1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [91]
But the president, far from thanking Scott for his wisdom and diligence, was turning pale with anger. The general’s plan, Lincoln told a confidant the next day, had given him “a cold shock.” Abandon Sumter and Pickens to the Confederates? Moreover, how dare he instruct the president on matters of statecraft? The old soldier had overstepped his bounds, blundering off the military path into the thickets of politics, an area that had never been his strong suit, to put it mildly. (Scott had run for president in 1852 on the Whig ticket; his prodigious ineptitude on the campaign trail had helped seal the party’s demise.)45
In fact, Lincoln had summoned Scott to the White House to talk not about evacuating Sumter but about reinforcing it—and to tell the general to be ready to implement plans for sending in food and supplies. Anderson had “played us false,” the president snapped: the major, for reasons of his own, had been misleading his superiors about the true feasibility of holding on to the fort.46 If Scott was not prepared to carry out his orders, Lincoln concluded coldly, he would find some other person who might do so.47
The general, crimson-faced, stuffed his memorandum back into his tunic and hastily departed, stomping out of the White House just as the first guests were arriving for dinner. It had taken as great an insult as this to make Winfield Scott pass up a meal.
The president played the genial host to perfection that evening. But William H. Russell, the canny journalist, noticed how his homespun stories always seemed to serve some deeper purpose, how he camouflaged himself in the “cloud of merriment” like a magician slipping away in a puff of smoke.48 At the end of the meal, the cabinet officers were startled when Lincoln, with an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, asked them to linger for a few minutes after the other guests had departed. He revealed the truth about General Scott’s absence and told them to return in the morning for an important meeting.
The president could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, his mind racing as it turned over, again and again, the problem of the forts.49
But after months of vacillation and evasion, Lincoln had finally begun showing his mettle—an early sign of the decisiveness that would eventually come to characterize his leadership. Unlike most around him, he was thinking of Sumter in terms of its symbolism not just for the South (as the secessionists had defined it) but for the North. For almost six months, Union forces had been in retreat as the rebels pressed relentlessly forward. Beyond the corridors of power in Washington, in towns and cities throughout the loyal states, Americans were sinking into despair at their leaders’ apparent impotence.
“The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers,” wrote George Templeton Strong, who had voted for Lincoln. “We are a weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national existence.” Indeed, after all the failed attempts at compromise, it was becoming clear to millions of Americans that nothing less than this—America’s very existence as a nation—was now at stake. Acquiescence to secession would bring disgrace before the eyes of the world, proving that the republic had carried within itself, ever since its birth, the seeds of its own destruction. Submission to the South’s demands would be tantamount to the same thing, making a travesty of majority rule.
Newspapers of both parties savaged the new administration. It was beginning to seem, one Republican editor in Wisconsin wrote, that “the North must get down on its knees and ask Jeff Davis for the ‘privilege to breathe.’ ” A Pennsylvania paper quoted a