CHAPTER VI

SECESSION

1. _The Case of the South against the Union_.

The Republicans of the North had given their votes upon a very clear

issue, but probably few of them had fully realised how grave a result

would follow. Within a few days of the election of Lincoln the first

step in the movement of Secession had been taken, and before the new

President entered upon his duties it was plain that either the

dissatisfied States must be allowed to leave the Union or the Union must

be maintained by war.

Englishmen at that time and since have found a difficulty in grasping the

precise cause of the war that followed. Of those who were inclined to

sympathise with the North, some regarded the war as being simply about

slavery, and, while unhesitatingly opposed to slavery, wondered whether

it was right to make war upon it; others, regarding it as a war for the

Union and not against slavery at all, wondered whether it was right to

make war for a Union that could not be peaceably maintained. Now it is

seldom possible to state the cause of a war quite candidly in a single

sentence, because as a rule there are on each side people who concur in

the final rupture for somewhat different reasons. But, in this case,

forecasting a conclusion which must be examined in some detail, we can

state the cause of war in a very few sentences. If we ask first what the

South fought for, the answer is: the leaders of the South and the great

mass of the Southern people had a single supreme and all-embracing object

in view, namely, to ensure the permanence and, if need be, the extension

of the slave system; they carried with them, however, a certain number of

Southerners who were opposed or at least averse to slavery, but who

thought that the right of their States to leave the Union or remain in it

as they chose must be maintained. If we ask what the North fought for,

the answer is: A majority, by no means overwhelming, of the Northern

people refused to purchase the adhesion of the South by conniving at any

further extension of slavery, and an overwhelming majority refused to let

the South dissolve the Union for slavery or for any other cause.

The issue about slavery, then, became merged in another issue, concerning

the Union, which had so far remained in the background.

The first thing that must be grasped about it is the total difference of

view which now existed between North and South in regard to the very

nature of their connection. The divergence had taken place so completely

and in the main so quietly that each side now realised with surprise and

indignation that the other held an opposite opinion. In the North the

Union was regarded as constituting a permanent and unquestionable

national unity from which it was flat rebellion for a State or any other

combination of persons to secede. In the South the Union appeared merely

as a peculiarly venerable treaty of alliance, of which the dissolution

would be very painful, but which left each State a sovereign body with an

indefeasible right to secede if in the last resort it judged that the

painful necessity had come. In a few border States there was division

and doubt on this subject, a fact which must have helped to hide from

each side the true strength of opinion on the other. But, setting aside

these border States, there were in the North some who doubted whether it

was expedient to fight for the Union, but none of any consequence who

doubted that it was constitutionally correct; and there were in the South

men who insisted that no occasion to secede had arisen, but these very

men, when outvoted in their States, maintained most passionately the

absolute right of secession.

The two sides contended for two contrary doctrines of constitutional law.

It is natural when parties are disputing over a question of political

wisdom and of moral right that each should claim for its contention if

possible the sanction of acknowledged legal principle. So it was with

the parties to the English Civil War, and the tendency to regard matters

from a legal point of view is to this day deeply engrained in the mental

habits of America. But North and South were really divided by something

other than legal opinion, a difference in the objects to which their

feelings of loyalty and patriotism were directed. This difference found

apt expression in the Cabinet of President Buchanan, who of course

remained in office between the election of Lincoln in November and his

inauguration in March. General Cass of Michigan had formerly stood for

the Presidency with the support of the South, and he held Cabinet office

now as a sympathiser with the South upon slavery, but he was a

Northerner. "I see how it is," he said to two of his colleagues; "you

are a Virginian, and you are a South Carolinian; I am not a Michigander,

I am an American."

In a former chapter the creation of the Union and the beginnings of a

common national life have been traced in outline. Obstacles to the Union

had existed both in the North and in the South, and, after it had been

carried, the tendency to threaten disruption upon some slight conflict of

interest had shown itself in each. But a proud sense of single

nationality had soon become prevalent in both, and in the North nothing

whatever had happened to set back this growth, for the idea which Lowell

had once attributed to his Hosea Biglow of abjuring Union with slave

owners was a negligible force. Undivided allegiance to the Union was the

natural sentiment of citizens of Ohio or Wisconsin, States created by the

authority of the Union out of the common dominion of the Union. It had

become, if anything, more deeply engrained in the original States of the

North, for their predominant occupation in commerce would tend in this

particular to give them larger views. The pride of a Boston man in the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts was of the same order as his pride in the

city of Boston; both were largely pride in the part which Boston and

Massachusetts had taken in making the United States of America. Such a

man knew well that South Carolina had once threatened secession, but, for

that matter, the so-called Federalists of New England had once threatened

it. The argument of Webster in the case of South Carolina was a classic,

and was taken as conclusive on the question of legal right. The terser

and more resonant declaration of President Jackson, a Southerner, and the

response to it which thrilled all States, South or North, outside South

Carolina, had set the seal to Webster's doctrines. There had been loud

and ominous talk of secession lately; it was certainly not mere bluster;

Northerners in the main were cautious politicians and had been tempted to

go far to conciliate it. But if the claim of Southern States were put in

practice, the whole North would now regard it not as a respectable claim,

but as an outrage.

It is important to notice that the disposition to take this view did not

depend upon advanced opinions against slavery. Some of the most violent

opponents of slavery would care relatively little about the Constitution

or the Union; they would at first hesitate as to whether a peaceful

separation between States which felt so differently on a moral question

like slavery was not a more Christian solution of their difference than a

fratricidal war. On the other hand, men who cared little about slavery,

and would gladly have sacrificed any convictions they had upon that

matter for the sake of the Union, were at first none the less vehement in

their anger at an attack upon the Union. There is, moreover, a more

subtle but still important point to be observed in this connection.

Democrats in the North inclined as a party to stringent and perhaps

pedantically legal views of State rights as against the rights of the

Union; but this by no means necessarily meant that they sympathised more

than Republicans with the claim to dissolve the Union. They laid

emphasis on State rights merely because they believed that these would be

a bulwark against any sort of government tyranny, and that the large

power which was reserved to the local or provincial authorities of the

States made the government of the nation as a whole more truly expressive

of the will of the whole people. They now found themselves entangled (as

we shall see) in curious doubts as to what the Federal Government might

do to maintain the Union, but they had not the faintest doubt that the

Union was meant to be maintained. The point which is now being

emphasised must not be misapprehended; differences of sentiment in regard

to slavery, in regard to State rights, in regard to the authority of

Government, did, as the war went on and the price was paid, gravely

embarrass the North; but it was a solid and unhesitating North which said

that the South had no right to secede.

Up to a certain point the sense of patriotic pride in the Union had grown

also in the South. It was fostered at first by the predominant part

which the South played in the political life of the country. But for a

generation past the sense of a separate interest of the South had been

growing still more vigorously. The political predominance of the South

had continued, but under a standing menace of downfall as the North grew

more populous and the patriotism which it at first encouraged had become

perverted into an arrogantly unconscious feeling that the Union was an

excellent thing on condition that it was subservient to the South. The

common interest of the Southern States was slavery; and, when the

Northerners had become a majority which might one day dominate the

Federal Government, this common interest of the slave States found a

weapon at hand in the doctrine of the inherent sovereignty of each

individual State. This doctrine of State sovereignty had come to be held

as universally in the South as the strict Unionist doctrine in the North,

and held with as quiet and unshakable a confidence that it could not be

questioned. It does not seem at all strange that the State, as against

the Union, should have remained the supreme object of loyalty in old

communities like those of South Carolina and Virginia, abounding as they

did in conservative influences which were lacking in the North. But this

provincial loyalty was not in the same sense a natural growth in States

like Alabama or Mississippi. These, no less than Indiana and Illinois,

were the creatures of the Federal Congress, set up within the memory of

living men, with arbitrary boundaries that cut across any old lines of

division. There was, in fact, no spontaneous feeling of allegiance

attaching to these political units, and the doctrine of their sovereignty

had no use except as a screen for the interest in slavery which the

Southern States had in common. But Calhoun, in a manner characteristic

of his peculiar and dangerous type of intellect, had early seen in a view

of State sovereignty, which would otherwise have been obsolete, the most

serviceable weapon for the joint interests of the Southern States. In a

society where intellectual life was restricted, his ascendency had been

great, though his disciples had, reasonably enough, thrown aside the

qualifications which his subtle mind had attached to the right of

secession. Thus in the Southern States generally, even among men most

strongly opposed to the actual proposal to secede, the real or alleged

constitutional right of a State to secede if it chose now passed

unquestioned and was even regarded as a precious liberty.

