The situation at the time of President Lincoln’s inauguration was as follows. First, the seven states of the lower south seceded with wide support. Some residuum of pro-union sentiment persisted, but the hope that it would assert itself in any meaningful way was unrealistic. Secession in the lower south would not be undone voluntarily, which meant that war was all but certain if the federal government acted to preserve the union.
Second, the states of the upper south had not seceded, and the steps they had taken toward secession were halting and indicated a lack of wide support. Military action to preserve the union would push some or perhaps all of those states into secession; the more that seceded, the more difficult the task of preserving the union. Even after the war had begun, the problem of retaining the states of the upper south in the union was a concern that influenced the actions of the federal government. In a private letter written in September 1861 – after the war had begun and Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia had joined the Confederacy – President Lincoln said, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”
Third, opinion in the northern states was divided. The display of enthusiasm when President Buchanan attempted to resupply Fort Sumter suggested a willingness of the people to support the federal union. The debates in Congress and the discussions of the Peace Conference showed substantial interest in a constitutional compromise as a nonmilitary means of attempting to preserve the union. Others were prepared to acquiesce to secession. In a speech delivered on January 20, 1861, in Boston, abolitionist Wendell Phillips celebrated secession as the annulment of the “covenant with death” and a breaking of the “agreement with hell”. On February 23, 1861, just days before Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, the New-York Tribune stated:
We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson, in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just; and that, if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so.
Although logic dictated that the national government’s response to the secession of the lower south would make war inevitable, the people of the north generally did not hold any shared belief about what might happen or what should happen.
Crisis and compromise had become the accustomed although irregular features in the governance of the United States. Secession following the presidential election of 1860 appeared to be another of these events. To the advocates of compromise, providing constitutional guarantees of slavery appeared to be a better alternative than either disunion or civil war. Yet compromise was not a solution that the secessionists or the Republicans would have been willing to entertain. At least since the formation of the Republican Party, and in some cases for decades before that, the fire-eaters had looked forward to the formal separation of the slave states from the federal union and to the formation of their own independent confederation. In March 1861 that goal had been substantially achieved. With seven states already seceded, the fire-eaters hoped the remaining eight slave states of the upper south would eventually follow. The circumstances that saw secession become an established fact were not unique, but they might not have occurred again in the immediately foreseeable future. After seizing the opportunity of secession, the fire-eaters were not about to give it up. The formation of a confederacy consisting solely of slaveholding states substantially reduced domestic opposition to the institution of slavery. More important, acceptance of a compromise that restored the union with constitutional guarantees of slavery removed the immediate threat to slavery, but it left the long-term threat to slavery in place.
From the point of view of the Republican Party, which was soon to be in control of the federal government, the analysis of the situation was remarkably similar. As President-elect Lincoln pointed out, agreeing to a compromise that guaranteed to slavery everything it demanded negated the Republican Party’s achievement of winning control of the federal government. The circumstances that permitted that to happen were not unique, but by agreeing to constitutional amendments to protect slavery, the conditions that were needed to repeal those amendments would not occur anytime soon.
Inasmuch as the principal purpose of the Republican Party was to limit the spread of slavery, constitutional amendments that guaranteed the continued existence of slavery and its existence in the territories would have written the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision into the text of the Constitution and rendered the goals of the Republican Party – and thus the party itself – a nullity. To acquiesce to the fact of disunion might have been a less painful alternative to civil war, but unlike President Buchanan, President Lincoln asserted the right of sovereign nations to self-preservation – not only to external threats such as war waged by other nations but also from internal threats that proposed to diminished the nation by secession of some of its states. Eventually the Confederate government made a similar judgment – it determined that the maintenance by a hostile foreign power’ (the United States’) of a military presence (the federal garrison in Fort Sumter) within its borders was an intolerable affront to Confederate national sovereignty, and therefore, in the name of self-preservation, the Confederate government ordered the army to fire upon and force the surrender of Fort Sumter.
In his March 4, 1861, inaugural address, President Lincoln announced the policy of the national government. He repeated the Republican Party position that the government lacked the power to interfere with slavery in the states. He asserted nonetheless that the union was perpetual, and he emphasized that the president, as the chief magistrate, was charged with the execution of the nation’s laws. He denied that secession was a lawful process, and he asserted that acts of violence against the United States constituted unlawful rebellion. President Lincoln stated that he intended no menace, but he asserted that the national government would defend and maintain itself and would “hold, occupy and possess” the properties (Fort Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola) belonging to it. On March 5, the day after his inauguration, President Lincoln learned that the garrison at Fort Sumter was short on supplies and could be expected to hold out for no more than about six weeks.
