A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (63 page)

At Fort Sumter, Anderson and seventy Union soldiers faced South Carolina’s forces. Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island, and Fort Johnson, on James Island, straddled Sumter on each side, which sat in the middle of Charleston harbor. Fort Johnson was already in Southern hands, but Moultrie held out. Because Anderson could not defend both Moultrie and Sumter, he was forced to relocate his troops to Fort Sumter, transferring them on the night of December twenty-sixth. This bought Buchanan time, for he thought keeping the remaining states in the Union held the keys to success. After February first, no other Southern state had bolted, indicating to Buchanan that compromise remained a possibility.

Upon assuming office, Lincoln wasted no time assessing the situation. After receiving mixed advice from his new cabinet, the president opted to resupply the post—as he put it, to “hold and occupy” all federal property. He had actually at first thought to “reclaim” federal territory in Confederate hands, but at the urging of a friend struck the clause from his inaugural address. He further made clear to the Rebels that he would only resupply Anderson, not bring in additional forces. Nevertheless, the inaugural declared that both universal law and the Constitution made “the Union of these States perpetual.” No state could simply leave; the articles of secession were null and void. He did hold out the olive branch one last time, offering to take under advisement federal appointees unacceptable to the South. Lincoln did not mince words when it came to any hostilities that might arise: “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.” “We are not enemies,” he reminded them, but “friends…. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, 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.”
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Lincoln’s cabinet opposed reprovisioning Sumter. Most of their opinions could be dismissed, but not those of William Seward, the secretary of state. Still smarting from the Republican convention, Seward connived almost immediately to undercut Lincoln and perhaps obtain by stealth what he could not gain by ballot. He struck at a time in late March 1861, when Lincoln was absorbed by war and suffering from powerful migraine headaches, leading to unusual eruptions of temper in the generally mild-mannered president.

At that point of weakness, Seward moved, presenting Lincoln with a memorandum audaciously recommending that he, Seward, take over, and, more absurdly, that the Union provoke a war with Spain and France. Not only did the secretary criticize the new president for an absence of policy direction, but suggested that as soon as Lincoln surrendered power, Seward would use the war he drummed up with the Europeans as a pretext to dispatch agents to Canada, Mexico, and Central America to “rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence” against the Confederacy. The president ignored this impertinence and quietly reminded Seward that he had spelled out his policies in the inaugural address and that Seward himself had supported the reprovisioning of Fort Sumter. Then, he made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on his scheming secretary of state.

By April sixth, Lincoln had concluded that the government must make an effort to hold Sumter. He dispatched a messenger to the governor of South Carolina informing him that Sumter would be reprovisioned with food and supplies only. Four days later, General P.G.T. Beauregard got orders from Montgomery instructing him to demand that federal troops abandon the fort. On April twelfth, Edmund Ruffin, the South Carolina fire eater who had done as much to bring about the war as anyone, had the honor of firing the first shot of the Civil War. In the ensuing brief artillery exchange in which Beauregard outgunned Anderson, his former West Point superior, four to one, no one was killed. A day later, Anderson surrendered, leading Jefferson Davis to quip optimistically, “There has been no blood spilled more precious than that of a mule.”
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Soon thereafter, the upper South joined the Confederacy, as did the Indian Territory tribes, including some of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. Lincoln expected as much. He knew, however, that victory resided not in the state houses of Richmond or Little Rock, but in Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, and western Virginia. Each of these border states or regions had slaves, but also held strong pro-Union views. Kentucky’s critical position as a jumping-off point for a possible invasion of Ohio by Confederates and as a perfect staging ground for a Union invasion of Tennessee was so important that Lincoln once remarked, “I’d like to have God on my side, but I’ve got to have Kentucky.”

