302

THE COMMISSIONERS AND THEIR ADVISERS.

bility; that no State, as a State, had seceded or could secede; that the National Government is a unit, and that it knows no States in the exercise of its executive authority, but deals only with the individuals of the people; therefore the "coercing of a State" was an impossibility, the contemplation of it an absurdity, and the assertion of its possibility a positive misrepresentation. And during the entire war that ensued, the Government acted upon the plain fact, declared by the very nature of the construction of the nation, that no State, as a State, was at any time in insurrection or rebellion, but only certain persons in certain States were acting in open defiance of the Law and of the Constitution. Individual citizens, not States, any more than counties or towns, were held amenable to the outraged Constitution and laws.1

Mr. Seward's Memorandum remained uncalled for and undelivered for twenty-three days, when, on the 8th of April, J. F. Pickett, Secretary of the Commissioners, applied for it. The Commissioners explained the delay in seeking a reply to their note, by asserting that they had been assured by “a person occupying a high official station in the Government," and who, they believed, was speaking by authority, that Fort Sumter would soon be evacuated, and that there would be no change in the relations of Fort Pickens to the "Confederacy," prejudicial to the "new government." They were also informed, they said, on the 1st of April, that an attempt might be made to send provisions to Fort Sumter, but nothing was said about re-enforcing the garrison. Governor Pickens, they understood, was to be informed before any attempt to send supplies should be made. With the belief that no hostile act would be undertaken unheralded, they had consented to wait, that they might secure the great object of their mission, namely, "a peaceful solution of existing complications.”

The "person occupying a high official station" was John A. Campbell, a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, who soon afterward resigned his seat on the bench, and joined the conspirators in their unholy work. He had received from Secretary Seward such assurances of peaceful intentions on the part of the Government, that on the day when the Secretary wrote his Memorandum for the Commissioners, Judge Campbell advised them not to press the matter of their mission. "I feel an entire confidence," he said, "that an immediate demand for an answer to your communication will be productive of evil and not of good." They acted upon his advice, and waited. It was from Judge Campbell that they received from Mr. Seward, on the 1st of April, the assurance that he was "satisfied that the Government would not undertake to supply Fort Sumter without giving notice to Governor Pickens." When, on the 8th, they were informed that

1 At Indianapolis, while on his way to Washington, Mr. Lincoln asked, significantly:-"In what consists the special sacredness of a State? I speak of that assumed primary right of a State to rule all which is less than itself, and ruin all which is greater than itself. If a State and a county, in a given case, should be equal in extent of territory and equal in number of inhabitants, in what, as a matter of principle, is the State better than the county? Would an exchange of names be an exchange of rights, upon principle? On what rightful principle may a State, being not more than one-fiftieth part of the Nation in soil and population, break up the Nation, and then coerce a proportionably larger subdivision of itself, in the most arbitrary way? What mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State?"

2 The original Memorandum is in the office of the Secretary of State. On it is an indorsement, setting forth that its delivery was delayed by the consent of the "Commissioners" and that, when called for, a verified copy was delivered to their Secretary.

PLEADINGS OF THE COMMISSIONERS.

303 Governor Pickens had been so notified, they sent for the Secretary's reply, and received the Memorandum alluded to; and on the 9th they returned a response characteristic of the cause which they represented. It was disingenuous, boastful, and menacing. They spoke of their government-the band of usurpers at Montgomery-as one seeking the good of the people, who (they falsely alleged) "had intrusted them with power, in the spirit of humanity, of the Christian civilization of the age," et cætera; and who, among its first acts, had sent to the Government of the United States, which they were attempting to revolutionize, the olive-branch of peace.

The Commissioners proceeded to give the Secretary a lecture, composed of a curious compound of truth, untruth, prophecy, and sophistry. "Persistently wedded," they said, "to those fatal theories of construction of the Federal Constitution always rejected by the statesmen of the South, and adhered to by those of the Administration school, until they have produced their natural and often-predicted result of the destruction of the Union, under which we might have continued to live happily and gloriously together, had the spirit of the ancestry who framed the common Constitution animated the hearts of all their sons, you now, with a persistence untaught and uncured by the ruin which has been wrought, refuse to recognize the great fact presented to you of a complete and successful revolution; you close your eyes to the existence of the government founded upon it, and ignore the high duties of moderation and humanity which attach to you in dealing with this great fact. Had you met these issues with the frankness and manliness with which the undersigned were instructed to present them to you and treat them, the undersigned had not now the melancholy duty to return. home and tell their government and their countrymen that their earnest and ceaseless efforts in behalf of peace had been futile, and that the Government of the United States meant to subjugate them by force of arms. Whatever may be the result, impartial history will record the innocence of the Government of the Confederate States, and place the responsibility of the blood and mourning that may ensue upon those who have denied the great fundamental doctrine of American liberty, that governments derive their just powers. from the consent of the governed;' and who have set naval and land armaments in motion to subject the people of one portion of the land to the will of another portion. That it can never be done while a freeman survives in the Confederate States to wiel a weapon, the undersigned appeal to past history to prove. * "It is proper, however, to advise you, that it were well to dismiss the hopes you seem to entertain that, by any of the modes indicated, the people of the Confederate States will ever be brought to submit to the authority of the Government of the United States. You are dealing with delusions, too, when you seek to separate our people from our government, and to characterize the deliberate sovereign act of the people as a 'perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.' If you cherish these dreams you will be awakened from them, and find them as unreal and unsubstantial as others in which you have recently indulged. The undersigned would omit the performance of an obvious duty, were they to fail to make known to the Government of the United States, that the people of the Confederate States have declared their independence with a full knowledge of all the responsi

