What, if any, issues did Lincoln face from his own commanders at the start of the Civil War?

Factual Questions
1

Inspired by several recent threads, including the ones about Pete Hegseth as well as blue state “soft secession”. I had honestly never considered this issue, but now it seems like something obvious, and I’m sure something that must have kept Lincoln up in bed at night.

At the onset of the Civil War, was there any chance that Grant, Sherman, etc. might have told Lincoln something like “we don’t follow illegal orders, such as firing on fellow Americans”? Any chance that the rank and file would have told the generals such a thing? Was there a risk, and if so, how large was it, that the Civil War could have been lost right off the bat due to the American military refusing to fight?

2

The Civil War started when Confederate troops fired upon the U.S. federal fort of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, leading to the destruction of the fort and the subsequent surrender of the U.S. Army forces defending it.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that this was an armed insurrection (a real one, not just a protest).

Any U.S. military commander sympathetic to the cause of the insurrectionists joined them, most famously Robert E. Lee, who resigned his U.S. Army commission on April 20, 1861 before he could receive any orders that he felt he could not follow.

3

There was a belief among many that the first fight of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run, was going to be an easy romp. People actually came out to watch the combat.

Once actual soldiers fell, due to actual confederate enemies, I believe any question about the legitimacy of the war fighting was resolved.

4

Lincoln did face a major issue early in the Civil War of his commanders being unwilling to fight, chiefly George McClellan.

McClellan was good at organizing an army, poor when it came to boldness and initiative. He didn’t reveal himself to be a defeatist and appeaser until considerably later.

5

The Civil War had its origins way back in the beginning of the 1800s. The anti-slavery movement had been steadily growing, and the economic and political split between the northern industrialists and the southern plantation owners had also been growing. Instead of working together to try to solve anything, both sides mostly just tried to force their ideals down their opponent’s throats, much as we do today (165 years later we’ve still failed to learn the lesson).

There were some compromises of course, otherwise we probably would have gone to war in the 1840s. But by the time 1860 came rolling around, there was so much built-up hatred on both sides that war was all but inevitable.

Keep in mind that the South was fighting for its very way of life. If the new territories became free states, the balance in Washington would shift and the free states would have more votes than the slave states. Slavery was on its way out world-wide, and it would just be a matter of time before slavery was abolished in the U.S. This would completely destroy the Southern economic structure as well as their social structure, both of which relied on unpaid slave labor and a working class that effectively had no rights and no voice in their own government. There was no way that the South was going to voluntarily dismantle their own social and economic way of life.

And thinking that common soldiers would say things like “we don’t follow illegal orders” is completely unrealistic. Modern soldiers might say something like that, but soldiers back in those days had a lot more respect for authority and command. Rebelling against a commander doing something extremely bad or illegal did happen back then, but it took something much more extreme to trigger that sort of behavior.

The South wasn’t just having a friendly argument with the North. They were in open rebellion. There was absolutely no question about the legality of orders in that case.

Besides, it’s not like the South could last for any amount of time. They didn’t have the heart to fight. A couple of battles and they would all go running. The war was certain to be over in a matter of days, maybe a few weeks at the most. It certainly wasn’t going to drag on for years and result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Uh… oops.

Yeah, both sides rather dramatically underestimated their opponent’s willingness and ability to fight. So that happened.

Yeah, this was the main problem that Lincoln faced, and it wasn’t just McClellan, though (rightfully so, IMHO) McClellan gets the lion’s share of the blame these days.

I don’t know if I would describe McClellan as defeatist, but he was definitely over-cautious to the point of losing battles that he could have won. Rather than being defeatist, I think it was more that he just didn’t like Lincoln and disagreed with him over just about everything, especially when Lincoln wanted him to be more aggressive.

Lincoln probably should have replaced him earlier, but McClellan was very popular among his troops, which made it more difficult for Lincoln to remove him.

6

Then how did slavery in other parts of world end, all after long and costly wars?

7

To be honest, I am much more familiar with slavery in the U.S. and while I know that Europe was mostly ahead of the U.S. in getting rid of slavery, I am extremely fuzzy on the details and I don’t know what political and economic struggles resulted from it. I know that Haiti had a huge rebellion to end slavery, but that is the only other country that I know of where it took an actual war to end slavery.

