The great American Union was crumbling as the handover from Buchanan to Lincoln neared. In his message to the Congress on December 3, Buchanan reiterated his notorious empathy with the slave states and declared the impotence of the federal government to prevent secession by force, on the advice of the attorney general, Jeremiah S. Black. (Black was rewarded for his pusillanimity by being named secretary of state when Cass left the sinking ship on December 14, 1860. Black said secession was illegal, but that coercion was also—a legally and practically absurd position that disgusted retired General Cass.) The legal argument about secession has always been fuzzy. Washington certainly charged the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention to produce an “indissoluble union,” and it was hoped that this had been done. But the right of distinct units of a country to secede is frequently asserted and recognized, such as, in the nineteenth century, Belgium from the Netherlands and Texas from Mexico (not altogether spontaneously, as has been recounted), and in the twentieth century, Norway from Sweden, Ireland from the United Kingdom, Singapore from Malaysia, all the Soviet republics from Russia, and the Slovaks from Czechoslovakia; but none of these federations had anything like the voluntary origins or formal, consensual legitimacy of the United States. It is very difficult to find any legal rationale for the American states simply purporting to secede as if they had an untrammeled right at all times to promote themselves from subordinate jurisdictions in a federal state to sovereignty, merely by vote of a convention struck by act of the state legislature.
Since the legality of secession is not clear, Lincoln wisely chose to strengthen his legal position, both for posterity and opposite foreign powers, by arranging for the insurgents to begin the violence with an act of coercive aggression against the federal government. Between December 28, 1860, and February 18, 1861, state militiamen seized federal forts and arsenals in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, though without gunfire or casualties. When President Buchanan tried to send supplies to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on January 5, in an unarmed ship, it was driven off by gunfire from Confederate shore batteries, again without casualties.
The Confederate States of America provisionally established themselves on February 4, 1861, at Montgomery, Alabama, with a states’ rights affiliation of consenting states, and five days later, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had opposed secession (along with Douglas’s recent running mate, Herschel V. Johnson), vice president of the Confederacy. From February 11 to 23, Lincoln was on his famous train trip from Springfield, where he gave a memorable farewell, to Washington, with 14 stops along the way to greet well-wishers from the back of the train. In his inaugural address on March 4, he was conciliatory (“We must not be enemies”), but said that “No state, on its own mere action, can get out of the Union,” making it clear that he did not accept the secessions that had been proclaimed. He also made it clear that violence need not occur, and that if it did, it would be the fault of the insurgents. Lincoln advised South Carolina that provisions only were on their way by ship to Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, and South Carolina opened up withering fire on the fort from shore batteries on April 11. It surrendered on April 13. The South had opened fire on the North and galvanized opinion to suppress the revolt. There had been a good deal of waffling about, in Horace Greeley’s words, not wanting “to live in a country where one part is pinned to the other by bayonets.” This line of reasoning largely vanished after Fort Sumter was attacked (albeit no one was killed).
Lincoln announced the existence of an insurrection and called for 75,000 volunteers. This was seen as the signal of an imminent invasion, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined the Confederacy between April 17 and May 20, taking most of their serving U.S. Army officers with them, including Colonel Robert E. Lee, who opposed secession but felt his higher loyalty was to Virginia than to the U.S.A. (On that day, he declined General Winfield Scott’s offer of command of the Union Army, and would assume command of the Army of Northern Virginia in June 1862, where he would become one of history’s great commanders.) The 50 western counties of Virginia seceded from Virginia and were recognized two years later as the state of West Virginia (fulfilling Hamilton’s old ambition to break up Virginia). The Union thus rejected the right of states to secede, but upheld the right of parts of states that opposed secession, when the majority in the state approved secession, to secede from the secessionist state and remain in the Union. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were slave states that remained in the Union, though there were close contests for the loyalty of the last three.
Lincoln had taken his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination into key government position—Seward as secretary of state, Chase at Treasury, Bates as attorney general—and he made the Pennsylvania Republican leader, Simon Cameron, secretary of war. (This last appointment was not a success, and Lincoln shortly replaced him with the forceful and abrasive, but effective, Edwin Stanton.) The 74-year-old Winfield Scott, a military hero for nearly 50 years, since America’s first victories in the War of 1812, was still the commanding general of the U.S. Army. He cautioned against rushing into battle with raw recruits against southerners who would be more experienced with firearms, but congressional and press demands for a quick victory caused General Irwin McDowell to be sent forward at the head of 30,000 men to engage General Pierre G.T. Beauregard at Bull Run (Manassas), near Washington, on July 21, 1861. It started out well but ingenious improvisations by Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and Thomas J. Jackson, who earned the nickname “Stonewall” on that day, turned it into a victory for the South and a rout of the Union, with much of social Washington watching from a nearby height.
Lincoln traveled to West Point to get Scott’s view. The ample septuagenarian said it would be a long and difficult war but was certainly winnable. Greater distances would eat up part of the Union’s manpower advantage, and it would take some time to accustom Union draftees to the soldier’s life that would come more easily to most Confederates. He produced—as he had for Polk 15 years before with his Mexican War strategy of Kearny’s procession to California, Taylor’s frontier action, and his own amphibious landing at Veracruz and march on Mexico City—a clever plan that was eventually executed. He advocated what was called an “Anaconda Plan” of strangling the South: a naval blockade along all its coast; constant pressure on its capital of Richmond from the main army defending Washington; attacks up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans and St. Louis to cut off Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana; and then an offensive from Tennessee southeast through Georgia with the Armies of the Cumberland and the Tennessee, to cut the Confederacy in half again; and a northern pivot to roll up the Confederates between those armies and the Union Army of the Potomac between and around Washington and Richmond. Once again, he instantly identified the winning strategy, which succeeded as soon as Lincoln found the commanders who could carry it out. (Scott lived to see the Anaconda Plan completed, and died, full of honors, in 1866, aged almost 80, along with Washington and Nathanael Greene, one of America’s three greatest general prior to those about to make their names.) Lincoln’s first commanding general was George B. McClellan, a dashing officer who had won some early skirmishes in West Virginia.
