4. The Outbreak of War.

Upon the newly-inaugurated President there now descended a swarm of office-seekers.  The Republican party had never been in power before, and these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had assailed any American President before.  To be accessible to all such was the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on him at this time.  When in the course of nature the number of office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing.  The horror of this enduring visitation has been described by Artemus Ward in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon.  His classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced and provisioned.  With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott, that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men, which did not exist.  The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval advisers.  The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the Confederate batteries.  Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter.  Blair said yes emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way.  The other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the neglect of the last administration.  Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter.  South Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort.  Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims.  The assertion that he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln’s Inaugural.  This was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on the Gulf of Mexico, which the administration was prepared to defend.  And now it was proposed that Lincoln, who had put down his foot with a bang yesterday, should take it up with a shuffle to-day.  And Lincoln reserved his judgment; and, which is much more, went on reserving it till the question nearly settled itself to his disgrace.