In the battle to be the Republican nominee, William H. Seward was Lincoln’s main opponent and, at first, the favoured Republican candidate. Seward was an outspoken enemy of slavery, famous for his 1850 declaration that ‘there is a higher law than the Constitution’. However, there were plenty who didn’t see slavery this way. Lincoln, ever the wily politician, avoided the issue, so as not to alienate potential voters. He might have abhorred slavery privately, but publicly his strategy was ‘to bite my lip and keep quiet’. It was his vocal support of protectionist tariffs, especially in Pennsylvania, that won him the nomination.

When the election came, Lincoln’s main rival was his old foe the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. But the Democrats were divided, with northerners voting for Douglas, and southerners for John Breckenridge. To win, Lincoln needed only to make sure he beat Douglas in the north, where Douglas and the Democrats were locked into an unpopular anti-tariff position. Lincoln’s simple strategy was to tone down the slavery and tone up the protectionism. It worked. No part of the Republican platform, says historian David M. Potter, was ‘greeted with louder cheers than the tariff plank’. Pennsylvania went into ‘spasms of joy . . . her whole delegation rising and swinging hats and canes’.

On 6 November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. He only won around 40% of the vote and his vic- tory came entirely from support in the north and west. In the states that eventually seceded, he won nothing. The Morrill Tariff was the twelfth of seventeen planks in the Republican platform. Republican control of Congress meant the return of protectionist tariffs with dramatic consequences. One by one, led by South Carolina, the southern states began withdrawing from the Union.

Southerners are ‘taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit’, said the South Carolina Address. The South Carolinians felt they were doing just as their ancestors had done when they cried ‘No taxation without representation!’ to their British rulers. They were in ‘exactly the same position’.

By 1 February 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had followed South Carolina out of the Union. The seven states formed their own government, the Confederate States of America.

Meanwhile, the economist Henry Carey urged the president- elect to push through the new tariff. ‘The success of your administration is wholly dependent upon the passage of the Morrill bill at the present session . . .

There is but one way to make the Party a permanent one,’ he said. Without the opposition of the seceded states, the bill passed easily through Congress. Two days later, on 4 March, Lincoln gave his inaugural address.

‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,’ he said. ‘I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.’ Congress, too, had offered the south constitutional amendments that protected it from federal government interference in slavery. The Supreme Court had also given its endorsement three years earlier, when in 1857 it ruled against Dred Scott, a former slave who had unsuccessfully tried to sue for his and his family’s freedom. The president, Congress and the Supreme Court – the three branches of US federal government – had all effectively offered the south guarantees over slavery, yet still the Confederate states wanted no part of the Union. Tariffs and autonomy were the bigger issue and there, Lincoln would not compromise. The revenue tariffs generated and the protection they gave were too valuable.

‘The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts,’ he said. ‘Beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.’
Lincoln would use force to collect taxes. It was clear. This was a stark choice for southerners: pay up or face the consequences.

While Republicans were pushing through the Morrill Bill, the seceded states drafted their own constitution. It was remarkably similar to the US Constitution. The most telling differences were in the sovereignty granted to each state and the limitations placed on federal power to collect taxes. Congress could only ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises’ to pay debts, provide defence and carry on government. No longer could it do so for the ‘general Welfare of the United States’.

‘Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry,’ it specified. Leaving no room for doubt, it continued, ‘Neither this, nor any other clause contained in the constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce.’

The issue of slavery was also addressed. The original US Constitution did not use the word ‘slavery’, instead referring to ‘Person[s] held to Service or Labor’ (which included whites in indentured servitude). The Confederate Constitution used the word directly. It banned any slave trade with Africa. It prevented states from abolishing slavery within their own borders (interestingly, this was the one area were individual states’ rights were not sovereign) and it protected the rights of slave owners travelling with their slaves.

The south did not want a war. It could not defeat the north. It wanted peaceful secession. As ‘an agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country’, said Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, in his inaugural address, ‘our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit . . . There should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities.’

One of Davis’s first acts as president of the Confederacy was to write to Abraham Lincoln expressing a desire for peaceful relations. He sent a peace delegation to Washington. Lincoln would not even meet with them.

