Decisive Battles of America

by Unknown

This is but begging the question. The constitutional view had its weight for the South in 1860 as it had for New England in the Jefferson-Madison period. Jefferson’s iron domination of the national government during his presidency, a policy hateful to New England, combined with the fear of being overweighted in sectional influence by the western extension through the Louisiana purchase, led to pronounced threats of secession by men of New England, ardently desirous of escaping from what Pickering, one of its most prominent men, termed the Virginian supremacy.[138] Exactly the same arguments were used, mutatis mutandis, later by the South.

As we all know, the movement, which never had any real popular support and which had its last spasm of life in the Hartford Convention at the close of the War of 1812, came to naught. Freed by the fall of Napoleon and the peace with England from the pressure of the upper and nether mill-stones which had so ground to pieces our commerce, a prosperity set in which drowned the sporadic discontent of the previous twenty years. The fears of the Eastern states no longer loomed so high and were as imaginary in fact, and had as slight a basis, as were, in the beginning of the era of discord, those of the South. Could slavery have been otherwise preserved, the extreme decentralizing ideas of the South would have disappeared with equal ease, and Stephens’ causa causans—“the different and directly opposite views as to the nature of the government of the United States, and where, under our system, ultimate sovereign power or paramount authority properly resides,” would have had no more intensity of meaning in 1860 than to-day.

Divergence of constitutional views, like most questions of government, follow the lines of self-interest; Jefferson’s qualms gave way before the great prize of Louisiana; one part of the South was ready in 1832 to go to war on account of a protective tariff; another, Louisiana, was at the same time demanding protection for her special industry. The South thus simply shared in our general human nature, and fought, not for a pure abstraction, as Davis and Stephens, led by Calhoun, would have it, but for the supposed self-interest which its view of the Constitution protected. Its section, its society, could not continue to develop in the Union under the Northern reading of the document, and the irrepressible and certain nationalization, so different from its own tendencies, to which the North as a whole was steadily moving.

Slavery drove the South into opposition to the broad, liberal movement of the age. The French Revolution; the destruction of feudalism by Napoleon; the later popular movements throughout Europe and South America; the liberalizing of Great Britain; the nationalistic ideas of which we have the results in the German empire and the kingdom of Italy, and the strong nationalistic feeling developing in the northern part of the Union itself had but little reflex action in the South because of slavery and the South’s consequent segregation and tendency to a feudalistic nationalization.

II
STATUS OF THE FORTS (OCT. 29, 1860–DEC. 20, 1860)

General Scott, with his memories of 1832, was one of those who appreciated the danger hanging over the country, and, October 29, 1860, he wrote from New York, where he had his headquarters, a letter of great length to the President, which in pompous phrases, conceding the right of secession, and embodying some absurd ideas, such as allowing “the fragments of the great republic to form themselves into new confederacies, probably four,” as a smaller evil than war, gave it as his “solemn conviction” that there was, from his knowledge of the Southern population, “some danger of an early act of rashness preliminary to secession, viz.: the seizure of some or all of the following posts: Forts Jackson and St. Philip on the Mississippi; Morgan below Mobile, all without garrisons; Pickens, McKee at Pensacola, with an insufficient garrison for one; Pulaski, below Savannah, without a garrison; Moultrie and Sumter, Charleston harbor, the former with an insufficient garrison, the latter without any; and Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, with an insufficient garrison.”

He gave it as his opinion that “all these works should be immediately so garrisoned as to make any attempt to take any one of them by surprise or coup de main ridiculous.” He did not state the number of men needed, but in a supplementary paper the next day (October 30th) said, “There is one (regular) company in Boston, one here (at the Narrows), one at Pittsburg, one at Baton Rouge—in all, five companies only within reach.”[139] These five companies, about two hundred and fifty men, were of course absurdly inadequate to garrison nine such posts, but, had there been a determination in the President’s mind to prevent seizures, enough men could have been brought together to hold the more important points.

For Scott’s statement as to the number available was grossly inaccurate, and but serves to show the parlous state of a war department in which the general-in-chief can either be so misinformed or allow himself to remain in ignorance of vital facts. There were but five points in the farther South of primal importance: the Mississippi, Mobile, Pensacola, Savannah, and Charleston; two hundred men at each would have been ample to hold the positions for the time being, and, being held, reinforcement in any degree would later have been easy. There was a total of 1048 officers and men at the Northern posts,[140] including Leavenworth, Mackinac, Plattsburg, Boston, New York, and Fort Monroe, who could have been drawn upon. There were already 250 men at Charleston, Key West, Pensacola, and Baton Rouge. It is safe to say that a thousand men were available. There were also some eight hundred marines at the navy-yards and barracks[141] who could have been used in such an emergency. The aggregate of the army, June 30, 1860, was 16,006, of which 14,926 were enlisted men; and it was in the power of the President to increase this total aggregate to 18,626.[142] Recruiting was, in fact, actively going on; almost every man at the posts mentioned could, even much after the date of Scott’s paper, have been safely withdrawn for the object mentioned and quickly replaced.

Scott’s inaccurate report gave Buchanan additional reason for the inaction which was his basic thought. He says, in his apologia, that “to have attempted to distribute these five companies in the eight forts of the cotton states and Fortress Monroe in Virginia, would have been a confession of weakness.... It could have had no effect in preventing secession, but must have done much to provoke it.”[143] The first part of this statement would have been true had these five companies been the only force available; the second, on the supposition that the President meant that any attempt with a force reasonably large would have provoked secession, was a short-sighted view. To garrison the forts could not have been more obnoxious than to put them in a state of defence. At any time before the secession of a state they could have been garrisoned without bringing on actual conflict. The statesmen of the South were well aware that an attack upon an armed force of the United States, before secession, must place them irretrievably in the wrong. South Carolina did not secede until December 20th. To resist the sending of troops before this date to any of these forts would have been unqualified treason, and for this no one in the South was prepared. The safety of the secession movement, the extension of sympathy throughout the South, rested very greatly upon strict compliance with the forms of law and with the theories of the Constitution held by that section. At least one ardent secessionist, Judge Longstreet, recognized this when he appealed to South-Carolinians to refrain from any act of war; “let the first shot,” he said, “come from the enemy. Burn that precept into your hearts.”[144] It was impossible that the Southern leaders should place themselves, or allow their people to place them, in the attitude of waging war against the Union while even in their own view their states still remained within it. There was, too, still a very large Union sentiment in the South, though finally swept into the vortex by the principle of going with the state, which would not have been averse to a determined action on the part of the President and might have upheld it, as in 1833. Such vigor would have given this sentiment a working basis, through the evidence that the Federal authority was to be upheld; and it would have caused a pause even in the least thoughtful of the secessionists had they felt that their coast strongholds were to be held and all their ports to be in the hands of the enemy. In the dearth of manufactures in the South, the holding of their ports was an essential to Southern military success. Their closure by blockade was equally an essential to the success of the North. The strategy of the situation was of the clearest and most palpable, and with their coast forts in Union hands warlike action on the part of the South is not conceivable. One can thus understand the importance of spreading the reiterated statements of “intense excitement” and “danger of attack” in the event of reinforcement; statements which, in the circumstances, must be regarded, if the phrase may be used, in the nature of a gigantic and successful “bluff.”

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