Read an Excerpt

Mr. Lincoln Goes to War

---

By William Marvel

Houghton Mifflin

Copyright © 2006 William Marvel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618583491

---

1 Songs for a Prelude

In culture and climate, Washington City belonged to the South, and as 1861
opened many feared that it might become part of a Southern confederacy, as
well. Those who deplored the prospect ruefully observed that the government
of the United States held power there only by popular assent: except for a
few Marines and an ordnance company, no organized troops stood by to
enforce federal authority. An armed mob could have driven congressmen and
senators from their respective chambers, evicted the president from the
executive mansion, and forced the United States government into exile north
of the Mason-Dixon Line. That January there would have been little anyone
could have done to prevent it. Most of the army manned outposts scattered
along the Southern coast or across the western frontier, weeks or months
away from the smoky saloons and hotel rooms where statesmen and
scoundrels negotiated the nation's future.
As the new year progressed and Abraham Lincoln prepared to
assume the presidency, key officials began to worry about an armed assault
against the federal presence on the Potomac. Terrified that the election of a
Republican president threatened their slave-based agricultural economy with
containment andextinction, political barons in the Deep South had convinced
five state conventions to renounce their ties to the Union by January 19, and
most of the remaining slave states had begun debating the expediency of
their own withdrawal. The secession of one slave state only encouraged
others to follow, for with that initial secession the South's balance of power in
the United States Senate evaporated. Appalled at the desertion of their Dixie
comrades, border-state senators proposed complicated compromises and
constitutional conventions with the hope of forming a still-more-perfect union,
but hotter heads prevailed.1 On January 9 South Carolina volunteers had fired
on the Star of the West when that unarmed vessel tried to supply the federal
garrison of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, and an infuriated North had
risen in a nonpartisan outcry for blood. The commander o New York's
associated veterans of the War of 1812 even offered the services of his
superannuated comrades in defense of the government, and he may have
intended more than a symbolic gesture, considering that the seat of
government lacked any practical protection. Striving to maintain peace in his
final weeks as president, James Buchanan declined to redress the national
insult. His inactivity allowed the crisis to abate, but then Southern militiamen
aggravated the offense when they began seizing United States forts and
arsenals in the seceded states. On January 24 hundreds of Georgia troops
compelled the garrison of the Augusta Arsenal to surrender; on that same
day, the commanding general of the U.S. Army made arrangements for at
least token reinforcements in the federal capital.2
Winfield Scott—himself one of those 1812 veterans—had donned
his first uniform before president-elect Lincoln was born. He had held the rank
of general for nearly half a century, and that of commanding general for two
decades, and he was the only lieutenant general the United States Congress
had ever created, even by brevet. At seventy-four the towering commander
had grown so stout that he could no longer mount a horse or lead troops in
battle, but he was the man who had conceived and conducted the brilliant
campaign against Mexico City only fourteen years before. For all the
pomposity of his prose and plumery he remained a sharp strategist, and he
inspired and demanded energy from subordinates even if he did not own
much of it himself. Until recently he had been saddled with a secretary of war
of dubious integrity: John Floyd, of Virginia, who seemed more loyal to the
slave South than to his national obligations. In December, 1860, the
resignation of that politico had brought a new and more decidedly loyal
secretary into office— Joseph Holt, an unflinching Kentucky Unionist who
ignored anonymous death threats and pushed the administration to
aggressive federal policy.3 With the trustworthy Holt behind him, late in
January General Scott outlined a plan to introduce more soldiers into
Washington gradually, to avoid the inflammatory impression that he was
amassing troops to march against the insurgent states.
A couple of batteries of artillery reached the capital by February 1,
coming from as far away as West Point. By then, Texas and Louisiana ha
also seceded. The withdrawal of each state removed two more Southerners
from the U.S. Senate, where equal numbers from slave and free states had
balanced a fragile truce over the issue of slavery since 1820, and the
increasing majority of free-state senators spelled the ultimate end of slavery
in whatever was left of the United States. That only heightened the anxiety of
plantation aristocrats in the remaining slave states, so secession fever ran
epidemic from Annapolis, Maryland, to Fort Smith, Arkansas.
