Authors: David Goldfield
While most northerners, regardless of political leaning, opposed coercion initially, a minority believed that the integrity of the Union was essential to fulfill the nation's destiny as God's Chosen Nation. Disunion would terminate America's noble experiment in spreading the ideals of a progressive Christian democracy across a continent and around the world. It would throw the globe into a downward spiral of chaos. The bloody aftermath of the failed European revolutions and sectarian violence and crime at home were harbingers of the social disintegration to come.
The northerners who considered coercion a viable option believed that allowing some states to leave the compact provided other states with the precedent to do the same at some later time. For these northerners, the issue was not states' rightsâthe states retained all of the rights bestowed on them by the Constitution. Secession was not one of these rights. The sacred documents were the foundations of law and order; secession, as a violation of the principles of Union articulated in these documents, threatened that stability. With that threat, the future of immutable progress and the order that supported it appeared doubtful. The Union, in other words, was a prerequisite for national greatness.
To defend the Union and the principle of law, and to avoid anarchy, Abraham Lincoln refused to rule out force as an option. Since the late 1830s he had warned against the dangers of internal dissension and the necessity of placing reason over impulse and of law over anarchy. From his reading of the Constitution, secession was illegal. The states derived their status from membership in the Union; they possessed no legal status apart from the Union. “By conquest, or purchase,” Lincoln explained, “the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States; and, in fact, it created them as States.”
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Lincoln believed that dismemberment presaged destruction. “The principle itself [of secession] is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure.” Much as southerners feared a slave insurrection in the wake of a Republican administration, so Lincoln saw chaos as the result of disunion. “Plainly,” he argued, “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.”
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In February 1861, as he prepared for his journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln's views on compromise and secession were clear and unyielding. As he told his secretary John Nicolay, “The right of a State to secede is not an open or debatable question. It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing Government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment.”
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By the time Lincoln packed for his travel eastward, however, even some of his staunchest Republican allies were exploring possible grounds for compromise. They watched the deepening economic disruption and feared the consequences of armed conflict. Colleagues urged Lincoln to make conciliatory statements to the South as a “means of strengthening our friends” there. There was talk of resurrecting Stephen A. Douglas's popular sovereignty doctrine, previously a sacrilege to Republicans, as a basis for compromise. This plan had the virtue of avoiding specific safeguards for slavery while still holding open the possibility of its extension into the territories. Whether that doctrine held any interest in the seceding states was doubtful. It might give Upper South states some pause and bolster Union sentiment there. Lincoln remained unimpressed. The president-elect urged Republicans to “stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”
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Abraham Lincoln departed Springfield for Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1861. He ordered his law partner, William Herndon, to keep the shingle, Lincoln & Herndon, “undisturbed” in front of their law office. “If I live I'm coming back some time, and then we'll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” He struck out on a meandering journey that lasted twelve days. Although the country's railroad mileage was more extensive in 1861 than it had been when Lincoln left the Congress in 1849, it was less a network than a kaleidoscope of short- and long-haul companies competing for freight and passenger traffic. The president-elect had to change trains seventeen times to reach his appointed destination, doubtless reinforcing his support for a seamless transcontinental railroad.
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The route took him to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and numerous smaller places in between, before depositing him at the nation's capital on February 23. Mostly friendly, often curious crowds greeted his appearance, except in New York City, where Walt Whitman witnessed the tense scene outside the Astor House. Lincoln had undertaken this trip less as a triumphal tour than as an opportunity to generate support for the Union and instill confidence among troubled northerners regardless of party. The purposeful rail journey afforded Lincoln a chance to meet his new constituents and vice versa. As he told a crowd at a stop in Indiana, “While some of us may differ in political opinions, still we are all united in one feeling for the Union. We all believe in the maintenance of the Union, of every star and every stripe of the glorious flag.”
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While he preached consensus to northern crowds, he offered no conciliation to the South. Some writers have argued that Lincoln did not appreciate the depth of southern animosity toward an impending Republican regime, implying that had he been aware of such sentiments he might have been more amenable to compromise. That was hardly the case. While he joshed about the innumerable southern threats of disunion prior to the election, the swift secession of the Lower South states convinced him that the crisis was real and required immediate attention. In his farewell speech to his neighbors in Springfield, he acknowledged that the challenge that awaited him was “greater than that which rested upon Washington.” He would not back away from what he saw as his constitutional duty and his love for the Union. He denied that such a position implied coercion: would it be coercion if the government “simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it,⦠or ⦠the collection of duties upon foreign importations,⦠or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated?” He quickly added that he had not yet reached a decision on these issues, but, clearly, the statement itself implied the possibility of confrontation. As he told the New Jersey legislature in Trenton, “It may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.”
