Though still obsessed with the idea of avoiding bloodshed, the President was aware that he had been ill rewarded for his friendliness toward the South. Alabama, Florida, and Georgia were taking over federal fortifications in emulation of South Carolina. Though still timid, Buchanan was surrounded now by firm Unionists—Black, Stanton, Holt, Dix, and King. He still believed, as did some of them, that compromise could be achieved. But come what might, he was now determined not to condone secession or surrender more government property.
Loyal Northerners entered upon the new year with rising spirits born of revived faith in the government. Holt drew warm praise for co-operating with Scott in raising the efficiency of the War Department. Black was commended for his consistently firm role. Dix had won immediate acclaim. And Stanton, according to Henry J. Raymond, of the New York Times, and Horace White, of the Chicago Tribune, was the backbone of the administration, responsible in large part for the change in Buchanan’s attitude. Thurlow Weed confided to Lincoln that “Secretaries Stanton and Holt are doing their duty nobly.”
Stanton does deserve a large measure of credit for whatever gains the Union cause had made. But he could not share in the growing confidence that the South would alter its disruptive course. “Public affairs are just now in … a dark and gloomy state,” he confided to William Stanton. “How long we shall have any Government at Washington is doubtful.” Stanton was tiring, his almost limitless energy draining away in unceasing activities, but more through fear that Buchanan would again reverse course and knuckle under to the South. And Stanton lacked confidence in Lincoln to improve the situation, even if the nation held together until he took office.12 But he hid his doubts and, shrugging away fatigue, went on.
On January 8, Buchanan submitted a special message to Congress, which, while demonstrating the augmented influence of his Unionist advisers, also revealed his continuing reluctance to take decisive action. Declaring his intention to “collect the public revenues and protect the public property,” the President, in the next breath, commended the existing “revolution” to the attention of Congress and asserted that all responsibility rested on the intransigent Southerners. He backed off from his position of the preceding December; now he recommended that something akin to the 36° 30′ dividing line of the Missouri Compromise extend to the Pacific, with slavery protected below it and forbidden elsewhere. Without comment, he submitted his correspondence with the South Carolina commissioners to Congress.
No sooner had the message been read than William A. Howard, representative from Michigan, secured passage of a resolution that the House appoint a special committee to inquire, among other matters, “whether any executive officer of the United States has been or is now treating or holding communication with any person or persons concerning the surrender of any forts, fortresses, or public property of the United States … [or] has at any time entered into any pledge, agreement, or understanding with any person or persons not to send any reinforcements to the forts of the United States in the harbor of Charleston.”
Howard later wrote that the resolution was inspired by “loyal members of the Cabinet,” who had prodded him to introduce it and to take its chairmanship. “I do not know that Mr. Stanton wrote the resolutions creating the Committee,” he recalled. “I did not see him write them. I never heard him say he wrote them. It would be easier, however, to persuade me that Mr. Jefferson did not write the Declaration of Independence than that Mr. Stanton did not write these resolutions.”
After weeks of investigation, a majority of the Howard committee recommended a bill specifically empowering the President to call out the militia to defend and recover forts and other government property, and another authorizing him to use the Navy to close insurrectionary ports. It presented a resolution declaring that suppressing treason was not the same as coercion of a state, and that the President had no authority to negotiate with persons who were dishonoring the flag.
In some of the actions of the committee, Stanton unquestionably had a hand. Committeeman Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts, recalled that memoranda, sent secretly by Stanton through Seward or directly to Howard, frequently gave the committee the lead to the next day’s cross-examination. Chairman Howard remembered that he and Stanton did not meet “at any time between the 1st of January and the 4th of March, 1861, but I think I heard from him more times than there were days in those two months. The clearest statements … defining the boundaries of treason, the most startling facts, when the evidence of treachery could be found, were furnished.”
There was treachery enough. The committee was tipped off that the officer who had surrendered the Pensacola navy yard to the secessionists was arranging to back-date his resignation to avoid a charge of treason. “We were put upon the inquiry,” Howard remarked, “by a ‘bird’ which flew directly from some Cabinet minister to the committee room.” In another instance, the Navy sent warships to Pensacola Harbor with reinforcements for Fort Pickens, but Senators Mason, of Virginia; Mallory, of Florida; and Slidell, of Louisiana interceded with Buchanan, urging him to avoid a hostile gesture by keeping the troops on shipboard unless the fort was threatened with attack. Buchanan put the proposal before the cabinet. Black, Stanton, and Dix were most earnestly opposed. Toucey favored acquiescence, and Buchanan authorized an order to that effect. Stanton, who detested Toucey for his tenderness toward the South, warned the committee that it should be prepared to arrest him on short notice.13
Since the convening of Congress in early December 1860, both houses had been trying to devise some formula of compromise. The House committee of thirty-three, one member from each state, had bogged down in futility; but the Senate committee of thirteen, composed of able men, suggested a number of plans. The only one that appeared to have a chance of adoption, however, was the handiwork of Crittenden, of Kentucky. He proposed a series of permanent amendments to the Constitution whereby, among other provisions, the territorial problem would be settled by extending the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30′ to the Pacific; in effect, slavery was to be forever excluded north of it and guaranteed in all territory to the south then owned or thereafter acquired by the United States.
