The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [103]
As early as March 15, the Chicago Tribune suggested that Lincoln send a ship “with provisions, but not with reinforcements” to Sumter and make “no secret of its undertaking.” This, it noted, would “place upon Mr. Jefferson Davis the responsibility of firing on a provision-ship going to the relief of American citizens, or suffering it to quickly accomplish the object of its mission.” After a month of indecision, with his cabinet deeply divided as to the best course of action, Lincoln adopted this very course. He announced a humanitarian venture to send food and medicine, but not arms, to the beleaguered troops. Unwilling to acquiesce in this show of federal authority, the Confederate president on April 12 ordered the bombardment of Sumter. Civil War had begun.
With the fort’s surrender, Lincoln declared that an “insurrection” existed in the seceded states. To suppress it, on April 15 he called for the states to supply 75,000 militia volunteers, ordered an expansion of the regular army and navy, proclaimed a blockade of the southern coast, authorized the expenditure of millions of dollars for military purposes, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the railroad line from Philadelphia to Washington. He also ordered federal troops stationed in the West to move to the East, thereby alienating Indian tribes whom the soldiers were there to protect from white incursions on their land, and, ironically, abandoning a number of Union forts. Congress had adjourned (Lincoln called it into special session beginning on July 4), and these were among the boldest unilateral exercises of executive authority in American history, doubly remarkable for a man who had entered politics as a member of a party opposed to what it considered abuses of presidential power. By the end of May, four more slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—seceded rather than take part in the coercion of their southern brethren.62
Whether Lincoln craftily maneuvered the South into firing the first shot or simply took a calculated risk of war, creating a situation that placed the onus of striking the first blow on Jefferson Davis rather than himself, the result galvanized public sentiment in the North. The attack on Fort Sumter crystallized in northern minds the direct opposition between free and slave societies that abolitionists and many Republicans had long insisted on. In time, serious divisions would emerge in the North over the conduct of the war. But in the early weeks, contemporaries were struck by the virtual unanimity of opinion. Stephen A. Douglas rushed to the White House to offer his support and then traveled to Illinois, where, only a few weeks before his untimely death, he addressed the legislature, calling for undivided loyalty to the Union. In Quincy, Illinois, a mass meeting of Democrats and Republicans unanimously adopted resolutions drawn up by Browning pledging “ardent support” to the administration in its efforts for “the suppression of rebellion, preservation of the Union, chastisement of treason, etc.” In Philadelphia, Sidney George Fisher recorded in his diary, “the streets are all of a flutter with flags, streaming from windows, hotels, stores…. It is at the risk of any man’s life that he utters publicly a sentiment in favor of secession.” “Ten days ago great differences of opinion existed among our people,” Elias B. Holmes, who had served in the 1840s as a Whig member of Congress, reported from upstate New York. “Today they are a unit…. The latent sparks of patriotism all over the land are being ignited.”63
In none of his proclamations did Lincoln mention the