It is impossible to avoid asking whether on this question of

constitutional law the Northern opinion or the Southern opinion was

correct. (The question was indeed an important question in determining

the proper course of procedure for a President when confronted with

secession, but it must be protested that the moral right and political

wisdom of neither party in the war depended mainly, if at all, upon this

legal point. It was a question of the construction which a court of law

should put upon a document which was not drawn up with any view to

determining this point.) If we go behind the Constitution, which was

then and is now in force, to the original document of which it took the

place, we shall find it entitled "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual

Union," but we shall not find any such provisions as men desirous of

creating a stable and permanent federal government might have been

expected to frame. If we read the actual Constitution we shall find no

word distinctly implying that a State could or could not secede. As to

the real intention of its chief authors, there can be no doubt that they

hoped and trusted the Union would prove indissoluble, and equally little

doubt that they did not wish to obtrude upon those whom they asked to

enter into it the thought that this step would be irrevocable. For the

view taken in the South there is one really powerful argument, on which

Jefferson Davis insisted passionately in the argumentative memoirs with

which he solaced himself in old age. It is that in several of the

States, when the Constitution was accepted, public declarations were made

to the citizens of those States by their own representatives that a State

might withdraw from the Union. But this is far from conclusive. No man

gets rid of the obligation of a bond by telling a witness that he does

not mean to be bound; the question is not what he means, but what the

party with whom he deals must naturally take him to mean. Now the

Constitution of the United States upon the face of it purports to create

a government able to take its place among the other governments of the

world, able if it declares war to wield the whole force of its country in

that war, and able if it makes peace to impose that peace upon all its

subjects. This seems to imply that the authority of that government over

part of the country should be legally indefeasible. It would have been

ridiculous if, during a war with Great Britain, States on the Canadian

border should have had the legal right to secede, and set up a neutral

government with a view to subsequent reunion with Great Britain. The

sound legal view of this matter would seem to be: that the doctrine of

secession is so repugnant to the primary intention with which the

national instrument of government was framed that it could only have been

supported by an express reservation of the right to secede in the

Constitution itself.

The Duke of Argyll, one of the few British statesmen of the time who

followed this struggle with intelligent interest, briefly summed up the

question thus: "I know of no government in the world that could possibly

have admitted the right of secession from its own allegiance." Oddly

enough, President Buchanan, in his Message to Congress on December 4, put

the same point not less forcibly.

But to say--as in a legal sense we may--that the Southern States rebelled

is not necessarily to say that they were wrong. The deliberate endeavour

of a people to separate themselves from the political sovereignty under

which they live and set up a new political community, in which their

national life shall develop itself more fully or more securely, must

always command a certain respect. Whether it is entitled further to the

full sympathy and to the support or at least acquiescence of others is a

question which in particular cases involves considerations such as cannot

be foreseen in any abstract discussion of political theory. But,

speaking very generally, it is a question in the main of the worth which

we attribute on the one hand to the common life to which it is sought to

give freer scope, and on the other hand to the common life which may

thereby be weakened or broken up. It sometimes seems to be held that

when a decided majority of the people whose voices can be heard, in a

more or less defined area, elect to live for the future under a

particular government, all enlightened men elsewhere would wish them to

have their way. If any such principle could be accepted without

qualification, few movements for independence would ever have been more

completely justified than the secession of the Southern States. If we

set aside the highland region of which mention has already been made, in

the six cotton-growing States which first seceded, and in several of

those which followed as soon as it was clear that secession would be

resisted, the preponderance of opinion in favour of the movement was

overwhelming. This was not only so among the educated and governing

portions of society, which were interested in slavery. While the negroes

themselves were unorganised and dumb and made no stir for freedom, the

poorer class of white people, to whom the institution of slavery was in

reality oppressive, were quite unconscious of this; the enslavement of

the negro appeared to them a tribute to their own dignity, and their

indiscriminating spirit of independence responded enthusiastically to the

appeal that they should assert themselves against the real or fancied

pretensions of the North. So large a statement would require some

qualification if we were here concerned with the life of a Southern

leader; and there was of course a brief space, to be dealt with in this

chapter, in which the question of secession hung in the balance, and it

is true in this, as in every case, that the men who gave the initial push

were few. But, broadly speaking, it is certain that the movement for

secession was begun with at least as general an enthusiasm and maintained

with at least as loyal a devotion as any national movement with which it

can be compared. And yet to-day, just fifty-one years after the

consummation of its failure, it may be doubted whether one soul among the

people concerned regrets that it failed.

English people from that time to this have found the statement

incredible; but the fact is that this imposing movement, in which rich

and poor, gentle and simple, astute men of state and pious clergymen,

went hand in hand to the verge of ruin and beyond, was undertaken simply

and solely in behalf of slavery. Northern writers of the time found it

so surprising that they took refuge in the theory of conspiracy, alleging

that a handful of schemers succeeded, by the help of fictitious popular

clamour and intimidation of their opponents, in launching the South upon

a course to which the real mind of the people was averse. Later and

calmer historical survey of the facts has completely dispelled this view;

and the English suspicion, that there must have been some cause beyond

and above slavery for desiring independence, never had any facts to

support it. Since 1830 no exponent of Southern views had ever hinted at

secession on any other ground than slavery; every Southern leader

declared with undoubted truth that on every other ground he prized the

Union; outside South Carolina every Southern leader made an earnest

attempt before he surrendered the Union cause to secure the guarantees he

thought sufficient for slavery within the Union. The Southern statesman

(for the soldiers were not statesmen) whose character most attracts

sympathy now was Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern

Confederacy, and though he was the man who persisted longest in the view

that slavery could be adequately secured without secession, he was none

the less entitled to speak for the South in his remarkable words on the

Constitution adopted by the Southern Confederacy: "The new Constitution

has put at rest for ever all the agitating questions relating to our

peculiar institution, African slavery. This was the immediate cause of

the late rupture and present revolution. The prevailing ideas

entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of

the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was wrong

in principle socially, morally, and politically. Our new government is

founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its

corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal

of the white man; that slavery--subordination to the white man--is his

natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in

the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical,

and moral truth. The great objects of humanity are best attained when

there is conformity to the Creator's laws and decrees." Equally explicit

and void of shame was the Convention of the State of Mississippi. "Our

position," they declared, "is thoroughly identified with slavery."

It is common to reproach the Southern leaders with reckless folly. They

tried to destroy the Union, which they really valued, for the sake of

slavery, which they valued more; they in fact destroyed slavery; and they

did this, it is said, in alarm at an imaginary danger. This is not a

true ground of reproach to them. It is true that the danger to slavery

from the election of Lincoln was not immediately pressing. He neither

would have done nor could have done more than to prevent during his four

years of office any new acquisition of territory in the slave-holding

interest, and to impose his veto on any Bill extending slavery within the

existing territory of the Union. His successor after four years might or

might not have been like-minded. He did not seem to stand for any

overwhelming force in American politics; there was a majority opposed to

him in both Houses of Congress; a great majority of the Supreme Court,

which might have an important part to play, held views of the

Constitution opposed to his; he had been elected by a minority only of

the whole American people. Why could not the Southern States have sat

still, secure that no great harm would happen to their institution for

the present, and hoping that their former ascendency would come back to

them with the changing fortunes of party strife? This is an argument

which might be expected to have weighed with Southern statesmen if each

of them had been anxious merely to keep up the value of his own slave

property for his own lifetime, but this was far from being their case.

