It is impossible to avoid asking whether on this question of constitutional law the Northern opinion or the Southern opinion was correct. (The question was indeed an important question in determining the proper course of procedure for a President when confronted with secession, but it must be protested that the moral right and political wisdom of neither party in the war depended mainly, if at all, upon this legal point. It was a question of the construction which a court of law should put upon a document which was not drawn up with any view to determining this point.) If we go behind the Constitution, which was then and is now in force, to the original document of which it took the place, we shall find it entitled "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," but we shall not find any such provisions as men desirous of creating a stable and permanent federal government might have been expected to frame. If we read the actual Constitution we shall find no word distinctly implying that a State could or could not secede. As to the real intention of its chief authors, there can be no doubt that they hoped and trusted the Union would prove indissoluble, and equally little doubt that they did not wish to obtrude upon those whom they asked to enter into it the thought that this step would be irrevocable. For the view taken in the South there is one really powerful argument, on which Jefferson Davis insisted passionately in the argumentative memoirs with which he solaced himself in old age. It is that in several of the States, when the Constitution was accepted, public declarations were made to the citizens of those States by their own representatives that a State might withdraw from the Union. But this is far from conclusive. No man gets rid of the obligation of a bond by telling a witness that he does not mean to be bound; the question is not what he means, but what the party with whom he deals must naturally take him to mean. Now the Constitution of the United States upon the face of it purports to create a government able to take its place among the other governments of the world, able if it declares war to wield the whole force of its country in that war, and able if it makes peace to impose that peace upon all its subjects. This seems to imply that the authority of that government over part of the country should be legally indefeasible. It would have been ridiculous if, during a war with Great Britain, States on the Canadian border should have had the legal right to secede, and set up a neutral government with a view to subsequent reunion with Great Britain. The sound legal view of this matter would seem to be: that the doctrine of secession is so repugnant to the primary intention with which the national instrument of government was framed that it could only have been supported by an express reservation of the right to secede in the Constitution itself.

The Duke of Argyll, one of the few British statesmen of the time who followed this struggle with intelligent interest, briefly summed up the question thus: "I know of no government in the world that could possibly have admitted the right of secession from its own allegiance." Oddly enough, President Buchanan, in his Message to Congress on December 4, put the same point not less forcibly.

But to say—as in a legal sense we may—that the Southern States rebelled is not necessarily to say that they were wrong. The deliberate endeavour of a people to separate themselves from the political sovereignty under which they live and set up a new political community, in which their national life shall develop itself more fully or more securely, must always command a certain respect. Whether it is entitled further to the full sympathy and to the support or at least acquiescence of others is a question which in particular cases involves considerations such as cannot be foreseen in any abstract discussion of political theory. But, speaking very generally, it is a question in the main of the worth which we attribute on the one hand to the common life to which it is sought to give freer scope, and on the other hand to the common life which may thereby be weakened or broken up. It sometimes seems to be held that when a decided majority of the people whose voices can be heard, in a more or less defined area, elect to live for the future under a particular government, all enlightened men elsewhere would wish them to have their way. If any such principle could be accepted without qualification, few movements for independence would ever have been more completely justified than the secession of the Southern States. If we set aside the highland region of which mention has already been made, in the six cotton-growing States which first seceded, and in several of those which followed as soon as it was clear that secession would be resisted, the preponderance of opinion in favour of the movement was overwhelming. This was not only so among the educated and governing portions of society, which were interested in slavery. While the negroes themselves were unorganised and dumb and made no stir for freedom, the poorer class of white people, to whom the institution of slavery was in reality oppressive, were quite unconscious of this; the enslavement of the negro appeared to them a tribute to their own dignity, and their indiscriminating spirit of independence responded enthusiastically to the appeal that they should assert themselves against the real or fancied pretensions of the North. So large a statement would require some qualification if we were here concerned with the life of a Southern leader; and there was of course a brief space, to be dealt with in this chapter, in which the question of secession hung in the balance, and it is true in this, as in every case, that the men who gave the initial push were few. But, broadly speaking, it is certain that the movement for secession was begun with at least as general an enthusiasm and maintained with at least as loyal a devotion as any national movement with which it can be compared. And yet to-day, just fifty-one years after the consummation of its failure, it may be doubted whether one soul among the people concerned regrets that it failed.

English people from that time to this have found the statement incredible; but the fact is that this imposing movement, in which rich and poor, gentle and simple, astute men of state and pious clergymen, went hand in hand to the verge of ruin and beyond, was undertaken simply and solely in behalf of slavery. Northern writers of the time found it so surprising that they took refuge in the theory of conspiracy, alleging that a handful of schemers succeeded, by the help of fictitious popular clamour and intimidation of their opponents, in launching the South upon a course to which the real mind of the people was averse. Later and calmer historical survey of the facts has completely dispelled this view; and the English suspicion, that there must have been some cause beyond and above slavery for desiring independence, never had any facts to support it. Since 1830 no exponent of Southern views had ever hinted at secession on any other ground than slavery; every Southern leader declared with undoubted truth that on every other ground he prized the Union; outside South Carolina every Southern leader made an earnest attempt before he surrendered the Union cause to secure the guarantees he thought sufficient for slavery within the Union. The Southern statesman (for the soldiers were not statesmen) whose character most attracts sympathy now was Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, and though he was the man who persisted longest in the view that slavery could be adequately secured without secession, he was none the less entitled to speak for the South in his remarkable words on the Constitution adopted by the Southern Confederacy: "The new Constitution has put at rest for ever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. The prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was wrong in principle socially, morally, and politically. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal of the white man; that slavery—subordination to the white man—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to the Creator's laws and decrees." Equally explicit and void of shame was the Convention of the State of Mississippi. "Our position," they declared, "is thoroughly identified with slavery."

It is common to reproach the Southern leaders with reckless folly. They tried to destroy the Union, which they really valued, for the sake of slavery, which they valued more; they in fact destroyed slavery; and they did this, it is said, in alarm at an imaginary danger. This is not a true ground of reproach to them. It is true that the danger to slavery from the election of Lincoln was not immediately pressing. He neither would have done nor could have done more than to prevent during his four years of office any new acquisition of territory in the slave-holding interest, and to impose his veto on any Bill extending slavery within the existing territory of the Union. His successor after four years might or might not have been like-minded. He did not seem to stand for any overwhelming force in American politics; there was a majority opposed to him in both Houses of Congress; a great majority of the Supreme Court, which might have an important part to play, held views of the Constitution opposed to his; he had been elected by a minority only of the whole American people. Why could not the Southern States have sat still, secure that no great harm would happen to their institution for the present, and hoping that their former ascendency would come back to them with the changing fortunes of party strife? This is an argument which might be expected to have weighed with Southern statesmen if each of them had been anxious merely to keep up the value of his own slave property for his own lifetime, but this was far from being their case. It is hard for us to put ourselves at the point of view of men who could sincerely speak of their property in negroes as theirs by the "decree of the Creator"; but it is certain that within the last two generations trouble of mind as to the rightfulness of slavery had died out in a large part of the South; the typical Southern leader valued the peculiar form of society under which he lived and wished to hand it on intact to his children's children. If their preposterous principle be granted, the most extreme among them deserve the credit of statesmanlike insight for having seen, the moment that Lincoln was elected, that they must strike for their institution now if they wished it to endure. The Convention of South Carolina justly observed that the majority in the North had voted that slavery was sinful; they had done little more than express this abstract opinion, but they had done all that. Lincoln's administration might have done apparently little, and after it the pendulum would probably have swung back. But the much-talked-of swing of the pendulum is the most delusive of political phenomena; America was never going to return to where it was before this first explicit national assertion of the wrongfulness of slavery had been made. It would have been hard to forecast how the end would come, or how soon; but the end was certain if the Southern States had elected to remain the countrymen of a people who were coming to regard their fundamental institution with growing reprobation. Lincoln had said, "This government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free." Lincoln was right, and so from their own point of view, that of men not brave or wise enough to take in hand a difficult social reform, were the leaders who declared immediately for secession.

