Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

by John Updike

  An unusually inclement winter had set in, Nevins tells us, with the flair of a one-time journalist. The white marble buildings were cold-looking, the ailanthus trees bare, the waters of the Potomac leaden-colored. As snow and rain smote the town, streets were alternately sheets of dazzling white, and stretches of viscid yellow mud. This is history? This is word painting. This is history:

  Christmas Day, 1860. Four events:

  1. In the White House, James Buchanan pens a letter to William M. Browne of the runaway Washington Constitution, which, though founded and subsidized as a pro-administration newspaper, has come out stridently in favor of secession. Private, his tremulous but tireless pen traces in parenthesis, and then forms the salutation, My Dear Sir. The moving pen writes, I have read with deep mortification your editorial this morning in which you take open ground against my message on the right of secession. I have defended you as long as I can against numerous complaints.… I am deeply sorry to say that I must in some authentic form declare that the “Constitution” is not the organ of the administration. [The authentic form became the withdrawal of government advertising and printing contracts; by the end of January the Constitution had to suspend publication.]

  2. Black tells Buchanan of Floyd’s cannon shipment from Pittsburgh and the President instantly cancels the order. Floyd, still capable of taking offense, is offended.

  3. Floyd is approached by Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas and others to join their plot to kidnap Buchanan and make Breckinridge, the Vice-President from Kentucky, President. Floyd refuses. [But what an episode in the history books that would have made! Old Buck would have become not just the only bachelor President but the only kidnapped President!!]

  4. In Charleston, Major Anderson and his men attend a Christmas party hosted by Captain J. G. Foster [see this page], giving no sign of the tactical surprise they had planned for the next night, that of the 26th; abandoning Fort Moultrie for the remoter, more defensible Fort Sumter.

  Floyd [drat this ubiquitous, dilatory nonentity!], hearing the news on the morning of December 27th, said, “It is impossible,” and telegraphed Anderson for an explanation. He received the reply I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I was certain that if attacked my men must have been sacrificed and the command of the harbor lost.

  That same morning, the President was visited by a trio of Southerners—Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Senator Robert Mercier Taliaferro Hunter of Virginia, and the former diplomat Trescot, who in February of 1861 composed an account of the visit, as part of his often-paraphrased Narrative, which he revised for publication in 1870.

  Colonel Davis asked the President, “Have you received any intelligence from Charleston in the last three hours?”

  “None,” was the cautious reply.

  “Then I have a great calamity to announce to you. Major Anderson last night, under cover of darkness, spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie and moved his full force to Fort Sumter. Now, Mr. President, you are surrounded with blood and dishonor on all sides.”

  Buchanan, who had been standing by the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in the palm of his hand, sat down.g “My God,” he asked, “are calamities never to come singly? I call God to witness: you gentlemen, better than anybody, know that this is not only without but against my orders; it is against my policy.”

  Other Senators—Yulee, Mallory, Bigler, Slidell—came calling, urging the President to order Anderson back to Moultrie and thus honor his gentleman’s agreement to preserve the status quo. Buchanan paced nervously, Nevins tells us, telling his excited callers to keep calm and trust him. Amid the clamor and pressure his habitual indecision and elderly stubbornness served as a shield: he could not condemn Anderson, he said, without the facts. He must call a Cabinet meeting. “If our gentlemen’s agreement has indeed been broken,” he promised, “it will be repaired.”

  In the Cabinet session, Floyd, overwrought, took the offensive. “Anderson has betrayed us all! He has compromised the President, and made war inevitable! This catastrophic maneuver was totally against his orders!”

  But Black said calmly, “On the contrary, sir, it was in precise accordance with his orders.”

  “Mr. Black, it was not. It could not have been.”

  “Mr. Floyd,” responded Black, in a voice of iron, “I have sent to the War Department for these orders of December 11th, drawn up by Major Anderson and Major Buell and endorsed by you. I shall read. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack or an attempt to take possession of any of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper, to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.”

