The Civil War: Memorandum Regarding Abraham Lincoln

December 22, 1860

Two days prior, South Carolina had decided to secede from the Union with a 169-0 vote. The day after that vote, the New York Times reported that President James Buchanan had ordered Major Robert Anderson to surrender Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, if attacked. The report was not entirely correct, however: Buchanan’s Secretary of War, John Floyd, had instructed Anderson to “exercise a sound military discretion” if attacked and to avoid “a vain and useless sacrifice” of life “upon a mere point of honor.”

Surrendering any fort would be no such “mere point of honor” to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s secretary, John G. Nicolay, recorded that the incoming president had not known of the news of Buchanan’s instructions to surrender Fort Moultrie.

Then, Lincoln reacted to the news: “If that is true they ought to hang him!”

Lincoln was not the only one upset by the report—inaccurate though it was. General Winfield Scott, one of the most exalted generals up to that time, had “felt considerably outraged that the President would not act as he wished him to in reinforcing the fort &c.” Lincoln told his secretary that he had written, through an intermediary, to General Scott that “immediately after my inauguration to make arrangements at once to hold the forts, or if they have been taken, to take them back again.” There would be a drastic change in approach: no longer would fear of confrontation or fear of conflict guide the White House.

Lincoln, later in the day, said: “There can be no doubt that in any event that is good ground to live and to die by.”