History of the United States, Volume 3

by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

Barnacles on Cable.
PERIOD IV.
CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
1860-1868
CHAPTER I.
CAUSES OF THE WAR
[1861]
It were a mistake to refer the great Rebellion, for ultimate source, to
ambiguity in the Constitution or to the wickedness of politicians or of
the people. It was simply the last resort in an "irrepressible conflict"
of principle--in the struggle for and against the genius of the world's
advance. Economic, social, and moral evolution, resulting in two
radically different civilizations, had enforced upon each section
unfaithfulness to the spirit and even to the letter of its
constitutional covenant. The South was not to blame that slavery was at
first profitable; and if it deemed it so too long and even thought of it
as a good morally, these convictions, however big with ill consequences
to the nation, were but errors of view, not strange considering the then
status of slavery in the world.
The South's pride, holding it to the course once chosen, was also no
indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime
for its "higher law fanaticism," which was simply the spirit of the age;
or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon
the land. Much as was "nominated in the bond" of the Constitution,
neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly
in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern
congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase
and being in the majority, they had gone on punctiliously heeding formal
obligation against manifest national weal. And when, in 1854, the great
sacred compact of 1820 was set aside by the authority of the South
itself, the North felt free even from formal fetters. All talk of
extra-legal negotiations and understandings touching slavery was now at
an end. The northern majority was at last united to legislate upon
slavery as it would, subject only to the Constitution. The South too
late saw this, and fearing that the peculiar institution, shut up to its
old home, would die, sought separation, with such chance of expansion as
this might yield.
The South had come to love slavery too well, the Constitution too
little. Upon conserving slavery all parties there, however dissident as
to modes, however hostile in other matters, were unconditionally bent.
The chief argument even of those opposing disunion was that it
endangered slavery. Our new government, said Alexander H. Stephens, soon
to be vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, is founded, its
cornerstone rests, upon the great physical, philosophical, and moral
truth, to which Jefferson and the men of his day were blind, that the
negro, by nature or the curse of Canaan, is not equal to the white man;
that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is, by ordination of
Providence, whose wisdom it is not for us to inquire into or question,
his natural and normal condition. As the apostle of such a principle the
South could not but abjure the old establishment, whose genius and
working were inevitably in the contrary direction. Many confessed it to
be the essential nature of our Government, and not unfair treatment
under it, against which they rebelled.
Slavery had also bred hatred of the Union indirectly, by fostering
anti-democratic habits of thought, feeling, and action. "The form of
liberty existed, the press seemed to be free, the deliberations of
legislative bodies were tumultuous, and every man boasted of his
independence. But the spirit of true liberty, tolerance of the minority
and respect for individual opinion, had departed, and those deceitful
appearances concealed the despotism of an inexorable master, slavery,
before whom the most powerful of slave-holders was himself but a slave,
as abject as the meanest." Over wide sections, untitled manorial lords,
"more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but
overbearing," controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional
districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man
save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists,
whom love for the "peculiar institution" rendered callous to national
interests.
The vigorous secession movements in the South at once after Lincoln's
election, raised a question of the first magnitude, which few people at
the North had reflected upon since 1833, viz., whether or not
non-revolutionary secession was possible. Almost unanimously the North
denied such possibility, the South affirmed it. This was at bottom
manifestly nothing but the old question of state sovereignty over again.
The South held the Union to be a state compact, which the northern
parties thereto had broken. To prove the compact theory no new proof was
now adduced. Rather did the southern people take the assertion of it as
an axiom, with a simplicity which spoke volumes for the influence of
Calhoun and for the indoctrination which the South had received in 1832.
Not alone Calhoun but nearly every other southerner of great influence,
at least from the day of the Missouri Compromise, had been inculcating
the supreme authority of the State as compared with the Union. The
southern States were all large, and, as travelling in or between them
was difficult and little common, they retained far more than those at
the North each its original separateness and peculiarities. Southern
population was more fixed than northern; southern state traditions were
held in far the deeper reverence. In a word, the colonial condition of
things to a great extent persisted in the South down to the very days of
the war. There was every reason why Alabama or North Carolina should,
more than Connecticut, feel like a separate nation.
