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

by George Cary Eggleston

On both sides every nerve was strained to make military preparations, precisely as if the coming of war had been recognized as certain—as in fact it was—while on both sides there was a jealously maintained pretense of entirely peaceful purposes. The organization of military forces on either side was easily explainable and excusable upon the plea of prudence and of a necessary preparation for conceivably possible emergencies, and on both sides these preparations for war served to arouse the fighting instincts of the populace and thus to make war more and more obviously inevitable.

During the first forty days or so of Mr. Lincoln's administration there was nothing done that was not in consonance with the Buchanan program of peace and waiting. Nothing was undertaken of a more positive character than the acts of the Buchanan rule. So far as proclamations and professions and pledges of peaceful purpose were concerned there was no change either for better or for worse.

In his inaugural address Mr. Lincoln outlined his policy by saying of the administration that it aimed only at the preservation of the Union. He said, "It will constitutionally maintain and defend itself. In doing this there need be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among people anywhere. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."

All this was very specious and to the Northern mind convincing, but it ignored the fundamental fact that the seceding states claimed a constitutional right to secede and that having exercised that asserted right, they denied the right of the United States Government to "hold, occupy and possess," forts, arsenals or custom houses within their territory, or within that territory to "collect duties and imposts." The very vitals of the question at issue were involved in that assumption of right on the part of the Federal Government to impose and enforce laws and imposts, and to assert and maintain rights of property possession within the territories of states that had, as they resolutely contended, taken themselves out of the Union by rigidly constitutional methods.

It is not purposed here idly and uselessly to discuss this constitutional question. It is only intended to show how it presented itself to the minds of men on the one side and upon the other. To the Northern mind, which had forgotten its own pleas for disunion and its own claims of the right of any state to secede, Mr. Lincoln's declared purpose seemed an altogether righteous and reasonable proposal of governmental activity and necessary national self-assertion. To the Southern mind, in which the traditional doctrine survived of the right of any state to secede at will, it seemed a proposal of intolerable aggression.

If the seceding states had acted within their constitutional right in seceding, then they were no longer within the dominion or in any remotest way subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Any attempt on the part of that government to exercise jurisdiction or to "collect duties and imposts" within their borders was a trespass upon their independence, an affront to their dignity, an invasion of their sovereignty, in brief an act of direct war upon them.

Mr. Lincoln's inaugural address, as the Southerners held, begged the whole question at issue. It assumed that secession was an unconstitutional nullity and that the seceding states were still in the Union and still subject to its laws, its imposts and its duties. That was the whole matter in dispute. If that assumption was correct then it was permitted to him to use any force he might see fit to employ with which to compel them to obedience. But if the assumption was incorrect—if those seceding states had in fact constitutionally withdrawn from the Union, as they contended that they had done—then he had no more right to exercise authority, to enforce laws, to possess "places and property" or to "collect duties and imposts" within their boundaries than he had to do the same within the domains of Britain, France or Germany. This was the very marrow of the question at issue.

Mr. Lincoln's words spoken in his inaugural address were meant to be placative to Southern sentiment and to minister to that reconciliation which from beginning to end was the sincerest desire of his soul. But they were based upon a seemingly total misconception. They constituted a refusal to recognize what the South held to be a fundamental fact. Mr. Lincoln's placative words did not placate for the reason that they completely ignored the Southern contention. They became instead, directly offensive as an assertion of the wrongfulness of secession, and its utter lack of constitutional authority.

His words, the men of the South thought, claimed either too much or greatly too little.

All this was only a part and a small part of the fencing by which the men in high place on either side sought in that troubled time to shift, each to the others' shoulders, responsibility for the actual and brutal beginning of a war which was clearly inevitable, and the occurrence of which had been made steadily more and more a necessity by the events of history during generations past.