow his subordinate’s lead, the immediate danger had passed by the time Floyd’s response reached South Carolina. Still, the results of the episode were significant. In Charleston, South Carolina militia now guarded the arsenal, city leaders warned Gardner that they would resist any attempt at reinforcement, and the garrison, for its part, no longer permitted any civilian presence in the forts. In Washington, forging a viable policy for the forts became the administration’s foremost concern and its most troublesome challenge. The ease with which Charleston harbor almost slid into violence engendered in President James Buchanan and several of his cabinet ministers an attitude of supreme caution and deference to Southern caveats, while stirring in others an intolerance for secessionists’ defiance of federal authority. Over the following weeks a similar rift would develop among all Northerners, coloring every option and shaping every debate for the next five months and eventually forcing a decision over war.

President Buchanan and others inclined to optimism had reason to hope that, provided open conflict were avoided, the crisis would be compromised away: it was far from the first sectional conflict, and all had somehow been resolved before. The history of sectional crises and compromises was as old as the Constitution, whose existence had itself required intense negotiation over the tender subject of slavery—and that at a time when most Northern states still allowed the controversial institution within their own borders. Through a series of crises since that time, two common threads ran: all arose out of Southern concerns that the federal government might somehow be able to interfere with slavery, and all were resolved through some arrangement whereby Northern leaders agreed to squelch any movement against what soon became a distinctly Southern institution. For both sides, the costs of antislavery action were simply too high: by the 1820s slavery had become so vital to the South’s economy and so central to its society and its culture that white residents could not afford to ignore any possible threat, while the vast majority of Northerners, for their part, believed that maintaining peace between the sections was far more important than ending slavery.

So it would seem reasonable that a solution would present itself in 1860 as well. But the new crisis would prove different from any that had come before; the constant threat of armed conflict at the Southern forts, so quick to emerge, showed that clearly enough. Only once before had violence loomed so near. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson had responded to South Carolina’s “nullification” of federal law by threatening to march an army into the Palmetto State and hang whom he considered the traitorous nullifiers. But the risk then had revolved around the unlikely prospect of an outside federal force invading a state; even had a rapid compromise not been worked out in Congress, the legal and logistical problems alone, never mind the utter lack of support from Jackson’s native South, would have delayed any action until cooler heads could prevail. In 1860, however, political negotiations would have to take place while a weak federal force was already positioned in the heart of Southern radicalism, in a situation in which hostilities could break out at any time.

What also boded ill for resolving this crisis was the objection most Northerners had to mollifying Southern concerns over the forts. Particularly unpromising was that the newly elected president shared their disgust with his predecessor’s policy of appeasement. In mid-December Lincoln would respond to rumors that Buchanan intended to evacuate the Charleston outposts by snapping angrily, “If that is true, they ought to hang him,” and then notifying the general in chief of the army and key Republican leaders that upon taking office he would immediately order the forts’ recapture.⁵ The rumors turned out to be false, and the Charleston forts were duly transferred to Lincoln’s authority two and a half months later, but if Northern leaders were so averse to conciliation, preserving the peace long enough for some resolution to develop would plainly be a difficult proposition.

This unique risk of conflict stemmed from a more basic difference from previous crises: Southerners had threatened to break up the Union before, but never had a state actually plunged into secession without waiting for its fellows—a wait that always before had delayed disunionism long enough to kill it. It was South Carolina’s unprecedented declaration of independence, formalized in mid-December but already real in the public mind in early November, that made the federal presence on its soil such a burning issue. At the same time, that act pushed the national debate beyond more traditional—and more negotiable—slavery-related matters and forced Northerners to confront the question of the perpetuity of the Union itself, a matter not open to any middle-ground solution or parliamentary sleight-of-hand.

In the final analysis, as Lieutenant Seymour and his contemporaries well knew, what led to his confrontation on November 7 was secession, and what provoked secession was Lincoln’s election on November 6. That, then, is where our story begins.