This intense state consciousness might gradually have subsided but for
the deep prejudices and passions begotten of slavery and of the
opposition it encountered from the North. Their resolution, against
emancipation led Southerners to cherish a view which made it seem
possible for them as a last resort to sever their alliance with the
North. It was this conjunction of influences, linking the slave-holder's
jealousy and pride to a false but natural conception of state
sovereignty, which created in southern men that love of State, intense
and sincere as real patriotism, causing them to look upon northern men,
with their different theory, as foes and foreigners.
A very imposing historical argument could of course have been built up
for the Calhoun theory of the Union. The Union emerged from the
preceding Confederacy without a shock. Most who voted for it were
unaware how radical a change it embodied. The Constitution, one may even
admit, could not have been adopted had it then been understood to
preclude the possibility of secession. Doubtless, too, the gradual
change of view concerning it all over the North, sprung from the
multiplication of social and economic ties between sections and States,
rather than from study of constitutional law. We believe that the
untruth of the central-sovereignty theory in no wise follows from these
admissions, and that its correctness might be made apparent from a
plenitude of considerations.
Champions of the northern side deemed it the less necessary to expatiate
upon this question, since, admitting the South's basal contention, the
right in question depended upon sufficiency of grievance. As, in the
South's view, the case was one of sovereigns one party of whom, without
referee, was about to break a compact without the other's consent, the
adequacy of the grievance should, to excuse the step, have been
absolutely beyond question. On the contrary it was subject to the
gravest question.
The South's only significant indictment against the North was the one
concerning the personal liberty laws. Moderates like Stephens, indeed,
stoutly condemned this plea for secession as insufficient; but,
believing in the State as sovereign, they had perforce to yield, and
they became as enthusiastic as any when once this "paramount authority"
had spoken. "Fire-eaters," at first a small minority, saw this advantage
and worked it to the utmost. On its complaint touching the personal
liberty legislation the South's case utterly broke down, theorizing the
Union into a rope of sand, not "more perfect" but far less so than the
old, which itself was to be "perpetual." According to the Calhoun
contention States were the parties to a pact, and it was a good way from
clear that any northern State as such, even by personal liberty
legislation, had broken the alleged pact. The liberty laws were innocent
at least in form, and at worst had never been endorsed in any state
convention. Buchanan himself testified that the fugitive slave law had
been faithfully executed, and its operation is well known never to have
been resisted by any public authority.
It was suspicious that no State ventured upon secession alone. It was
equally remarkable that the Gulf States were the readiest to go, and
made most of the personal liberty laws as their pretext, accounting this
cry, as was ingenuously confessed, a necessary means for holding the
border States solidly to the southern cause. Weak enough, indeed, was
the complaint of "consolidationist" aggression, of which certainly no
party to the so-called pact was or could have been guilty. But the deeps
of folly were sounded when northern "persecution" of the South was
mentioned, or Lincoln's election as threat of such. This was simply the
election as President, in a perfectly constitutional way, of a citizen,
honest and unambitious, who was pledged against touching slavery in
States. Having become President, he was unable to procure minister, law,
treaty, or even adequate guard for his own person save by the consent of
the party hitherto in power. Lincoln had failed of a popular majority by
a million. Both Houses of Congress were against him at the time of his
election, and, but for the absence of southern members, they would, it
is likely, have continued so through his entire term. It was the South's
bad logic on these points which gave the war Democrats their excellent
plea for drawing sword on the northern side.
But even supposing secession technically justifiable, how strange that
it should have been judged rational, prudent, or in the long run best
for the South itself. Could aught but frenzy have so drowned in
Americans the memories of our great past; or launched them upon a course
that must have ended by Mexicanizing this nation, wresting from it the
lead in freedom's march, and crushing out, in the breast of struggling
patriotism the world over, all hope of government by and for the people!
