Those who in peaceful times like these wonder why so strong and
direct a man as Lincoln should have been so eager to conciliate the
haughty and rebellious Confederacy, to assure the rebels that there
would be no “coercion” or “invasion,” and to appeal to their historic
national consciousness, rather than to tell them in so many words that
they would be scourged into obedience, must consider that he at last
realized the Southern misunderstanding of his purpose and temperament
which caused the Governor of Florida to write to the Governor of South
Carolina:
“If there is sufficient manliness at the South to strike for our
rights, honor and safety, in God’s name let it be done before the
inauguration of Lincoln.”
Not only that, but Mr. Seward, the great Republican leader of the East,
now Secretary of State, and one of the deadliest foes of slavery,
within three weeks wrote this advice:
“_Change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about
slavery_, for a question upon _union or disunion._”
No man knew or loved Lincoln better than Leonard Sweet, who made this
deliberate analysis of him:
“In dealing with men he was a trimmer, and such a trimmer the world has
never seen. Halifax, who was great in his day as a trimmer, would blush
by the side of Lincoln; _yet Lincoln never trimmed in principles_, it
was only in his conduct with men.”
Besides, Lincoln was incapable of mere hatred. All through the Civil
War he showed that his love for the whole American people was tidal.
It was his belief in the goodness of human nature and the justice of
the Union cause that made him grieve like a defied and deserted father
over the erring Southern insurgents, and to hope, with an intensity
that drew prayer from his lips, that the ties of race, continental
pride and common national memory would reunite the nation without the
sacrifice and seal of bloodshed.
It was not for love of the negro that he waged war upon slavery, but
for the sake of justice and humanity, and to save the nation from
increasing degradation and demoralization. True, he had challenged the
South when he said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I
believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half
free.” But he had also said:
“There is a physical difference between the white and black races which
I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms
of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live,
while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior
and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race.”
Lincoln’s private letters and conversations, from his nomination to his
election, prove that there was one point only on which he would permit
no compromise--slavery must not be extended to the free territories.
[Illustration: St. Gaudens statue, Lincoln Park, Chicago]
But as President his one supreme duty was to save the Union, to prevent
the destruction of the nation. He was yet to write amid the roar of a
conflict in which half a million lives were lost, that agonized but
unflinching letter to Horace Greeley:
“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the
Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the
nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there be those who
would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy
slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would
do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do
it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone,
I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I
do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I
forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
Those who did not recognize the greatness of Lincoln under his simple
manners and kindly, humble disposition, assumed that he would be
dominated by Mr. Seward, his scholarly and distinguished Secretary of
State. The homespun, picturesque orator of Illinois was all very well
to catch votes. But Mr. Seward would be the real President.
Mrs. Lincoln heard the talk and mentioned it to her husband.
“I may not rule myself, but certainly Seward shall not,” said Lincoln.
“The only ruler I have is my conscience--following God in it--and
these men will have to learn that yet.”
John Hay, his secretary and bosom friend, who called Lincoln “the
greatest character since Christ,” wrote to Mr. Herndon: “It is absurd
to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his
intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that
men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”
Still, even though he stood rocklike where his mind and conscience told
him that he was right, a humbler, simpler, more unaffected man never
walked the earth; and there are libraries of books teeming with tales
of his tenderness to women, his love of little children, his compassion
for the unfortunate.
The first sign of the strong, sure Lincoln in the White House came when
the new President on the day after his inauguration received a dispatch
from Major Anderson declaring that he was short of provisions, that
Fort Sumter must be abandoned to the Confederacy in a few weeks,
and that it would take at least twenty thousand soldiers to relieve
Charleston harbor from the Confederate siege. The whole Federal army
numbered only sixteen thousand men.
Washington was filled with clamorous office-seekers who crowded the
White House. The President was distracted. Even his carriage was
stopped by a greedy applicant, and he was compelled to cry, “I won’t
open shop in the street.”
With the secret news from Fort Sumter stirring his soul--for no one
knew better that immediate war depended on his action--Lincoln told
stories, cracked jokes and dealt with the thronging politicians in his
old shrewd, homely way. None of the place-hunters was permitted to
suspect the impending tragedy that made him bow his head when he was
alone.
Meanwhile he ordered General Scott to report what could be done; but
the old hero advised him that the abandonment of Sumter was “almost
inevitable.” He had also ordered troops to be sent to relieve Fort
Pickens, in Florida, which was also menaced. General Scott reported
that both Pickens and Sumter should be evacuated.
Instantly the President ordered the Navy Department to prepare plans
for a relief expedition for Fort Sumter. That night he gave a great
state dinner. His humorous stories and quaint sallies of wit kept his
guests in high spirits. His lean face was convulsed with laughter, his
eyes sparkled and his thin, high voice whipped up the merriment.
But as the night waned and the laughter died down, he called the
members of his Cabinet aside and, with haggard face and a voice of deep
emotion, he told them the news from General Scott.
That night Lincoln did not close his eyes. The next day, against the
advice of five of his Cabinet, including Mr. Seward, all of whom
advised the abandonment of Fort Sumter, he ordered the preparation of
a naval expedition to relieve Major Anderson. Additional troops and
supplies were ordered into the beleaguered Fort Pickens in Florida.
The Confederate commissioners might seek conferences with Secretary
Seward in vain. The expedition to rescue Sumter sailed with orders to
deliver food to the garrison and, if opposed, to force its way in.
Lincoln’s hand had signed the order that precipitated the Civil War.
