Shortly after Lincoln's inauguration, South Carolina decided
to suspend all sales of goods and merchandise to the Union troops
who occupied Fort Sumter. This put Lincoln squarely in the same
predicament that Buchanan had faced. Union forces were sorely
in need of supplies. To send in relief might appear to be an act
of aggression, but to withdraw troops would be tantamount to capitulation,
and a recognition of Confederate sovereignty.
Under increasing pressure from the federal forces at Sumter,
and ignoring the more cautious wishes of his cabinet, Lincoln decided
to send supplies to Charleston in the first week of April. When
the federal relief expedition arrived at Fort Sumter on April 12,
Confederate forces opened fire, and the undermanned and unprepared federal
troops were forced to surrender the next day. With this, the war
was on.
At the time of this insurrection, the combined forces
of the United States equaled a paltry 16,000. Most of these were
holding positions on the frontier in an attempt to fight back hostile
natives. Now, with a civil war in effect, Lincoln found his forces
halved, with the need for numbers raised exponentially. In order
to support a weakened federal force, Lincoln made an appeal to the
state governors on April 15, with hopes of gaining 75,000 enlisted
men. With the period of service set at one hundred days, the forces
originally fielded far more volunteers than the government was
capable of outfitting. Such are the heady early days of war.
In reinforcing Fort Sumter, and in marshalling federal
troops to prepare for battle with the Confederacy, Lincoln had
single-handedly made an effective declaration of war. He himself
had vehemently opposed such a sweeping step as a member of Congress
in 1847, but now he found himself exercising the same executive
privileges that James K. Polk had employed during the Mexican War.
Inevitably, the criticism against him was considerable.
Two days after the federal mobilization, the Union suffered
a key blow when Virginia voted to secede. Mere months before,
the Old Dominion had spearheaded a peace conference; now it was
lost to the Union cause, shortly to become the heart of the insurgency.
Hoping to counteract this defection, Lincoln promptly offered command
of the Union armies to Virginian Robert E. Lee, who perforce declined
and resigned his military position.
Within the next month, three more states would secede:
Arkansas on May 6, Tennessee on May 7, and North Carolina, finding itself
regionally isolated, on May 20. Then, on May 23, Virginia voted
overwhelmingly to join the Confederacy, placing the rival factions
face to face. Shortly thereafter, President Jefferson Davis pushed
through a motion to shift the Confederate capital from Montgomery
to Richmond, Virginia. As a result, the nerve centers of the Confederate
and Union forces lay less than one hundred miles from each other.
To be sure, the intervening valleys of Northern Virginia would
become a crucial theater of war.
By late spring, the Confederate States of America enjoyed
an eleven-state membership stretching from the so-called Indian
Territory in the west all the way east to the Atlantic Ocean.
As a land mass, it was actually larger than the northern states
of the Union. But as a population, it could barely come to halfway,
with 9 million against the Union's 18 million.
With the battle lines mostly in place, a few key states
remained to be won. Known today as the border states, this group
included Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. As it happened,
none of them officially seceded from the Union, although considerable rebel
factions wreaked havoc in each case. Since the war often seemed
to hang in the balance of border loyalties, Lincoln would make
much of his policy with an eye to how it would be received by the
loyalists in these states, many of whom continued to be dedicated
to the dual preservation of slavery and union.
But in the spring of 1861, it was unclear as to whether
the border states would stay in the Union or swing to the Confederacy.
Maryland and Kentucky were especially volatile, with differences
of opinion paralyzing the executive and legislative branches of
state government. Shortly after the conflict at Sumter, rebel
sympathizers in Maryland cut telegraph lines and rail ties to Washington,
hoping to isolate the Union's command center. By early May, with
10,000 troops defending Washington from a possible attack, Lincoln
had declared martial law in Maryland, placing all dissidents under
lock and key. Clearly an illegal step in peacetime, this was Lincoln's
first significant war measure. While it too drew fierce criticism,
it also firmly established him as a strong leader in a time of
civil strife.
With tensions also brewing out west, Lincoln sent troops
in to restore peace in Missouri. The governor of Missouri protested
by calling this action "illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary."
Against his protests and the protests of many others, Lincoln declared
martial law in St. Louis in June, and in all Missouri in August.
Although rebels were able to secure southwestern Missouri for
the Confederacy, the rest of the state remained loyal, largely because
it had been purged of rebel voices. This too was the case in Maryland,
and while Delaware and Kentucky were less tumultuous, they also
maintained a delicate balance between Union loyalty and rebel suppression.
At the same time that Lincoln was attempting to restore
civil order, he also had a set of military objectives to consider.
Initially, he had imposed General Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan,
a naval operation that combined a coastal blockade and control
of the Mississippi River in hopes of squeezing the Confederacy
to death without actually having to fight it. But as sectarian
warfare began to break out and weeks turned into months, Lincoln
began to lose confidence in what he saw as an overly passive plan.
In the field, the first significant fighting occurred
in Western Virginia, where General George McClellan made a push
to defend the position of Union loyalists there. A series of early
military successes emboldened a group of counties in Western Virginia
to refuse the legitimacy of secession on June 11, and this alliance
was promptly recognized by Washington as the official government
of Virginia. At the nadir of Union fortunes, in an attempt to
bolster the Union cause, these counties would be admitted under
separate cover as the thirty-fifth state, West Virginia, on June
20, 1863.
But for the moment, such desperate, drawn-out days were
far in the offing. With the early successes in Western Virginia
underfoot, Union confidence was high, and many believed that the
war could be decided in a single major battle. Journalists such
as Horace Greeley announced that the Union needed to assert its
dominance in a single, swift assault on Richmond. Meanwhile, military
tacticians such as Scott were of the opinion that more time should
be sent mobilizing.
With the initial Union enlistments about to expire, and
the Confederates poised to convene at Richmond, Lincoln caved in
to public opinion and ordered a Union operation to cross the Potomac
and march on the Confederacy. When General Irvin McDowell, in command
of the eastern theater, lobbied Lincoln for additional time to
mobilize, Lincoln responded by saying, "you are green, it is true; but
they are green also. You are all green alike."
In ordering a hasty, reckless attack of undefined objective,
Lincoln revealed that he was equally "green," as were the Washington journalists
and politicians who took picnic lunches to the site of the battlefield
on the morning of July 21, only to be sent scurrying by the bloodshed
they witnessed. Despite enjoying vastly superior numbers, McDowell's
early morning attack was routed by forces under the command of
Confederate Generals Pierre Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson.
The Union catastrophe, known today as First Manassas (also Bull
Run), would later be described by poet Walt Whitman as "Lincoln's
crucifixion day."