It is hard for us to put ourselves at the point of view of men who could

sincerely speak of their property in negroes as theirs by the "decree of

the Creator"; but it is certain that within the last two generations

trouble of mind as to the rightfulness of slavery had died out in a large

part of the South; the typical Southern leader valued the peculiar form

of society under which he lived and wished to hand it on intact to his

children's children. If their preposterous principle be granted, the

most extreme among them deserve the credit of statesmanlike insight for

having seen, the moment that Lincoln was elected, that they must strike

for their institution now if they wished it to endure. The Convention of

South Carolina justly observed that the majority in the North had voted

that slavery was sinful; they had done little more than express this

abstract opinion, but they had done all that. Lincoln's administration

might have done apparently little, and after it the pendulum would

probably have swung back. But the much-talked-of swing of the pendulum

is the most delusive of political phenomena; America was never going to

return to where it was before this first explicit national assertion of

the wrongfulness of slavery had been made. It would have been hard to

forecast how the end would come, or how soon; but the end was certain if

the Southern States had elected to remain the countrymen of a people who

were coming to regard their fundamental institution with growing

reprobation. Lincoln had said, "This government cannot endure

permanently, half slave and half free." Lincoln was right, and so from

their own point of view, that of men not brave or wise enough to take in

hand a difficult social reform, were the leaders who declared immediately

for secession.

In no other contest of history are those elements in human affairs on

which tragic dramatists are prone to dwell so clearly marked as in the

American Civil War. No unsophisticated person now, except in ignorance

as to the cause of the war, can hesitate as to which side enlists his

sympathy, or can regard the victory of the North otherwise than as the

costly and imperfect triumph of the right. But the wrong

side--emphatically wrong--is not lacking in dignity or human worth; the

long-drawn agony of the struggle is not purely horrible to contemplate;

there is nothing that in this case makes us reluctant to acknowledge the

merits of the men who took arms in the evil cause. The experience as to

the relations between superior and inferior races, which is now at the

command of every intelligent Englishman, forbids us to think that the

inferiority of the negro justified slavery, but it also forbids us to

fancy that men to whom the relation of owner to slave had become natural

must themselves have been altogether degraded. The men upon the Southern

side who can claim any special admiration were simple soldiers who had no

share in causing the war; among the political leaders whom they served,

there was none who stands out now as a very interesting personality, and

their chosen chief is an unattractive figure; but we are not to think of

these authors of the war as a gang of hardened, unscrupulous, corrupted

men. As a class they were reputable, public-spirited, and religious men;

they served their cause with devotion and were not wholly to blame that

they chose it so ill. The responsibility for the actual secession does

not rest in an especial degree on any individual leader. Secession began

rather with the spontaneous movement of the whole community of South

Carolina, and in the States which followed leading politicians expressed

rather than inspired the general will. The guilt which any of us can

venture to attribute for this action of a whole deluded society must rest

on men like Calhoun, who in a previous generation, while opinion in the

South was still to some extent unformed, stifled all thought of reform

and gave the semblance of moral and intellectual justification to a

system only susceptible of a historical excuse.

The South was neither base nor senseless, but it was wrong. To some

minds it may not seem to follow that it was well to resist it by war, and

indeed at the time, as often happens, people took up arms with greater

searchings of heart upon the right side than upon the wrong. If the

slave States had been suffered to depart in peace they would have set up

a new and peculiar political society, more truly held together than the

original Union by a single avowed principle; a nation dedicated to the

inequality of men. It is not really possible to think of the free

national life which they could thus have initiated as a thing to be

respected and preserved. Nor is it true that their choice for themselves

of this dingy freedom was no concern of their neighbours. We have seen

how the slave interest hankered for enlarged dominion; and it is certain

that the Southern Confederacy, once firmly established, would have been

an aggressive and disturbing power upon the continent of America. The

questions of territorial and other rights between it and the old Union

might have been capable of satisfactory settlement for the moment, or

they might have proved as insoluble as Lincoln thought they were. But,

at the best, if the States which adhered to the old Union had admitted

the claim of the first seceding States to go, they could only have

retained for themselves an insecure existence as a nation, threatened at

each fresh conflict of interest or sentiment with a further disruption

which could not upon any principle have been resisted. The preceding

chapters have dwelt with iteration upon the sentiments which had operated

to make Americans a people, and on the form and the degree in which those

sentiments animated the mind of Lincoln. Only so perhaps can we fully

appreciate for what the people of the North fought. It is inaccurate,

though not gravely misleading, to say that they fought against slavery.

It would be wholly false to say that they fought for mere dominion. They

fought to preserve and complete a political unity nobly conceived by

those who had done most to create it, and capable, as the sequel showed,

of a permanent and a healthy continuance.

And it must never be forgotten, if we wish to enter into the spirit which

sustained the North in its struggle, that loyalty for Union had a larger

aspect than that of mere allegiance to a particular authority. Vividly

present to the mind of some few, vaguely but honestly present to the mind

of a great multitude, was the sense that even had slavery not entered

into the question a larger cause than that of their recent Union was

bound up with the issues of the war. The Government of the United States

had been the first and most famous attempt in a great modern country to

secure government by the will of the mass of the people. If in this

crucial instance such a Government were seen to be intolerably weak, if

it was found to be at the mercy of the first powerful minority which

seized a worked-up occasion to rebel, what they had learnt to think the

most hopeful agency for the uplifting of man everywhere would for ages to

come have proved a failure. This feeling could not be stronger in any

American than it was in Lincoln himself. "It has long been a question,"

he said, "whether any Government which is not too strong for the

liberties of the people can be strong enough to maintain itself." There

is one marked feature of his patriotism, which could be illustrated by

abundance of phrases from his speeches and letters, and which the people

of several countries of Europe can appreciate to-day. His affection for

his own country and its institutions is curiously dependent upon a wider

cause of human good, and is not a whit the less intense for that. There

is perhaps no better expression of this widespread feeling in the North

than the unprepared speech which he delivered on his way to become

President, in the Hall of Independence at Philadelphia, in which the

Declaration of Independence had been signed. "I have never," he said,

"had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments

embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over

the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and framed

and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the

toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who

achieved that independence. I have often inquired of myself what great

principle or idea it was that kept the Confederacy so long together. It

was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the

motherland, it was the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which

gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the

world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due

time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."

2. _The Progress of Secession_.

So much for the broad causes without which there could have been no Civil

War in America. We have now to sketch the process by which the fuel was

kindled. It will be remembered that the President elected in November

does not enter upon his office for nearly four months. For that time,

therefore, the conduct of government lay in the hands of President

Buchanan, who, for all his past subserviency to Southern interests,

believed and said that secession was absolutely unlawful. Several

members of his Cabinet were Southerners who favoured secession; but the

only considerable man among them, Cobb of Georgia, soon declared that his

loyalty to his own State was not compatible with his office and resigned;

and, though others, including the Secretary for War, hung on to their

position, it does not appear that they influenced Buchanan much, or that

their somewhat dubious conduct while they remained was of great

importance. Black, the Attorney-General, and Cass, the Secretary of

State, who, however, resigned when his advice was disregarded, were not

only loyal to the Union, but anxious that the Government should do

everything that seemed necessary in its defence. Thus this

administration, hitherto Southern in its sympathies, must be regarded for

its remaining months as standing for the Union, so far as it stood for

anything. Lincoln meanwhile had little that he could do but to watch

events and prepare. There was, nevertheless, a point in the negotiations

which took place between parties at which he took on himself a tremendous

responsibility and at which his action was probably decisive of all that

followed.

The Presidential election took place on November 6, 1860. On November 10

the Legislature of South Carolina, which had remained in session for this

purpose, convened a specially elected Convention of the State to decide

upon the question of secession. Slave owners and poor whites, young and

old, street rabble, persons of fashion, politicians and clergy, the whole

people of this peculiar State, distinguished in some marked respects even

from its nearest neighbours, received the action of the Legislature with

enthusiastic but grave approval. It was not till December 20 that the

Convention could pass its formal "Ordinance of Secession," but there was

never for a moment any doubt as to what it would do. The question was

what other States would follow the example of South Carolina. There

ensued in all the Southern States earnest discussion as to whether to

secede or not, and in the North, on which the action of South Carolina,

however easily it might have been foretold, came as a shock, great

bewilderment as to what was to be done. As has been said, there was in

the South generally no disposition to give up Southern claims, no doubt

as to the right of secession, and no fundamental and overriding loyalty

to the Union, but there was a considerable reluctance to give up the

Union and much doubt as to whether secession was really wise; there was

in the North among those who then made themselves heard no doubt whatever

as to the loyalty due to the Union, but there was, apart from previous

differences about slavery, every possible variety and fluctuation of

opinion as to the right way of dealing with States which should secede or

rebel. In certain border States, few in number but likely to play an

important part in civil war, Northern and Southern elements were mingled.