Although the President had notified Governor Pickens, of South
Carolina, that the relief expedition simply contemplated the peaceful
delivery of provisions to a garrison threatened by starvation, the
Confederates immediately demanded the surrender of Sumter, with
a pledge from Major Anderson that he should make no preparations
to injure the fort after withdrawing. This demand was refused by
Anderson, who added, “if I can only be permitted to leave on the pledge
you mention, I shall never, so help me God, leave this fort alive.”
Again and again Anderson was called upon to surrender Sumter. The
Confederates were determined to have the place before Lincoln’s
supplies arrived. Each time the brave Union officer replied that he
would maintain his country’s flag where it flew.
Then came the crash which shook the continent and thrilled the
civilized world.
At daybreak on April 12, 1861, in the presence of a great multitude of
civilian spectators in Charleston harbor, the rebel batteries opened
fire on Fort Sumter and the Union. For two days the fort withstood the
terrific bombardment, and then, with all food gone, his quarters set
on fire by red hot cannon balls, and his ammunition almost exhausted,
Major Anderson lowered the stars and stripes to native-born Americans
and hoisted the white flag.
That was on Saturday. On Sunday Lincoln wrote a proclamation calling
for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the Union.
The same night Douglas called at the White House--Douglas, the
Democratic, thundering Douglas, the champion of slavery; Douglas, the
antagonist of Lincoln in almost every crisis of his career; Douglas,
who in the Senate only a few weeks ago had cried, “War is disunion.
War is final, eternal separation”--and Lincoln clasped hands with the
brilliant rival from whom he had won his wife and the Presidency, now
come to pledge his life to the defence of the Union.
On Monday morning Lincoln’s proclamation and Douglas’s noble and
magnanimous declaration that he would support Lincoln in saving the
nation were read by the American people.
To the exultant shout that went up from the armed slave States, there
came an answering cry of rage and indignation from the free States.
The whole country trembled with the war spirit. War! war! war! Every
city, town and village in the North answered Lincoln’s call for troops
to crush the rebellion. Farms and factories poured out their men.
Streets were gay with bunting and noisy with marching feet. Industry
was abandoned in the instant and tremendous preparation for the
conflict.
Yet Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand men was to grow into
a call for a half million men and a half billion dollars, and the
struggle between the sixteen free States and the seven rebellious slave
States, with the border States hesitating between, was to change into a
four years’ death-grapple between all the States of the South and all
the States of the North, a conflict without parallel in its horror and
costliness.
Mr. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, thus described
Lincoln in the White House at the beginning of the war:
“A remarkably tall and forward-bending form is coming through the
further folding doors, leaving them carelessly open behind him. He is
walking slowly, heavily, like a man in a dream. His strongly marked
features have a drawn look, there are dark circles under his deep-set
eyes, and these seem to be gazing at something far away, or into the
future.”
That countenance of unutterable sadness, fixed gray eyes that seemed to
see something in the vacant air; thin, stooped shoulders, bowed head,
hands clasped behind the back, slow, halting step and general air of
weariness and melancholy abstraction, was known only to those who saw
Lincoln when he wrestled alone with the agony of his burdens.
The greedy crowd that pressed for office, the impatient fanatics who
thrust their advice upon him, the haughty statesmen who condescended
to meddle with his powers, the tricksters and traders, saw only the
simple, resolute, vulgar, kindly Lincoln, full of the old allure
of anecdote and jest, patient, keen and ready in a flash to avoid
an immature decision or soften a refusal by a witty epigram or an
illuminating joke.
It is an astonishing evidence of Lincoln’s complex character that he
could laugh and play like a careless boy, and patiently putter over the
small details of office-giving, while the iron of his character was
annealing in the furnace of war.
No more sensitive or imaginative man than Lincoln ever lived. His
amazing sense of humor stayed him in his trial. It was sometimes
Titanic.
“Has anything gone wrong at the front?” asked a friend, seeing him
downcast.
“No,” replied the President with a weary smile. “It isn’t the war; it’s
the post office at Brownsville, Missouri.”
The deadly, ceaseless, shameless crowding and intriguing of
place-hunters--notwithstanding the shock of war that threatened the
nation itself--made a profound impression on Lincoln.
“This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without
work, will finally test the strength of our institutions,” he said to
Mr. Herndon.
That has been the idea of every tormented President of the United
States, from Washington to Roosevelt.
“He is an old criminal lawyer,” wrote one of his secretaries,
“practiced in observing the ways of rascals, accustomed to reading them
and circumventing them, but he does not commonly tell any man precisely
what he thinks of him.”
Even so able a man as Secretary Seward did not at first recognize the
force, genius and dignity that lay behind the rough, whimsical exterior
of Lincoln, and gave himself the airs of a superior; but presently even
Seward said: “He is the best of us all.”
While the country was ringing with the sounds of marching men after
the fall of Fort Sumter, it was reported that a great force of
Confederates was moving against Washington. There were only four or
five thousand troops in the capital. A Massachusetts regiment on the
way to Washington had been attacked by a mob. The Seventh Regiment of
New York was expected, but the Marylanders had torn up the tracks and
it did not come. The city was in danger of famine. The Confederate
attack was hourly expected. The capital was cut off.
Lincoln’s anguish was unconcealed. Walking up and down his office, with
a look of pain on his face, he gave vent to his dread.
“I begin to believe that there is no North. The Seventh Regiment is a
myth.”
Again he paced the floor for half an hour.
“Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?” he groaned.
[Illustration: