A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 17
We Must Not Be Enemies February 1861–April 1861

THE MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY, STRETCHING FROM EVERY BATTLEFIELD, AND PATRIOT GRAVE, TO EVERY LIVING HEART AND HEARTH-STONE, ALL OVER THIS BROAD LAND, WILL YET SWELL THE CHORUS OF THE UNION, WHEN AGAIN TOUCHED, AS SURELY THEY WILL BE, BY THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
First inaugural address, March 4, 1861

AS THE SUN WAS ABOUT TO RISE OVER WASHINGTON ON SATURDAY morning, February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, arriving incognito at the Baltimore and Ohio railway depot, was met by a party of one. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne stepped out from behind a pillar, “caught hold of Lincoln,” and exclaimed, “Abe, you can’t play that on me.” Allan Pinkerton, on Lincoln’s left, “hit the gentleman with a punch,” causing Washburne to stagger back. The detective, worried that the plot to smuggle the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night had been discovered, stepped toward what he assumed was an assailant, when Lincoln intervened. “Don’t strike him—that is my friend Washburne.”
Indeed, Washburne, Lincoln’s Republican colleague from Galena, Illinois, had discovered Lincoln’s new schedule from William Seward’s son, Frederick. Seward had intended to meet Lincoln at the station, but overslept. With calm restored, Washburne arranged for a carriage to take Lincoln to the Willard Hotel at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Because of his unexpected early arrival, the hotel gave Lincoln temporary quarters before lodging him later that day in Parlor Suite 6, consisting of two bedrooms and two parlors on the corner of the second floor overlooking the White House.
Lincoln joined Governor Seward, as he liked to be called, who had hurried to the hotel for breakfast. Seward’s appearance was both unusual, with his slender build and beaklike nose, and impressive, with his vigorous personality conveyed through his animated eyes. Lincoln had met Seward only twice, once in September 1848, when they both campaigned in New England on behalf of presidential candidate Zachary Taylor, and five months earlier, when Seward traveled through Springfield in the midst of a campaign tour in the West. Now Seward informed Lincoln of up-to-the-minute occurrences in the frenzied capital.
Lincoln’s secret arrival created a sensation. George Templeton Strong, reading the “Extras” published by noon in New York, recognized the problems the early morning arrival could create for the president-elect. He wrote in his diary, “This surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration.”
Frederick Douglass, capturing the poignancy of Lincoln’s arrival from the vantage point of black Americans, wrote,
He reached the Capital as the poor, hunted fugitive slave reaches the North, in disguise, seeking concealment, evading persuers, by the underground railroad, between two days, not during the sunlight, but crawling and dodging under the sable wing of night. He changed his programme, took another route, started at another hour, traveled in other company, and arrived at another time in Washington.
In the end, Douglass declared, “We have no censure for the President at this point. He only did what braver men have done.”
ON HIS FIRST MORNING IN WASHINGTON, Lincoln called on President Buchanan and his cabinet at the Executive Mansion. Buchanan’s manner suggested that he could not wait for the inauguration of the new president.
Lincoln requested that the Illinois delegation meet with him at the Willard at 4 p.m. He especially wanted to speak with Senator Stephen Douglas. Their relationship in recent years had been as opposing candidates for the Senate and for the presidency. Although attention has often focused on Lincoln reaching out to his Republican rivals, Lincoln’s rapprochement with Douglas, his Democratic rival, in whose shadow he had lived his whole political life, was even more remarkable. Lincoln was shocked at Douglas’s appearance. He did not look well. Lincoln surmised the strain of constant campaigning had taken its toll. He had heard that Douglas was drinking too much. On this afternoon, Lincoln expressed his delight to see his old Illinois competitor. The two men shared more in common than the casual observer might have thought. They both believed in the indivisibility of the Union. A newspaper correspondent reported a “peculiarly pleasant” meeting between the two leaders. Later in the day, Adele Douglas, “with graceful courtesy,” called on Mary Lincoln.
Lincoln went to Seward’s home at 7 p.m. for a private dinner with Seward and Vice President–elect Hamlin. Seward, pleased with his initial day with Lincoln, wrote that evening to his wife, Frances, of his first impressions. “He is very cordial and kind toward me … simple, natural, and agreeable.”
The next day, Sunday, Lincoln joined Seward for worship at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. Upon their return to his hotel, Lincoln asked Seward if he would read his inaugural address and suggest any changes. Lincoln had earlier asked David Davis and Orville Browning, longtime friends, for their suggestions. When Lincoln requested Seward to scrutinize his speech, he approached a new colleague: a former rival who was not yet a friend.
Lincoln must have been surprised when Seward responded with a seven-page letter containing forty-nine suggestions, as well as two options for a new final paragraph. Working with the final version printed in Springfield, Seward had carefully numbered every line on the seven pages as the template for his editorial effort. He told Lincoln, “Your case is quite like that of Jefferson.” Thomas Jefferson won a contentious election not finally decided until thirty-six ballots were cast in the House of Representatives in February 1801. At Jefferson’s inauguration on March 4, 1801, the resentment of the defeated Federalists could be felt almost everywhere, especially in the visible absence of Federalist John Adams, defeated for a second term as president. Seward reminded Lincoln that Jefferson “sank the partisan in the patriot in his inaugural address, and propitiated his adversaries by declaring: ‘We are all Federalists, all Republicans.’ ” Seward advised, “Be sure that while all your administrative conduct will be in harmony with Republican principles and policy, you cannot lose the Republican Party by practicing in your advent to office the magnanimity of a victor.” Lincoln integrated, if sometimes recast, twenty-seven of Seward’s forty-nine suggestions.