I’m sure there are others. I would actually appreciate details if anyone has them, though it would probably be better to start a different thread rather than hijack this one.

8

The actual beginning of the war was December 20, 1860, when South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Succession. Six other states had seceded by February 1, 1861, with President James Buchanan silently approving and publicly saying it was Lincoln’s problem. The Confederacy was formed in the next week. Lincoln wasn’t inaugurated until March 4. It is no coincidence that Virginia, a border state with qualms, seceded on April 17, five days after Sumter.

The United States was already broken. People were already choosing sides. The South was unalterably fixed in the defense of slavery; the North was furious at the betrayal. The attack on a federal fort guaranteed a shooting war, but the fuses were already laid merely waiting for a match somewhere, anywhere.

The response in the North was very much like that in the US after Pearl Harbor. Anybody who didn’t want war was a Confederate sympathizer and an enemy. They existed - New York City was a hotbed for them throughout the war and as others have said, Southern officers left for the South and so did many who had relatives there - but they were contrary to the overall sentiment that this was the most just and honorable war in America’s history and maybe the world.

9

At the start of the French Revolution, the monarchy fell when the army refused to fire on their own civilians.

10

During the long drawn out lead up to the civil war it was abundantly clear that remaining in the US army meant fighting Americans and there was plenty of opportunity for those that didn’t want to (or felt more loyalty to the south) to resign. Being still in the US army when the shooting war started meant you were OK with that.

That said I don’t know of any senior figures from before the civil war who choose to just resign and leave the military completely rather than fight Americans (there were plenty, as mentioned above including famously Robert Lee, that chose to resign and join the south)

11

IIRC Europe itself did not use slaves in any great number or at all by 1800.

Haiti was a full-on slave rebellion that tossed out the ruling class (or their bodies/heads). If anything, it made the South more repressive given the example of Haiti. The French Revolution encouraged the black population of Haiti and when the new French government in Paris did not follow through with its principle of ‘the rights of man” for all in Haiti, the revolt became particularly vicious, considering the population ratio was about 10:1 slaves to French.

I saw a post about how Britain took out a huge loan to compensate slave owners for loss of “property” in 1833, which (according to the post) was not fully paid off until 1956. I’m not sure how true that is. That would likely have been mainly the Carribean colonies where slavery was the norm for sugar plantations.

I guess the USA had the convenience(?) of the open insurrection to escape the need to compensate slave-holders for the loss of their “property”.

12

Right, General McClellan was extremely over-cautious to the point of ineffectiveness, but he never had any qualms against “firing on fellow Americans” (per the OP) as he rightly regarded them as insurrectionists in armed rebellion.

He was later the Democratic nominee for president against Lincoln in the 1864 election. The Democratic party platform called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy (which would have resulted in a permanent split). McClellan was personally against this, and opposed to his own party’s platform, as he was in support of putting down the rebellion and restoring the Union. (This mixed message contributed to his defeat in the election.)

But he was so hesitant about how to accomplish this, that had he won the election he may well have gone along with those in his party pushing for a negotiated settlement.

13

FWIW, I have spent a fair amount of time in Barbados and learned something of their history. Whereas in the US south, slaves were bread and–to some extent cared for–in Barbados, they were basically worked to death and then replaced. Once the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, the system was dying. When slavery abolished in the British Commonwealth (1838), the whole system was on its last legs. The remaining blacks became paid workers. Their lives were not great, but they and their employers had every incentive to keep them alive. They still celebrate a holiday called “Crop Over” at the end of the sugarcane harvest season. Of course their farming is much more diversified.

14

Other countries had a government that could eliminate slavery through statute. The US government did not have that power and could only do so through the amendment process which, in normal times, could never happen.

15

For starters, Grant and Sherman were both civilians at the outset of the war - Grant working at his father’s tannery in Galena IL, and Sherman for a streetcar line in St. Louis (having recently resigned the position of superintendent of a Louisiana military academy).

The U.S. Army in 1861 had just over 16,000 enlisted and officers, wholly inadequate to the task of subduing the Confederacy. Whether the small standing army fought for the Union or not was really fairly insignificant - the real issue was whether the free states could be convinced that the Union was a cause worth fighting for, and to commit resources human, industrial, and financial to that end.

