LINCOLN

Frustration

DECEMBER 20–24

IN WASHINGTON THAT NIGHT, A NAVY LIEUTENANT NAMED DAVID Dixon Porter, soon to become a focus of national attention, set out to learn what he could about the day’s events. On the way downtown, he passed the home of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, a leased twenty-three-room mansion at Eighteenth and G streets near the White House, and decided to stop in. The house was brightly lit and a party seemed to be underway.

Porter, forty-seven, came from a prominent naval family and was wholly loyal to the Union but made a point of building friendships with leading men in Washington from both camps “to ascertain if there was any prospect of a peaceful termination of the difficulties between the North and South.” He had close connections within the city’s Southern delegations—too close, in the appraisal of some Navy officials. He was particularly friendly with the Davises. He was also a man of intense ambition, “given to intrigues,” according to his future boss, Gideon Welles, soon to be Lincoln’s pick for secretary of the Navy. Porter liked Davis, whom he called “a distinguished Southern gentleman,” but especially admired his wife, “a magnificent woman.” As a friend of the family’s, it was not surprising that Porter would appear at the party.

“As I approached the front door I met Mrs. Davis coming hastily down the steps wrapped in a cloak, and there was loud and boisterous talking in the parlor,” he wrote. She seemed very excited; as soon as she saw him, she exclaimed, “Oh Captain I am so glad to see you, I want you to walk with me to the President’s.” Meaning, of course, the White House, which in this time was open to any visitor who chose to stop by. “There is glorious news,” she continued, “we have just heard that South Carolina has seceded, and I wish to go right to the President’s.”

Apparently she was so convinced that Buchanan secretly favored secession that she believed he would be in a celebratory mood. Gauging the distance too far for her to walk, Porter found a “hack,” or hackney carriage, and drove her to the White House. Along the way Varina gushed about her delight at South Carolina’s secession. Porter felt otherwise, he told her, but she brushed this away. She offered to make him an admiral in the new secessionist navy. “You will join us,” she said; “we are going to have a glorious monarchy.”

“And be made Duke of Benedict Arnold?” he countered. Porter doubted any such regime could succeed but kept his skepticism to himself. “In my mind’s eye, however, I could see a number of dirty little republics, tearing each other’s vitals out, and following in the footsteps of our republican sister, Mexico.”

He left Varina at the White House door, not wishing to “witness the congratulations she said she was going to offer Mr. Buchanan.” Porter drove back to the Davises’ house intending to return the carriage and then go home, but, “anxious still to find a peg on which to hang a hope,” he went back into the parlor. “There I witnessed a scene I shall never forget.”

A DOZEN MEN, APPARENTLY Davis’s Mississippi constituents, were in the room, “some of them having evidently dined out”—Porter’s oblique way of saying they had been drinking. “They were vociferating and congratulating each other in the most frantic manner,” he wrote. “Mr. Davis was the only calm man present, and there was a quiet look of pleasure beaming on his countenance, which plainly showed that the news from South Carolina was very acceptable to him.”

All in the room save Porter seemed to think the secession of South Carolina was the best thing that had ever happened—“that anyone ought to be too happy to be allowed to share in that rich adventure.” But it struck him that the “wild excitement” in the room was overheated. “I thought the men before me somewhat fuddled with wine, and trusted that a good night’s sleep would bring them to their senses.” He felt deep disappointment that Davis, a man he respected, would endorse Carolina’s rebellion, “but then I imagined that he might have been drinking an extra glass and was humoring those madcaps.”

At length the party decided to follow Varina and go to the White House. Porter did not join them. “This fraternizing with rebels by the President of the United States struck me at the time as very singular,” he wrote. “I could not understand how a man who had sworn to uphold the Constitution, and maintain the laws of the country could, at such a time as that, be receiving the felicitations of a rebel cause … yet so it was, and there they all went, drunk and sober, to call upon James Buchanan at eleven o’clock at night, when he should have been in session with his cabinet, calling out his armies and manning the Navy, to put a stop to the further progress of the rebellion.”

Given Buchanan’s antipathy toward turmoil in these last months of his presidency, it is hard to imagine his receiving the Davis crowd with open arms, but as to this, the historical record is silent.

IN NEW YORK THAT SATURDAY, December 22, Horace Greeley, whose earlier editorial proposed that the South should be allowed to “go in peace,” wrote a letter to Lincoln in which he now deployed a markedly more bellicose tone. He recruited a surrogate scribe to copy the letter to ensure that Lincoln could actually read it—Greeley’s penmanship left recipients of his letters universally flummoxed, as he confessed to Lincoln in a postscript. “So many people entertain a violent prejudice against my handwriting that I have had the above copied to save you trouble in deciphering it.”

