1861

by Adam Goodheart

  I endeavored in a few words to explain this subject to her; but she still persisted in expressing the same opinion, and, of course, I would not argue with her. The truth is, that the people of Europe, and more especially those of this country, cannot be made to understand the operations of our Government. Upon hearing of any severe conflicts of opinion in the United States, they believe what they wish, that a revolution may be the consequence.53

  Now it seemed that Her Imperial Highness, surveying American politics from that distant Baltic shore, had been shrewder than he.

  Buchanan’s inauguration in 1857 had come at a rare moment of relative concord, and was greeted with such pomp and fanfare that one observer said it resembled an imperial coronation. The swearing-in, another wrote, drew supporters “from every State and Territory in the Union; the pale-faced, sharp-set New England man jostled the thicker-skinned and darker-hued Southerner.”54 Then, just two days later, the Supreme Court—having received discreet encouragement from the president-elect—handed down its Dred Scott decision. So much for national unity. For the next four years, Buchanan buried himself in the minutiae of office, toiling sixteen-hour days at the White House; some called him the hardest-working president in history. He labored over multiple handwritten drafts of even the most mundane letter, and each routine official document—whether a land grant, a military commission, or a consular appointment—could not receive the president’s signature without his careful perusal of every line. It surprised no one that he showed no desire to seek reelection in 1860. As Buchanan’s term drew toward its close, the president would tell anyone who would listen that he couldn’t wait to get out of the accursed White House and back to his Lancaster County estate. In any case, there was little danger he would have been asked to remain. By then, millions of Northerners detested him as an appeaser of the slave power, while Southerners distrusted him as a weak and vacillating ally at best. Both sides despised the corruption that had seeped into federal officialdom under his stewardship. Neither would have wished the secession crisis to happen on his watch.

  Though Buchanan may already have proven a spectacularly ineffectual leader, he was neither a villain nor a coward, despite what his enemies said at the time and what his detractors have said since. When secession loomed in the weeks after Lincoln’s election, he stepped into the breach with the mightiest weapon at his disposal: his pen. He had always been a man who trusted pieces of paper to solve things—witness his misplaced faith in Dred Scott—and so now he set out to compose a document that would freeze disunion in its tracks.

  At the end of each year, it was the president’s responsibility to issue an annual message to Congress, the precursor to today’s State of the Union address. Buchanan began writing his just a day or two after Lincoln was elected, and for the next month he did little but work on the draft, anxious that the document should be ready to send to the lame-duck Congress when it opened its session on December 3. As chief executive of the nation, Buchanan felt it was his role to serve as high arbiter of the unfolding conflict, expressing judgments that all factions would have to concede were wise and fair.

  Toward that end he revised and polished the composition numerous times, reading various sections aloud to his Northern and Southern cabinet members and asking for comments, which were naturally so contradictory of one another that the poor president found himself doing far more scribbling and crossing out than he could have anticipated. (The only point on which everyone concurred was how felicitously written it was.) Toward the end of November, he welcomed Senator Davis into his office to endure a full recitation. The Mississippian made many helpful suggestions—all of which Buchanan “very kindly accepted,” Davis would recall much later—although by the time the document was complete, it had gone through so many further drafts that Davis could no longer find in it much to agree with. Still, the president dutifully toiled, though he was now feeling increasingly unwell and, instead of going into his office, would work in his private library, dressed in a silk robe and chewing on an unlit cigar. He at last finished his opus, now running to some fourteen thousand words, at the beginning of December. (To be fair, Buchanan expended some of those words addressing not merely the crisis of the Union but also such other pressing matters as crop failures in Kansas, Chinese-American diplomatic relations, and problems with mail delivery on the Pacific coast.) By this time, of course, South Carolina’s leaders had set a date for their secession convention and were cheerfully making plans for their state’s future as an independent republic, while the rest of the cotton states were preparing to follow suit.55

  Unsurprisingly, Buchanan’s message ended up satisfying no one, either within Congress or without it. The Southern states, he firmly declared, had no legal right to secede from the Union. If they elected to do so, he suggested, they really ought to call it “revolution” instead of “secession.” And even if they did have a right to leave the Union, why do so simply because a man they didn’t like had been elected president? And even if they did feel compelled to leave the Union because Lincoln had been elected president, why not wait until after he took office, to see whether he was truly as awful as they feared? The North, meanwhile, needed to realize that the slaveholders’ only real wish was “to be let alone.” So why not oblige them? As for the federal government’s role in averting the disaster, Buchanan admitted regretfully that “it is beyond the power of any president, no matter what may be his own political proclivities, to restore peace and harmony among the states,” since this would be a violation of state sovereignty. In other words, while the Constitution forbade secession, it also forbade the federal government to prevent it. Buchanan’s final suggestion: What if the United States bought Cuba from Spain? That would help the South by adding a major new slave state, but it would also please the abolitionists. Under Spanish rule, the island imported thousands of slaves each year from Africa, but U.S. law would forbid this. Everybody (except perhaps the Cuban slavers) could be happy.