In January the stars were falling from the flag so quickly that it
seemed no slave state would stick to the Union, and even seasoned army
officers whose states had not yet seceded, like Major George Thomas of
Virginia, began casting about for alternative employment.4
Those Southern-born officers frequently found their allegiance to
the Union doubted, both by devoted loyalists who feared their treachery and
by authorities in their home states who coveted their services. Major Thomas
applied for a post at the Virginia Military Institute; instead he received an
invitation to serve as chief of ordnance for the governor of Virginia, and he
declined, but others lacked his constancy. At least two artillery captains who
brought their batteries to Washington would soon wear the stars of
Confederate generals, and one of them briefly commanded all the troops in
the city.5
The few companies that reached Washington in late January and
February numbered barely four hundred men, doubtful officers and all. The
presence of even that many soldiers raised questions in Congress, which
sent President Buchanan a sp inquiry on the subject when the capital
garrison had been augmented to only 653 soldiers. Southern representatives
who believed in the right of secession but had not made use of it worried that
the president intended to bring the Union back together by force. For their
part, Northern congressmen wanted to know if the reinforcements indicated
that the administration had gotten wind of a conspiracy to seize the capital
before Lincoln could be inaugurated; prominent Republicans had been
warning of such a plot since the end of December. Bellicose talk among
Southern-leaning militia companies in the district fueled widespread anxiety
of armed revolt, and citizens took to sleeping with loaded revolvers handy.6
That anxiety thickened in February, when delegates from the seven
estranged states joined together at Montgomery, Alabama, to organize as
the Confederate States of America. They elected a president and, on
the last day of that month, made provisions for an army.
That potential new market for arms and materiel elicited a sheaf of
proposals from Northern manufacturers. A Milwaukee man offered his
revolutionary breechloading cannon; a New York firm touted its military and
naval telescopes; another New York company sent an agent hawking its
percussion caps. Kentucky breeders who wished to supply the Confederate
army with horses and mules sent their cards to Montgomery, and a
Washington inventor who had produced breechloading carbines for the U.S.
Army stood ready to make as many as the Confederacy might desire.7
Experienced soldiers, practicing physicians, and common citizens from all
over the free states border states offered their services to the new nation,
often without any evident sense of impropriety.8
The establishment of a skeleton army by a new government
augured no particular ill, for every nation must provide for its own defense:
peaceful resolution still seemed possible, especially since the new
Confederate Congress authorized the president to appoint a peace
commission as soon as he took office.9 Some Northerners who harbored
abundant devotion to their government, and to the nation it represented for
them, viewed the voluntary departure of the seceded states with unmitigated
relief. One thoughtful and sophisticated New Yorker felt satisfied to bid the
Gulf states and rabid South Carolina goodbye—if only Maryland, Virginia,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri would remain (although he seemed not
to care either way about Arkansas). Some even wished that those sisters in
slavery would follow the Deep South out of the Union. An Ohio attorney who
would one day occupy the White House saw no threat in the abrupt division:
he stood ready to let the whole South go, assuming that a smaller nation
without slavery might be preferable to an "unfortunate union of thirty-three
States" that permitted it. A young veteran of the free-state fight in Kansas
told the folks back home in Pennsylvania that he greeted the secession of
slaveholding states with "much pleasure."10
While the formal organization of a Confederate government and
army posed no imminent danger to Washington, it excited the advocates of
secession in Virginia and Maryland, for the new government at Montgomery
might act as a magne toward other states whose citizens wished to see
slavery specifically protected. That attraction pulled strongest on the states
that shared a border with the new nation, but even in Virginia, where Union
sentiment still throve, most citizens' allegiance would have faltered or fallen
at the first sign of hostile intentions toward the Confederacy. If that opposition
translated into overt rebellion, fewer than a thousand soldiers and Marines
could hardly have defended so large and open a city as Washington. General
Scott planned to protect the Capitol and the president's mansion, along with
the most defensible department office buildings around the White House. In
