Читать книгу The Other Side of Lincoln - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 5

Contrary to the avowed promise of his Secretary of War, William Seward...President Lincoln sent notice to the commander of Fort Sumter and to the governor of South Carolina that he would re-supply the fort at the request of its commander Major Robert Anderson.

Anderson was under siege, surrounded by the Confederates under the command of his former student at West Point, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, second in his class where he studied artillery now had the cannons directed at his teacher and was intent on demonstrating that he had learned his lesson well.

Major Anderson had previously abandoned, with the tacit neglect of any direction from President Buchanan, two other United States military installations in Charlestown harbor...Fort’s Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. Beauregard delivered his ultimatum to abandon Fort Sumter, through an emissary, Colonel James Chestnut, Jr., a former U.S. Senator.

“Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort down around us, we shall all be starved in a few days.” Anderson responded.

“State the date by which you will abandon the fort under truce?” Colonel Chestnut demanded.

“Baring other instructions or the arrival of additional supplies, I shall abandon on April 15th.” Anderson said.

“Regrettably sir, we are unable to permit you to wait for supplies, munitions and additional men...you must abandon now.” Chestnut is reported to have said to Anderson, and he continued.

“If we never meet in this world again Major...I hope that we may meet in the next.”

At 4:30 A.M. on April 12-three days before the Anderson request to abandon, a single mortar was discharged...it was the signal, by Captain George S. James for the forty-three Confederate guns around Fort Sumter to fire four thousand shells...the first of which coming from Edmund Ruffin.

During the next day’s evacuation, Anderson ordered a cannon salute to the flag. One gun exploded; killing Private’s Daniel Hough and Edward Galloway...the first causalities of the Civil War were by accident.

Over the last several decades, many historians have held that Lincoln’s refusal to see his old friend Alexander Stephens who had come secretly on the orders of Jefferson Davis to meet with the Secretary of War Seward at the White House to try to work out a peaceful compromise and Lincoln’s refusal to accept Seward’s word on the issue of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s decision to re-supply the fort upon notice to the Governor, constituted a breach of good faith in the negotiating process and the deliberate attempt by Lincoln to provoke the Confederates into firing the first shots in order to garner world opinion, especially the English, on the side of the Union.

By his act and the acts of omission by his predecessor, Lincoln not only forced the hand of the Confederacy but his call for volunteers prompted the secession of four more southern states: Arkansas; North Carolina; Tennessee and Virginia.

Head of the Union forces at that time, seventy-five year old General Winfield Scott immediately upon notice that his commander-in-chief had taken this event to the Congress as a declaration of insurrection, put forth his strategic military plan...even-though his counsel to the President on the evacuation of Fort Sumter had been viewed by many of Lincoln’s Republican friends as a reason to question this old Virginian’s loyalty. His plan later derisively called “The Anaconda Plan,” was sent to Lincoln’s friend General George McClellan. It called for a blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports and in connection with the blockade a military movement down the Mississippi River to the ocean. This methodology so designed to cordon the seaboard, envelope the insurgent states through the cessation of commerce resulting in surrender of the Confederacy with a minimal bloodshed.

George McClellan was a conniving man, he leaked the plan to the press as he had taken credit for at least one battle in which he had minimal participation (The Battle of Rich Mountain). McClellan was thirty-five years old and thought the plan and the old man were out of step. He wanted something more grand and Napoleonic. But despite the undermining, Scott’s plan by any other name, the blockade of the southern ports and the control of the Mississippi by U.S. Grant who was to replace George McClellan who was a detractor of Grant at West Point, provided the ultimate basis for the economic and military defeat of the Confederacy.

Of course McClellan also knew ostensively through either his friend Allen Pinkerton or directly from the President that General Scott had recommended fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee to lead the armies of the north. On April 18, 1861, Lee met with powerbroker, Frank Blair, Sr. who unofficially offered Lee the command.

Born on January 19, 1807, in Stratford Hall, a plantation on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, Robert E. Lee descended from the line of Virginia Lees that had been among the countries most influential families. It was clear that he had the credentials and bloodlines to lead the nation’s military. One of his ancestors, Richard Henry Lee, issued the motion calling for independence at the Continental Congress in 1776. Another, Francis Lightfoot Lee, had signed the Declaration of Independence. Robert E. Lee’s father, Major General Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee had been one of General George Washington’s most accomplished cavalry officers and trusted aide. The man eulogized Washington as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” He also served as Virginia’s governor and U. S. Congressman. A great soldier and apt politician, Henry Lee was like Grant and Lincoln...terrible businessmen but he was loyal to his friends in need and while helping a friend defend his printing presses against an angry mob, he was stabbed and left for dead. Broke, disfigured and crippled, Henry Lee was sent to Barbados by President James Monroe.

Forced from the family home, Robert E. Lee lived with his mother’s family until he went to West Point, emerging second in his class. He later married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, a granddaughter of Martha Custis Washington, the wife of the first president, whose son by her first husband was adopted by Washington.

After Virginia seceded from the Union, Lee was torn between duty and home. Declining Lincoln’s offer of command, Lee resigned his commission. In many ways Lee was like Lincoln in that he was a man of contradiction. He was personally opposed to slavery, even-though he was a part of the plantation aristocracy, he supported the preservation of the Union. But his deepest loyalty was to his native Virginia, his legacy, and love of his family. To Lee and others like him, unlike Lincoln... state meant more than country. Later, Lincoln admitted that this was a quality he could not understand...while professing loyalty to the Union, Lee broke his oath for the Confederacy, for which he would pay dearly.

Two days after Lee resigned, Arlington House, the Custis family residence overlooking the Potomac was occupied by Union forces and General Irvin McDowell took the mansion as his headquarters and the estate was confiscated. In 1864 two hundred acres around Arlington House were set-aside as a military cemetery for the Union dead...later, Lee’s son received $150,000 as retribution for the taking of the property and it eventually became Arlington National Cemetery.