With long-standing commercial and political ties to the North, Kentucky nevertheless remained a hotbed of proslavery sentiment. Governor Beriah Magoffin initially refused calls for troops from both Lincoln and Davis and declared neutrality. But Yankee forces under Grant ensured Kentucky’s allegiance to the Union, although Kentucky Confederates simultaneously organized their own countergovernment. Militias of the Kentucky State Guard (Union) and Kentucky Home Guard (Confederate) squared off in warfare that quite literally pitted brother against brother.

Maryland was equally important because a Confederate Maryland would leave Washington, D.C., surrounded by enemies. Lincoln prevented Maryland’s proslavery forces (approximately one third of the populace) from joining the Confederacy by sending in the army. The mere sight of Union troops marching through Maryland to garrison Washington had its effect. Although New York regiments expected trouble—the governor of New York warned that the First Zouaves would go through Baltimore “like a dose of salts”—in fact, a wide belt of secure pro-Union territory was carved twenty miles across Maryland.
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Rioting and looting in Baltimore were met by a suspension of habeas corpus laws (allowing military governors to keep troublemakers incarcerated indefinitely), and by the arrest of Maryland fire eaters, including nineteen state legislators. When General Benjamin “Beast” Butler marched 1,000 men to seize arms readied for the Confederates and to occupy Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore during a thunderstorm, Maryland’s opportunity for secession vanished.

One of those firebrands arrested under the suspension of habeus corpus, John Merryman, challenged his arrest. His case went to the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice (and Marylander Democrat) Roger Taney, who sat as a circuit judge. Taney, seeing his opportunity to derail the Union’s agenda, declared Lincoln’s actions unconstitutional. Imitating Jackson in 1832, Lincoln simply ignored the chief justice.

In western Virginia, the story was different. Large pockets of Union support existed throughout the southern Appalachian mountains. In Morgantown, the grievances that the westerners in Virginia felt toward Richmond exceeded those suffered by the Tidewater planters who were against the Union. A certain degree of reality also set in: Wheeling was susceptible immediately to a bombardment from Ohio, and forces could converge from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to crush any rebellion there. Wisely, then, on June 19, 1861, western Unionists voted in a special convention declaring theirs the only legitimate government of Virginia, and the following June,
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Virginia became a new Union state. “Let us save Virginia, and then save the Union,” proclaimed the delegates to the West Virginia statehood convention, and then, as if to underscore that it was the “restored” government of Virginia, the new state adopted the seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia with the phrase “Liberty and Union” added.
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West Virginia’s defection to the Union buffered Ohio and western Pennsylvania from invasion the same way that keeping Kentucky’s geographical location protected Ohio. In a few politically masterful strokes, Lincoln had succeeded in retaining the border states he needed.
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The North had secured the upper Chesapeake, the entire western section of Virginia; more important, it held strategic inroads into Virginia through the Shenandoah Valley, into Mississippi and Louisiana through Kentucky and Missouri, and into Georgia through the exposed position of the Confederates in Tennessee.
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Moreover, the populations of the border states, though divided, still favored the Union, and “three times as many white Missourians would fight for the Union as for the Confederacy, twice as many Marylanders, and half again as many Kentuckians.”
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Missouri’s divided populace bred some of the most violent strife in the border regions. Missourians had literally been at war since 1856 on the Kansas border, and Confederates enjoyed strong support in the vast rural portions of the state. In St. Louis, however, thousands of German American immigrants stood true to the Union. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain), who served a brief stint in a Missouri Confederate militia unit, remembered that in 1861 “our state was invaded by Union forces,” whereupon the secessionist governor, Caleb Jackson, “issued his proclamation to help repel the invader.”
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In fact, Missouri remained a hotbed of real and pseudorebel resistance, with more than a few outlaw gangs pretending to be Confederates in order to plunder and pillage. William Quantrill’s raiders (including the infamous Frank and Jesse James) and other criminals used the Rebel cause as a smokescreen to commit crimes. They crisscrossed the Missouri-Kansas borders, capturing the town of Independence, Missouri, in August 1862, and only then were they sworn into the Confederate Army. Quantrill’s terror campaign came to a peak a year later with the pillage of Lawrence, Kansas, where his cutthroats killed more than 150 men. Unionist Jayhawkers, scarcely less criminal, organized to counter these Confederate raiders.

