Thus Lincoln was very far from inspiring general confidence in anything beyond his good intentions. He is remembered as a personality with a "something" about him—the vague phrase is John Bright's—which widely endeared him, but his was by no means that "magnetic" personality which we might be led to believe was indispensable in America. Indeed, it is remarkable that to some really good judges he remained always unimpressive. Charles Francis Adams, who during the Civil War served his country as well as Minister in London as his grandfather had done after the War of Independence, lamented to the end that Seward, his immediate chief, had to serve under an inferior man; and a more sympathetic man, Lord Lyons, our representative at Washington, refers to Lincoln with nothing more than an amused kindliness. No detail of his policy has escaped fierce criticism, and the man himself while he lived was the subject of so much depreciation and condescending approval, that we are forced to ask who discovered his greatness till his death inclined them to idealise him. The answer is that precisely those Americans of trained intellect whose title to this description is clearest outside America were the first who began to see beneath his strange exterior. Lowell, watching the course of public events with ceaseless scrutiny; Walt Whitman, sauntering in Washington in the intervals of the labour among the wounded by which he broke down his robust strength, and seeing things as they passed with the sure observation of a poet; Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic, studying affairs in the thick of them at the outset of the war, and not less closely by correspondence when he went as Minister to Vienna—such men when they praised Lincoln after his death expressed a judgment which they began to form from the first; a judgment which started with the recognition of his honesty, traced the evidence of his wisdom as it appeared, gradually and not by repentant impulse learned his greatness. And it is a judgment large enough to explain the lower estimate of Lincoln which certainly had wide currency. Not to multiply witnesses, Motley in June, 1861, having seen him for the second time, writes: "I went and had an hour's talk with Mr. Lincoln. I am very glad of it, for, had I not done so, I should have left Washington with a very inaccurate impression of the President. I am now satisfied that he is a man of very considerable native sagacity; and that he has an ingenuous, unsophisticated, frank, and noble character. I believe him to be as true as steel, and as courageous as true. At the same time there is doubtless an ignorance about State matters, and particularly about foreign affairs, which he does not attempt to conceal, but which we must of necessity regret in a man placed in such a position at such a crisis. Nevertheless his very modesty in this respect disarms criticism. We parted very affectionately, and perhaps I shall never set eyes on him again, but I feel that, so far as perfect integrity and directness of purpose go, the country will be safe in his hands." Three years had passed, and the political world of America was in that storm of general dissatisfaction in which not a member of Congress would be known as "a Lincoln man," when Motley writes again from Vienna to his mother, "I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the true, honest type of American democracy. There is nothing of the shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn't-be fine gentleman; he is the great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful, brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onwards towards what he believes the right." In a later letter he observes, "His mental abilities were large, and they became the more robust as the more weight was imposed upon them."
This last sentence, especially if in Lincoln's mental abilities the qualities of his character be included, probably indicates the chief point for remark in any estimate of his presidency. It is true that he was judged at first as a stranger among strangers. Walt Whitman has described vividly a scene, with "a dash of comedy, almost farce, such as Shakespeare puts in his blackest tragedies," outside the hotel in New York where Lincoln stayed on his journey to Washington; "his look and gait, his perfect composure and coolness," to cut it short, the usually noted marks of his eccentricity, "as he stood looking with curiosity on that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces returned the look with similar curiosity, not a single one" among the crowd "his personal friend." He was not much otherwise situated when he came to Washington. It is true also that in the early days he was learning his business. "Why, Mr. President," said some one towards the end of his life, "you have changed your mind." "Yes, I have," said he, "and I don't think much of a man who isn't wiser to-day than he was yesterday." But it seems to be above all true that the exercise of power and the endurance of responsibility gave him new strength. This, of course, cannot be demonstrated, but Americans then living, who recall Abraham Lincoln, remark most frequently how the man grew to his task. And this perhaps is the main impression which the slight record here presented will convey, the impression of a man quite unlike the many statesmen whom power and the vexations attendant upon it have in some piteous way spoiled and marred, a man who started by being tough and shrewd and canny and became very strong and very wise, started with an inclination to honesty, courage, and kindness, and became, under a tremendous strain, honest, brave, and kind to an almost tremendous degree.
The North then started upon the struggle with an eagerness and unanimity from which the revulsion was to try all hearts, and the President's most of all; and not a man in the North guessed what the strain of that struggle was to be. At first indeed there was alarm in Washington for the immediate safety of the city. Confederate flags could be seen floating from the hotels in Alexandria across the river; Washington itself was full of rumours of plots and intended assassinations, and full of actual Southern spies; everything was disorganised; and Lincoln himself, walking round one night, found the arsenal with open doors, absolutely unguarded.
