Davis's Proclamation for Privateers—Lincoln's Proclamation of Blockade—The Call for Three Years' Volunteers—Southern Military Preparations—Rebel Capital Moved to Richmond—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas Admitted to Confederate States—Desertion of Army and Navy Officers—Union Troops Fortify Virginia Shore of the Potomac—Concentration at Harper's Ferry—Concentration at Fortress Monroe and Cairo—English Neutrality—Seward's 21st-of-May Despatch—Lincoln's Corrections—Preliminary Skirmishes—Forward to Richmond—Plan of McDowell's Campaign
From the slower political developments in the border slave States we must return and follow up the primary hostilities of the rebellion. The bombardment of Sumter, President Lincoln's call for troops, the Baltimore riot, the burning of Harper's Ferry armory and Norfolk navy-yard, and the interruption of railroad communication which, for nearly a week, isolated the capital and threatened it with siege and possible capture, fully demonstrated the beginning of serious civil war.
Jefferson Davis's proclamation, on April 17, of intention to issue letters of marque, was met two days later by President Lincoln's counter-proclamation instituting a blockade of the Southern ports, and declaring that privateers would be held amenable to the laws against piracy. His first call for seventy-five thousand three months' militia was dictated as to numbers by the sudden emergency, and as to form and term of service by the provisions of the Act of 1795. It needed only a few days to show that this form of enlistment was both cumbrous and inadequate; and the creation of a more powerful army was almost immediately begun. On May 3 a new proclamation was issued, calling into service 42,034 three years' volunteers, 22,714 enlisted men to add ten regiments to the regular army, and 18,000 seamen for blockade service: a total immediate increase of 82,748, swelling the entire military establishment to an army of 156,861 and a navy of 25,000.
No express authority of law yet existed for these measures; but President Lincoln took the responsibility of ordering them, trusting that Congress would legalize his acts. His confidence was entirely justified. At the special session which met under his proclamation, on the fourth of July, these acts were declared valid, and he was authorized, moreover, to raise an army of a million men and $250,000,000 in money to carry on the war to suppress the rebellion; while other legislation conferred upon him supplementary authority to meet the emergency.
Meanwhile, the first effort of the governors of the loyal States was to furnish their quotas under the first call for militia. This was easy enough as to men. It required only a few days to fill the regiments and forward them to the State capitals and principal cities; but to arm and equip them for the field on the spur of the moment was a difficult task which involved much confusion and delay, even though existing armories and foundries pushed their work to the utmost and new ones were established. Under the militia call, the governors appointed all the officers required by their respective quotas, from company lieutenant to major-general of division; while under the new call for three years' volunteers, their authority was limited to the simple organization of regiments.
In the South, war preparation also immediately became active. All the indications are that up to their attack on Sumter, the Southern leaders hoped to effect separation through concession and compromise by the North. That hope, of course, disappeared with South Carolina's opening guns, and the Confederate government made what haste it could to meet the ordeal it dreaded even while it had provoked it. The rebel Congress was hastily called together, and passed acts recognizing war and regulating privateering; admitting Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the Confederate States; authorizing a $50,000,000 loan; practically confiscating debts due from Southern to Northern citizens; and removing the seat of government from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia.
Four different calls for Southern volunteers had been made, aggregating 82,000 men; and Jefferson Davis's message now proposed to further organize and hold in readiness an army of 100,000. The work of erecting forts and batteries for defense was being rapidly pushed at all points: on the Atlantic coast, on the Potomac, and on the Mississippi and other Western streams. For the present the Confederates were well supplied with cannon and small arms from the captured navy-yards at Norfolk and Pensacola and the six or eight arsenals located in the South. The martial spirit of their people was roused to the highest enthusiasm, and there was no lack of volunteers to fill the companies and regiments which the Confederate legislators authorized Davis to accept, either by regular calls on State executives in accordance with, or singly in defiance of, their central dogma of States Rights, as he might prefer.
The secession of the Southern States not only strengthened the rebellion with the arms and supplies stored in the various military and naval depots within their limits, and the fortifications erected for their defense: what was of yet greater help to the revolt, a considerable portion of the officers of the army and navy—perhaps one third—abandoned the allegiance which they had sworn to the United States, and, under the false doctrine of State supremacy taught by Southern leaders, gave their professional skill and experience to the destruction of the government which had educated and honored them. The defection of Robert E. Lee was a conspicuous example, and his loss to the Union and service to the rebel army cannot easily be measured. So, also, were the similar cases of Adjutant-General Cooper and Quartermaster-General Johnston. In gratifying contrast stands the steadfast loyalty and devotion of Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott, who, though he was a Virginian and loved his native State, never wavered an instant in his allegiance to the flag he had heroically followed in the War of 1812, and triumphantly planted over the capital of Mexico in 1847. Though unable to take the field, he as general-in-chief directed the assembling and first movements of the Union troops.
The largest part of the three months' regiments were ordered to Washington city as the most important position in a political, and most exposed in a military point of view. The great machine of war, once started, moved, as it always does, by its own inherent energy from arming to concentration, from concentration to skirmish and battle. It was not long before Washington was a military camp. Gradually the hesitation to "invade" the "sacred soil" of the South faded out under the stern necessity to forestall an invasion of the equally sacred soil of the North; and on May 24 the Union regiments in Washington crossed the Potomac and planted themselves in a great semicircle of formidable earthworks eighteen miles long on the Virginia shore, from Chain Bridge to Hunting Creek, below Alexandria.
Meanwhile, a secondary concentration of force developed itself at Harper's Ferry, forty-nine miles northwest of Washington. When, on April 20, a Union detachment had burned and abandoned the armory at that point, it was at once occupied by a handful of rebel militia; and immediately thereafter Jefferson Davis had hurried his regiments thither to "sustain" or overawe Baltimore; and when that prospect failed, it became a rebel camp of instruction. Afterward, as Major-General Patterson collected his Pennsylvania quota, he turned it toward that point as a probable field of operations. As a mere town, Harper's Ferry was unimportant; but, lying on the Potomac, and being at the head of the great Shenandoah valley, down which not only a good turnpike, but also an effective railroad ran southeastward to the very heart of the Confederacy, it was, and remained through the entire war, a strategical line of the first importance, protected, as the Shenandoah valley was, by the main chain of the Alleghanies on the west and the Blue Ridge on the east.