The Life of Lyman Trumbull

CHAPTER IX

FORT SUMTER

Mrs. Trumbull did not accompany her husband to Washington at the special session of Congress July 4, 1861. A few letters written to her by him have been preserved. One of these revives the memory of an affair which caused intense indignation throughout the loyal states.

On the day when it was decided in Cabinet meeting to send supplies to Major Anderson in Fort Sumter, a newspaper correspondent named Harvey, a native of South Carolina, sent a telegram to Governor Pickens at Charleston notifying him of the fact. Harvey was the only newspaper man in Washington who had the news. He did not put his own name on the telegram, but signed it "A Friend." He was afterward appointed, at Secretary Seward's instance, as Minister to Portugal, although he was so obscure in the political world that the other Washington correspondents had to unearth and identify him to the public. It was said that he had once been the editor of the Philadelphia North American. After he had departed for his mission, there had been a seizure of telegrams by the Government and this anonymous one to Governor Pickens was found. The receiving-clerk testified that it had been sent by Harvey. The Republicans in Congress, and especially the Senators who had voted to confirm him, were boiling with indignation. A committee of the latter was appointed to call upon the President and request him to recall Harvey. A letter of Trumbull to his wife (July 14) says:

The Republicans in caucus appointed a committee to express to him their want of confidence in Harvey, Minister to Portugal. Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward informed the committee that they were aware of the worst dispatch to Governor Pickens before he left the country, but not before he received the appointment, and they did not think from their conversation with Harvey that he had any criminal intent, and requested the committee to report the facts to the caucus, Mr. Lincoln saying that he would like to know whether Senators were as dissatisfied when they came to know all the facts. The caucus will meet to-morrow and I do not believe will be satisfied with the explanation.

The inside history of this telegram was made public long afterward. Shortly before Seward took office as Secretary of State there came to Washington City three commissioners from Montgomery, Alabama, whose purpose was to negotiate terms of peaceful separation of the Confederate States of America from the United States, or to report to their own Government the refusal of the latter to enter into such negotiation. These men were Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman. They arrived in Washington on the 27th of February, four days after Lincoln's arrival and one week before his inauguration. They did not make their errand known until after the inauguration. They then communicated with Seward, by an intermediary, the nature of their mission, and the latter replied verbally that it was the intention of the new Administration to settle the dispute in an amicable manner. On the 15th of March, Seward assured the Confederate envoys that Sumter would be evacuated before a letter from them could reach Montgomery—that is, within five days. The negotiations were protracted till a decision had been reached, contrary to Seward's desires and promises, to send a fleet with provisions to relieve the garrison at Fort Sumter. Then Seward gave this fact to Harvey, knowing that he would transmit it to Governor Pickens and that the probable effect would be to defeat the scheme of relieving the garrison. This he evidently desired. He had already secretly detached the steamer Powhatan, an indispensable part of the Sumter fleet, and sent it on a useless expedition to Pensacola Harbor.

Gideon Welles's account of the Harvey affair is as follows:

Soon after President Lincoln had formed the resolution to attempt the relief of Sumter, and whilst it was yet a secret, a young man connected with the telegraph office in Washington, with whom I was acquainted, a native of the same town with myself, brought to me successively two telegrams conveying to the rebel authorities information of the purposes and decisions of the Administration. One of these telegrams was from Mr. Harvey, a newspaper correspondent, who was soon after, and with a full knowledge of his having communicated to the rebels the movements of the Government, appointed Minister to Lisbon. I had, on receiving these copies, handed them to the President. Mr. Blair, who had also obtained a copy of one, perhaps both, of these telegrams from another source, likewise informed him of the treachery. The subject was once or twice alluded to in Cabinet without eliciting any action, and when the nomination of Mr. Harvey to the Portuguese Mission was announced—a nomination made without the knowledge of any member of the Cabinet but the Secretary of State and made at his special request—there was general disapprobation except by the President (who avoided the expression of any opinion) and by Mr. Seward. The latter defended and justified the selection, which he admitted was recommended by himself, but the President was silent in regard to it.51