A considerable number of congressmen looked with favor on this plan. But Lincoln advised the Republican leaders that it might impel Southern expansionists to try to annex Cuba or to grab more land from Mexico. Urging them confidentially to hold firm on the Republican platform of uncompromising opposition to the expansion of slavery on any terms, he blocked the adoption.
While Congress worked itself into stalemate, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas passed secession ordinances. The four states of the upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—though taking no overt action at this time, made it clearly evident that they would resist any effort of the government to coerce their sister slave states, and Virginia proposed that the states send delegates to a Peace Conference at Washington on February 4, to work out a formula of compromise on the basis of Crittenden’s proposal. But none of the states that had seceded manifested any interest in the conference.
Senators and representatives from those states had begun to resign from Congress, though several of them stayed on in Washington as potential troublemakers. Government workers gave up their jobs and started South. Others were suspected of keeping their positions only to spy. The capital seethed with rumors of plots and dark designs. Holt, Stanton, and General Scott joined Black in pleading for the immediate reinforcement of the city. The Howard committee, at Stanton’s instigation, began to investigate subversion in the capital and among federal employees.
Stanton confidentially advised Chase that he believed an effort to set up a provisional Confederate government in Washington would be made before March 4, and that it might very well be successful. Holt would resist it with every weapon at his command, but the available force was wholly inadequate. Buchanan had no power to accept offers of volunteer troops from the loyal states without authorization from Congress
and would not ask for permission. The Union men in Congress should go ahead and pass such a law on their own initiative, said Stanton. In fact, they should have done it before this.
Armed men were drilling in companies and battalions in Washington every night, Stanton informed Chase. But Buchanan could not be persuaded that the country faced an emergency. Stanton believed that the crux of the situation lay in the retention of the capital, “keeping the forms, archives, and symbols of established government out of the hands of the revolutionists. If they do not get possession of these, all the seceding ordinances, laws, etc.. are nothing more than paper filibustering, which must soon be exhausted and give place to the reestablishment of law & order—even in the seceding states.”
An attempt to seize Washington was imminent, he warned, and those “who mean to maintain the Government & enjoy their constitutional right to administer it for the next four years, should be diligently preparing & making ready for the emergency that will surely soon be upon them, and may come at any hour.” Having obtained the capital, the revolutionists would seek recognition from foreign governments. That gained, their power would be unshakable.14
On January 24, while Chase read this, doddering former President Tyler, head of the Virginia delegation to the Peace Conference, arrived in Washington and received Buchanan’s promise to support the efforts of the conference. Next day, Stanton had an interview with Sumner, who, like Chase, would command great influence when the Republicans came to power.
Stanton drew Sumner into his office. Then, glancing around at the clerks, he took him through six different rooms and, finding them all occupied, finally led him into the entry. “He told me,” Sumner reported to Republican Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, “that he was ‘surrounded by secessionists’—who would report in an hour to the newspapers any interview between us—that he must see me at some other time & place—that everything was bad as could be.” Stanton warned Sumner that the Virginia peace effort was merely a smoke screen and would come to nothing, “that Virginia would most certainly secede—that the conspiracy there was the most wide-spread & perfect.” Kentucky would follow Virginia, and Maryland would go too. Virginia’s real purpose was not to bring peace, but “to constitute a Provisional Govt. which was to take possession of the Capital & declare itself a nation.” Recounting this conversation to Governor Andrew, Sumner urged him to “keep Massachusetts out of all these schemes,” and agreed with Stanton that “we are in the midst of a revolution.”
Three nights later Stanton had another conference with Sumner. “I know from him what I cannot communicate,” Sumner wrote to Andrew. “Suffice it to say, he does not think it probable, hardly possible that we shall be here on the 4th March. The Presdt has been trimming again; … Genl. Scott is very anxious.”15
On February 2, five days after talking with Stanton, Sumner met with Buchanan. The President insisted that the best thing Massachusetts could do for the country was to approve the Crittenden proposition. Sumner vehemently expressed his disbelief in the wisdom or desirability of such a course. Stanton had steeled the senator to stand fast. Sumner would have been surprised to learn that Stanton, shortly before warning him to shun the Peace Conference which hoped to bring about the adoption of the Crittenden plan, had advised some Steubenville residents that if the Republicans in Congress would endorse the compromise proposal, “I think the troubles that now disturb and endanger the country would be speedily removed.”
Here again Stanton was playing both sides, for he had to retain Buchanan’s confidence or else lose all influence with the uncertain President. Stanton’s liaison role with the Republicans was the secret one, although his Unionist position in cabinet proceedings was frank enough. So far as the rest of the world was concerned, however, he took the official Buchanan posture of conciliation for the South.16
Former Governor John H. Clifford and Stephen Philips, of Massachusetts, were in Washington at this time, and on January 30, Stanton gave them the same sort of warning he had given to Chase and Sumner about an attempt to seize Washington, and asked them to convey it to Governor Andrew. Stanton had told them of the development of “a terrible and treasonable conspiracy,” conceived at the 1860 Charleston convention, to take over the North, not merely to remove the South from the union of states. Thus, the “symbols of government,” the public buildings and records of Washington, were in danger of seizure. Stanton, Scott, and Holt were “pressing the President every way with poor success.” The issue must become military, not political, Stanton had insisted, but in view of Buchanan’s refusal to assemble troops, all he can do “is to pass the word along & beg true men to see that all is done which can be done.”