As 1861 ended, the Union and the Confederacy were settling into what promised to be prolonged combat. Lincoln made it clear that he was conducting a war forced upon him, to preserve the Union, and that it was not a war to end slavery, though he would not tolerate the spread of slavery. Now he was armed with a plan of war; it remained to find the commanders and recruit and train the armies. The fact that many still regarded him as an ungainly bumpkin conferred the advantage of being underestimated.
Beyond the technical arguments about the indissolubility of the Union, and the general right to put down an insurrection, Lincoln invoked what amounted to a constitutional doctrine of eminent domain. Only the restoration of the Union would preserve the continuity of the great experiment of 1776, would continue to hold out the promise to the world of democratic government from the people upwards, and not devolved downward on men, whom he saw as essentially self-governing. If the South departed successfully, the United States would lose nearly 30 percent of its people and 40 percent of its territory, its momentum, mystique, national morale, and heritage of freedom; it would be hemmed about between British Canada and insolent rebels, as European countries are surrounded by rivals; and America’s destiny to lead the world toward the attainment of the rights of man would be forfeit, as the dead and brutal hand of slavery crumpled the proclaimed principles of the Declaration of Independence. Until Lincoln had the armed might to crush the South, he would be vulnerable to the rationalizations and lapses of purpose of his people. If he could develop the first without being swamped by the second, he would save the nation that, in less time than now separated America from Yorktown, would save democracy in the world. Part of Lincoln’s infallible eloquence was his unjingoistic conviction of America’s predestined greatness and vocation to lead the world. His vision was accurate, as long as his self-confidence, which survived his frequent lapses into moroseness, was justified. A great and terrible drama was well underway.
3. ANTIETAM AND RELATIONS WITH THE BRITISH AND THE FRENCH
Abraham Lincoln issued his War Order No. 1, on January 27, 1862 (nine months after hostilities began), for a general Union offensive. In a pattern that was to become tediously familiar, McClellan ignored it. In what was to become a more agreeable tradition, his order was carried out beyond the call of duty in the west, where Generals George H. Thomas and Ulysses S. Grant advanced in January and February into Tennessee and captured Fort Donelson, where Grant shocked the South by taking 14,000 prisoners, and took Nashville on February 25. A sign of things to come was furnished when real blood was drawn at Shiloh, almost at the border of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, on April 6–7, where Grant took 13,000 casualties out of 63,000 Union soldiers engaged, and inflicted 11,0000 casualties on the Confederacy, including their commander, General A.S. Johnston, who was killed on the battlefield.
On April 26, 1862, a Union naval force under future admiral David Farragut landed General Benjamin Butler’s forces, which took New Orleans. Only about 300 miles separated Grant from Butler, a narrowing window between the eastern and western Confederacy. The blockade of the Confederate coastline was already in force and being tightened, and the third of General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda strategy components, the cutting off of the western Confederacy by driving down the Mississippi after taking New Orleans, was already underway. The second element, keeping the pressure constantly on Richmond, was off to a slow start.
In the east, Lincoln quickly tired of McClellan’s excuses for inaction, and of McClellan personally. The general was a vain and insubordinate martinet, which Lincoln, who had a notoriously invulnerable ego, would happily have overlooked if the general had won something. Under Lincoln’s orders to move on Richmond, McClellan chose to do so by an amphibious operation landed at the evocative locale of Yorktown on May 4. He moved slowly up the peninsula between the James and York Rivers, and a series of battles occurred between May and September. While this was happening, Stonewall Jackson moved brilliantly up the Shenandoah Valley between March and June, with about 20,000 men, outmaneuvering and defeating nearly 50,000 Union troops, until McDowell and local militia were forced to provide 30,000 troops for a possible defense of Washington.
McClellan got within five miles of Richmond but was stopped by General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks), May 31 and June 1, 1862. The Union had about 6,000 casualties, the Confederacy 8,000, including Johnston, who was seriously wounded, but recovered. The struggle for Richmond continued in the Seven Days’ Battles around Mechanicsville from June 26 to July 2, where Lee made his debut as Confederate commander in Virginia. Both sides withdrew after this series of bloody engagements, in which the Union took 16,000 and the Confederacy over 20,000 casualties. If McClellan had had the determination of the war’s last Union commander in the east, he would have held Lee’s feet to the fire and might have broken the Confederacy’s back. On July 11, Lincoln put the ponderous General Henry Halleck in as general-in-chief, with McClellan continuing as head of the Army of the Potomac. He consolidated the armies of Virginia and ordered a land approach to Richmond. Lee masterminded an ambush superbly executed by his able lieutenants, Generals Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, and defeated General John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) on August 29 and 30. Pope retreated to the defenses of Washington, was replaced by McClellan, and Lee invaded the North, entering northwestward into Maryland, apparently aiming to advance into Pennsylvania and isolate the Union capital. He took Harper’s Ferry on September 15, capturing immense supplies of munitions and stores in the arsenal from which he had ejected John Brown on behalf of the Union just three years before, and taking 11,000 Union prisoners.
McClellan, in his brief but finest hour, overtook Lee near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, and on the bloodiest day of the war, at Antietam, the two armies divided nearly 25,000 casualties almost evenly. McClellan did not commit his reserves, as a bolder general would have done, given his numerical advantage, and Lee withdrew. McClellan did not try to press an advantage, but the day had important repercussions, at home and abroad.