If enough states wanted to exit the Union all at once—“seven or eight contiguous States (not one small one)”—they should be allowed to go, he told Lincoln. But, he cautioned, “if the seceding State or States go to fighting and defying the laws—the Union being yet undissolved, save by their own say-so—I guess they will have to be made to behave themselves. I am sorry for this, for I would much sooner have them behave of their own accord; but if they won’t, it must be fixed the other way.”

Above all, Greeley wanted to avoid resorting yet again to compromise, with the result that the slave states would always be able to use the threat of secession to get their way. “I fear nothing, care for nothing, but another disgraceful back-down of the Free States,” he told Lincoln. “That is the only real danger. Let the Union slide—it may be reconstructed; let Presidents be assassinated—we can elect more; let the Republicans be defeated and crushed—we shall rise again; but another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads, and this nation becomes a second edition of the Barbary States as they were sixty years ago.”

Greeley, who hitherto had downplayed the threat of Southern unrest, now acknowledged its severity. “The Cotton States are going,” he told Lincoln. “Nothing that we can offer will stop them. The Union-loving men are cowed and speechless; a Reign of Terror prevails from Cape Fear to the Rio Grande. Every suggestion of reason is drowned in a mad whirl of passion and faction. You will be President over no foot of the Cotton States not commanded by Federal Arms. Even your life is not safe, and it is your simple duty to be very careful of exposing it.” He cautioned Lincoln about traveling to Washington for his inauguration and warned “it is not yet certain that the Federal District will not be in the hands of a Pro-Slavery rebel array before the 4th of March.”

Unlike Buchanan, the president-elect wanted to act but could not. He declined to speak in public about the secession crisis for fear of further alienating not just the South but also the North, where the clamor for a more aggressive campaign to end slavery was mounting. Ever the lawyer, Lincoln was acutely aware that he wasn’t even truly the president yet. The certification of electoral votes and his inauguration had yet to occur, and a rising swell of rumor warned that these might be disrupted, possibly by an invading force of Southern militia.

With secession now a reality, the risk of armed conflict grew. Lincoln received a letter from Rep. Elihu Washburne, an ally from Illinois, summarizing a conversation he’d had with Gen. Winfield Scott, America’s aging and very large commanding general—three hundred pounds, six-four, some accounts say six-five—in which the general raised concerns about the vulnerability of forts Moultrie and Sumter in Charleston Harbor if Southern forces chose to attack. Legendary for his valor in the Mexican War, Scott still drew public reverence, but among officials who dealt with him in person he had come to seem less and less effective as a commander. He was seventy-four years old and often ill, periodically left prostrate by stomach problems and gout. Visitors would find him sitting with his feet bathed in a tub of ice. Navy lieutenant Porter, who had fought with Scott in 1847 during the Siege of Vera Cruz, found that age had seriously diminished his competence. “Fifteen years and the gout together had not improved his abilities or his temper and paying him a visit was very much like calling on a sick bear.”

Still, General Scott understood war and military strategy. In Scott’s view, Moultrie, which was manned only by a small detachment of U.S. soldiers, would be next to impossible to defend. The same held for Sumter, which didn’t even have a garrison of soldiers, only a crew of laborers. Scott told Washburne that both forts should be reinforced.

After reading Washburne’s summary, Lincoln on December 21 asked the congressman to pay a return visit to General Scott “and tell him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at, and after the inaugeration.” The correct spelling of the word consistently eluded Lincoln.

Over the next few days Lincoln heard speculation that Buchanan might simply surrender the forts to keep the peace. “I can scarcely believe this,” he wrote to Senator Trumbull, his man in Washington, on Christmas Eve, “but if it prove true, I will, if our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that they are to be retaken after the inaugeration.” Signaling his continued faith that a potent pro-Union vanguard existed in the South, Lincoln added that this “would give the Union men a rallying cry.”

For the time being, however, faith was about all that Lincoln possessed. “The political horizon looks dark and lowering,” he wrote to Peter H. Silvester, a New York lawyer and former congressman, “but the people, under Providence, will set all right.”

Inwardly, Lincoln’s frustration was mounting, occasionally bursting forth in remarks both stark and direct. In an offhand comment to private-secretary Nicolay, Lincoln said that if it was true that Buchanan planned to surrender the Charleston forts, “they ought to hang him.”