Penguin History of the United States of America (58 page)

John Brown’s raid thus marks the point of no return: it began the uncoiling of a terrible chain of events leading to rebellion and war. It seems a small, almost a ridiculous seed for such a harvest. And in fact Harper’s Ferry, for all its significance, was the occasion, not the cause, of civil war. In the end,
all the analyses come back to slavery. The commitment of the South to its peculiar institution not only entailed a persecution complex; it turned the section into a pseudo-nation. For more than a generation the South had been bringing its religion, culture, politics and trade into line. The same test was applied to everything, even to thought: was it consistent with slavery, did it build up the defences of a slave society? Matters came to such a pass that one planter, who was ready to treat his slaves kindly, even if it meant growing less cotton, ashamedly feared that he was ‘near an abolitionist’, so guilty did he feel about his heresy and so large a crime did the slightest variation from the line now seem in the South. It was this obsession which had destroyed the two-party system in the Deep South and given the fire-eaters a clear field in which to promote secession, and the idea of a new Southern nation. By 1859–60 this new Southern nationalism was merely looking for an excuse to break the Union: John Brown, and then Abraham Lincoln, did no more than provide it.

Even after Harper’s Ferry, the few wise heads in the South urged restraint. Men like Sam Houston, the venerable founder of Texas, now its Governor for the last time, knew what the Union meant to the North and West; knew that there was an American patriotism quite as powerful as the Southern, and much longer established; and that it was backed by far greater resources. Some may even have glimpsed the significance of the cult of John Brown in the North. Thomas Bingham Bishop was the composer of a successful camp-meeting chorus, ‘Gone to be a Soldier in the Army of the Lord’. On hearing of Brown’s death, he quickly fitted some new words to the tune: ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave…’. They proved ominously popular. The South paid little attention. It had its own song, ‘Dixie’ (written in 1859, paradoxically enough by a Northerner).
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The Democratic convention met in April i860 and was a disaster. By a horrible fatality it was held in Charleston, the very capital of secessionist feeling, where they still remembered the Nullification Crisis. It was not a city where Northern and Western Democrats could feel happy: nor did they. Led by Yancey, the Southerners refused to hear of the nomination of Douglas: the Northerners would not abandon him. They had nothing to gain by doing so: a pro-slavery candidate could not carry any state outside the South. The Democratic cause had been weakenened by the Buchanan administration’s record of incompetence and corruption: only Douglas might save it. The inducement to earn general contempt by sacrificing their principles was therefore small. Equally, the fire-eaters saw no reason to budge. Eventually the convention broke up. One fragment reassembled at
Baltimore and nominated Douglas as the official Democratic candidate. The fire-eaters nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky, Vice-President of the United States, who could almost pass for a moderate. The real Southern moderates, mostly remnants of the Whig party, rejected both names and nominated Bell of Tennessee, on a Constitutional Union ticket.

The Southern and Democratic vote being hopelessly split, the Republicans, without effort on their part, had the game in their hands. Their convention met in the rising metropolis of the North-West, Chicago. This proved fortunate for the local candidate. The nomination had been expected to go to Seward, but he was regarded as dangerously extreme on the slavery question and too sympathetic to Catholics and immigrants. The party managers were determined to do nothing to alienate any nervous person who had a vote. Accordingly they turned to the tall man with the high voice, in the shiny, rumpled black suit: Abraham Lincoln. He had made fewer enemies than Seward. He came from a key section, the North-West, and a key state, Illinois. In his debates with Douglas, and in various orations since, he had shown himself to be intelligent and eloquent; he was known to be honest (a nice contrast to the Buchananites); he could be built up as a popular candidate because he had been born in a log-cabin and had chopped wood for a living when young. No one suspected that he was a great man. To a professional, the only impressive thing about him was that somehow, in spite of losing two Senatorial elections, he had kept his dominant position in the Whig and Republican parties of Illinois. With judicious negotiations behind the scenes by his agents and uproarious clamour from the public galleries, which had been carefully packed with the local boy’s supporters, the trick was done. ‘The Railsplitter’ was to be the next President of the United States.

Douglas fought a last, heroic, useless campaign. Lincoln won only 39 per cent of the popular vote, but he carried the majority of Northern and Western states with a plurality. He did not carry a single state in the South. When the news of his election reached Charleston, the process of secession was immediately set going.

In state after southern state conventions were summoned, bypassing the state assemblies and thus revolutionizing the state governments as the Committees of Correspondence had revolutionized the colonial governments eighty-five years previously. The loyalists struggled, but except in the Upper South they did so in vain. In December, South Carolina formally seceded from the United States, to be followed at once by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. These states next sent delegates to Montgomery, Alabama, to found a new inter-state government. Theoretically each seceding state could have become an independent country; but it seemed wiser to federate, as it has seemed wise to those earlier Founding Fathers of 1776: in adopting this course the Southerners showed how, in spite of everything, they were still intensely American. The Confederate States of America – usually known as the Confederacy – was
announced to the world, in a document that was not quite as memorable as the Declaration of Independence, on 4 February 1861. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was to be President. The C S Constitution was issued on 11 March: it strikingly resembled that of the US.

These events struck the North flat with amazement. The Union of the American States was such a profound commitment; the pride in the achievements of the American Revolution was so enormous; the belief in the promises of liberty, equality and property if America held together was so deep, that it seemed impossible that American citizens could really mean to destroy what the President-elect called ‘the last, best hope of Earth’. The Republicans had never believed that the threat to secede was serious: they had dismissed it as an electioneering trick. Even after the event they could not quite take it in, and hoped against hope, indeed against reason, that the Unionist majority in the South would reassert itself as it had in the past. But now there was no Union majority in the South.

