by John Updike
McQueen stepped forward, like the paw of a predator instinctively shooting out. “May we have that in writing, Mr. President?”
But the old man was not to be so easily caught. Though weariness rested on his face like a veil of cheesecloth, he looked up with an alertness excited by technical parrying. “After all,” he purred, “this is a matter of honor among gentlemen. You have no status, until South Carolina declare independence, and only Congress, not the President, has the power to deal with federal property. I do not know that any paper or writing is necessary. We understand each other.”
Keitt stated in his barking baritone, “I doubt that we do. Mr. President, you have determined to let things remain as they are, and not to send reinforcements; but suppose you should hereafter change your policy for any reason, what then?”
Buchanan smiled, and tapped their written assurance on his desk. “Then I would first return to you this paper.”
When the men had gone, he took their memorandum and wrote on the back his version of the meeting, and of a little meeting that followed it: Afterwards Messrs. McQueen and Bonham called, in behalf of the delegation, and gave me the most positive assurance that the forts and public property would not be molested until after commissioners had been appointed to treat with the Federal Government in relation to the public property, and until the decision was known. I informed them that what would be done was a question for Congress and not for the Executive. That if they [the forts] were assailed, this would put them [the South Carolinians] completely in the wrong, and making them the authors of the civil war. They [McQueen and Bonham] gave the same assurances to Messrs. Floyd, Thompson, and others.
The next day he wrote the brief memorandum Tuesday, 11th December, 1860, General Cass announced to me his purpose to resign. The same day, Senators Gwin and Slidell came calling. Slidell did almost all the talking. “Buchanan,” he said, “I am astounded to be told that you refused the South Carolina delegation a simple promise not to reinforce the forts, after they had extended to you any number of manly and generous assurances!”
“Which they had no authority to extend. And they asked, Senator, for what the President cannot give.”
“Your hand is weak, and growing weaker. Georgia is going, and the Gulf States cannot stay. Why stick at these forts, when a continent teeters?” [Slidell: The wily and unscrupulous political king of Louisiana, a native New Yorker with a tempestuous and irregular youth. Just two years younger than Buchanan, he displayed white hair, a red, whiskey-scorched complexion, and an occasional glint, above the sharp arched nose, of the steely-eyed glamour that had hypnotized the slightly older, more cautious and scrupulous man. Slidell by ingenuities of voter transfer had assured Louisiana for Polk in ’44; in ’45 had acted as emissary to Mexico from Buchanan’s State Department, as the two nations approached war; in ’53 he had seized upon the Senate seat impetuous Soulé had to vacate in accepting the mission to Spain. Pierce had won his enmity by prosecuting a henchman; in ’56 he and Bright and Bayard and Benjamin had engineered Buchanan’s nomination. Slidell will be appointed the Confederacy’s Ambassador to France; he will be seized in the famous Trent affair aboard a British vessel heading out of Nassau; his machinations in the court of Napoleon III will not achieve French recognition or significant assistance; he will die in Cowes, England, in 1871, his request in 1866 for permission to return to Louisiana having been left unanswered by the first President Johnson.]
Buchanan adjusted the angle of his head to give Slidell a steady gaze, and said, “Sadly, Senator, do I perceive that you, too, would tip us toward disunion. That Keitt, and Rhett, and Yancy, and other discontented small fry seek to manufacture opportunities within upheaval I can comprehend; but that you, and Toombs, and Davis, who held sway over the Union’s capital—no. I can no longer give ear to your advice. I regret that I needed it so long.”
“That advice made you President.”
“And would unmake me, as President, now.”
“Buchanan, don’t be an imbecile. Your interest has always lain south, and still lies there.”
“Mr. James Buchanan, as a seeker of his own interest, is dead. There remains only the President of the United States. He has many duties to perform. Sir, you are excused. I thank you most gratefully for the favor of your views.”
