Buchanan, though himself desiring to preserve the Union, had not the bold temperament, and he had too long been a political tool of the slave power to effectually resist its violent aggressions; nor did he have the discernment to discover that his official household was the centre of a disunion movement. His Secretary of War distributed officers of the army believed to be friendly to the South where they could become available to it; he sent from the North small arms and cannon, ammunition and stores where they could be seized at the right time.(103) Members of the Cabinet kept the secession leaders advised of all acts of the administration, and generally aided them. The auspicious time, if ever, seemed to have come for a successful dissolution of the Union. The army and navy were full of able Southern men, ready, as the sequel proves, to go with their States, abandon the country that had nurtured and educated them, and the flag that had been their glory.
Governor Wm. H. Gist, of South Carolina, October 5, 1860, by confidential letters to the governors of the cotton States, fairly inaugurated disunion, based on the anticipated election of Abraham Lincoln a month thence.(104)
One week later, without waiting for a consultation of governors of slave States, he, by proclamation, convened the Legislature of South Carolina to "take action for the safety and protection of the State."
This body met November 5th, the day preceding the Presidential election.
The alleged grounds of justification for this early meeting were:
"The strong possibility of the election to the Presidency of a sectional candidate by a party committed to the support of measures which, if carried out, will inevitably destroyour equality in the Union," etc.
This was the avowed reason, finally, for secession, though the true reason was the absolute restriction of slavery and the overthrow of the slave power in the Republic. The election of a Republican President was, of course, a disappointment to Southern statesmen, long used to absolute sway in Congress and in the administration of the government. The charge that Lincoln was a sectional President was true only to the extent that freedom was sectional. Slavery only was then, by secessionists, regarded as national.
The first important step of the South Carolina Legislature was to appropriate $100,000 to be expended by the Governor in purchasing small-arms and a battery of rifled cannon. Without opposition a convention was called to take "into consideration the dangers incident to the position of the State in the Federal Union." Her two United States Senators and other of her Federal officers forthwith resigned. A grand mass meeting was held, November 17th, at Charleston, generally participated in by the ladies, merchants, etc. The Stars and Stripes were not displayed, but a white palmetto flag, after solemn prayer, was unfurled in its stead. Disunion was here inaugurated. November 13th the Legislature of South Carolina stayed the collection of all debts due to citizens of non- slaveholding States. It was not sufficient to repudiate the Union, but honest debts must also be repudiated.
The convention thus called first met at Columbia, December 17th, thence adjourned to Charleston, where (appropriately) on December 20, 1860, an Ordinance of Secession was passed reading thus:
"_An Ordinance,
"To dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled 'The Constitution of the United States of America_.'
"We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained: That the Ordinance adopted by us in convention on the 23d day of May, in the year of our Lord 1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and also, all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, and the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."
This action was taken in Buchanan's administration while secessionists and promoters of disunion were yet in his Cabinet, and Jefferson Davis and others were still plotting in Congress.
Great stress was laid upon the right to rescind the original Ordinance of 1788 ratifying the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States was denominated only a "compact." The passage of the Ordinance of Secession was followed by "bonfires and illuminations, ringing of bells, insults to the Stars and Stripes," participated in by South Carolina aristocracy, especially cheered on by the first ladies of the State and city, little dreaming that slavery's opening death-knell was being proclaimed.(105)
It was fitting that South Carolina should lead the van of secession. She had, in a Colonial state, furnished more Tories in the Revolution of 1776 than any of the other colonies; she had initiated secession through nullification in 1832; and her greatest statesman, Calhoun, was the first to propose disunion as a remedy for slavery restrictions.
Events succeeded rapidly.
An Alabama convention met, and, on January 8, 1861, received commissioners from South Carolina, and on the 11th passed, in secret session, an Ordinance of Secession, refusing to submit it to a vote of her people.
Mississippi, on January 9, 1861, passed, through a convention, a like Ordinance.
Georgia, January 19th, by a convention passed her Ordinance ofSecession.
Louisiana's convention passed an Ordinance of Secession January 25, 1861.
Texas passed, in convention, on February 1, 1861, a like Ordinance, which was ratified by a vote of her people February 24th.(106)
Thus seven States resolved to secede before Abraham Lincoln becamePresident.
And each of these States had prepared for armed opposition; most, if not all, of their Senators and Representatives in Congress had withdrawn; in most of the States named United States forts, arms, military stores, and other public property had been seized; and many officers of the army and navy had deserted, weakly excusing their action by declaring they must go with their States.
Events were happening in Washington. Cass resigned as Secretary of State because Buchanan adhered to the doctrine that there was no power to coerce a seceding State. Under this baleful doctrine, secession had secured, apparently, a free and bloodless right of way in its mad rush to dissolve the Union and to establish a slave empire. It was at first thought by Southern leaders wise to postpone the formation of a "Confederacy" until Lincoln was inaugurated. But about January 1st there came a Cabinet rupture. Floyd was driven from it, and Joseph Holt of Kentucky, a most able and patriotic Union man, succeeded him. Later, Edwin M. Stanton and Jeremiah Black came into the Cabinet, Buchanan yielding to more patriotic influences and adopting more decided Union measures, though not based wholly on a coercive policy.
