Part 11

Seward approached the problem in the same temper, with the same assumptions, that were his in the previous December. He still believed that his main purpose was to enable a group of politicians to save their faces by effecting a strategic retreat. Imputing to the Southern leaders an attitude of pure self-interest, he believed that if allowed to play the game as they desired, they would mark time until circumstances revealed to them whether there was more profit for them in the Union or out; he also believed that if sufficient time could be given, and if no armed clash took place, it would be demonstrated first, that they did not have so strong a hold on the South as they had thought they had; and second, that on the whole, it was to their interests to patch up the quarrel and come back into the Union. But he also saw that they had a serious problem of leadership, which, if rudely handled, might make it impossible for them to stand still. They had inflamed the sentiment of state-patriotism. In South Carolina, particularly, the popular demand was for independence. With this went the demand that Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, garrisoned by Federal troops, should be surrendered, or if not surrendered, taken forcibly from the United States. A few cannon shots at Sumter would mean war. An article in Seward's creed of statecraft asserted that the populace will always go wild over a war. To prevent a war fever in the North was the first condition of his policy at home. Therefore, in order to prevent it, the first step in saving his enemies' faces was to safeguard them against the same danger in their own calm. He must help them to prevent a war fever in the South. He saw but one way to do this. The conclusion which became the bed rock of his policy was inevitable. Sumter must be evacuated.

Even before the inauguration, he had broached this idea to Lincoln. He had tried to keep Lincoln from inserting in the inaugural the words, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government." He had proposed instead, "The power confided in me shall be used indeed with efficacy, but also with discretion, in every case and exigency, according to the circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections."(6) With the rejection of Seward's proffered revision, a difference between them in policy began to develop. Lincoln, says one of his secretaries, accepted Seward's main purpose but did not share his "optimism."(7) It would be truer to say that in this stage of his development, he was lacking in audacity. In his eager search for advice, he had to strike a balance between the daring Seward who at this moment built entirely on his own power of political devination, and the cautious remainder of the Cabinet who had their ears to the ground trying their best to catch the note of authority in the rumblings of vox populi. For his own part, Lincoln began with two resolves: to go very cautiously,--and not give something for nothing. Far from him, as yet, was that plunging mood which in Seward pushed audacity to the verge of a gamble. However, just previous to the inauguration, he took a cautious step in Seward's direction. Virginia, like all the other States of the upper South, was torn by the question which side to take. There was a "Union" party in Virginia, and a "Secession" party. A committee of leading Unionists conferred with Lincoln. They saw the immediate problem very much as Seward did. They believed that if time were allowed, the crisis could be tided over and the Union restored; but the first breath of war would wreck their hopes. The condition of bringing about an adjustment was the evacuation of Sumter. Lincoln told them that if Virginia could be kept in the Union by the evacuation of Sumter, he would not hesitate to recall the garrison.(8) A few days later, despite what he had said in the inaugural, he repeated this offer. A convention was then sitting at Richmond in debate upon the relations of Virginia to the Union. If it would drop the matter and dissolve--so Lincoln told another committee--he would evacuate Sumter and trust the recovery of the lower South to negotiation.(9) No results, so far as is known, came of either of those offers.

During the first half of March, the Washington government marked time. The office-seekers continued to besiege the President. South Carolina continued to clamor for possession of Sumter. The Confederacy sent commissioners to Washington whom Lincoln refused to recognize. The Virginia Convention swayed this way and that.

Seward went serenely about his business, confident that everything was certain to come his way soon or late. He went so far as to advise an intermediary to tell the Confederate Commissioners that all they had to do to get possession of Sumter was to wait. The rest of the Cabinet pressed their ears more tightly than ever to the ground. The rumblings of vox populi were hard to interpret. The North appeared to be in two minds. This was revealed the day following the inauguration, when a Republican Club in New York held a high debate upon the condition of the country. One faction wanted Lincoln to declare for a war-policy; another wished the Club to content itself with a vote of confidence in the Administration. Each faction put its views into a resolution and as a happy device for maintaining harmony, both resolutions were passed.(10) The fragmentary, miscellaneous evidence of newspapers, political meetings, the talk of leaders, local elections, formed a confused clamor which each listener interpreted according to his predisposition. The members of the Cabinet in their relative isolation at Washington found it exceedingly difficult to make up their minds what the people were really saying. Of but one thing they were certain, and that was that they represented a minority party. Before committing themselves any way, it was life and death to know what portion of the North would stand by them.(11)