The South ought at least to have spared itself. Either its alleged
horror at the advance of central-sovereignty sentiment at the North was
sheer pretence, or it should have been certain that this section would
not hesitate, as Buchanan so illogically did, to coerce "rebellious"
state-bodies. If the North believed the totality of the nation to be the
"paramount authority," Lincoln would surely imitate Jackson instead of
Buchanan, and in doing so he would not seek military support in vain.

James Buchanan. From a photograph by Brady.
Quite as sure, too, must the final result have appeared from the census
of 1850, had people been calm enough to read this. By that census the
free States had a population fifty per cent. above the population of the
slave states, slaves included, and the disparity was rapidly increasing.
Their wealth was even more preponderant, being, slaves apart, nearly one
hundred per cent. the larger. Their merchant tonnage was five times the
greater--even young inland Ohio out-doing old South Carolina in this,
and the one district of New York City the whole South. The North had
three or four times the South's miles of railway, all the sinews of war
without importation, and mechanics unnumbered and of every sort. And
while champions of the Union would fight with all the prestige of law,
national history and the status quo on their side, Europe's aid to the
South, or even that of the border slave States, was more than
problematical, as was a successful career for the Confederacy in case
its independence should chance to be won. Events proved that the very
defence of slavery had best prospect in the Union, and it seems as if
this might have been foreseen by all, as it actually was by some.
CHAPTER II.
SECESSION
[1861]
Secession was no new thought at the South. It lurked darkly behind the
Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-99. It was brought out into
broad daylight by South Carolina in the nullification troubles of 1832.
"Texas or disunion!" was the cry at the South in 1843-44. In 1850 South
Carolina declared herself ready to secede in the event of legislation
hostile to slavery. Two years later the same State solemnly affirmed
that it had a right to secede, but that, out of deference to the wishes
of the other slave States, it forbore to exercise such right.
It must be admitted that in early years the North had helped to make the
thought of secession familiar. In 1803, in view of the great increase of
southern territory by the Louisiana Purchase, and again in 1813, when
New England opposition to the war with England culminated in the
Hartford Convention, there had been talk of a separate northern
confederacy. But from that time on the thought of disunion died out at
the North, while the South dallied with it more and more boldly. During
the presidential campaign of 1856, threats were made that if Fremont,
the republican candidate, should be elected, the South would leave the
Union. In October of that year a secret convention of southern governors
was held at Raleigh, N. C., supposed to have been for the purpose of
considering such a contingency. Governor Wise, of Virginia, who called
the convention, afterward proclaimed that had Fremont been chosen he
would have marched to Washington at the head of 20,000 troops, seized
the Capitol, and prevented the inauguration. This threatening attitude
in 1856 may have been chiefly an electioneering device; but during the
next four years the gulf between North and South widened rapidly, and
the southern leaders turned more and more resolutely toward secession as
the remedy for their alleged wrongs.
No sooner had the presidential campaign of 1860 begun than deep
mutterings foretold the coming storm. "Elect Lincoln, and the South will
secede!" cried the campaign orators of the South, while the halls of
Congress rang with threats similar in tenor. As the campaign went on and
republican success became probable, the southern leaders began to nerve
up their hosts for the conflict. In October the governor and congressmen
of South Carolina, with other prominent politicians, met and unanimously
resolved that if Lincoln should win, the Palmetto State ought to
renounce the Union. Similar meetings were held in Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Florida. Governor Gist sent a confidential circular to
the governors of all the cotton States declaring that South Carolina
would secede with any other State, or would make the plunge alone if
others would promise to follow. The governors of Florida, Alabama, and
Mississippi replied that their States would certainly do this. Georgia
proposed to wait for some overt act by the National Government. North
Carolina and Louisiana, it was learned, would probably not go out at
all.
But the enthusiasts in South Carolina had got all the encouragement they
wanted, and bided their time. Their time was at hand. The presidential
election fell on November 6th. Next day the tidings flashed over the
land that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President by the vote of a
solid North against a solid South. The wires had scarcely ceased to
thrill with this message of death to slavery-extension, when South
Carolina sounded a trumpet-call to the South. Her Legislature ordered a
secession state convention to meet in December, issued a call for 10,000
volunteers, and voted money for the purchase of arms. Federal
office-holders resigned. Judge Magrath, of the United States District
Court, laid aside his robes, declaring, "So far as I am concerned, the
temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is
now closed." Militia organized throughout the State. The streets of
Charleston echoed nightly with the tramp of drilling minute-men.