But, on January 5, 1861, a "Central Cabal," consisting of "Southern Statesmen," who still lingered at Washington, where they could best promote and direct the secession of the States and keep the administration in check, if not control it, met in one of the rooms of theCapitolto devise an ultimate programme for the future. It agreed on these propositions:
First. Immediate secession of States.
Second. A convention to meet at Montgomery, Alabama, not later than February 15th, to organize a Confederacy.
To prevent hostile legislation under the changed and more loyal impulses of the President and his reconstructed Cabinet, the cotton States Senators should remain awhile in their places, to "keep the hands of Buchanan tied."(107)
This cabal appointed Senators Jefferson Davis, Slidell, and Mallory "to carry out the objects of the meeting."
Thus, beneath the "Dome of the Capitol," treason was plotted by Senators and Representatives who still held their seats and official places, and still received their pay from the United States Treasury, for the sole purpose of enabling them the better to accomplish the end sought. Think of the prospective President of the "Confederate States of America," their future Minister to the Court of France, and their future Secretary of the Navy, plotting secretly in the Capitol at Washington to destroy the Union! But these were treasonable times.
Through resolution of the Mississippi Legislature, the Montgomery Convention was hastened, and it met February 4, instead of February 15, 1861, as suggested by the Washington caucus of Southern Congressmen. The delegates from the six seceded States east of the Mississippi assembled, and a little later (March 2d) delegates from Texas joined them. On the fourth day of its session the nationalslave-childwas born, and christened "Confederate States of America." The next day Jefferson Davis was elected President, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, Vice-President. Stephens took the oath of office on the day following his election. Davis arrived from Washington, and was, on the 18th, inaugurated the first (and last) President of this Confederacy.
The next step was a permanent Constitution. With characteristic celerity, this was prepared and adopted March 11, 1861, one week after Lincoln became President of the United States, though the Confederacy had been formed almost a month before his official term commenced.
This instrument was modelled on the Constitution of the UnitedStates.
It forbade the importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country, other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States. Then following, for the first time probably in the history of nations, the proposed new Republic dedicated itself to eternal slavery, thus:
"No bill of attainder,ex post factolaw, orlaw denying or impairingthe right of property in negro slaves, shall be passed."(108)
Singularly enough, the astute friends of the institution of slavery, knowing and avowing that it could not survive competition with the free, well-paid labor necessary to manufacturing industries, and knowing also that slavery was only adapted to rural pursuits, not to skilled mechanical labor, and desiring to plant human slavery permanently in the new nation, removed from all possibility of competition with anything that might, by dignifying labor, build up wealth as witnessed in the great Northern cities and thus endanger slavery, sought to protect it by a clause incorporated in their organic act, prohibiting any form oftariffto protect home industries.
"Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."(109)
Cotton was ever to be "King" in the Confederacy.
Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" justifying secession with perfect honesty announced:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition or a dissolution of the Union."
The best, most candid, conservative, and comprehensive statement in explanation and vindication of the Confederate Constitution, the purposes and objects of the nation and people to be governed by and under it, is found in a speech of Vice-President Stephens at Savannah, Georgia, delivered ten days (March 21, 1861) after its adoption.
Here is a single extract:
"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the rock upon which the old Union would split. He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him, and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a government built upon it: when the 'storms came and the wind blew, it fell.'
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid,its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery— subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all the other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics."
This is a fair and truthful exposition of the fundamental principles of the Confederacy, fallacious as they were.
North Carolina, after her people had voted down a convention to consider the question of secession at an extra session of her Legislature, called a convention which, on May 21, 1861, when the war had begun, passed an Ordinance of Secession without submission to a vote of her people.
Virginia through her Legislature called a convention which, April 17, 1861, passed an Ordinance of Secession in secret session, subject to ratification by a vote of her people. This was after Sumter had been fired on.
The vote was taken June 25th, and the Ordinance was ratified.
Arkansas defeated in convention an Ordinance for secession March 18, but passed one May 6, 1861, without a vote of her people.
Tennessee, by a vote of her people, February 8, 1861 (67,360 to 54,156) voted against a convention, but her Legislature (May 7, 1861) in secret session adopted a "Declaration of Independence and Ordinance dissolving her Federal relations," subject to a vote of her people on June 8th. The vote being for separation, her Governor, June 24, 1861, declared the State out of the Union.(110)
This was the last State of the eleven to secede. All these four ratified the Confederate Constitution and joined the already-formed Confederacy.
The seceded States early passed laws authorizing the organization of their militia, and making appropriations for defence against coercion, and providing for the seizure of United States forts, arsenals, and other property within their respective limits, and later, that they should be turned over to the Confederate States.
Some of the States by law provided severe penalties against any of their citizens holding office under the Government of the United States. Virginia, in July, 1861, in convention, passed an ordinance declaring that any citizen of Virginia holding office under the old Government should be forever banished from that State, and if he undertook to represent the State in the Congress of the United States, he should, in addition, be guilty of treason and his property confiscated.
The other Border States failed to break up their relation to the Union, though in all of them (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) various irregular expedients were resorted to, to declare them a part of the Confederacy. From their people, however, much material and moral support was given to the Confederate cause.
(101) Jefferson'sWorks, viii., p. 403.—Notes on Virginia.
(102)Lincoln(Nicolay and Hay), vol. ii., pp. 299-314.
(103)Annual Cyclopaedia(Appleton), 1861, p. 123.
(104) For this letter, seeLincoln(N. and H.), vol. ii., p. 306.