At this point began a perplexity that was to torment the President almost to the verge of distraction. How far could he trust his military advisers? Old General Scott was at the head of the army. He had once been a striking, if not a great figure. Should his military advice be accepted as final? Scott informed Lincoln that Sumter was short of food and that any attempt to relieve it would call for a much larger force than the government could muster. Scott urged him to withdraw the garrison. Lincoln submitted the matter to the Cabinet. He asked for their opinions in writing.(12) Five advised taking Scott at his word and giving up all thought of relieving Sumter. There were two dissenters. The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Portland Chase, struck the key-note of his later political career by an elaborate argument on expediency. If relieving Sumter would lead to civil war, Chase was not in favor of relief; but on the whole he did not think that civil war would result, and therefore, on the whole, he favored a relief expedition. One member of the Cabinet, Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, an impetuous, fierce man, was vehement for relief at all costs. Lincoln wanted to agree with Chase and Blair. He reasoned that if the fort was given up, the necessity under which it was done would not be fully understood; that by many it would be construed as part of a voluntary policy, that at home it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the matter a recognition abroad.

Nevertheless, with the Cabinet five to two against him, with his military adviser against him, Lincoln put aside his own views. The government went on marking time and considering the credentials of applicants for country post-offices.

By this time, Lincoln had thrown off the overpowering gloom which possessed him in the latter days at Springfield. It is possible he had reacted to a mood in which there was something of levity. His oscillation of mood from a gloom that nothing penetrated to a sort of desperate mirth, has been noted by various observers. And in 1861 he had not reached his final poise, that firm holding of the middle way,---which afterward fused his moods and made of him, at least in action, a sustained personality.

About the middle of the month he had a famous interview with Colonel W. T. Sherman who had been President of the University of Louisiana and had recently resigned. Senator John Sherman called at the White House with regard to "some minor appointments in Ohio." The Colonel went with him. When Colonel Sherman spoke of the seriousness of the Secession movement, Lincoln replied, "Oh, we'll manage to keep house." The Colonel was so offended by what seemed to him the flippancy of the President that he abandoned his intention to resume the military life and withdrew from Washington in disgust.(13)

Not yet had Lincoln attained a true appreciation of the real difficulty before him. He had not got rid of the idea that a dispute over slavery had widened accidentally into a needless sectional quarrel, and that as soon as the South had time to think things over, it would see that it did not really want the quarrel. He had a queer idea that meanwhile he could hold a few points on the margin of the Seceded States, open custom houses on ships at the mouths of harbors, but leave vacant all Federal appointments within the Seceded States and ignore the absence of their representatives from Washington.(14) This marginal policy did not seem to him a policy of coercion; and though he was beginning to see that the situation from the Southern point of view turned on the right of a State to resist coercion, he was yet to learn that idealistic elements of emotion and of political dogma were the larger part of his difficulty.

Meanwhile, the upper South had been proclaiming its idealism. Its attitude was creating a problem for the lower South as well as for the North. The pro-slavery leaders had been startled out of a dream. The belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others, that belief had been proved fallacious. It had been made plain that on the economic issue, even as on the issue of sectional distrust, the upper South would not follow the lower South into secession. When delegates from the Georgia Secessionists visited the legislature of North Carolina, every courtesy was shown to them; the Speaker of the House assured them of North Carolina's sympathy and of her enduring friendliness; but he was careful not to suggest an intention to secede, unless (the condition that was destiny!) an attempt should be made to violate the sovereignty of the State by marching troops across her soil to attack the Confederates. Then, on the one issue of State sovereignty, North Carolina would leave the Union.(15) The Unionists in Virginia took similar ground. They wished to stay in the Union, and they were determined not to go out on the issue of slavery. Therefore they laid their heads together to get that issue out of the way. Their problem was to devise a compromise that would do three things: lay the Southern dread of an inundation of sectional Northern influence; silence the slave profiteers; meet the objections that had induced Lincoln to wreck the Crittenden Compromise. They felt that the first and second objectives would be reached easily enough by reviving the line of the Missouri Compromise. But something more was needed, or again, Lincoln would refuse to negotiate. They met their crucial difficulty by boldly appealing to the South to be satisfied with the conservation of its present life and renounce the dream of unlimited Southern expansion. Their Compromise proposed a death blow to the filibuster and all he stood for. It provided that no new territory other than naval stations should be acquired by the United States on either side the Missouri Line without consent of a majority of the Senators from the States on the opposite side of that line.(16)

