THE WHITE HOUSE

First Day

MARCH 5

ON TUESDAY, MARCH 5, LINCOLN’S FIRST DAY IN OFFICE, HE RECEIVED a letter from William Seward confirming that he would in fact accept appointment as secretary of state.

Seward explained his turnabout to his wife, Frances, after first congratulating himself on having “slipped quietly out of Congress, without getting any bones broken.”

Lincoln, he told her, “is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent”—a reference to the fact that Lincoln’s cabinet choices not only had clashing personalities but that a number of them, including Seward himself, had competed against him for the Republican presidential nomination. “I was at one time on the point of refusing—nay, I did refuse, for a time to hazard myself in the experiment. But a distracted country appeared before me; and I withdrew from that position. I believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that I can endure enough to make the experiment successful. At all events I did not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance.”

That morning when Lincoln arrived at his office, as his friend Orville Browning would later recall, “the very first thing placed in his hands” was a letter from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter, accompanied by a note from outgoing war secretary Joseph Holt. This was Anderson’s report summarizing the estimates made by his officers as to the number of troops and the quantity of supplies that would be necessary to sustain the fort against Confederate attack.

Lincoln immediately forwarded these materials to Gen. Winfield Scott, who read them promptly and returned them the same day. On Holt’s letter he scrawled: “I see no alternative but a surrender.”

Scott went so far as to draft an order to that effect, to be issued to Anderson. “Sir: The time having been allowed to pass by when it was practicable to fit out an expedition adequate to the succor of your garrison, before the exhaustion of its means of subsistence—you will, after communicating your purpose to His Excellency, the Governor of So. Carolina,—engage suitable water transportation, and peacefully evacuate Fort Sumter.”

He did not send it.

ON THAT TUESDAY, MARCH 5, the new U.S. Senate, now under Republican control because of Southern defections, confirmed Lincoln’s full slate of cabinet nominees, among them Seward as secretary of state.

Lincoln wrote to Seward: “Please give me an interview at once.”