THE SUMMONS
The news of the capitulation of Fort Sumter reached Washington on Sunday morning, April 14th. At a momentous cabinet meeting, President Lincoln read the draft of a proclamation calling into service seventy-five thousand men, to suppress combinations obstructing the execution of the laws in the Southern States. The cabinet was now a unit. Now that the crisis had come, the administration had a policy. Would it approve itself to the anxious people of the North? Could it count upon the support of those who had counselled peace, peace at any cost?
Those who knew Senator Douglas well could not doubt his loyalty to the Union in this crisis; yet his friends knew that Union-loving men in the Democratic ranks would respond to the President's proclamation with a thousandfold greater enthusiasm, could they know that their leader stood by the administration. Moved by these considerations, Hon. George Ashmun of Massachusetts ventured to call upon Douglas on this Sunday evening, and to suggest the propriety of some public statement to strengthen the President's hands. Would he not call upon the President at once and give him the assurance of his support? Douglas demurred: he was not sure that Mr. Lincoln wanted his advice and aid. Mr. Ashmun assured him that the President would welcome any advances, and he spoke advisedly as a friend to both men. The peril of the country was grave; surely this was not a time when men should let personal and partisan considerations stand between them and service to their country. Mrs. Douglas added her entreaties, and Douglas finally yielded. Though the hour was late, the two men set off for the White House, and found there the hearty welcome which Ashmun had promised.[[979]]
Of all the occurrences of this memorable day, this interview between Lincoln and Douglas strikes the imagination with most poignant suggestiveness. Had Douglas been a less generous opponent, he might have reminded the President that matters had come to just that pass which he had foreseen in 1858. Nothing of the sort passed Douglas's lips. The meeting of the rivals was most cordial and hearty. They held converse as men must when hearts are oppressed with a common burden. The President took up and read aloud the proclamation summoning the nation to arms. When he had done, Douglas said with deep earnestness, "Mr. President, I cordially concur in every word of that document, except that instead of the call for seventy-five thousand men, I would make it two hundred thousand. You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do."[[980]] Why has not some artist seized upon the dramatic moment when they rose and passed to the end of the room to examine a map which hung there? Douglas, with animated face and impetuous gesture, pointing out the strategic places in the coming contest; Lincoln, with the suggestion of brooding melancholy upon his careworn face, listening in rapt attention to the quick, penetrating observations of his life-long rival. But what no artist could put upon canvas was the dramatic absence of resentment and defeated ambition in the one, and the patient teachableness and self-mastery of the other. As they parted, a quick hearty grasp of hands symbolized this remarkable consecration to a common task.
As they left the executive mansion, Ashmun urged his companion to send an account of this interview to the press, that it might accompany the President's message on the morrow. Douglas then penned the following dispatch: "Senator Douglas called upon the President, and had an interesting conversation on the present condition of the country. The substance of it was, on the part of Mr. Douglas, that while he was unalterably opposed to the administration in all its political issues, he was prepared to fully sustain the President in the exercise of all his constitutional functions, to preserve the Union, maintain the government, and defend the Federal capital. A firm policy and prompt action was necessary. The capital was in danger, and must be defended at all hazards, and at any expense of men and money. He spoke of the present and future without any reference to the past."[[981]] When the people of the North read the proclamation in the newspapers, on the following morning, a million men were cheered and sustained in their loyalty to the Union by the intelligence that their great leader had subordinated all lesser ends of party to the paramount duty of maintaining the Constitution of the fathers. To his friends in Washington, Douglas said unhesitatingly, "We must fight for our country and forget all differences. There can be but two parties—the party of patriots and the party of traitors. We belong to the first."[[982]] And to friends in Missouri where disunion sentiment was rife, he telegraphed, "I deprecate war, but if it must come I am with my country, and for my country, under all circumstances and in every contingency. Individual policy must be subordinated to the public safety."[[983]]
From this day on, Douglas was in frequent consultation with the President. The sorely tried and distressed Lincoln was unutterably grateful for the firm grip which this first of "War Democrats" kept upon the progress of public opinion in the irresolute border States. It was during one of these interviews, after the attack upon the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment in the streets of Baltimore, that Douglas urged upon the President the possibility of bringing troops by water to Annapolis, thence to Washington, thus avoiding further conflict in the disaffected districts of Maryland.[[984]] Eventually the Eighth Massachusetts and the Seventh New York reached Washington by this route, to the immense relief of the President and his cabinet.