case of alarm he assigned one company (under one of those future
Confederate brigadiers) to garrison the Treasury Department building as a
final retreat where he, the president, and every soldier left standing would
barricade themselves and hold out as long as they could.11
Charles Pomeroy Stone served as one of Scott's chief
collaborators in the defense of the capital. Stone had wanted to be a soldier
all his life: growing up in western Massachusetts, he was told that his
grandfather had stood with the militia at Lexington Green and Bunker Hill,
and he was only six months past his fifteenth birthday when he first applied
to West Point. Numerous testimonials to his scholarship and irreproachable
conduct failed to win the appointment that time, but a different secretary of
war granted his wish the next year.12 Stone graduated seventh in the class
of 1845, alongside more than a dozen future generals. His intellect and
energy inspired confidence from t beginning. After teaching geography,
history, and ethics for a term at the academy, he had served Scott as an
ordnance officer on the campaign to Mexico City, coming out of that war with
two brevet promotions for his conduct at Molino del Rey and Chapultepec,
and he had remained in the army for nearly another decade. For two years he
had toured Europe and the Levant, observing an assortment of armies. He
had spent several years as chief of ordnance on the West Coast, but his
career track promised so limited a future that in 1856 he had resigned to go
into banking. After less than a year he accepted a survey contract with the
Mexican government, mapping the topography and exploring the resources of
Sonora and Baja California. By 1860 he had completed that contract and had
brought his wife and daughter to Washington. They lodged with Mrs. Stone's
father, Captain Robert Clary, a well-heeled army quartermaster, while Stone
prepared his Mexican observations for publication.13 On the last day of that
year, shortly after the changing of the guard at the War Department, Stone
paid a social call on General Scott, evidently with the ulterior aim of
reminding the old general that he was available for service.14
Scott's esteem for Stone manifested itself in a commission as
colonel and an assignment as inspector general for militia in the District of
Columbia, in which capacity Stone immediately began assessing the loyalty
of the various uniformed companies in Georgetown and Washington.15
Stone's surveillance only heightened Scott's concern for the safety of the
capital when he found that at least a quarter of the militia seemed
sympathetic to the Confederate cause. High on his list of suspicious
organizations stood the better part of the National Rifles, a well-armed
company under a Baltimore native named Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer had
served as an infantry captain and ordnance officer in the Mexican War before
migrating to California, where he finagled an appointment as a second
lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. Artillery.16 He had never reported for duty, though;
his regiment had carried him on the rolls as absent without leave for months
before he bothered to resign. Later Schaeffer secured a more agreeable
position as a clerk in the Interior Department, and in that capacity he had
returned East.17
Schaeffer's troubles began when he declined a promotion to major
rather than take a new oath that would have pledged his fealty to the federal
government. Like many Tidewater natives, Schaeffer seemed more devoted to
the cause of state sovereignty than to secession, but uncompromising
Unionists acknowledged little distinction between the two. Colonel Stone and
Roger Weightman, the aging commander of militia in the District of Columbia,
confronted Schaeffer in the library of the U.S. Patent Office on February 5,
where they asked him certain questions about his loyalty. Schaeffer recalled
that they wished to know whether he would take up arms against either
Virginia or his native Maryland if those states seceded, and he instantly
replied that he would not. As Stone and Weightman recalled it, they wanted
to know whether he would defend the capital if those states should attack it,
to which he responded that he would not. In any event indicated that he
could not submit to the oath he would be required to take if the district militia
were called into federal service, and on that pretext alone they felt justified in
stripping him even of his captain's commission.18
Stone apparently marked his man well, for within four months
Schaeffer would abandon his federal clerkship and lead scores of
Washingtonians over the river to fight for the Confederacy. In his place Stone
appointed a captain of the Regular service.19
Under the moribund administration of James Buchanan, the
government offered precious little resistance to secession, waiting instead for
the outcome of congressional and private compromise committees and the
accession of the new president, whose election had brought so much trouble.
