Coming Fury, Volume 1 (21 page)

General Emory Upton, analyzing this situation some years later, pointed out that to suppress Indians and guard inhabitants and emigrant trains in all the region west of the Mississippi, there was
one soldier for every 120 square miles; to do whatever might be necessary in all the rest of the country there was one soldier for every 1300 square miles. Theoretically, the militia of course could be called on, and theoretically it could bring three million men to the colors, but in actual fact the militia “did not merit the name of a military force,” since it was destitute of instruction and training and very nearly destitute of equipment. The states could, to be sure, draw their quotas of arms from the War Department, but during the fifties the War Department was equipping the regulars with new weapons, and what was available for the states consisted very largely of material that was nearly obsolete. In any case, many of the states neglected to draw the weapons they might have had.

The War Department itself slumbered in an easy placidity befitting this state of affairs. Its eight dominant bureaus were bound up in red tape and made practically senile by sheer age; of the officers who commanded these bureaus, all but one had been in service since the War of 1812, and several had held their posts for decades, happily contributing to the lethargic routine which slowed all activities down to a crawl. There were great leather-bound ledgers into which incoming letters were methodically copied; there were some scores of clerks, whose chief qualification for their jobs was that they wrote a fine legible hand. During 1860 Congress had bestirred itself slightly in regard to the army. It had increased the enlisted man’s ration of sugar and coffee, it had set up a commission to look into the course of instruction and system of discipline at West Point, and the Senate had ordered its Committee on Military Affairs (whose chairman was Jefferson Davis) to determine whether expenditures on the army might not further be reduced without detriment to the public service. As matters stood in the fall of 1860, the country could do almost anything with its army except fight with it. The obvious explanation for all of this was that nobody had supposed that it would have to fight at all.
²

Now General Scott was speaking up, demanding that empty forts be provided with garrisons, and President Buchanan felt that this request was illogical and impractical, which is not to be wondered at—especially in view of the fact that Buchanan was not a man who was easily brought to affirmative action under any circumstances. As a matter of fact, there is more to be said on
Buchanan’s side than usually gets said, or listened to. He was a Doughface, as men used words then, a Northerner with Southern sympathies, and his cabinet was of very little help to him. His administration had been able to do nothing of any consequence except keep Stephen Douglas from being the presidential candidate of a united Democracy, and now it had to face the most outlandish domestic crisis in American history. The general of the armies was stepping far out of his proper sphere to give unwanted advice on high policy, and the worst of this was that with his uncertain vision the old soldier had seen one thing with great clarity—there was probably going to be a big fight, and something ought to be done to get ready for it.

This was a time when most men were purblind. The tragedy of the leaders of the North had been that they could not see that a Republican victory would almost automatically mean secession of one or many of the states of the deep South; and the tragedy of the Southerners was that they were not able to see that secession would finally mean war. Neither side believed that the other side was deeply in earnest, and neither side was prepared to face the consequences of its own acts. Now the consequences were beginning to take shape, and the aged general saw what was coming and demanded that his government be prepared to fight. It was all dreadfully upsetting.

The whole point of the Buchanan cabinet was that, like the President himself, it was qualified to do nothing of any consequence with great dignity. Now the heat was on, and there was going to be some sort of action, even if the best action the administration could devise might be to let things drift on toward catastrophe. Few presidents ever faced a harder task than Buchanan now faced.

Lewis Cass, of Michigan, very old and very dignified and very stuffy, was Secretary of State, and Howell Cobb, of Georgia, who was not in the least aged or stuffy, was Secretary of the Treasury. John B. Floyd, of Virginia, was Secretary of War; a bumbling incompetent who had permitted much corruption without (as would finally appear) being personally touched by very much of it, the man who held top command over an army that was about to do things not specified in the tables of organization. Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, an amiable nonentity, was Secretary of the Navy
(which was quite as crippled by declining appropriations as was the Army) and the forceful Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, was Secretary of the Interior. Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, sour and limited but strongly pro-Union, was Postmaster General, and the Unionist Jeremiah Black, of Pennsylvania, was Attorney General. Cobb and Thompson and Floyd were devout Southerners, Toucey was either neutral or a cipher, and the rest were run-of-the-mill Northerners, some of them devoted, some of them less so. These were Buchanan’s closest advisers.