  “Seldom,” wrote the editors of the Cincinnati Enquirer, “have we known so strong an argument come to so lame and impotent a conclusion.” The Atlantic’s James Russell Lowell was even harsher: President Buchanan’s message, he wrote, was “the last juiceless squeeze of the orange.”56

  WHILE BUCHANAN HAD BEEN off squeezing his orange, members of his administration had been playing rather more influential roles in the developing crisis, and not necessarily in support of the government they were sworn to uphold.

  At the center of the intrigue was an urbane Charlestonian named William Henry Trescot, who had been serving for the past six months as assistant secretary of state. During most of that time, he had more or less run the State Department. The venerable secretary himself, Lewis Cass, was a crumbling monument to another age whom Buchanan had appointed as a sop to the North, which considered Cass a hero for his gallantry in the Michigan Territory during the War of 1812. Trescot was the administration’s only high-ranking South Carolinian; he was also perhaps its only truly industrious and enterprising member. Two days after the presidential results came in, he called on Secretary Floyd at the War Department, bearing a purchase order for ten thousand muskets to be sent to his native state, which Floyd was happy to execute. As the Fort Moultrie confrontation began to take shape, Trescot also took it upon himself to open a channel of private communication with South Carolina’s governor, William Henry Gist, whom he kept apprised of the Buchanan administration’s plans.

  After Buchanan finished his message to Congress, still completely unaware of Trescot’s machinations, he summoned the assistant secretary to carry a copy to Governor Gist. (Little did he know that Gist had been informed of its basic substance weeks earlier, possibly sooner than Buchanan knew it himself.) The president was confident that the message would prove persuasive. Trescot hinted gently that such optimism was unwarranted, but went to Columbia anyhow, taking the occasion to familiarize himself thoroughly with South Carolina’s strategy for winning its independence without resistance or bloods
hed. A crucial part of that strategy was making sure federal troops did not reinforce the forts in Charleston Harbor. Trescot assured Governor Gist that Floyd and his fellow Southerners in the Buchanan cabinet would never let this happen. (The fact that Trescot’s family owned a summer cottage a hundred yards from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island may have been further inducement to forestall an artillery barrage.)57

  Floyd himself, while believing in the justice of slavery and loathing the Black Republicans, may not yet have been fully convinced that secession was in the South’s best interests. Still, if hostilities did break out, he was in little doubt as to which side he would support. It was not difficult for the glib Trescot to maneuver him—and, through him, the president.58

  Buchanan was now beset from several sides at once. A delegation of South Carolina congressmen, knowing that their days in Washington were numbered, visited the White House. They sought Buchanan’s assurance that Major Anderson would stay where he was until an amicable settlement could be worked out, while the other two Charleston forts would be left unoccupied. In return, they said, they would try to ensure that no one attacked Moultrie—at least for the next ten days, until South Carolina could secede officially. Ever the courteous diplomat, Buchanan nodded, smiled gravely, and assured them that he was in complete sympathy with their views. “After all, this is a matter of honor among gentlemen,” he told his visitors as they rose to depart. “We understand each other.”

  No doubt Buchanan was satisfied with himself: he had won at least an extra week and a half of peace with little more than a handshake and a few reassuring words. But what exactly had he promised in return? The Carolinians were certain that they understood the arrangement, but there is little evidence that Buchanan did.59

  The tacitly arranged truce—unknown, of course, to Major Anderson and his officers at Charleston—did last the ten days until South Carolina’s secession, and even a week after that. Then one morning at the end of the month, President Buchanan was upstairs in the White House when a servant brought him word that three gentlemen were calling unexpectedly: Assistant Secretary Trescot, Senator Davis, and another Southern senator, R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia. Buchanan found the visitors seated in his office. Anxious that something unpleasant was afoot, he began toying with his cigar, making nervous small talk about a certain thorny problem he had just been addressing, a vexing issue that concerned the American consul at Liverpool. Jefferson Davis cut him off. “Mr. President,” he said, “we have called upon you about an infinitely greater matter than any consulate.” “What is it?” Buchanan asked. Davis asked if he had heard any reports from Charleston in the past two or three hours. The president had not. “Then,” said Davis, “I have a great calamity to announce to you.”

  As the president listened to Davis’s news—that Major Anderson had transferred his force to Fort Sumter—he slumped against the marble mantelpiece, crumpling the cigar between his fingers. “My God,” Buchanan said, “are misfortunes 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.”60

  But the following days would show that all Buchanan’s assurances and apologies were in vain. It was not long before the South Carolina congressmen complained publicly that the president had broken his solemn word. He had tried to be a friend to all, to settle things as a matter of honor among gentlemen. Now both sides called him not merely a weakling, but a traitor. There was not much left for James Buchanan to do but wait—like millions of other Americans—and see what other hands might arrange.