To maintain the loyalty of the remaining slave states, Buchanan wished to
avoid the least hint that Washington might contest the right of any state to
withdraw, but he fell short of acknowledging the secession itself. The day
after Texas voted itself out of the Union, a battery of light artillery unlimbered
near the Capitol and fired a salute of thirty-four guns to celebrate the
admission of Kansas. A Southern-leaning man who bothered to count the
number of discharges might have found something ominous in his tally,
noting one round for the new state and thirty-three for the old—including the
seven that had opted out of membership.20
Symbolic salutes meant little against the events that Buchanan
dared not prevent. His policy of placating Southern Unionists cost the army a
great deal: most of the manpower still lay scattered on the fro
Buchanan failed to concentrate those forces when he had the opportunity,
leaving them vulnerable to piecemeal destruction. He also left Texas under
the command of David Twiggs, a native Georgian of duplicitous intent, who
surrendered all the troops and facilities there as soon as Texas forces asked
for them, taking a Confederate general's commission in return. Had
Buchanan reassigned Twiggs as soon as Georgia seceded, the Texas
command would have fallen to a Connecticut colonel of unquestioned loyalty.
Instead, by the time Abraham Lincoln made his appearance in Washington
on February 23, the perfidy of General Twiggs had neutralized one-sixth of
the U.S. Army, and nearly every fort in the insurgent states had been
seized.21
On his way across Indiana and Ohio Abraham Lincoln hinted that
the government had the right to hold or recover such property by force, but he
disavowed any desire to subdue the South and questioned the validity of the
crisis, hailing the common cause of South and West. On a loop through New
York and New Jersey he said little, but in Philadelphia he stopped at
Independence Hall. There, on the day before he reached Washington, he let
slip his belief that the Declaration of Independence promised ultimate equality
for all, and although he seemed to regret the remark as "something
indiscreet," he added that "if this country can't be saved upon that
principle . . . I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender to
it."22
That very night the threat of assassination convinced Lincoln to
enter the capital as surreptitiously as anyone might who stood eight inches
taller than the average man of his era; he negotiated Baltimore in the wee
hours to avoid a plot that Colonel Stone's operatives thought they had
detected. Mrs. Lincoln and the rest of the retinue came in on an afternoon
train, and the family reunited at the rambling, six-story hotel of the Willard
brothers at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
23 The indecorous midnight passage marred Lincoln's introduction
to the nation, sparking widespread speculation on his personal courage at a
time when such things mattered to people. The safe conclusion of his journey
merely initiated ten more anxious days for Stone and Scott, who anticipated
further attempts on Lincoln's life prior to the inauguration, perhaps as part of
a general revolt. Lowering skies and howling winds buffeted the capital city on
the Lincolns' first full day in Washington, setting the tone for their entire
sojourn there.24
Lincoln spent his final days before the inauguration corresponding
with cabinet candidates, perambulating hallways jammed with the office
seekers who had descended like locusts upon Willard's, and circulating
about the city, introducing himself to the notables who would be his
associates. A so-called Peace Convention of representatives from Northern
and border states met behind closed doors at Willard's through most of
February, and a Missouri delegate who encountered Lincoln there lamented
his ascendance: Lincoln impressed him as "a man of no intelligence, no
enlargement of views, as ridiculously vain and fantastic as a country boy with
his first red morocco hat." That critic spoke from deep hostility to Linco
party, but such impressions troubled loyal Republicans as well. Many found
the lanky westerner naive, and supposed that he would be ruled by one of his
more commanding cabinet officers. Some expected the executive power to
be exercised by Ohio's Salmon P. Chase, whom Lincoln wanted to head the
Treasury Department, but the real odds went to Senator William Henry
Seward, whom Lincoln had chosen for his secretary of state. One fellow
senator considered Seward "a coward & a sneak," but Seward viewed himself
as the leader of the Republican Party and felt that he had deserved the
presidential nomination far more than Lincoln had.25 Slave-state Democrats
who served in the Senate with Seward openly shared his image of himself as
the power behind the throne, ultimately to the detriment of Lincoln's
relationship with that faction.26
Working independently of the executive succession, the Peace
Convention forwarded a feeble attempt at reconciliation. From their secret
conclave at Willard's the delegates proposed a constitutional amendment