In no other contest of history are those elements in human affairs on which tragic dramatists are prone to dwell so clearly marked as in the American Civil War. No unsophisticated person now, except in ignorance as to the cause of the war, can hesitate as to which side enlists his sympathy, or can regard the victory of the North otherwise than as the costly and imperfect triumph of the right. But the wrong side—emphatically wrong—is not lacking in dignity or human worth; the long-drawn agony of the struggle is not purely horrible to contemplate; there is nothing that in this case makes us reluctant to acknowledge the merits of the men who took arms in the evil cause. The experience as to the relations between superior and inferior races, which is now at the command of every intelligent Englishman, forbids us to think that the inferiority of the negro justified slavery, but it also forbids us to fancy that men to whom the relation of owner to slave had become natural must themselves have been altogether degraded. The men upon the Southern side who can claim any special admiration were simple soldiers who had no share in causing the war; among the political leaders whom they served, there was none who stands out now as a very interesting personality, and their chosen chief is an unattractive figure; but we are not to think of these authors of the war as a gang of hardened, unscrupulous, corrupted men. As a class they were reputable, public-spirited, and religious men; they served their cause with devotion and were not wholly to blame that they chose it so ill. The responsibility for the actual secession does not rest in an especial degree on any individual leader. Secession began rather with the spontaneous movement of the whole community of South Carolina, and in the States which followed leading politicians expressed rather than inspired the general will. The guilt which any of us can venture to attribute for this action of a whole deluded society must rest on men like Calhoun, who in a previous generation, while opinion in the South was still to some extent unformed, stifled all thought of reform and gave the semblance of moral and intellectual justification to a system only susceptible of a historical excuse.

The South was neither base nor senseless, but it was wrong. To some minds it may not seem to follow that it was well to resist it by war, and indeed at the time, as often happens, people took up arms with greater searchings of heart upon the right side than upon the wrong. If the slave States had been suffered to depart in peace they would have set up a new and peculiar political society, more truly held together than the original Union by a single avowed principle; a nation dedicated to the inequality of men. It is not really possible to think of the free national life which they could thus have initiated as a thing to be respected and preserved. Nor is it true that their choice for themselves of this dingy freedom was no concern of their neighbours. We have seen how the slave interest hankered for enlarged dominion; and it is certain that the Southern Confederacy, once firmly established, would have been an aggressive and disturbing power upon the continent of America. The questions of territorial and other rights between it and the old Union might have been capable of satisfactory settlement for the moment, or they might have proved as insoluble as Lincoln thought they were. But, at the best, if the States which adhered to the old Union had admitted the claim of the first seceding States to go, they could only have retained for themselves an insecure existence as a nation, threatened at each fresh conflict of interest or sentiment with a further disruption which could not upon any principle have been resisted. The preceding chapters have dwelt with iteration upon the sentiments which had operated to make Americans a people, and on the form and the degree in which those sentiments animated the mind of Lincoln. Only so perhaps can we fully appreciate for what the people of the North fought. It is inaccurate, though not gravely misleading, to say that they fought against slavery. It would be wholly false to say that they fought for mere dominion. They fought to preserve and complete a political unity nobly conceived by those who had done most to create it, and capable, as the sequel showed, of a permanent and a healthy continuance.

And it must never be forgotten, if we wish to enter into the spirit which sustained the North in its struggle, that loyalty for Union had a larger aspect than that of mere allegiance to a particular authority. Vividly present to the mind of some few, vaguely but honestly present to the mind of a great multitude, was the sense that even had slavery not entered into the question a larger cause than that of their recent Union was bound up with the issues of the war. The Government of the United States had been the first and most famous attempt in a great modern country to secure government by the will of the mass of the people. If in this crucial instance such a Government were seen to be intolerably weak, if it was found to be at the mercy of the first powerful minority which seized a worked-up occasion to rebel, what they had learnt to think the most hopeful agency for the uplifting of man everywhere would for ages to come have proved a failure. This feeling could not be stronger in any American than it was in Lincoln himself. "It has long been a question," he said, "whether any Government which is not too strong for the liberties of the people can be strong enough to maintain itself." There is one marked feature of his patriotism, which could be illustrated by abundance of phrases from his speeches and letters, and which the people of several countries of Europe can appreciate to-day. His affection for his own country and its institutions is curiously dependent upon a wider cause of human good, and is not a whit the less intense for that. There is perhaps no better expression of this widespread feeling in the North than the unprepared speech which he delivered on his way to become President, in the Hall of Independence at Philadelphia, in which the Declaration of Independence had been signed. "I have never," he said, "had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that independence. I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept the Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, it was the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."

2. The Progress of Secession.

So much for the broad causes without which there could have been no Civil War in America. We have now to sketch the process by which the fuel was kindled. It will be remembered that the President elected in November does not enter upon his office for nearly four months. For that time, therefore, the conduct of government lay in the hands of President Buchanan, who, for all his past subserviency to Southern interests, believed and said that secession was absolutely unlawful. Several members of his Cabinet were Southerners who favoured secession; but the only considerable man among them, Cobb of Georgia, soon declared that his loyalty to his own State was not compatible with his office and resigned; and, though others, including the Secretary for War, hung on to their position, it does not appear that they influenced Buchanan much, or that their somewhat dubious conduct while they remained was of great importance. Black, the Attorney-General, and Cass, the Secretary of State, who, however, resigned when his advice was disregarded, were not only loyal to the Union, but anxious that the Government should do everything that seemed necessary in its defence. Thus this administration, hitherto Southern in its sympathies, must be regarded for its remaining months as standing for the Union, so far as it stood for anything. Lincoln meanwhile had little that he could do but to watch events and prepare. There was, nevertheless, a point in the negotiations which took place between parties at which he took on himself a tremendous responsibility and at which his action was probably decisive of all that followed.

The Presidential election took place on November 6, 1860. On November 10 the Legislature of South Carolina, which had remained in session for this purpose, convened a specially elected Convention of the State to decide upon the question of secession. Slave owners and poor whites, young and old, street rabble, persons of fashion, politicians and clergy, the whole people of this peculiar State, distinguished in some marked respects even from its nearest neighbours, received the action of the Legislature with enthusiastic but grave approval. It was not till December 20 that the Convention could pass its formal "Ordinance of Secession," but there was never for a moment any doubt as to what it would do. The question was what other States would follow the example of South Carolina. There ensued in all the Southern States earnest discussion as to whether to secede or not, and in the North, on which the action of South Carolina, however easily it might have been foretold, came as a shock, great bewilderment as to what was to be done. As has been said, there was in the South generally no disposition to give up Southern claims, no doubt as to the right of secession, and no fundamental and overriding loyalty to the Union, but there was a considerable reluctance to give up the Union and much doubt as to whether secession was really wise; there was in the North among those who then made themselves heard no doubt whatever as to the loyalty due to the Union, but there was, apart from previous differences about slavery, every possible variety and fluctuation of opinion as to the right way of dealing with States which should secede or rebel. In certain border States, few in number but likely to play an important part in civil war, Northern and Southern elements were mingled. Amid loud and distracted discussion, public and private, leaders of the several parties and of the two sections of the country conducted earnest negotiations in the hope of finding a peaceable settlement, and when Congress met, early in December, their debates took a formal shape in committees appointed by the Senate and by the House.

Meanwhile the President was called upon to deal with the problem presented for the Executive Government of the Union by the action of South Carolina. It may be observed that if he had given his mind to the military measures required to meet the possible future, the North, which in the end had his entire sympathy, would have begun the war with that advantage in preparation which, as it was, was gained by the South. In this respect he did nothing. But, apart from this, if he had taken up a clear and comprehensible attitude towards South Carolina and had given a lead to Unionist sympathy, he would have consolidated public opinion in the North, and he would have greatly strengthened those in the South who remained averse to secession. There would have been a considerable further secession, but in all likelihood it would not have become so formidable as it did. As it was, the movement for secession proceeded with all the proud confidence that can be felt in a right which is not challenged, and the people of the South were not aware, though shrewd leaders like Jefferson Davis knew it well, of the risk they would encounter till they had committed themselves to defying it.

