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At the formal dinner, “there was a Babel of small talk,” Russell observed, “except when there was an attentive silence caused by one of the President’s stories…for which he is famous.” As he reeled off one humorous anecdote after another, no one could have guessed that earlier that day, Lincoln had received devastating news from General Scott. In a written memorandum, Scott had advised that it was now unlikely, “according to recent information from the South, whether the voluntary evacuation of Fort Sumter alone would have a decisive effect upon the States now wavering between adherence to the Union and secession.” Fort Pickens would also have to be abandoned, Scott argued, in order to “give confidence to the eight remaining slave-holding States.”

Shortly before the state dinner ended, Lincoln called his cabinet colleagues aside and asked them to follow him into a different room. Montgomery Blair would long remember Lincoln’s agitation as he revealed the contents of Scott’s report. “A very oppressive silence succeeded,” Blair recalled, interrupted only by his own angry retort that Scott was playing “politician and not General,” a comment directed at Seward’s influence with Scott. Like his son, Blair Senior had long believed that Lincoln should have announced the reinforcement of Sumter at the time of his inauguration and he blamed Seward for Lincoln’s “timid temporizing policy.” It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”

THAT NIGHT, Lincoln was unable to sleep. The time for musing and assessment was at an end. He must make the decision between a surrender that might compromise the honor of the North and tear it apart, or a reinforcement that might carry the country into civil war. Later he confessed to Browning, “of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

At noon the next day, the cabinet convened. Lincoln presented all the intelligence he had gathered, including Fox’s report on Major Anderson’s situation and Hurlbut’s conclusion that Unionism was essentially dead in South Carolina. Once more the members were asked to submit their opinions in writing. This time, shaped no doubt by Lincoln’s presentation and General Scott’s disturbing memo, the majority opinion—with only Seward and Smith clearly dissenting—advised that both Sumter and Pickens should be resupplied and reinforced.

Evidence suggests that Lincoln had reached a decision before the cabinet met, for he had already requested that Fox send a list of the “ships, men, and supplies he would need for his expedition.” Several hours after the cabinet adjourned, he also implemented a drastic restructuring of his daily schedule. Much as he wanted to give office seekers their due, he needed time and space to consider the grave problems facing the country. He ordered Nicolay to limit visiting hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., ending the hectic burden of twelve-hour days that Nicolay knew “would be impossible to sustain for a great length of time.”

For Seward, Lincoln’s decision to reinforce Sumter was shattering. He was in his house on the evening of March 29 when George Harrington, assistant secretary of the treasury, knocked at the door. Harrington had just left the White House, where Welles, Blair, and Fox had met with Lincoln, and “it was finally determined, with the President’s approval to reinforce Fort Sumter.”

“Thunder, George! What are you talking about?” Seward asked. “It cannot be.” When Harrington repeated his news, Seward was irate. “I want no more at this time of the Administration which may be defeated. We are not yet in a position to go to war.” Seward’s success in getting Lincoln to soften the tone of his inaugural address, coupled with the cabinet vote on March 15, decisively echoing his own advice to evacuate Sumter, had left him with the mistaken conviction that