Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

first thought he might need, for the president was sure that a show of resolute determination on the part of the federal government in raising an army would be all that was necessary to force the secessionists to back down. Still confident that Southern Unionism would reassert itself, Lincoln “questioned whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.” At least, he added weakly, “the contrary has not been demonstrated in any one of them.” Only let the federal government show its resolve, and the rebellion would collapse before a rebirth of Union loyalty.

In fact, almost the exact opposite happened. Virginia had called a state convention soon after Lincoln’s election to consider secession. The convention met on February 13, 1861, but debate on a secession ordinance dragged on for a month and a half before it was finally put to a vote on April 11, when secession lost, 88 to 45. The upper South, and especially Virginia, was not willing to go following the will-o’-the-wisp of secession, especially when it was led by the hotheads of South Carolina. Lincoln’s call for the states to put their militia at the disposal of the federal government laid an entirely different complexion over affairs, however. Virginia would not fight the Union for South Carolina, but it would not join with the rest of the Union in suppressing its fellow Southerners and denying the principle of secession. “The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view,” Virginia governor John Letcher replied to Lincoln’s summons.13 Forced by Lincoln’s proclamation to choose which master it would serve, the Virginia convention reversed itself and voted to secede on April 17; the state then proceeded to seize the undefended federal navy yard at Norfolk.

Similar reactions set in across the upper South. In Maryland, pro-secession riots broke out in the streets of Baltimore a day after Lincoln issued his call for the militia, and a secessionist mob stoned the men of the 6th Massachusetts on April 19 as they changed trains in Baltimore en route to Washington. The panicky militiamen responded by opening fire, killing four civilians and wounding thirty-one. Maryland secessionists had been haranguing Maryland governor Thomas Hicks for a special session of the state legislature, which was strongly Democratic, but Hicks had so far stubbornly refused to yield to them. The Baltimore shootings momentarily unsettled Hicks and forced him to call a special session on April 26.

Hicks soon recovered his Unionist composure and designated the rural town of Frederick as the meeting place for the session, rather than in the agitated atmosphere of the state capital at Annapolis. In the peace and detachment of Frederick, Hicks was able to keep the legislature from bolting down the secession path. When the state legislature tried to reconvene in September to reconsider secession, Federal troops, now securely in control of the state, arrested twenty-seven state representatives and prevented the legislature from meeting. New state elections that fall installed a Unionist in the governor’s chair and a Unionist majority in the legislature, who in turn sent Thomas Hicks to Washington as a U.S. senator.14

However, on May 7 the Tennessee legislature followed the example of Virginia rather than Maryland and voted to secede without even bothering to call a special convention into being. The Arkansas state convention passed a secession ordinance on the same day, and on May 20 North Carolina also seceded. In short order, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, and North Carolina then joined the Confederacy, and to cement Virginia’s loyalty to the new Southern republic, the Confederate government chose to move its capital from Montgomery to the Virginia capital of Richmond, only 100 miles south of Washington. Lincoln could now look out of the White House windows and see the new Confederate flag waving naughtily from housetops across the Potomac in Alexandria.

No more cheering were the deliberations Lincoln faced about what to do with the army of militia and the volunteers he had called into being. Lincoln’s choice for secretary of war was a political hack from Pennsylvania, Simon Cameron, who quickly proved utterly inadequate to the task of managing a wartime army. Even if Lincoln had appointed a professional soldier to the post, the results might not have been much better. The dispersion of the regular army all over the frontier meant that virtually none of those officers had ever commanded any large military formations. Jacob Dolson Cox was appalled to find that the regular army officers whom he met knew little, read little in military science, and were woefully unprepared for the actual conduct of a war. When Cox complained to one regular whom he knew, the commonsense reply he got was: “What could you expect of men who have had to spend their lives at a two-company post, where there was nothing to do when off duty but play draw-poker and drink whiskey at the sutler’s shop?” The result, as Cox could see, was that the regular army was almost useless for the war that was now breaking out, or at least not much more useful than the host of amateur military and militia units across the country. The regulars’ “advantage over equally well-educated civilians is reduced to a practical knowledge of the duties of the company and the petty post,” complained Cox, “and in comparison with the officers of well-drilled militia companies, it amounted to little more than a better knowledge of the army regulations and the administrative process.”15

As it was, what little strategic wisdom there was in the regular army was divided into two conflicting schools of military thought. At the head of one of these schools stood the figure of Napoleon, or at least Napoleon as interpreted by one of the more popular of Napoleon’s former staff officers, Antoine-Henri Jomini. French military practice, as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars, was considered the most advanced