The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

The regular United States army at that time was ridiculously inadequate in numbers to undertake any enterprise of consequence. Its feeble forces were scattered from Maine to Texas, from Florida to Oregon. Its hands were more than full with the task of holding the Indians in subjection and protecting the borders against the ravages of savage war. The Buchanan administration called no volunteers into the field, while in every Southern state there were musterings at every county seat and military organizations of a formidable character.

In the meantime the newly elected president and those who supported him had no opportunity to make preparation for meeting these conditions. They were not even privileged to advise.

The administration that still remained in power was rapidly disintegrating. Four of the cabinet officers resigned their places, thus still further paralyzing the hands of the President. At the North there was a fixed conviction that secession was merely a bit of political play which would never be pushed to the point of actual war and consequently there was very little of military preparation, while all the able-bodied young men of the South, and even of Virginia, which so emphatically refused to secede, were organizing and drilling and holding themselves in readiness for whatever might happen.

But everywhere there was apprehension. From the hour of the election returns in November until the incoming of Mr. Lincoln's administration on the fourth of March, conservative men at the North and at the South anxiously busied themselves in an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulty, to save the Union from disruption and the country from civil war.

On the second day of December the Albany Evening Journal, a newspaper edited by Thurlow Weed and the personal organ of Mr. Seward, appealed strongly and even passionately to patriotism throughout the country for "such moderation, and forbearance as will draw out, combine and strengthen the Union sentiment of the whole country."

But this and like appeals made by Union-loving, patriotic men North and South fell, not so much upon deaf ears as upon the ears of those who had lost control of their respective parties. Had the conservative men of the Nation been able to act together, they must undoubtedly have prevailed for peace in virtue of their majority of a million, but on both sides the radicals had seized upon the reins. At the South the secessionists were rejoicing in Mr. Lincoln's election under circumstances that gave excuse for the dissolution of the Union. At the North the radical abolitionists saw and welcomed in that event an opportunity to use the whole power of the Federal Government for the final extirpation of African slavery. At the North and at the South the extremists were in control, chiefly by virtue of their intensity and their clamor.

On neither side did the radicals desire the preservation of the Union; on neither side did they seek any amicable adjustment of the controversy. On the contrary they invoked controversy, invited disunion and courted war.

In Congress many efforts were made to find a plan and a basis of adjustment. By a vote of 145 to 38 the House of Representatives created a committee of one member from each state to consider the state of the Union and to report measures of pacification. The Senate adopted measures of like purport.

In that body Andrew Johnson of Tennessee—afterwards president—deliberately proposed a constitutional amendment to the effect that thereafter the president and vice-president should be chosen the one from the North and the other from the South and that the two sections should alternately enjoy the advantage of furnishing the incumbent of the higher office.

Even at that excited and unreasoning time there was probably no more insane proposal made than this. It would have put sectionalism into the Constitution itself. It would have limited both parties in their choice of candidates to men resident in one section or in the other; it would have made of the so-called Mason and Dixon's line a divisional boundary over which no political power, no popular preference, no vote, however overwhelming, could step; it would have changed the United States from the condition of a single, federal republic in which all the states and all citizens were possessed of equal rights into a bifurcated alliance between two antagonistic groups of states, the chief bond of union between which would have been an agreement that they should alternately govern each other.