ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Winfield Scott's role in the evolution of the federal government's policy toward the seceded states and the development of his relationship with Abraham Lincoln during the crisis of November 1860-April 1861. It describes how Scott's and Lincoln's responses to the secession crisis reflected their respective roots in wings of the antebellum Whig party that dashed over the nature, statesman-ship and the ends of political action. As Scott predicted, the matter of federal forts in the southern states emerged as a great point of contention after Lincoln's election. Although Lincoln had, like Scott, been a member of the Whig party, the president-elect had been a different type of Whig from the commanding general. The political roots of the first type of Whig were usually in the Federalist party or "National" faction that gained ascendancy in the Jeffersonian Republican party after the War of 1812.