THE NINE DAYS BETWEEN Lincoln’s arrival in Washington and his inauguration were both exhilarating and exhausting. On Monday afternoon, Seward, who had acquired the nickname “the premier” because of the lead role he hoped to play in the new administration, squired Lincoln to the Capitol. Lincoln walked into the Senate chamber and shook hands with senators from both sides of the aisle. In the House of Representatives, where he had served one term more than a decade before, he accepted congratulations from Republicans as well as a few—but not all—of the remaining Southern members. Finally, Lincoln called upon the Supreme Court, conversing with Chief Justice Roger Taney and the other justices responsible for the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
One visitor immediately gained access to the president-elect. Francis Preston Blair, patriarch of a distinguished Kentucky Democratic family, had supported Edward Bates at the Republican convention, but he quickly offered his support and advice to Lincoln. Blair first came to Washington in 1830 when President Andrew Jackson asked him to become the founding editor of the Congressional Globe. Approaching his seventieth birthday, Blair, with his sons Montgomery and Francis, Jr., had become prominent in the politics of two critical border states, Maryland and Missouri.
Blair had gained Lincoln’s confidence with a long, incisive letter in January wherein he offered useful evaluations of the various personalities in Washington. He warned Lincoln about the political efforts in Washington to compromise with the South. “You are about to assume a position of greater responsibility than Washington ever occupied.” Why? Because the states had grown far more powerful than the colonies. However, Blair stated, there existed a crucial difference between then and now. “Washington had to assist him in administration the genius and virtue of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton,” whereas Lincoln was surrounding himself with cabinet members, such as Seward and Simon Cameron, of “greedy & unscrupulous ambition that really rejoices in the principle that ‘every man has his price.’ ” Blair counseled Lincoln that “neither you, nor they can change their natures.” Blair did offer a word of encouragement. “You need not depend on clerks or Cabinets if your own sound & honest sense is known to preside in the administration.”


Throughout the week, Lincoln found himself honored and feted at celebrations, dinners, and receptions. Gideon Welles, whom Lincoln had met in Connecticut after his Cooper Union address and would now appoint as secretary of the navy, reported, “A host of ravenous partisans from Maine to California” including “a large proportion of those Whigs long excluded from office,” descended upon Washington and “besieged the White House.” Lincoln told reporter Henry Villard, “It was bad enough in Springfield, but it was child’s play compared with this tussle here. I hardly have a chance to eat or sleep. I am fair game for that hungry lot.”
IN THE MIDST OF innumerable requests for meetings, Lincoln worked to complete his cabinet—or so he thought. At each social gathering Lincoln found himself under immense pressure as Republican leaders pressed the credentials of their friends and colleagues. Newspaper editors, especially Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, were enjoying publishing continually shifting lists of who would or should join the cabinet.
On Tuesday afternoon, February 26, 1861, Lincoln returned to the Senate to carry out a plan he had decided upon in Springfield. He requested to see each Republican senator in alphabetical order. He asked only one question: Who was their choice for secretary of the treasury? Lincoln did not ask what they thought of Cameron or Chase. Lincoln surprised the senators and cabinet watchers by his open posture.
Although seeking counsel from many persons, Lincoln carried with him in his right vest pocket the small piece of paper in which he first listed his choices for the cabinet. The final list would not differ much from the original list jotted down on the evening of his election. He did invite Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania to join the cabinet. He met with Ohio senator Salmon Chase in Springfield, and again in his first days in Washington, but had not yet tendered him a formal invitation for a cabinet position. Lincoln had settled on the tall Marylander Montgomery Blair, son of Francis Preston Blair, for postmaster general, which allowed him to say he had included Southerners in his cabinet. Blair spoke of secessionists with disdain, which helped explain the growing dislike between Blair and Seward. Indiana believed it had been promised an appointment by David Davis. Lincoln had decided on fifty-two-year-old Caleb Smith, whom he knew from his term in Congress, when several from the Hoosier state suggested Schuyler Colfax, thirty-seven-year-old congressman from South Bend. In the end, Lincoln settled on the person he knew, the bland Smith, for the Interior Department. Lincoln, concerned that Colfax believed he was passed over because of his alleged pro-Douglas activity in 1858, wrote to him, “When you were brought forward I said ‘Colfax is a young man—is already in position—is running a brilliant career, and is sure of a bright future in any event’—With Smith, it is now or never.’ ” Lincoln concluded, “I now have to beg that you will not do me the injustice to suppose, for a moment, that I remember any thing against you in malice.”
Just when everything seemed settled with the cabinet, Seward resigned on the eve of the inauguration in a terse letter. “Circumstances which have occurred since I expressed to you in December last my willingness to accept the office of Secretary of State seem to me to render it my duty to ask leave to withdraw that consent.” What circumstances? Seward did not say, but Lincoln knew he had objected strenuously to the prospect of the appointment of Salmon P. Chase to the cabinet.
What could Lincoln do? On the morning of his inauguration, while the inaugural parade lined up in the street below, Lincoln wrote out a reply and gave it to John Nicolay to copy. He told his secretary, “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick.” Having only a day to consider Seward’s request, Lincoln wrote that the reception of the note was extremely “painful” but “I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal.” Lincoln had heard and seen that Seward had many opponents in Washington, but Lincoln had come to value his abilities. “The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction.” He asked Seward to answer by 9 a.m. on March 5, 1861, the first working day of the new administration. On the evening of March 4, Seward called on Lincoln at the Executive Mansion and the two “had a long and confidential talk.” Seward withdrew his letter and agreed to “remain.”
Lincoln’s absorption with completing his cabinet left him open to criticism. Charles Francis Adams believed that in Lincoln’s first weeks in Washington he seemed “more intent on the distribution of offices than on the gravity of the crisis” in the South. Gideon Welles, the new secretary of the navy, wrote that Lincoln “was accused of wasting his time in a great emergency on mere party appointments.”
MARCH 4, 1861, dawned windy, cool, and overcast. A crowd of between twenty-five and thirty thousand, including a large number of “Western men,” began arriving in the early hours to find places close enough to hear Lincoln’s address. Riflemen stationed themselves on the rooftops of buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. Soldiers on horseback patrolled all the major crossroads. Sharpshooters kept the inaugural platform under close watch from windows in the Capitol.