Lincoln understood this, and initially pursued a policy of not antagonizing the seceded states or those slave states remaining in the Union, while adhering to the Republican position on slavery expansion and holding on to federal property in the seceded states. Union sentiment was not strong in the free states initially, breaking largely on party lines - there were some who wanted to let the seceding states go, or to establish a policy towards them independent of the government. So Lincoln had to keep from tearing the Union states apart due to internal dissent from his policies.

The Fort Sumter crisis forced his hand, and he strove to maintain northern unity. To that end, he sent a task force to provide provisions to the fort, as it was close to being starved out, and announced this publicly to establish his peaceful intent. Jefferson Davis, seeing a way to quell Unionist sentiment in the nascent Confederacy as well as a way to assert his government’s sovereignty, took the bait and attacked the fort before it could be resupplied, thus at a stroke polarizing sentiment in both slave and free states, driving four more states to secede and unifying both Union and Confederacy (for a time) behind their respective war aims.

So the focus antebellum was less on the Army itself and more on the support of the entire people of the Union states. An army disloyal to the President-elect could have caused trouble for him during the secession crisis, but once the war had started it was a very small part of the overall picture. In this sense, Lincoln’s maneuvering to force Davis to either strike the first blow by firing on the U.S. Flag or lose face by tolerating Union control of a major Confederate port was masterful, as it ensured that at least early on, the Union would be unified under his leadership and in pursuit of his goal.

16

Sorry to continue the hijack:

Brazil is probably most analogous to the US. They ended slavery in 1888. The biggest difference is that there was a larger free black population in Brazil already than in the US. While Brazil didn’t go to war over this, it did take a war to accelerate the process: the war with Paraguay, which gave many blacks (who fought in it) a taste of freedom; many didn’t return to being enslaved after it ended.

17

As mentioned, leaders who became prominent later in the war were often insignificant at the start. Which is a pattern seen in other wars and civil wars. General Winfield Scott, the head of the Army, had fought in the war of 1812, and when the Civil War began he was over 70 years old. There was never any question of him refusing to obey the president’s directives.

18

I recall also reading that slavery in Brazil was more analogous to the Mediterranean/Roman model. The article in some church publication decades ago mentioned how slaves could own property and money and buy their own freedom. One story was about a slave worked in a gold mine, and while washing his hair after working the mine, realized he was washing out gold dust too. So the slaves started collecting the gold dust that went home with them, and many eventually bought their freedom.

I’m not sure how true this is.

19

In the UK, the politics of the issue were, in effect, that the Reform Act of 1832 resolved our version of “industrialists vs agriculturists” by increasing the representation of industrial cities in the House of Commons. Also, slavery was not part and parcel of a defined part of the polity with a territory and a constitutional status of its own - just another economic interest group to be, as it happened, bought out. And, as it happened, it turned out to be a rather more widespread and varied group than just the big plantation owners.

(I have no idea about any loan financing specific to that process in amongst all the other government debt bonds accumulated over the years).

20

It looks like the OP has been satisfied, and nobody could find any examples of reluctance on the part of Union generals to fight their countrymen. (Lincoln did have trouble with Sherman’s initial indifference to emancipation, and Grant’s ordering all Jewish peddlers out of his military jurisdiction) And we’ve been allowed to discuss how comparative nations eliminated slavery.

If we can agree that the US Civil War was really about slavery, then so was the Madhist Revolt in the Sudan. The Europeans imposed abolition on the Egyptians, extending down the Nile to the source of the enslaved in central Africa. The middlemen whose livelihood was threatened were the Sudanese. They could rally around issues of self-determination and Islamic ideology, but the money says it was about slavery. The British and Egyptians sent in General Gordon, their best enslaver-fighter, who, like Lincoln, gambled his life and lost.

In Russia, Alexander II also gambled his life and lost after freeing the serfs (not “slaves,” but a distinction without a difference). History might expect him to have been assassinated by reactionary hardliners, but in his case it was radicals on the other side. Sometimes the most dangerous enemies of extremism aren’t their opposite numbers, but rather the voices of conciliation and compromise in the middle.