The next day, the 12th, General Scott at last was well enough to appear in Washington. He was informed by Senator Lyman Trumbull that Buchanan was planning the surrender of Fort Moultrie and ought to be gibbeted. He advised Buchanan to send a force of three hundred men to Fort Moultrie immediately. In his Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of Rebellion, Buchanan wrote: It is scarcely a lack of charity to infer that General Scott knew at the time when he made this recommendation (on the 15th December) that it must be rejected. The President could not have complied with it, the position of affairs still remaining unchanged, without at once reversing his entire policy, and without a degree of inconsistency amounting almost to self-stultification. Also, the army, hamstrung by Congress, scarcely existed: Our army was still out of reach on the remote frontiers, and could not be withdrawn, during midwinter, in time for this military operation. Indeed, the General had never suggested such a withdrawal. He knew that had this been possible, the inhabitants on our distant frontiers would have been immediately exposed to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians.
Cass’s letter of resignation, dated December 12th but not delivered until the 15th, cited his decided opinion, which for some time past I have urged at various meetings of the Cabinet, that additional troops should be sent to reinforce the forts in the harbor of Charleston, with a view to their better defence should they be attacked, and that an armed vessel should likewise be ordered there, to aid, if necessary, in the defence. Reading this, Buchanan managed a bitter laugh. “Where was this fine bravado when he sat in Cabinet dozing off beneath his wig?” he asked Attorney-General Black, who as the storm mounted had drawn closer to Buchanan’s side, like Edgar to Lear’s. “When the Cabinet discussed my message to the Congress earlier this month, his only criticism was that I didn’t emphasize strongly enough the inability of Congress to make war upon a state; I strengthened it to suit him. I have often had occasion to remember what General Jackson said to me of Cass, when he sent him to Paris; he said, ‘Cass decides nothing for himself, but comes to me constantly with great bundles of paper.’ Well, Black, we’ll no longer have to write his dispatches for him.”
Black [harshly masculine; big-boned, shaggy-browed; ornate and avid in thought: Raymond Massey more than Jason Robards] said, “I understand he already regrets his resignation, and would like it retracted.”
“Indeed? Quickly, then, write me a letter of acceptance full of courteous and patriotic flowers. I have a new Secretary of State: you, Mr. Black.” Buchanan felt almost merry, at the thought of being rid of Cass. Though old himself, he disliked old men.
Black protested, “I pray you to reconsider. General Cass’s resignation, which you can undo in a word, will give fuel to your enemies, as he is a Northern name of long-standing repute. He consented to serve your cause when he was past the age of usual retirement; now, on second thought, he wishes to serve with you to the end.”
“He is a dropsical old dotard who spoiled the nomination for me in ’48 and again in ’52, with Cameron’s wicked conniving. Let him go, and take his place. If all else desert us, we’ll hold the fort with none but friends from the Keystone State!”
“Mr. President, if your determination is perfectly fixed, let me urge as my replacement as Attorney General my assistant, Edwin Stanton of Pittsburgh. He is incomparably informed upon the great land cases presently coming before the Supreme Court, and in my estimation his work as government counsel in California proved him the most brilliant lawyer in the land.”
“But he is not well versed, I believe, in constitutional theory. He is an abolitionist, and his temper has made him many enemies. I have it from more than one source that Stanton is not to be trusted.�
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“An un-looked-for stricture, Mr. President, from one who so long trusted Howell Cobb, and who still trusts John Floyd.”
Buchanan felt, as Black’s excessively orotund and increasingly confident voice invaded his aural canals, undermined; his political constitution was being reformed, as if in the course of a cancerous disease, by these resignations and substitutions. His true substance had been left behind in John Passmore’s Lancaster, in Nicholas’s St. Petersburg, in the tobacco-brown and claret-red rooms he had shared with Senator King, in the glittering London he and Harriet had so charmed. “Floyd is a muddler, perhaps,” he weakly admitted, “but not a villain.”
“In his capacity as Secretary of War,” said Black, “it is villainous to muddle as Floyd has done.”
As always with these high-toned actors, Buchanan reflected to himself, there is overstatement, with the nuance of precise truth lost in the stampede of assertions and action. Floyd was a good man, but how tedious to explain in exactly what way! Wearily the President waved events onward. “Very well—Stanton is our soldier. My heart can just barely rise to this, Jeremiah. I approach the Biblical age, and should be composing myself to mingle my physical substance with the dust. Instead, a fight beckons, against the very men whom I have counted first among my friends.”