By April 20, first the Navy Yard at Gosport, in Virginia, had to be abandoned, then the Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and on the day of this latter event Lee went over to the South. One regiment from Massachusetts, where the State authorities had prepared for war before the fall of Sumter, was already in Washington; but it had had to fight its way through a furious mob in Baltimore, with some loss of life on both sides. A deputation from many churches in that city came to the President, begging him to desist from his bloodthirsty preparations, but found him "constitutionally genial and jovial," and "wholly inaccessible to Christian appeals." It mattered more that a majority of the Maryland Legislature was for the South, and that the Governor temporised and requested that no more troops should pass through Baltimore. The Mayor of Baltimore and the railway authorities burned railway bridges and tore up railway lines, and the telegraph wires were cut. Thus for about five days the direct route to Washington from the North was barred. It seemed as if the boast of some Southern orator that the Confederate flag would float over the capital by May 1 might be fulfilled. Beauregard could have transported his now drilled troops by rail from South Carolina and would have found Washington isolated and hardly garrisoned. As a matter of fact, no such daring move was contemplated in the South, and the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, were themselves under a similar alarm; but the South had a real opportunity.
The fall of Washington at that moment would have had political consequences which no one realised better than Lincoln. It might well have led the Unionists in the border States to despair, and there is evidence that even then he so fully realised the task which lay before the North as to feel that the loss of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri would have made it impossible. He was at heart intensely anxious, and quaintly and injudiciously relieved his feelings by the remark to the "6th Massachusetts" that he felt as if all other help were a dream, and they were "the only real thing." Yet those who were with him testify to his composure and to the vigour with which he concerted with his Cabinet the various measures of naval, military, financial, postal, and police preparation which the occasion required, but which need not here be detailed. Many of the measures of course lay outside the powers which Congress had conferred on the public departments, but the President had no hesitation in "availing himself," as he put it, "of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection," and looking for the sanction of Congress afterwards, rather than "let the Government at once fall into ruin." The difficulties of government were greatly aggravated by the uncertainty as to which of its servants, civil, naval, or military, were loyal, and the need of rapidly filling the many posts left vacant by unexpected desertion. Meanwhile troops from New England, and also from New York, which had utterly disappointed some natural expectations in the South by the enthusiasm of its rally to the Union, quickly arrived near Baltimore. They repaired for themselves the interrupted railway tracks round the city, and by April 25 enough soldiers were in Washington to put an end to any present alarm. In case of need, the law of "habeas corpus" was suspended in Maryland. The President had no wish that unnecessary recourse should be had to martial law. Naturally, however, one of his generals summarily arrested a Southern recruiting agent in Baltimore. The ordinary law would probably have sufficed, and Lincoln is believed to have regretted this action, but it was obvious that he must support it when done. Hence arose an occasion for the old Chief Justice Taney to make a protest on behalf of legality, to which the President, who had armed force on his side, could not give way, and thus early began a controversy to which we must recur. It was gravely urged upon Lincoln that he should forcibly prevent the Legislature of Maryland from holding a formal sitting; he refused on the sensible ground that the legislators could assemble in some way and had better not assemble with a real grievance in constitutional law. Then a strange alteration came over Baltimore. Within three weeks all active demonstration in favour of the South had subsided; the disaffected Legislature resolved upon neutrality; the Governor, loyal at heart—if the brief epithet loyal may pass, as not begging any profound legal question—carried on affairs in the interest of the Union; postal communication and the passage of troops were free from interruption by the middle of May; and the pressing alarm about Maryland was over. These incidents of the first days of war have been recounted in some detail, because they may illustrate the gravity of the issue in the border States, in others of which the struggle, though further removed from observation, lasted longer; and because, too, it is well to realise the stress of agitation under which the Government had to make far-reaching preparation for a larger struggle, while Lincoln, whose will was decisive in all these measures, carried on all the while that seemingly unimportant routine of a President's life which is in the quietest times exacting.
The alarm in Washington was only transitory, and it was generally supposed in the North that insurrection would be easily put down. Some even specified the number of days necessary, agreeably fixing upon a smaller number than the ninety days for which the militia were called out. Secretary Seward has been credited with language of this kind, and even General Scott, whose political judgment was feeble, though his military judgment was sound, seems at first to have rejected proposals, for example, for drilling irregular cavalry, made in the expectation of a war of some length. There is evidence that neither Lincoln nor Cameron, the Secretary of War, indulged in these pleasant fancies. Irresistible public opinion, in the East especially, demanded to see prompt activity. The North had arisen in its might; it was for the Administration to put forth that might, capture Richmond, to which the Confederate Government had moved, and therewith make an end of rebellion. The truth was that the North had to make its army before it could wisely advance into the assured territory of the South; the situation of the Southern Government in this respect was precisely the same. The North had enough to do meantime in making sure of the States which were still debatable ground. Such forces as were available must of necessity be used for this purpose, but for any larger operations of war military considerations, especially on the side which had the larger resources at its back, were in favour of waiting and perfecting the instrument which was to be used. But in the course of July the pressure of public opinion and of Congress, which had then assembled, overcame, not without some reason, the more cautious military view, and on the 21st of that month the North received its first great lesson in adversity at the battle of Bull Run.