Trumbull says in his letter that Lincoln and Seward told the committee that they did not know that Harvey had sent the dispatch before he received the appointment. Welles says that both of them knew it beforehand, and that it was a matter of Cabinet discussion in which Lincoln, however, took no part. How are we to explain this contradiction? It was impossible for Lincoln to utter an untruth, but if we may credit Gideon Welles, passim, it was not impossible for Seward to do so and for Lincoln to remain silent while he did so, as he remained silent while the Cabinet were discussing the appointment of Harvey. If Seward, at the meeting of which Trumbull wrote, in this private letter to his wife, took the lead in the conversation, as was his habit, and said that there was no knowledge of Harvey's telegram to Governor Pickens until after Harvey had been appointed as minister, and Lincoln said nothing to the contrary, he would naturally have assumed that Seward spoke for both.

There is reason to believe that Seward had previously prevailed upon the President to agree to surrender Fort Sumter, as a means of preventing the secession of Virginia. Evidence of this fact is supplied by the following entry in the diary of John Hay, under date October 22, 1861:

At Seward's to-night the President talked about Secession, Compromise, and other such. He spoke of a Committee of Southern pseudo-unionists coming to him before inauguration for guarantees, etc. He promised to evacuate Sumter if they would break up their Convention without any row, or nonsense. They demurred. Subsequently he renewed proposition to Summers, but without any result. The President was most anxious to prevent bloodshed.52

Hay here speaks of two offers made by Lincoln to evacuate Sumter, one before his inauguration and one after. Both were made on condition that a certain convention should be adjourned. This was the convention of Virginia, which had been called to consider the question of secession. It had met in Richmond on the 18th of February, while Lincoln was en route for Washington. As Lincoln arrived in Washington on the 23d of February, the first offer must have been made in the interval between that day and the 4th of March.

The History of Nicolay and Hay does not mention the first offer. It speaks of the second one as a matter about which the facts are in dispute, the disputants being John Minor Botts and J. B. Baldwin. Botts was an ex-member of Congress from Virginia and a strong Union man. Baldwin was a member of the Virginia Convention and a Union man. He had come to Washington in response to an invitation which Lincoln had sent, on or about the 20th of March, to George W. Summers, who was likewise a member of the convention. Summers was not able to come at the time when the invitation reached him, and he deputed Baldwin to go in his place.

After the war ended, Botts wrote a book entitled "The Great Rebellion," in which he gave the following account of an interview he had had with President Lincoln on Sunday, April 7, 1861 (two days after Baldwin had had his interview):

About this time Mr. Lincoln sent a messenger to Richmond, inviting a distinguished member of the Union party to come immediately to Washington, and if he could not come himself, to send some other prominent Union man, as he wanted to see him on business of the first importance. The gentleman thus addressed, Mr. Summers, did not go, but sent another, Mr. J. B. Baldwin, who had distinguished himself by his zeal in the Union cause during the session of the convention; but this gentleman was slow in getting to Washington, and did not reach there for something like a week after the time he was expected. He reached Washington on Friday, the 5th of April, and, on calling on Mr. Lincoln, the following conversation in substance took place, as I learned from Mr. Lincoln himself. After expressing some regret that he had not come sooner, Mr. Lincoln said, "My object in desiring the presence of Mr. Summers, or some other influential and leading member of the Union party in your convention, was to submit a proposition by which I think the peace of the country can be preserved; but I fear you are almost too late. However, I will make it yet.

"This afternoon," he said, "a fleet is to sail from the harbor of New York for Charleston; your convention has been in session for nearly two months, and you have done nothing but hold and shake the rod over my head. You have just taken a vote, by which it appears you have a majority of two to one against secession. Now, so great is my desire to preserve the peace of the country, and to save the border states to the Union, that if you gentlemen of the Union party will adjourn without passing an ordinance of secession, I will telegraph at once to New York, arrest the sailing of the fleet, and take the responsibility of evacuating Fort Sumter!"