  Floyd said triumphantly, “Indeed so; I defy you to produce tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.”

  Stanton spoke up. Short, round, pugnacious, he sported the wire-rim glasses and pharaonic beard that would become famous during his term as Lincoln’s Secretary of War. “Sir,” he told Floyd, who, pale and ill, wilted a bit under this wind from a new direction, “a resolution has been publicly introduced into the South Carolina legislature for possession of all the forts! The Charleston Mercury insists on it daily! The very workmen employed at Fort Sumter openly sport the blue cockade!”

  “Rumors and gestures, merely—not justification for a defiant military action,” Floyd argued. “Anderson left the guns at Moultrie spiked and burnt the carriages; such warlike tactics utterly violate the solemn pledge given by this government.”

  Stanton asked, “When was any such pledge given? Where does it exist in writing?”

  See this page–this page.

  Black stood to his lanky height and warned, “Mr. Floyd, you are impugning the honor of the President of the United States.”

  Buchanan attempted to defend his own honor. “I promised nothing certain. I said my intent was to preserve the status quo.” Had he said precisely that? It was so hard exactly to remember. Men’s bellies and voices, pressing, pressing. He turned for relief to the silent members of the Cabinet—the Secretary of the Navy, little old Isaac Toucey of Connecticut, a colleague from Polk’s Cabinet long ago, and pale, stocky Thompson, exhausted by his three days on the trail of the missing Indian bonds. The President mildly declared, “I agree that Major Anderson’s maneuver, though unexpected, was justified by the discretion granted him in explicit orders.”

  Floyd, in a voice loud like that of a drunk or of an actor, stated, “If the letter of official orders is to replace honor among men, then one remedy alone is left, and that is to withdraw the garrison from Charleston Harbor altogether. I demand the right to order withdrawal. I will sit down here and write out the order.”

  Black shook the papers holding Anderson’s orders in Floyd’s face and, overtopping the Virginian’s histrionics with his own, orated, “Mr. Floyd, there never was a moment in the history of England when a minister of the Crown could have proposed to surrender a military post which might be defended, without bringing his head to the block!”

  Stanton added furiously, his excited spittle visible in the Cabinet Room gaslights, installed in 1848: “To accede to such a proposal would be a crime like Arnold’s, and all the participants should be hanged like André, and a President of the United States who would make such an order would be guilty of treason!”

  Buchanan lifted his hands and cried out, as if wounded, “Oh, no! Not so bad as that, my friend—not so bad as that!”

  [How dismayingly, arriving at this climactic crisis of my tale and of Buchanan’s life, did I find nothing but dried old words, yards of them strung together from accounts of suspect authenticity, concerning details that in retrospect seem ridiculously niggling—the exact terms of Anderson’s orders, and the legal propriety of how to deal with the Commissioners from South Carolina, who had arrived in Washington and whose first meet
ing with the President had been postponed a day by the excitement over Anderson’s move to Sumter. Are all great events as they occur hidden by details, first from the participants and then from us?]

  The Cabinet meeting of the 27th wrangled on. They met again, after dinner, and into the night, while newspapermen waited for news and bands of Congressmen gathered to cast their weight into the battle for the President’s mind. The Tribune reported that the Cabinet voted four to three (Floyd, Thompson, and Philip F. Thomas, a pro-Southern Maryland politician who had replaced Howell Cobb as head of the Treasury Department, and who was to resign after a month of uneasy service) not to order Anderson back, with Black, Stanton, and Postmaster General Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, successfully bringing pressure to bear on Toucey, the member closest to the President’s extremely middling views. At last, midnight having come and gone, Buchanan decided to make no decision: In this state of suspense, to quote his own account, the President determined to await official information from Major Anderson himself. “He acted within the letter of his instructions,” Buchanan wearily told the Cabinet, “though against the trend of my policy. If, upon receipt and examination of his report, it appears he took alarm without cause, then we might think seriously of restoring for the present the former status quo.”