specifically prohibiting congressional interference with slavery inside the
existing states, and they assumed that they had disposed of the thorniest
problem—slavery in the territories—simply by resurrecting the old Missouri
Compromise boundary between slave and free territory.27 The resolutions
resembled the elements of the doomed compromise that Kentucky senator
John J. Crittenden had proposed the previous winter, which ultimately failed
precisely because it ignored the widespread hostility to the territorial
expansion of slavery. The convention proposal nonethele inspired
momentary hope on both sides. Reports that the House of Representatives
had accepted the resolutions brought some strained rejoicing, including a
hundred-gun salute, but the initial euphoria had not abated before most
people sensed the futility of such belated measures. The resolutions died in
the Senate by a margin of four to one on the eve of the new president's
inauguration.28
Foreboding over plots of assassination and revolt deepened as
inauguration day drew near. At last, on Monday morning, March 4, Benjamin
Brown French appeared at City Hall in the role of parade marshal for the
inauguration ceremony. French was one of those perennial Washington
political appointees, and the role of chief marshal—like most of the positions
he had held in government employ—carried less authority or responsibility
than the title implied. It would be military men who choreographed the day's
events. The participants in the procession and the order of their march had
been decided the day before, in General Scott's office. Regular infantry would
precede the presidential carriage and double files of District of Columbia
volunteers would flank it, freshly mounted and equipped as cavalry, while
more district militia followed on foot. Colonel Stone would ride alongside the
carriage, among his mounted volunteers, while a detachment of the 1st U.S.
Cavalry cleared the way and guarded each intersection.29 Stone trusted the
loyalty of few men in these times, expecting trouble from any quarter, and not
without cause. Each shift in the political winds scattered men's sympathies,
and today's ally might be tomorrow's enemy. The little cavalry detachment,
for instance, responded that morning to the orders of a second lieutenant of
good pedigree— Lunsford Lomax, the son and grandson of career army
officers, who would end a long family tradition of military service four years
hence as a major general in the Confederate army.30
A dripping rain threatened the festivities early in the morning, but it
gave way to clear skies and cool air. The column left City Hall shortly after
eleven o'clock and lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue with the leading
elements abreast of Willard's Hotel. The committee of arrangement and
assorted assistant marshals fussed with the alignment while everyone waited
for President Buchanan, whose last cabinet meeting ran late because his
secretary of war, Mr. Holt, had received unsettling news from Fort Sumter.
Inside the hotel, Lincoln spent his last hour as a private citizen in the
company of his old friend from the Illinois legislature, Edward Dickinson
Baker. Lincoln had known this English immigrant for nearly a quarter of a
century, and had grown so fond of him in their youth that he had named a
son after him. Baker had moved to the West Coast nearly a decade before,
but now he was in Washington as one of Oregon's U.S. senators, and
Lincoln relied on him as a barometer of political sentiment in the Pacific
states. When Buchanan called at the hotel room that noon, the white-haired
Baker joined them in the barouche waiting at the door, along with a Unionist
Democrat from Maryland. The carriage pulled into line, a band began blaring,
and the leading horses lurched toward the Capitol, dragging the rest of the
parade after them.31
Over the east steps of the Capitol hovered a temporary platform
guarded by more of Stone's district volunteers, and marksmen occupied
most of the windows in the building. Between there and First Street milled an
immense throng, waiting to hear what the new leader would have to say in
the way of firmness or conciliation on secession. They numbered so many
thousand that few of them could expect to hear the actual words, and for all
the hope they expressed to each other they showed little enthusiasm for the
new president. The more observant of the spectators lining Pennsylvania
Avenue might have offered some speculation on the thrust of Lincoln's
address, though, for in the presidential parade rolled a float conspicuously
labeled "Constitution," bearing one young lady for each of the thirty-four stars
in the national flag.32
Lincoln, Buchanan, and Baker dismounted at the north entrance
and entered the Senate chamber to watch Hannibal Hamlin take the oath of
office as vice president. Then they emerged on the front steps, mounted the
platform, and Lincoln turned to his audience. Over the heads of the multitude,
on the far side of First Street, loomed the gloomy brick building known as the