If Buchanan had been a man of original force, this would not have mattered so much, but he was nothing of the kind. He was 69, and he was torn by two deep emotions—a strong, automatic sympathy for the South, and an equally potent love for the unbroken Union of the States: a situation that left him feeling that to secede was illegal and that to prevent secession by force was equally illegal. The cabinet members on whom he most relied were Cobb and Thompson, and both men came from states that obviously were about to leave the Union. The cabinet could not possibly agree on anything of importance, and Buchanan was a man who could not act without the counsel of his cabinet; and now he was facing a problem without precedent in American history, the general of the armies was calling for action that would undoubtedly precipitate a crisis, and it was also time to compose the annual message to Congress—a lame-duck Congress, chosen two years earlier, when no one supposed that either the executive or the legislative branch would have to deal with a general disruption of the government.

On November 7, the day after election, Buchanan wrote an anxious note to Floyd. He had been told that armed South Carolinians had assaulted and taken the forts at Charleston; would the Secretary of War please visit him at once? The Secretary did so, assured the President that the rumor was false, and agreed that the signs were all bad: disunion apparently was on the way, Floyd wrote, but Buchanan’s emotions “repelled the convictions of his mind.” Two days later there was a cabinet meeting to consider the annual message to Congress, and at this meeting, as Floyd remembered it, Buchanan asked for advice regarding an idea he had developed. He admitted that he was “compelled to notice the alarming condition of the country,” and he proposed calling a general
convention of all of the states to provide some means for compromising the disputes between extremists of the North and the South. The cabinet hemmed and hawed and said nothing very definite. There was another meeting on the following day, November 10, at which Buchanan presented his proposal in the form of a draft that might either go into his annual message to Congress or be presented to the country in the form of a presidential proclamation. The paper was supported by an opinion from Attorney General Black, which in effect asserted the Federal government’s legal power to maintain the Union by force if necessary.

The cabinet promptly divided on sectional lines. The Northerners praised Buchanan’s proposal—Floyd wrote that it “met with extravagant commendation” from Black, Cass, Holt and Toucey—and the Southerners expressed grave doubts, objecting in particular to the statement that the government possessed and could use the power of coercion. Both Cobb and Thompson felt that the President was urging “submission to Lincoln’s election,” and Floyd wrote that Buchanan failed to understand “the temper of the Southern people” and was adopting an improper stand in respect to the use of force. Floyd added: “I do not see what good can come of the paper, as prepared, and I do see how much mischief may flow from it.”
³

In the face of this split, Buchanan temporized, which was unfortunate. It was not yet too late to handle the developing crisis. Formal action for secession had not been taken anywhere, and there was still a strong nucleus of Unionist sentiment in the South, as evidenced by the substantial vote that had been cast for Bell and for Douglas. A forthright move by the executive to encourage this Unionist sentiment and to bring all of the states together in an attempt to settle the growing argument by negotiation and compromise might have made a vast difference. Buchanan could not take the lead. He told Attorney General Black that he had a “desire to stand between the factions … with my hand on the head of each counselling peace,” but a more decisive step was called for. If he proposed to lead the country away from secession, his first step must be to get rid of the secessionists in his own cabinet, and this was beyond him. He asked Black to give him a second, more moderate opinion, exploring in detail the government’s legal capacities in the
situation, and the plan for a convention of the states began to drift out of sight.
⁴