*

*

*

*

*

*

**

THE SECRETARY OF STATE ACCUSED OF PERFIDY.

304 bilities of that act, and with as firm a determination to maintain it by all the means with which Nature has endowed them, as that which sustained their fathers when they threw off the authority of the British crown.' . . . The undersigned, in behalf of their government and people, accept the gage of battle thus thrown down to them; and, appealing to God and the judgment of mankind for the righteousness of their cause, the people of the Confederate States will defend their liberties to the last against this flagrant and open attempt at their subjugation to sectional power." In conclusion, these bold conspirators offended truth and insulted the Chief Magistrate by saying, it was clear that Mr. Lincoln had determined to appeal to the sword, to reduce the people of the Confederate States to the will of the section or party whose President he was."

In a memorandum of a few lines, on the 10th of April the Secretary of State acknowledged the receipt of this communication, and declined to make a reply. So ended the first attempt of the so-called Government of the "Confederate States of America" to hold diplomatic intercourse with the National Government, whose forbearance they had reason to admire. The Commissioners left Washington on the morning of the 11th.

In their communication, Messrs. Forsyth and Crawford recited the assurances concerning Fort Sumter which they had received from the Secretary of State through Judge Campbell, and charged the Administration with bad faith, because, early in April, it attempted to send supplies to the Fort. Judge Campbell, finding himself suspected of treachery, or at best of duplicity, by his friends at Montgomery, hastened, on the day after the attack on Fort Sumter, to exculpate himself by a letter to the Secretary of State, intended for publication. "On the 7th of April," he said, "I addressed you a letter on the subject of the alarm that the preparations by the Government had created, and asked you if the assurances I had given were well or ill founded in respect to Sumter. Your reply was:-'Faith, as to Sumter, fully kept wait and see.' In the morning's paper I read :-- An authorized messenger from President Lincoln informed Governor Pickens and General Beauregard that provisions will be sent to Fort Sumter--peaceably, or otherwise by force.' This was on the 8th, at Charleston, the day following your last assurance, and is the evidence of the faith I was invited to wait for and see. In the same paper, I read that intercepted dispatches disclosed the fact that Mr. Fox, who had been allowed to visit Major Anderson, on the pledge that his purpose was pacific, employed his opportunity to devise a plan for supplying the fort by force, and that this plan had been adopted by the Washington Government, and was in process of execution. My recollection of the date of Mr. Fox's visit carries it to a day in March. I learn he is a near connection of a member of the Cabinet. My connection with the Commissioners and yourself was superinduced. by a conversation with Justice Nelson. He informed me of your strong disposition in favor of peace, and that you were pressed with a demand of the Commissioners of the Confederate States for a reply to their first letter, and that you desired to avoid it at that time."

1 How cruelly the people were kept silent on the subject of the formation of an independent govermirent, the careful reader of these pages may easily comprehend.

FALSE POSITION OF THE GOVERNMENT.

305

Judge Campbell then mentioned his interview with the Secretary, and the pledge given for the evacuation of Sumter, as the ground of his advice to the Commissioners to wait, and added:-"The Commissioners who received those communications conclude they have been abused and overreached. The Montgomery Government holds the same opinion. . . . I think no candid man, who will read over what I have written, and consider for a moment what is going on at Sumter, but will agree that the equivocating conduct of the Administration, as measured and interpreted in connection with these promises, is the proximate cause of the great calamity. I have a profound conviction that the telegrams of the 8th of April, of General Beauregard, and of the 10th of April, of General Walker, the Secretary of War, can be referred to nothing else than their belief that there has been systematic duplicity practiced on them, through me.' It is under an oppressive sense of the weight of this responsibility that I submit to you these things for your explanation." The Secretary did not reply to this letter, nor to another note, again asking for explanations, written on the 20th of April.

