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By Root 1733 0

none of them, and appointed them mostly according to the need to balance patronage among key states and political factions. “Neither, on the other hand, did they know him,” his secretaries Nicolay and Hay would later recall. “He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt due to themselves.… Perhaps the first real question of the Lincoln Cabinet was, ‘Who is the greatest man?’ It is pretty safe to assert that no one—not even he himself—believed it was Abraham Lincoln.”53

But now Lincoln revealed the momentous decision he had just made without consulting any of these respected statesmen: he had ordered Captain Fox to be ready to depart for Charleston Harbor in little more than a week’s time if ordered to do so. It doubtless interested the president to note that his cabinet members’ opinions, too, had begun to shift. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, considered the group’s staunchest Republican partisan, had previously been wavering on the Sumter question. Now he came out firmly in favor of reinforcement. So did Gideon Welles, the sober-sided secretary of the navy. Still, the president did not commit himself. Perhaps Anderson was right after all. While Fox prepared his tugboats to launch, Lincoln could continue to ponder.54

Whom was the president to trust: Anderson, whose loyalty might be doubted but whose military expertise was unquestioned; or Fox, whose loyalty was indubitable but whose grasp of naval strategy seemed tenuous at best?55

The starkness of this decision, and the magnitude of the stakes, seemed too much for Lincoln to bear. The past few weeks had already taken a physical toll; those who knew him well had been astonished at how drawn and haggard he seemed. Not long after the cabinet meeting broke up, the president collapsed into bed again, incapacitated by a migraine “sick headache” such as he hadn’t had in years. For the next three days, he plunged into one of the spells of profound depression that had plagued him periodically his entire life.56

But, as in previous such moments, Lincoln’s acute mental pain seems to have culminated in a flash of clarity.57 Sometime during that awful weekend, the president had an epiphany: he needed to trust neither Fox nor Anderson—only himself. If the tugboat mission succeeded, it would be a blow to secession, a victory for the new administration, and a rallying point for Unionists (and Republicans) everywhere. Even if it failed—if the rebel guns succeeded in driving off his fleet—it would at least be proof of the administration’s resolve. Moreover, it would bring war. And this, Lincoln had come to believe, was no longer a result to be dreaded. At least not if the rebels fired the first shot.

Peaceful reunification with the wayward states now seemed clearly impossible. No offer, however generous, had been good enough for the Deep South. Crittenden had failed; Corwin had failed; the Peace Conference had failed; Douglas and Seward both appeared to be failing. The real issue now was whether the Upper South could be kept from casting its lot with the rebellion. The border states still wavered, with strong pro-Union factions active in all of them. A Northern show of strength—or a Southern display of intemperate aggression—might give those Unionists a rallying point. And a demonstration that secession would inevitably mean bloodshed might scare disunionists back into the fold. Marylanders, Virginians, Kentuckians, and Tennesseeans, especially, knew that their states would become battlegrounds in the event of full-scale war—and this consideration was not to be taken lightly.

Lincoln’s decision was probably also influenced by what he had heard at the cabinet meeting. Blair must have reiterated, as he had for months, that Southerners who doubted “the manhood of Northern men,” who mistakenly thought Yankees a pusillanimous race of “factory people and shop keepers” instead of warriors, needed to be taught a lesson.58 Welles pointed out that