1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [90]
This was untrue. Scott was, in fact, nowhere in the mansion. Nor was his decrepitude causing him more torment than usual. The general-in-chief’s indisposition was of a political nature.
Scott had come early, summoned by an urgent note from the president. Lincoln’s brief missive had not specifed the matter at hand, but Scott knew it must involve Forts Sumter and Pickens. Indeed, he assumed that the president was finally ready to discuss evacuation plans, a conversation the general had been awaiting with growing impatience. The day after the inauguration, he had informed Lincoln bluntly that any opportunity to reinforce Sumter had long passed, and that the only question was whether its garrison could be withdrawn before the rebels attacked. A few days later, Scott even took it upon himself to draft orders for the evacuation and forward them to the War Department pending the president’s final approval. Major Anderson and his men, he said, should leave Sumter literally as soon as they could find a boat to carry them.42
Moreover, Scott knew that almost all of Lincoln’s other top advisors, as well as the heads of both major political parties in the North, shared his opinions. Stephen Douglas, the Democratic leader, had publicly endorsed evacuating Sumter. (He was also pushing a scheme to replace the old Union, at least temporarily, with a kind of North American free-trade zone stretching from Upper Canada to the Isthmus of Panama.) Seward, still considered chieftain of the Republican Party, was working more actively—and at times covertly—toward the same end. The secretary of state still believed that the Deep South might be coaxed and petted back into the Union, and, communicating through Southern intermediaries, he had continually assured Confederate authorities that Sumter would soon be in their hands, once even asking them to inform President Davis that the fort would be evacuated within three days. At cabinet meetings, nearly everyone sided with Seward: only Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general, consistently argued for reinforcement. Even as uncompromising a radical as Senator Sumner made it known he was ready to yield to the inevitable.43
It was with much self-confidence, then—and not a little condescension—that General Scott met Lincoln before the first White House dinner. At six foot five and more than three hundred pounds, Scott was one of the few men in Washington who towered physically over the president. His opinion of his new commander-in-chief had never been especially high; back in November, he’d snorted that if he’d ever laid eyes on the former Illinois congressman during his brief stint in Washington, he certainly couldn’t recall it. Presidents might come and go—he had served eight of them in his years as general-in-chief—but the hero of Lundy’s Lane and Veracruz remained. Scott took it for granted, naturally, that he would steer the administration’s military policies himself. Now he barely gave Lincoln a chance to speak before he began lecturing the president about the Southern forts, and unfolded a memorandum on the subject he had penned earlier that day. Not only must Sumter obviously be evacuated, he said, but Fort Pickens as well. Such a gesture of magnanimity toward “our Southern friends,” Scott opined, would unquestionably keep the Upper South in the Union, and might even bring South Carolina and Florida back in. (Actually,