Precisely at twelve o’clock, President-elect Lincoln came out a side door of the Willard. He wore a new black suit, a white shirt, and black boots. He had on a tall black hat and held in his hand an ebony cane with a gold head. While a band played “Hail to the Chief,” Lincoln waved away a closed carriage and took his seat in an open four-seated carriage opposite President Buchanan, where he could be seen by the people. Buchanan “appeared pale and wearied.” As the carriage bounced along the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, Buchanan said to Lincoln, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland you are a happy man.”
In Lincoln’s time, the inaugural parade preceded the inaugural address. One hundred marshals, dressed in blue, orange, and pink, guided their horses at the front of the parade. All along the parade route, between the White House and the Capitol, American flags soared in the breeze from open windows. Soldiers were grouped so closely around the open presidential carriage that it was difficult to see Lincoln. Ahead, rising over the nation’s capital, Lincoln could see the Capitol. The wooden dome that Lincoln saw when he arrived for his single term in Congress in 1847 had been taken down. A decision had been made in 1855 to build a new iron dome. All Lincoln could see on this inaugural day was the arm of a huge crane extending up from the unfinished dome.
No inaugural address had ever been presented in such turbulent times. Rumors raced through the capital of threats to Lincoln and of attacks on Washington. Hundreds of disgruntled Southerners remained in the capital on Inauguration Day.
Lincoln took his place in the front row on the massive platform that had been constructed on the east front of the Capitol. Stephen Douglas sat nearby. Lincoln had asked silver-haired Senator Edward D. Baker of Oregon, who as a young legislator in Illinois had outshone Lincoln as a speaker, to introduce him. As Lincoln stood, he realized there was no place to put his top hat and cane. Douglas stepped forward and asked if he could hold them. Lincoln took out his steel-rimmed spectacles and stepped forward to the small speaker’s table.


Lincoln saw a very different Capitol when he returned to Washington in 1861. The old dome was removed in 1856, and at the time of his inauguration a crane can be seen sticking through the opening of what will become the new dome.

“Fellow citizens of the United States,” he began. After an opening self-reference, Lincoln began a pattern of directing attention away from himself to the larger persona of American political bodies: “a Republican administration … the Union … the American people … the national authority … the Constitution … the people.” He was determined to use nonpartisan language. At a time when the Northern press, and many politicians, were using inflammatory language, Lincoln stayed away from such volatile words as “enemy,” “secessionists,” or even “Confederacy.” His initial rhetorical move was toward conciliation.
Lincoln’s instinct told him to move directly to the real source of tension in his audience: “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are endangered.” By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration, seven states had seceded, but by saying “Southern States,” he affirmed that they were still part of the Union. He would not use the name “Confederate States of America.”
He sought to allay their anxieties: “There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you.”
Lincoln’s lawyerly reasoning governed the structure and content of most of the address. As a lawyer-politician, he referred the jury-audience to the precedent of his own speeches. He did not present himself as prepared to do something new, but rather to follow the ideas and practices that he had advocated since the middle of the 1850s.


This distant view by an unknown photographer captures the crowd gathering before the east front of the unfinished Capitol for Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861.

Lincoln bowed further toward conciliation when he announced he would continue to support the fugitive slave law. Why did he introduce a discussion of this controversial law so early in his address? He believed he had more to gain from those in favor of the law than to lose from those opposed to it. Introducing the fugitive slave law also offered Lincoln the opportunity to underline his larger point. In taking the oath as president, he intended to uphold the Constitution in all matters. He hoped his language would send a signal that the South had nothing to fear in this new president from the West.
Horace Greeley, sitting behind Lincoln, recalled that as the audience listened quietly he almost expected to hear the crack of rifle fire. But the quiet was broken only by the noise of a spectator crashing down from his perch in the top of a tree.
Lincoln’s high-pitched voice and his Kentucky accent struck many Easterners in the audience as inelegant, but Lincoln’s ideas, to the sympathetic listener, were substantial. “I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these states is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.”
Cheers greeted his words about the perpetuity of the Union. He had decided in Springfield to make the central theme of his address the indivisibility of the Union. Lincoln declared that states had the right to uphold their own domestic institutions, not on the basis of state sovereignty, but because of their respective roles within the nation. He reminded his audience that “the Union is much older than the Constitution.”
But Lincoln knew he could not discuss the Constitution for too long. He needed to speak about what was on the listeners’ minds: the very real possibilities of “bloodshed and violence.” He wanted to establish a baseline: Any violence would not come from his administration. He employed the phrase “national authority,” contrasting his constitutional legitimacy with all lesser authorities.
As Lincoln pivoted from conciliation to firmness, he began by characterizing the actions of the leaders of the secession movement. “Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Attempting to call to mind memories of 1776, secessionists had clothed themselves in a righteous second war of independence, but Lincoln forcefully disrobed their actions by calling them “anarchy” and “despotism.” Sounding like a teacher of constitutional law, Lincoln made the case that “no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” He declared that, “in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken” and he understood it to be his duty as president to ensure “that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” Then, as if remembering his conciliatory side, he quickly added, “I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend, and maintain itself.”
No one was more caught up in Lincoln’s address than Stephen Doug las. As Lincoln spoke, Douglas whispered under his breath, “Good,” “That’s so,” “No coercion,” and “Good again.” Lincoln concluded with two dramatic paragraphs. First, he skillfully combined challenge and affirmation, driving home his point by employing one of his favorite rhetorical devices, opposition:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressor. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it.
Lincoln, after being widely criticized for months for failing to understand the threat to the Union, now named the crisis. He wanted the historical testimony to be unambiguous about who the antagonist would be. “The government will not assail you.” Conciliation, the main motif of the speech, yielded in this penultimate paragraph to determination.