Amid loud and distracted discussion, public and private, leaders of the

several parties and of the two sections of the country conducted earnest

negotiations in the hope of finding a peaceable settlement, and when

Congress met, early in December, their debates took a formal shape in

committees appointed by the Senate and by the House.

Meanwhile the President was called upon to deal with the problem

presented for the Executive Government of the Union by the action of

South Carolina. It may be observed that if he had given his mind to the

military measures required to meet the possible future, the North, which

in the end had his entire sympathy, would have begun the war with that

advantage in preparation which, as it was, was gained by the South. In

this respect he did nothing. But, apart from this, if he had taken up a

clear and comprehensible attitude towards South Carolina and had given a

lead to Unionist sympathy, he would have consolidated public opinion in

the North, and he would have greatly strengthened those in the South who

remained averse to secession. There would have been a considerable

further secession, but in all likelihood it would not have become so

formidable as it did. As it was, the movement for secession proceeded

with all the proud confidence that can be felt in a right which is not

challenged, and the people of the South were not aware, though shrewd

leaders like Jefferson Davis knew it well, of the risk they would

encounter till they had committed themselves to defying it.

The problem before Buchanan was the same which, aggravated by his failure

to deal with it, confronted Lincoln when he came into office, and it must

be clearly understood. The secession of South Carolina was not a

movement which could at once be quelled by prompt measures of repression.

Even if sufficient military force and apt forms of law had existed for

taking such measures they would have united the South in support of South

Carolina, and alienated the North, which was anxious for conciliation.

Yet it was possible for the Government of the Union, while patiently

abstaining from violent or provocative action, to make plain that in the

last resort it would maintain its rights in South Carolina with its full

strength. The main dealings of the Union authorities with the people of

a State came under a very few heads. There were local Federal Courts to

try certain limited classes of issues; jurors, of course, could not be

compelled to serve in these nor parties to appear. There was the postal

service; the people of South Carolina did not at present interfere with

this source of convenience to themselves and of revenue to the Union.

There were customs duties to be collected at the ports, and there were

forts at the entrance of the harbour in Charleston, South Carolina, as

well as forts, dockyards and arsenals of the United States at a number of

points in the Southern States; the Government should quietly but openly

have taken steps to ensure that the collection should go on unmolested,

and that the forts and the like should be made safe from attack, in South

Carolina and everywhere else where they were likely to be threatened.

Measures of this sort were early urged upon Buchanan by Scott, the

Lieutenant-General (that is, Second in Command under the President) of

the Army, who had been the officer that carried out Jackson's military

dispositions when secession was threatened in South Carolina thirty years

before, and by other officers concerned, particularly by Major Anderson,

a keen Southerner, but a keen soldier, commanding the forts at

Charleston, and by Cass and Black in his Cabinet. Public opinion in the

North demanded such measures.

If further action than the proper manning and supply of certain forts had

been in contemplation, an embarrassing legal question would have arisen.

In the opinion of the Attorney-General, of leading Democrats like Cass

and Douglas, and apparently of most legal authorities of every party,

there was an important distinction, puzzling to an English lawyer even if

he is versed in the American Constitution, between the steps which the

Government might justly take in self-protection, and measures which could

be regarded as coercion of the State of South Carolina as such. These

latter would be unlawful. Buchanan, instead of acting on or declaring

his intentions, entertained Congress, which met early in December, with a

Message, laying down very clearly the illegality of secession, but

discussing at large this abstract question of the precise powers of the

Executive in resisting secession. The legal question will not further

concern us because the distinction which it was really intended to draw

between lawful and unlawful measures against secession quite coincided,

in its practical application, with what common sense and just feeling

would in these peculiar circumstances have dictated. But, as a natural

consequence of such discussion, an impression was spread abroad of the

illegality of something vaguely called coercion, and of the shadowy

nature of any power which the Government claimed.

Up to Lincoln's inauguration the story of the Charleston forts, of which

one, lying on an island in the mouth of the harbour, was the famous Fort

Sumter, is briefly this. Buchanan was early informed that if the Union

Government desired to hold them, troops and ships of war should instantly

be sent. Congressmen from South Carolina remaining in Washington came to

him and represented that their State regarded these forts upon its soil

as their own; they gave assurances that there would be no attack on the

forts if the existing military situation was not altered, and they tried

to get a promise that the forts should not be reinforced. Buchanan would

give them no promise, but he equally refused the entreaties of Scott and

his own principal ministers that he should reinforce the forts, because

he declared that this would precipitate a conflict. Towards the end of

the year Major Anderson, not having men enough to hold all the forts if,

as he expected, they were attacked, withdrew his whole force to Fort

Sumter, which he thought the most defensible, dismantling the principal

other fort. The Governor of South Carolina protested against this as a

violation of a supposed understanding with the President, and seized upon

the United States arsenal and the custom house, taking the revenue

officers into State service. Commissioners had previously gone from

South Carolina to Washington to request the surrender of the forts, upon

terms of payment for property; they now declared that Anderson's

withdrawal, as putting him in a better position for defence, was an act

of war, and demanded that he should be ordered to retire to the mainland.

Buchanan wavered; decided to yield to them on this last point;

ultimately, on the last day of 1860, yielded instead to severe pressure

from Black, and decided to reinforce Anderson on Fort Sumter. The actual

attempt to reinforce him was bungled; a transport sent for this purpose

was fired upon by the South Carolina forces, and returned idle. This

first act of war, for some curious reason, caused no excitement. The

people of the North were intensely relieved that Buchanan had not yielded

to whatever South Carolina might demand, and, being prone to forgive and

to applaud, seem for a time to have experienced a thrill of glory in the

thought that the national administration had a mind. Dix, the Secretary

of the Treasury, elated them yet further by telegraphing to a Treasury

official at New Orleans, "If any one attempts to haul down the American

flag, shoot him on the spot." But Anderson remained without

reinforcements or further provisions when Lincoln entered office; and

troops in the service first of South Carolina and afterwards of the

Southern Confederacy, which was formed in February, erected batteries and

prepared to bombard Fort Sumter.

No possible plea for President Buchanan can make him rank among those who

have held high office with any credit at all, but he must at once be

acquitted of any intentional treachery to the Union. It is agreed that

he was a truthful and sincere man, and there is something pleasant in the

simple avowal he made to a Southern negotiator who was pressing him for

some instant concession, that he always said his prayers before deciding

any important matter of State. His previous dealings with Kansas would

suggest to us robust unscrupulousness, but it seems that he had quite

given his judgment over into the keeping of a little group of Southern

Senators. Now that he was deprived of this help, he had only enough will

left to be obstinate against other advice. It is suggested that he had

now but one motive, the desire that the struggle should break out in his

successor's time rather than his own. Even this is perhaps to judge

Buchanan's notorious and calamitous laches unfairly. Any action that he

took must to a certain extent have been provocative, and he knew it, and

he may have clung to the hope that by sheer inaction he would give time

for some possible forces of reason and conciliation to work. If so, he

was wrong, but similar and about as foolish hopes paralysed Lincoln's

Cabinet (and to a less but still very dangerous degree Lincoln himself)

when they took up the problem which Buchanan's neglect had made more

urgent. Buchanan had in this instance the advantage of far better

advice, but this silly old man must not be gibbeted and Lincoln left free

from criticism for his part in the same transaction. Both Presidents

hesitated where to us who look back the case seems clear. The

circumstances had altered in some respects when Lincoln came in, but it

is only upon a somewhat broad survey of the governing tendencies of

Lincoln's administration and of its mighty result in the mass that we

discover what really distinguishes his slowness of action in such cases

as this from the hesitation of a man like Buchanan. Buchanan waited in

the hope of avoiding action, Lincoln with the firm intention to see his

path in the fullest light he could get.