(105) The prophecy: "The rebellion, which began where Charleston is, shall end where Charlestonwas," was fulfilled.
For a vivid, though sad description of Charleston at the end of the war, by an eye-witness, seeCivil war in Am.(Draper), vol. i, p. 564. Andrew's Hall, where the first Ordinance passed, and the Institute in which it was signed, were then charred rubbish.
TheDemonwar had been abroad in Charleston—who respects not life or death.
(106) Sam Houston was the rightful Governor of Texas in 1861, but on the adoption of an Ordinance of Secession (February 24, 1861) he declined to take an oath of allegiance to the new government and was deposed by a convention March 16, 1861. Just previous to the vote of the State on ratifying the ordinance, at Galveston, before an immense, seething, secession audience, with few personal friends to support him, in face of threatened violence, he denounced the impolicy of Secession, and painted a prophetic picture of the consequences that would result to his State from it. He said:
"Let me tell you what is coming on the heels of secession. The time will come when your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded together like sheep and cattle, at the point of the bayonet, and your mothers and wives, your sisters and daughters, will ask: Where are they? You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds and thousands of precious lives, succeed, if God is not against you, in winning Southern independence. But I doubt it. It is a bare possibility at best. I tell you that while I believe, with you, in the doctrine of state rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people, as you are, for the live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, they move with the steady momentum of a giant avalanche, and what I fear is that they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."
During this speech a horse in a team near by grew restive, and kicked out of harness, but was soon beaten to submission by his driver. Houston seized on the incident for an illustration, saying: "That horse tried a little practical secession—See how speedily he was whipped back into the Union." This quick-witted remark brought him applause from unsympathetic hearers.
Houston refused to recognize any Secession authority, and a few days subsequent to his deposition retired to his home near Huntsville, without friends, full of years, weak in body, suffering from wounds received in his country's service, but strong in soul, and wholly undismayed, though mourning his State's folly. In front of his house on the prairie he mounted a four-pound cannon, saying: "Texas may go to the devil and ruin if she pleases, but she shall not drag me along with her." History does not record another such incident. To the credit of the Secessionists, they respected the age and valor of the old hero, and did not molest, but permitted him to hold his personal "fortress" until his death, which occurred July 26, 1863 (three weeks after Vicksburg fell), in his seventy-first year.
He died satisfied the Confederacy and secession would soon be overthrown and the Union preserved.
(107)Lincoln(N. and H.), vol. iii, pp. 180-1.
(108) Con., Art. I., Sec. 9, pars. 1, 4.
(109) Confederate Con., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 1.
(110) McPherson'sHist. of the Rebellion, pp. 4-8.
Significant above all other of the great events resulting from the secession of the Southern States was the dissolution of the great religious denominations in the United States.(111)
First, the Old School Presbyterian Church Synod of South Carolina, early as December 3, 1860, declared for a slave Confederacy. This was followed by other such synods in the South, all deciding for separation from the Church North. The Baptists in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina were equally prompt in taking similar action.
Likewise the Protestant Episcopal Church, in a General Convention, held in Columbia, South Carolina, after having endorsed the Confederacy, adopted a "Constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America"; all its Southern bishops being present and approving, save Bishop Leonidas Polk of Louisiana, who was absent, a Major-General in the Confederate army.(112)
The Methodist Episcopal Church South endorsed disunion and slavery; it had, however, in 1845, separated from the Methodist Church North.
The Roman Catholic Church, through Bishop Lynch, early in 1861, espoused the Confederate cause, and he, later, corresponded with the Pope of Rome in its interests, receiving a conciliatory answer in the Pope's name by Cardinal Antonelli.
The Young Men's Christian Association of New Orleans, May 22, 1861, issued anAddress to the Young Men's Christian Associations of North America, declaring secession justifiable, and protesting, "in the name of Christ and his divine teachings," against waging war against the Southern States and their institutions.
Later, in 1863, the "Confederate clergy" issued a most memorable "Address to Christians throughout the World," likewise protesting against further prosecution of the war; declaring that the Union was forever dissolved, and specially pointing out "the most indefensible act growing out of the inexcusable war" to be
"The recent proclamation of the President of the United States seeking theemancipation of the slavesof the South."
And saying further:
"It is in our judgment a suitable occasion for solemn protest on the part of the people of God throughout the world."
Thus encouraged and upheld, the new Confederacy, with slavery for its "corner-stone," defiantly embarked.
The counter-action of the Church North was equally emphatic forfreedom, and the Union of the States under one flag and one God.(113)
It is appropriate in connection with the attitude of the religious people of the country toward slavery and the Confederacy, and the war to preserve the one and to establish the other, to quote from President Lincoln's valedictory Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), in which he refers to the attitude of opposing parties, the cause of the conflict, and to each party invoking God's aid.
"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us 'judge not that we be not judged.' The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.
"The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offences. For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of woe may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
"With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
(111)Hist. of Rebellion(McPherson), 508-520.
(112) He was, as Lieutenant-General, June 14, 1864, killed by a shell, at Marietta, Ga., while reconnoitering the Union lines.
(113)Hist. of Rebellion(McPherson), pp. 460-508.