After speaking for nearly thirty minutes, Lincoln turned to his concluding paragraph. In his first and second drafts of the address, he had ended with a question: “With you and not with me is the solemn question, ‘Shall it be peace or a sword?’ ” Seward urged Lincoln to employ a different conclusion: “some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” Seward achieved the reputation of being a fine speaker, but a comparison affords an opportunity to observe how Lincoln transformed Seward’s words into his own prose poetry.
Seward Lincoln
1. I close. I am loath to close.
2. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
3. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
4. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln pared away all superfluous words. He made use of assonance, which placed together words or syllables with related sounds. He em ployed alliteration, which brought close together the same consonant and sound five times in the final two sentences, and encouraged the connection of words within the paragraph for the hearer: break, bonds, battlefield, broad, better.
He used symbolic images to shape a rhetoric of unity. The power of his appeal grew as he called to mind the figure of “the mystic chords of memory.” Lincoln, who understood better than anyone the power of words, but who had been silent for the previous ten months, now spoke with the hope that he could bridge the growing divide to appeal to mutual feelings for the Union.
At the conclusion of the address, Chief Justice Taney stepped forward. A bowed, lean figure in his black gown, Taney may have remembered the previous presidents he had sworn in—Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan—as he prepared to swear in a ninth president. Lincoln placed his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand, and repeated the oath of office. As Lincoln ended the oath, the cheering began. One of the first to congratulate Lincoln was Senator Douglas. Artillery boomed salute after salute to the newly inaugurated sixteenth president.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER LINCOLN’S INAUGURATION, citizens in small hamlets and large cities congregated at newspaper offices eager for telegraphic reports of his address. The next day, the first newspaper responses reflected the nation’s divided opinion. In a highly politicized press, critics read Lincoln’s words through their own partisan glasses.
Greeley’s New York Tribune liked the firmness of Lincoln’s remarks. “The avowal of purpose … is unequivocal, unhesitating, firm, and earnest.” The New York Times, then a barometer of conservative opinion, editorialized that “conservative people are in raptures over the Inauguration.” The two newspapers in Illinois that had long supported Lincoln applauded. The Chicago Tribune stated, “No document can be found among American state papers embodying sounder wisdom and higher patriotism.” The Illinois State Journal in Springfield proclaimed, “The Inaugural Address of our noble Chief Magistrate has electrified the whole country.”
The anti-Lincoln papers heard much to criticize. The Chicago Times deplored the address as “a loose, disjointed, rambling affair.” The New York Herald criticized Lincoln’s words as “neither candid nor statesmanlike; nor does it possess any essential dignity or patriotism.” Comparing Lincoln to his praiseworthy predecessors, the Herald declared the address “would have caused a Washington to mourn, and would have inspired a Jefferson, Madison, or Jackson with contempt.”
Southern newspapers did not hear the conciliation that Lincoln believed was one of the twin pillars of his address. The Richmond Enquirer excoriated the address as “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic,” believing Lincoln’s aim to be “the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” The Charleston Mercury, an important Southern voice whose editorials were often republished in Northern newspapers, berated Lincoln’s “lamentable display of feeble inability to grasp the circumstances of the momentous emergency.”
In response, the New York Times questioned whether newspapers in the South had even taken time to read the address. “Before the Inaugural has been read in a single Southern State, it is denounced, through the telegraph, from every Southern point, as a declaration of war.”
George Templeton Strong conveyed in his diary the sense of anticipation the inaugural caused in New York City. He reported that on Wall Street, “news from Washington” was “awaited impatiently.” Newspapers printed special editions at noon and 1:30 p.m. Strong read the first half of Lincoln’s inaugural in the second edition of the evening papers. The next day, he had time to read the entire inaugural address and speak with colleagues who liked Lincoln’s conciliatory and cautious approach. Strong, whose diary is fascinating in the ways that he brings in opinions other than his own, offered his response: “I think there is a clank of metal in it.” Strong believed that Lincoln’s address “is unlike any message or state paper of any class that has appeared in my time.” What Strong especially liked was that the inaugural “seems to introduce one to a man and to dispose one to like him.”
Two American leaders with whom Lincoln was destined to cross paths in dramatic encounters during his presidency were each dispirited in reading the address. Edward Everett followed the reactions to Lincoln’s oratory from his home on Summer Street in Boston. On March 4, 1861, after receiving the inaugural address by telegraph, he lauded Lincoln’s “conciliatory” tone in his journal, but expressed the opinion that Lincoln’s intention to hold the forts would “result in Civil War.” On April 3, he noted that all of the opinions of the English press had now arrived, and wrote that Lincoln’s inaugural address “is almost universally spoken of as feeble, equivocal, and temporizing. It has evidently disappointed public expectation.” He went on to express his empathy for the new president. He believed that Lincoln was caught between the abolitionist beliefs of the Republicans he knew well in New England and the president’s own instincts for magnanimity. “The truth is the President’s situation is impossible.”
Frederick Douglass, from his home at the northwest corner of Robinson Drive and South Avenue in Rochester, New York, was not so charitable. Wrought up with “tension and frustration” during the months of the secession crisis, he characterized the address as “little better than our fears.” It was a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions, and conceals rather than declares a definite policy.” Douglass contended what cartoonists were illustrating: “No man reading it could say whether Mr. Lincoln was for peace or war.” Douglass had followed Lincoln’s attacks on Stephen Douglas’s race-baiting in their 1858 debates and now found the “denial of all feeling against slavery … wholly discreditable to the head and heart of Mr. Lincoln.” Worst of all, in Douglass’s eyes, was Lincoln’s announced intention to abide by the fugitive slave law. As for what black Americans could expect from the new president, Douglass wrote, “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends the knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.”
