April 7, 1861; The New York Herald
The recent inactivity of our new administration has ceased to be a mystery. It is at length understood. Professions and appearances of peace, conciliation and forbearance in regard to the seceded States were all well enough in view of Mr. Secretary Chase’s call upon Wall street for eight millions in the way of a loan, and in view of certain elections in Connecticut and Rhode Island. But those elections being over, and Mr. Chase’s loan having been sufficiently successful to delude him with the idea that, come what may, he has only to ask in order to receive any amount of money from our Wall street financiers, we find that all these late professions and pretences of peace and conciliation were only disguises, which, having served their objects, are now thrown aside. The people of Connecticut and Rhode Island have been deceived, and the sharp and knowing money changers of Wall street have been egregiously humbugged. War, and not peace, it is now manifest, has been all along the fixed policy and purpose of Mr. Lincoln’s administration.
Our new President has some reputation as a joker, and the practical jokes, in the game of hide and seek, which he has been playing with Fort Sumter for several weeks, have certainly been very amusing. Astonished one day by authentic advices from Washington of a Cabinet decision for the immediate evacuation of said fort, and taken somewhat aback the next day by reliable information that there has been no Cabinet decision on the subject, we have been positively assured on the third day that if Major Anderson cannot be relieved he will be left himself to choose between starvation, evacuation or capitulation. Fourthly, all the Washington correspondents concur in the report that though Fort Sumter may be abandoned, Fort Pickens will be held by our government all hazards and to the last extremity.
Now here we have some stratagems of war, the credit of which does not belong to the President or any member of his Cabinet. The finger of General Scott is in this pie. Fort Pickens is invested, on the land side, by a besieging force of three or four thousand men. But the fort, out in the water on a sandbar, is hard to get at, and well prepared for defensive purposes. The besiegers are awaiting more men and heavier artillery; the besieged are expecting supplies and reinforcements. Gen. Scott, then, we will suppose, thus states his case to the Cabinet: You must not abandon Fort Sumter until you have sent your provisions, munitions of war and reinforcements into Fort Pickens; because, otherwise the three thousand fire-eaters and their materials of war now investing Sumter will be hurried off to Pensacola, and Pickens will thus in a few days be as far beyond your means of relief as Sumter is today. At this information Honest Old Abe pricks up his ears and nods his head approvingly; General Cameron, the Secretary of War, knocks under to the superior military sagacity of General Scott, and it is resolved that those terrible South Carolinians investing Fort Sumter must be kept there until we are sure heading them off at Fort Pickens.
General Scott having thus stolen a march upon General Davis, we may very soon now expect to hear of the evacuation of Fort Sumter. It is of no use to the United States against the seceded States, as matters now stand; but the case is far different with Fort Pickens and its collateral securities. They are to a great extent the keys of the Gulf of Mexico, and in the tug of war between the United States and the Confederate States, the former, in holding Fort Pickens and its dependencies, will have an immense advantage over the seceded States in a strategic, military, naval and commercial point of view. General Jefferson Davis understands all this, and hence his concentration of troops by the thousand, and of heavy guns by the hundred, in front of Fort Pickens. They must have that fort, or the threatened privateering policy of the Confederate States in the Gulf of Mexico cannot be successfully attempted; and without said fort the absolute independence of those States cannot be satisfactorily shown to England and France.
We have, therefore, every reason to believe that all these movements of ships of the navy, and steam transports, and men and munitions of war, on the part of our federal administration, are directed to the relief, reinforcement and maintenance of Fort Pickens; and, considering the importance of that fortress to the United States and to the Confederate States for war purposes against each other, we may soon expect to hear of a bloody collision there which will open wide the gates of civil war throughout the length and breadth of the land.