The proposition was declined. On the following Sunday night I was with Mr. Lincoln, and the greater part of the time alone, when Mr. Lincoln related the above facts to me. I inquired, "Well, Mr. Lincoln, what reply did Mr. Baldwin make?" "Oh," said he, throwing up his hands, "he wouldn't listen to it at all; scarcely treated me with civility; asked me what I meant by an adjournment; was it an adjournment sine die?" "Of course," said Mr. Lincoln, "I don't want you to adjourn, and, after I have evacuated the fort, meet again to adopt an ordinance of secession." I then said, "Mr. Lincoln, will you authorize me to make that proposition? For I will start to-morrow morning, and have a meeting of the Union men to-morrow night, who, I have no doubt, will gladly accept it." To which he replied, "It's too late, now; the fleet sailed on Friday evening."

In 1866, the Reconstruction Committee of Congress got an inkling of this interview between Lincoln and Baldwin, called Baldwin as a witness, and questioned him about it. He testified that he had an interview with the President at the date mentioned, but denied that Lincoln had offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia Convention would adjourn sine die. Thereupon Botts collected and published a mass of collateral evidence to show that Baldwin had testified falsely.

Botts says in his book that he had confirmatory letters from Governor Peirpoint, General Millson, of Virginia, Dr. Stone, of Washington, Hon. Garrett Davis (Senator from Kentucky), Robert A. Gray, of Rockingham (brother-in-law to Baldwin), Campbell Tarr, of Wheeling, and three others, to whom Lincoln made the statement regarding his interview with Baldwin, in almost the same language in which he made it to Botts himself. Botts quotes from two letters written to him by John F. Lewis in 1866, in which the latter says that Baldwin acknowledged to him (Lewis) that Lincoln did offer to evacuate Fort Sumter on the condition named. There are persons now living to whom Lewis made the same statement, verbally.

There is another piece of evidence, supplied by Rev. R. L. Dabney in the Southern Historical Society Papers, in a communication entitled "Colonel Baldwin's Interview with Mr. Lincoln." This purports to give the writer's recollections of an interview with Baldwin in March, 1865, at Petersburg, while the siege of that place was going on. Baldwin said that Secretary Seward sent Allan B. Magruder as a messenger to Mr. Janney, president of the Virginia Convention, urging that one of the Union members come to Washington to confer with Lincoln. Baldwin was called out of the convention by Summers on the 3d of April to see Magruder, and the latter said that Seward had authorized him to say that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the ensuing week. The gentlemen consulted urged Baldwin to go to Washington, and he consented and did go promptly. Seward accompanied him to the White House and Lincoln took him upstairs into his bedroom and locked the door. Lincoln "took a seat on the edge of the bed, spitting from time to time on the carpet." The two entered into a long dispute about the right of secession. Baldwin insisted that coercion would lead to war, in which case Virginia would join in behalf of the seceded states.

Lincoln's native good sense [the narrative proceeds], with Baldwin's evident sincerity, seemed now to open his eyes to the truth. He slid off the edge of the bed and began to stalk in his awkward manner across the chamber in great excitement and perplexity. He clutched his shaggy hair as though he would jerk out handfuls by the roots. He frowned and contorted his features, exclaiming, "I ought to have known this sooner; you are too late, sir, too late. Why did you not come here four days ago and tell me all this?" Colonel Baldwin replied: "Why, Mr. President, you did not ask our advice."

The foregoing narrative involves the supposition that Lincoln, in the midst of preparations for sending a fleet to Fort Sumter, dispatched a messenger to Richmond to bring a man to Washington to discuss with him the abstract question of the right of a state to secede, and that, having procured the presence of such a person, he took him into a bedroom, locked the door, and had the debate with him, taking care that nobody else should hear a syllable of it. Not a word about Fort Sumter, although Magruder, the messenger, had said that it would be evacuated on the following Friday! Yet the Rev. Mr. Dabney did not see the incongruity of the situation.