  IN THOSE LAST ANTEBELLUM DAYS, the White House was overshadowed in its role of governing the country by another institution, two blocks away. This was the Willard Hotel. The folds and ravels of its endless corridors sheltered more political intrigue than the presidential mansion, while on any given morning, far more business was legislated at its breakfast tables than in either chamber of Congress. A morning repast at the Willard might include oysters, roast pigeons, fresh shad, pigs’ feet, and robins on toast—all washed down, perhaps, with official Washington’s two favorite digestifs: strong cigars and stronger whiskey. The cocktail hour, guests noticed, began early and ended late—often, indeed, sometime after sunrise the following day.61

  Since its beginnings in President Madison’s time as a humble inn, the hotel had, through a characteristically American process of incessant self-aggrandizement, grown to encompass almost an entire block. Rather than demolish any buildings that stood in its path, the Willard strangled them like some relentless jungle vine, sending out shoots and tendrils of faux marble, carved oak, and polished brass until the unfortunate structures were wholly engulfed. In the winter of 1861, it had recently swallowed up God himself, in the form of a handsome little Greek Revival church that the Presbyterians hastily vacated, paying due reverence to the superior claims of America’s nascent hospitality industry.62

  During the first days of February, employees of Willard’s could be seen fussing over the nave of that church, which had been reconsecrated as a conference room with the secular name of Willard’s Hall. At the altar end they installed three portraits: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay.63 Soon afterward, a fourth figure from American history was installed beneath the other three: John Tyler. The former president appeared not as a lithographed engraving but in the actual—now fairly diminished—flesh. In most important respects, though, he had a great deal in common with those other heroes. Like Washington, Jackson, and Clay, he was a slaveholder. Like them, he was a border-state man—in his case, a Virginian, a scion of the Cavaliers, not one of those swaggering Gulf Coast parvenus who had lately made such mischief on the congressional floor. And like them, Tyler loved, at least for the time being, the Union. On the basis of these claims, the last one especially, he was selected by unanimous acclamation president of the Peace Conference of 1861.

  This meeting was Virginia’s idea. The Old Dominion, after all, had once invested heavily in the concept of the United States as … well, united states. (Wizened Mr. Tyler, as a boy, had shaken the great Washington’s hand.) In 1787, when the loose-jointed American confederation was tottering precariously, it had been the Virginians who stepped forward to steady things, orchestrating a new form of government that balanced North and South, states and nation, freedom and slavery. So the concept of a Virginia-led “solemn family council”—as the Charlottesville patriarch William Cabell Rives, once Thomas Jefferson’s law student, put it—seemed, at least to its organizers, to be blessed by history itself. (Nor were such men as Rives unmindful of self-interest. They knew that in the event of all-out war, their state would be the battleground.) Virginia’s state legislature issued the call to convene; her fellow border states and all but a few Northern ones answered it.

  The delegates assembled in the winter of 1861 with the summer of 1787 foremost in mind, and with a grave self-consciousness born of the prospect that their names would be handed down to futurity. They were, indeed, the best that the old Union had to offer: not only the ex-president, but also senators, congressmen, former ambassadors, war heroes, and railroad owners. “Our godlike fathers created,” President Tyler exhorted his fellow delegates, “we have to preserve. They built up, through their wisdom and patriotism, monuments which have eternized their names. You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally grand, equally sublime, quite as full of glory and immortality.… If you reach the height of this great occasion, your children’s children will rise up and call you blessed.”64

  Not everyone in Washington shared such optimism. Twenty-two-year-old Henry Adams was in town serving as secretary to his father, a powerful congressman closely allied with Seward. In early February, he attended a ball hosted by Senator and Mrs. Douglas. Half the capital seemed to be there, packing the stifling parlors; Adams attempted to waltz with a female acquaintance, but finally was “obliged to drag her from the room in a suffocating condition, and administer ice to her.” He surveyed the r
oom with a jaundiced eye and afterward described the scene to his brother Charles:

  A crowd of admiring devotees surrounded the ancient buffer Tyler, another crowd surrounded that other ancient buffer Crittenden. Ye Gods, what are we, when mortals no bigger—no, damn it, not so big as—ourselves, are looked up to as though their thunder spoke from the real original Olympus. Here is an old Virginia politician, of whom by good rights, no one ought ever to have heard, reappearing in the ancient cerements of his forgotten grave—political and social—and men look up to him as they would at Solomon, if he could be made the subject of a resurrection.

  In another letter, Adams spoke for many Americans—especially those not on the Douglases’ guest list—when he predicted of the Peace Conference, “I suppose they will potter ahead until no one feels any more interest in them, and then they may die.”65

  Out in the expanses of the Republic, beyond the Douglas mansion and Willard’s Hotel, troubling omens could be perceived on all sides. The states of the far Northwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan—refused even to send delegates to the Peace Conference. “We have fed the [Southern] whiners with sugar plums long enough,” one Michigan newspaper declared. A paper in Minnesota framed its position in more alarming terms: “Before this rampant fever of disunion will abate, THERE MUST BE BLOOD-LETTING!”66