The problem before Buchanan was the same which, aggravated by his failure to deal with it, confronted Lincoln when he came into office, and it must be clearly understood. The secession of South Carolina was not a movement which could at once be quelled by prompt measures of repression. Even if sufficient military force and apt forms of law had existed for taking such measures they would have united the South in support of South Carolina, and alienated the North, which was anxious for conciliation. Yet it was possible for the Government of the Union, while patiently abstaining from violent or provocative action, to make plain that in the last resort it would maintain its rights in South Carolina with its full strength. The main dealings of the Union authorities with the people of a State came under a very few heads. There were local Federal Courts to try certain limited classes of issues; jurors, of course, could not be compelled to serve in these nor parties to appear. There was the postal service; the people of South Carolina did not at present interfere with this source of convenience to themselves and of revenue to the Union. There were customs duties to be collected at the ports, and there were forts at the entrance of the harbour in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as forts, dockyards and arsenals of the United States at a number of points in the Southern States; the Government should quietly but openly have taken steps to ensure that the collection should go on unmolested, and that the forts and the like should be made safe from attack, in South Carolina and everywhere else where they were likely to be threatened. Measures of this sort were early urged upon Buchanan by Scott, the Lieutenant-General (that is, Second in Command under the President) of the Army, who had been the officer that carried out Jackson's military dispositions when secession was threatened in South Carolina thirty years before, and by other officers concerned, particularly by Major Anderson, a keen Southerner, but a keen soldier, commanding the forts at Charleston, and by Cass and Black in his Cabinet. Public opinion in the North demanded such measures.

If further action than the proper manning and supply of certain forts had been in contemplation, an embarrassing legal question would have arisen. In the opinion of the Attorney-General, of leading Democrats like Cass and Douglas, and apparently of most legal authorities of every party, there was an important distinction, puzzling to an English lawyer even if he is versed in the American Constitution, between the steps which the Government might justly take in self-protection, and measures which could be regarded as coercion of the State of South Carolina as such. These latter would be unlawful. Buchanan, instead of acting on or declaring his intentions, entertained Congress, which met early in December, with a Message, laying down very clearly the illegality of secession, but discussing at large this abstract question of the precise powers of the Executive in resisting secession. The legal question will not further concern us because the distinction which it was really intended to draw between lawful and unlawful measures against secession quite coincided, in its practical application, with what common sense and just feeling would in these peculiar circumstances have dictated. But, as a natural consequence of such discussion, an impression was spread abroad of the illegality of something vaguely called coercion, and of the shadowy nature of any power which the Government claimed.

Up to Lincoln's inauguration the story of the Charleston forts, of which one, lying on an island in the mouth of the harbour, was the famous Fort Sumter, is briefly this. Buchanan was early informed that if the Union Government desired to hold them, troops and ships of war should instantly be sent. Congressmen from South Carolina remaining in Washington came to him and represented that their State regarded these forts upon its soil as their own; they gave assurances that there would be no attack on the forts if the existing military situation was not altered, and they tried to get a promise that the forts should not be reinforced. Buchanan would give them no promise, but he equally refused the entreaties of Scott and his own principal ministers that he should reinforce the forts, because he declared that this would precipitate a conflict. Towards the end of the year Major Anderson, not having men enough to hold all the forts if, as he expected, they were attacked, withdrew his whole force to Fort Sumter, which he thought the most defensible, dismantling the principal other fort. The Governor of South Carolina protested against this as a violation of a supposed understanding with the President, and seized upon the United States arsenal and the custom house, taking the revenue officers into State service. Commissioners had previously gone from South Carolina to Washington to request the surrender of the forts, upon terms of payment for property; they now declared that Anderson's withdrawal, as putting him in a better position for defence, was an act of war, and demanded that he should be ordered to retire to the mainland. Buchanan wavered; decided to yield to them on this last point; ultimately, on the last day of 1860, yielded instead to severe pressure from Black, and decided to reinforce Anderson on Fort Sumter. The actual attempt to reinforce him was bungled; a transport sent for this purpose was fired upon by the South Carolina forces, and returned idle. This first act of war, for some curious reason, caused no excitement. The people of the North were intensely relieved that Buchanan had not yielded to whatever South Carolina might demand, and, being prone to forgive and to applaud, seem for a time to have experienced a thrill of glory in the thought that the national administration had a mind. Dix, the Secretary of the Treasury, elated them yet further by telegraphing to a Treasury official at New Orleans, "If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." But Anderson remained without reinforcements or further provisions when Lincoln entered office; and troops in the service first of South Carolina and afterwards of the Southern Confederacy, which was formed in February, erected batteries and prepared to bombard Fort Sumter.

No possible plea for President Buchanan can make him rank among those who have held high office with any credit at all, but he must at once be acquitted of any intentional treachery to the Union. It is agreed that he was a truthful and sincere man, and there is something pleasant in the simple avowal he made to a Southern negotiator who was pressing him for some instant concession, that he always said his prayers before deciding any important matter of State. His previous dealings with Kansas would suggest to us robust unscrupulousness, but it seems that he had quite given his judgment over into the keeping of a little group of Southern Senators. Now that he was deprived of this help, he had only enough will left to be obstinate against other advice. It is suggested that he had now but one motive, the desire that the struggle should break out in his successor's time rather than his own. Even this is perhaps to judge Buchanan's notorious and calamitous laches unfairly. Any action that he took must to a certain extent have been provocative, and he knew it, and he may have clung to the hope that by sheer inaction he would give time for some possible forces of reason and conciliation to work. If so, he was wrong, but similar and about as foolish hopes paralysed Lincoln's Cabinet (and to a less but still very dangerous degree Lincoln himself) when they took up the problem which Buchanan's neglect had made more urgent. Buchanan had in this instance the advantage of far better advice, but this silly old man must not be gibbeted and Lincoln left free from criticism for his part in the same transaction. Both Presidents hesitated where to us who look back the case seems clear. The circumstances had altered in some respects when Lincoln came in, but it is only upon a somewhat broad survey of the governing tendencies of Lincoln's administration and of its mighty result in the mass that we discover what really distinguishes his slowness of action in such cases as this from the hesitation of a man like Buchanan. Buchanan waited in the hope of avoiding action, Lincoln with the firm intention to see his path in the fullest light he could get.

From an early date in November, 1860, every effort was made, by men too numerous to mention, to devise if possible such a settlement of what were now called the grievances of the South as would prevent any other State from following the example of South Carolina. Apart from the intangible difference presented by much disapprobation of slavery in the North and growing resentment in the South as this disapprobation grew louder, the solid ground of dispute concerned the position of slavery in the existing Territories and future acquisitions of the United States Government; the quarrel arose from the election of a President pledged to use whatever power he had, though indeed that might prove little, to prevent the further extension of slavery; and we may almost confine our attention to this point. Other points came into discussion. Several of the Northern States had "Personal Liberty Laws" expressly devised to impede the execution of the Federal law of 1850 as to fugitive slaves. Some attention was devoted to these, especially by Alexander Stephens, who, as the Southern leader most opposed to immediate secession, wished to direct men's minds to a grievance that could be remedied. Lincoln, who had always said that, though the Fugitive Slave Law should be made just and seemly, it ought in substance to be enforced, made clear again that he thought such "Personal Liberty Laws" should be amended, though he protested that it was not for him as President-elect to advise the State Legislatures on their own business. The Republicans generally agreed. Some of the States concerned actually began amending their laws. Thus, if the disquiet of the South had depended on this grievance, the cause of disquiet would no doubt have been removed. Again the Republican leaders, including Lincoln in particular, let there be no ground for thinking that an attack was intended upon slavery in the States where it was established; they offered eventually to give the most solemn pledge possible in this matter by passing an Amendment of the Constitution declaring that it should never be altered so as to take away the independence of the existing slave States as to this portion of their democratic institutions. Lincoln indeed refused on several occasions to make any fresh public disclaimer of an intention to attack existing institutions. His views were "open to all who will read." "For the good men in the South," he writes privately, "—I regard the majority of them as such—I have no objection to repeat them seventy times seven. But I have bad men to deal with both North and South; men who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentations; men who would like to frighten me, or at least fix upon me the character of timidity and cowardice." Nevertheless he endeavoured constantly in private correspondence to narrow and define the issue, which, as he insisted, concerned only the territorial extension of slavery.