Fort Sumter controlled access to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. One of many forts along America’s coastline, it was the point at which tariffs were collected. It was occupied by Union troops. The Confederacy had been trying for weeks to get them to leave peacefully. It had offered to pay compensation not only for Fort Sumter, but for all federal property in southern territory. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, had promised the Confederacy that the fort would be evacuated, but the commander holding the garrison, Major Anderson, refused to leave.

It was April 1861. No shots in the civil war had yet been fired. Unionist Colonel John Baldwin had been called before Lincoln to update him on events at the secession convention in Virginia. ‘We have a clear and controlling majority of nearly three to one,’ said Baldwin. He was confident of winning the convention ‘with perfect certainty’.

‘Withdraw the troops at Sumter,’ Baldwin begged the president, adding that he should do it ‘for the sake of peace . . . If you take that position there is national feeling enough in the seceded States them- selves and all over the country to rally to your support, and you would gather more friends than any man in the country has ever had . . . For every one of your friends whom you would lose by such a policy you would gain ten who would rally to you and to the national standard of peace and Union.’

But Sumter was a tariff collection point. ‘What about the revenue?’ said Lincoln. ‘What would I do about the collection of duties?’ ‘Sir, how much do you expect to collect in a year?’ Colonel

Baldwin asked.
‘Fifty or sixty millions,’ Lincoln replied.
‘Why, sir,’ replied the Colonel, ‘say $250 million would be the

revenue of your term of the presidency; what is that but a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of such a war as we are threatened with? Let it all go, if necessary; but I do not believe that it will be necessary, because I believe that you can settle it . . . If there is a gun fired at Sumter – I do not care on which side it is fired – the thing is gone . . . As sure as there is a God in heaven the thing is gone. Virginia herself, strong as the Union majority in the Convention is now, will be out in forty-eight hours.’

‘Oh,’ said Lincoln, ‘sir, that is impossible.’

‘You have the choice to make, and you have got to make it very soon. You have, I believe, the power to place yourself up by the side of Washington himself as the saviour of your country, or, by taking a different course of policy, to send down your name on the page of history notorious forever.’

Lincoln chose war.

Baldwin was right. When the first shells of the American Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter one week later, none of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee had seceded. The initial votes, whether in convention or by popular vote, had all gone against secession. They wanted to remain in the Union and they wanted the Union to remain. But when it was clear Lincoln was going to use force against the Confederacy, new votes were held. Then they voted in favour of secession – and heavily so, just as Baldwin had said.

Lincoln knew that shots in Fort Sumter could spark a war. He also knew that ‘the power to make war against a State [which wishes to withdraw from the Union] is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution’. His ruse to justify unconstitutional action was to have the south perceived as the aggressor. He sent three unarmed ships with supplies. ‘You know perfectly well,’ said Baldwin, ‘that the people of Charleston have been feed- ing them already.’

‘The attempt at reinforcement was a feint,’ said the New York Times at the time. ‘Its object was to put upon the rebels the full and clear responsibility of commencing the war.’ Lincoln had even told his cabinet that if South Carolina’s artillery opened fire on the fort or the resupply ship, ‘he could blame the Confederacy for start- ing a war’.

As the supply ships neared Sumter, the Confederates again demanded Major Anderson surrender the fort, and again he refused. On 12 April, they began shelling. It was the reaction Lincoln wanted. He had enough to deem this a rebellion. Now bloodshed was ‘forced upon the national authority’, even if no Union troops were killed in the bombardment and Anderson ceded the fort the following day. Confederate President Jefferson Davis ‘ran blindly into the trap’.

The south had no ambition to conquer the north, nor did it make any attempt. Almost every battle in the war took place in the south, with the majority of fighting in Virginia and Tennessee. Southern Pennsylvania was as far north as the fighting went. The south was defensive. It could not defeat the north. Its population was 9 million to the north’s 22 million. Union soldiers outnumbered Confederates by almost two to one. The north had the factories, the industry, the manufacturing. Davis said repeatedly that the south only wanted peaceful secession, and that the Confederacy did not want conflict with the Union. Shelling Sumter proved a terrible mistake. What little chance there ever was of Lincoln granting peaceful secession had evaporated. Now the south could only hope to hold on long enough that the north would grow tired of casualties and eventually allow the Confederacy to exist.

‘The plan succeeded,’ said Lincoln. ‘They attacked Sumter – it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.’