Lincoln and the star of the war
You've asked an excellent question here. I wrote and published a book on the constitutionality of secession in 2006 (see sig line) and also examined some other related issues, including the contention that Lincoln was forced into fighting because the South attacked Fort Sumter. I devoted one of the more detailed chapters of my book to this issue, and although it's too complicated to go into here in anything resembling a complete fashion, I can give you the highlights.
This will be a lengthy post, but I think it's long past time that we dispel the myth that the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in a naked act of aggression.
Here are the key things you should know:
1. The Confederates tried to negotiate with Lincoln.
Jefferson Davis sent three commissioners to Washington shortly before Lincoln's inaugural. They bore this letter of good will from the Confederate president:
Sir: Being animated by an earnest desire to unite and bind together
our respective countries by friendly ties, I have appointed Martin J. Crawford, one of our most esteemed and trustworthy citizens, as special Commissioner of the Confederate States to the Government of the United States; and I have now the honor to introduce him to you, and to ask for him a reception and treatment
corresponding to his station, and to the purposes for which he is sent.
The Confederates also included a provision regarding their desire to settle all outstanding matters with the United States in their provisional constitution.
2. Lincoln refused to acknowledge the Confederacy's efforts to negotiate, and actually lied to Congress about their intentions while making his case for war.
The Confederates tried to get an audience with Lincoln from the time of his inauguration until the start of the war. They sent a letter to Secretary of State Seward, who would not meet with them directly but agreed to exchange correspondence through the auspices of two Supreme Court justices. Seward told them repeatedly that Fort Sumter would be evacuated. It's probable that he actually thought this was the case in the beginning, but toward the end he knew better, and yet he continued to provide false assurances. Needless to say, the Confederates didn't appreciate this. It heightened their distrust of Washington and made them wonder if they were being lulled into a false sense of security while Lincoln prepared to strike at them.
Finally, Seward sent the commissioners a letter indicating that the administration would not negotiate with them. The commissioners informed Jefferson Davis:
“We never had a chance to make Lincoln an offer of any kind. You can’t negotiate with a man who says you don’t exist.”
Noah Brooks, a reporter and personal friend of Lincoln’s, wrote that Lincoln would not negotiate with the Confederates because he would not “permit himself to be seduced into recognizing any persons as ambassadors or emissaries sent from the so-called President Davis,” as Lincoln denied the legitimacy of the Confederate government. Beyond this point, however, Brooks went on to say that there was no reason for Lincoln to negotiate anyway because, “Negotiation implies that the rebellion was not without cause and that the Government stands ready to make just concessions; it argues governmental inability to conquer a peace”
Lincoln knew of the presence of these commissioners and their mission to settle all matters between the United States and the Confederate States, and he refused to have anything to do with them. He even referred to their attempts to negotiate with the United States in his second inaugural address:
While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war; seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation.
But on July 4, 1861, Lincoln stated the following to Congress while making his case for war:
The nation purchased with money the countries out of which several
of these States were formed: is it just that they shall go off without leave and without refunding? The nation paid very large sums (in the aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to relieve Florida of its aboriginal tribes: is it just that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return?
So what we have here is Lincoln accusing the Southern states of attempting to leave the Union without paying their fair share of the debts, and then later priding himself before the country on having resisted their attempts to negotiate on those debts. Can anything be more disingenuous?
3. Southerners had other reasons besides Secretary Seward to believe that Sumter would be evacuated.
One of Lincoln's personal friends, Ward Hill Lamon, traveled to Sumter and spoke with Major Anderson, the garrison commander at Fort Sumter, along with Governor Francis Pickens. Although he was very devoted to Lincoln – and would eventually serve as his bodyguard – Lamon favored the peace policies of Secretary of State Seward in the Sumter affair, and actually went so far as to inform Major Anderson and Governor Pickens that no relief expedition would be attempted for Sumter. When Lincoln heard of Lamon’s promises to Anderson and Pickens, he was outraged and declared that Lamon had never been given authority to make any such statements. Still, due to his stubborn refusal to communicate with representatives from the seceded states (who, as he knew, were in Washington seeking an audience with him even then), Lincoln made no attempt to correct Lamon’s misinformation. Governor Pickens, Major Anderson, and the Confederate States government proceeded under the assumption that Sumter would be given up, believing that they had the authority of a presidential representative to that effect.
