Upon the Altar of the Nation Read online

  South Carolinians prided themselves as well on their “conservatism,” a blanket term that encapsulated their differences from the “Unitarian” North. Their America was republican, not democratic, and this meant a society premised on the principle of ordered inequality—aristocratic hierarchy—not equality. In their world, all men and women were created unequal.4 Such a social order established the planter masters at the top, the slaves at the bottom, and the yeomanry in between. Within the Southern worldview, therefore, slavery constituted a good that protected slaves in a race-based hierarchy of superior and inferior. Slavery appeared as a win-win, both for the black slave and the white owner. Proslavery apologists would argue that any republican society without slavery as its basis could not permanently survive.

  Alongside political arguments for an unequal, slave-based republic came powerful religious arguments. Clerical voices—which mattered greatly as moral arbiters and upholders of a virtuous social order—so meshed evangelical Christianity with Southern republicanism that one seemingly could not exist without the other. The historian Stephanie McCurry aptly summarizes Southern planter ideology as “conservative Christian republicanism.”5 In this view, evangelical Christianity, Southern republicanism, and “friends” to slaves existed in a galvanic and ultimately disastrous alchemy.

  With the momentous close of 1860, the self-proclaimed “free and independent” state of South Carolina had good reason to believe that this time others would not only embrace their proclamation but also follow their lead. They would not have long to wait. On New Year’s Day 1861, the Charleston Mercury boldly proclaimed:The spirit of the South is rising to meet the great emergency her safety and honor requires; and as State after State withdraws from the Union, the fixed attention which our little State drew upon itself will be turned to the grand aggregation of free and independent Southern states seeking, in a common assemblage, those new means of preserving their liberties and institutions which their separate organization renders necessary.

  By February 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had joined the “little state” in secession. The seceding states adopted the Confederate constitution on February 8, conspicuously “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in its preamble. Following these landmark events, Jefferson Davis, a former Mississippi senator and secretary of war, was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States of America and commander in chief of Confederate forces.6

  At the start, many military officers, Northern opinion shapers, and ordinary citizens were more than willing to let the South secede peacefully. Without ever slackening in their denunciations of slavery and its evils, they nevertheless assumed that under the Constitution, slavery in the existing slave states was up to those states and no one else to abolish. If, instead of abolishing slavery, the cotton states chose to betray the Constitution and leave the Union, that was an evil they would have to answer for; but secession was not a cause for costly offensive military action.

  On February 14, 1861, the Independent, a nationally influential religious weekly, began a column entitled “What Shall Be Done?” The writers had no doubt what America’s course of action should be—let the South leave. Slavery was the major issue dividing the nation, and by allowing the South to leave, “the problem of the perpetuity of slavery is coming to its solution. We have long feared an insurrection of the slaves. We now see an insurrection of the masters.” The only thing staying God’s vengeful hand from sinful slaveholders, the writers asserted, was their association with the God-fearing North. With secession, God would be freed to exercise “that retributive Providence which is ordering their dreadful destiny.”

  On March 21, the writers’ opinion had not changed: “Let them go! How evident is it that God, for great and beneficent purposes of his own, has permitted this insanity to come upon them! Let them go, to work out their own destiny by themselves!”

  In a fast-day sermon delivered on April 4, Zachary Eddy, a Congregational minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, was still not ready for war. Eddy reasoned that the North must let the “idolatrous” South go peacefully. Clearly they were already a new nation. After citing various offenses—including the seizure of federal property, the arming of state militias for self-defense, and the commission of foreign ministers—Eddy concluded that there could be only one response: “I submit that all these facts demonstrate an accomplished revolution—a revolution which will hardly go backward. It is high time to look the melancholy fact full in the face, that the union is actually dissolved.”7

  Some Democratic clergy in the North not only accepted secession but went so far as to say that the abolitionist Northerners were worse than the seceders and should be held primarily to blame. In Bath, Maine, the Congregational minister John Fiske had used the occasion of the January 4 fast to complain bitterly: There is far more danger to the peace of the country, in my opinion, from the bad, bitter, unscriptural temper with which the institution of slavery has been assailed, than from slavery itself.... Party strifes, divisions of opinions, occasional indications of disorder may be expected always to occur. If all slavery were abolished to-day, they would continue to be as many and as violent in the future as they are now.8

  Other Northern arbiters of morality had their doubts. From their perspective, the Union embodied an idea and a rule of law that was unbreakable. This was precisely President Lincoln’s position in his First Inaugural Address:I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.... It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union,—that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

  One secession had led to seven. If seven states could secede, why not more? Union was not like marriage, Lincoln asserted; divorce was not an option.9

  Abolitionists occupied a conflicted position toward secession. Followers of William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833, had themselves urged Northern secession from a sinful slaveholding South.10 After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Garrison publicly burned the Constitution. Many other abolitionists had pacifistic principles that discouraged all talk of war as a response to secession. Most doubted the rightness of a war fought solely to preserve the Union. If war were waged for universal and immediate emancipation, that would be just. But in a civil war launched simply for the Union, the cause was territory—not justice—and was therefore wrong.