From an early date in November, 1860, every effort was made, by men too

numerous to mention, to devise if possible such a settlement of what were

now called the grievances of the South as would prevent any other State

from following the example of South Carolina. Apart from the intangible

difference presented by much disapprobation of slavery in the North and

growing resentment in the South as this disapprobation grew louder, the

solid ground of dispute concerned the position of slavery in the existing

Territories and future acquisitions of the United States Government; the

quarrel arose from the election of a President pledged to use whatever

power he had, though indeed that might prove little, to prevent the

further extension of slavery; and we may almost confine our attention to

this point. Other points came into discussion. Several of the Northern

States had "Personal Liberty Laws" expressly devised to impede the

execution of the Federal law of 1850 as to fugitive slaves. Some

attention was devoted to these, especially by Alexander Stephens, who, as

the Southern leader most opposed to immediate secession, wished to direct

men's minds to a grievance that could be remedied. Lincoln, who had

always said that, though the Fugitive Slave Law should be made just and

seemly, it ought in substance to be enforced, made clear again that he

thought such "Personal Liberty Laws" should be amended, though he

protested that it was not for him as President-elect to advise the State

Legislatures on their own business. The Republicans generally agreed.

Some of the States concerned actually began amending their laws. Thus,

if the disquiet of the South had depended on this grievance, the cause of

disquiet would no doubt have been removed. Again the Republican leaders,

including Lincoln in particular, let there be no ground for thinking that

an attack was intended upon slavery in the States where it was

established; they offered eventually to give the most solemn pledge

possible in this matter by passing an Amendment of the Constitution

declaring that it should never be altered so as to take away the

independence of the existing slave States as to this portion of their

democratic institutions. Lincoln indeed refused on several occasions to

make any fresh public disclaimer of an intention to attack existing

institutions. His views were "open to all who will read." "For the good

men in the South," he writes privately, "--I regard the majority of them

as such--I have no objection to repeat them seventy times seven. But I

have bad men to deal with both North and South; men who are eager for

something new upon which to base new misrepresentations; men who would

like to frighten me, or at least fix upon me the character of timidity

and cowardice." Nevertheless he endeavoured constantly in private

correspondence to narrow and define the issue, which, as he insisted,

concerned only the territorial extension of slavery.

The most serious of the negotiations that took place, and to which most

hope was attached, consisted in the deliberations of a committee of

thirteen appointed by the Senate in December, 1860, which took for its

guidance a detailed scheme of compromise put forward by Senator

Crittenden, of Kentucky. The efforts of this committee to come to an

agreement broke down at the outset upon the question of the Territories,

and the responsibility, for good or for evil, of bringing them to an end

must probably be attributed to the advice of Lincoln. Crittenden's first

proposal was that there should be a Constitutional Amendment declaring

that slavery should be prohibited "in all the territory of the United

States, now held or hereafter acquired, north of latitude 36 degrees 30

minutes"--(the limit fixed in the Missouri Compromise, but restricted

then to the Louisiana purchase)--while in all territory, now held or

thereafter acquired south of that line, it should be permitted.

Crittenden also proposed that when a Territory on either side of the line

became a State, it should become free to decide the question for itself;

but the discussion never reached this point. On the proposal as to the

Territories there seemed at first to be a prospect that the Republicans

would agree, in which case the South might very likely have agreed too.

The desire for peace was intensely strong among the commercial men of New

York and other cities, and it affected the great political managers and

the statesmen who, like Seward himself, were in close touch with this

commercial influence. Tenacious adherence to declared principle may have

been as strong in country districts as the desire for accommodation was

in these cities, but it was at any rate far less vocal, and on the whole

it seems that compromise was then in the air. It seemed clear from the

expressed opinions of his closest allies that Seward would support this

compromise. Now Seward just at this time received Lincoln's offer of the

office of Secretary of State, a great office and one in which Seward

expected to rule Lincoln and the country, but in accepting which, as he

did, he made it incumbent on himself not to part company at once with the

man who would be nominally his chief. Then there occurred a visit paid

on Seward's behalf by his friend Thurlow Weed, an astute political

manager but also an able statesman, to Lincoln at Springfield. Weed

brought back a written statement of Lincoln's views. Seward's support

was not given to the compromise; nor naturally was that of the more

radical Republicans, to use a term which now became common; and the

Committee of Thirteen found itself unable to agree.

It is unnecessary to repeat what Lincoln's conviction on this, to him the

one essential point of policy, was, or to quote from the numerous letters

in which from the time of his nomination he tried to keep the minds of

his friends firm on this single principle, and to show them that if there

were the slightest further yielding as to this, save indeed as to the

peculiar case of New Mexico, which did not matter, and which perhaps he

regarded as conceded already, the Southern policy of extending slavery

and of "filibustering" against neighbouring counties for that purpose

would revive in full force, and the whole labour of the Republican

movement would have to begin over again. Since his election he had been

writing also to Southern politicians who were personally friendly, to

Gilmer of North Carolina, to whom he offered Cabinet office, and to

Stephens, making absolutely plain that his difference with them lay in

this one point, but making it no less plain that on this point he was,

with entire respect to them, immovable. Now, on December 22, the _New

York Tribune_ was "enabled to state that Mr. Lincoln stands now as he

stood in May last, square upon the Republican platform." The writing

that Weed brought to Seward must have said, perhaps more elaborately, the

same. If Lincoln had not stood square upon that platform there were

others like Senator Wade of Ohio and Senator Grimes of Iowa who might

have done so and might have been able to wreck the compromise. Lincoln,

however, did wreck it, at a time when it seemed likely to succeed, and it

is most probable that thereby he caused the Civil War. It cannot be said

that he definitely expected the Civil War. Probably he avoided making

any definite forecast; but he expressed no alarm, and he privately told a

friend about this time that "he could not in his heart believe that the

South designed the overthrow of the Government." But, if he had in his

heart believed it, nothing in his life gives reason to think that he

would have been more anxious to conciliate the South; on the contrary, it

is in line with all we know of his feelings to suppose that he would have

thought firmness all the more imperative. We cannot recall the solemnity

of his long-considered speech about "a house divided against itself,"

with which all his words and acts accorded, without seeing that, if

perhaps he speculated little about the risks, he was prepared to face

them whatever they were. Doubtless he took a heavy responsibility, but

it is painful to find honourable historians, who heartily dislike the

cause of slavery, capable to-day of wondering whether he was right to do

so. "If he had not stood square" in December upon the same "platform" on

which he had stood in May, if he had preferred to enroll himself among

those statesmen of all countries whose strongest words are uttered for

their own subsequent enjoyment in eating them, he might conceivably have

saved much bloodshed, but he would not have left the United States a

country of which any good man was proud to be a citizen.

Thus, by the end of 1860, the bottom was really out of the policy of

compromise, and it is not worth while to examine the praiseworthy efforts

that were still made for it while State after State in the South was

deciding to secede. One interesting proposal, which was aired in

January, 1861, deserves notice, namely, that the terms of compromise

proposed by Crittenden should have been submitted to a vote of the whole

people. It was not passed. Seward, whom many people now thought likely

to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with

justice that it was "unconstitutional and ineffectual." Ineffectual it

would have been in this sense: the compromise would in all probability

have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States

and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good

feeling, had no further definite opinion upon the chief questions at

issue; but it would have left a local majority in many of the Southern

States and a local majority in many of the Northern States as

irreconcilable with each other as ever. It was opposed also to the

spirit of the Constitution. In a great country where the people with

infinitely varied interests and opinions can slowly make their

predominant wishes appear, but cannot really take counsel together and

give a firm decision upon any emergency, there may be exceptional cases

when a popular vote on a defined issue would be valuable, significant,

desired by the people themselves; but the machinery of representative

government, however faulty, is the only machinery by which the people can

in some sense govern itself, instead of making itself ungovernable.

Above all, in a serious crisis it is supremely repugnant to the spirit of

popular government that the men chosen by a people to govern it should

throw their responsibility back at the heads of the electors. It is well

to be clear as to the kind of proceeding which the authors of this

proposal were really advocating: a statesman has come before the ordinary

citizen with a definite statement of the principle on which he would act,

and an ordinary citizen has thereupon taken his part in entrusting him

with power; then comes the moment for the statesman to carry out his

principle, and the latent opposition becomes of necessity more alarming;

the statesman is therefore to say to the ordinary citizen, "This is a

more difficult matter than I thought; and if I am to act as I said I

would, take on yourself the responsibility which I recently put myself

forward to bear." The ordinary citizen will naturally as a rule decline

a responsibility thus offered him, but he will not be grateful for the

offer or glad to be a forced accomplice in this process of indecision.

