Memories of the Ford Administration (43 page)

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?

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 meeting 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.” S
HAME
. L
OSS
. 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. P
RAYERS
. 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. S
LEEP
. We remain children, though we seem to become men.