The manner of receiving and treating the secession of the States by the administration of Buchanan and the Thirty-Sixth Congress can only here have a brief notice. There was a pretty general disposition to make further concessions and compromises to appease the disunion sentiment of the South. His administration was weak and vacillating. Two serious attempts at conciliation were made. President Buchanan, in his last Annual Message (December 4, 1860), while declaring that the election of any one to the office of President was not a just cause for dissolving the Union, and while denying that "Secession" could be justified under the Constitution, yet announced his conclusion that the latter had not "delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn, from the Confederacy"; that coercion was "not among the specific and enumerated powers granted to Congress." He did not think it was constitutional to preserve the Constitution or the Union of the States. This view was held by most leaders of his party at the time and throughout the ensuing war; not so, however, by the rank and file.
Buchanan did not believe that self-preservation inhered in theConstitution or the Union.
The President in this Message suggested an explanatory amendment to the Constitution: (1) To recognize the right of property in slaves in the States where it existed; (2) to protect this right in the Territories until they were admitted as States with or without slavery; (3) a like recognition of the right of the master to have his escaped slave delivered up to him; and (4) declaring all unfriendly State laws impairing this right unconstitutional.
This was the signal for the presentation of a numerous brood of propositions to amend the Constitution in the interest of slavery, and by way of concessions to the South.
A committee of thirty-three, one from each State, of which Thomas Corwin of Ohio was chairman, was (December 4, 1860) appointed to consider the part of the President's Message referred to.
Mr. Noel of Missouri proposed to instruct this committee to report on the expediency of abolishing the office of President, and in lieu thereof establishing an Executive Council of three, elected by districts composed of contiguous States—each member armed with a veto power; and he also proposed to restore the equilibrium of the States by dividing slave States into two or more.
Mr. Hindman of Arkansas proposed to amend the Constitution so as to expressly recognize slavery in the States; to protect it in the Territories; to allow slaves to be transported through free States; to prohibit representation in Congress to any State passing laws impairing the Fugitive-Slave Act; giving slave States a negative upon all acts relating to slavery, and making such amendment unalterable.
Mr. Florence of Pennsylvania and Mr. Kellogg of Illinois each proposed to amend the Constitution "granting the right to hold slaves in all territory south of 36° 30´, and prohibiting slavery in territory north of this line," etc.
Mr. Vallandigham of Ohio proposed a long amendment to the Constitution, the central idea of which was a division of the Union into four sections, with a complicated and necessarily impracticable plan of voting in Congress, and of voting for the election of President and Vice-President.
These are only samples of the many propositions to amend the Constitution, but they will suffice for all. None of them had the approval of both Houses of Congress.
There were many patriotic propositions offered looking to the preservation of the Union as it was. They too failed.
The great committee reported (January 14, 1861) five propositions. The first a series of resolutions declaratory of the duty of Congress and the government to the States, and in relation to slavery; the second an amendment to the Constitution relating to slavery; the third a bill for the admission of New Mexico, including therein Arizona, as a State; the fourth a bill amending and making more efficient the Fugitive-Slave Law, among other things giving the United States Commissionerten dollarswhether he remanded or discharged the alleged fugitive; and the fifth a bill for the rendition of fugitives from justice. These several propositions (save the fifth, which was rejected) passed the House, the proposed constitutional amendment of the committee being amended on motion of Mr. Corwin before its passage.
None of the propositions were considered in the Senate save the second, and even this one did not receive the support of the secessionists still lingering in Congress.
The proposition to amend the Constitution passed both Houses by the requisite two thirds vote. It read:
"Art. XIII. No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of any State."
TwoStatesonly—Maryland andOhio(114)—ratified this proposed amendment. It was needless, and, if adopted, would have taken no power from Congress, which any respectable party had ever claimed it possessed, but the amendment was tendered to answer the false cry that slavery in the slave States was in danger from Congressional action.
(What a contrast between this proposed Thirteenth Amendment to theConstitution and the Thirteenth Amendment adopted four years later!The former proposed to establish slavery forever; the latterabolished itforever.)
The resolutions of John J. Crittenden in the Senate proposed various amendments to the Constitution, among others to legalize slavery south of 36° 30´; to admit States from territory north of that line, with or without slavery; to prohibit the abolition of slavery in the States and also in the District of Columbia so long as it existed in Virginia or Maryland, such abolition even then to be only with the consent of the inhabitants of the District and with compensation to the slave owners; to require the United States to pay for fugitive slaves who were prevented from arrest or return to slavery by violence and intimidation, and to make all the provisions of the Constitution, including the proposed amendments, unchangeable forever. The Crittenden resolutions, at the end of much debate, and after various votes on amendments proposed thereto, failed (19 to 20) in the Senate, and therefore were never considered in the House.(115)
It was claimed at the time that had the Congressmen from the Southern States remained and voted for the Corwin and Crittenden propositions the Constitution might have been amended, giving slavery all these guarantees.
(114) Joint resolution of ratification,Ohio Laws, 1861, p. 190.
(115)Hist. of Rebellion(McPherson), pp. 57-67.
