Coming Fury, Volume 1 (55 page)

The probabilities caught up with Lee almost immediately. On April 18, the day Virginia’s troops were moving on Harper’s Ferry, the day after the convention had voted for secession, Lee was called into conference in Washington by Francis P. Blair, Sr., who asked him point-blank if he would take command of the United States Army. Blair made it clear that he was asking this question with the full approval of President Lincoln. Afterward, Blair wrote that Lee expressed a certain devotion to the Union and said that he could not make up his mind without first consulting General Scott; Lee himself, after the war, said that he told Blair he could take no part in any invasion of the South, and he added that he went to see Scott simply to tell him what his decision had been. In any case, he called on Scott as soon as he left Blair and told him what had happened.

The meeting with Scott was brief. Lee told Scott that he was going to resign and admitted that the struggle was hard. He did not believe in secession, he said, and if he owned every slave in the South he would free them all if that would bring peace; but to fight against Virginia was not in him. Lee went back to Arlington. Two days later he wrote a formal letter of resignation and sent it to the War Department, asking that it be made effective at once.

Those two intervening days appear to have been days of emotional upheaval rather than of intellectual analysis. To his sister, Mrs. Anne Marshall, of Baltimore, Lee wrote that the whole South “is in a state of revolution” and that Virginia had been drawn into it. He himself could see no necessity for this state of things, but his course seemed clear: “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to
draw my sword.” To his brother, Captain Sydney Smith Lee, of the Navy, he wrote in much the same vein; he had thought to wait until Virginia’s voters had passed on the ordinance of secession, but the war had actually begun and he might at any moment be ordered to do things which he could not conscientiously do. Accordingly, “save in defense of my native State I have no desire ever again to draw my sword.” The same phrase about drawing his sword only in defense of his native state had appeared in his letter of resignation addressed to Simon Cameron. In a letter which she wrote to friends at about this time, Mrs. Lee said: “You can scarcely conceive the struggle it has cost Robert to resign to contend against the flag he has so long honored disapproving, as we both do, the course of the North & South, yet our fate is now linked with the latter & may the prayers of the faithful for the restoration of peace be heard.… We shall remain quietly at home as long as possible.”
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This would not be very long. Two days later a delegation sent by the Virginia authorities invited Lee to go to Richmond. He went at once, and on April 23 he was made commander of Virginia’s armed forces. The time of waiting was over; Lee had not so much made up his mind as followed his heart. In this he was doing what most of his fellow Americans were doing.

In Boston, George Ticknor wrote to a friend in England: “We have been slow to kindle; but we have made a Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace of it at last, and the heat will remain, and the embers will smoulder, long after the flames that now light up everything shall cease to be seen or felt.”
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CHAPTER SIX

The Southern Confederacy had been in existence a little more than two months, and in that time it had made much progress. By the middle of April it had acquired both a fort and a state which it had not had before. Its credit was good, subscriptions of $8,000,000 having been received on a national loan that asked for $5,000,000; a new and much larger issue would be launched very shortly. The Post Office Department was about ready to go into business despite a lamentable lack of proper stamps; courts had been set up in most of the states, and there would soon be a patent office, it being evident that the Yankees had no monopoly on the inventive genius. The Confederate State Department was already in action, and long before Sumter was fired on it had sent commissioners abroad to explain secession to the powers of Europe and (it was devoutly hoped) to win recognition and treaties of friendship, commerce, and navigation.

Significantly, the principal commissioner was William L. Yancey. The prince of fire-eaters was being sent far away from the nation he had done so much to create; he was entrusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions, not so much because anyone supposed that he had a talent for diplomacy—his enormous skill lay in the rough-and-tumble of American politics—as because he might be an embarrassment if he stayed at home. Leaders who could eat fire had served their turn. The destiny of the Confederacy now was in the hands of more moderate men who were prepared to emphasize the eternal logic and justice of Southern secession, ready to
meet force with unmeasured force if need be but still abiding in the faith that reasonable men must eventually accept the Confederacy at its own valuation.

