TCNJ

19 SPRING 2018 to safeguard slavery. Had it been ratified, it would have become the 13th Amendment. Lincoln's inaugural address walked a fine line. Seven Deep South states, from South Carolina west to Texas, had abruptly renounced the Union in response to Lincoln's election and started building an independent country, the Confederate States of America. He pronounced their action invalid. Regarding the Union as "perpetual" and "unbroken," he interpreted his oath to mean he was president of all 34 states. But the address also promised to seek "a peaceful solution of the national troubles." Lincoln knew that eight states in the Upper South, home to two-thirds of white Southerners, had resisted the secession epidemic and remained in the Union. "We are not enemies, but friends," his memorable peroration concluded; "we must not be enemies." Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's long-time Illinois rival, eagerly sought to keep the peace. At the inaugural ceremonies, the relentless "Little Giant" tried to "make his association with the new president as conspicuous as possible," historian Roy Franklin Nichols recounted. Douglas "crowded hard upon Lincoln's heels," stood close as he spoke, and seconded conciliatory parts of the message sotto voce — "Good!" "That's so." "No coercion!" The Illinois senator's theatrics were designed to move Lincoln away from a military confrontation with the nascent Confederacy. Douglas was convinced the Union could not be preserved by war or "cemented by blood." Lincoln's newly appointed Secretary of State William Henry Seward also dreaded war. The New Yorker had long been the political antislavery move- ment's most eloquent spokesman. He also had been the odds-on favorite to gain the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 — until Lincoln unexpectedly seized the great prize. When the Union suddenly started to unravel after the November election, Seward tried to allay the panic. He drafted the actual language of the constitutional amendment. Then Douglas stayed up the entire night before the inauguration to bring it to a vote in the Senate. The unlikely duo of Douglas and Seward — one a Democrat, the other a Republican — hoped to counter Southern hysteria and to contain, and ultimately reverse, the secession movement. That necessarily would take time, certainly many months, more likely years. But the seven-state Confederacy's assertion of sovereignty threatened to trigger a violent encoun- ter far sooner. A small contingent of U.S. soldiers under the command of Major Robert Anderson huddled behind the walls of Fort Sumter, located on an artificial island offshore from Charles- ton, South Carolina. Confederate artillery, installed at other points in the harbor, menaced Sumter. The Sumter dilemma immediately landed in Lincoln's lap. Anderson reported a dwindling food supply, and the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, Winfield Scott, calculated that 25,000 troops and a naval fleet would be needed to secure the fort. Scott recommended abandoning the outpost because no such force could be gathered on short notice. But Lincoln's inaugural had promised to "hold, occupy, and possess" all government property, and Sumter had become a powerful symbol of Northern commitment to the Union. The last thing the new president wanted was to begin his term by giving up Sumter. But he also wanted to keep the peace. Sumter had the potential to start a war — and if shooting started there, Confederates would likely crush the small Union contingent. Southern Unionists agreed with Seward and Douglas: Sumter was too dangerous to hold. A widely admired North Carolinian, John A. Gilmer, who agonized for two months before refusing a post in Lincoln's cabinet, was called home at the end of the congres- sional session by "the extreme and dangerous illness of a member of my family." He sent Seward up-to-date assessments of the fast-changing political balance in the Upper South, where secession momentum lan- guished. Disunionists, who had been defeated at the polls in state after state,

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