The Ifs of History

by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

Speaking of the lighting of the fires of civil war in this country in the years 1860 and 1861, Charles Francis Adams said, in 1873, "One single hour of the will displayed by General Jackson would have stifled the fire in its cradle." The metaphor in the last phrase is peculiar, and strangely Celtic for a Yankee, but the history is true.

Montgomery Blair expressed the idea with greater plainness and vividness in that same year, 1873, in these words, "If we could have held Fort Sumter, there never would have been a drop of blood shed." Both these remarks were made by men who had been in some sense actors in the events to which they referred, and made after years of reflection upon the circumstances.

It does not seem to Americans of the present generation that there was ever a moment, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the Civil War could have been averted. It appears, in retrospect, to have been absolutely inevitable. Yet there was certainly one moment when, if President Buchanan had had the courage to apply the general views which he himself advanced in his annual message to Congress of December 3, 1860, and his special message of January 8, 1861, which explicitly denied the right of secession, a halt might have been called to the growing rebellion.

The secession movement was at first concentrated in the State of South Carolina. That State, all through the winter of 1860-1861, was presenting to the rest of the South an object lesson of successful nullification.

In 1833 South Carolina had ordained nullification, but its ordinance was so instantly and heavily repressed by President Andrew Jackson that the State was absolutely unable to carry it out, or to move hand or foot. But now, in 1860, it did not merely ordain nullification—it enacted it. Every Federal judge, every judicial servant, and nearly every Federal official, in South Carolina, resigned, and the nation was left without an agent to enforce its laws, for no new ones were sent in. The United States authority in the State was at an end, save for the custom house at Charleston and Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor.

As long as South Carolina was let alone, her case plainly said to all the other slave States, "You see we can withdraw from the Union; we have withdrawn from the Union; and the Union takes no step to keep us in; you can do the same thing."

At this time North Carolina and Virginia were opposed to secession. Governor Sam Houston, of Texas, stood like a rock against it. Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, never seceded. Other States were wavering. A great deal depended on the degree of success which South Carolina, the leader in the revolt, might have. And it was Buchanan who permitted South Carolina's success to become apparently complete, though in the message to which I have referred the president declared that secession was "wholly inconsistent with the Constitution," that "no human power could absolve him (the president) from his duty to enforce the laws," and that the danger of national disruption was upon the country. Buchanan, in his December message, actually quoted Jackson's solemn denunciation of the doctrine that a State had a right to separate itself from the Union.

But while he was making these terrible admissions of his own duty, what was Buchanan doing? Instead of holding up the hands of the nation's representatives in South Carolina, he was weakening them. Instead of strengthening the Federal garrison in Charleston harbor, he permitted, it to dwindle until it was powerless to take a single step. Not one act, indeed, did he perform, but contented himself with calling on Congress for legislation to meet the emergency. And out of Congress, of course, he could get nothing, for the Southern representatives would vote for no such legislation, and the Republican members were bent upon waiting until Lincoln, who had been elected president, came in in March, and the northern Democrats were paralyzed with pusillanimity.

So South Carolina went on proving to the other slave States that it could "go it alone." One after another these other States seceded from the Union. Northern arsenals were stripped of arms. Southern officers went out of the army one by one, and made ready to organize the army of the new Confederacy which was forming under the president's nose.

It was a time for the strong arm, and for quick, decisive, Jacksonian, and not at all squeamish, action. But no such action was taken. The golden moment was lost, and when, three months afterward, Lincoln came in at last, war, with all its horrors, was upon the country.