  Rare was the abolitionist who had much good to say about Lincoln. He seemed too timid about slavery. In Worcester, Massachusetts, an ardent abolitionist named Martha LeBaron Goddard made clear in her correspondence her pronounced dislike for President Lincoln and the cause of war. Even before Lincoln’s inauguration, she suspected his motives: “I think of nothing but the war, am heart-sick sometimes at the slowness and timidity of men around me—and sometimes fiercely indignant—at Abe Lincoln, whom I don’t trust and don’t like—and sometimes, thank God, glad in my soul for a word or act for freedom.” One month later, Goddard was willing to let the South go: “The Charleston article in the last Atlantic interested me, and made me feel anew how much better it would be to let south Carolina go, and any other states that wish to share her ‘outer darkness.’ ”11

  Though abolitionists were highly vocal and widely identified in the South as the dominant intellectual and moral influence on the North, the numbers of radical abolitionists were small and not growing. They were more of a symbolic presence than a real numerical force. By 1861 subscriptions to Garrison’s Liberator had dwindled to twelve hundred.12 Southerners envisioned abolitionists as all of the North—or at least New England—while Northerners saw them as extreme and hostile to the Constitution and its provisions supporting slavery.

  Even if many in the white North were willing to let t
he South go in early 1861, large parts of the South outside of South Carolina were hesitant to secede. 13 Robert Lewis Dabney, a young Presbyterian pastor who would become Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff and the preeminent champion of Confederate nationalism, feared secession outright.14 In a letter to Richmond’s venerable Presbyterian minister Moses Hoge, written in 1860, Dabney styled himself a “Washington-Madison politician” who feared disunion and the “terrific” consequences of a war setting all adrift in “a sea which has no chart.”15

  On President Buchanan’s national fast day in January 1861, Hoge and T. V. Moore—the two most powerful Presbyterian clerics in Richmond—reflected antebellum strictures against “political preaching” and refused to speak to the national crisis from their pulpits. If their integrity as “prophets” was to be maintained, politics would have to be kept out of the pulpit. In a letter to Dabney, Hoge insisted that “Moore and myself do not mean to introduce anything political into our sermons, but wish to direct the minds of the people from man to God.... I think of taking for my text: Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.”16 In a letter to Princeton Theological Seminary’s Charles Hodge, a conservative former Whig who had voted for Lincoln, Dabney spoke for many in his city when he expressed hope for reconciliation between North and South. In a gracious reply, Hodge asserted that no “sane man” wanted war but preferred instead a “peaceable separation.” At the same time, he feared that “forcible separation is inevitably war.”17

  Until the provocative events at Fort Sumter, Lincoln himself did not believe there would be a war or, if there was one, that secession would be permanent or widely supported. Nor did he put much thought into how he might prepare for war. At that point, the newly elected Lincoln wanted desperately to avoid conflict of any kind that would probably lead to more secessions from the upper South.18 He continued to hope for a redemptive core of “Unionists” who would put down the secession movement and expose a handful of renegade “rebel” planters to be a breed of troublemakers as rare to the South as abolitionists were to the North. Lincoln repeatedly made clear to all sides, from Southern “fire-eaters” to New England “abolitionists,” his willingness to entertain compromises that would sacrifice the interests and freedom of slaves for the prospect of saving the Union. He even lent his tacit support to a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right of the South to their slaves in perpetuity, and he supported colonization for those freed.

  Lincoln would not budge on two issues, however: the right of states to secede from the Union and the expansion of slavery into the territories.19 Neither was allowable or negotiable. Lincoln’s patriotism burned deep and informed his morality. Ever since the Senate campaign debates with Stephen Douglas and the presidential campaign that followed, Lincoln had made it plain that there was only one ultimate good that required unlimited loyalty—the Declaration of Independence and the Union that flowed from it. This loyalty was by no means an abolitionist platform, let alone a call for racial equality, but it did have profound implications for the spread of slavery into the vast United States territories.20

  In his Cooper Union address, Lincoln made it clear that his brief extended only to the territories and fell well short of emancipation in the slave states:Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the power of emancipation is in the Federal Government ... as to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slaveholding States only [to emancipate themselves]. The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has the power of restraining the extension of the institution—the power to insure that a slave insurrection shall never occur on any American soil which is now free from slavery.