Secession orators harangued enthusiastic crowds. Hardly a coat but bore
a secession cockade. November 17th, the Palmetto flag was unfurled in
Charleston. It was a gala day. Cannon roared, bands played the
Marseillaise, and processions paraded the streets bearing such mottoes
as "Let's Bury the Union's Dead Carcass!" "Death to All Abolitionists!"
The whole South was beside itself with excitement. One State after
another assembled its convention to decide the question of secession.
Even the Georgia Legislature, within a week after the election of
Lincoln, voted $1,000,000 to arm the State.
The South Carolina convention met at Charleston, and on December 20th
unanimously adopted an ordinance declaring:
"The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under
the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved."
This action was hailed with wildest enthusiasm. Huge placards--"The
Union is Dissolved!"--were posted throughout the city, while the clang
of bells and the boom of cannon notified the country round. The
sidewalks were thronged with ladies wearing secession bonnets made of
cotton with palmetto decorations. A party of gentlemen visited the tomb
of Calhoun, and there registered their vows to defend the southern cause
with their fortunes and lives. In the evening the convention marched to
the hall in procession, and formally signed the revolutionary ordinance.
The chairman then solemnly proclaimed South Carolina an "independent
commonwealth." The little State, whose white population was less than
300,000, began to play at being a nation. The governor was authorized to
appoint a cabinet and receive foreign ambassadors, and the papers put
information from other parts of the country under the head of "foreign
news."

Street Banner in Charleston.
"One voice and millions of strong arms to uphold the honor of South
Carolina 1776-1860"
The secession of South Carolina was greeted with joy in most of the
other slave States. Montgomery and Mobile, Ala., each fired one hundred
guns. At Richmond, Va., a palmetto banner was unfurled, while bells,
bonfires, and processions celebrated the event all over the South. The
other cotton States, spurred on by the bold deed of South Carolina,
rapidly followed her lead. Mississippi seceded January 9th, Florida the
10th, Alabama the 11th, Georgia the 19th, Louisiana the 26th, Texas
February 1st.
It is probable that only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida
were the majority of whites in favor of secession. The South was after
all full of Union sentiment. The ordinance of secession proceeded in
each State from a convention, and the election of delegates to this
witnessed the earnest work. The noble efforts of those Union men in
their fierce struggle have never yet been appreciated. But they fought
against great odds, and were inevitably overborne. The opposition was
organized, ably led, and white-hot with zeal. The political power and
the wealth of the South lay in the hands of the secessionists. The
clergy threw their weight on that side, preaching that slavery, God's
ordinance, was in danger. Union proclivities were crushed out by force.
Vigilance committees were everywhere on the alert. In the rougher States
of the Southwest abolitionists were tarred and feathered. Some were
shot. In all the States Union men were warned to keep quiet or leave the
South. One of the most powerful agents of intimidation was the Knights
of the Golden Circle, a vast secret society which extended throughout
the southern States.
Yet, in spite of all, the vote was close even in several of the cotton
States. The Georgia people wanted new safeguards for slavery, but did
not at first desire secession. Alexander H. Stephens, who headed the
anti-secession movement, declared that Georgia was won over to take the
fatal step at last only by the cry, "Better terms can be made out of the
Union than in it." Even then the first vote for secession stood only 165
to 130. In Louisiana the popular vote for convention delegates was
20,000 for secession and 17,000 against.