Nicolay and Hay say that Lincoln did not make any offer to Baldwin to evacuate Sumter, but did tell him what he had intended to say to Summers, if the latter had come to Washington at the right time.53

Douglas in combating the Rebels, in contrast to the futile diplomacy of Seward:

A marvelous incident is related in Welles's Diary immediately after his narrative of the Harvey affair. It describes the activity and earnestness of Stephen A.

Two days preceding the attack on Sumter, I met Senator Douglas in front of the Treasury Building. He was in a carriage with Mrs. Douglas, driving rapidly up the street. When he saw me he checked his driver, jumped from the carriage, and came to me on the sidewalk, and in a very earnest and emphatic manner said the rebels were determined on war and were about to make an assault on Sumter. He thought immediate and decisive measures should be taken; considered it a mistake that there had not already been more energetic action; said the dilatory proceedings of the Government would bring on a terrible civil war; that the whole South was united and in earnest. Although he had differed with the Administration on important questions and would never be in accord with some of its members on measures and principles that were fundamental, yet he had no fellowship with traitors or disunionists. He was for the Union and would stand by the Administration and all others in its defense, regardless of party. [Welles proposed that they should step into the State Department and consult with Seward.] The look of mingled astonishment and incredulity which came over him I can never forget. "Then you," he said, "have faith in Seward! Have you made yourself acquainted with what has been going on here all winter? Seward has had an understanding with these men. If he has influence with them, why don't he use it?"

Douglas considered it a waste of time and effort to talk to Seward, considered him a dead weight and drag on the Administration; said that Lincoln was honest and meant to do right, but was benumbed by Seward; but finally yielded to Welles's desire that they should go into Seward's office, in front of which they were standing. They went in and Douglas told Seward what he had told Welles, that the rebels were determined on war and were about to make an assault on Sumter, and that the Administration ought not to delay another minute, but should make instant preparations for war. All the reply they got from Seward was that there were many rash and reckless men at Charleston and that if they were determined to assault Sumter he did not know how they were to be prevented from doing so.

Seward's aims were patriotic but futile. He wished to save the Union without bloodshed, but the steps which he took were almost suicidal. What the country then needed was a jettison of compromises, and a resolution of doubts. Providence supplied these. The bombardment of Sumter accomplished the object as nothing else could have done. Nothing could have been contrived so sure to awaken the volcanic forces that ended in the destruction of slavery as the spectacle in Charleston Harbor.

CHAPTER X

BULL RUN—THE CONFISCATION ACT

In company with other Senators, Trumbull went to the battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861. His experience there he communicated to his wife, first by a brief telegram, and afterwards by letter. The telegram was suppressed by the authorities in charge of the telegraph office, who substituted one of their own in place of it and appended his name to it. The letter follows:

Washington, July 22nd, 1861.

We started over into Virginia about 9 o'clock A.M., and drove to Centreville, which is a high commanding position and a village of perhaps fifty houses. Bull Run, where the battle occurred, is South about 3 miles and the creek on the main road, looking West, is about 4-1/2 miles distant. The country is timbered for perhaps a mile West of the creek, between which and Centreville there are a good many cleared fields. At Centreville, Grimes and I got saddles and rode horseback down the main road towards the creek about three miles toward a hospital where were some few wounded soldiers and a few prisoners who had been sent back. This was about half-past three o'clock P.M. Here we met with Col. Vandever of Iowa, who gave us a very clear account of the battle. He had been with Gen. McDowell and Gen. Hunter, who with the strongest part of the army, had gone early in the morning a few miles north of the main road and crossed the creek to take the enemy in the flank. His division had very serious fighting, but had driven the enemy back and taken three of his batteries. At the hospital we were about one and a half miles from Generals Tyler and Schenck, Col. Sherman, etc., who were down the road in the woods and out of sight, with several regiments and a number of guns. Their troops, Vandever told us, were a good deal demoralized, and he feared an attack from the South towards Bull Run where the battle of a few days ago was fought. About this time a battery, apparently not more than a mile and a half distant and from the South, fired on the battery where Sherman and Schenck were. The firing was not rapid. On the hill at Centreville we could see quite beyond the timber of the creek off towards Manassas and see the smoke and hear the report of the artillery, but not very rapid as I thought. This we observed before leaving Centreville, and were told it was our main army driving the enemy back, but slowly and with great difficulty.