The most serious of the negotiations that took place, and to which most hope was attached, consisted in the deliberations of a committee of thirteen appointed by the Senate in December, 1860, which took for its guidance a detailed scheme of compromise put forward by Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky. The efforts of this committee to come to an agreement broke down at the outset upon the question of the Territories, and the responsibility, for good or for evil, of bringing them to an end must probably be attributed to the advice of Lincoln. Crittenden's first proposal was that there should be a Constitutional Amendment declaring that slavery should be prohibited "in all the territory of the United States, now held or hereafter acquired, north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes"—(the limit fixed in the Missouri Compromise, but restricted then to the Louisiana purchase)—while in all territory, now held or thereafter acquired south of that line, it should be permitted. Crittenden also proposed that when a Territory on either side of the line became a State, it should become free to decide the question for itself; but the discussion never reached this point. On the proposal as to the Territories there seemed at first to be a prospect that the Republicans would agree, in which case the South might very likely have agreed too. The desire for peace was intensely strong among the commercial men of New York and other cities, and it affected the great political managers and the statesmen who, like Seward himself, were in close touch with this commercial influence. Tenacious adherence to declared principle may have been as strong in country districts as the desire for accommodation was in these cities, but it was at any rate far less vocal, and on the whole it seems that compromise was then in the air. It seemed clear from the expressed opinions of his closest allies that Seward would support this compromise. Now Seward just at this time received Lincoln's offer of the office of Secretary of State, a great office and one in which Seward expected to rule Lincoln and the country, but in accepting which, as he did, he made it incumbent on himself not to part company at once with the man who would be nominally his chief. Then there occurred a visit paid on Seward's behalf by his friend Thurlow Weed, an astute political manager but also an able statesman, to Lincoln at Springfield. Weed brought back a written statement of Lincoln's views. Seward's support was not given to the compromise; nor naturally was that of the more radical Republicans, to use a term which now became common; and the Committee of Thirteen found itself unable to agree.

It is unnecessary to repeat what Lincoln's conviction on this, to him the one essential point of policy, was, or to quote from the numerous letters in which from the time of his nomination he tried to keep the minds of his friends firm on this single principle, and to show them that if there were the slightest further yielding as to this, save indeed as to the peculiar case of New Mexico, which did not matter, and which perhaps he regarded as conceded already, the Southern policy of extending slavery and of "filibustering" against neighbouring counties for that purpose would revive in full force, and the whole labour of the Republican movement would have to begin over again. Since his election he had been writing also to Southern politicians who were personally friendly, to Gilmer of North Carolina, to whom he offered Cabinet office, and to Stephens, making absolutely plain that his difference with them lay in this one point, but making it no less plain that on this point he was, with entire respect to them, immovable. Now, on December 22, the New York Tribune was "enabled to state that Mr. Lincoln stands now as he stood in May last, square upon the Republican platform." The writing that Weed brought to Seward must have said, perhaps more elaborately, the same. If Lincoln had not stood square upon that platform there were others like Senator Wade of Ohio and Senator Grimes of Iowa who might have done so and might have been able to wreck the compromise. Lincoln, however, did wreck it, at a time when it seemed likely to succeed, and it is most probable that thereby he caused the Civil War. It cannot be said that he definitely expected the Civil War. Probably he avoided making any definite forecast; but he expressed no alarm, and he privately told a friend about this time that "he could not in his heart believe that the South designed the overthrow of the Government." But, if he had in his heart believed it, nothing in his life gives reason to think that he would have been more anxious to conciliate the South; on the contrary, it is in line with all we know of his feelings to suppose that he would have thought firmness all the more imperative. We cannot recall the solemnity of his long-considered speech about "a house divided against itself," with which all his words and acts accorded, without seeing that, if perhaps he speculated little about the risks, he was prepared to face them whatever they were. Doubtless he took a heavy responsibility, but it is painful to find honourable historians, who heartily dislike the cause of slavery, capable to-day of wondering whether he was right to do so. "If he had not stood square" in December upon the same "platform" on which he had stood in May, if he had preferred to enroll himself among those statesmen of all countries whose strongest words are uttered for their own subsequent enjoyment in eating them, he might conceivably have saved much bloodshed, but he would not have left the United States a country of which any good man was proud to be a citizen.

Thus, by the end of 1860, the bottom was really out of the policy of compromise, and it is not worth while to examine the praiseworthy efforts that were still made for it while State after State in the South was deciding to secede. One interesting proposal, which was aired in January, 1861, deserves notice, namely, that the terms of compromise proposed by Crittenden should have been submitted to a vote of the whole people. It was not passed. Seward, whom many people now thought likely to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with justice that it was "unconstitutional and ineffectual." Ineffectual it would have been in this sense: the compromise would in all probability have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good feeling, had no further definite opinion upon the chief questions at issue; but it would have left a local majority in many of the Southern States and a local majority in many of the Northern States as irreconcilable with each other as ever. It was opposed also to the spirit of the Constitution. In a great country where the people with infinitely varied interests and opinions can slowly make their predominant wishes appear, but cannot really take counsel together and give a firm decision upon any emergency, there may be exceptional cases when a popular vote on a defined issue would be valuable, significant, desired by the people themselves; but the machinery of representative government, however faulty, is the only machinery by which the people can in some sense govern itself, instead of making itself ungovernable. Above all, in a serious crisis it is supremely repugnant to the spirit of popular government that the men chosen by a people to govern it should throw their responsibility back at the heads of the electors. It is well to be clear as to the kind of proceeding which the authors of this proposal were really advocating: a statesman has come before the ordinary citizen with a definite statement of the principle on which he would act, and an ordinary citizen has thereupon taken his part in entrusting him with power; then comes the moment for the statesman to carry out his principle, and the latent opposition becomes of necessity more alarming; the statesman is therefore to say to the ordinary citizen, "This is a more difficult matter than I thought; and if I am to act as I said I would, take on yourself the responsibility which I recently put myself forward to bear." The ordinary citizen will naturally as a rule decline a responsibility thus offered him, but he will not be grateful for the offer or glad to be a forced accomplice in this process of indecision.

If we could determine the prevailing sentiment in the North at some particular moment during the crisis, it would probably represent what very few individual men continued to think for six months together. Early in the crisis some strong opponents of slavery were for letting the South go, declaring, as did Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, that "they would not be citizens of a Republic of which one part was pinned to the other part with bayonets"; but this sentiment seems soon to have given way when the same men began to consider, as Lincoln had considered, whether an agreement to sever the Union between the States, with the difficult adjustment of mutual interests which it would have involved, could be so effected as to secure a lasting peace. A blind rage on behalf of conciliation broke out later in prosperous business men in great towns—even in Boston it is related that "Beacon Street aristocrats" broke up a meeting to commemorate John Brown on the anniversary of his death, and grave persons thought the meeting an outrage. Waves of eager desire for compromise passed over the Northern community. Observers at the time and historians after are easily mistaken as to popular feeling; the acute fluctuations of opinion inevitable among journalists, and in any sort of circle where men are constantly meeting and talking politics, may leave the great mass of quiet folk almost unaffected. We may be sure that there was a considerable body of steady opinion very much in accord with Lincoln; this should not be forgotten, but it must not be supposed that it prevailed constantly. On the contrary, it was inherent in the nature of the crisis that opinion wavered and swayed. We should miss the whole significance of Lincoln's story if we did not think of the North now and to the end of the war as exposed to disunion, hesitation, and quick reaction. If at this time a sufficiently authoritative leader with sufficiently determined timidity had inaugurated a policy of stampede, he might have had a vast and tumultuous following. Only his following would quickly, if too late, have repented. What was wanted, if the people of the North were to have what most justly might be called their way, was a leader who would not seem to hurry them along, nor yet be ever looking round to see if they followed, but just go groping forward among the innumerable obstacles, guided by such principles of good sense and of right as would perhaps on the whole and in the long run be approved by the maturer thought of most men; and Lincoln was such a leader.