By appointments of governors or legislatures, commissioners fromeach of twenty States, chosen at the request of the Legislature ofVirginia, met in Washington, February 4, 1861, in a "PeaceConference."(116) Ex-President John Tyler of Virginia was madePresident, and Crafts J. Wright of Ohio Secretary.(117)
It adjourned February 27th, having agreed to recommend to the several States amendments to the Constitution, in substance: That north of 36° 30´ slavery in the Territories shall be, and south of that line it shall not be, prohibited; that neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature shall pass any law to prevent slaves from being taken from the States to the Territories; that no Territory shall be acquired by the United States, except by discovery and for naval stations, without the consent of a majority of the Senators from the slave and also from the free States; that Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in any State, nor in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland; nor to prohibit Congressmen from taking their slaves to and from said District; nor the power to prohibit the free transportation of slaves from one slave State or Territory to another; that bringing slaves into the District of Columbia for sale, or to be placed in depot for transfer and sale at other places, is prohibited; that the clauses in the Constitution and its amendments relating to slavery shall never be abolished or amended without the consent of all the States; and that Congress shall provide by law for paying owners for escaped slaves where officers, whose duty it was to arrest them, were prevented from arresting them or returning them to their owners after being arrested.
"The Peace Conference" was composed of 133 members, among whom were some of the most eminent men of the country, though generally, however, only conservatives from each section were selected as members. Its remarkable recommendations were made with considerable unanimity, voting in the conference being by States, the Continental method.
Wm. Pitt Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill of Maine, Geo. S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, David Dudley Field and Erastus Corning of New York, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, John Tyler, Wm. C. Rives, and John A. Seddon of Virginia, Wm. O. Butler, James B. Clay, James Guthrie, and Charles A. Wickcliffe of Kentucky, C. P. Wolcott, Salmon P. Chase, John C. Wright, Wm. S. Groesback, Franklin T. Backus, Reuben Hitchcock, Thomas Ewing (Sen.), and Valentine B. Horton of Ohio, Caleb B. Smith and Godlove S. Orth of Indiana, John M. Palmer and Burton C. Cook of Illinois, and James Harlan and James W. Grimes of Iowa were of the number. Many of them were then, or afterwards, celebrated as statesmen; and some of them subsequently held high rank as soldiers.
March 2, 1861, the "Peace Conference" propositions were offered twice to the Senate, and each time overwhelmingly defeated, as they had been, on the day preceding, by the House.(118)
There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119)
Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times.
Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said:
"I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right."
We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and constitutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided.
TheEmancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln(January 1, 1863) and theThirteenthAmendment to the Constitution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; theFourteenthAmendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and theFifteenthAmendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankindnowapprove what was done.
The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy institution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others.
The history of emancipation and of these constitutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war.
There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which passed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly theresultof that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.
(116) Kansas joined later, and Michigan, California, and Oregon were not represented; nor were the then seceded Southern States, or Arkansas, represented.
(117) Blaine (Twenty Years of Congress, vol. i., p. 269), says: "Puleston, a delegate from Pennsylvania, a subject of Queen Victoria, later (1884) of the British Parliament, was chosen Secretary of the Conference."—This is an error. He was not a delegate: only one of several assistant secretaries.
On the next page of Blaine's book he falls into another error in saying the Wilmot Proviso was embodied (1848) in the Oregon territorial act. It was never embodied in any act. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 is embodied in that act word for word.
(118)Hist. of Rebellion(McPherson), pp. 68-9.
(119)Ibid., p. 76.
The District of Columbia, acquired by the United States in 1791 for the purpose of founding the city of Washington as the permanent Federal Capital, was, by the laws of Virginia and Maryland, slave territory. The District was originally ten miles square, and included the city of Alexandria. Later (1846) the part acquired from Virginia (about forty square miles) was retroceded to that State. Congress had complete jurisdiction over it, though the laws of Maryland and Virginia, for some purposes, were continued in force. It was, however, from the beginning claimed that Congress had the right to abolish slavery within its boundaries.
Congress is given the right "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District."(120) But slavery was claimed to be excepted because of its peculiar character.
The institution of slavery was therefore perpetuated in the District, and in the Capital of the Republic slave-marts existed where men and women were sold from the auction block, and families were torn asunder and carried to different parts of the country to be continued in bondage. In the shadow of the Capitol the voice of the auctioneer proclaiming in the accustomed way the merits of the slave commingled with that of the statesmen in the Halls of Congress proclaiming the boasted liberty of the great American Republic! Daniel Drayton (1848) was tried in the District for the larceny of seventy-four human beings, his crime consisting of affording means (in the schoonerPearl) for their escape to freedom.(121)
Under the laws of the District many others were punished for like offences.
As late as 1856, when the sculptor Crawford furnished a design for theStatue of Libertyto crown the dome of the Capitol, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered the "liberty cap" struck from the model, because in art it had an "established origin in its use as a badge of the freed slave."(122)
We have seen how much the consciences of just men were shocked, and how assiduously such men labored to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and with what tenacity the slave party fought to maintain it there, and even by constitutional amendments to fix it there forever.
But when slavery had brought the country to war, the emancipation of slaves in the District was early considered.
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, December 16, 1861, introduced a bill in the Senate, which, after a most memorable debate in both Houses of Congress, passed, and on April 16, 1862, became a law, with the approval of President Lincoln. This act emancipated forthwith all the slaves of the District, and annulled the laws of Maryland over it relating to slavery and all statutes giving the cities of Washington and Georgetown authority to pass ordinances discriminating against persons of color.
(120) Con. U. S., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 17.
