The Lincoln administration hammered away at shaping a new and huge war establishment. On May 3 the President issued a proclamation calling into service 42,034 three-year volunteers, 22,714 enlisted men to add ten regiments to the regular U.S. Army, 18,000 seamen for blockade service—bringing the total of the Army to 156,861 and the Navy to 25,000. Day and night the President and other anxious officers worked on grand strategy and petty details.
From the windows of the White House Lincoln’s spyglass caught the Confederate flag flying over the town of Alexandria eight miles down the Potomac River, where several heavy guns and 500 troops had been forwarded from Richmond.
After May ’61, the U.S. mail service no longer ran into the seceded states. In this month too the Confederate Congress authorized all persons owing debts in the United States (except in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and the District of Columbia) to pay the amount of those debts into the Confederate Treasury. According to R. G. Dun & Company, the South owed Northern merchants about $211,000,000, of which $169,000,000 was due in New York City.
By May 9 some 20,000 troops were in Washington. They included Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth and the regiment of Fire Zouaves he had recruited in ten days from New York City fire-department men. New Yorkers had raised a fund of $60,000 for uniforms and arms. Ten different patterns of rifles were carried by Ellsworth’s red-trousered ranks.
In bright moonlight on May 24 at two o’clock in the morning, squads of cavalry crossed the bridges leading from Washington across the Potomac into Virginia, and were followed by infantry and by engineers, who began crowning every hill for miles with defense trenches for the protection of the ten-mile-square District of Columbia surrounded by Slave States.
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While a Michigan regiment marched toward the rear of Alexandria, Colonel Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves were to sail on transports down to that town of 10,000 and capture it. A Union sloop of war had preceded the transports and under a flag of truce had sent a message giving the Confederate troops one hour to leave town. Ellsworth was told the Confederate force of 500 had agreed to evacuate and, with a few straggling picket shots, they had done so.
Ellsworth started for the telegraph office to stop communication southward, taking a squad with him. They came to the Marshall House, a second-class hotel, flying at the top of its flagpole the secession flag. Ellsworth threw open the front door and walked in to ask a barefoot man in shirt and trousers what sort of flag was over the roof. The man said he was only a boarder and knew nothing of it. Ellsworth sprang up the stairs, followed by his friends, to the third story, where with a ladder he mounted to the roof and cut down the secession flag.
Then, as the New York Tribune man told it: “We turned to descend, Corporal Brownell leading the way, and Ellsworth immediately following with the flag. As Brownell reached the first landing-place, after a descent of some dozen steps, a man jumped from a dark passage, and hardly noticing Brownell, leveled a double-barrelled gun square at the Colonel’s breast. Brownell made a quick pass to turn the weapon aside, but the fellow’s hand was firm, and he discharged one barrel straight to its aim, the slugs or buckshot entering the Colonel’s heart, and killing him at the instant. I think my arm was resting on poor Ellsworth’s shoulder at the moment; at any rate, he seemed to fall almost from my grasp. He was on the second or third step from the landing, and he dropped forward with that headlong weight which comes of sudden death.” Brownell sent his own rifle slug into the face of Ellsworth’s killer, “and before the man dropped, he thrust his saber-bayonet through and through the body.”
Ellsworth’s body was laid on a bed in a room nearby, the secession flag wrapped about his feet. The Tribune man left to make sure of the seizure of the telegraph office. “When I returned to the hotel, there was a terrible scene enacting. A woman had run from a lower room to the stairway where the body of the assassin lay, and cried aloud with an agony so heart-rending that no person could witness it without emotion. She flung her arms in the air, struck her brow madly, offered no reproaches, appeared almost regardless of our presence, and yielded only to her own frantic despair. It was her husband that had been shot—James W. Jackson, proprietor of the hotel”—the partly- dressed man who had told Ellsworth, “I am only a boarder here.”
1 he body of Ellsworth arrived in Washington and was placed in a navy yard building. 1 he tolling of bells went on, the flags of public buildings at half-mast. In the White House a New York Herald man, with Senator
Wilson of Massachusetts, saw the President standing at a window looking out across the Potomac: "He did not move until we approached very closely, when he turned round abruptly, and advanced toward us, extending his hand: ‘Excuse me, but I cannot talk.’ ... to our surprise the President burst into tears, and concealed his face in his handkerchief... ‘I will make no apology, gentlemen,’ said he, ‘for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well and held him in high regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of his unfortunate death.’”