When we turn to the South, where, as has been said, the movement for secession was making steady though not unopposed progress, we have indeed to make exceptions to any sweeping statement, but we must recognise a far more clearly defined and far more prevailing general opinion. We may set aside for the moment the border slave States of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, each of which has a distinct and an important history. Delaware belonged in effect to the North. In Texas there were peculiar conditions, and Texas had an interesting history of its own in this matter, but may be treated as remote. There was also, as has been said, a highland region covering the west of Virginia and the east of Kentucky but reaching far south into the northern part of Alabama. Looking at the pathetic spectacle of enduring heroism in a mistaken cause which the South presented, many people have been ready to suppose that it was manoeuvred and tricked into its folly by its politicians and might have recovered itself from it if the North and the Government had exercised greater patience and given it time. In support of this view instances are cited of strong Unionist feeling in the South. Such instances probably belong to the peculiar people of this highland country, or else to the mixed and more or less neutral population that might be found at New Orleans or trading along the Mississippi. There remains a solid and far larger South in which indeed (except for South Carolina) dominant Southern policy was briskly debated, but as a question of time, degree, and expediency. Three mental forces worked for the same end: the alarmed vested interest of the people of substance, aristocratic and otherwise; the racial sentiment of the poor whites, a sentiment often strongest in those who have no subject of worldly pride but their colour; and the philosophy of the clergy and other professional men who constituted what in some countries is called the intellectual class. These influences resulted in a rare uniformity of opinion that slavery was right and all attacks on it were monstrous, that the Southern States were free to secede and form, if they chose, a new Confederacy, and that they ought to do this if the moment should arrive when they could not otherwise safeguard their interests. Doubtless there were leading men who had thought over the matter in advance of the rest and taken counsel together long before, but the fact seems to be that such leaders now found their followers in advance of them. Jefferson Davis, by far the most commanding man among them, now found himself—certainly it served him right—anxiously counselling delay, and spending nights in prayer before he made his farewell speech to the Senate in words of greater dignity and good feeling than seem to comport with the fanatical narrowness of his view and the progressive warping of his determined character to which it condemned him. Whatever fundamental loyalty to the Union existed in any man's heart there were months of debate in which it found no organised and hardly any audible expression. The most notable stand against actual secession was that which was made in Georgia by Stephens; he was determined and outspoken, but he proceeded wholly upon the ground that secession was premature. And this instance is significant of something further. It has been said that discussion and voting were not free, and it would be altogether unlikely that their freedom should in no cases be infringed, but there is no evidence that this charge was widely true. It is surely significant of the general temper of the South, and most honourable to it, that Stephens, who thus struggled against secession at that moment, was chosen Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy.

By February 4, 1861, the States of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina by passing Ordinances of Secession, and on that date representatives of these States met at Montgomery in Alabama to found a new Confederacy. Texas, where considerable resistance was offered by Governor Houston, the adventurous leader under whom that State had separated from Mexico, was in process of passing the like Ordinance. Virginia and North Carolina, which lie north of the region where cotton prevails, and with them their western neighbour Tennessee, and Arkansas, yet further west and separated from Tennessee by the Mississippi River, did not secede till after Lincoln's inauguration and the outbreak of war. But the position of Virginia (except for its western districts) admitted of very little doubt, and that of Tennessee and North Carolina was known to be much the same. Virginia took a historic pride in the Union, and its interest in slavery was not quite the same as that of the cotton States, yet its strongest social ties were to the South. This State was now engaged in a last idle attempt to keep itself and other border States in the Union, with some hope also that the departed States might return; and on this same February 6, a "Peace Convention," invited by Virginia and attended by delegates from twenty-one States, met at Washington with ex-President Tyler in the chair; but for Virginia it was all along a condition of any terms of agreement that the right of any State to secede should be fully acknowledged.

The Congress of the seceding States, which met at Montgomery, was described by Stephens as, "taken all in all, the noblest, soberest, most intelligent, and most conservative body I was ever in." It has been remarked that Southern politicians of the agitator type were not sent to it. It adopted a provisional Constitution modelled largely upon that of the United States. Jefferson Davis, who had retired to his farm, was sent for to become President; Stephens, as already said, became Vice-President. The delegates there were to continue in session for the present as the regular Congress. Whether sobered by the thought that they were acting in the eyes of the world, or in accordance with their own prevailing sentiment, these men, some of whom had before urged the revival of the slave trade, now placed in their Constitution a perpetual prohibition of it, and when, as a regular legislature, they afterwards passed a penal statute which carried out this intention inadequately, President Davis conscientiously vetoed it and demanded a more satisfactory measure. At his inauguration the Southern President delivered an address, typical of that curious blending of propriety and insincerity, of which the politics of that period in America had offered many examples. It may seem incredible, but it contained no word of slavery, but recited in dignified terms how the South had been driven to separation by "wanton aggression on the part of others," and after it had "vainly endeavoured to secure tranquillity." The new Southern Congress now resolved to take over the forts and other property in the seceded States that had belonged to the Union, and the first Confederate general, Beauregard, was sent to Charleston to hover over Fort Sumter.

3. The Inauguration of Lincoln.

The first necessary business of the President-elect, while he watched the gathering of what Emerson named "the hurricane in which he was called to the helm," was to construct a strong Cabinet, to which may be added the seemingly unnecessary business forced upon him of dealing with a horde of pilgrims who at once began visiting him to solicit some office or, in rarer cases, to press their disinterested opinions. His Cabinet, designed in principle, as has been said, while he was waiting in the telegraph office for election returns, was actually constructed with some delay and hesitation. Lincoln could not know personally all the men he invited to join him, but he proceeded with the view of conjoining in his administration representatives of the chief shades of opinion which in this critical time it would be his supreme duty to hold together. Not only different shades of opinion, but the local sentiment of different districts had to be considered; he once complained that if the twelve Apostles had to be chosen nowadays the principle of locality would have to be regarded; but at this time there was very solid reason why different States should be contented and why he should be advised as to their feelings. His own chief rivals for the Presidency offered a good choice from both these points of view. They were Seward of New York, Chase of Ohio, Bates of Missouri, Cameron of Pennsylvania. Seward and Chase were both able and outstanding men: the former was in a sense the old Republican leader, but was more and more coming to be regarded as the typical "Conservative," or cautious Republican; Chase on the other hand was a leader of the "Radicals," who were "stern and unbending" in their attitude towards slavery and towards the South. These two must be got and kept together if possible. Bates was a good and capable man who moreover came from Missouri, a border slave State, where his influence was much to be desired. He became Attorney-General. Cameron, an unfortunate choice as it turned out, was a very wealthy business man of Pennsylvania, representative of the weighty Protectionist influence there. After he had been offered office, which had been without Lincoln's authority promised him in the Republican Convention, Lincoln was dismayed by representations that he was "a bad, corrupted man"; he wrote a curious letter asking Cameron to refuse his offer; Cameron instead produced evidence of the desire of Pennsylvania for him; Lincoln stuck to his offer; the old Whig element among Republicans, the Protectionist element, and above all, the friends of the indispensable Seward, would otherwise have been outweighted in the Cabinet. Cameron eventually became for a time Secretary of War. To these Lincoln, upon somebody's strong representations, tried, without much hope, to add some distinctly Southern politician. The effort, of course, failed. Ultimately the Cabinet was completed by the addition of Caleb Smith of Indiana as Secretary of the Interior, Gideon Welles of Connecticut as Secretary of the Navy, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland as Postmaster-General. Welles, with the guidance of a brilliant subordinate, Fox, served usefully, was very loyal to Lincoln, had an antipathy to England which was dangerous, and kept very diligently a diary for which we may be grateful now. Blair was a vehement, irresponsible person with an influential connection, and, which was important, his influence and that of his family lay in Maryland and other border slave States. Of all these men, Seward, Secretary of State—that is, Foreign Minister and something more—and Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, most concern us. Lincoln's offer to Seward was made and accepted in terms that did credit to both men, and Seward, still smarting at his own defeat, was admirably loyal. But his friends, though they had secured the appointment of Cameron to support them, thought increasingly ill of the prospects of a Cabinet which included the Radical Chase. On the very night before his inauguration Lincoln received from Seward, who had just been helping to revise his Inaugural Address, a letter withdrawing his acceptance of office. By some not clearly recorded exercise of that great power over men, which, if with some failures, was generally at his command, he forced Seward to see that the unconditional withdrawal of this letter was his public duty. It must throughout what follows be remembered that Lincoln's first and most constant duty was to hold together the jarring elements in the North which these jarring elements in his own Cabinet represented; and it was one of his great achievements that he kept together, for as long as was needful, able but discordant public servants who could never have combined together without him.