(121) Drayton did not succeed in the attempt to afford these slaves means to escape. He was tried on two indictments for larceny, convicted, and on each sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. The Circuit Court reversed these convictions on the erroneous charge of the trial judge (Crawford), to the effect that a man might be guilty of larceny of property—slaves—without the intent to appropriate it to his own use. On re-trial Drayton was acquitted on the larceny indictments; but verdicts were taken against him on seventy-four indictments for transporting slaves—not a penitentiary offense—and he was sentenced to pay a fine of $10,000, and to remain in prison until paid. He was most ably defended by Horace Mann of Boston, and J. M. Carlisle of Washington, D. C., either as volunteer counsel or employed by Drayton's friends, he being poor. There were 115—41 for larceny, 64 for transportation—indictments against Drayton, which led Mr. Mann to remark of the threatened penalty: "Methuselah himself must have been caught young in order to survive such a sentence."—Slavery, Letters, etc.(Mann), p. 93.
President Fillmore, being defeated in 1852 for nomination forPresident, pardoned Drayton after four years' and four months'imprisonment, which pardon, it was claimed, defeated Scott, theWhig nominee, at the polls.—Memoir of Drayton, p. 118.
(122) Correspondence in War Department between Davis and Quartermaster- General Meigs.
The present nondescript hood, giving the statue crowning the dome its appearance, in some views, of a wild Indian, was substituted for the Liberty cap.
Growing out of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the question was raised by Lovejoy of Illinois and others as to the duty of Congress to declare freedomnationaland slaverysectional;and also to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the Union.
A bill was passed, which (June 19, 1862) was approved by the President, and became the last general law of Congress on the subject of slavery in the Territories. It reads:
"That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States, now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
By this act the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 (sixth section) were applied universally to all existing and to be acquired territory of the United States.
It was only, in effect, Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, defeated byonevote in the old Congress, the loss of which he deplored so much. His benign purpose to restrict slavery was delayed seventy- eight years—until blood flowed to sanction it.
We close this already too long history of human slavery in the United States with Thomas H. Benton's summary of the "cardinal points" in the aggressive policy of the impetuous South in pushing forward slavery as a cause for disunion. He wrote, four years anterior to the Rebellion of 1861, with a prophetic pen, nibbed by the experience of a Senator for thirty years, and as a slaveholder. He had actively participated in most of the events of which he speaks, and was personally familiar with all of them.(123)
"But I am not now writing the history of the present slavery agitation—a history which the young have not learnt, and the old have forgotten, and which every American ought to understand. I only indicate cardinal points to show its character; and of these a main one remains to be stated. Up to Mr. Pierce's administration the plan had been defensive—that is to say, to make the secession of the South a measure of self-defence against the abolition encroachments, aggressions, and crusades of the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce, the plan became offensive—that is to say, to commence the expansion of slavery, and the acquisition of territory to spread it over, so as to overpower the North with new slave States, and drive them out of the Union. In this change of tactics originated the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, the attempt to purchase one half of Mexico, and the actual purchase of a large part; the design to take Cuba; the encouragement to Kinney and to Walker in Central America; the quarrels with Great Britain for outlandish coasts and islands; the designs upon the Tehuantepec, the Nicaragua, the Panama, and the Darien routes; and the scheme to get a foothold in the Island of San Domingo. The rising in the free States in consequence of the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise checked these schemes, and limited the success of the disunionists to the revival of the agitation which enables them to wield the South against the North in all the Federal elections and Federal legislation. Accidents and events have given this part a strange pre-eminence— under Jackson's administration proclaimed for treason; since, at the head of the government and of the Democratic party. The death of Harrison, and the accession of Tyler, was their first great lift; the election of Mr. Pierce was their culminating point. It not only gave them the government, but power to pass themselves for the Union party, and for democrats; and to stigmatize all who refused to go with them as disunionists and abolitionists. And to keep up this classification is the object of the eleven pages of the message which calls for this Review—unhappily assisted in that object by the conduct of a few real abolitionists (not five per centum of the population of the free States); but made to stand, in the eyes of the South, for the whole."
(123) Hist., etc., Ex.,Dred Scott Case, pp. 184-5.
We are approaching the period for the fulfilment of prophecy in relation to the perpetuity of human slavery in the United States.
We summarize a few of the prophecies made by distinguished American statesmen and citizens. George Washington, Patrick Henry, and other Virginia statesmen and slaveholders at the close of the Revolution predicted that slaves would be emancipated, or they would acquire their freedom violently. These patriots advocated emancipation. The stumbling-block to abolition in Virginia at that time was, what to do with the blacks. The white population could not reconcile themselves to the idea of living on an equality with them, as they deemed they must if the blacks were free. As early as 1782 Jefferson expressed his serious forebodings:
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. . . .
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for a total emancipation."
The anti-slavery societies when they first met in annual convention (1804) proclaimed that
"Freedom and slavery cannot long exist together."
John Quincy Adams, in 1843, prophesied:
"I am satisfied slavery will not go down until it goes down in blood."(124)
Abraham Lincoln, at the beginning of his celebrated debate with Douglas (1858) expressed his belief that this nation could not exist "half slave and half free." He had, however, made the same declaration in a letter to a Kentucky friend to whom he wrote:
"Experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. . . .
"On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal' aself-evident truth;but now, when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the maxim 'a self-evident lie.' The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great dy for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution. . . . So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue togetherpermanently—forever—half slave, and half free'? The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."
(Under God, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was the instrument for the solution of themighty problem!)
This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield,Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:
"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'
"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."(125)
Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):
"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."(126)
But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow in blood.
