Terrible Swift Sword (2 page)

_{Terrible Swift Sword}

CHAPTER
ONE

The Leaders and the Led

1.
Tornado Weather

On the Monday
after
the Battle of Bull Run the Congress of the United States went about its duties
in a dignified and abstracted calm. Human fragments of the routed army drifted
up and down the streets of Washington, clotting the sidewalks and alleys,
eddying sluggishly about the bars, as soiled and depressing to see as fragments
of the broken republic itself, but the legislators had little to say openly
about the defeated soldiers or about the disaster that had taken place. In the
Senate the new tariff was up for consideration, and there was also discussion
of a proposal to increase the naval medical corps; and in the House the members
devoted themselves to Mr. Crittenden's bill defining the cause and scope of the
war.

That the war might
grow and change immeasurably because of what had happened during the last
twenty-four hours was neither argued nor, apparently, thought about. Mr.
Crittenden's bill was static. It asserted that the war had been forced on the
country by Southern malcontents, and held that the Federal government's only
aim in pressing on toward an assured final victory was "to preserve the
Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states
unimpaired." This was the definition of a small war, and the shattering defeat
just experienced was a disturbing sign that the war was not going to be small.
It might grow very great indeed—great enough to involve at last the dignity,
equality, and rights of human beings as well as of states—and if it went in
that direction there was no telling what might come of it.

But
the House was in no mood to examine the future. Avoiding the hysteria which
Bull Run had evoked in so many quarters, the House was still willing to see the
war as something manageable, an incident rather than a cataclysm. Even Thaddeus
Stevens, the Republican leader, brooding darkly on the tragedy whose ultimate
dimensions he perhaps saw more clearly than anyone else, warning the
legislators that the terrible laws of war were their only guide now—even
Stevens was content to vote for this enactment, and in the end Mr. Crittenden's
measure was adopted with just two votes cast against it.
¹

One
of these dissenting votes came from Congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle, an
antislavery man from Ohio's Western Reserve who confessed that he could hardly
believe his ears as he heard member after member vote for an explicit statement
that the war would be fought in such a way that it would not affect the
institution of slavery in the slightest degree. He went to the members' lobby
after he had voted, and there some of his colleagues urged him to go back and
change his vote. Riddle flared up at them. Slavery, he said, was doomed to die,
and every sensible man knew it, and when it died it would not simply be voted
out of existence; it would be abolished "by convulsion, fire and
blood," and the convulsion had already begun. The convulsion was, in
short, this war which (as Mr. Riddle felt) was being so badly defined, and he
wanted the war recognized as the thing that would kill slavery: "I mean
to make a conquest of it; to beat it to extinction under the iron hooves of our
war horses." Northerners who thought that the war could be fought without
touching the slavery issue (he said) were like children who tiptoed about in
the dark for fear of waking a destroying ogre. For himself, he believed that
the ogre was already awake and that the thing to do now was to kill it.
²

In the middle of that
summer of 1861, the thing Mr. Riddle was talking about was actually more
disturbing than the Bull Run defeat itself. The military disaster was
humiliating, even infuriating, but it was not—to a people who, after all, were
fairly tough-minded—really frightening. It might even help to inspire them to
put down secession and to restore the shattered American past in all its
beauty. But to say flatly that the war would be fought against slavery (thereby
implying unmistakably that it would be fought for slavery's opposite, freedom,
which is unlimited) was to bid an eternal goodbye to the cherished past, to
confess that it could never be restored on earth. It was to invoke revolution,
far-ranging and uncontrollable, in order to put down mere rebellion; and at
this point in their development the people were not ready for any such
invocation.

Still, there it was: if the war became
great it would transcend the intentions of its authors. This might have momentous
results at home, and it was beginning to be apparent that it could also have
consequences overseas. It was apparent, at least, to the Secretary of State,
William H. Seward, who had sought to make use of the fact in his conduct of the
nation's foreign policy.

This
policy struck Charles Francis Adams, the minister to England, as almost
inconceivably bold and aggressive, so reckless that for a time he suspected
that someone in the administration had gone mad. Mr. Adams reached London two
months before the battle of Bull Run was fought, and soon after he got there he
received a letter from Secretary Seward saying that the United States would
unhesitatingly make war on any European nation or combination of nations which
extended aid, comfort, or recognition to the Southern Confederacy.

It
was hard to be sure about Mr. Seward. Mr. Adams's son Henry, looking at the man
from his own special vantage point, saw a slouching figure with "a head
like a wise macaw," a gravelly voice, disorderly clothes, and a baffling
way of indulging in loose talk which might or might not reflect his inner
thoughts. Mr. Seward, the younger Adams reflected, had worn a politician's mask
so long that neither he nor anyone else was always sure whether the impression
he made at any given moment was real or contrived. Seward had a basic integrity
which impressed the older Adams (along with an uncomplicated sense of fun
which appealed to President Lincoln) and Mr. Adams believed that someone else
must have fathered his foreign policy. In his diary he remarked that a conflict
with "a handful of slave-holding states" seemed to be giving the
Lincoln administration all that it could handle, and he wondered: "What
are we to do when we throw down the glove to all Europe?"
⁸

If he had known all of the facts Mr.
Adams would have been even more painfully baffled. The policy was not merely
Mr. Seward's own, but it reached London in a form much less sharp than Mr. Seward
had originally intended. As the Secretary drafted it, the letter had been
downright provocative, a taunting challenge to the British government to view
secession, the blockade, and all related matters precisely as Washington saw
them—or to fight. Furthermore, Mr. Seward had planned that the unexpurgated
text of the letter should be given to Lord John Russell, the British Secretary
for Foreign Affairs, immediately upon its receipt in London. Henry Adams wrote
that if his father had shown the letter to the Foreign Secretary "he would
have made a war in five minutes,"
⁴
and it may be that this
was just what Mr. Seward had in mind. In March he had suggested a war overseas
as a means of reuniting America, and the idea continued to fascinate him; not
until after the Bull Run disaster did he abandon the notion that most
Southerners would rally around the old flag if some foreign nation could be
maneuvered into firing on it.