On a beautiful fall Saturday in the small lakeside city of Oswego, New York, twenty-four-year-old Gus Frey penned a letter to his brother Lud in Palatine Bridge. With just three days remaining before the election, he fairly bubbled, “Politics is about the only topic of Conversation just now.” Brimming with enthusiasm, he listed the speakers at the large Republican rally he had attended at nearby Pevirs Hollow the night before and at the one to be held in Oswego that night. He bragged about the large majority that local party officials expected to give Lincoln on Tuesday and expressed his hope that Lud and his colleagues would be equally successful down in Montgomery County. He scoffed at the possibility that a Republican victory might have dangerous consequences: “We shall carry old Abe the Rail Splitter triumphantly into the White House. And immediately after this I suffer we must expect to see a ‘wery large army,’ of fierce big whiskered Southerners, to carry fire and Slaughter into our peaceful homes over the list. I doubt very much whether any one is very much scared by all the raw head and bloody bones stories of the Democratic papers.” “But,” Gus concluded, “you probably dont care to hear any more about Politics and so I will say no more about it, till after next Tuesday, and on the night of that day could you see me you would doubtless think me a fit subject for the insane asylum, when you saw me giving three times three, throwing up my hat and turning four somersaults backwards.”⁶

Not all of Oswego’s residents were so sanguine. Although politics was considerably more peripheral to Sarah Woolsey Johnson’s life than it was to young Gus Frey’s, on Sunday, November 4, the day after her fellow-townsman wrote so enthusiastically to his brother, Sarah Johnson expressed her own strong feelings about the result of the impending contest. In the midst of the news of family and neighbors that dominated her private journal, she wrote, with no elaboration, “Very gloomy about election. God help this distracted country.” Two days later her fears were confirmed. On the evening of the sixth, she observed simply, “Election. Mr Lincoln of course elected.” Then, no doubt thinking of the likes of Gus Frey and his compatriots, she added in a rush, “Again I say God help the country the Republican party here are radical in the extreme.”⁷

In such private writings can we see the attitude toward politics of (for lack of a better term) ordinary Northerners: here, an excited young man eagerly involved in one of his first campaigns and an older, less politically engaged woman, unable to vote and more concerned with the issues of daily life. Two features of these brief snapshots stand out: the deep interest of both individuals in the outcome of the election, and their diametrically opposed views of what that outcome would mean. In these our two writers were profoundly typical of participants and observers across the North. Everyone knew the election of 1860 was momentous; by election day everyone knew the Republicans would win; and nobody agreed on what would happen next.

In its pageantry and excitement the election of 1860 rivaled any campaign in living memory. Throughout the North, huge rallies, fireworks displays, and torchlight processions were the order of the day. New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong described one such parade of the Wide Awakes, the organization of militant young Republicans, as “imposing and splendid”: “The clubs marched in good order, each man with his torch or lamp of kerosene oil on a pole, with a flag below the light; and the line was further illuminated by the most lavish pyrotechnics. Every file had its rockets and its Roman candles, and the procession moved along under a galaxy of fire balls. I have never seen so beautiful a spectacle on any political turnout.” The city being a Democratic stronghold, a few weeks later Strong and tens of thousands of his fellow New Yorkers witnessed an anti-Republican exhibition that dwarfed the previous one, a torchlight parade “more numerous than any political demonstration I have ever witnessed.” Being unsympathetic to the cause, he and a friend left early, but hours later, as he was writing in his diary, he could still hear the parade going by outside his window.⁸

Across the country and throughout the months leading up to the election, multitudes of Americans witnessed and participated in similar displays as the parties pulled out all the stops to attract voters. And it seemed they succeeded. On election day, November 6, over 82 percent of eligible Northerners showed up at th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: On the Brink of the Precipice
• Chapter 2: I Would Not Endanger the Perpetuity of This Union
• Chapter 3: Proportions of Which I Had but a Faint Conception
• Chapter 4: The Issues of the Late Campaign Are Obsolete
• Chapter 5: We Know Not What a Day or Two or an Hour May Bring Forth
• Chapter 6: One’s Opinions Change Fast in Revolutionary Times
• Chapter 7: The Storm Is Weathered
• Chapter 8: A Calm Pervades the Political World
• Chapter 9: Any Decision Would Be Preferable to This Uncertainty
• Chapter 10: Everybody Now Is for the Union
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index