[Notes to myself, in late 1976:]
SHAME. Shame as the emotion of this endless December, creeping in, suffusing. Buchanan’s need for silence, for peace, for space to pray. His prayers as a long soak in trepidation, hedged about as he is with bloody alternatives. His sense of layers peeling back, to reveal the shameful sinful incorrigible substance of the earth. His own life as one long trespass, beneath the gilt, gentility, success, etc. The odd sense of drawing closer to God through disgrace, terror, calumny, embarrassment. SHAME the taste of authenticity since la Chute, since Adam and Eve. Primitive chemical experiments remembered from Dickinson College days. JB’s sense of soaking, tasting, this liquid substance. Gets drunk on it. Do a prayer for him?
[My text staggered on:]
The next day, December 16th, Secretary of the Interior Thompson [an energetic Mississippian, remember?] came to Buchanan and said his state had appointed him agent to visit North [sic, not South] Carolina, to discuss the secession movement. The President was much criticized then and later for granting permission for him to go, as if furthering the secession movement via a Cabinet member. But he had approved only in the belief that Thompson’s mission was to prevent rather than precipitate secession, having been assured by Thompson as to the moderation of his views: Thompson believed, contrary to Buchanan’s message to the Congress on December 3rd, that a right of secession did exist, but that this right came into existence only when there was sufficient cause, and sufficient cause did not yet exist.
December 16th, Buchanan wrote to George M. Wharton saying: I have no word of encouragement to give you in regard to Southern secession. I still hope the storm may blow over; but there are no indications of it at present.… My information is not encouraging from any quarter.… The North are not yet impressed with a just sense of the danger. I have been warning them for years of what would finally be the result of their agitation; but Cassandra-like, all in vain.… P.S. I need not say that I consider secession to be revolution. This is the first letter I have penned upon the subject, & it is for yourself alone.
On December 17th, Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune ran an editorial [not headlined, as Klein has it] which began: There is a rumor in town, apparently derived from responsible sources at Washington, to the effect that President Buchanan is insane! This is probably not true, though in view of his course through the last six eventful weeks, the confirmation of the report would afford no reason for astonishment. More lamentable imbecility, or more deliberate treachery, was never seen. At every step he has contributed to the disruption of the Republic; and if, as Mr. Cobb declared, he shall prove to be the last President of the existing Union, it will be due to either his own weakness or wickedness quite as much as to any other cause. Let him be pronounced a lunatic, and he may stand at the bar of history relieved of a crime with scarce an equal in the records of human frailty and depravity. The editorial ended, With [General Cass’s] resignation the last vestige of dignity and of true patriotism seems to have left the Executive, and it would be a relief to the country and would alleviate Mr. Buchanan’s own reputation in the future, if he could now be proved insane. Henry Adams wrote from Washington to his brother Charles, of gossip from New York, Toward the close of the day a report was circulated that President Buchanan had gone insane, and stocks rose.… Poor old Buchanan! I don’t see but what he’ll have to be impeached. The terror here among the inhabitants is something wonderful to witness.
[Eds.: Could be shortened, but I put these quotes in to show what snide and supercilious pricks the so-called good guys, on the p.c. anti-slavery side, were. The entire Greeley editorial could be an appendix in 8-point, if you choose to publish. To get it I travelled all the way to the Boston Public Library—a little room at a corner of the musty courtyard where six of the crapulous homeless dozed; a plump omniscient girl of Asian ancestry behind the desk; a complicated call slip to fill out; a heavy spool of gray microfilm that sang in the projector like a missile homing in; then, Greeley!]