The institution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its enormities.
A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection in which slavery was held:
"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)
The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery must, in the mill of justice, be ground to a violent death, in obedience to the will of God.
Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:
"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters ofHumanityhave been writ in blood. I once hoped that AmericanDemocracywould be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many aPharoahwill go under and perish. . . .
"Slavery will notdie a dry death. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128)
Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "sin of the nation" would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia —the State that hung John Brown—at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching free negroes—sons of Africa—to read and write—to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129)
One sample of prophecy of whatdisunionwould be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland:
"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide. The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury and madness which cannot stop to reason.Dissolutionmeans death, the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection—death without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her tenderly to a sepulchre—dead Liberty, left to all the horrors of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body, which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where the tyrants of the earth who feared her living will mock her dead, passing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Beholdhernow, howshethat was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'— and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will shed tears over her desolation as they pass, and cast handfuls of earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children, stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary lines will be marked by compass and chain? Sir, that will be a portentous commission that shall settle that partition, for cannon will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger- posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the bosom of the Republic—some meandering vein whence generations of her children have drawn their nourishment—but a sharp and jagged chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle on the liberties of mankind in this Western World.This is dissolution!If such, Sir, isdissolutionseen in a glass darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps—an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir,there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they have shed."(130)
This eloquent, patriotic, word-picture ofdissolution, intended to deter those who so impetuously and glibly talked of it, was not, as the sequel proved, overdrawn. When delivered it was not generally believed that a dissolution of the Union could or would be attempted. In the Presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860, as well as in Congress, there was much eloquence displayed in line with the above; few of the orators, however, believed that dissolution, with all the wild terrors of war, was near at hand. But there were some men in public life who early comprehended the destiny awaiting the politically storm-racked Republic, and as it approached, boldly gave the opinion that "a little blood-letting would be good for the body politic."(131)
The story of the war which secession inaugurated remains to be in part narrated in succeeding chapters, portraying the impetuous rush to battle; the unparalleled heroism of the mighty hosts on either side; the slaughter of men; the hell of suffering; the bitter tears; the incalculable sorrow; the billions expended; the destruction of property; the alternating defeats and triumphs; the final victory of the Union arms; the overthrow of state-rights, nullification, secession—disunion; the emancipation of four million human slaves, and the annihilation in the United States of the institution of slavery, including all its baleful doctrines, whether advanced by partisan, pro-slavery statesmen, or advocated by learned politicians, or upheld by church or clergy in the name of the prophets of Holy Writ or of Christ and his Apostles, or expounded by a tribunal clothed in the ermine, majesty, dignity, and power of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Abraham Lincoln, whose beautiful character is illumined in the intense light of a third of a century of heightened civilization, will be immortalized through all time as God's chiefest instrument in accomplishing the end.
In closing this chapter we desire again to remind the reader that in 1861 the Congress of the United States, by a two thirds majority in each branch, voted to so amend the Constitution as to make forever unalterable its provisions for the recognition and perpetuation of human bondage; that if the amendment thus submitted had been ratified by three fourths of the States, this nation would have been the first and only one in the history of the world wherein the right to enslave human beings was fundamental and decreed to be eternal.
This amendment, guaranteeing perpetual slavery, was the tender made by Union men in 1861 to avert disunion and war. It was the humiliating and unholy pledge offered to a slave-loving people to induce them to remain true to the Constitution and the Union. In the providence of God the amendment was not ratified, nor was a willingness to accept it shown by the defiant South. On the contrary, it was spurned by it with singular unanimity and deserved contempt. A nation to be wholly slave was alone acceptable to the disunionists; and to establish such a nation the hosts were arrayed on the one side; to preserve and perpetuate the Union and to overthrow the would-be slave nation, they were also, thank God, arrayed on the other.
This was the portentous issue made up—triable by the tribunal of last resort from which there is no earthly appeal.
Promptly, even enthusiastically, did the South respond to the summons to battle, and with a heroism worthy of a better cause did it devote life and property to the maintenance of the Confederacy. But from mountain, hillside, vale, plain, and prairie, from field, factory, counting-house, city, village, and hamlet, from all professions and occupation alike came the sons of freedom, with the cry of "Union and Liberty," under one flag, to meet the opposing hosts, heroically ready to make the necessary sacrifice that the unity of the American Republic should be preserved.
The effort to establish a slave nation in the afternoon of the nineteenth century resulted in a civil war unparalleled in magnitude, and the bloodiest in the history of the human race. In the eleven seceding States the authority of the Constitution was thrown off; the National Government was defied; former official oaths of army, navy, and civil officers were disregarded, and other oaths were taken to support another government; the public property of the United States was seized in the seceding States as of right, Cabinet officers of the President assisting in the plunder; Senators and Representatives in Congress, while yet holding seats, making laws, and drawing pay, plotted treason, and, later, defiantly joined the Confederacy; sequestration acts were passed by the Confederate Congress, and citizens of the United States were made aliens in the Confederacy, and their property there was confiscated, and debts due loyal men North were collected for the benefit of the Confederate Treasury; piratical vessels, with the aid and connivance of boastfulcivilizedmonarchies of Europe, destroyed our commerce and drove our flag from the high seas; above a half million of men fell in battle, and another half million died of wounds and disease incident to war; above sixty thousand Union soldiers died in Southern prisons; the direct cost of the Rebellion, paid from the United States Treasury, approximated seven billions of dollars, and the indirect cost to the loyal people, in property destroyed, etc., was at least equal to seven billions more. Fairly estimated, slaves not considered, the people of the seceding States expended and lost in the prosecution and devastations of the war more than double the expenditures and losses of the North; imagination cannot compass or language portray the suffering and sorrow, agony and despair, which pervaded the whole land. All this to settle the momentous question, whether or not human slavery should be fundamental as a domestic, social, and political institution.