The correspondence of the Commissioners, and the letter of Judge Campbell to Secretary Seward, were soon published to the world, and made an unfavorable impression concerning the dignity and good faith of the Government. The Commissioners disingenuously affected to be ignorant of the reason why an answer was not immediately given by the Secretary to their letter, when, as we have seen, they had made arrangements themselves with Campbell, their friend and adviser, to delay asking for it. Campbell's letter to the Secretary was also unnoticed; and the charges, actual and implied, of bad faith on the part of the Government, went out uncontradicted. The friends of the conspirators everywhere denounced the Administration as faithless. It was held up to scorn by the organs of the ruling classes in England and on the Continent; and its friends, in the absence of explanations, were unable to defend it with success. State policy, which allowed the President to give a partial explanation three months later, commanded silence at that time. The pledges concerning Sumter, and the charge that they had been violated by the Government, were obscured in mystery, and month after month the Opposition pointed significantly to the seeming bad faith of the Secretary of State. The following facts, communicated to the author of this work, semi-officially, in September, 1864, may, in connection with Mr. Lincoln's Message, just referred to, make it plain that he and his advisers acted in good faith, and that Mr. Seward's assurances were honestly given:

On the 4th of March, the day when Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated, a

1 The following are the telegraphic dispatches alluded to:-

"To L. P. WALKER, Secretary of War :

CHARLESTON, April 8, 1861.

“An authorized message from President Lincoln just informed Governor Pickens and myself that provisions will be sent to Fort Sumter peaceably, or otherwise by force.

*General G. T. Beauregard:

G. T. BEAUREGARD.” "MONTGOMERY, April 10, 1861.

“If you have no doubt as to the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the instructions of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force, you will at once demand its evacuation; and if this is refusted, proceed. In such manner as you may determine, to reduce it.

* See the President's Message to Congress, July 4, 1961, sixth and seventh paragraphs. VOL. I.-20

"L. P. WALKER."

306

a 1861.

PLAN FOR THE RELIEF OF FORT SUMTER.

letter was received at the War Department from Major Anderson, dated the 28th of February," in which that officer expressed an opinion that re-enforcements "could not be thrown into Fort Sumter within the time for his relief, rendered necessary by the limited supply of provisions, and with a view of holding possession of the same, with a force of less than twenty thousand good and well-disciplined men.". This letter was laid before the President and his Cabinet on the 5th, and the first question of importance which that council was called upon to decide was, whether Fort Sumter should be surrendered to the demands of the South Carolina authorities. General Scott was called into the council, and he concurred in opinion with Major Anderson. No sufficient force was then at the control of the Government, nor could they be raised and taken to the ground before Anderson's supplies would be exhausted. In a military point of view, the Administration was reduced to the simple duty of getting the garrison safely out of the fort.

Mr. Lincoln, governed by the advice of General Scott, who had been earnest some weeks earlier, while there was yet time, for re-enforcing the fort, was in favor of abandoning any further attempts to hold it. Every member of his Cabinet but two-anxious for peace, and believing further efforts to hold Sumter would be useless, and perhaps mischievous-coincided with the views of the President and of General Scott. Those members were Messrs. Chase and Blair. Finding himself alone in support of March 12. the idea that the fort must be held at all hazards, Mr. Blair sent' for his kinsman by marriage, Gustavus V. Fox, who had resigned his commission of lieutenant in the Navy several years before.

⚫ January 7.

Mr. Fox had already, through Secretary Holt, presented to Mr. Buchanan a plan for provisioning and re-enforcing the garrison of Sumter, which was highly approved by General Scott. This plan, which Mr. Blair now wished to lay before President Lincoln, proposed the preparation of necessary supplies in packages of portable form; to appear off Charleston bar with them and the troops in a large ocean steamer; to have three or four men-of-war as a protecting force; to have the steamer accompanied by three fast New York tug-boats, and, during the night, to send in the supplies and troops in these tugs, or in launches, as should seem best, after arrival and examination. The channel between Cummings's Point and Fort Moultrie is one mile and one-third in width; and this plan was based on the feasibility of passing the line of fire, from batteries that commanded this channel, with impunity. Experience has taught us that it was so. Farragut's successes during the late war were achieved by action based upon the same plan; and the impunity with which vessels passed up and down the Potomac, after the insurgents had established batteries upon its banks, shows that the plan was feasible.

The President was strongly urged to give up Fort Sumter for the sake of peace; but the Postmaster-General argued against it, in opposition to the opinions of the General-in-Chief and other military men, with great pertinacity. Aided by the practical suggestions of Mr. Fox, he succeeded in

1 Anderson's MS. Letter-book. President Lincoln's Message, July 4, 1861.

* See the Frontispiece of this volume.