Stanton did not suffer from “a nervous trepidation; I am sure I only state what Stanton evidently believes,” Philips wrote Andrew. He was impressed by Stanton’s logic, by his concern for the safety of the capital and the necessity to keep the border states for the Union, which foreshadowed Lincoln’s policy a year later. Buchanan only that morning had refused the army commander his request for a substantial increase in the military forces near Washington.17
Andrew conveyed the substance of Stanton’s warning to the Massachusetts legislature, which on February 3 voted an emergency fund of $100,000 to be placed in the hands of the governor. The governor sent a state official to Washington to confer with General Scott, and, fearful that the land route to Washington would be blocked if Maryland seceded, as Stanton had warned, he authorized an investigation of a possible water route to the capital.
Scott, responsible for the military safety of the capital, and sharing Stanton’s fears and uncertainty over the degree of Buchanan’s support, mustered what weak strength the regular army offered for the defense of Washington. But on the day the Peace Conference assembled, Stanton wrote to his former Steubenville partner, McCook, that these forces would easily be overcome if Maryland and Virginia should secede. South Carolina had made another demand for Fort Sumter, but it had been pitched in a lower key, and Stanton did not believe that Anderson would be attacked. The presence of the Brooklyn and the Macedonia had made the insurgents more cautious at Pensacola. “It was very plain,” wrote Stanton, “that as long as the United States continued to run away there would be no ‘bloodshed’ and now that the Government has determined to stand its ground there will still be ‘no bloodshed.’ ”18 The new policy of firmness was paying off, he felt. Within a week, however, delegates from the seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama, proclaimed the Confederate States of America, and elected Jefferson Davis President.
Excitement in Washington mounted as February 13, the day for counting the electoral votes, approached; Stanton, along with many others, feared that secessionist conspirators might choose this time to attempt their coup d’état. Additional companies of regulars were stationed at strategic points throughout the city. Militia guarded the Potomac bridges. Officers were ordered to be ready for instant action, day or night.
But no hostile demonstrations took place. The day passed quietly. Five days later Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy, and Lincoln started for Washington by a winding route that would take him through many Northern cities.
Stanton, Holt, and Scott, fearing that the attempt to take the capital had merely been deferred and that Lincoln’s inauguration would be the signal for an outbreak of revolt, again urged Buchanan to ask
Congress to increase the strength of the Army so that it could meet any emergency. When their efforts were unavailing, Stanton went to his cousin, Benjamin Stanton, of Ohio, chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, and urged him to initiate action. Congressman Stanton’s committee reported out a bill authorizing the President to call out the militia in case of a general insurrection. But conservative congressmen feared that the bill would antagonize the recently convened Virginia state convention, where loyal delegates were holding out against impatient secessionists. Lincoln, arriving in Washington on the twenty-third, also threw his infl
uence against the measure, and it failed to pass.
During all this time, Black and Buchanan had no inkling of Stanton’s secret dealings with the Republicans. A decade later, when former Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, revealed part of Stanton’s clandestine activities, Black declared in amazement: “Surely, if these things are true, he was the most marvellous impostor who ever lived or died.”19
As a matter of fact, Holt and General Scott as well as Stanton were working closely with Benjamin Stanton, who in 1865 denied a claim made by Montgomery Blair that Edwin Stanton in 1860 and 1861 had been in full sympathy with the Southern leaders in Congress who were dragging the South into secession. Blair had learned from Albert G. Brown, senator from Mississippi, that in early January 1861 Brown had met Stanton just after Mississippi had seceded and Brown had resigned from the Senate. According to Brown, Stanton had approved his actions and stated: “You have only to secede to secure your rights.… It was the only course to save the South.”
Such a statement of Brown’s, if unsupported, might be dismissed as sheer vindictiveness which Blair, who hated Stanton, was uncritically willing to accept. But if supported, Brown’s recollection indicates that Stanton may sometimes have advocated the extremist Southern view in order to conceal his secret arrangement with Unionist leaders and to gain information, all the while publicly supporting the Buchanan position of favoring the Crittenden proposal. If this is true, Stanton was indeed a master of duplicity, however lofty his purpose.
The only evidence in support of the Blair-Brown argument, however, is fragmentary and does not convince that Stanton ever supported secession. To be sure, his friend, the Washington lawyer of Southern birth, Philip Phillips, years later recalled that in 1861 Stanton was “a stronger sympathizer with the South than I was.” Stanton’s conduct during the secession winter became the subject of reminiscences at a dinner party ten years later, and Caleb Cushing, prominent Massachusetts Democrat and former trusted Buchanan lieutenant, stated that he, Stanton, and others had met frequently in early 1861 to talk over events, and that Stanton had been so outspoken in defense of Southern rights that listeners thought him a “rebel.”
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