William Howard Russell, a correspondent for the London Times, arrived in New York City in mid-March, and from there he traveled to Washington City. In both his reports printed by the Times and his observations published later as a diary of his American travels, he observed in those two cities a calm that belied the ongoing political crisis. He said the excitement in a European city during a comparable crisis would be palpable. Although he heard rumors and reports (always proven false) that Fort Sumter would or had surrendered, he was reassured by new secretary of state William H. Seward that the federal government stood by the policy that President Lincoln had set forth in his inaugural address and therefore came to the conclusion that surrender was unlikely, and war was probable. Mr. Russell said to his readers in the Times:
Be satisfied of this – the United States Government will give up no power or possession which it has at present got. By its voluntary act it will surrender nothing whatever. No matter what reports may appear in the papers or in letters, distrust them if they would lead you to believe that Mr. Lincoln is preparing either to abandon what he has now, or to recover that which he has not.
President Lincoln took steps to reinforce Fort Sumter. On April 6 he sent a messenger to inform the governor of South Carolina that the national government intended to resupply Fort Sumter with provisions unless the fort or the supply convoy was attacked, in which case men, arms, and ammunition would be put into the fort. The president’s message was delivered on April 8. On April 9 the Confederates decided to attack and reduce the fort before the supply convoy arrived at Charleston. They opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12. The lead elements of the supply convoy arrived that day to find the artillery duel in progress. Fort Sumter surrendered on April 13, and the garrison was evacuated two days later.
On April 15 President Lincoln declared the existence of an insurrection that was too powerful to be put down by the means at hand, and he called for volunteers. The news of the attack on Fort Sumter was an electric shock to public opinion in the northern states. It banished ideas of compromise and acquiescence to disunion and left in their place the substantial (but not unanimous) resolve that the union had to be preserved.
After the war was over, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis and former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens both argued that by creating a situation that forced the Confederates to attack Fort Sumter, President Lincoln was the aggressor since he was responsible for having fired the first shot of the Civil War. The allegation was accurate but irrelevant. The significance of the events was that President Lincoln gambled both how the Confederate government would react to the information that the national government intended to resupply the fort and how the citizens of the northern states would respond to the fact the Confederates had fired the first shot. It brought the weight of northern opinion behind the government’s policy that the union must be preserved. That this was the intended result was indicated by a letter President Lincoln wrote shortly after the war began to the commander of the supply convoy vessels that had been sent to Fort Sumter. The president acknowledged that circumstances had prevented the commander’s plan from being tested, and he assured the commander that the attempt had heightened the president’s estimation of him. In concluding President Lincoln said, “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”
Artemus Ward, the humorous persona created by author Charles F. Browne, saw this immediately and expressed the coalescing northern opinion. A story published in the May 11, 1861, issue of Vanity Fair told how he had taken his sideshow into the south when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and the authorities confiscated his show, arrested him, and sent him to Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederate capital, where he was questioned by Jefferson Davis, “the president of the Southern Conthieveracy.” President Davis told him he was free to go, saying, “we hav many frens in the North, who sympathise with us, and won’t mingle with this fight”, to which Artemus Ward replied:
J. Davis, there’s your grate mistaik. Many of us was your sincere frends, and thought certin parties amung us was fussin about you and meddlin with your consarns intirely too much. But J. Davis, the minit you fire a gun at the piece of dry-goods called the Star-Spangled Banner, the North gits up and rises en massy, in defence of that banner. Not agin you as individooals, – not agin the South even – but to save the flag. We should indeed be weak in the knees, unsound in the heart, milk-white in the liver, and soft in the hed, if we stood quietly by and saw this glorus Govyment smashed to pieces, either by a furrin or a intestine foe.
President Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion in the southern states sparked a third wave of secession: in Arkansas and North Carolina the legislatures voted to secede, and in Tennessee and Virginia the question was submitted to the voters. They chose secession. Kentucky and Missouri resolved to be neutral.
The Civil War had begun.
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