  To fellow Republicans, he insisted, “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.”21

  Lincoln’s belief in the Union and American prosperity was confirmed by his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence, which had long since become his political bible. The Constitution might change, and indeed should change through amendments, but the Declaration on which it rested represented its eternal and immutable lodestone. Central to that Declaration, and to the Union, was the universal proposition that “all men are created equal.” Using the metaphors, respectively, of apples for the Declaration of Independence and a picture frame of silver for the Constitution, Lincoln argued in 1860 that “[t]he picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.”22

  Lying at the heart of Lincoln’s embrace of the Declaration was the abstract idea of freedom in a nineteenth-century romantic context. As an idea, freedom would remain forever protean and unbound to time, boundaries, races, ethnicities, or gender. It transcended law and politics, and grounded a metaphysical republic for the ages. In an 1859 letter praising Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln conceded that the Revolution could have been waged without Jefferson’s paean to equality, but it would have been merely a political revolt. By including that phrase, Jefferson “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth.”23

  Most Northern Republicans shared Lincoln’s hatred for the institution of slavery, yet, as he did, they accepted both Southerners’ constitutional right to own slaves and the obligations imposed on them by the Fugitive Slave Law to return, by force if necessary, runaway slaves. Most also shared racist assumptions regarding the inferiority of African Americans, slave or free. But beyond these concessions, they agreed with Lincoln on two points: slavery could not be allowed to spread any further into the territories, and secession was not a moral right but an act of unjust rebellion.

  Like Lincoln, Confederate president Jefferson Davis did not expect war. Nor did he prepare for it. Much of his time was spent assembling a government and a military. The numbers of well-wishers and appointment seekers threatened to swamp him. Little around him portended war.24 Unlike Lincoln, he knew that Northern Union sentiments in the South were weak and ill equipped to spark a move back into the Union. From his vantage point in patriotic Richmond, Davis believed that once Lincoln saw that the Confederacy was intent on creating its own nation, he would have no choice but to let them go.

  Throughout the early debates and saber rattling, few asked hard questions about the morality of war should it erupt. The word was constantly on everyone’s lips, either as a tragedy to be avoided or an adventure to be embraced. But few explored the moral meaning of war or the “laws of war” with reference to a potential civil war. Their failure to address issues of a just war before hostilities ensued effectively set the stage for Americans to ignore them after hostilities began. For such moral unpreparedness both sides would pay a horrific price.

  CHAPTER 2

  “LET THE STRIFE BEGIN”

  Whatever the expectations of Lincoln and Davis, South Carolina was itching for a fight and would not take its foot off Lincoln’s neck. The focal points of pressure were the Federal forts in Charleston Harbor. While Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Florida, was more strategically important to Federal control of the Gulf Coast, the Charleston forts Moultrie and Sumter were more politically important. And so they became all-important.1

  Better to defend his Federal forces, the commander of the Charleston forts, Major Robert Anderson, a Southerner and friend of Jefferson Davis, spiked the cannons at Moultrie and moved his forces to the more defensible Fort Sumter. Anderson hoped that war could be averted at any cost, but he remained loyal to his commander in chief. Immediately after Lincoln’s election, Anderson sent word that Sumter would be almost impossible to defend without substantial reinforcements; supplies were running low as well. Sooner or later the forts would have to be reprovisioned or abandoned. Either way, fateful decisions had to be made.

  To South Carolinian sensibilities, reprovisioning of Federal forts in their new nation would constitute an act of war.2 In fact, they were convinced that t
he first blow had already been struck when Major Anderson spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie. Neither did it help South Carolinian pride to know that, despite their leadership for secession, theirs was the only secession state besides Florida that failed to seize all Federal properties on its soil.

  While loath to be the architect of civil war, Lincoln was not ready to vacate the fort peacefully, despite the advice of General Winfield Scott, the aging hero of the Mexican War. In his inaugural address, Lincoln asserted his intention to “hold, occupy, and possess” Federal properties wherever they be found.3

  Meanwhile, Major Anderson’s plight grew worse by the day. On March 29, after suffering a sleepless night with a migraine headache, Lincoln authorized an unarmed flotilla of supplies to relieve the fort. Most of his advisers pointed out that such an act would be interpreted as an act of war, but Lincoln was not to be deterred. The expedition set sail by April 6.4 An additional expedition was ordered for Fort Pickens in Pensacola. Nobody knew what the outcome of these resupply missions might be, nor did anyone know what Lincoln would do should South Carolina’s response be hostile.

  When President Davis received word that Lincoln intended to provision Fort Sumter with nonmilitary supplies, he declared the attempt an “act of aggression.” Davis knew that the only way to lend plausibility to a real national independence for the Confederacy in the eyes of England and the uncommitted border states was to make a strong response. Already the Daily Richmond Enquirer had responded to Lincoln’s inaugural with a vitriolic declaration of war: “Sectional war, declared by Mr. Lincoln, awaits only the signal gun from the insulted Southern Confederacy, to light its horrid fires all along the border of Virginia.”5 To fail to act would be to concede defeat. And in any event, the outraged South Carolinians might attack the fort on their own if they sensed presidential timidity. Davis felt the extreme tension of an ultimatum and went to bed with a migraine of his own.6