April 5, 1861; The New York Herald
By the telegraphic despatches from Washington, which we publish today and published yesterday, and the day before, and by intelligence from all points of the compass, including the Navy Yard at Brooklyn, it appears that the policy of inactivity, of which we have so much experience of late, has given place to unusual bustle and excitement at the White House, in the War and Navy Departments, and at various naval and military posts throughout the country. General Scott is closeted for hours with the Cabinet. Movements of troops and war ships are ordered. Artillery companies and corps of sappers and miners leave Washington for New York, and General Sumner suddenly leaves for the same city, and for the South, to command the troops which are being concentrated there. General Scott’s private secretary also leaves upon a secret expedition. In the Navy Department numerous orders are issued, and every available ship is to be called home. The Minnesota has been ordered from Boston to the mouths of the Mississippi; the Powhatan, the Release and the Perry are directed to proceed South, and sealed orders have been despatched to the Cumberland, Pocahontas and Dolphin at Hampton Roads.
It is thus evident that there is something in the wind, but what it is nobody knows. One correspondent telegraphs that it has reference to the Spanish movements in St. Domingo, while the Spanish agents and all the foreign Ministers in Washington say there is nothing whatever in those movements; and the probability is that the story is got up to divert attention and cover very different designs of the government. A second correspondent says the troops are destined for the mouths of the Mississippi; a third that their destination is to collect the revenue at the entrance to every Southern port on the decks of ships-of-war, contrary to the laws of Congress; a fourth insists that Pensacola Bay is the place of rendezvous, and that the reinforcement of Fort Pickens, which the federal troops cannot hold, even if it should be reinforced, is the real object of the orders and preparations now going forward. It is also suggested that a grand coup d’ is to be made on Charleston, with a view to the reinforcement of Fort Sumter and the recovery of Fort Moultrie.
Which of all these points, or whether any of them, has been selected as the theatre of war, and for the display of the sudden and unexpected energy of the government, is mere matter of conjecture. What the Southern army is doing and what are the objects of its movements everybody knows. There is no mystery at Montgomery. The possession of Forts Sumter and Pickens is the avowed intention of President Davis and his Cabinet. But when the nation turns to Washington to look for information as to the design of the military and naval preparations of the Northern government, it is met either with mysterious silence, or conflicting stories, or ambiguous utterances, like the responses of the Delphic oracles.
Now, the effect of all this mystery, so foreign to the genius of a republican government, is most disastrous to the whole country. As to the North, with its idle capitalists, surplus breadstuffs and its enterprising spirit chafing for employment, the policy of the administration is most ruinous to it. All the operations of trade and commerce and manufactures are paralyzed and fettered by uncertainty, which is more fatal to business interests than the worst reality. Merchants cannot make their calculations, and dare not invest till they have some idea of what is before them. If it be war, they will know what to do. If it be peace, they will promptly act accordingly. But suspense is death to all enterprise. So destructive to the public welfare is the conduct of the administration that the people of the North will not stand it much longer.
In the South the know-nothing, do-nothing policy of Mr. Lincoln’s administration is equally obnoxious. It compels the confederacy to keep up a standing army at a terrible expense. At the lowest calculation the cost of maintaining ten thousand men for the year is five millions of dollars. The Confederate States will no longer submit to this expense without coming to blows; and the irritating, tantalizing course of our government, and their marchings and countermarchings, will probably soon drive the Cabinet at Montgomery into a solution of the difficulty, by taking the initiative and capturing the two forts in its waters held by the United States troops.
This we have no doubt is what Mr. Lincoln wants, for it would give him the opportunity of throwing upon the Southern confederacy the responsibility of commencing hostilities. But the country and posterity will hold him just as responsible as if he struck the first blow. The provocation to assault is often more culpable than the assault itself. In the same way he shirks his responsibility in the case of Fort Sumter. At half a dozen Cabinet meetings it has been decided, and that, too, with the concurrence of General Scott, that the evacuation of the fort is a military necessity. Yet Mr. Lincoln will not give the order for its evacuation, lest it should be placed on the record against him; and he prefers to allow Major Anderson to be starved out, or driven out by the batteries by which he is surrounded, in which event the lives of the garrison would probably fall a sacrifice, on the military principle that no commander has a right to hold out in an indefensible position after being summoned to surrender by a superior force. For this useless sacrifice of a brave officer and his command, which may occur at any moment, Mr. Lincoln would be held responsible by the Nation. He cannot, therefore, escape the consequences of his omission; for by all nations it is held to be the most sacred of duties to relieve a patriotic garrison, either by raising the siege or by ordering the surrender of the stronghold.
The ambiguity of the government seems to pervade even the elections. The results in New England indicate the uncertainty and suspense in which the people are held from day to day. They know not what to do. In their business relations they are equally at sea, without a chart or compass or star to guide them over the dark waves; and thousands, fearing to embark and make shipwrecks, are ruined from inaction. Such is the sad condition to which the country has been reduced since the triumph of the republican party on the 6th of November. How much longer the people are to be kept in a state of suspense remains to be seen. There is great apparent official activity going on in the Cabinet and at the War and Navy Departments in Washington; but what it all amounts to is still a mystery.