for National Geographic News
One hundred and forty years ago, the United States went to war against
itself. When Southern secessionists fired on Fort Sumter, South
Carolina, in April 1861 in their first blow for independence from the
Union, President Abraham Lincoln sent for Robert E. Lee, a colonel in
the United States Army.
Calling for Lee was the logical thing for
Lincoln, as commander-in-chief, to do. The Lee family had played a
prominent role in the American Revolution, and Lee, with more than 30
years in the military, was a highly regarded soldier.
Lee had commanded troops in the autumn of 1859 in response to John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later to become West Virginia when the state seceded from Virginia in 1862).
At the behest of President James Buchanan, Lee's men quickly overpowered and captured Brown, a religious crusader radically opposed to slavery. Brown was tried for treason and executed, providing the growing abolitionist movement in the North with a nationally known martyr.
Less than two years later, Lincoln asked Lee to command the 75,000 volunteers that would be raised to crush the rebellion begun at Fort Sumter. The president naively calculated that the war would be over in no more than 90 days.
Lee rejected the president's offer.
Never before had this most loyal of Americans disobeyed a superior. Motivated solely by the need to choose correctly between duty and desire, Lee returned home and resigned his commission. Several days later Virginia seceded from the Union and Lee announced that he would fervently follow the fate of his state. Lincoln was devastated by the decision.
State's Rights and Slavery
Contrary to what most Americans are taught, the Civil War did not begin with the goal of destroying slavery. It was begun, first and foremost, to preserve the Union and to do so at all costs.
Lincoln's decision to abolish slavery was not announced until April 16, 1862, a year after the firing on Fort Sumter. The Final Draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam, which was fought only 75 miles from Washington, D.C. The battle marked the pivotal point of the war. Although fighting would continue for nearly three more years, the tide had turned at Antietam, and Union victory became inevitable.
The proclamation didn't enter into effect until January 1, 1863, 21 months after the war began. Furthermore, the document had absolutely no application whatsoever to the four slave-holding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky (the president's home state), which remained in the Union.
Always politically astute, Lincoln once half-jokingly told Fredrick Douglass, a former slave who rose to prominence in the abolitionist movement: "I've always wanted God on our side in this affair, but we absolutely must have Kentucky."