Mrs. Lincoln visited the navy yard in the afternoon, left flowers, and talked with Corporal Brownell. An hour later, the embalming completed, she came again with the President, and they looked on the still face of Ellsworth, Lincoln moaning: “My boy! my boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?” Lincoln invited the Zouave guards to take the body to the White House for the funeral services.
They brought the body into the East Room, where Ellsworth lay in state and was viewed by thousands, had escorts with muffled drums and reversed arms. Then home at last to Mechanicsville, New York, for burial, arriving in a gale of wind and wild rain. Addressing a letter “To the Father and Mother of Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth,” the President wrote: “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own . . . May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.”
So Ellsworth became a legend identified with patriotic valor, the image of youth moving to drums and banners for the sake of emblems and a sacred, mystic cause.
In the Chicago Wigwam, Stephen A. Douglas had told an immense audience, “Before God it is the duty of every American citizen to rally around the flag of his country,” and then gone home, to die. At his Oakenwald estate, overlooking Lake Michigan, in hearing of the Illinois Central locomotives, in a place that had always rested him, he argued stubbornly against the final adversary. Once in a delirium he called, “Telegraph to the President and let the column move on.” The afternoon of June 3 his wife, holding his hand, asked if he had any last word for his boys and he answered, “Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States.” These were telegraphed and generally recorded as his last words, though Chicago and New York newspaper accounts agreed in substance with that of the New York Herald: “When a few moments before his death, his wife leaned lovingly over him and sobbingly asked, ‘Husband, do you know me? Will you kiss me? he raised his eyes and smiled, and though too weak to speak, the movements of the muscles of his mouth evinced that he was making an almost dying struggle
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to comply with her request. His death was calm and peaceful; a few faint breaths after 9 o’clock; a slight rattling of his throat; a short, quick convulsive shudder, and Stephen A. Douglas passed into eternity.”
His 48 years of life had taken his short, massive body through enough spectacular tumults, quarrels and dramas to fill a life of many more years. Northern Democrats mourned the lost giant of their party, while Republicans paid tribute to a leader who in a crisis had hushed mutiny among his followers.
Roll call of the Todd family of Lexington, Kentucky, found Mary Todd Lincoln’s eldest brother Levi, and her half-sister Margaret Kellogg for the Union, while her youngest brother George and her three half-brothers Samuel, David and Alexander had joined the Confederate Army, and her half- sisters Emilie Helm, Martha White and Elodie Dawson were the wives of Confederate officers.
To the White House on Lincoln’s invitation had come Ben Hardin Helm, West Pointer, son of a former governor of Kentucky, a Democrat, and the husband of Mary Todd Lincoln’s “Little Sister” Emilie. During those few days the White House guest talked with old West Point comrades, some of them resigned and packing to go South. He was still undecided when as he left the White House Lincoln handed him an envelope holding a major’s commission in the U.S. Army, saying: “Ben, here is something for you. Think it over for yourself and let me know what you will do.” Mary Lincoln gave him a kiss to carry to Emilie and said, “Good-by, we hope to see you both very soon in Washington.” After a long handclasp with Lincoln, Helm walked slowly down the stairs and out the door and was gone. Days passed and word came that he would wear the Confederate gray.
The fierce old Kentucky preacher and Union man, Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, could not get personal with his opposition. It included two of his own sons who were going into Confederate gray, one of them organizing a company for service under the Stars and Bars, and such kinsmen as his nephew John C. Breckinridge, and such illustrious Kentuckians as James B. Clay, the son of Henry Clay. Of his three sons only one was choosing the Stars and Stripes to fight under.
1 he Kentucky Legislature, after almost continuous session since January ’61, adjourned sine die, proclaiming neutrality but still in the Union, and slowly drifting away from her sister Slave States to the south, who occasionally taunted Kentucky with “hesitation and cowardice.” Joshua Speed and his brother James at Louisville had been allies of Dr. Breckinridge. Commissioned a brigadier general by Lincoln, Robert Anderson, who had said at Fort Sumter that if Kentucky seceded he would go to Europe, had set up headquarters in
Cincinnati and given his best efforts to keep Kentucky in the Union. A naval lieutenant, William Nelson of Kentucky, had asked Lincoln to send him to his native state to stop secession. Nelson and others had distributed 10,000 rifles among Union men and Union military organizations. By stealth in the nighttime many a homeguard Unionist took to his arms his “Lincoln rifle” for use in emergency. Across the Ohio River on Ohio soil recruiting camps were set up, and some Ohio regiments had a fourth of their enrolled men from Kentucky. In the June balloting for members of the Congress Lincoln had called to meet July 4, Kentucky elected antisecessionists in nine out of the ten districts, the Union majority in the state being 54,700.