Before this succor came to the alarmed capital, Douglas had left the city for the West. He had received intimations that Egypt in his own State showed marked symptoms of disaffection. The old ties of blood and kinship of the people of southern Illinois with their neighbors in the border States were proving stronger than Northern affiliations. Douglas wielded an influence in these southern, Democratic counties, such as no other man possessed. Could he not best serve the administration by bearding disunionism in its den? Believing that Cairo, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio, was destined to be a strategic point of immense importance in the coming struggle, and that the fate of the whole valley depended upon the unwavering loyalty of Illinois, Douglas laid the matter before Lincoln. He would go or stay in Washington, wherever Lincoln thought he could do the most good. Probably neither then realized the tremendous nature of the struggle upon which the country had entered; yet both knew that the Northwest would be the makeweight in the balance for the Union; and that every nerve must be strained to hold the border States of Kentucky and Missouri. Who could rouse the latent Unionism of the Northwest and of the border States like Douglas? Lincoln advised him to go. There was a quick hand-grasp, a hurried farewell, and they parted never to meet again.[[985]]
Rumor gave strange shapes to this "mission" which carried Douglas in such haste to the Northwest. Most persistent of all is the tradition that he was authorized to raise a huge army in the States of the upper Mississippi Valley, and to undertake that vast flanking movement which subsequently fell to Grant and Sherman to execute. Such a project would have been thoroughly consonant with Douglas's conviction of the inevitable unity and importance of the great valley; but evidence is wanting to corroborate this legend.[[986]] Its frequent repetition, then and now, must rather be taken as a popular recognition of the complete accord between the President and the greatest of War Democrats. Colonel Forney, who stood very near to Douglas, afterward stated "by authority," that President Lincoln would eventually have called Douglas into the administration or have placed him in one of the highest military commands.[[987]] Such importance may be given to this testimony as belongs to statements which have passed unconfirmed and unchallenged for half a century.
On his way to Illinois, Douglas missed a train and was detained half a day in the little town of Bellaire, Ohio, a few miles below Wheeling in Virginia.[[988]] It was a happy accident, for just across the river the people of northwestern Virginia were meditating resistance to the secession movement, which under the guidance of Governor Letcher threatened to sever them from the Union-loving population of Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was precisely in this region, nearly a hundred years before, that popular sovereignty had almost succeeded in forming a fourteenth State of the Confederacy. There had always been a disparity between the people of these transmontane counties and the tide-water region. The intelligence that Douglas was in Bellaire speedily brought a throng about the hotel in which he was resting. There were clamors for a speech. In the afternoon he yielded to their importunities. By this time the countryside was aroused. People came across the river from Virginia and many came down by train from Wheeling,[[989]] Men who were torn by a conflict of sentiments, not knowing where their paramount allegiance lay, hung upon his words.
Douglas spoke soberly and thoughtfully, not as a Democrat, not as a Northern man, but simply and directly as a lover of the Union. "If we recognize the right of secession in one case, we give our assent to it in all cases; and if the few States upon the Gulf are now to separate themselves from us, and erect a barrier across the mouth of that great river of which the Ohio is a tributary, how long will it be before New York may come to the conclusion that she may set up for herself, and levy taxes upon every dollar's worth of goods imported and consumed in the Northwest, and taxes upon every bushel of wheat, and every pound of pork, or beef, or other productions that may be sent from the Northwest to the Atlantic in search of a market?" Secession meant endless division and sub-division, the formation of petty confederacies, appeals to the sword and the bayonet instead of to the ballot.