On the morning of December 20th, Buchanan received a communication from his old friend, the Palmetto State’s new governor, Francis Wilkinson Pickens; it was delivered to the White House by the marshal for South Carolina, D. H. Hamilton, accompanied by William H. Trescot. Trescot, that same morning, had had his resignation as Assistant Secretary of State (a position enlarged in importance by Cass’s limitations) accepted and was now acting openly on behalf of South Carolina. The letter asked that Pickens be allowed to send a small force, not exceeding twenty-five men and an officer, to take possession of Fort Sumter immediately, in order to give a feeling of safety to the community.… If something of the kind be not done, I cannot answer for the consequences.
Buchanan passed the letter to Trescot to read. Able, intelligent Trescot quickly sensed that the President was offended. He had been pushed too hard, too soon. Buchanan invited Hamilton to return tomorrow morning for his reply.
On the same day, Buchanan wrote the sympathetic James Gordon Bennett of the New-York Herald, in implicit riposte to the Tribune’s rumor, I have never enjoyed better health or a more tranquil spirit than during the past year. All our troubles have not cost me an hour’s sleep or a meal’s victuals, though I trust I have a just sense of my high responsibility. I weigh well and prayerfully what course I ought to adopt, and adhere to it steadily, leaving the results to Providence. This is my nature, and I deserve neither praise nor blame for it.
This same busy day, Buchanan attended the reception for the wedding of a Miss Parker to a Mr. Bouligny of Louisiana, a very Southern affair, Auchampaugh assures us: as Klein tells it, guests at a wedding reception on December 20 which the president attended found him proclaiming that he had never enjoyed better health and looking the part.
Out in the hall, however, there arose such a commotion that Buchanan asked another guest, “Madame, do you suppose the house is on fire?”
But the incendiary commotion was being created by one hot-blooded guest, Laurence Keitt, who was jubilantly leaping into the air and brandishing a piece of paper. “Thank God! Oh, thank God!” he cried. “South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram! I feel like a boy let out from school!”
Buchanan called for a carriage and went back to the White House. There, it seems, he composed an answer to Governor Pickens, saying: As an executive officer of the Government, I have no power to surrender to any human authority Fort Sumter or any of the other forts or public property in South Carolina.… If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States.
Meanwhile, Trescot, realizing that Pickens’ demand might lead to a rebuff and release the President from his informal pledge to preserve
the status quo, had talked with Slidell, Jefferson Davis, and South Carolina Congressmen Bonham and McQueen, and all telegraphed Pickens to withdraw his letter. By ten o’clock the next morning, Trescot called at the White House with a telegram Pickens had sent—You are authorised & requested to withdraw my letter sent by Dr. Hamilton immediately—and Buchanan’s combative response was withheld.
This same day, December 21st, a Cabinet meeting considered the position of Major Anderson; Buchanan asked exactly what orders had been forwarded to Fort Moultrie ten days earlier, by way of Major Don Carlos Buell. Buell had had no written instructions and he and Anderson had together composed some, which were sent back to the War Department and authenticated by Floyd. Floyd could not remember what they were. A search turned up Buell’s memorandum. Buchanan did not like the sentence which directed Anderson to defend himself to the last extremity, since this seemed to ask for needless sacrifice of life. Black wrote out a revised copy and Floyd signed it and sent it by courier to Anderson at Fort Moultrie.
Floyd was unwell but not idle. On December 19th he sent instructions to Captain J. G. Foster, at Fort Moultrie, to return to the federal arsenal in Charleston some forty muskets he had two days earlier removed under an unfilled order of the Ordnance Department dated November 1st. On December 20th Floyd called his ordnance chief to his sickbed in Washington and gave verbal orders to dispatch a large shipment of heavy cannon from a Pittsburgh foundry down the Mississippi to some uncompleted Texas forts.
What meaning did Floyd’s actions—widely construed, by the Northern press, as an attempt to arm the South while keeping the Union disarmed—really have? None, or almost none, Auchampaugh argues. Floyd was a good man held up to too harsh a light. Considering the things Floyd could have done and did not do, points to much in his favor. He sent nothing to Virginia; he knew the efficiency of the Southern cavalry, but sent not a sabre; he knew the Southern need of artillery, but sent not a gun before December, 1860. And indeed, why should Floyd’s actions have a meaning, if, as contemporary cosmologists virtually all agree, the universe itself has none?