When Major Anderson later heard that Lincoln was not giving up the fort but was actually sending a "relief" expedition, he had the following to say:
I trust that this matter will be at once put in a correct light, as a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country.
It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox [the architect of Lincoln's plan]. I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned...
I ought to have been informed that this expedition was to come. Colonel Lamon’s remark convinced me that the idea, merely hinted at to me by Captain Fox, would not be carried out. We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. That God will still
avert it, and cause us to resort to pacific measures to maintain our rights, is my ardent prayer.
4. Lincoln and his cabinet knew that any attempt to relieve Sumter would start a war.
Shortly after entering office, Lincoln polled his cabinet as to whether he should try and relieve Sumter. To his chagrin, his cabinet was against it, as well as the military. General-in-chief Winfield Scott remarked:
The proposition presented by Mr. Fox, so sincerely entertained and ably advocated, would be entitled to my favorable consideration if, with all the light before me and in the face of so many distinguished military authorities on the other side, I did not believe that the attempt to carry it into effect would initiate a bloody and protracted conflict…
Scott went on to quote a letter from Major Anderson in which Anderson stated that it would take a force of no less than 20,000 “good and well-disciplined men” to seize control of Charleston harbor and effectively re-supply Fort Sumter. Scott also made it clear that the majority of his advisors concurred with Anderson’s opinion and advised against attempting such a mission. He then concluded his response to Lincoln with the following notation:
No practical benefit will result to the country or the Government by accepting the proposal alluded to, and I am therefore of opinion that the cause of humanity and the highest obligation to the public interest would be best promoted by adopting the counsels of those brave and experienced men whose suggestions I have laid before you.
In the cabinet, Secretary Seward was of the firm belief that any attempt to resupply Sumter would “provoke combat, and probably initiate a civil war”. Attorney General Bates, while he believed that South Carolina had already “struck the first blow” was, nevertheless, reluctant to do anything “which may have the semblance…of beginning a civil war, the terrible consequences of which would, I think, find no parallel in modern times”.
Later, Lincoln's cabinet heads changed their minds and approved the plan to resupply Fort Sumter, believing that, if war was to come it would be best to have it start in such a way. Lincoln himself openly acknowledged the inevitability of conflict where his plan was concerned but, with his cabinet behind him, was determined to press forward with it in spite of the consequences. As Allan Nevins observes in his
War for the Union: “To a friend he remarked that he was ‘in the dumps’ – for he knew that he must try to relieve Sumter, and relief meant war.”
5. Lincoln actively provoked the Confederates into firing that first shot because he was in a dilemma, and the Confederates firing the first shot was the only way out for him whereby he would not look like an aggressor.
Lincoln was advised to employ this tactic by his friend Senator Orville Browning of Illinois, among others, and for the very purpose of attempting to place the Southern states in the wrong, as illustrated by the following excerpt from one of Browning’s letters to Lincoln:
In any conflict…between the government and the seceding States,
it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong. The first attempt…to furnish supplies or reinforcements to [Fort] Sumter will induce aggression by South Carolina, and then the government will stand justified, before the entire country, in repelling that aggression, and retaking the forts.
Writing to Orville Browning after the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter, Lincoln stated: “The plan succeeded…They attacked Sumter – it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.” To Gustavus Fox, the architect of his re-supply plan, Lincoln wrote:
"You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result."