It was Abraham Lincoln who had toned the
letter down by careful editing; and it was Lincoln who had added the all-important
proviso that the letter was simply a statement of policy for the minister's
guidance and was not under any circumstances to be shown to anyone else.
⁵
The policy enunciated remained stiff enough, in all conscience; everything
that Mr. Adams said and did in London must be said and done in the knowledge
that his government would make war on an England openly friendly to the
Confederacy. But he did not have to go around with a chip on his shoulder, or
publicly tell the British government to mend its ways. Much was left to his
discretion, which was unfailing. What he did not know was that this opportunity
for the exercise of discretion would never have been opened to him if President
Lincoln had not first exercised discretion of his own.

Charles
Francis Adams was prepared to expect nothing of the kind, for his opinion of
Mr. Lincoln just then was low. Mr. Adams was the son of one President and the
grandson of another; he had lived in Paris and in London as a boy, he had
studied law in the office of Daniel Webster, and he had served in the
Massachusetts legislature and in the United States Congress; he was Boston and
Harvard at full strength, undiluted and not susceptible of dilution; and he had
not been impressed by President Lincoln. Mr. Seward had taken him to the White
House late in April, just after his ministerial appointment had been arranged,
and in the Presidential quarters which still (in this caller's mind) seemed
almost to belong to old John Quincy Adams there was this long, ungainly,
loose-jointed man, awkward, apparently ill at ease, with big coarse features,
shabbily dressed, in shapeless pants and worn carpet slippers—Abe Lincoln of
Illinois with the bark on. It was no sight for an Adams; nor was memory of the
sight made more pleasant by the fact that instead of discussing foreign policy
and the British the President talked to Mr. Seward about some petty matter of
political patronage in far-away Chicago.
⁶
Better knowledge of the
President lay in the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Adams did the best he could; as
modified, the letter left him a good deal of leeway. He wrote that his function
seemed to be "to prevent the mutual irritation from coming to a downright
quarrel," and Lord John Russell was a man he could talk to: elderly,
reserved, thoughtful, with a cold blue eye —a man not altogether unlike Mr.
Adams himself. His Lordship confessed that he had twice talked, unofficially,
with the Confederate commissioners sent to London by Jefferson Davis, and when
Mr. Adams remarked that a continuation of these unofficial conferences
"could hardly fail to be viewed by us as hostile in spirit" the
Foreign Minister said that he had no expectation of seeing the commissioners
any more. By July, Mr. Adams felt that relations with Great Britain were in a
fairly promising condition; "I have no idea that anybody wants war."
⁷

Yet
the British did not quite seem to understand the kind of war the American
government was fighting. "They think this is a hasty quarrel, the mere
result of passion, which will be arranged as soon as the cause of it shall pass
off," wrote Mr. Adams. "They do not comprehend the connection which
slavery has with it, because we do not at once preach emancipation. Hence they
go to the other extreme and argue that it is not an element of the
struggle." Bull Run, to be sure, set off a wave of pro-Confederate
sentiment, but Mr. Adams believed that it was important to remember that
"Great Britain always looks to her own interest as a paramount law of her
action in foreign affairs."
⁸

This
was the point Secretary Seward was thinking about when he drafted his defiant
letter. His tart sentences had been framed to warn the British ruling class
that this American war was one they just could not afford to enter. If they did
get into it, Seward remarked, the result would be another war between
"the European and American branches of the British race," strongly
resembling the war for American independence, fought less than a century ago.
"Europe atoned by forty years of suffering," he wrote, "for the
error that Great Britain committed in provoking the contest. If that nation
shall now repeat the same great error, the social convulsions which will
follow may not be so long but they will be more general. When they shall have
ceased it will, we think, be seen, whatever may have been the fortunes of
other nations that it is not the United States that will have come out of them
with its precious constitution altered or its honestly obtained dominion in any
degree abridged." It would be well, the Secretary concluded, for the
British to reflect that in such a war "our cause will involve the
independence of nations and the rights of human nature."
⁹

Secretary
Seward thus was brandishing democracy and inviting the conservative British to
contemplate it (hinting as well that the loss of privilege might be accompanied
by the loss of Canada). He was saying, almost in so many words, that a
revolutionary upheaval was germinating somewhere below the surface of this war
between North and South, and he was suggesting that the American government
could survive such an upheaval but that the governments of the established nations
of Europe could not. To his wife he had written that if war did develop between
America and England "it will be the strife of the younger branch of the
British stock, for freedom, against the elder, for slavery"; he believed
that it would be dreadful, "but the end will be sure and swift."
¹⁰

Secretary
Seward, to be sure, may have been talking through his hat. So far, revolution
was only germinating. Whatever values and perils might be added if the war
became an all-out struggle for human rights, that change had not yet been made
and there was no sure indication that it ever would be made. Congress was all
but unanimous in its declaration that the war had nothing whatever to do with
slavery, and when it spoke thus Congress unquestionably spoke for a majority.
The slavery issue, like a fulminate of mercury cap which could set off an
immense explosion, had been carefully wrapped in protective swaddling so that
it might not be jarred unduly. If the war could be fought with some restraint,
limited by the sober design of its leaders and kept always under proper control,
the disastrous shock could very likely be averted.