Abraham Lincoln

by Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood

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.