Old Capitol, where Congress had convened in 1814 after the British burned
Washington. To the right of that, as Lincoln scanned the horizon, stood the
three-story row house where he and his wife had boarded during his term in
the House of Representatives. Barely thirteen years before, in the building
right behind him, Lincoln had argued the legitimacy of the Mexican and
Tex revolutions, contending that "any people anywhere, being inclined and
having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing
government, and form one that suits them better."33
Now had come a new emergency—and, perhaps, a new
perspective on popular revolt. In his remarks Lincoln resumed the soothing
homilies of his February pilgrimage, assuring the protection of slavery where
it existed and implying that he would not use military force to bring the errant
states back into the Union. Reading from the Republican Party platform,
Lincoln reminded his listeners that "we denounce the lawless invasion by
armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what
pretext," and he offered support for constitutional amendments like that
proposed by the Peace Convention. He warned, though, that he lacked any
power to negotiate a separation of the Union, and claimed that no state had a
right to secede without the consent of the others. Summarizing the entire
dispute as a disagreement over the extension of slavery into the territories
that could be resolved peacefully, he asserted that he considered the various
secession ordinances legally void and the Union unbroken, insisting that "we
cannot separate."34
With that Lincoln took the oath of office from Roger B. Taney, the
octogenarian slaveowner who served as chief justice. Afterward Lincoln and
Buchanan returned to their carriage and drove back to the White House amid
their heterogeneous escort of troops, who saluted both of them as they
entered the executive mansion. Then the soldiers, including Colonel Stone,
turned home for s well-deserved rest while the cavalcade of girls climbed
down from their festooned float and filed into the White House to meet
President Lincoln. The gangly westerner asked to kiss each of the thirty-four,
irrespective of the states they represented, and they all consented.35
No violence had marred the day, and in their nervous relief many
Washingtonians drew more encouragement from the inaugural address than
it ought to have warranted, flavoring their conflicting interpretations with
partisan hope. That day's issue of the Washington Evening Star printed the
entire speech, and residents scanned it by gaslight. Parade marshal French,
a New Hampshire native and a convert to the Republican Party, judged it
exactly what Union men wanted—conciliatory and peaceable "but firm in its
tone." Lieutenant Lomax's mother and several of her Virginia friends
concurred on the moderation of Lincoln's rhetoric, albeit for different reasons.
Halfway across the continent, in her hovel upon the Kansas prairie, a hopeful
woman writing a letter at the hour of the inauguration thought she could
sense the relief, for a driving snowstorm suddenly abated and the sky began
to clear. As the snow started melting on the ground she predicted that "mad
rebellion and blustering secession will subside and melt away under the more
genial influence of Republican rule." A Missouri newspaper with a more
Southern perspective remarked with grim sarcasm that the address Lincoln
read was "not the one that Seward wrote."36
New Yorkers who actually read the new president's inaugural
speech greeted it, as well as the safe installation of Buchanan' successor,
with the same enthusiasm as the residents of Washington. A Wall Street
lawyer named George Templeton Strong recorded majority approval among
his associates, though he noted that the stock market fell with the news. For
his part, Strong complained only of Lincoln's acknowledgment of Northern
moralizing on the matter of slavery, which could only hurt Southern Unionists
as they tried to dissuade their neighbors from secession. "We Northerners
object to slavery on grounds of political economy," wrote Strong, "not of
ethics."37
Lincoln's address drew more ominous reaction across the South.
Moderate newspaper editors strained for hopeful interpretations, but the
Richmond Dispatch read it as a declaration of war because of the implied
threat of coercion. South Carolinians reading galley proofs of the speech on
bulletin boards outside the Charleston Mercury office translated Lincoln's
denial of the right of secession and his refusal to yield federal facilities as a
solemn promise to subjugate the Confederacy. With the guns of Fort Sumter
glistening over the entrance to their harbor, those Southerners seemed to
express relief at the prospect of an armed contest, or even to welcome it.38

Copyright 2006 by William Marvel. Reprinted with permission by Houghton
Mifflin Company.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Mr. Lincoln Goes to War by William Marvel Copyright © 2006 by William Marvel. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---