Thus far slavery has been our theme, and the war for the suppression of the Rebellion only incidentally referred to, but in succeeding chapters slavery will only be incidentally referred to, and the war will have such attention as the scope of the narrative permits.
(124)Life of Seward, vol. i., p. 672.
(125) A. Lincoln,Complete Works, vol. i., pp. 215, 240, 251.
(126) Seward'sWorks, vol. iv, p. 289.
(127)Hist. U. S.(Rhodes), vol. i, p. 469.
(128)Life of Parker(Weiss), vol. ii., p. 172-4 (406).
(129)Civil War in America(Draper), vol. i, 565-6.
(130) Speech of Henry Winter Davis, House of Representatives, Aug. 7, 1856.
(131) Zachariah Chandler, 1860.
TheStar of the West, a merchant vessel, was sent from New York, with the reluctant consent of President Buchanan, by Lieutenant- General Winfield Scott, Commander-in-Chief of the army, to carry re-enforcements and provisions to Fort Sumter. As this vessel attempted to enter Charleston harbor (January 9, 1861) a shot was fired across its bows which turned it back, and its mission failed. "Slapped in the mouth" was the opprobrious epithet used to express this insult to the United States. This was not the shot that summoned the North to arms. It was, however, the first angry gun fired by a citizen of the Union against his country's flag, and it announced the dawn of civil war. When this shot was fired, only South Carolina had passed an Ordinance of Secession; the Confederate States were not yet formed.
On the night of December 26, 1860, Major Robert Anderson, in command of the land forces, forts, and defences at Charleston, South Carolina, being threatened by armed secession troops, and regarding his position at Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, untenable if attacked from the land side, as a matter of precaution, without order from his superiors, but possessing complete authority within the limits of his command, removed his small force, consisting of only sixty-five soldiers, from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, where, at high noon of the next day, after a solemn prayer by his chaplain, the Stars and Stripes were run up on a flagstaff, to float in triumph only for a short time, then to be insulted and shot down, not to again be unfurled over the same fort until four years of war had intervened.
An ineffectual effort was made by Governor Pickens of South Carolina to induce Major Anderson by his demands and threats to return to his defenceless position at Fort Moultrie. President Buchanan, at the instigation of his Secretary of War, Floyd, was on the point of ordering him to do so, but when the matter was considered in a Cabinet meeting, other counsels prevailed, and Floyd made this his excuse for leaving the Cabinet.( 1) Fortunately, his place was filled by Hon. Joseph Holt of Kentucky, a Union man of force, energy, will power, and true courage, who, later, became Judge- Advocate-General U.S.A., serving as such until after the close of the war.
To the end of Buchanan's administration, Sumter was held by Major Anderson with his small force, and around it centered the greatest anxiety. It was the policy of the South to seize and occupy all forts, arsenals, dock-yards, public property, and all strongholds belonging to the United States located within the limits of seceded States, and to take possession of arms and material of war as though of right belonging to them. The right and title to United States property thus located were not regarded. Louisiana seized the United States Mint at New Orleans, and turned over of its contents $536,000 in coin to the Confederate States treasury, for which she received a vote of thanks from the Confederate Congress.( 2) All the forts of the United States within or on the coast of the then seceded States, save Forts Sumter and Pickens, were soon, with their armament and military supplies, in possession of and manned by Southern soldiers. At first seizures were made by State authority alone, but on the organization, at Montgomery, of the Confederacy (February 8, 1861) it assumed charge of all questions between the seceded States and the United States relating to the occupation of forts and other public establishments; and, March 15th, the Confederacy called on the States that had joined it to cede to it all the forts, etc., thus seized, which was done accordingly.
On February 28th the Confederate Congress passed an act under which President Davis assumed control of all military operations and received from the seceding States all the arms and munitions of war acquired from the United States and all other material of war the States of the Confederacy saw proper to turn over to him.
A letter from the Chief of Ordnance of the United States Army to Secretary of War Holt, of date, January 15, 1861, shows that, commencing in 1859, under orders from Secretary of War Floyd, 115,000 muskets were transferred from the Springfield (Mass.) and Watervliet (N. Y.) arsenals to arsenals South; and, under like orders, other percussion muskets and rifles were similarly transferred, all of which were seized, together with many cannon and other material of war, by the Confederate authorities.( 3)
Harper's Ferry, and the arsenal there, with its arms and ordnance stores, were seized by the Confederates, April 18, 1861, and the machinery and equipment for manufacturing arms, not burned, was taken South.
The arsenal at Fayetteville, N. C., was also seized, April 22, 1861.
In February, 1861, Beauregard ( 4) was commissioned by Davis a Brigadier-General, and ordered to Charleston, South Carolina, to organize an army. Other officers were put in commission by the Confederacy, and a large force was soon mustering defiantly for the coming struggle.