Opinion

Abe’s ticking clock

Surprises can be cruel things. One of the cruelest landed on the desk of Abraham Lincoln the day after he was inaugurated as the 16th president of the United States.

From December 1860 to February 1861, seven Southern states — South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas — had, one by one, renounced their allegiance to the United States and seceded from the Union in order to form a new republic, the Confederate States of America. They saw Lincoln’s election the previous November as a dagger pointed at their most important economic institution, slavery, and they were getting loose from the federal government’s embrace while they still could.

If they could. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned that the Constitution gave no authority to the states to secede on their own hook any more than a business partnership could be single-handedly dissolved by one of the partners.

AND what threat, Lincoln asked, was driving the slave states to secession? True, he was the first president to publicly oppose slavery. But the same Constitution that prevented them from tearing up the Union also prevented him from meddling with the Southern states’ slavery laws. The only threat Lincoln could make as president was the promise that he would recognize the creation of no new slave states in the western territories.

The newly minted Confederacy was only worried about preserving slavery and the stiffly ranked society that slavery created — but in Lincoln’s mind the issue was even larger: Secession was anarchy — and no friend to democracy.

On the day Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, the United States was the only large-scale example of a democracy left in the world. There had been others — but from 1789 until 1861, all of those other struggles for democracy had been snuffed out by kings, emperors and dictators of various sorts.

If the American democracy shattered itself because seven states weren’t willing to abide by the outcome of the presidential election, then every one of those kings, emperors and dictators would be able to say to their nations, “See what democracy gets you? Instability. Disorder. The moment one faction loses out to another, they want to break the whole thing up! That’s democracy!”

THE one thorn in the Confederates’ side was the string of US military installations on their soil — especially Fort Sumter, an enormous brick fort sitting on a man-made island in the harbor of Charleston, SC. So long as the Stars and Stripes waved over Fort Sumter and its little garrison of 70 artillerymen, the Confederates’ claim to be an independent nation rang embarrassingly hollow in the ears of the other slave states of the Upper South — North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas — which the infant Confederacy needed to join.

The Confederates ringed Charleston harbor with cannon and troops. But sitting on its island, Fort Sumter was beyond the reach of any but the most powerful artillery.

THE Confederates were not eager to put themselves in the place of firing the first shot in what could easily become a nightmare civil war. But they knew that every day Lincoln could make them wait, the more impotent they’d look and the less seriously the other Southern states would take them. So his strategy would be to run the clock and let the folly of the secessionists finally force them to back down.

That was when the surprise arrived — in the form of a report from Fort Sumter’s commandant, Maj. Robert Anderson. The Confederates might not be able to touch him on his island in Charleston harbor, but they could certainly starve him into surrender — and, based on his inventory, it would take just six weeks.

Suddenly, Lincoln had no clock. He had to act — and act at once. His first instinct was to send a supply mission and reinforce the garrison. But the Confederates could declare that a hostile gesture and begin bombarding in “self-defense.” On the other hand, if he abandoned Fort Sumter, his presidency would be over before it had barely begun.

At the end of March, he at last decided that he could not simply walk away from Sumter. He sent an unarmed relief expedition, carrying only food and medicine, and even notified South Carolina Gov. Francis Pickens so that no one could accuse him of subterfuge.

IF the Confederates wanted to open fire on a harmless supply ship, then so be it. There would be war — but it would be a war the Confederates had brought down on their own heads.

The Confederates scoffed — but behind the scoffing was genuine alarm. If they allowed Sumter to be re-supplied, the standoff would go into extra innings, and time was not their friend; but if they fired on an unarmed supply ship, they’d be denounced as cowards.

On April 10, the new president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, ordered his general in Charleston, Pierre G.T. Beauregard, to issue an ultimatum to Maj. Anderson: Surrender now, or we will bombard you into surrender. Anderson replied that the Confederates could have the fort without the trouble of a bombardment in five or six days, when the garrison’s food ran out. But, no, he otherwise would not surrender.

At half-past four in the morning of April 12, 1861, a signal shot notified the Confederate artillery all around Charleston harbor to open fire. After 34 hours, with his ammunition and supplies exhausted and the fort’s interior ablaze, Anderson agreed to surrender.

Lincoln’s supply expedition arrived off the mouth of the harbor in time only to watch the bombardment and to take off Anderson and his garrison as part of the surrender agreement. Miraculously, not a single soldier, Union or Confederate, had been killed in the bombardment.

AHEAD stretched a four-year-long highway to carnage and death — until the Confederacy was finally beaten into defeat, slavery (the root cause of the war) was abolished, and Lincoln himself lay dead from an assassin’s bullet.

But, at the end, the integrity of the American union would be preserved, ready in the 20th century to come three times — in the two world wars and the Cold War — to the rescue of Western civilization.

In the process, Lincoln showed that democracies are not doomed to self-destruction, that ordinary people are capable of governing themselves, and that they can protect their government from inner dissolution without turning into a despotism themselves. The price we paid for that lesson was a steep one — 620,000 dead, $6 billion in property wiped out, a generation decimated.

We do well, for both its cost and its lesson, not to forget how dearly bought democracy’s survival was.

One hundred and fifty years ago, at Fort Sumter . . . democracy’s last bloodless battle.

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College.