On February 11, 1861, Lincoln, standing on the gallery at the end of a railway car, upon the instant of departure from the home to which he never returned, said to his old neighbours (according to the version of his speech which his private secretary got him to dictate immediately after): "My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

He was, indeed, going to a task not less great than Washington's, but he was going to it with a preparation in many respects far inferior to his. For the last eight years he had laboured as a public speaker, and in a measure as a party leader, and had displayed and developed comprehension, perhaps unequalled, of some of the larger causes which mould public affairs. But, except in sheer moral discipline, those years had done nothing to supply the special training which he had previously lacked, for high executive office. In such office at such a time ready decision in an obscure and passing situation may often be a not less requisite than philosophic grasp either of the popular mind or of eternal laws. The powers which he had hitherto shown would still be needful to him, but so too would other powers which he had never practised in any comparable position, and which nature does not in a moment supply. Any attempt to judge of Lincoln's Presidency—and it can only be judged at all when it has gone on some way—must take account, not perhaps so much of his inexperience, as of his own reasonable consciousness of it and his great anxiety to use the advice of men who were in any way presumably more competent.

He deliberately delayed his arrival in Washington and availed himself of official invitations to stay at four great towns and five State capitals which he could conveniently pass on his way. The journey abounded in small incidents and speeches, some of which exposed him to a little ridicule in the press, though they probably created an undercurrent of sympathy for him. Near one station where the train stopped lived a little girl he knew, who had recently urged upon him to wear a beard or whiskers. To this dreadful young person, and to that persistent good nature of his which was now and then fatuous, was due the ill-designed hairy ornamentation which during his Presidency hid the really beautiful modelling of his jaw and chin. He enquired for her at the station, had her fetched from the crowd, claimed her praise for this supposed improvement, and kissed her in presence of the press. In New York he was guilty of a more sinister and tragic misfeasance. In that city, where, if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his large hands in black kid gloves. Here perhaps it is well to say that the educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately deplored Lincoln's supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly indifferent how plain a man he might be. His lesser speeches as he went were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he tried to do his duty. To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly felicitous. Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia, which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered felicitous at the time. They were too unpretentious. Moreover, they contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship. Whether they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised utterances was the best proof of his statesmanship. He would appeal to the steady loyalty of the North, but he was not going to arouse its passion. He assumed to the last that calm reflection might prevail in the South, which was menaced by nothing but "an artificial crisis." He referred to war as a possibility, but left no doubt of his own wish by all means to avoid it. "There will," he said, "be no bloodshed unless it be forced on the Government. The Government will not use force unless force is used against it."

Before he passed through Baltimore he received earnest communications from Seward and from General Scott. Each had received trustworthy information of a plot, which existed, to murder him in that city. Owing to their warnings he went through Baltimore secretly at night, so that his arrival in Washington, on February 23, was unexpected. This was his obvious duty, and nobody who knew him was ever in doubt of his personal intrepidity; but of course it helped to damp the effect of what many people would have been glad to regard as a triumphal progress.

On March 4, 1861, old Buchanan came in his carriage to escort his successor to the inaugural ceremony, where it was the ironical fate of Chief Justice Taney to administer the oath to a President who had already gone far to undo his great work. Yet a third notable Democrat was there to do a pleasant little act. Douglas, Lincoln's defeated rival, placed himself with a fine ostentation by his side, and, observing that he was embarrassed as to where to put his new tall hat and preposterous gold-knobbed cane, took charge of these encumbrances before the moment arrived for the most eagerly awaited of all his speeches. Lincoln had submitted his draft of his "First Inaugural" to Seward, and this draft with Seward's abundant suggestions of amendment has been preserved. It has considerable literary interest, and, by the readiness with which most of Seward's suggestions were adopted, and the decision with which some, and those not the least important, were set aside by Lincoln, it illustrates well the working relation which, after one short struggle, was to be established between these two men. By Seward's advice Lincoln added to an otherwise dry speech some concluding paragraphs of emotional appeal. The last sentence of the speech, which alone is much remembered, is Seward's in the first conception of it, Seward's in the slightly hackneyed phrase with which it ends, Lincoln's alone in the touch of haunting beauty which is on it.

His "First Inaugural" was by general confession an able state paper, setting forth simply and well a situation with which we are now familiar. It sets out dispassionately the state of the controversy on slavery, lays down with brief argument the position that the Union is indissoluble, and proceeds to define the duty of the Government in face of an attempt to dissolve it. "The power," he said, "confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union." He proceeded to set out what he conceived to be the impossibility of real separation; the intimate relations between the peoples of the several States must still continue; they would still remain for adjustment after any length of warfare; they could be far better adjusted in Union than in enmity. He concluded: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

4. The Outbreak of War.

Upon the newly-inaugurated President there now descended a swarm of office-seekers. The Republican party had never been in power before, and these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had assailed any American President before. To be accessible to all such was the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on him at this time. When in the course of nature the number of office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing. The horror of this enduring visitation has been described by Artemus Ward in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon. His classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced and provisioned. With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott, that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men, which did not exist. The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval advisers. The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the Confederate batteries. Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter. Blair said yes emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way. The other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the neglect of the last administration. Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter. South Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort. Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims. The assertion that he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln's Inaugural. This was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on the Gulf of Mexico, which the administration was prepared to defend. And now it was proposed that Lincoln, who had put down his foot with a bang yesterday, should take it up with a shuffle to-day. And Lincoln reserved his judgment; and, which is much more, went on reserving it till the question nearly settled itself to his disgrace.

Lincoln lacked here, it would seem, not by any means the qualities of the trained administrator, but just that rough perception and vigour which untaught genius might be supposed to possess. The passionate Jackson (who, by the way, was a far more educated man in the respects which count) would not have acted so. Lincoln, it is true, had declared that he would take no provocative step—"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war," and the risk which he would have taken by over-ruling that day the opinion of the bulk of his Cabinet based on that of his chief military adviser is obvious, but it seems to have been a lesser risk than he did take in delaying so long to overrule his Cabinet. It is precisely characteristic of his strength and of his weakness that he did not at once yield to his advisers; that he long continued weighing the matter undisturbed by the danger of delay; that he decided as soon as and no sooner than he felt sure as to the political results, which alone here mattered, for the military consequences amounted to nothing.

This story was entangled from the first with another difficult story. Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy came to Washington and sought interviews with Seward; they came to treat for the recognition of the Confederacy and the peaceful surrender of forts and the like within its borders. Meanwhile the action of Virginia was in the balance, and the "Peace Convention," summoned by Virginia, still "threshing again," as Lowell said, "the already twice-threshed straw of debate." The action of Virginia and of other border States, about which Lincoln was intensely solicitous, would certainly depend upon the action of the Government towards the States that had already seceded. Might it not be well that the Government should avoid immediate conflict with South Carolina about Fort Sumter, though conflict with the Confederacy about Fort Pickens and the rest would still impend? Was it not possible that conflict could be staved off till an agreement could be reached with Virginia and the border States, which would induce the seceded States to return? These questions were clearly absurd, but they were as clearly natural, and they greatly exercised Seward. Disappointed at not being President and equally disturbed at the prospect of civil war, but still inclined to large and sanguine hopes, he was rather anxious to take things out of Lincoln's hands and very anxious to serve his country as the great peacemaker. Indirect negotiations now took place between him and the Southern Commissioners, who of course could not be officially recognised, through the medium of two Supreme Court Judges, especially one Campbell, who was then in Washington. Seward was quite loyal to Lincoln and told him in a general way what he was doing; he was also candid with Campbell and his friends, and explained to them his lack of authority, but he talked freely and rashly of what he hoped to bring about. Lincoln gave Seward some proper cautions and left him all proper freedom; but it is possible that he once told Douglas that he intended, at that moment, to evacuate Fort Sumter. The upshot of the matter is that the decision of the Government was delayed by negotiations which, as it ought to have known, could come to nothing, and that the Southern Government and the Commissioners, after they had got home, thought they had been deceived in these negotiations.