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The most moving stop occurred at Philadelphia on February 22, the birthday of George Washington. The crowd at storied Independence Hall that day was decidedly friendlier than the one he had encountered in New York City. The atmosphere was still tense, however, as death threats had followed Lincoln's train. Outside this hallowed hall, the president-elect grasped a rope and hoisted a large Star-Spangled Banner. As he pulled on the halyards the flag rose, slowly unfurling in the gentle wind, revealing the colors radiant in the brilliant sunshine. A crescendo of cheers followed the flag upward as if the ascending standard embodied the enduring strength of their beloved Union, and the hope that everything and everyone would be saved. When the flag reached the summit, a band burst into a lively rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the cannon assembled in the square boomed a deafening affirmation.
Inside the hall, Lincoln spoke of the document framed within its walls and what it meant to Americans and to people around the world. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he acknowledged. There was “something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that
all
should have an equal chance.” Even the lowly slave. It was this global vision of America offering hope to men everywhere that sustained Lincoln's love for the Union and the Constitution upon which it rested.
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That the president-elect had to clandestinely change trains in Baltimore at three in the morning on February 23 attested both to the hostility of this slaveholding city and to the precarious nature of the crisis he was about to inherit. Washington, D.C., was also a southern city. Confederate agents, spies, slaves, and slave traders occupied various precincts even if many southern lawmakers had officially abandoned the federal government. Intrigue and rumor were the prime currencies and trading cheaply. The city landscape remained incomplete, with vast distances connected by muddy thoroughfares populated by indifferent structures punctuated here and there by a stately residence or an imposing federal building. Scaffolding covered the Capitol dome, part of a building project sixty-three years old and still counting, a symbol of how fragile the nation seemed at the moment. As one reporter noted, “If the Union is preserved, and Washington remains the Capital, a hundred years hence the original scheme may be carried out.”
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The extraordinary crisis called for extraordinary statesmanship. How the president-elect put together his cabinet provided some insight into his character and conviction. He collected some of his most bitter political rivals and critics and rewarded them with plum positions. A cynic might say he shrewdly co-opted his enemies, but these were menâSecretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Secretary of State William H. Sewardâwho would not be readily flattered by an individual for whom they held little respect. He explained his unorthodox choices: “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet.⦠I had no right to deprive the country of their service.” Though Stanton and Seward eventually warmed to the president, Chase never did. Lincoln rewarded the obstreperous Chase with a promotion to chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. All would prove exemplary in their respective roles, made infinitely more difficult by the necessities of war and reconstruction.
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The composition of his cabinet revealed that Lincoln bore no grudges against his enemies; that the interests of his country prevailed over his personal ego. Would he go that far with the South? His inaugural address on March 4, 1861, was the most important speech he had ever delivered. With the Union hanging in the balance, a new nation already up and running hard on its borders, a brace of compromises fallen by the wayside, and Unionist sentiment becoming ever more precarious in the remaining slave states, he stepped to the podium at the East Portico of the Capitol on a cool, clear March day to take his oath of office from none other than Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Stephen A. Douglas sat in the front row. He was holding the president-elect's hat. A fractured nation and many parts of the world waited anxiously for Lincoln's words.
Preparing his address, Lincoln studied three texts: Andrew Jackson's proclamation against Nullification and the speeches of the two greatest Whig luminaries, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. From Clay, Lincoln chose his speech on behalf of the Compromise of 1850, and from Webster, his renowned speech against Nullification in 1830, a speech he had committed to memory and had used numerous times in the past.
Lincoln's inaugural address was not a great speech, especially compared with his earlier and later orations, though such comparisons may be unfair. It was a walking-on-eggshells speech balancing his own conviction of the sanctity and destiny of the federal Union with the nation's desire to resolve the current crisis peacefully.
He tried to address southern fears by reiterating what he had said in countless speeches prior to 1861: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He also pledged to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. Much of the remainder of the speech took the form of a detailed legal brief denying the constitutionality of secession and coupling this denial with a vow to uphold his oath “to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government.” Once again, he equated secession with “anarchy.” While the government was protective of minority rights, majority rule must prevail. “The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” Time and again, Lincoln reminded listeners of his constitutional duty, “the most solemn one to âpreserve, protect, and defend'” the government and the country. Lincoln closed with the only stirring lines of the day, urging southerners to abandon “passion” and “think calmly and
well
upon the whole subject,” so that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.”
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None of this left southerners, in or out of the Confederacy, with the warm feeling of conciliation. Lincoln's eloquent appeal to a common past only provided southerners with a painful reminder of their current diminished position in the Union compared with their formative role in the nation's founding. The new president's evocation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence did not resonate among a people schooled to doubt that those documents protected them and their institutions. Southerners did not need a history lesson; they required ironclad guarantees and explicitly conciliatory rhetoric. They got neither.
While some Republicans praised the “firmness” of the speech, and Douglas called it a “peace offering,” Lincoln's failure to address the issue of coercion in relation to federal property in the Confederate states, particularly those few properties still in the government's possession, troubled many both north and south. An Ohio journalist believed Lincoln intended to “stain the soil and color the waters of the entire continent” with blood. A southerner echoed the sentiment: “This means war.”
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