As a solution of the sectional quarrel, to the extent that it had been definitely put into words, what could have been more astute? Lincoln himself had said in the inaugural, "One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended; while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. That is the only substantial dispute." In the same inaugural, he had pledged himself not to "interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists;" and also had urged a vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. He never had approved of any sort of emancipation other than purchase or the gradual operation of economic conditions. It was well known that slavery could flourish only on fresh land amid prodigal agricultural methods suited to the most ignorant labor. The Virginia Compromise, by giving to slavery a fixed area and abolishing its hopes of continual extensions into fresh land, was the virtual fulfillment of Lincoln's demand.

The failure of the Virginia Compromise is one more proof that a great deal of vital history never gets into words until after it is over. During the second half of March, Unionists and Secessionists in the Virginia Convention debated with deep emotion this searching new proposal. The Unionists had a fatal weakness in their position. This was the feature of the situation that had not hitherto been put into words. Lincoln had not been accurate when he said that the slavery question was "the only substantial dispute." He had taken for granted that the Southern opposition to nationalism was not a real thing,--a mere device of the politicians to work up excitement. All the compromises he was ready to offer were addressed to that part of the South which was seeking to make an issue on slavery. They had little meaning for that other and more numerous part in whose thinking slavery was an incident. For this other South, the ideas which Lincoln as late as the middle of March did not bring into play were the whole story. Lincoln, willing to give all sorts of guarantees for the noninterference with slavery, would not give a single guarantee supporting the idea of State sovereignty against the idea of the sovereign power of the national Union. The Virginians, willing to go great lengths in making concessions with regard to slavery, would not go one inch in the way of admitting that their State was not a sovereign power included in the American Union of its own free will, and not the legitimate subject of any sort of coercion.

The Virginia Compromise was really a profound new complication. The very care with which it divided the issue of nationality from the issue of slavery was a storm signal. For a thoroughgoing nationalist like Lincoln, deep perplexities lay hidden in this full disclosure of the issue that was vital to the moderate South. Lincoln's shifting of his mental ground, his perception that hitherto he had been oblivious of his most formidable opponent, the one with whom compromise was impossible, occurred in the second half of the month.

As always, Lincoln kept his own counsel upon the maturing of a purpose in his own mind. He listened to every adviser--opening his office doors without reserve to all sorts and conditions--and silently, anxiously, struggled with himself for a decision. He watched Virginia; he watched the North; he listened--and waited. General Scott continued hopeless, though minor military men gave encouragement. And whom should the President trust-the tired old General who disagreed with him, or the eager young men who held views he would like to hold? Many a time he was to ask himself that question during the years to come.

On March twenty-ninth, he again consulted the Cabinet.(17) A great deal of water had run under the mill since they gave their opinions on March sixteenth. The voice of the people was still a bewildering roar, but out of that roar most of the Cabinet seemed to hear definite words. They were convinced that the North was veering toward a warlike mood. The phrase "masterly inactivity," which had been applied to the government's course admiringly a few weeks before, was now being applied satirically. Republican extremists were demanding action. A subtle barometer was the Secretary of the Treasury. Now, as on the sixteenth, he craftily said something without saying it. After juggling the word "if," he assumed his "if" to be a fact and concluded, "If war is to be the result, I perceive no reason why it may not best be begun in consequence of military resistance to the efforts of the Administration to sustain troops of the Union, stationed under authority of the government in a fort of the Union, in the ordinary course of service."

This elaborate equivocation, which had all the force of an assertion, was Chase all over! Three other ministers agreed with him except that they did not equivocate. One evaded. Of all those who had stood with Seward on the sixteenth, only one was still in favor of evacuation. Seward stood fast. This reversal of the Cabinet's position, jumping as it did with Lincoln's desires, encouraged him to prepare for action. But just as he was about to act his diffidence asserted itself. He authorized the preparation of a relief expedition but withheld sailing orders until further notice.(18) Oh, for Seward's audacity; for the ability to do one thing or another and take the consequences!

Seward had not foreseen this turn of events. He had little respect for the rest of the Cabinet, and had still to discover that the President, for all his semblance of vacillation, was a great man. Seward was undeniably vain. That the President with such a Secretary of State should judge the strength of a Cabinet vote by counting noses--preposterous! But that was just what this curiously simple-minded President had done. If he went on in his weak, amiable way listening to the time-servers who were listening to the bigots, what would become of the country? And of the Secretary of State and his deep policies? The President must be pulled up short--brought to his senses--taught a lesson or two.