Black was a stalwart Union man, but now the fire went out of him. In effect, he seemed now to say that the government had the legal power to prevent secession but that it could not legally use this power. “Your right to take such measures as may seem to be necessary for the protection of the public property is very clear … you may employ such parts of the land and naval forces as you may judge necessary for the purpose of causing the laws to be duly executed.” But these powers were purely defensive; with its armed forces the government could do no more than what might be done by an ordinary civil posse, called out to suppress combinations that were obstructing the execution of the laws. Suppose the judges and other civil authorities in the areas where obstruction was taking place were themselves on the side of the obstructionists, so that there were no courts to issue judicial process and no ministerial officers to execute it? “In that event troops would certainly be out of place and their use wholly illegal.” If they were sent to aid courts and marshals, there must be courts and marshals to aid, and if such were lacking—as they obviously would be in a state that had seceded—“the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the strength which the government has at its command.”

If a state announced that it was leaving the Union, Black continued, it might be exercising a right guaranteed under the Constitution or it might be engaging in a revolutionary movement, but whether it was acting legally or illegally made no difference; “it is certain that you have not in either case the authority to recognize her independence or to absolve her from her Federal obligations.” Whether Congress had the right to make war against one or more states was something for Congress to determine, but “if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure, will not all the States be absolved from their Federal obligations?” And so, in conclusion: “If this view of the subject be correct, as I think it is, then the Union must utterly perish at the moment when Congress shall arm one part of the people against another for any purpose beyond that of merely
protecting the General Government in the exercise of its proper constitutional functions.”
⁵

Here was a charter for inaction which the baffled Buchanan for the time being could do nothing but follow religiously. And at this point, with the proposed convention of the states receding forever into the shadows, a significant new turn was given the whole sectional argument. Up to this moment slavery itself, in one way or another, was what men were arguing about, and the argument had brought up the question of secession. Now, with secession about to take place, the big question was the legal right of a state to secede, which was something very different; for now the question came down from the level at which only the impassioned extremists would be willing to fight about it and got into an area where it touched the deep emotions of millions of men, North and South alike. A state’s right to make its own laws respecting slavery was unquestioned even by the radical Republicans, and the rights of the several states in regard to slavery in the territories were abstractions. But the question of a state’s right to leave the Union entirely, and the linked question of the central government’s right to prevent this by force—here was something infinitely broader, something that went to the very heart of the democratic experiment. Without entirely realizing it, the President and cabinet, in these days following the election, were witnessing the development of a situation that could easily lead to war. What old General Scott had so ponderously spoken of as “the laceration and despotism of the sword” had drawn perilously close.

If all of this was not clearly seen by the country at large, it was beginning to be very clearly felt. South Carolina had not yet seceded, but no one had the least doubt that she would presently do so, and that other cotton states were very likely to follow, and South Carolina officials were working to lay in a supply of arms—if there was going to be any coercion, this state would be prepared to meet it. While the cabinet was considering the President’s plan for a convention, Thomas L. Drayton, of South Carolina, was in Washington negotiating with Secretary Floyd for the purchase of surplus army muskets. He could, he wrote to Governor Gist, buy 10,000 old smooth bores, flint locks altered to percussion, and although these were rather out of date they were at least lethal
weapons, and the quartermaster-general of the army, Joseph E. Johnston, who was also president of the Ordnance Board, had assured him that “for our purposes” they were perfectly acceptable. They could be shipped from the arsenal at Watervliet, New York, and Drayton urged that the deal be put through without delay: “The cabinet may break up at any moment on differences of opinion with the President as to the right of secession—and a new Secretary of War might stop the muskets going south, if not already on the way when he comes into office.” A South Carolina militia officer, Roswell S. Ripley, who was shopping for guns in Philadelphia, wrote that his state would probably have to buy in Europe if it wanted first-rate weapons, and he believed the state could not be fully prepared until February; in view of which fact he urged that no overt act be taken until Lincoln had been inaugurated. “Let her take her position & act March 4th & until that time she cannot be interfered with—other states will do the same thing & Mr. Lincoln will walk into a house gutted of its best furniture.”
⁶