At the Baltimore election of April 24, 1861, only one ticket had been in the field, “States’ Rights.” Of 30,000 voters in the city, only 9,244 went to the polls and they all voted for secessionist members of the Maryland Legislature, which was to assemble two days later.
What with Union regiments increasing daily at Annapolis, Governor Hicks could have pleased the secessionist element by calling the legislature to Baltimore. Instead he convened it at the town of Frederick, a Unionist community but without Union troops. Such decisions favoring the Unionists came regularly from Governor Hicks. His message to the legislature reported his personal interviews with the President and the Cabinet, and the Presidents insistence that while he wished to avoid collisions through bringing troops across Maryland, military necessity required that such troops be brought to the defense of the national capital.
Slowly it became clear that the strength of secession in Maryland lay chiefly in a furiously active minority in Baltimore. William Rollinson Whittingham, Episcopal bishop of Maryland, was not of this minority. He rebuked clergymen who omitted the prayer for the President of the United States, and admonished them that the offense must not continue. A commission appointed by the Maryland Legislature reported May 6 that they had been courteously received by the President at Washington. They had differed as to fact, but on the general principle at issue, said the report, “The President concurred in the opinion that so long as Maryland had not taken, and was not taking, a hostile attitude toward the Federal Government, that the exclusive military occupation of her ways of communications, and the seizure of the property of her citizens, would be without justification.”
Day by day the boiling point in Maryland receded as it became more evident that secession would result in devastating trade losses to Baltimore. Charleston at her distance could more easily be defiant. The days passed till 10, 20, 30 regiments had crossed Maryland to Washington. A military
department under Brigadier General Benjamin F. Butler was set up at Annapolis.
In rain, darkness and thunder Butler moved 1,000 troops to Baltimore May 13, stacked arms on Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore, issued a proclamation that they were there to enforce respect and obedience to the laws of the United States. The North cheered Butler. He was continuing in the national scene his Massachusetts record for ingenuity and expedients, for sheer nerve and audacity, for the calculated exhibitions of a careerist, for the chameleon shifts of a wily criminal lawyer suspected by his own clients of a shaded and always partly defensible treachery. Heavy of body, with a well-rounded paunch, bald, sleepy-eyed with cunning, a cast in one eye, he was at every moment an actor with ready answers fitting his favorite combined role of the Man of the People and the Man Who Knows How. His militia troops in Massachusetts had elected him colonel, then brigadier general. To Carl Schurz passing through Annapolis, the chunky-shaped Butler was a little grotesque, was most evidently enjoying his power, and “keenly appreciating its theatrical possibilities.”
As between two lawyers, Butler had told Lincoln that the order for him to leave with his brigade for Washington arrived when he was trying a case before a jury. He had quit his argument to the jury and got his case continued. It woke Lincoln to muse slowly, “I guess we both wish we were back trying cases.”
Butler when removed from Maryland and put in charge of Fortress Monroe in Virginia protested personally to Lincoln; the treatment of him implied reproaches. The President, according to Butler’s report, said very kindly and courteously, “The administration has done everything to remove every thought of reproach upon you.”
They shook hands and Butler left to spread word that they were “the warmest personal friends.” Not yet had Butler discredited himself. His performances in Maryland had heartened the North, and he was on form worth the high commission Lincoln handed him. Yet he was basically an actor, a political general, and a military politician, so that eventually when John Hay should say to Lincoln he believed Butler was the only man in the Army to whom power would be dangerous, Lincoln would reply: “Yes, he is like Jim Jett’s brother. Jim used to say that his brother was the damndest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence he was also the damndest fool.”
The Butler gift for expedients rang across the country again when in May fugitive slaves flocked by hundreds into his camp. The legal question Butler disposed of by his decision, “The negro must now be regarded as contraband" (like smuggled goods or anything forbidden to be supplied by neutrals to belligerents). The country picked up this word “contraband” as often untying knots ol the Fugitive Slave Law. Many a runaway slave, after starving in
timber and swamp, arrived in the Union lines to say with jubilation, “I’se contraband.”