Before recounting this disaster we may proceed with the story of the struggle in the border States. At an early date the rising armies of the North had been organised into three commands, called the Department of the Potomac, on the front between Washington and Richmond, the Department of the Ohio, on the upper watershed of the river of that name, and the Department of the West. Of necessity the generals commanding in these two more Western Departments exercised a larger discretion than the general at Washington. The Department of the Ohio was under General McClellan, before the war a captain of Engineers, who had retired from active service and had been engaged as a railway manager, in which capacity he has already been noticed, but who had earned a good name in the Mexican War, had been keen enough in his profession to visit the Crimea, and was esteemed by General Scott. The people of West Virginia, who, as has been said, were trying to organise themselves as a new State, adhering to the Union, were invaded by forces despatched by the Governor of their old State. They lay mainly west of the mountains, and help could reach them up tributary valleys of the Ohio. They appealed to McClellan, and the successes quickly won by forces despatched by him, and afterwards under his direct command, secured West Virginia, and incidentally the reputation of McClellan. In Kentucky, further west, the Governor endeavoured to hold the field for the South with a body known as the State Guard, while Unionist leaders among the people were raising volunteer regiments for the North. Nothing, however, was determined by fighting between these forces. The State Legislature at first took up an attitude of neutrality, but a new Legislature, elected in June, was overwhelmingly for the Union. Ultimately the Confederate armies invaded Kentucky, and the Legislature thereupon invited the Union armies into the State to expel them, and placed 40,000 Kentucky volunteers at the disposal of the President. Thenceforward, though Kentucky, stretching as it does for four hundred miles between the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, remained for long a battle-ground, the allegiance of its people to the Union was unshaken. But the uncertainty about their attitude continued till the autumn of 1861, and while it lasted was an important element in Lincoln's calculations. (It must be remembered that slavery existed in Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.) In Missouri the strife of factions was fierce. Already in January there had been reports of a conspiracy to seize the arsenal at St. Louis for the South when the time came, and General Scott had placed in command Captain Nathaniel Lyon, on whose loyalty he relied the more because he was an opponent of slavery. The Governor was in favour of the South—as was also the Legislature, and the Governor could count on some part of the State Militia; so Lincoln, when he called for volunteers, commissioned Lyon to raise them in Missouri. In this task a Union State Committee in St. Louis greatly helped him, and the large German population in that city was especially ready to enlist for the Union. Many of the German immigrants of those days had come to America partly for the sake of its free institutions. A State Convention was summoned by the Governor to pass an Ordinance of Secession, but its electors were minded otherwise, and the Convention voted against secession. In several encounters Lyon, who was an intrepid soldier, defeated the forces of the Governor; in June he took possession of the State capital, driving the Governor and Legislature away; the State Convention then again assembled and set up a Unionist Government for the State. This new State Government was not everywhere acknowledged; conspiracies in the Southern interest continued to exist in Missouri; and the State was repeatedly molested by invasions, of no great military consequence, from Arkansas. Indeed, in the autumn there was a serious recrudescence of trouble, in which Lyon lost his life. But substantially Missouri was secured for the Union. Naturally enough, a great many of the citizens of Missouri who had combined to save their State to the Union became among the strongest of the "Radicals" who will later engage our attention. Many, however, of the leading men who had done most in this cause, including the friends of Blair, Lincoln's Postmaster-General, adhered no less emphatically to the "Conservative" section of the Republicans.