EARLY ON TUESDAY MORNING, March 5, 1861, Lincoln went to his new White House office where the very first paper given to him was a military communication requiring urgent attention: a letter from Major Robert Anderson, commander of the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, the five-sided fort constructed on a shoal in South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. Anderson wrote that he had supplies to last only six weeks. Unless resupplied, he would be forced to surrender. Lincoln was fully aware of the pressure put upon President Buchanan to surrender Fort Sumter after South Carolina seceded in December, but never had a newly inaugurated president faced such an immediate challenge. In his inaugural address, Lincoln had attempted to balance conciliation and firmness. How would he execute this balance in responding to the threat to Fort Sumter?
At noon, Lincoln sent to the Senate, meeting in extra session, the list of his cabinet.
Secretary of State, William H. Seward, New York
Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, Ohio
Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania
Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, Connecticut
Secretary of the Interior, Caleb B. Smith, Indiana
Attorney General, Edward Bates, Missouri
Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, Maryland
The Senate confirmed each cabinet nominee, and the next day each was inducted into office.
Absent from the floor of the Senate when the votes on cabinet positions were taken, Chase was taken aback when colleagues rushed up to congratulate him after he returned. A man of tremendous pride who believed in the right political protocol, Chase sought Lincoln out to decline the nomination. The president explained that it would be embarrassing to both of them if he did not accept the appointment. Chase resigned his seat in the Senate and wrote to Lincoln later that day, “I accept the post which you have tendered me.”
Lincoln’s first executive act, the selection of his cabinet, sent a strong signal both of his own sense of security and the direction of his leadership. Rather than choosing lesser yes-men, he surrounded himself with some of the nation’s most able men: three ex-Whigs, Seward, Bates, and Smith, and four ex-Democrats, Chase, Cameron, Welles, and Blair. Some Republicans immediately criticized Lincoln for the majority of ex-Democrats in his cabinet, but he countered that he, as a former Whig, made the cabinet perfectly balanced: four to four. Lincoln had learned in Illinois how to bring divergent voices together, and he now set out to do this on the larger stage of Washington.
Lincoln convened his first cabinet meeting on the evening of March 6, 1861. The cabinet gathered, in the order of their seniority, around the table in the center of Lincoln’s office. An engraved oil portrait of Andrew Jackson stared down at this gathering of old Whigs, old Democrats, and the new Republican president. Lincoln intended this initial meeting to be only introductory. Attorney General Edward Bates confided to his diary that he found the first cabinet meeting “uninteresting.”
LINCOLN CAME TO THE PRESIDENCY lacking executive experience, and his first weeks in office did little to inspire confidence that he could launch and run a new administration.
A large walnut table, piled with books and maps, dominated his sizable office on the second floor of the White House. Here Lincoln conducted cabinet meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays, but cabinet officers soon learned not to depend on their regularity. Lincoln often worked at an old upright mahogany writing desk by the middle windows of the south wall facing the Washington Monument and further to the Potomac River. His secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, described his desk as looking like it came from “some old furniture auction.” Lincoln used the pigeonholes of the desk, as earlier in Illinois he had used his stovepipe hat and desk drawers, as repositories for his legendary notes to himself. Two horsehair sofas and wooden chairs were scattered about the room in no particular arrangement. More maps hung above the sofas. Oilcloth covered the floor. Lighted by gaslights and heated by a fireplace, the room functioned as a working office, not a ceremonial office, even though Lincoln received many of his guests there. The president could call for Nicolay and Hay with a bell cord close to his desk.
Lincoln was well aware that, in the words of David Davis, “he had no administrative ability until he went to Washington.” At first he tried to do everything by himself. He acknowledged to Robert L. Wilson, a member of the “Long Nine” of the Illinois House of Representatives in the 1830s, his initial floundering. “When [I] first commenced doing the duties, [I] was entirely ignorant not only of the duties, but of the manner of doing the business” of the presidency.
Hay remembered, “There was little order or system about it. … Those around him strove from beginning to end to erect barriers to defend him against constant interruption, but the President himself was always the first to break them down.” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee would work closely with Lincoln, once tried to counsel him about his availability to people: “You will wear yourself out.” Lincoln replied, “They don’t want much; they get but little, and I must see them.”
It has been suggested that Lincoln, innately cautious, was a reactor rather than an initiator. Certainly, in his first months in office, Lincoln felt his way, and the press of events called for a steep learning curve. But there is a difference between being cautious and being passive. While Lincoln never offered any philosophy of leadership, it is possible to observe principles that guided his development of policy, his relationships with colleagues, and his command of the war. Once in Washington, to the surprise of many, Lincoln was a quick learner.
LINCOLN WAS NOT PREPARED to deal with the crisis of Fort Sumter at the beginning of his presidency. He had determined in Springfield to preserve the Union without war, and he was aware of his inexperience in military matters. His previous method of dealing with crises, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the Dred Scott decision, was to take months to research, think, and brood in private, before announcing his public response. But Anderson’s memorandum informed the War Department that there were only weeks to decide what to do.
Now Lincoln faced a far-reaching choice. He had to deal with the thorny problem of Fort Sumter on Charleston harbor in South Carolina, as well as Fort Pickens, constructed to fortify Pensacola, in the northern part of seceded Florida. The main show was Fort Sumter. Lincoln could surrender Fort Sumter and hope that this might keep the four states of the upper South and four border states from joining the secession, or he could attempt to resupply the forts and take the probable risk of starting a civil war. He asked Buchanan’s secretary of war Joseph Holt, a Unionist Kentuckian who had agreed to stay on while Lincoln waited for Simon Cameron to assume his duties, whether the Kentuckian Robert Anderson could be trusted. Holt said he could. Lincoln would find himself asking this question many times about government officials and military officers in the opening weeks of his administration. The new president needed time to think and to plan, but the clock was ticking.
In the following days, Lincoln conferred with cabinet secretaries and army and navy men about how to tackle the problem in the Charleston harbor. He listened respectfully as Secretary of State Seward argued strongly against resupplying Fort Sumter in order to preserve the peace. Welles, after several of these conferences, wrote of the president in his diary, “He was disinclined to hasty action, and wished time for the Administration to get in working order.”