The next flare-up in Maryland ended with the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court tangled in dispute with the President. General George Cadwalader, in command of Fort McHenry near Baltimore, sent a squad of soldiers who at two o’clock the morning of May 25 roused one John Merryman from bed in his home at Hayfields and took him to Fort McHenry and locked him up "in close custody.” Lawyers for Merryman appeared the same day before Roger B. Taney, who made his home in Baltimore. They denied that Merryman was guilty of reported charges of treason, prayed for a writ of habeas corpus. Chief Justice Taney issued the writ and commanded that General Cadwalader appear before him “and that you have with you the body of John Merryman.”
General Cadwalader’s response to Taney was brought by a staff member, Colonel Lee, who explained that the General was busy with pressing matters and then read a statement from the General that the aforesaid John Merryman was charged with treason, was publicly known to be holding a commission as lieutenant in a company having in their possession arms belonging to the United States, and avowing his purpose of armed hostility against the Government. “He has further to inform you that he is duly authorized by the President of the United States in such cases to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for public safety.” After various proceedings neither Merryman nor Cadwalader appeared in court as ordered by Taney. The Chief Justice transmitted to the President a long written opinion on the ancient Anglo-Saxon custom of issuing writs of habeas corpus, with reminders and admonitions that the Executive himself should not violate law.
Police Marshal George P. Kane, whose methods clearly allied him with the Confederacy, was arrested at dawn June 27 and locked up at Fort McHenry. Four police commissioners, who were avowed secessionists, met and protested this action, and disbanded the city police force. So on July 1 the four police commissioners were also arrested and locked up in Fort McHenry. The secessionist trend in Maryland was definitely checked in June, when railroad schedules were re-established, Unionists were elected to Congress in the six districts of Maryland, and Governor Hicks was having no difficulty enlisting four regiments of men to serve within the limits of Maryland or for the defense of the national capital.
Lincolns reply to Chief Justice Taney was given to the country in a message to Congress on July 4:
Soon after the first call for militia, it was considered a duty to authorize the Commanding General, in proper cases, according to his discretion, to suspend the
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privilege of the writ of habeas corpus; or, in other words, to arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety ... Of course some consideration was given to the questions of power, and propriety, before this matter was acted upon . . . Are all the laws, but one , to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown ... It was not believed that any law was violated . . . It was decided that we have a case of rebellion . . . Now it is insisted that Congress, and not the Executive, is vested with this power. But the Constitution itself, is silent as to which, or who, is to exercise the power . . .
Seward was still playing lingeringly with his old idea that a war with Great Britain might bring the Southern forces behind the old American flag in a solid Union. He believed nothing was to be lost by using a menacing tone to the British Government. His good friend in London, Minister Adams, took his reckless threats and turned them into well-measured reproaches and courteous arguments. Adams was English-blooded and had instincts that were at home in London, one saying his face could “outfreeze” that of any English gentleman with whom he had to dicker.
Queen Victoria’s proclamation of May 13, 1861, took notice of hostilities “between the government of the United States of America and certain States styling themselves the Confederate States of America” and declared the “royal determination to maintain a strict and impartial neutrality in the contest between said contending parties.” The Queen and her consort, Prince Albert, the political liberals and rhe masses of the English people leaned to the North in sympathy, while Prime Minister Palmerston and the officials and imperialistic cliques voiced by the London Times favored the South and in various technical rulings deviated far from strict neutrality. To the New York Rothschild agent, August Belmont, Palmerston said, “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.” A queer obstacle, not easily defined yet definitely operating, known as British Public Opinion, was about all that stopped Palmerston from giving complete recognition to the Southern Confederacy and lending it the British fleet.
To Carl Schurz departing for Spain Lincoln spoke about foreign affairs “with the same nonchalance with which he might have discussed an everyday law case at Springfield, Illinois.” He told Schurz that if the administration had so far “stumbled along,” as was said, it had, on the whole, “stumbled along in the right direction.”
