Fort Sumter: The First Shot 37375,000 volunteers; his request prompted Virginia,
North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee to secede.
After years of crises and compromises, the nation
chose to settle the great quarrel between the sections
by force of arms.
Southerners considered Lincoln’s call for troops
an act of naked aggression. When the first Union
regiment tried to pass through Baltimore in mid-
April, it was attacked by a mob. The pro-southern
chief of police telegraphed the Maryland state attor-
ney: “Streets red with blood. Send... for the rifle-
men to come, without delay. Fresh hordes will be
down on us to-morrow.” The chief and the mayor of
Baltimore then ordered the railroad bridges connect-
ing Baltimore with the northern states destroyed.
Order was not restored until Union troops occupied
key points in the city.
The Southerners were seeking to exercise what
a later generation would call the right of self-
determination. How, they asked, could the North
square its professed belief in democracy with its refusal
to permit the southern states to leave the Union when a
majority of their citizens wished to do so?
Lincoln took the position that secession was a
rejection of democracy. If the South could refuse to
abide by the result of an election in which it had
freely participated, then everything that monarchists
and other conservatives had said about the instability
of republican governments would be proved true.
“The central idea of secession is the essence of anar-
chy,” he said. The United States must “demonstrate
to the world” that “when ballots have been fairly
and constitutionally decided, there can be no suc-
cessful appeal except to ballots themselves, at suc-
ceeding elections.”
This was the proper ground to take. A war
against slavery would not have been supported by a
majority of Northerners. Slavery was the root cause of
secession but not of the North’s determination to
resist secession, which resulted from the people’s
commitment to the Union. Although abolition was
to be one of the major results of the Civil War, the
war was fought for nationalistic reasons, not to
destroy slavery. Lincoln made this plain when he
wrote in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley
urging immediate emancipation: “I would save the
Union.... If I could save the Union without freeing
any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by free-
ing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would alsoThis lithograph by Currier and Ives gives an erroneous impression of the “battle.” Major Robert Anderson, commander of Ft. Sumter, did not
want to expose his men to the looping mortar shells and artillery of the Confederates, so he manned only the cannon on the lowest floor, just
above the water. The top two levels of guns were seldom fired.