Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [225]
On Sunday, Lincoln returned from church and immediately called his cabinet into session. He had decided to issue a proclamation to the North, calling out state militias and fixing a time for Congress to reconvene. The number of volunteer soldiers to be requested came under debate. Some wanted 100,000, others 50,000; Lincoln settled on 75,000. The timing of the congressional session also posed a difficult question. While the executive branch needed Congress to raise armies and authorize spending, Lincoln was advised that “to wait for ‘many men of many minds’ to shape a war policy would be to invite disaster.” Seward was particularly adamant on this point, believing that “history tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.” Lincoln and his cabinet set the Fourth of July as the date for Congress to reconvene, relying on “their patriotism to sanction the war measures taken prior to that time by the Executive.”
John Nicolay made a copy of the president’s proclamation and delivered it to the secretary of state, who stamped the great seal and sent it for publication the following day. That afternoon, Lincoln took a carriage ride with his boys and Nicolay, trying for a moment to distract himself from the increasingly onerous events. Upon his return, he welcomed his old rival Stephen Douglas for a private meeting of several hours. Douglas was not well; a lifetime of alcohol and frenetic activity had taken its toll. In two months’ time, he would be dead. Nevertheless, he offered his solid support to Lincoln, afterward publicly declaring himself ready “to sustain the President in the exercise of his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the Government.” His statement proved tremendously helpful in mobilizing Democratic support. “In this hour of trial it becomes the duty of every patriotic citizen to sustain the General Government,” one Douglas paper began. Another urged “every man to lay aside his party bias…give up small prejudices and go in, heart and hand, to put down treason and traitors.”
“The response to the Proclamation at the North,” Fred Seward recalled, “was all or more than could be anticipated. Every Governor of a free State promptly promised that his quota should be forthcoming. An enthusiastic outburst of patriotic feeling—an ‘uprising of the North’ in town and country—was reported by telegraph.” Northern newspapers described massive rallies, with bands blaring and volunteers marching in support of the Union. Old party lines seemed to have evaporated. “We begin to look like a United North,” George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary, prophesying that the Democratic New York Herald would soon “denounce Jefferson Davis as it denounced Lincoln a week ago.”
The enthusiastic solidarity of the North dangerously underestimated the strength and determination of the South. Seward predicted that the war would be over in sixty days. John Hay expressed the condescending wish that it would “be bloody and short, in pity to the maniac South. They are weak, ignorant, bankrupt in money and credit. Their army is a vast mob, insubordinate and hungry…. What is before them but defeat, poverty, dissensions, insurrections and ruin.”
Ominous signals from the South soon deflated these facile forecasts. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky refused to send troops “for the wicked purpose of subduing [their] sister Southern States.” Then, on April 17, citing the president’s call to arms, the vital state of Virginia seceded from the Union. The historian James Randall would designate this act “one of the most fateful events in American history.” News of Virginia’s decision provoked jubilation throughout the South. “We never saw our population so much excited as it was yesterday afternoon, when the glorious news spread all over town as