  Late as it was, Secretary Black lingered in the Cabinet Room. He said, “With some ingenuity, sir, we have brought ourselves to stand upon a very narrow piece of ground.”

  “It will suffice, if it serves to gain us time. Time, Mr. Black, time. Time is the great conservative force. We must buy it by the month, and it is sold only by the hour.” He explained a secret thread he had been spinning beneath the tumult of these days. “Since Lincoln will not come to Washington, I have sent Duff Green to Springfield, to gain the assent of the President-elect to a new national constitutional convention. Such a convention would become the voice of the people, who are overwhelmingly conservative, and whose terrorstricken letters pour in upon me like a hurricane of tears. Extend the Missouri Compromise line, and enforce the Fugitive Slave law—that is all we need for peace. Hourly I await for Green to telegram Lincoln’s reprieving statement.”

  “But,” Black pointed out, in the face of the old man’s pathetic hope, “the Republican party was born of repugnance for the Missouri Compromise. The party is the free-soil delusion’s very child. Lincoln can scarcely disavow his own platform, when abolitionist fanaticism has at last secured in him its national instrument.”

  “But he will be President. If only he would come to Washington and smell the blood in the air! Seward now smells it, and was ready to assent to the Crittenden Compromise, until the radicals renewed their hold on Lincoln. Wall Street is panicking, and that will speak to the Republicans.”

  “But in no case will the Gulf States stay in.”

  “The tide runs secessionist now. But when Virginia and Tennessee hold fast, that tide will turn.”

  Black said, “I fear the ground where you stand is so narrow, not many will join you on it.”

  “The ground is narrow, as the gate to salvation is strait!”

  Black said, with some tenderness for his old chief and sponsor, and with some condescension, “Mr. President, you need rest. These pressures bear upon you cruelly.”

  Buchanan brushed impatiently at cobwebs in the air. “They whittle, but there is still some stick left. All things pass. Sufficient unto the day. I say my prayers, and act by the light given me. The rest belongs to God.”

  Or “is God’s.” SHAME. LOSS. The eternity of life. The eternal non-returningness of it. His DOUBT, deeper and deeper. Byron was right. Ann was right. The gravity of time as it presses on us, shapes us, destroys us. So grave it makes us break into sweat, like a gravedigger who suddenly imagines the walls of clay collapsing upon him. At some point, maybe later, have JB look out window at frozen White House gardens and join Ann the night in Philadelphia she was struck by the horror of the colorless ferns in garden? He joins her then on the floor of things, in hopelessness. PRAYERS. In a letter to his brother, the Reverend Edward Y. Buchanan, from Russia in 1833, we find this: I have thought much upon the subject since my arrival in this strange land, and sometimes almost persuade myself that I am a Christian; but I am often haunted by the spirit of scepticism and doubt. My true feeling upon many occasions is: “Lord, I would believe; help Thou my unbelief.” Yet I am far from being an unbeliever. To the same, from Washington in 1844: I think often & think seriously of my latter end; but when I pray (and I have preserved & with the blessing of God shall preserve this good habit from my parents) I can rarely keep my mind from wandering. I trust that the Almighty father, through the merits & atonement of his son, will yet vouchsafe to me a clearer & stronger faith than I possess. Prayers return him to childhood prayers with his mother, in the log cabin lit by the brutal unsteady flare of resiny pine splints stuck between the fireplace stones. When they spark out, time to close eyes and sleep. SLEEP. We remain children, though we seem to become men.

  Next morning, the 28th, brought the Carolina Commissioners: Barnwell, Orr, and J. H. Adams. Men of parts, says Nevins. They had a natural sense of their dignity in representing a new republic, and came not to sue for terms but to treat as equals. Buchanan told them, “I receive you as private gentlemen of the highest character, and not as diplomatic agents. As I stated unmistakably in my message of December 3rd, Congress alone has the authority to decide what shall be the relations between South Carolina and the federal government.”

