In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction Crisis at Baltimore Fort Sumter fell on April 14, 1861. Five days later, pro-Confederate mobs attacked Massachusetts infantry traveling through Baltimore en route to Washington, D.C., and the troops returned fire.To prevent further movement of U.S. troops through Baltimore, railroad bridges connecting that city to Washington and the North had been burned, not by saboteurs or guerrillas, but by organized members of the Maryland state militia acting with the approval of the mayor of Baltimore and the governor of the state. The Maryland legislature would soon assemble, perhaps to vote to secede and join the Confederacy, cutting the capital off from the rest of the United States. On April 25, President Abraham Lincoln signed an order to General Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. Army. If the Maryland legislature voted “to arm their people against the United States,” Scott was “to adopt the most prompt, and efficient means to counteract, even, if necessary, to the bombardment of their cities.”1 The war was less than a month old, and already the president had authorized the army to turn artillery on American cities filled with unarmed men, women, and children . It was not a decision he made easily. His secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, recalled that the president’s initial reaction was to seek conciliation. In the early morning of April 20, he assured a delegation from Baltimore that he would move future reinforcements around Baltimore , not through it. Attempting to lighten the situation with humor, Lincoln remarked: “If I grant you this, you shall come to-morrow demanding that no troops shall pass around.” The joke became a prophecy. Later that day one of Maryland’s congressmen demanded that no U.S. troops travel through his state at all. The next day another delegation, led by the mayor of Baltimore, demanded that a body of Pennsylvania troops, who had reached a point fifteen miles north of Baltimore, be ordered to leave the state. “Fear- 2 Lincoln on Trial ing that renewed hostilities between soldiers and civilians might play into the hands of Maryland’s secessionists,” the president ordered the troops to return to Pennsylvania. Despite this order, Maryland militia destroyed the railroad bridges leading into the city, isolating Washington from the North. On April 22, another Baltimore delegation arrived in Washington to again ask that no troops pass through the state and added a demand that the president recognize the Confederacy. Lincoln had finally reached his limit, and he warned that if future reinforcements were attacked he would “lay Baltimore in ashes.” Three days later he authorized the shelling of Baltimore if necessary to save Washington.2 Little in his background had prepared Abraham Lincoln to issue military orders endangering civilians. Nevertheless, he would grapple with similar issues repeatedly over the next four years. His most extreme critics would argue that, notwithstanding his humanitarian reputation, the president was at heart a bloody-minded autocrat, careless of innocent life and property. Jefferson Davis saw the Emancipation Proclamation as a deliberate attempt to incite the slaughter of white women and children, and Lord Richard Lyons, the British minister in Civil War Washington, appears to have agreed.3 Even today, Lincoln’s bitterest critics have not hesitated to charge him with waging a war of terror against unarmed civilians, to the extent of resorting to the inflammatory term “war crimes,” a term unknown in the nineteenth century.4 Even if the most extreme of these charges are rejected as absurd, how are we to reconcile Lincoln the humanitarian, who hated the “monstrous injustice” of slavery, with Lincoln the relentless commander in chief, who would bombard the citizens of Baltimore to save the government in Washington? Answering this question will give us a new vantage point on the man himself, his personality, his philosophy, and his leadership. A serious effort to analyze Lincoln’s treatment of Southern civilians must start by determining what measures President Lincoln authorized, or at least which ones he knew about and did not oppose. Waging war against civilians is a very imprecise concept and could refer to a wide spectrum of activity. At its most serious, it would involve the deliberate killing of unarmed and unresisting civilian persons. At the other end of the scale would be the destruction or seizure of civilian property. Somewhere in between would lie restraints on personal liberty, such as arrest, exile, and forcible movement of civilians, and actions that, although not deliberately targeting civilians for...

Share