Discussions were still proceeding as to Fort Sumter when a fresh difficulty arose for Lincoln, but one which enabled him to become henceforth master in his Cabinet. The strain of Seward's position upon a man inclined to be vain and weak can easily be imagined, but the sudden vagary in which it now resulted was surprising. Upon April 1 he sent to Lincoln "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration." In this paper, after deploring what he described as the lack of any policy so far, and defining, in a way that does not matter, his attitude as to the forts in the South, he proceeded thus: "I would demand explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America, to raise a vigorous spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention, and if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and declare war against them." In other words, Seward would seek to end all domestic dissensions by suddenly creating out of nothing a dazzling foreign policy. But this was not the only point, even if it was the main point; he proceeded: "Either the President must do it" (that is the sole conduct of this policy) "himself, or devolve it on some member of his Cabinet. It is not my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility." In other words, Seward put himself forward as the sole director of the Government. In his brief reply Lincoln made no reference whatever to Seward's amazing programme. He pointed out that the policy so far, as to which Seward had complained, was one in which Seward had entirely concurred. As to the concluding demand that some one man, and that man Seward, should control all policy, he wrote, "If this must be done, I must do it. When a general line of policy is adopted, I apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without good reason, or continuing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to have, the advice of all the Cabinet." Seward was not a fool, far from it; he was one of the ablest men in America, only at that moment strained and excited beyond the limits of his good sense. Lincoln's quiet answer sobered him then and for ever after. He showed a generous mind; he wrote to his wife soon after: "Executive force and vigour are rare qualities; the President is the best of us." And Lincoln's generosity was no less; his private secretary, Nicolay, saw these papers; but no other man knew anything of Seward's abortive rebellion against Lincoln till after they both were dead. The story needs no explanation, but the more attentively all the circumstances are considered, the more Lincoln's handling of this emergency, which threatened the ruin of his Government, throws into shade the weakness he had hitherto shown.

Lincoln was thus in a stronger position when he finally decided as to Fort Sumter. It is unnecessary to follow the repeated consultations that took place. There were preparations for possible expeditions both to Fort Sumter and to Fort Pickens, and various blunders about them, and Seward made some trouble by officious interference about them. An announcement was sent to the Governor of South Carolina that provisions would be sent to Fort Sumter and he was assured that if this was unopposed no further steps would be taken. What chiefly concerns us is that the eventual decision to send provisions but not troops to Fort Sumter was Lincoln's decision; but that it was not taken till after Senators and Congressmen had made clear to him that Northern opinion would support him. It was the right decision, for it conspicuously avoided the appearance of provocation, while it upheld the right of the Union; but it was taken perilously late, and the delay exposed the Government to the risk of a great humiliation.

An Alabama gentleman had urged Jefferson Davis that the impending struggle must not be delayed. "Unless," he said, "you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in ten days." There is every reason to suppose that the gentleman's statement as to the probable collapse of the South was mere rhetoric, but it seems that his advice led to orders being sent to Beauregard to reduce Fort Sumter. Beauregard sent a summons to Anderson; Anderson, now all but starved out, replied that unless he received supplies or instructions he would surrender on April 15. Whether by Beauregard's orders or through some misunderstanding, the Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12. Fort Sumter became untenable on the next day, when the relief ships, which Anderson had been led to expect sooner, but which could in no case really have helped him, were just appearing in the offing. Anderson very properly capitulated. On Sunday, April 14, 1861, he marched out with the honours of war. The Union flag had been fired upon in earnest by the Confederates, and, leaving Virginia and the States that went with it to join the Confederacy if they chose, the North sprang to arms.

In the events which had led up to the outbreak of war Abraham Lincoln had played a part more admirable and more decisive in its effect than his countrymen could have noted at the time or perhaps have appreciated since. He was confronted now with duties requiring mental gifts of a different kind from those which he had hitherto displayed, and with temptations to which he had not yet been exposed. In a general sense the greatness of mind and heart which he unfolded under fierce trial does not need to be demonstrated to-day. Yet in detail hardly an action of his Presidency is exempt from controversy; nor is his many-sided character one of those which men readily flatter themselves that they understand. There are always, moreover, those to whom it is a marvel how any great man came by his name. The particular tribute, which in the pages that follow it is desired to pay to him, consists in the careful examination of just those actions and just those qualities of his upon which candid detraction has in fact fastened, or on which candid admiration has pronounced with hesitancy.



CHAPTER VII

THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR

In recounting the history of Lincoln's Presidency, it will be necessary to mark the course of the Civil War stage by stage as we proceed. There are, however, one or two general features of the contest with which it may be well to deal by way of preface.

It has seldom happened that a people entering upon a great war have understood at the outset what the character of that war would be. When the American Civil War broke out the North expected an easy victory, but, as disappointment came soon and was long maintained, many clever people adopted the opinion, which early prevailed in Europe, that there was no possibility of their success at all. At the first the difficulty of the task was unrecognised; under early and long-sustained disappointment the strength by which those difficulties could be overcome began to be despaired of without reason.

The North, after several slave States, which were at first doubtful, had adhered to it, had more than double the population of the South; of the Southern population a very large part were slaves, who, though industrially useful, could not be enlisted. In material resources the superiority of the North was no less marked, and its material wealth grew during the war to a greater extent than had perhaps ever happened to any other belligerent power. These advantages were likely to be decisive in the end, if the North could and would endure to the end. But at the very beginning these advantages simply did not tell at all, for the immediately available military force of the North was insignificant, and that of the South clearly superior to it; and even when they began to tell, it was bound to be very long before their full weight could be brought to bear. And the object which was to be obtained was supremely difficult of attainment. It was not a defeat of the South which might result in the alteration of a frontier, the cession of some Colonies, the payment of an indemnity, and such like matters; it was a conquest of the South so complete that the Union could be restored on a firmer basis than before. Any less result than this would be failure in the war. And the country, to be thus completely conquered by an unmilitary people of nineteen millions, was of enormous extent: leaving out of account the huge outlying State of Texas, which is larger than Germany, the remaining Southern States which joined in the Confederacy have an area somewhat larger than that of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Holland, and Belgium put together; and this great region had no industrial centres or other points of such great strategic importance that by the occupation of them the remaining area could be dominated. The feat which the Northern people eventually achieved has been said by the English historians of the war (perhaps with some exaggeration) to have been "a greater one than that which Napoleon attempted to his own undoing when he invaded Russia in 1812."

On the other hand, the South was in some respects very favourably placed for resisting invasion from the North. The Southern forces during most of the war were, in the language of military writers, operating on interior lines; that is, the different portions of them lay nearer to one another than did the different portions of the Northern forces, and could be more quickly brought to converge on the same point; the country abounded in strong positions for defence which could be held by a relatively small force, while in every invading movement the invaders had to advance long distances from the base, thus exposing their lines of communication to attack. The advantage of this situation, if competent use were made of it, was bound to go very far towards compensating for inferiority of numbers; the North could not make its superior numbers on land tell in any rapidly decisive fashion without exposing itself to dangerous counter-strokes. In naval strength its superiority was asserted almost from the first, and by cutting off foreign supplies caused the Southern armies to suffer severe privations before the war was half through; but its full effect could only be produced very slowly. Thus, if its people were brave and its leaders capable, the South was by no means in so hopeless a case as might at first have appeared; with good fortune it might hope to strike its powerful antagonist some deadly blow before that antagonist could bring its strength to bear; and even if this hope failed, a sufficiently tenacious defence might well wear down the patience of the North.

