Lincoln was at best inept and at worse intent on war. Seward told him repeatedly that if he did the things he ended up doing there would be war. He told him repeatedly how to avoid the war and Lincoln ignored him.
LetÂ’s look at SewardÂ’s proposals to Lincoln on the crisis between the North and South, examine the personalities of the two men (Lincoln and Seward). Also some specific proposals of Seward and the events surrounding those proposals:
While Lincoln had been out in Springfield coping with office-seekers and reporters and writing his [inaugural] speech, Seward had been in Washington, in the Senate, playing the central role in crafting the Republican Party response as the string of Deep South states claimed to take themselves out of the Union. Seward, once a prime spokesman for antislavery reformers now became a prime conciliator, writing letters to keep Lincoln informed. When Lincoln began appointing his cabinet, his first offer was to Seward, proposing to make him secretary of state, and after a brief consideration, Seward accepted. Secretaries of state had often been key figures in government, sometimes as important as their presidents. So it seemed to many – including Seward himself – that's how it would be now.
When Lincoln named the rest of his cabinet, it included one of his rivals for the nomination, Salmon P Chase. Seward let it be known he objected to Chase, and that he expected Lincoln to drop Chase. Just two days before the inauguration, Seward passed a note to Lincoln asking “leave to withdraw” from his acceptance as Secretary of State. While the inaugural procession was forming Lincoln handed Seward back a note asking him to withdraw his withdrawal “The public interest, I think demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction.”
Seward, who had far more experience abroad and in world politics than most American politicians, had said at the outset of the Lincoln administration that because of “the utter absence of any acquaintance with the subject in the chief (executive), his [Seward’s] would be the guiding hand in Union diplomacy”
After the inauguration Seward had his own policy for the looming national crisis, and it seemed to him that Lincoln did not. We know that because he said so; On a busy day for the president, April 1st, 1861 Seward handed Lincoln a memo saying:
“We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either foreign or domestic.”
He urged the president to change the issues "before the public from one upon slavery . . . . for a question upon Union or Disunion . . . from what would be regarded as a Party question to one of Patriotism or Union.” One way to do that was deliberately to get into a war with another nation, a suggestion that Lincoln in his response quietly ignored.
In that memorandum to Lincoln Seward said the way to bring peace the United States was to engage the country in a war which would unite North and South in a battle against a foreign power. Seward thought that the shared nationalism, would override the ideologies separating the North and South; South Carolina would join Massachusetts in the war against – somebody.
One did not have to have long years of experience in the highest levels of diplomacy to recognize that that was not a good idea. In Lincoln’s mind the likelier scenario in early April 1861 was not that South Carolina firebrands would wheel around and join Massachusetts abolitionists in fighting an American war against another country – Great Britain? Russia? France?* -- but that some of these nations would give diplomatic recognition and aid to the Confederacy instead. For Washington to provoke a war with any one of them, thinking that the South would join with the North in that war, would be “folly of the highest order.”
*The following is part of the text of Steward’s April 1 “considerations” addressed to Lincoln:
“I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and declare war against them”
But the primary way to shift the questions that lay between the North and South sections, according to Seward, was for the government to give up Fort Sumter [South Carolina] and make the reinforcement of Fort Pickens, [Florida] the symbol of Union resolve.
Seward had a personal stake in giving up Fort Sumter. After the election while Lincoln had been in Springfield, travelling, speaking, meeting people, otherwise preparing for his administration, Seward had been in Washington speaking and acting for and leading the Republicans. He had repeatedly informed the Confederate government; through informal communications (through 3-commissioners) that Fort Sumter would be evacuated.
Lincoln immediately wrote his own little paper responding to Seward’s “thoughts.”
He denied that the administration lacked a policy; it had the policy that he had stated in the inaugural address, with which Seward who had seen and conferred with Lincoln on his address had agreed:
“I said ‘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.’ This had you distinct approval at the time.”
And when that inaugural statement was combined with the order Lincoln gave the first day to the general in chief of the army, it represented precisely the policy in Seward’s present proposal – with just one exception:
“[The inaugural statement] taken in connection with the order I immediately gave General Scott, directing him to employ every means in his power to strengthen and hold the forts, comprises the exact domestic policy you now urge, with the single exception, that it does not propose to abandon Fort Sumpter.”
“I do not perceive how the re-enforcement of Fort Sumpter would be done on a slavery, or party issue [note the party connection with the slavery issue here mentioned by both Lincoln and Seward], while that of Fort Pickens would be on a more national, and patriotic one.”
Lincoln as opposed to Seward, saw reinforcing Sumter, with its particular geography (both Sumter and Pickens were forts on islands in harbors surrounded by Confederate installations) and history and symbolic meaning, as vastly more important; but Lincoln believed that both posts should be held, as he had said in his inaugural.
In a conflict of orders between Lincoln and Seward) regarding the two forts, ships carrying supplies and men were confused enroute (Powhattan affair), resulting in a failure of support reaching and reinforcing both Sumter and Pickens. Lincoln entirely took the blame for the failure of both missions.
Secretary of the Navy Wells, who had been left out of the operation, telling about it said:
“He [Lincoln] took upon himself the whole blame, said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part, he ought to have been more careful and attentive.”
Wells wrote after the Lincoln presidency: President Lincoln never shunned any responsibility and often declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them, when I sometimes thought otherwise.”
Another leader would have found SewardÂ’s conduct in this affair hard to forgive. It was the last in a series of episodes that had occurred since SewardÂ’s defeat by Lincoln in Chicago. But Lincoln, generous and clearheaded, realized that he needed Seward -- needed him for his following, for his reputation, and, despite what Lincoln might have concluded from this episode, for his experience and advice. Before many more weeks were out, Seward would be writing to his wife, Frances, about LincolnÂ’s executive skill.