When the captain and crew of the privateer Jefferson Davis were convicted in Philadelphia of piracy, the decision was finally put up to Lincoln whether they should hang as pirates, in which event an equal number of Federal
officers in Southern prisons, chosen by lot, would likewise be hanged, announced the Confederate Secretary of War. And Davis went so far as to name the 13 Union officers, selected by drawing of numbers, who would go to the gallows. Lincoln refused to begin a competition in hanging.
The President and the Cabinet through the new and often bungling personnels of their old departments were wrestling with crazy patterns or military organization, red tape, confusions of counsels, inpouring brigades, telegrams exchanged daily or hourly with governors recruiting troops, the direction of four grades of troops: (1) regulars; (2) three-month volunteers; (3) state militia; (4) three-year volunteers; besides independent troop units in Border States still neutral.
In the furious, complex and driving labors of shaping effective armies for grand strategic campaigns, General Scott was slow and fussy, his dropsy and vertigo pathetic afflictions of an aged hero. In many cases Lincoln and Secretary Cameron went directly over Scott’s head and ordered action on political grounds, if not military.
The new consul to Paris, John Bigelow, heard a conversation between Lincoln and a Senator on army and field operations. “I observed no sign of weakness in anything the President said,” noted Bigelow. “What did impress me, however, was what I can only describe as a certain lack of sovereignty. He seemed to me, nor was it in the least strange that he did, like a man utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States occupied that day in the history of the human race . . . This impression was strengthened by Mr. Lincoln’s . . . frequent avowals of ignorance, which, even where it exists, it is as well for a captain as far as possible to conceal from the public.”
In commissioning major generals of volunteers the President seemed to rest chiefly on the judgment of Scott, who favored John E. Wool, John A. Dix, Henry W. Halleck, Don Carlos Buell. The appointment of John C. Fremont as a major general was mainly political, as were the appointments of Benjamin F. Butler and Nathaniel P. Banks. David Hunter, Edwin V. Sumner and John Pope, who had accompanied Lincoln from Springfield to Harrisburg, were commissioned as brigadiers. Among the May and June appointees as brigadiers nearly all had West Point training and Mexican War service records.
William Tecumseh Sherman came again to the White House and left with a colonel’s commission. Sherman had amazed the President and given him a healthy laugh by refusing a brigadier’s commission and saying he would rather work up from colonel. Sherman sent the St. Louis horsecar street railways a word of good-by as superintendent; he would do his best for the war, though he was storm-tossed and haunted with impressions that men North and South
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were blind and crazy, that greedy politicians had too large a sway at Washington, and the war would end in a hundred years rather than the hundred days many people were predicting. Another West Pointer, Joseph E. Johnston of Virginia, of much the same feeling, in grief and tears had just resigned as quartermaster general of the U.S. Army to go into Confederate gray.
Sherman had said to Lincoln, “Why don’t you nominate Thomas?” meaning George H. Thomas, a Virginian and a West Pointer of long army experience. Lincoln replied that Thomas was born in Virginia and there were doubts as to his loyalty. Sherman protested, “Mr. President, Old Tom is as loyal as I am, and as a soldier he is superior to all on your list.” Lincoln inquired, “Will you be responsible for him?” Sherman snapped, “With the greatest pleasure.” And Lincoln sent the nomination of Thomas as brigadier general to the Senate that day.
Of a total of 1,108 U.S. Army officers, 387 had resigned to go South. These resigned Southerners, 288 of them West Point-trained, included promising officers, of actual field and battle service. Among West Pointers in Northern service were 162 born in Slave States. Among West Pointers gone South for service were 19 Northern-born men. Lincoln was writing in a message to Congress: “It is worthy of note, that while in this, the government’s hour of trial, large numbers of those in the Army and Navy, who have been favored with the offices, have resigned, and proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common soldier, or common sailor is known to have deserted his flag. Great honor is due to those officers who remain true . . .”
In May and June ’61 Lincoln was stressing popular government and maintenance of the Union above all issues. If the slavery issue was to come up front it would be through force of circumstances, through “yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity.” This necessity had begun to work the moment the secession movement gained headway. It thrust the slavery issue forward for discussion and required that the millions of Negroes in the South be considered as a war factor, to be used by one side or both.
The South had a secret the North knew little of; the South had many doubts about slavery. Over the South not yet did they dare speak this secret. As to white-race superiority the South had no doubts. While it defended black-race slavery as a living institution, the South was not sure but that the institution was dying of some inherent malady.