Seward saw that new difficulties had arisen in the course of that fateful March which those colleagues of his in the Cabinet--well-meaning, inferior men, to be sure--had not the subtlety to comprehend. Of course the matter of evacuation remained what it always had been, the plain open road to an ultimate diplomatic triumph. Who but a president out of the West, or a minor member of the Cabinet, would fail to see that! But there were two other considerations which, also, his well-meaning colleagues were failing to allow for. While all this talk about the Virginia Unionists had been going on, while Washington and Richmond had been trying to negotiate, neither really had any control of its own game. They were card players with all the trumps out of their hands. Montgomery, the Confederate Congress, held the trumps. At any minute it could terminate all this make-believe of diplomatic independence, both at Washington and at Richmond. A few cannon shots aimed at Sumter, the cry for revenge in the North, the inevitable protest against coercion in Virginia, the convention blown into the air, and there you are--War!

And after all that, who knows what next? And yet, Blair and Chase and the rest would not consent to slip Montgomery's trumps out of her hands--the easiest thing in the world to do!--by throwing Sumter into her lap and thus destroying the pretext for the cannon shots. More than ever before, Seward would insist firmly on the evacuation of Sumter.

But there was the other consideration, the really new turn of events. Suppose Sumter is evacuated; suppose Montgomery has lost her chance to force Virginia into war by precipitating the issue of coercion, what follows? All along Seward had advocated a national convention to readjust all the matters "in dispute between the sections." But what would such a convention discuss? In his inaugural, Lincoln had advised an amendment to the Constitution "to the effect that the Federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the State, including that of persons held to service." Very good! The convention might be expected to accept this, and after this, of course, there would come up the Virginia Compromise. Was it a practical scheme? Did it form a basis for drawing back into the Union the lower South?

Seward's whole thought upon this subject has never been disclosed. It must be inferred from the conclusion which he reached, which he put into a paper entitled, Thoughts for the President's Consideration, and submitted to Lincoln, April first.

The Thoughts outlined a scheme of policy, the most startling feature of which was an instant, predatory, foreign war. There are two clues to this astounding proposal. One was a political maxim in which Seward had unwavering faith. "A fundamental principle of politics," he said, "is always to be on the side of your country in a war. It kills any party to oppose a war. When Mr. Buchanan got up his Mormon War, our people, Wade and Fremont, and The Tribune, led off furiously against it. I supported it to the immense disgust of enemies and friends. If you want to sicken your opponents with their own war, go in for it till they give it up."(19) He was not alone among the politicians of his time, and some other times, in these cynical views. Lincoln has a story of a politician who was asked to oppose the Mexican War, and who replied, "I opposed one war; that was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine."

The second clue to Seward's new policy of international brigandage was the need, as he conceived it, to propitiate those Southern expansionists who in the lower South at least formed so large a part of the political machine, who must somehow be lured back into the Union; to whom the Virginia Compromise, as well as every other scheme of readjustment yet suggested, offered no allurement. Like Lincoln defeating the Crittenden Compromise, like the Virginians planning the last compromise, Seward remembered the filibusters and the dreams of the expansionists, annexation of Cuba, annexation of Nicaragua and all the rest, and he looked about for a way to reach them along that line. Chance had played into his hands. Already Napoleon III had begun his ill-fated interference with the affairs of Mexico. A rebellion had just taken place in San Domingo and Spain was supposed to have designs on the island. Here, for any one who believed in predatory war as an infallible last recourse to rouse the patriotism of a country, were pretexts enough. Along with these would go a raging assertion of the Monroe Doctrine and a bellicose attitude toward other European powers on less substantial grounds. And amid it all, between the lines of it all, could not any one glimpse a scheme for the expansion of the United States southward? War with Spain over San Domingo! And who, pray, held the Island of Cuba! And what might not a defeated Spain be willing to do with Cuba? And if France were driven out of Mexico by our conquering arms, did not the shadows of the future veil but dimly a grateful Mexico where American capital should find great opportunities? And would not Southern capital in the nature of things, have a large share in all that was to come? Surely, granting Seward's political creed, remembering the problem he wished to solve, there is nothing to be wondered at in his proposal to Lincoln: "I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once." . . . And if satisfactory explanations were not received from Spain and France, "would convene Congress and declare war against them."