While at the hospital McDougall of California came up from the neighborhood of Gen. Schenck and said he was going back towards Centreville to a convenient place where he could get water and take lunch. As Grimes and myself had got separated from Messrs. Wade and Chandler and Brown, who had with them our supplies, we concluded to go back with McD. and partake with him. We returned on the road towards Centreville and turned up towards a house fifty or a hundred yards from the road, where we quietly took our lunch, the firing continuing about as before. Just as we were putting away the things we heard a great noise, and looking up towards the road saw it filled with wagons, horsemen and footmen in full run towards Centreville. We immediately mounted our horses and galloped to the road, by which time it was crowded, hundreds being in advance on the way to Centreville and two guns of the Sherman battery having already passed in full retreat. We kept on with the crowd, not knowing what else to do. On the way to Centreville many soldiers threw away their guns, knapsacks, etc. Gov. Grimes and I each picked up a gun. I soon came up to Senator Lane of Indiana, and the gun being heavy to carry and he better able to manage it, I gave it to him. Efforts were made to rally the men by civilians and others on their way to Centreville, but all to no purpose. Literally, three could have chased ten thousand. All this stampede was occasioned, as I understand, by a charge of not exceeding two hundred cavalry upon Schenck's column down in the woods, which, instead of repulsing as they could easily have done (having before become disordered and having lost some of their officers), broke and ran, communicating the panic to everybody they met. The rebel cavalry, or about one hundred of them, charged up past the hospital where we had been and took there some prisoners, as I am told, and released those we had. It was the most shameful rout you can conceive of. I suppose two thousand soldiers came rushing into Centreville in this disorganized condition. The cavalry which made the charge I did not see, but suppose they disappeared in double-quick time, not dreaming that they had put a whole division to flight. Several guns were left down in the woods, though I believe two were brought off. What became of Schenck I do not know. Tyler, I understand, was at Centreville when I got back there. Whether other portions of our army were shamefully routed just at the close of the day, after we had really won the battle, it seems impossible for me to learn, though I was told that McDowell was at Centreville when we were there and that his column had also been driven back. If this be so it is a terrible defeat. At Centreville there was a reserve of 8000 or 10,000 men under Col. Miles who had not been in the action and they were formed in line of battle when we left there, but the enemy did not, I presume, advance to that point last night, as we heard no firing. We fed our horses at Centreville and left there at six o'clock last evening. Came on to Fairfax Court House, where we got supper, and leaving there at ten o'clock reached home at half-past two this morning, having had a sad day and witnessed scenes I hope never to see again. Not very many baggage wagons, perhaps not more than fifty, were advanced beyond Centreville. From them the horses were mostly unhitched and the wagons left standing in the road when the stampede took place. This side of Centreville there were a great many wagons, and the alarm if possible was greater than on the other. Thousands of shovels were thrown out upon the road, also axes, boxes of provisions, etc. In some instances wagons were upset to get them out of the road, and the road was full of four-horse wagons retreating as fast as possible, and also of flying soldiers who could not be made to stop at Centreville. The officers stopped the wagons and a good many of the retreating soldiers by putting a file of men across the road and not allowing them to pass. In this way all the teams were stopped, but a good many stragglers climbed the fences and got by. I fear that a great, and, of course, a terrible slaughter has overtaken the Union forces—God's ways are inscrutable. I am dreadfully disappointed and mortified.