The question to ask here is how could Lincoln claim to be “justified” by the result of his plan when the result was war? Unless, of course, that was the plan. True to Browning’s advice, Lincoln had placed the Confederacy on the horns of a most unpleasant dilemma. If the Confederates allowed Fort Sumter to remain in Union hands, they would have essentially surrendered their claims to independence. They would also have been allowing a foreign government to retain control of a key defensive position in the midst of one of their few good ports. On the other hand, if they did strike out at the fort, they risked being labeled as aggressors, and, in the words of Browning, the United States government would “stand justified…in repelling that aggression, and retaking the forts”. Either way, Lincoln won and he knew it. In the words of Shelby Foote, Lincoln’s plan was to “await an act of aggression by the South, exerting in the interim just enough pressure to provoke such an act, without exerting enough to justify it”. Historian James McPherson has referred to Lincoln’s strategy as “a stroke of genius,” remarking that, “in effect, he was telling Jefferson Davis, ‘heads I win, tails you lose’”
Lincoln biographer David Donald comments that Lincoln was in a “contradictory position” because he had vowed “not to be the first to shed fraternal blood. But he had also vowed not to surrender the forts”:
The only resolution of these contradictory positions was for the Confederates to fire the first shot. The attempt to relieve Fort Sumter provoked them to do just that.
6. The Confederates tried every way they could think of to get Anderson and his men out of Sumter before Lincoln's fleet arrived.
On the afternoon of March 11, 1861, two of General Beauregard’s aids were dispatched to Anderson with a letter advising him that Beauregard had been ordered to take possession of Sumter. Anderson declined to surrender the garrison, but stated to Beauregard’s aids that if the Confederates did not “batter us to pieces” the garrison would be starved out in a few days anyway.
Beauregard included this information along with Anderson’s written response in a transmission to the Confederate government, and received instructions allowing him to wait as long as possible for Anderson to abandon the fort. In a follow-up communication, Anderson announced that he would abandon the fort on April 15, but Jefferson Davis later stated that Beauregard could not accept Anderson’s terms due to the fact that the re-supply mission would arrive well before noon on April 15, as well as the fact that any confrontation with those ships entering the harbor would release Major Anderson from his agreement not to fire on the Confederates. For these reasons, Beauregard determined that he had no other choice but to open fire and “reduce” Fort Sumter before the re-supply fleet could arrive.
I include this info here to demonstrate that the Confederate government was not chomping at the bit to spill blood. They suspected that Lincoln might be intending to retake all of the forts in Charleston harbor, or even to invade the city itself. For that reason, they decided to take control of Sumter before the fleet could arrive, lest they find themselves confronting the guns of a naval flotilla in combination those of Anderson. “A deadly weapon has been aimed at our heart,” Jefferson Davis said in summary of the Confederate position, “only a fool would wait until the shot has been fired.”
***
A few final thoughts from my book:
If Lincoln had no other choice but war in meeting the issue of secession, it was he who put himself in that position. There were other alternatives available, including negotiation. The South was certainly willing to negotiate. It actively tried to negotiate. It had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from negotiation. Nor would holding negotiations with the Confederates have been equivalent to recognizing their independence or granting them some sort of legitimacy. President Washington attempted negotiation with the Whiskey Rebellion insurgents in 1795 but, in doing so, he certainly did not recognize their movement as legitimate, nor did anyone believe that he had. Lincoln appealed to other precedents set by Washington at that time – why not this one as well?
In the final analysis, Lincoln made a very simple, informed choice concerning the matter of secession. He did have options other than war. He could have referred the matter to Congress, called for a constitutional conference, or suggested a special election to ascertain the will of the American people. He did none of these things. Instead, he determined that he would adopt one course and pursue it inflexibly.
The facts of the situation and the opinions of his friends and advisors were before him; he understood the implications. He went forward, knowing what the result would be, and trying to color the circumstances so they would be as favorable to his cause as possible.
Really that's the first time I've heard this claim. And the "majority of the slave trade" represented a trickle after the slave trade was outlawed. (Don't forget the slave trade would have been banned sooner than it was if not for the protestations of SC).