As soldiers the Southerners started with a superiority which the Northerners could only overtake slowly. If each people were taken in the mass, the proportion of Southerners bred to an outdoor life was higher. Generally speaking, if not exactly more frugal, they were far less used to living comfortably. Above all, all classes of people among them were still accustomed to think of fighting as a normal and suitable occupation for a man; while the prevailing temper of the North thought of man as meant for business, and its higher temper was apt to think of fighting as odious and war out of date. This, like the other advantages of the South, was transitory; before very long Northerners who became soldiers at a sacrifice of inclination, from the highest spirit of patriotism or in the methodic temper in which business has to be done, would become man for man as good soldiers as the Southerners; but the original superiority of the Southerners would continue to have a moral effect in their own ranks and on the mind of the enemy, more especially of the enemy's generals, even after its cause had ceased to exist; and herein the military advantage of the South was undoubtedly, through the first half of the war, considerable.

In the matter of leadership the South had certain very real and certain other apparent but probably delusive advantages. The United States had no large number of trained military officers, still capable of active service. The armies of the North and South alike had to be commanded and staffed to a great extent by men who first studied their profession in that war; and the lack of ripe military judgment was likely to be felt most in the higher commands where the forces to be employed and co-ordinated were largest. The South secured what may be called its fair proportion of the comparatively few officers, but it was of tremendous moment that, among the officers who, when the war began, were recognised as competent, two, who sadly but in simple loyalty to the State of Virginia took the Southern side, were men of genius. The advantages of the South would have been no advantages without skill and resolution to make use of them. The main conditions of the war—the vast space, the difficulty in all parts of it of moving troops, the generally low level of military knowledge—were all such as greatly enhance the opportunities of the most gifted commander. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson thus became, the former throughout the war, the latter till he was killed in the summer of 1863, factors of primary importance in the struggle. Wolseley, who had, besides studying their record, conversed both with Lee and with Moltke, thought Lee even greater than Moltke, and the military writers of our day speak of him as one of the great commanders of history. As to Jackson, Lee's belief in him is sufficient testimony to his value. And the good fortune of the South was not confined to these two signal instances. Most of the Southern generals who appeared early in the war could be retained in important commands to the end.

The South might have seemed at first equally fortunate in the character of the Administration at the back of the generals. An ascendency was at once conceded to Jefferson Davis, a tried political leader, to which Lincoln had to win his way, and the past experiences of the two men had been very different. The operations of war in which Lincoln had taken part were confined, according to his own romantic account in a speech in Congress, to stealing ducks and onions from the civil population; his Ministers were as ignorant in the matter as he; their military adviser, Scott, was so infirm that he had soon to retire, and it proved most difficult to replace him. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, started with knowledge of affairs, including military affairs; he had been Secretary of War in Pierce's Cabinet and Chairman of the Senate Committee on War since then; above all, he had been a soldier and had commanded a regiment with some distinction in the Mexican War. It is thought that he would have preferred a military command to the Presidency of the Confederacy, and as his own experience of actual war was as great as that of his generals, he can hardly be blamed for a disposition to interfere with them at the beginning. But military historians, while criticising (perhaps a little hastily) all Lincoln's interventions in the affairs of war up to the time when he found generals whom he trusted, insist that Davis' systematic interference was far more harmful to his cause; and Wolseley, who watched events closely from Canada and who visited the Southern Army in 1863, is most emphatic in this opinion. He interfered with Lee to an extent which nothing but Lee's devoted friendship and loyalty could have made tolerable. He put himself into relations of dire hostility with Joseph Johnston, and in 1864 suspended him in the most injudicious manner. Above all, when the military position of the South had begun to be acutely perilous, Jefferson Davis neither devised for himself, nor allowed his generals to devise, any bold policy by which the chance that still remained could be utilised. His energy of will showed itself in the end in nothing but a resolution to protract bloodshed after it had certainly become idle.

If we turn to the political conditions, on which, in any but a short war, so much depends, the South will appear to have had great advantages. Its people were more richly endowed than the mixed and crudely democratic multitude of the North, in the traditional aptitude for commanding or obeying which enables people to pull together in a crisis. And they were united in a cause such as would secure the sustained loyalty of any ordinary people under any ordinary leader. For, though it was nothing but slavery that led to their assertion of independence, from the moment that they found themselves involved in war, they were fighting for a freedom to which they felt themselves entitled, and for nothing else whatever. A few successful encounters at the start tempted the ordinary Southerner to think himself a better man than the ordinary Northerner, even as the Southern Congressmen felt themselves superior to the persons whom the mistaken democracy of the North too frequently elected. This claim of independence soon acquired something of the fierce pride that might have been felt by an ancient nation. But it would have been impossible that the Northern people as a whole should be similarly possessed by the cause in which they fought. They did not seem to be fighting for their own liberty, and they would have hated to think that they were fighting for conquest. They were fighting for the maintenance of a national unity which they held dear. The question how far it was worth fighting a formidable enemy for the sake of eventual unity with him, was bound to present itself. Thus, far from wondering that the cause of the Union aroused no fuller devotion than it did in the whole lump of the Northern people, we may wonder that it inspired with so lofty a patriotism men and women in every rank of life who were able to leaven that lump. But the political element in this war was of such importance as to lead to a startling result; the North came nearest to yielding at a time when in a military sense its success had become sure. To preserve a united North was the greatest and one of the hardest of the duties of President Lincoln.

To a civilian reader the history of the war, in spite of the picturesque incidents of many battles, may easily be made dreary. Till far on in the lengthy process of subjecting the South, we might easily become immersed in some futile story of how General X. was superseded by General Y. in a command, for which neither discovered any purpose but that of not co-operating with General Z. And this impression is not merely due to our failure to understand the difficulties which confronted these gallant officers. The dearth of trained military faculty, which was felt at the outset, could only be made good by the training which the war itself supplied. Such commanders as Grant and Sherman and Sheridan not only could not have been recognised at the beginning of the war; they were not then the soldiers that they afterwards became. And the want was necessarily very serious in the case of the higher commands which required the movement of large forces, the control of subordinates each of whom must have a wide discretion, and the energy of intellect and will necessary for resolving the more complex problems of strategy. We are called upon to admire upon both sides the devotion of forgotten thousands, and to admire upon the side of the South the brilliant and daring operations by which in so many battles Lee and Jackson defeated superior forces. On the Northern side, later on, great generals came to view, but it is in the main a different sort of achievement which we are called upon to appreciate. An Administration appointed to direct a stupendous operation of conquest was itself of necessity ill prepared for such a task; behind it were a Legislature and a public opinion equally ill prepared to support and to assist it. There were in its military service many intelligent and many enterprising men, but none, at first, so combining intelligence and enterprise that he could grapple with any great responsibility or that the civil power would have been warranted in reposing complete confidence in him. The history of the war has to be recounted in this volume chiefly with a view to these difficulties of the Administration.

One of the most interesting features of the war would, in any military study of it, be seen to be the character of the troops on both sides. On both sides their individual quality was high; on both, circumstances and the disposition of the people combined to make discipline weak. This character, common to the two armies, was conspicuous in many battles of the war, but a larger interest attaches to the policy of the two administrations in raising and organising their civilian armies. The Southern Government, if its proceedings were studied in detail, would probably seem to have been better advised at the start on matters of military organisation; for instance, it had early and long retained a superiority in cavalry which was not a mere result of good fortune. But here, too, there was an inherent advantage in the very fact that the South had started upon a desperate venture. There can hardly be a more difficult problem of detail for statesmen than the co-ordination of military and civil requirements in the raising of an army. But in the South all civil considerations merged themselves in the paramount necessity of a military success for which all knew the utmost effort was needed. The several States of the South, claiming as they did a far larger independence than the Northern States, knew that they could only make that claim good by being efficient members of the Confederacy. Thus it was comparatively easy for the Confederate Government to adopt and maintain a consecutive policy in this matter, and though, from the conditions of a widely spread agricultural population, voluntary enlistment produced poor results at the beginning of the war, it appears to have been easy to introduce quite early an entirely compulsory system of a stringent kind.