If we could determine the prevailing sentiment in the North at some

particular moment during the crisis, it would probably represent what

very few individual men continued to think for six months together.

Early in the crisis some strong opponents of slavery were for letting the

South go, declaring, as did Horace Greeley of the _New York Tribune_,

that "they would not be citizens of a Republic of which one part was

pinned to the other part with bayonets"; but this sentiment seems soon to

have given way when the same men began to consider, as Lincoln had

considered, whether an agreement to sever the Union between the States,

with the difficult adjustment of mutual interests which it would have

involved, could be so effected as to secure a lasting peace. A blind

rage on behalf of conciliation broke out later in prosperous business men

in great towns--even in Boston it is related that "Beacon Street

aristocrats" broke up a meeting to commemorate John Brown on the

anniversary of his death, and grave persons thought the meeting an

outrage. Waves of eager desire for compromise passed over the Northern

community. Observers at the time and historians after are easily

mistaken as to popular feeling; the acute fluctuations of opinion

inevitable among journalists, and in any sort of circle where men are

constantly meeting and talking politics, may leave the great mass of

quiet folk almost unaffected. We may be sure that there was a

considerable body of steady opinion very much in accord with Lincoln;

this should not be forgotten, but it must not be supposed that it

prevailed constantly. On the contrary, it was inherent in the nature of

the crisis that opinion wavered and swayed. We should miss the whole

significance of Lincoln's story if we did not think of the North now and

to the end of the war as exposed to disunion, hesitation, and quick

reaction. If at this time a sufficiently authoritative leader with

sufficiently determined timidity had inaugurated a policy of stampede, he

might have had a vast and tumultuous following. Only his following would

quickly, if too late, have repented. What was wanted, if the people of

the North were to have what most justly might be called their way, was a

leader who would not seem to hurry them along, nor yet be ever looking

round to see if they followed, but just go groping forward among the

innumerable obstacles, guided by such principles of good sense and of

right as would perhaps on the whole and in the long run be approved by

the maturer thought of most men; and Lincoln was such a leader.

When we turn to the South, where, as has been said, the movement for

secession was making steady though not unopposed progress, we have indeed

to make exceptions to any sweeping statement, but we must recognise a far

more clearly defined and far more prevailing general opinion. We may set

aside for the moment the border slave States of Maryland, Virginia,

Kentucky, and Missouri, each of which has a distinct and an important

history. Delaware belonged in effect to the North. In Texas there were

peculiar conditions, and Texas had an interesting history of its own in

this matter, but may be treated as remote. There was also, as has been

said, a highland region covering the west of Virginia and the east of

Kentucky but reaching far south into the northern part of Alabama.

Looking at the pathetic spectacle of enduring heroism in a mistaken cause

which the South presented, many people have been ready to suppose that it

was manoeuvred and tricked into its folly by its politicians and might

have recovered itself from it if the North and the Government had

exercised greater patience and given it time. In support of this view

instances are cited of strong Unionist feeling in the South. Such

instances probably belong to the peculiar people of this highland

country, or else to the mixed and more or less neutral population that

might be found at New Orleans or trading along the Mississippi. There

remains a solid and far larger South in which indeed (except for South

Carolina) dominant Southern policy was briskly debated, but as a question

of time, degree, and expediency. Three mental forces worked for the same

end: the alarmed vested interest of the people of substance, aristocratic

and otherwise; the racial sentiment of the poor whites, a sentiment often

strongest in those who have no subject of worldly pride but their colour;

and the philosophy of the clergy and other professional men who

constituted what in some countries is called the intellectual class.

These influences resulted in a rare uniformity of opinion that slavery

was right and all attacks on it were monstrous, that the Southern States

were free to secede and form, if they chose, a new Confederacy, and that

they ought to do this if the moment should arrive when they could not

otherwise safeguard their interests. Doubtless there were leading men

who had thought over the matter in advance of the rest and taken counsel

together long before, but the fact seems to be that such leaders now

found their followers in advance of them. Jefferson Davis, by far the

most commanding man among them, now found himself--certainly it served

him right--anxiously counselling delay, and spending nights in prayer

before he made his farewell speech to the Senate in words of greater

dignity and good feeling than seem to comport with the fanatical

narrowness of his view and the progressive warping of his determined

character to which it condemned him. Whatever fundamental loyalty to the

Union existed in any man's heart there were months of debate in which it

found no organised and hardly any audible expression. The most notable

stand against actual secession was that which was made in Georgia by

Stephens; he was determined and outspoken, but he proceeded wholly upon

the ground that secession was premature. And this instance is

significant of something further. It has been said that discussion and

voting were not free, and it would be altogether unlikely that their

freedom should in no cases be infringed, but there is no evidence that

this charge was widely true. It is surely significant of the general

temper of the South, and most honourable to it, that Stephens, who thus

struggled against secession at that moment, was chosen Vice-President of

the Southern Confederacy.

By February 4, 1861, the States of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama,

Georgia, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina by passing Ordinances

of Secession, and on that date representatives of these States met at

Montgomery in Alabama to found a new Confederacy. Texas, where

considerable resistance was offered by Governor Houston, the adventurous

leader under whom that State had separated from Mexico, was in process of

passing the like Ordinance. Virginia and North Carolina, which lie north

of the region where cotton prevails, and with them their western

neighbour Tennessee, and Arkansas, yet further west and separated from

Tennessee by the Mississippi River, did not secede till after Lincoln's

inauguration and the outbreak of war. But the position of Virginia

(except for its western districts) admitted of very little doubt, and

that of Tennessee and North Carolina was known to be much the same.

Virginia took a historic pride in the Union, and its interest in slavery

was not quite the same as that of the cotton States, yet its strongest

social ties were to the South. This State was now engaged in a last idle

attempt to keep itself and other border States in the Union, with some

hope also that the departed States might return; and on this same

February 6, a "Peace Convention," invited by Virginia and attended by

delegates from twenty-one States, met at Washington with ex-President

Tyler in the chair; but for Virginia it was all along a condition of any

terms of agreement that the right of any State to secede should be fully

acknowledged.

The Congress of the seceding States, which met at Montgomery, was

described by Stephens as, "taken all in all, the noblest, soberest, most

intelligent, and most conservative body I was ever in." It has been

remarked that Southern politicians of the agitator type were not sent to

it. It adopted a provisional Constitution modelled largely upon that of

the United States. Jefferson Davis, who had retired to his farm, was

sent for to become President; Stephens, as already said, became

Vice-President. The delegates there were to continue in session for the

present as the regular Congress. Whether sobered by the thought that

they were acting in the eyes of the world, or in accordance with their

own prevailing sentiment, these men, some of whom had before urged the

revival of the slave trade, now placed in their Constitution a perpetual

prohibition of it, and when, as a regular legislature, they afterwards

passed a penal statute which carried out this intention inadequately,

President Davis conscientiously vetoed it and demanded a more

satisfactory measure. At his inauguration the Southern President

delivered an address, typical of that curious blending of propriety and

insincerity, of which the politics of that period in America had offered

many examples. It may seem incredible, but it contained no word of

slavery, but recited in dignified terms how the South had been driven to

separation by "wanton aggression on the part of others," and after it had

"vainly endeavoured to secure tranquillity." The new Southern Congress

now resolved to take over the forts and other property in the seceded

States that had belonged to the Union, and the first Confederate general,

Beauregard, was sent to Charleston to hover over Fort Sumter.

3. _The Inauguration of Lincoln_.