The winter months passed in a desperate frenzy of schemes to restore normality. Seward had one, so did Charles Francis Adams, so did Senator Crittenden (he came from Henry Clay’s Kentucky and hoped to repeat Clay’s triumphs). But the Senators and Representatives of the seceding states had withdrawn when their states went out, and the Northerners, finding the foe absent, seized the opportunity to pass a new, protectionist tariff, which would have outraged the cotton South had it still regarded itself as part of the Union. The Morrill Tariff (named after its chief planner) perhaps shows that subconsciously members of Congress knew that the secession was real, and aspired to be permanent.

The lapse in time between the election in early November and Lincoln’s entry into office in March was unfortunate. Until then Buchanan remained President and had the duty of grappling with a crisis that threatened to shade from being a demonstration to being a rebellion to being a war. He proved as incapable as ever. Helplessly he allowed the secessionists to eliminate all Union presence from the Confederacy. The American government had always been such a loose, devolved, feeble affair that this was very easy: apart from the post and customs offices, there was little to remove save certain more or less unfinished or obsolete military and naval posts. The inland and most of the coastal ones fell immediately into Confederate hands; but at two points the Unionists could hold out – at Fort Pickens, off the Florida coast, and at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. This last quickly became the emotional focus of the crisis for both sides. The little fort lay right in the jaws of the Confederacy. It was temptingly weak, for it had been built for defence against a sea attack, not a land one, and it was both undermanned and ill-supplied. Its jaunty flag, fluttering the formerly sacred colours of the United States right under their noses, was a deep affront to the seceders, otherwise giddy with joy and confidence; while its presence at such a point was a matter of hope and reassurance to the North. Fort Pickens, which was much more defensible (it was to continue in US
hands throughout the years following), was soon overlooked: attention was obsessively directed at Charleston.

Buchanan dithered, and would no doubt have gone on doing so – would even have allowed Fort Sumter to fall unresisting – but for the determination of his Attorney-General, Edwin Stanton (1814–69) of Ohio, appointed to replace a seceding Southerner. Arrogant, energetic, certain he was right, Stanton insisted that Sumter must be retained and if necessary be resupplied and reinforced. When Lincoln took the oath of office on 4 March the fort was still in United States hands; Virginia and the other states of the Upper South had still not left the Union; not a shot had been fired. Perhaps peace might still be preserved, but tension was rapidly mounting.

The Presidential oath commits him who takes it to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and with almost no exception all the Presidents, even the feeblest, have regarded it very seriously. Abraham Lincoln was the opposite of feeble, and on taking the oath he explained, in his first inaugural address, what he understood by it. ‘The power confided to me,’ he said, ‘will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts’; for his pledge to protect the government was registered in heaven. In this way a line was drawn, a warning was issued. But the rest of his speech was an attempt to show the South, in its own terms, that it was safe under a Republican administration and that therefore secession was unnecessary. Read today, what is most striking, next to Lincoln’s desperate earnestness, is the way in which his very effort to be heard by the South reveals the gap between the two sides. Lincoln minimized that gap as best he could, saying it was no more than a dispute as to whether or not slavery should be extended; he pointed out that the Constitution was inviolate; he indicated that he would accept Crittenden’s proposal to write a guarantee of slavery into the Constitution; he pledged the Republicans to leave slavery alone; he remarked, without a smile, that there was very little damage that any administration could do in four years, and he held up as a beacon to the South one of his deepest beliefs:

A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or despotism.

Surely the South would see this, and cease its rejection of him and of the majority which had made him President. At the very least, let it do nothing in a hurry. ‘Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.’

The speech did the orator credit, but it could not find its mark. For one thing Lincoln could not quite hide his feeling that secession was not only wrong but frivolous. For another, he offered the South nothing but the
status quo
, of which even the Crittenden Amendment was only a reinforcement.
He stuck to his refusal to countenance slavery expansion; and he did not recognize either the right to secede or the independence of the Confederacy. He did not say he would not fight, either: only that he would not assail the seceders. He did not lay bare all his thought: but behind his praise of the American system could be felt his commitment to human equality, his love of his country, his hatred of slavery. In essence, he did not offer the South the slightest reassurance. Even if he had, it is doubtful if the seceding states, buoyant in the excitement of their new Confederacy, would have paid any attention. They had finished with Uncle Sam.

For the next few weeks Lincoln was besieged by the mob of office-seekers that assailed every new President, and as a sensible party leader he devoted much time to them; but though they wearied him they did not distract him from the question of Sumter. He adopted Stanton’s policy, but in his own fashion: he played for time. He hoped that, if it came to a showdown, he could keep the border states on his side. For this and other reasons he was determined not to fire the first shot; and he hoped against hope that no shots would be necessary. But he did not order the evacuation of Fort Sumter.

The matter was out of his hands. Many announcements were made by Southern leaders; many furtive negotiations were undertaken, some with the connivance of Seward, now Secretary of State. But since the Confederates had no intention of withdrawing the secession ordinances they had little choice, once it became clear that Lincoln had no intention of dropping the claims of the Union. A newborn nation, seething with bombastic pride, could not tolerate the impertinence of Sumter. General Beauregard received his orders; he mounted batteries against the fort, and on 12 April he opened his bombardment.

Mrs Chesnut and the other ladies of Charleston were appalled by the man-made thunder that crashed and reverberated incessantly through their town: they had never heard anything like it in their lives, and for a moment they glimpsed the nature of the abyss to which the slave states had been moving so recklessly for so long. In spite of the noise, no one was killed: Major Anderson, in command at the fort, was too skilful a soldier to let his men expose themselves. The fortifications were too good to be shattered immediately, but after a day and a night they could no longer be defended. Anderson asked for terms, which were granted; the stars and stripes were lowered, and the garrison marched out with the honours of war. War it was indeed; though how terrible was not yet clear.