Up in Maine the little woman who had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin received in the mail one day a pair of Negro ears sent by someone who loathed her race-equality ideas.
In his message to Congress Lincoln was writing no line or word dealing with any phase of the Negro and slavery. The President kept an official loyalty to the Fugitive Slave Act. It seemed that fugitive slaves from Virginia, owned
by secessionist Virginians, who fled into Butler’s camp at Fortress Monroe were easily held as “contraband,” having no intercessors for their owners at Washington. But Maryland slaves who drifted into District of Columbia and Virginia camps of the Union Army were immediately and hotly spoken for by Maryland Unionist members of Congress, sometimes for slaveowners who could not be shown as disloyal. So Lincoln began slowly evolving a policy of letting commanders and localities develop their own method of treating fugitive slaves, military necessity always to govern the method.
On July 6, 1861, Secretary of War Cameron notified Lincoln that 64 volunteer regiments of 900 men each, besides 1,200 Regulars, were in readiness around Washington, and the troops enrolled elsewhere over the North made a total of 225,000. Of this army, one of the largest the earth had ever seen, Lincoln was Commander in Chief. And he wrote his high pride of these volunteers in his message to Congress, for the world to know: “So large an army as the government has now on foot, was never before known, without a soldier in it, but who has taken his place there, of his own free choice. But more than this: there are many single Regiments whose members, one and another, possess foil practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions, and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known in the world . . .”
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, superintendent of the West Point Military Academy before he resigned the previous winter, a Mexican War veteran, was now commanding an army of 20,000 Confederate troops near Washington at Manassas Junction. As the hero who had shot away the flag at Fort Sumter, he was called to Virginia to check Northern invasion. He began June 1 with a proclamation: “A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his Abolition hosts among you ... All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned . . . Your honor and that of your wives and daughters, your fortunes, and your lives are involved in this momentous contest.”
On July 4 when Congress assembled it was in the air that soon a battle would be fought near Washington. Greeley’s Tribune clamored in headlines: “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond! The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July! By that date the place must be held by the National Army!”
Business was worse, money scarce, loans slow. A short war was wanted. Everybody agreed on that. The time was already up for some three-month troops; the 4th Pennsylvania Volunteers and the 8th New York Artillery were calling for their discharges.
In his message to Congress the President gave a miniature history of the Fort Sumter affair, of how the fort was bombarded to its fall “without even
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awaiting the arrival of the provisioning expedition. It forced the questions: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness? . . . Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” No choice was left but “to call out the war power of the Government.” Applause swept the House at the recommendation “that you give the legal means for making this contest a short and decisive one” and for the work at least 400,000 men and $400,000,000.
The President then queried whether the Southern movement should be called “secession” or “rebellion,” saying that the instigators of the movement understood the difference. “They knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments [of their people]. Accordingly they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. [Italics added.] They invented an ingenious sophism . . . that any state of the Union may, consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully , and peacefully , withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other state. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. With rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind [italics added] of their section for more than thirty years; and, until at length, they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretence of taking their State out of the Union, who could have been brought to no such thing the day before ... To be consistent they must secede from one another, whenever they shall find it the easiest way of settling their debts, or effecting any other selfish, or unjust object.”
The message was a brief for a client, a letter to the American people. The Northern press gave it greater approval than any utterance hitherto from Lincoln. The editor of Harper’s Weekly , George William Curtis, vented his enthusiasm in a letter: “I envy no other age. I believe with all my heart in the cause, and in Abe Lincoln. His message is the most truly American message ever delivered . . . Wonderlully acute, simple, sagacious, and of antique honesty! I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong. This people is not rotten. What the young men dream, the old men shall see.”
The Senate confirmed the President’s appointments. A new army bill gave the President more than he asked, authorizing 500,000 three-year volunteers. A joint resolution to make legal and valid the extralegal, dictatorial and proscriptive acts of the President in the emergencies since his proclamation of war in April met little direct opposition, but was held up and laid away amid
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unfinished business from day to day. He had gone out of his way to do so many things without the required authority from Congress. Now Congress politely refused to sanction all he had done. Some of the murmuring took the form that he should have called Congress earlier and day by day asked its Yes or No.
Senator Baker of Oregon rang out: “I want sudden, bold, forward determined war; and I do not think anybody can conduct war of that kind as well as a Dictator.”
CHAPTER VI