“I cannot comprehend the madness of the times. Southern men are theoretically crazy. Extreme northern men are practical fools, the latter are really quite as bad as the former. Treason is in the air around us every where & goes by the name of Patriotism.”
THOMAS CORWIN TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN, JANUARY 16, 18611
“We have been grossly cheated by the North and I would rather that every soul of us would be exterminated than we should be allied to her again.”
SOUTH CAROLINA SECESSIONIST T. H. SPANN, LETTER TO ANNIE SPANN, JANUARY 27, 18612
BY JANUARY 1861, the young United States of America was beginning to tear apart. After the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican Party opposed the spread of slavery beyond the states where it already existed, Southern states economically dependent on what Southerners termed the “peculiar institution” of slavery were afraid that the balance of power in the Union would soon tip irrevocably in favor of the industrial, free-labor North. To avoid suffering the consequences of such a shift in political influence, they began carrying through on a threat Southern “fire-eaters”—ardent secessionists—had been making periodically since the 1830s. With South Carolina leading the way, by February 1 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had declared their ties to the United States null and void.
Published in 1862 by Bacon and Company of London, England, this Military Map of America uses different colors for the slaveholding states (pink and yellow) and free states and territories (light blue), delineating the central difference between North and South that led to the Civil War.
To ardent secessionists, the time had come to form a confederacy of slaveholding states neither dependent on the North nor aggravated by it and true to its own interpretation of the intent of the Founding Fathers—who had, after all, included provisions supporting slavery in the Constitution. To dedicated Unionists, secession was unthinkable, the death knell of the great American experiment in representative democracy.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), photograph, May 16, 1861, by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, Washington, DC; and Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), photograph by Julian Vannerson in McClees’ Gallery of Photographic Portraits of the Senators, Representatives & Delegates of the Thirty-Fifth Congress (1859). Both men were born in what was to become the crucially important border state of Kentucky and then traveled very different paths to become the political leaders of the warring American regions.
On February 11, two men—Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln—embarked on journeys that marked the deepening fault line dividing the Northern and Southern regions of the United States.
A West Point graduate and a former U.S. secretary of war and senator from Mississippi, Davis left Brierfield, his plantation just south of Vicksburg, for a five-day steamboat and railroad journey to the Confederate capital, Montgomery, Alabama. Although he had expected the delegates from six Southern states meeting there to name him to a major post in the new government, Davis was far from jubilant when a messenger from Vicksburg had arrived two days earlier with the notification telegram.3 He was all too aware of the challenges confronting the Confederacy that he would be heading.
Throughout the South, transportation, education, and communications systems, as well as business and industry, were all far less developed than in the North; economically, the South leaned heavily on “King Cotton” and the slave labor that planted and harvested that prize crop and performed much other manual and domestic labor. Though heavily dependent on waterborne commerce, the South had no navy; most American shipbuilders were located in the North, thus most experienced merchant seamen were based there.4 “We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by a powerful opposition,” Davis will write to his wife, Varina, on February 20.5 The Confederate States of America would need the strength and resources of as many of the remaining eight Southern and border slave states as possible if it was to succeed as a separate political entity.
The Confederate president-designate was forced by the comparatively haphazard structure of Southern railroads to follow a circuitous route to Montgomery: north and east through parts of northern Alabama and Tennessee; south to Atlanta, Georgia; then west into south-central Alabama and his final destination. Along the way, he was buoyed by what the Charleston (SC) Mercury termed “continuous ovations… military demonstrations, salutes of cannon, &c.” Davis made more than two dozen speeches during the five-day trip, culminating in an address to the jubilant crowd that greeted him on his arrival in Montgomery on February 16. There, the Mercury reported, Davis declared that the new Confederacy’s “only hope was in a determined maintenance of our position, and to make all who oppose us smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel…. Our separation from the old Union is complete. no compromise; no reconstruction can be now entertained.” These sentiments were received, the paper noted, with “tremendous applause.”6
Preparing to leave Springfield, Illinois, on a cold, damp February 11, Abraham Lincoln hoped, as did many other Northerners, that Unionist sentiment, even in the seceded states, remained sufficiently strong to allow peaceful closure of the regional rift. To Lincoln, the Union was permanent and indissoluble, and it was now his principal job to lead the way to its preservation. “The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people,” he will say in the inaugural address that he was still crafting as he began his journey to Washington, “and they have conferred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States.” The final address will be both a firm declaration of principles and an attempt to reassure those Southerners who feared “that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered.” It will also single out the one issue that lay at the heart of the nation’s political ferment: “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. This is the only substantial dispute.”7
Lincoln delivered the first of many speeches he was to give on his slow progress to Washington from the rear platform of his special train before it even left Springfield: a moving, ad hoc farewell address to the people of that city, his neighbors for a quarter of a century, to whose kindness, he declared, “I owe every thing…. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon [George] Washington.” Sad and pensive as his journey began, the president-elect quickly regained his spirits as he greeted the celebratory crowds that met his train at each of its many scheduled stops. On February 13, in Columbus, Ohio, he learned that feared secessionist attempts to disrupt the meeting of the electoral college in Washington had not materialized, and the electors, unmolested, had confirmed his election. As the train moved on through Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, he attempted to calm rather than emphasize the regional tensions that had raised the specter of war. “There is no crisis excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians,” he told the people of Pittsburgh on February 15. “My advice, then, under such circumstances, is to keep cool. If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end.”8