On Saturday evening, March 9, 1861, when Lincoln reconvened his new cabinet, he invited General Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War, to join the discussion. Scott, old and obese, had been studying Anderson’s dispatches. He urged, in the strongest terms, an evacuation of Fort Sumter. Everyone at the cabinet meeting, with the exception of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, agreed.
Despite the majority sentiment to withdraw, Lincoln decided to seek more information. Later, he wrote out three questions for General Scott. Lincoln convened another cabinet meeting on March 11, 1861, to share Scott’s answers. Scott advised that to undertake a mission to resupply Fort Sumter would take a fleet of war vessels, five thousand regular troops, plus twenty thousand volunteers. Lincoln read the sobering final sentence of Scott’s reply. “To raise, organize, & discipline such an army, would require new acts of Congress & from six to eight months.”
On the same day, Francis Blair, Sr., Montgomery Blair’s father, called upon Lincoln at the White House and told him “the surrender of Fort Sumter … was virtually a surrender of the Union unless under irresistible force—that compounding with treason was treason to the Govt.” The next day the elder Blair wrote to Montgomery, who passed the letter on to Lincoln. The elder Blair half apologized—“I may have said things that were impertinent”—for his strong words with the president. Hearkening back to the resolve of President Jackson in the nullification crisis with South Carolina in 1832, the Blairs, father and sons, were committed to stiffening the backbone of Lincoln.
Two days later, Montgomery Blair hurried to the White House to introduce Lincoln to his brother-in-law, Gustavus Fox, a short, sturdy former naval officer who was now in private business in Massachusetts. Fox, at the urging of the Blairs, presented an inventive plan to resupply Fort Sumter. He had offered his plan to President Buchanan in February, who had turned him away, but Lincoln heard him out. Having studied the Confederate defenses, Fox proposed sending a large steamer, carrying troops, accompanied by two New York tugboats, carrying supplies. Arriving by daylight, he would test Confederate intentions and probe the vulnerable places in their defenses, and then run in men and supplies by the cover of night.
Impressed, Lincoln presented the plan at the cabinet meeting of March 15, 1861. Fox told the cabinet he was willing to risk his life in leading the relief effort. After the meeting, Lincoln sent a note to each cabinet member with a single question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter, under all the circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?”
On Monday, March 18, 1861, with a spring snow hanging on in Washington, Lincoln sat alone at his desk to review the seven responses from his cabinet.
William Seward, secretary of state, writing in his suite of two rooms on the second floor of the State Department building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, offered an extended answer that was summed up in one conviction, “I would not provoke war in any way now.” No.
Salmon Chase, secretary of the treasury, after voicing concern that “the attempt will so inflame civil war,” concluded “it seems to me high improbable that the attempt … will produce such consequences.” A qualified yes.
Simon Cameron, secretary of war, influenced by the arguments of the army officers, answered, “It would be unwise now to make such an attempt.” No.
Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, believed the attempt would need to have both a military and a political component, but on both counts, “I do not think it wise.” No.
Caleb Smith, secretary of the interior, after weighing the conflicting army and navy recommendations, concluded, “It would not be wise under all circumstances.” No.
Edward Bates, attorney general, after sifting the legal arguments, concluded, “I do not think it wise now to attempt to provision Fort Sumter.” No.
Montgomery Blair, postmaster general, alone, voiced his strong support for provisioning Fort Sumter, on two counts. First, he believed this action would inspire a like-minded courage among loyal Unionists in the South. Second, not to do so “will convince the rebels that the administration lacks firmness.” Such an evacuation would signal an unwillingness “to maintain the authority of the United States.” Yes.
The count was 5 to 2, a clear majority against a relief mission, but Lincoln was not yet prepared to abandon Fort Sumter. He decided to test some of the conjectures of his advisers. To gather yet more information, he sent Fox to see Anderson and investigate the problems and possibilities in a defense of Fort Sumter. He also dispatched Ward Hill Lamon and Stephen Hurlbut, an old Illinois friend who had grown up in Charleston, for a second reconnoiter mission. Seward had argued that Unionism was strong if temporarily silent in South Carolina. Lincoln wanted to test this thesis. Fox returned on March 25, 1861, more ready than ever to attempt the resupply mission. Hurlbut and Lamon returned on March 27 reporting that the American flag could not be seen flying anywhere. “The Sentiment of National Patriotism always feeble in Carolina, has been Extinguished.”
As the crisis at Fort Sumter focused inordinate attention on Lincoln, everyone sought to take the measure of the new president. William Howard Russell, special correspondent of the Times of London, had earned an international reputation from twenty years of reporting on events in Ireland, India, and the Crimean War. Russell had arrived in New York in the middle of March and hurried on to Washington. On March 27, 1861, the generously proportioned London correspondent was taken to the White House. Russell recorded in his diary his first impressions of Lincoln.
There entered, with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet. He was dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral; round his neck a rope of black silk was knotted in a large bulb, with flying ends projecting beyond the collar of his coat; his turned-down shirt-collar disclosed a sinewy, muscular yellow neck, and above that, nestling in a great black mass of hair, bristling and compact like a ruff of marching pins, rose the strange quaint face and head, covered with its thatch of wild republican hair, of President Lincoln.
Russell, known to be disdainful of everything not English, left his first encounter with Lincoln “agreeably impressed with his shrewdness, humor, and natural sagacity.”
The clock was running down at Fort Sumter. As it did, Americans of all political persuasions were growing impatient with the president.
Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, Southern Democratic presidential candidate in 1860, was the voice of the remnant of Southerners still in Congress. Breckinridge kept pressing for information on Lincoln’s policies and criticized the North for being unwilling to compromise. On March 28, 1861, Lyman Trumbull introduced a Senate resolution to support, but also to prod, Lincoln. “Resolved, the opinion of the Senate, the true way to preserve the Union is to enforce the laws of the Union.” As Lincoln’s political career ascended, Trumbull’s relationship with Lincoln had begun to cool. Trumbull viewed Lincoln as “ambitious but indecisive, a compromiser who could be swayed by knowledgeable advisors” like Seward. The final words of his resolution read: “It is the duty of the President … to use all means in his power to hold and protect the public property of the United States.” Trumbull, distrusting Seward and unsure of Lincoln, wanted not simply to encourage the president, but to make him accountable to the consensus he hoped the Republicans were building in Congress.
Also on March 28, 1861, General Scott told Lincoln, once again, that Fort Sumter could not be resupplied. Lincoln, who corresponded with General Scott all through the long secession winter, had come to Washington with great admiration for the old military hero. In one of Lincoln’s first acts of presidential leadership, he made the painful decision to respectfully disagree with those whom he respected. That night, Lincoln slept not at all.
By March 29, 1861, Good Friday, Lincoln had decided to resupply Fort Sumter, “but he took care to make it as unprovocative as possible.” He informed his cabinet at their noon meeting that, with only two weeks left before supplies would run out, he was ordering Welles and Cameron to draw up plans for the relief of the fort. Gustavus Fox went to New York to take charge of naval preparations to sail for Charleston harbor. Lincoln had made his first real decision as commander in chief.
The weeks of nonstop debate and indecision had taken a toll. Lincoln told a military officer, “If to be the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here, I could find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.” Sam Ward, a Washington insider, noted on March 30, “ ‘Abe’ is getting heartily sick of ‘the situation’—It is hard for the Captain of a new Steamer to ‘work this passage.’ ” Ward wrote that the day before, Lincoln had told a mutual friend he was “in the dumps.”
WHEN THE LINCOLNS ARRIVED in Washington, a number of churches had invited them to attend Sunday worship. Two days after the inauguration, the First Presbyterian Church invited President and Mrs. Lincoln to accept a pew in their church, free of rent. Many Protestant congregations in the nineteenth century charged pew rents as a means of raising money for church budgets. First Presbyterian, which enjoyed its reputation as “the church of the presidents,” boasted that Presidents Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan had worshipped there. It was made up largely of Democrats and had until recently included many of the Southern members of Congress.
On the first Sunday after inauguration, the Lincolns worshipped at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. The next week a deacon from the church brought a plat, or map, of the pews to the White House for inspection. No free rent.
New York Avenue was an Old School congregation, whereas First Presbyterian Church was New School. The Presbyterian Church had split in 1837 over a number of theological and organizational issues. Both traditions were grounded in the Bible, but the Old School rooted itself in a rational doctrinal tradition, whereas the New School was more open to experience expressed in the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening. The New School committed itself to political reform, especially antislavery reform, whereas the Old School held that the church should not involve itself in political questions.
Phineas Densmore Gurley was the minister at New York Avenue. He had graduated first in his class at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1840. A fine-looking man of large frame and voice, Gurley stood squarely in the American Old School Presbyterian understanding of Reformed theology. American Presbyterians strove to balance a high view of God with a low view of humanity. A denomination that prized learned ministers, they nevertheless understood God not as the first principle in philosophy but as the primary actor in history. Lincoln, ever attuned to paradox, appreciated the Presbyterian belief that the sinful-ness of human beings did not lead to passivity, because Christian men and women were called to be instruments of divine purpose in society. Though Lincoln had attended the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield infrequently, he would become more regular in his attendance at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and Gurley would become a regular visitor in the White House. Lincoln sent his first quarterly check for the pew rent of fifty dollars a year.
“WANTED—A POLICY.” In an editorial on April 3, 1861, the New York Times charged the new Republican administration with “a blindness and a stolidity without parallel in the history of intelligent statesmanship.” Editor Henry J. Raymond aimed his criticism at Lincoln. “He must go up to a higher level than he has yet reached, before he can see and realize the high duties to which he has been called.”
As painful as it must have been to hear this charge from a leading newspaper that had supported his election, Lincoln found himself blindsided by the person closest to him in his cabinet. Seward, increasingly perturbed by what he came to believe was Lincoln’s lack of leadership, finally reacted in exasperation. On Sunday, March 31, 1861, he had drafted a letter, “Some Thoughts for the President’s consideration.” Seward’s son, Frederick, delivered the letter to the president on Monday morning, April 1.
“We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign. … Further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.” What was the solution? Seward stated, “It must be somebody’s business to pursue and direct it incessantly.” And who should the leader be? “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it; or Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” Certainly Seward did not consider himself out of line. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the secretary of state assumed a major share of leadership in presidential administrations.
Lincoln replied immediately, responding point by point. He acknowledged that he and Seward had disagreed over the question of resupplying Fort Sumter. The president declared he did have a new policy and reiterated the policy outlined in his inaugural address. He reminded Seward, who had been helpful in reviewing the second draft of the address, “This had your distinct approval at the time.” Yet Lincoln probably never sent his carefully worded letter, the first of many letters he wrote as president but never sent, deciding it would be better to speak with Seward in person. Lincoln told Seward, “If this must be done, I must do it.”
Lincoln took another significant step forward on April 1, 1861. He wrote a short note to General Scott asking, “Would it impose too much labor” to “make short, comprehensive daily reports to me of what occurs in his Department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence?” Framed politely, as a question, it was in fact an order that indicated Lincoln’s belief that he needed to become more directly involved in the military’s day-by-day operations. That Lincoln read these reports carefully was evident nearly three weeks later when he wrote a memo to himself, “No report from Gen. Scott this 19. April 1861.”
On a warm Saturday, April 6, 1861, with the trees beginning to leaf out and the peach trees blossoming in the capital, political tensions were mounting. Lincoln directed Secretary of War Cameron to dispatch a courier, Robert S. Chew, to Charleston with a message for Governor Andrew W. Pickens of South Carolina: “An attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made.” After a series of aggravating delays, on April 9, Fox sailed from New York, with his small fleet planning to rendezvous off Charleston harbor.