The border States held aloof. Kentucky and Tennessee refused to call
conventions. So, for long, did North Carolina. The convention of
Virginia and of Missouri each had a majority of Union delegates. When
the Confederate Government was organized in February, only seven of the
fifteen slave States had seceded. Their white population was about
2,600,000, or less than half that of the entire slave region. But
Arkansas and North Carolina were soon swept along by the current, and
seceded in May. Virginia and Tennessee were finally carried (the former
in May, the latter in June) by the aid of troops, who swarmed in from
the seceded States, and turned the elections into a farce. Unionists in
the Virginia Convention were given the choice to vote secession, leave,
or be hanged. Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland resisted all
attempts to drag them into the Confederacy, though the first two, after
the United States began to apply force, appeared neutral rather than
loyal.
The seizure of United States property went hand in hand with secession.
Most of the government works were feebly garrisoned, and made no
resistance. By January 15th the secessionists had possession of arsenals
at Augusta, Ga., Mount Vernon, Ala., Fayetteville, N. C, Chattahoochee,
Fla., and Baton Rouge, La., of forts in Alabama and Georgia, of a
navy-yard at Pensacola, Fla., and of Forts Jackson and St. Philip,
commanding the mouth of the Mississippi. At one arsenal they found
150,000 pounds of powder, at another 22,000 muskets and rifles, besides
ammunition and cannon, at another 50,000 small arms and 20 heavy guns.
The whole South had been well supplied with military stores by the
enterprising foresight of J. B. Floyd, of Virginia, Buchanan's Secretary
of War, who had sent thither 115,000 muskets from the Springfield
arsenal alone.

Major Robert Anderson.
Fort Moultrie, in Charleston harbor, was held by Major Robert Anderson,
of Kentucky, with a garrison of some seventy men. On December 27th the
whole country was thrilled, and the South enraged, by the news that on
the previous night Anderson had secretly transferred his whole force to
Fort Sumter, a new and stronger work in the centre of the harbor,
leaving spiked cannon and burning gun-carriages behind him at Moultrie.
The South Carolina militia at once occupied the deserted fortress with
the other harbor fortifications, and began to put them into a state of
defence. At Pensacola, Fla., Lieutenant Slemmer, by a movement similar
to Anderson's, held Fort Pickens.

Major Anderson removing his Forces from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter,
December 26, 1861.
The seizure of government property went on through January and February.
In Louisiana all the commissary stores were confiscated, and the revenue
cutter McClelland surrendered. The mint at New Orleans, containing over
half a million in gold and silver, was seized. More than half of the
regular army were stationed in Texas, under General Twiggs. In February,
at the demand of a secessionist committee of public safety, he
surrendered his entire force, together with eighteen military posts. The
troops were sent to a Gulf port and there detained.
This wholesale seizure of government property, worth some $20,000,000,
has brought down upon the South much scathing rebuke. The conduct of
Floyd, stabbing his country under the cloak of a cabinet office, cannot
be too strongly condemned; but with the seceding States the case was
different. Having (so they thought) established themselves as
independent republics, they could not allow the military works within
their borders to remain in the hands of a foreign power. As to the
Government's property right, they recognized it, and proposed to pay
damages. The provisional constitution of the Confederacy, adopted in
February, provided for negotiations to settle the claim of the United
States.
The southern leaders were not more anxious to get the slave States out
of the Union than to get them into a grand Southern Confederacy. Early
in January a caucus of secession congressmen was held at Washington, and
arrangements made for a constitutional convention.
February 4, 1861, delegates from the States which had left the Union met
at Montgomery, Ala., and formed themselves into a provisional Congress.
A temporary government, styled "The Confederate States of America," was
soon organized. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was chosen President by
the Congress, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, Vice-President.
Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808. He graduated at West Point, fought
as colonel in the Mexican war, served three terms as congressman from
Mississippi, the last two in the Senate, and was Secretary of War under
Pierce. After Calhoun's death, in 1850, he became the most prominent of
the ultra southern leaders. The new President was brought from Jackson,
Miss., to Montgomery by a special train, his progress a continual
ovation. Cheering crowds gathered at every station to see and hear him.
February 18th Davis was inaugurated. In his address, which was calm and
moderate in tone, he declared that reunion was now "neither practicable
nor desirable;" he hoped for peace, but said that if the North refused
this, the South must appeal to arms, secure in the blessing of God on a
just cause.