The first necessary business of the President-elect, while he watched the

gathering of what Emerson named "the hurricane in which he was called to

the helm," was to construct a strong Cabinet, to which may be added the

seemingly unnecessary business forced upon him of dealing with a horde of

pilgrims who at once began visiting him to solicit some office or, in

rarer cases, to press their disinterested opinions. His Cabinet,

designed in principle, as has been said, while he was waiting in the

telegraph office for election returns, was actually constructed with some

delay and hesitation. Lincoln could not know personally all the men he

invited to join him, but he proceeded with the view of conjoining in his

administration representatives of the chief shades of opinion which in

this critical time it would be his supreme duty to hold together. Not

only different shades of opinion, but the local sentiment of different

districts had to be considered; he once complained that if the twelve

Apostles had to be chosen nowadays the principle of locality would have

to be regarded; but at this time there was very solid reason why

different States should be contented and why he should be advised as to

their feelings. His own chief rivals for the Presidency offered a good

choice from both these points of view. They were Seward of New York,

Chase of Ohio, Bates of Missouri, Cameron of Pennsylvania. Seward and

Chase were both able and outstanding men: the former was in a sense the

old Republican leader, but was more and more coming to be regarded as the

typical "Conservative," or cautious Republican; Chase on the other hand

was a leader of the "Radicals," who were "stern and unbending" in their

attitude towards slavery and towards the South. These two must be got

and kept together if possible. Bates was a good and capable man who

moreover came from Missouri, a border slave State, where his influence

was much to be desired. He became Attorney-General. Cameron, an

unfortunate choice as it turned out, was a very wealthy business man of

Pennsylvania, representative of the weighty Protectionist influence

there. After he had been offered office, which had been without

Lincoln's authority promised him in the Republican Convention, Lincoln

was dismayed by representations that he was "a bad, corrupted man"; he

wrote a curious letter asking Cameron to refuse his offer; Cameron

instead produced evidence of the desire of Pennsylvania for him; Lincoln

stuck to his offer; the old Whig element among Republicans, the

Protectionist element, and above all, the friends of the indispensable

Seward, would otherwise have been outweighted in the Cabinet. Cameron

eventually became for a time Secretary of War. To these Lincoln, upon

somebody's strong representations, tried, without much hope, to add some

distinctly Southern politician. The effort, of course, failed.

Ultimately the Cabinet was completed by the addition of Caleb Smith of

Indiana as Secretary of the Interior, Gideon Welles of Connecticut as

Secretary of the Navy, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland as

Postmaster-General. Welles, with the guidance of a brilliant

subordinate, Fox, served usefully, was very loyal to Lincoln, had an

antipathy to England which was dangerous, and kept very diligently a

diary for which we may be grateful now. Blair was a vehement,

irresponsible person with an influential connection, and, which was

important, his influence and that of his family lay in Maryland and other

border slave States. Of all these men, Seward, Secretary of State--that

is, Foreign Minister and something more--and Chase, Secretary of the

Treasury, most concern us. Lincoln's offer to Seward was made and

accepted in terms that did credit to both men, and Seward, still smarting

at his own defeat, was admirably loyal. But his friends, though they had

secured the appointment of Cameron to support them, thought increasingly

ill of the prospects of a Cabinet which included the Radical Chase. On

the very night before his inauguration Lincoln received from Seward, who

had just been helping to revise his Inaugural Address, a letter

withdrawing his acceptance of office. By some not clearly recorded

exercise of that great power over men, which, if with some failures, was

generally at his command, he forced Seward to see that the unconditional

withdrawal of this letter was his public duty. It must throughout what

follows be remembered that Lincoln's first and most constant duty was to

hold together the jarring elements in the North which these jarring

elements in his own Cabinet represented; and it was one of his great

achievements that he kept together, for as long as was needful, able but

discordant public servants who could never have combined together without

him.

On February 11, 1861, Lincoln, standing on the gallery at the end of a

railway car, upon the instant of departure from the home to which he

never returned, said to his old neighbours (according to the version of

his speech which his private secretary got him to dictate immediately

after): "My friends, 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 for 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."

He was, indeed, going to a task not less great than Washington's, but he

was going to it with a preparation in many respects far inferior to his.

For the last eight years he had laboured as a public speaker, and in a

measure as a party leader, and had displayed and developed comprehension,

perhaps unequalled, of some of the larger causes which mould public

affairs. But, except in sheer moral discipline, those years had done

nothing to supply the special training which he had previously lacked,

for high executive office. In such office at such a time ready decision

in an obscure and passing situation may often be a not less requisite

than philosophic grasp either of the popular mind or of eternal laws.

The powers which he had hitherto shown would still be needful to him, but

so too would other powers which he had never practised in any comparable

position, and which nature does not in a moment supply. Any attempt to

judge of Lincoln's Presidency--and it can only be judged at all when it

has gone on some way--must take account, not perhaps so much of his

inexperience, as of his own reasonable consciousness of it and his great

anxiety to use the advice of men who were in any way presumably more

competent.

He deliberately delayed his arrival in Washington and availed himself of

official invitations to stay at four great towns and five State capitals

which he could conveniently pass on his way. The journey abounded in

small incidents and speeches, some of which exposed him to a little

ridicule in the press, though they probably created an undercurrent of

sympathy for him. Near one station where the train stopped lived a

little girl he knew, who had recently urged upon him to wear a beard or

whiskers. To this dreadful young person, and to that persistent good

nature of his which was now and then fatuous, was due the ill-designed

hairy ornamentation which during his Presidency hid the really beautiful

modelling of his jaw and chin. He enquired for her at the station, had

her fetched from the crowd, claimed her praise for this supposed

improvement, and kissed her in presence of the press. In New York he was

guilty of a more sinister and tragic misfeasance. In that city, where,

if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a

fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the

more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history

still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his

large hands in black kid gloves. Here perhaps it is well to say that the

educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately

deplored Lincoln's supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief

magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly

indifferent how plain a man he might be. His lesser speeches as he went

were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy

to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he

tried to do his duty. To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart

and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly

felicitous. Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia,

which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered

felicitous at the time. They were too unpretentious. Moreover, they

contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis

in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship. Whether

they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised

utterances was the best proof of his statesmanship. He would appeal to

the steady loyalty of the North, but he was not going to arouse its

passion. He assumed to the last that calm reflection might prevail in

the South, which was menaced by nothing but "an artificial crisis." He

referred to war as a possibility, but left no doubt of his own wish by

all means to avoid it. "There will," he said, "be no bloodshed unless it

be forced on the Government. The Government will not use force unless

force is used against it."

Before he passed through Baltimore he received earnest communications

from Seward and from General Scott. Each had received trustworthy

information of a plot, which existed, to murder him in that city. Owing

to their warnings he went through Baltimore secretly at night, so that

his arrival in Washington, on February 23, was unexpected. This was his

obvious duty, and nobody who knew him was ever in doubt of his personal

intrepidity; but of course it helped to damp the effect of what many

people would have been glad to regard as a triumphal progress.

On March 4, 1861, old Buchanan came in his carriage to escort his

successor to the inaugural ceremony, where it was the ironical fate of

Chief Justice Taney to administer the oath to a President who had already

gone far to undo his great work. Yet a third notable Democrat was there

to do a pleasant little act. Douglas, Lincoln's defeated rival, placed

himself with a fine ostentation by his side, and, observing that he was

embarrassed as to where to put his new tall hat and preposterous

gold-knobbed cane, took charge of these encumbrances before the moment

arrived for the most eagerly awaited of all his speeches. Lincoln had

submitted his draft of his "First Inaugural" to Seward, and this draft

with Seward's abundant suggestions of amendment has been preserved. It

has considerable literary interest, and, by the readiness with which most

of Seward's suggestions were adopted, and the decision with which some,

and those not the least important, were set aside by Lincoln, it

illustrates well the working relation which, after one short struggle,

was to be established between these two men. By Seward's advice Lincoln

added to an otherwise dry speech some concluding paragraphs of emotional

appeal. The last sentence of the speech, which alone is much remembered,

is Seward's in the first conception of it, Seward's in the slightly

hackneyed phrase with which it ends, Lincoln's alone in the touch of

haunting beauty which is on it.

His "First Inaugural" was by general confession an able state paper,

setting forth simply and well a situation with which we are now familiar.

It sets out dispassionately the state of the controversy on slavery, lays

down with brief argument the position that the Union is indissoluble, and

proceeds to define the duty of the Government in face of an attempt to

dissolve it. "The power," he said, "confided to me will be used to hold,

occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government,

and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary

for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or

among the people anywhere. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to

be furnished in all parts of the Union." He proceeded to set out what he

conceived to be the impossibility of real separation; the intimate

relations between the peoples of the several States must still continue;

they would still remain for adjustment after any length of warfare; they

could be far better adjusted in Union than in enmity. He concluded: "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. 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."

4. _The Outbreak of War_.

Upon the newly-inaugurated President there now descended a swarm of

office-seekers. The Republican party had never been in power before, and

these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had

assailed any American President before. To be accessible to all such was

the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on

him at this time. When in the course of nature the number of

office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by

supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing.