John C. Frémont, “the Pathfinder” of Mexican War fame, commanded the Union’s Western Department. Responding to the Missouri violence, he imposed martial law in August 1861, invoking the death penalty against any captured guerrillas. Frémont further decreed arbitrarily that any slaves captured from rebel forces were emancipated, providing the prosecession forces in the border states all the ammunition necessary to push them into the Confederacy. This went too far for Lincoln, who countermanded Frémont’s emancipation edict, while letting martial law stand.

The Combatants Square Off

One of the major questions about the American Civil War period is, “Why did it take the North four long and hard years to finally defeat the South?” On the surface, the Yankees seemed to possess most of the advantages: a huge population, a standing army and navy, the vast bulk of American industrial might, and a large and effective transportation system. They also had the powerful causes of union and free soil to inspire and propel their soldiers. Yet the North faced a grim and determined foe, whose lack of men and war matériel was balanced somewhat by an abundance of military leadership and combat expertise. Moreover, the war scenario gave an advantage to the defense, not the offense.

The conflict sharply illustrated the predictable results when the Western way of war met its exact duplicate on the field of battle, with each side armed with long-range cannons, new rifles, and even newer breech-loading and repeating weapons.

Over the course of four years, more than 618,000 men would die—more than the combined military losses of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, Korea, and the twentieth century’s two world wars combined. Gettysburg alone, in three bloody days, saw 50,000 killed, wounded, or missing. Sharpsburg—or Antietam—itself produced more casualties than the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War put together. Worse, these were Americans fighting Americans. Stories of brother fighting brother abound. Mary Lincoln’s three brothers all died fighting for the Confederacy, while Varina Davis (Jefferson Davis’s second wife) had relatives in blue. John Crittenden’s sons each held the rank of colonel, but in opposing armies. David Farragut, the hero of Mobile Bay, had lived in Virginia, and Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky, a slave state. Robert E. Lee had a nephew commanding a Union squadron on the James River. Union general George McClellan preferred letting the South go; Sam Houston, the governor of Texas, wanted the South to stay in the Union. As young boys, future presidents Theodore Roosevelt (New York) and Woodrow Wilson (Georgia) prayed for divine blessings, but Roosevelt prayed for the North and Wilson for the South.
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The forces of the Union seemed insurmountable. Northerners boasted a population of more than 20 million, while the white population of the South, that is, those who were eligible to bear arms, numbered under 6 million. Slaves were used in labor situations to supplement the Confederate Army in building bridges, digging trenches, and driving wagons, but the slaves often constituted, at best, a potentially hostile force that had to be guarded, further diminishing active frontline troops. In all, the Union put 2.1 million men into the field: 46,000 draftees, 118,000 paid substitutes, and the rest volunteers in the regular army or militia. Rebel forces totaled 800,000, of which almost one fourth were either draftees or substitutes. It is an irony, then, that today’s neo-Confederates and libertarians who berate the Union as oppressing the rights of free men ignore the fact that the Confederacy forced more free whites under arms than the North.
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Union forces deserted in higher absolute numbers (200,000 to just more than half that number of Confederates), but as a proportion of the total wartime force, the Rebels saw almost 12.5 percent of their army desert, compared to less than 10 percent of the Union forces.

Nevertheless, it would not take long before the Yankees realized the mettle of their opponent. The valor and tenacity of the Rebels, winning battle after battle with smaller forces and holding off the North for four years, is a testament to both their commitment to the Confederate cause (as they saw it) and, more important, to their nurturing as Americans, themselves steeped in the Western way of war. If only in the war’s duration, the élan and skill of the Confederate soldiers is noteworthy.