Yancey and his fellow commissioners, Pierre A. Rost, of Louisiana, and A. Dudley Mann, of Georgia, were to work especially on Great Britain. Secretary of State Toombs, himself a man of action who would soon find the dignity of his office too confining, had given detailed instructions. They were to reveal to the British statesmen the complete and undeniable legitimacy of the new Confederate nation; they were also to remind them that this nation was where most of Britain’s cotton came from, and were to hint delicately that the supply would probably be cut off in case of a long war. It was hoped, in Montgomery, that this reasonable presentation would be enough. Editor Rhett, of Charleston, was complaining that Yancey ought to have authority to bait the net properly, offering to the British nation of shopkeepers irresistible trade concessions in return for a binding offensive and defensive alliance, but the government was playing a more sober game.
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Davis’s attitude was revealed in his address to a special session of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate states, called together after the long dispute at Fort Sumter finally exploded into actual war. “All we ask is to be let alone,” he cried. The moment Lincoln showed himself ready to adopt a let-alone policy, “the sword will drop from our grasp and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce that can but be mutually beneficial.” For the time being, however, the sword must be held. The Confederacy had 19,000 men in the field—at Charleston and at Pensacola, in Fort Pulaski below Savannah, in Fort Morgan at Mobile, and in Forts Jackson and St. Philip at the mouth of the Mississippi—and it was sending 16,000 more to Virginia. It was preparing to organize and equip an army of 100,000 men, and as long as the United States showed a desire to subjugate the South, “we will continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence and self government.” But there could be no reasonable doubt of final success of the cause.
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Davis would have no fire-eaters setting the pace. A man of profound self-control, he would avoid the unpredictable violence of revolution; he would play this by the book. Both Presidents
would, as a matter of fact, until it became impossible to play it that way any longer. One of the saddest facts about the nation’s final plunge over the brink is that even after the fighting had actually started, both Davis and Lincoln responded to some dim, deeply held feeling that perhaps the point of no return had not really been passed, that there might yet by some miracle be a bloodless solution and a healing. Long afterward the Confederate President’s wife, Varina Howell Davis, remembered how her husband took the news that Major Anderson had surrendered Fort Sumter. His first remark was that he was glad so little blood had been shed. Then, most strangely, he remarked: “Separation is not yet, of necessity, final. There has been no blood spilled more precious than that of a mule.” And Lincoln, in this same month of April, talking to a group of “frontier guards” at the White House, said an equally unexpected thing: “I have desired as sincerely as any man—I sometimes think more than any other man—that our present difficulties might be settled without the shedding of blood. I will not say that all hope is yet gone.”
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Separation not yet final, hope not yet gone … but each man had set himself a task which he would not give up, had taken a position to which he would cling with the most uncompromising tenacity. More than that: the immense emotion that was welling up from bottomless deeps in the hearts of people all over the country was stronger now than any President and would carry America beyond all formalities and restraints. The country had entered upon a revolution, even though it was not quite clear just who was making the revolution or whom the revolution was directed against, and it would at last wring from Lincoln the bitter cry (in which austere Davis might well have joined) that he could not claim to have controlled events but must admit rather that events had controlled him.

Revolution sets soldiers fighting civilians, and it can pick a city street for a battlefield. So it was now. This was civil war, a time of overthrow and destruction and rising savagery, and the first real fight came when a senseless riot went rolling across Baltimore, with men in uniform and men not in uniform stretched dead on the pavement after it had passed … and with a new forced draft applied to Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.

The border states had been considered the key pieces in the
secession crisis, and in some ways Maryland was the most important of the lot. If Maryland went out of the Union (Virginia having gone already), the national capital would be wholly cut off and the government could be imprisoned by its foes, in which case the government would probably lose the war for sheer inability to function. At any cost whatever, the Lincoln administration had to keep Maryland in the Union—with a gun at the nape of the neck, if in no other way.

Cotton-state agents who came proselytizing for additions to the Confederacy in the weeks just after South Carolina seceded had a thin time of it in Maryland; the state listened politely but refused to respond. Although the Mason and Dixon line formed its northern boundary, Maryland was only half southern; it was Dixieland along the eastern shore, but it was straight Pennsylvania west of Baltimore, and Baltimore itself was partly a southern city and partly a trading center of the northern type, prospering because it was both a gateway to the Middle West and an outpost of eastern finance. In a time of civil war a state thus divided was certain to have trouble, and Maryland got its full share at a very early stage.

When Lincoln called for troops, Maryland’s Governor Thomas H. Hicks, Unionist-minded but fully aware that very careful handling was called for, hurried to Washington and got from Secretary Cameron and General Scott a promise that Maryland’s militia would be used only inside the state and in the District of Columbia. He passed this assurance on to the people of Maryland, and in a sober proclamation he warned that “the consequences of a rash step will be fearful” and urged everyone to refrain from words or deeds that might “precipitate us into the gulf of discord and ruin gaping to receive us.” Maryland would furnish her quota of troops, giving the government a conditional but invaluable loyalty which might or might not last for the duration of the war.
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The trouble that Governor Hicks foresaw came almost at once. Washington needed troops, being almost totally undefended, and because Washington’s only railroad connection with the North was the railroad line that came down from Baltimore, the troops Washington got had to cross Maryland. The first contingent reached the capital on April 18, the day the Harper’s Ferry arsenal was lost; a detachment of 460 Pennsylvania volunteers, whose seeming unreadiness
led John Hay to comment acidly on the “unlicked patriotism” that came in “ragged and unarmed,” and a company of regulars brought from Indian-country posts in Minnesota. These came down from Harrisburg, were alternately hooted and cheered as they went through Baltimore, and reached Washington without incident, but their passing stung the sensitivities of the numerous Southern sympathizers in and around Baltimore. This transit of troops bent on coercion of the South was an outrage, and if there was any more of it, Baltimore’s Southerners would take steps. Rumors of coming violence reached Washington, and Secretary Cameron warned Governor Hicks by telegraph that “unlawful combinations of misguided citizens” proposed to use force to keep troops from coming to Washington. This warning might have done some good, except that no one in the War Department told either Governor Hicks or Mayor George William Brown, of Baltimore, when the next contingent of troops was due to pass through Baltimore. The local authorities, who knew without being told by Cameron that something was likely to pop, thus lacked the one bit of knowledge that would enable them to take effective precautions.
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