Governor Pickens quickly notified Jefferson Davis of Lincoln’s message. The leaders of the Confederacy found Lincoln’s action to be a direct threat. The Confederate cabinet met and decided to seek the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. At noon on April 11, 1861, a message was sent to Major Anderson demanding surrender. He refused.
In the meantime, the sailing of the relief mission to Fort Sumter had run afoul of yet another squabble between cabinet members, a feud between Seward and Welles. Seward, who believed that Fort Pickens should be reinforced but Sumter evacuated, intervened at the last moment to persuade Lincoln to divert the warship Powhatan to accompany the mission to Fort Pickens instead of to Fort Sumter. Fox was unaware of the change, which would deprive him of his most powerful weapon.
As Lincoln waited to hear news of Fox’s relief expedition, Jefferson Davis and his military leaders attacked. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard ordered a Confederate battery to open fire on Fort Sumter, thirty-nine days after Lincoln’s inaugural address. A single red ball arced ominously over Fort Sumter and exploded. Quickly, forty-three guns and mortars circling the harbor opened fire. Anderson deliberately held his fire until 7 a.m., when Captain Abner Doubleday fired at a South Carolina shore battery. Fort Sumter had been built to repel a naval, not a land, assault. Anderson’s best guns were mounted on the top tier of the fort, but this meant the men manning them would be most vulnerable to incoming fire.


The attack on Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861, galvanized Northern opinion to defend the Union. The attack is dramatized in this illustration from Harper’s Weekly April 27, 1861.

A powerful Atlantic storm had delayed Fox’s depleted fleet, and he discovered off Charleston that he had lost his three tugboats. As the bombardment proceeded, the captains of the Pawnee and Harriet Lane believed it too treacherous to navigate their ships around the sandbar at the mouth of the harbor; they could only watch helplessly from afar.
At noon on April 13, after thirty-three hours, and four thousand shots and shells, Anderson ordered a white flag raised in surrender. Fox’s flotilla finally arrived to ferry Anderson and his small garrison back to the North. Anderson held in his hands a tattered American flag. The Confederates had fired the first shot of the Civil War.
WASHINGTON BECAME ALIVE with the news about the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The mood was a curious mixture of foreboding and expectation: relief that the long stalemate was over, and an adventurous—if reckless—spirit ready to go to war. Horatio Nelson Taft, who came to Washington to work in the Patent Office in 1858, expressed the sentiment of many when he wrote in his diary for April 13, 1861, “Everybody much excited, and all will soon be compelled to ‘show their hands,’ for or against the Union.”
Abraham and Mary Lincoln worshipped that Sunday morning at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. In his sermon, Phineas Gurley pointed to “God, in his merciful providence” offering “another opportunity for counsel, for pause, for appeal to Him for assistance before letting loose upon the land the direct scourge which He permits to visit a people—civil war.” Gurley concluded with a prayer that the “counsels of the Administration might be sanctified and blessed.”
In the afternoon, Lincoln was working alone when Stephen Douglas arrived unexpectedly. Lincoln took from his desk a draft of the proclamation he planned to issue the next day. The two men studied Lincoln’s text. Lincoln intended to ask for 75,000 volunteers to join the army. “I would make it 200,000,” declared Douglas. The two men talked together for almost two hours, their meeting marked, in Douglas’s words, by a “cordial feeling of a united, friendly, and patriotic purpose.”
Douglas later spoke of their meeting. While emphasizing that he was opposed to the administration, and that he had been against the attempt to resupply Fort Sumter, he declared that he was now united with the president in the need for strong action. Douglas reported they “spoke of the present & future, without reference to the past.” When Douglas met a friend at the telegraph office who asked about Lincoln, he replied, “I’ve known Mr. Lincoln a longer time than you have, or than the country has; he’ll come out right, and we will all stand by him.” The account of Douglas’s conversation with Lincoln was printed widely.
As the war broke out, Lincoln had the freedom to act without the restraint of Congress, which wasn’t in session, but he knew he could not act alone. He needed the authorization of Congress in order to prosecute and to pay for the war. But the legislative branch of the government was not scheduled to convene as the new Thirty-seventh Congress until the first Monday in December.
On April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a special session of Congress to convene on July 4, 1861. The coming storm, of which Lincoln had spoken many times, had arrived in the waters off Charleston, South Carolina. Within the next two months, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee would join the Confederacy, bringing the number of states to eleven.
At the time, and ever since, critics have scrutinized Lincoln’s words and actions in an attempt to understand his intentions during this crisis. Did Lincoln, given contradictory advice by his political and military advisers, arrive at a result beyond his control? Or, by his decision to resupply Fort Sumter, did he control events, forcing the Confederacy to fire the first shot at Fort Sumter? As Lincoln had said in his inaugural address, “The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” Did he do everything in his power to forestall open hostilities between the North and the South?
In the next months, Lincoln offered an explanation of his actions to two friends. Of the military officers he met in March and April, he had come to especially admire naval officer Gustavus Fox. He wrote to him on May 1, 1861, “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.” Ten weeks after the event, Lincoln told his old friend Orville Browning, “The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.” Lincoln did confess to Browning, “All the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those which intervened between this time and the fall of Fort Sumter.”
As Lincoln encountered these troubles, he began to find his footing. Respectfully seeking the advice of his senior general, becoming pain fully aware that his secretary of state was charting his own course, listening to the discordant voices of his cabinet, Lincoln proved to be not passive but prudent as he determined his own course on Fort Sumter. The whole constellation of decisions leading to the first shot of the Civil War in South Carolina revealed the initial signs of Lincoln’s emerging presidential leadership.


President Abraham Lincoln sat for this photograph in Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington in April 1861. Some said at the time that this photograph showed a shrewd if not cunning look—an accusation seized upon by his opponents.