WASHINGTON

Change of Heart

MARCH 27

ON THURSDAY, MARCH 28, SHORTLY BEFORE LINCOLN’S FIRST STATE dinner, the president received a memorandum from Gen. Winfield Scott, whose prior appraisal of what would be required to save Fort Sumter had been so discouraging. This new assessment was doubly so.

First, Scott addressed Sumter. With the passage of time, he argued, Anderson’s position had become more and more untenable due to Beauregard’s installation of so many new artillery batteries. To relieve the fort now, Scott wrote, would require a full-on invasion with enough ships and troops to seize control of those batteries. He estimated that organizing such an offensive would take ten months, during which Anderson undoubtedly would be starved out or forced to surrender by a Confederate assault. An expedition like the one proposed by Gustavus Fox would at best provide only temporary relief. “An abandonment of the fort in a few weeks, sooner or later, would appear, therefore, to be a sure necessity,” Scott wrote, and he added it was best to do it soon, gracefully, as a gesture of the government’s sincere interest in peace.

But now he went further. He argued that Sumter’s evacuation alone was no longer enough to persuade the upper South and border states to stay in the Union. Citing “recent information from the South,” he wrote that the situation had degraded to the point where only the evacuation of both Sumter and Fort Pickens would be persuasive. “Our Southern friends,” he wrote, were clear that this “would instantly soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slaveholding States, and render their cordial adherence to this Union perpetual.”

Lincoln was stunned. Until now, no one had suggested a voluntary evacuation of Fort Pickens. Moreover, Scott seemed to be basing his judgment on political, rather than military, considerations. Who were these “Southern friends,” and what was this “recent information”? The memo, Lincoln said later, gave him “a cold shock,” but with his state dinner about to begin, he could not immediately address it. At seven P.M., Lincoln and Mary led a procession of guests into the state dining room, accompanied by the Marine band. William Russell, an invited guest, noted that “a babel of small talk” filled the room, interrupted now and then by sudden silence as Lincoln told one of his homespun stories. Mrs. Lincoln in particular captured Russell’s attention. She was, he wrote, strikingly plain, “her nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance homely, stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer; she is profuse in the introduction of the word ‘sir’ in every sentence.” She used a hand fan “with much energy.”

Lincoln seemed utterly at ease and clearly enjoyed the gleam and energy of the evening. Russell had no idea that inwardly Lincoln was deeply troubled owing to General Scott’s memorandum.

Now the correspondent got his first direct experience of Lincoln’s penchant for telling jokes and stories and saw immediately that it had a tactical element, allowing him to extricate himself from awkward conversations. “Mr. Lincoln raises a laugh by some bold west-country anecdote and moves off in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke,” Russell wrote. At one point during the dinner, Lincoln, with Russell present, heard his new attorney general, Edward Bates, express opposition to the appointment of a certain lawyer to a federal judgeship. “Come now, Bates,” Lincoln said, “he’s not half as bad as you think.” Lincoln explained that the lawyer in question had once done him a favor: Lincoln was walking to a courthouse about a dozen miles away when the lawyer overtook him in his coach and offered a ride. The driver of the coach drove erratically; Lincoln looked outside and watched a moment. The driver appeared intoxicated. Lincoln told this to the lawyer, who then shouted at the driver, “Why, you infernal scoundrel, you are drunk!” The driver halted the horses and gravely turned to the lawyer. “By gorra!” the driver said, “that’s the first rightful decision you have given for the last twelvemonth.”

At which point, under cover of laughter, Lincoln “beat a quiet retreat from the neighborhood of the Attorney-General.”

Russell had hoped to learn something substantive that night about how Lincoln planned to address the secession crisis but found himself disappointed. He wrote to a friend: “I dined with the Presdt. on Thursday and with his Cabinet, and am not a bit the wiser.”

AS LINCOLN’S STATE DINNER wound down, he discreetly asked the members of his cabinet who were present to join him in an adjacent room. Making no attempt to hide his irritation, Lincoln read General Scott’s message aloud.

“A long pause of blank amazement followed,” according to John Hay and John Nicolay. Postmaster Blair recalled a “very oppressive silence.” Blair broke it, growling that Scott was “playing politician and not General.”

Lincoln asked the members to convene for a formal cabinet meeting at noon the next day, Friday, March 29. “That night,” his secretaries recalled, “Lincoln’s eyes did not close in sleep.”

At the next day’s meeting, Lincoln summarized the information he had accumulated thus far, including the report from his friend, Stephen Hurlbut, on the absence of pro-Union sentiment in South Carolina. Lincoln asked for another vote on whether to send an armed resupply mission to Fort Sumter, and each man wrote a brief statement of his views. Now, just fourteen days after their initial vote, the cabinet largely reversed itself, with Blair, Welles, and Treasury Secretary Chase all voting to resupply Sumter. Seward remained opposed; Interior Sec. Caleb Smith also voted no. Attorney General Bates offered a conclusion so noncommittal as to be almost funny: “As to Fort Sumter,” he wrote, “I think the time is come either to evacuate or relieve it.”

Blair urged action now to spare more bloodshed later. “South Carolina is the head and front of this rebellion,” he wrote, “and when that State is safely delivered from the authority of the United States it will strike a blow against our authority from which it will take us years of bloody strife to recover.”

All of the six members present, including Seward, endorsed directly or implicitly the reinforcement of Fort Pickens.

LINCOLN AUTHORIZED BOTH EXPEDITIONS. This was a bold decision for a fledgling administration facing the imminent disintegration of the Union. But what would soon prove calamitous was that the commanders of both expeditions hinged their success on the use of the same powerful warship, a side-wheel steam frigate called the Powhatan.

Lincoln inadvertently assigned this one ship to both.