  Former Governor James Hopkins Adams was the most extreme of the three: an old nullifier and ardent proponent of reviving the African slave trade, he owned one hundred ninety-two slaves on his cotton plantation in lower Richland County. He struck a note of high formality. “We have the honor, Mr. President, to transmit to you a copy of the ordinance of secession by which the state of South Carolina has resumed the powers she once delegated to the government of the United States.”

  “A well-worded document, no doubt,” Buchanan said, but did not reach out his hand to accept it. Seated at his little walnut desk, while the commissioners stood, he was struck by the pendulous motion of Adams’s watch fob, a chain leading into the pocket of his dove-gray vest and swinging in sympathy with the motions of his diaphragm as he spoke.

  It was Orr’s turn to speak. Buchanan liked James Lawrence Orr: a sound man. Like Buchanan himself, he had worked in his father’s store and then turned lawyer; a former Speaker of the House, Orr knew the North’s case better than most Southerners, and as recently as this past April had argued for the Union at his state’s Democratic convention. Campaigning for the Senate in 1858, he had dared quote Daniel Webster on nullification, and been defeated for it. But now the secessionist tide was carrying him along. He stated, “Mr. President, in this very office, little more than a fortnight ago, you made a solemn pledge, as a gentleman, to maintain the status quo in Charleston Harbor. Major Anderson has violated that pledge, and unless restitution is made, a bloody issue is most probable.”

  The President permitted himself a wintry smile, and cocked his head to bring the other’s large, flushed face into focus. “But, Mr. Orr, word has just arrived that the troops of Governor Pickens have now seized Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie, not to mention the post office and the customhouse. How can we order Major Anderson back, when the place to which he would return has been occupied by force?” Buchanan waited briefly for their reply, while contemplating their three vests. These men had been his friends and political allies a few weeks ago, solid congenial men with whom, save for a few trifling matters such as the sacred status of slavery, he had no disagreements. It now seemed that that had been an illusion. These men were willing to sink his Presidency and douse Anderson and his troops in blood. These groomed and well-stuffed bellies, these bulging vests and starched shirtfronts were hollow: there was nothing in there; nothing had ever been there but self-interest and expediency. The President added, in the face of their momentarily baffled silence, “I ask my question in a rheto
rical sense merely, for it is not my office, nor my purpose, to negotiate with you. Only Congress can negotiate.”

  Barnwell, a Harvard graduate who had been President of the South Carolina College as well as Representative and Senator, bore down with a pedantic relentlessness. “Mr. Buchanan, sir, we came here as the representatives of an authority which could at any time within the past sixty days have taken possession of the forts, but which, upon pledges given in a manner that we cannot doubt, determined to trust to your honor rather than to its own power. We urge upon you the immediate withdrawal of all the troops from the harbor of Charleston. They constitute a standing menace; their presence poisons negotiations that should be settled with temperance and judgment. Remove them, Mr. President, to safeguard your own honor, and the welfare of the people who still accept your governance.”

  “My honor is not at issue,” Buchanan said curtly. “I made no pledge; I distinctly recall stating that the President could not be bound by any proviso.”

  Barnwell insisted, “But, Mr. President, your personal honor is involved in this matter; the faith you pledged has been violated; and your personal honor requires you to issue the order. Withdrawal or war, sir. Choose. Withdrawal or war.”

  Buchanan then said, so memorably that Orr recounted it word for word in a letter written on September 17, 1871, “Mr. Barnwell, you are pressing me too importunely; you don’t give me time to consider; you don’t give me time to say my prayers. I always say my prayers when required to act upon any great state affair.”

  In truth, history testifies, the three Commissioners had been badgering Buchanan for two hours. There is real time and narrative time; if they were not different, it would take as long to tell a man’s life as to live it.