2. Bull Run.
Thus, in the autumn of 1861, North and South had become solidified into something like two countries. In the month of July, which now concerns us, this process was well on its way, but it is to be marked that the whole long tract of Kentucky still formed a neutral zone, which the Northern Government did not wish to harass, and which perhaps the South would have done well to let alone, while further west in Missouri the forces of the North were not even as fully organised as in the East. So the only possible direction in which any great blow could be struck was the direction of Richmond, now the capital, and it might seem, therefore, the heart, of the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress was to meet there on July 20. The New York Tribune, which was edited by Mr. Horace Greeley, a vigorous writer whose omniscience was unabated by the variation of his own opinion, was the one journal of far-reaching influence in the North; and it only gave exaggerated point to a general feeling when it declared that the Confederate Congress must not meet. The Senators and Congressmen now in Washington were not quite so exacting, but they had come there unanimous in their readiness to vote taxes and support the war in every way, and they wanted to see something done; and they wanted it all the more because the three months' service of the militia was running out. General Scott, still the chief military adviser of Government, was quite distinct in his preference for waiting and for perfecting the discipline and organisation of the volunteers, who had not yet even been formed into brigades. On the militia he set no value at all. For long he refused to countenance any but minor movements preparatory to a later advance. It is not quite certain, however, that Congress and public opinion were wrong in clamouring for action. The Southern troops were not much, if at all, more ready for use than the Northerners; and Jefferson Davis and his military adviser, Lee, desired time for their defensive preparations. It was perhaps too much to expect that the country after its great uprising should be content to give supplies and men without end while nothing apparently happened; and the spirit of the troops themselves might suffer more from inaction than from defeat. A further thought, while it made defeat seem more dangerous, made battle more tempting. There was fear that European Powers might recognise the Southern Confederacy and enter into relations with it. Whether they did so depended on whether they were confirmed in their growing suspicion that the North could not conquer the South. Balancing the military advice which was given them as to the risk against this political importunity, Lincoln and his Cabinet chose the risk, and Scott at length withdrew his opposition. Lincoln was possibly more sensitive to pressure than he afterwards became, more prone to treat himself as a person under the orders of the people, but there is no reason to doubt that he acted on his own sober judgment as well as that of his Cabinet. Whatever degree of confidence he reposed in Scott, Scott was not very insistent; the risk was not overwhelming; the battle was very nearly won, would have been won if the orders of Scott had been carried out. No very great harm in fact followed the defeat of Bull Run; and the danger of inaction was real. He was probably then, as he certainly was afterwards, profoundly afraid that the excessive military caution which he often encountered would destroy the cause of the North by disheartening the people who supported the war. That is no doubt a kind of fear to which many statesmen are too prone, but Lincoln's sense of real popular feeling throughout the wide extent of the North is agreed to have been uncommonly sure. Definite judgment on such a question is impossible, but probably Lincoln and his Cabinet were wise.
However, they did not win their battle. The Southern army under Beauregard lay near the Bull Run river, some twenty miles from Washington, covering the railway junction of Manassas on the line to Richmond. The main Northern army, under General McDowell, a capable officer, lay south of the Potomac, where fortifications to guard Washington had already been erected on Virginian soil. In the Shenandoah Valley was another Southern force, under Joseph Johnston, watched by the Northern general Patterson at Harper's Ferry, which had been recovered by Scott's operations. Each of these Northern generals was in superior force to his opponent. McDowell was to attack the Confederate position at Manassas, while Patterson, whose numbers were nearly double Johnston's, was to keep him so seriously occupied that he could not join Beauregard. With whatever excuse of misunderstanding or the like, Patterson made hardly an attempt to carry out his part of Scott's orders, and Johnston, with the bulk of his force, succeeded in joining Beauregard the day before McDowell's attack, and without his gaining knowledge of this movement. The battle of Bull Run or Manassas (or rather the earlier and more famous of two battles so named) was an engagement of untrained troops in which up to a certain point the high individual quality of those troops supplied the place of discipline. McDowell handled with good judgment a very unhandy instrument. It was only since his advance had been contemplated that his army had been organised in brigades. The enemy, occupying high wooded banks on the south side of the Bull Run, a stream about as broad as the Thames at Oxford but fordable, was successfully pushed back to a high ridge beyond; but the stubborn attacks over difficult ground upon this further position failed from lack of co-ordination, and, when it already seemed doubtful whether the tired soldiers of the North could renew them with any hope, they were themselves attacked on their right flank. It seems that from that moment their success upon that day was really hopeless, but some declare that the Northern soldiers with one accord became possessed of a belief that this flank attack by a comparatively small body was that of the whole force of Johnston, freshly arrived upon the scene. In any case they spontaneously retired in disorder; they were not effectively pursued, but McDowell was unable to rally them at Centreville, a mile or so behind the Bull Run. Among the camp followers the panic became extreme, and they pressed into Washington in wild alarm, accompanied by citizens and Congressmen who had come out to see a victory, and who left one or two of their number behind as prisoners of war. The result was a surprise to the Southern army. Johnston, who now took over the command, declared that it was as much disorganised by victory as the Northern army by defeat. With the full approval of his superiors in Richmond, he devoted himself to entrenching his position at Manassas. But in Washington, where rumours of victory had been arriving all through the day of battle, there prevailed for some time an impression that the city was exposed to immediate capture, and this impression was shared by McClellan, to whom universal opinion now turned as the appointed saviour, and who was forthwith summoned to Washington to take command of the army of the Potomac.