The horror of this enduring visitation has been described by Artemus Ward

in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon. His

classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it

should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of

statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a

large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful

tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort

Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced

and provisioned. With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott,

that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men,

which did not exist. The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval

advisers. The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into

Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the

Confederate batteries. Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to

be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter.

Blair said yes emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way. The

other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his

opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be

evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be

recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the

neglect of the last administration. Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter. South

Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign

and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed

it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort.

Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims. The assertion that

he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln's Inaugural. This

was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the

Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were

other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on the Gulf of Mexico, which the

administration was prepared to defend. And now it was proposed that

Lincoln, who had put down his foot with a bang yesterday, should take it

up with a shuffle to-day. And Lincoln reserved his judgment; and, which

is much more, went on reserving it till the question nearly settled

itself to his disgrace.

Lincoln lacked here, it would seem, not by any means the qualities of the

trained administrator, but just that rough perception and vigour which

untaught genius might be supposed to possess. The passionate Jackson

(who, by the way, was a far more educated man in the respects which

count) would not have acted so. Lincoln, it is true, had declared that

he would take no provocative step--"In your hands, my dissatisfied

fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war,"

and the risk which he would have taken by over-ruling that day the

opinion of the bulk of his Cabinet based on that of his chief military

adviser is obvious, but it seems to have been a lesser risk than he did

take in delaying so long to overrule his Cabinet. It is precisely

characteristic of his strength and of his weakness that he did not at

once yield to his advisers; that he long continued weighing the matter

undisturbed by the danger of delay; that he decided as soon as and no

sooner than he felt sure as to the political results, which alone here

mattered, for the military consequences amounted to nothing.

This story was entangled from the first with another difficult story.

Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy came to Washington and sought

interviews with Seward; they came to treat for the recognition of the

Confederacy and the peaceful surrender of forts and the like within its

borders. Meanwhile the action of Virginia was in the balance, and the

"Peace Convention," summoned by Virginia, still "threshing again," as

Lowell said, "the already twice-threshed straw of debate." The action of

Virginia and of other border States, about which Lincoln was intensely

solicitous, would certainly depend upon the action of the Government

towards the States that had already seceded. Might it not be well that

the Government should avoid immediate conflict with South Carolina about

Fort Sumter, though conflict with the Confederacy about Fort Pickens and

the rest would still impend? Was it not possible that conflict could be

staved off till an agreement could be reached with Virginia and the

border States, which would induce the seceded States to return? These

questions were clearly absurd, but they were as clearly natural, and they

greatly exercised Seward. Disappointed at not being President and

equally disturbed at the prospect of civil war, but still inclined to

large and sanguine hopes, he was rather anxious to take things out of

Lincoln's hands and very anxious to serve his country as the great

peacemaker. Indirect negotiations now took place between him and the

Southern Commissioners, who of course could not be officially recognised,

through the medium of two Supreme Court Judges, especially one Campbell,

who was then in Washington. Seward was quite loyal to Lincoln and told

him in a general way what he was doing; he was also candid with Campbell

and his friends, and explained to them his lack of authority, but he

talked freely and rashly of what he hoped to bring about. Lincoln gave

Seward some proper cautions and left him all proper freedom; but it is

possible that he once told Douglas that he intended, at that moment, to

evacuate Fort Sumter. The upshot of the matter is that the decision of

the Government was delayed by negotiations which, as it ought to have

known, could come to nothing, and that the Southern Government and the

Commissioners, after they had got home, thought they had been deceived in

these negotiations.

Discussions were still proceeding as to Fort Sumter when a fresh

difficulty arose for Lincoln, but one which enabled him to become

henceforth master in his Cabinet. The strain of Seward's position upon a

man inclined to be vain and weak can easily be imagined, but the sudden

vagary in which it now resulted was surprising. Upon April 1 he sent to

Lincoln "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." In this

paper, after deploring what he described as the lack of any policy so

far, and defining, in a way that does not matter, his attitude as to the

forts in the South, he proceeded thus: "I would demand explanations from

Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and

Central America, to raise a vigorous spirit of independence on this

continent against European intervention, and if satisfactory explanations

are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and

declare war against them." In other words, Seward would seek to end all

domestic dissensions by suddenly creating out of nothing a dazzling

foreign policy. But this was not the only point, even if it was the main

point; he proceeded: "Either the President must do it" (that is the sole

conduct of this policy) "himself, or devolve it on some member of his

Cabinet. It is not my especial province. But I neither seek to evade

nor assume responsibility." In other words, Seward put himself forward

as the sole director of the Government. In his brief reply Lincoln made

no reference whatever to Seward's amazing programme. He pointed out that

the policy so far, as to which Seward had complained, was one in which

Seward had entirely concurred. As to the concluding demand that some one

man, and that man Seward, should control all policy, he wrote, "If this

must be done, I must do it. When a general line of policy is adopted, I

apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without good reason, or

continuing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points

arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to have, the

advice of all the Cabinet." Seward was not a fool, far from it; he was

one of the ablest men in America, only at that moment strained and

excited beyond the limits of his good sense. Lincoln's quiet answer

sobered him then and for ever after. He showed a generous mind; he wrote

to his wife soon after: "Executive force and vigour are rare qualities;

the President is the best of us." And Lincoln's generosity was no less;

his private secretary, Nicolay, saw these papers; but no other man knew

anything of Seward's abortive rebellion against Lincoln till after they

both were dead. The story needs no explanation, but the more attentively

all the circumstances are considered, the more Lincoln's handling of this

emergency, which threatened the ruin of his Government, throws into shade

the weakness he had hitherto shown.

Lincoln was thus in a stronger position when he finally decided as to

Fort Sumter. It is unnecessary to follow the repeated consultations that

took place. There were preparations for possible expeditions both to

Fort Sumter and to Fort Pickens, and various blunders about them, and

Seward made some trouble by officious interference about them. An

announcement was sent to the Governor of South Carolina that provisions

would be sent to Fort Sumter and he was assured that if this was

unopposed no further steps would be taken. What chiefly concerns us is

that the eventual decision to send provisions but not troops to Fort

Sumter was Lincoln's decision; but that it was not taken till after

Senators and Congressmen had made clear to him that Northern opinion

would support him. It was the right decision, for it conspicuously

avoided the appearance of provocation, while it upheld the right of the

Union; but it was taken perilously late, and the delay exposed the

Government to the risk of a great humiliation.

An Alabama gentleman had urged Jefferson Davis that the impending

struggle must not be delayed. "Unless," he said, "you sprinkle blood in

the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in

ten days." There is every reason to suppose that the gentleman's

statement as to the probable collapse of the South was mere rhetoric, but

it seems that his advice led to orders being sent to Beauregard to reduce

Fort Sumter. Beauregard sent a summons to Anderson; Anderson, now all

but starved out, replied that unless he received supplies or instructions

he would surrender on April 15. Whether by Beauregard's orders or

through some misunderstanding, the Confederate batteries opened fire on

Fort Sumter on April 12. Fort Sumter became untenable on the next day,

when the relief ships, which Anderson had been led to expect sooner, but

which could in no case really have helped him, were just appearing in the

offing. Anderson very properly capitulated. On Sunday, April 14, 1861,

he marched out with the honours of war. The Union flag had been fired

upon in earnest by the Confederates, and, leaving Virginia and the States

that went with it to join the Confederacy if they chose, the North sprang

to arms.

In the events which had led up to the outbreak of war Abraham Lincoln had

played a part more admirable and more decisive in its effect than his

countrymen could have noted at the time or perhaps have appreciated

since. He was confronted now with duties requiring mental gifts of a

different kind from those which he had hitherto displayed, and with

temptations to which he had not yet been exposed. In a general sense the

greatness of mind and heart which he unfolded under fierce trial does not

need to be demonstrated to-day. Yet in detail hardly an action of his

Presidency is exempt from controversy; nor is his many-sided character

one of those which men readily flatter themselves that they understand.

There are always, moreover, those to whom it is a marvel how any great

man came by his name. The particular tribute, which in the pages that

follow it is desired to pay to him, consists in the careful examination

of just those actions and just those qualities of his upon which candid

detraction has in fact fastened, or on which candid admiration has

pronounced with hesitancy.