Memories of the Ford Administration (45 page)

Pledge, bargain, bargain and sale. A lifetime of tact, misconstrued, crushed in the world’s iron gears. What did Jackson say?
Them that travel the byways of compromise is the ones that get lost
. Only the Secretary of the Navy, little timid Toucey, his appointment a sop to the Pierce contingent, liked the President’s reply just as it was.

Stanton was stridently saying, his metal-framed spectacles flashing awry in his fury, “Major Anderson is a hero, who saved the country when all else were paralyzed!”

Black, more gently: “Mr. President, you reiterate the Constitution’s failure to specify a right of coercion, when what is meant is the right of our government to make war upon a state considered as a foreign country,
not
the right of the chief executive to defend federal property, or to put down those who resist federal officers performing their legal duties. You have always asserted the right of coercion to that extent. In your anxious, and laudable, desire to avoid civil war, you promote in these Carolina rebels dangerous illusions of power.”

Thompson protested, “I resist, sir, the imputation that any rebellion has taken place. South Carolina’s dissolution of its contract with the other states was carried forward with strict legality.”

Buchanan pleaded, in a voice grown wheedling and quavery, “Time, gentlemen, let me gain a little time. Time is the great healer.”

Stanton contradicted, “Time does not preserve, it destroys.
Men
protect and preserve, Mr. President, when their nerve does not fail them!”

Black agreed: “Time is not their enemy but ours. We speak of Congressional prerogatives, but Congress has no clear will; the extremists paralyze every attempt at resolution; this fall’s Democratic victories have hardened the Republican minority to the point that they are en
cour
aging Southern secession.”

Holt pointed out, “Even the conservative press in the North rages against our failure to show force. General Scott urged reinforcement months ago; but Sumter can still be saved. Two hundred fifty recruits can sail from New York tomorrow!”

Buchanan resisted. “You speak of the forts as though they possessed real value. But their value now is chiefly symbolic.”

Stanton said, “Precisely, sir. Send troops to Sumter, send guns; and the Unionists even within the Palmetto State will rise up and scatter the secessionist illusion to the winds!”

E
TC., ETC
. B
IFF
. B
ANG
. P
OOR
O
LD
B
UCK
. There was a seriousness here, a bottomless depth, that Buchanan felt no one but he apprehended. “Such reinforcements will give the South a rallying cry. I
did
affirm the
status quo
as my policy.… If war is to come, we must not appear to strike the first blow.” He again remembered General Jackson, that frosty morning in 1824. The black man dozing on the park bench, the old soldier slim as a kindle light, skeletal, as if the heat of life was burning him to a frazzle.
With the people in yer belly, ye can do no wrong
. It had been exactly this terminal time of the year. Buchanan told his Cabinet, “Power does not flow from the government, in a nation constructed such as ours; it flows upward, from the people. If the people are to rally, it must be to a flag that is wronged. I will not reinforce Anderson, nor will I withdraw him. There let us leave the matter, and convene again tomorrow, after our Christian devotions.”

He had become an old man, the oldest man ever to serve as President. Next April, he would be seventy. Making his way up to his bedroom, he felt his body dragging on his spirit. He felt a taunting emptiness in things. A bitter rain mixed with streaks of quick-melting snow muttered on the black panes of the second-story windows. Oblong imperfections in the glass added to the effect of waver and blur. Squinting through the wet glass, Buchanan spied only scattered lights in the apprehensive city—the lamps of a few carriages threading their way on midnight errands through the dark and the mud. Gleams pale as glowworms bobbed beneath the lanterns, reflected from icy puddles. He could not see, at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol waiting for its dome or, beyond the foot of the White House grounds, on the far side of Tiber Creek and its pestilential swamp, the ghostly marmoreal stub of the Washington Monument, uncompleted and perhaps now never to be, mutual sectional hatred having dried up all appropriations.

The coal-burning furnace Pierce had installed indifferently warmed the upstairs. Harriet was asleep, and all the staff. No longer was her cousin and the President’s long-time secretary, James Buchanan Henry, under the White House roof; the boy had last year resigned, gone to New York, grown a large black mustache, and impudently married without his uncle’s consent. Buchanan did not feel exactly well: his throat had never ceased to twinge beneath its scars from the operation when he was Secretary of State; a life of rich meals and ample drink weighed on his lungs and abdomen; his hard-working eyes felt tender and grainy; the endless disputations of the last weeks had robbed his system of sleep and left him lightheaded. Yet neither was he exactly ill: as he lifted the warming
pan from the Presidential bed and fitted himself, in checkered nightgown and wool sleeping cap, between the sheets—scalding hot here and chill as ice there, like opinion in the newspapers—the old functionary sank into his weariness with something like voluptuousness. The thin partition between war and peace had held for another day. The Congress, with Lincoln’s concurrence, might yet arrange a constitutional convention, and the South Carolinians pull in their horns, as Pickens did the day after secession. And if not … if the worst befall … well, he had gone the extra mile with the men of the South, and the war would be on their heads. They would be crushed, as poor dear Ann had been crushed.

He sleepily prayed, and the silence into which his brain poured its half-formed words, the sense melting like wax at the edge of the flaming wick, tonight seemed itself a message, tuned to his great weariness. He saw for a moment through not his own mismatched eyes
^l
but through God’s clear colorless ones; he saw that
sub specie aeternitatis
nothing greatly matters: not his own life, his ambitions, his patient intricate craven search for power, nor, cruel as the thought might appear from a wakeful perspective, the lives of the nation, the millions as they strain toward him for rescue. The hordes of Sennacherib
invaded Israel, and the Temple was destroyed stone by stone, and yet within the beautiful dispassion of God these cataclysms had been cradled, and now slept unremembered but by a few. While Buchanan had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James, British educated opinion had been considerably agitated by the apparent discoveries, within geology, of tracts of time vaster than any the Bible disclosed: Buchanan now perceived a cause for serenity here, a vastness that dwindled all our agitations to a scarcely perceptible stir, and our mountains and chasms to a prairie smoothness, a luminous smoothness like that of Greenland, or of the unexpected southernmost continent first sighted by Captain Cook. Having been long troubled by the silence into which his prayers seemed to sink without an echo, Buchanan in his majestic fatigue appreciated that the silence
was
an answer, the only answer whose mercy was lasting, impartial, and omnipresent. Just so, Lincoln’s silence from Springfield, was an answer, of a certain grandeur, after all the clamor of the Cabinet meetings. As if through the gimlet eye of an eagle soaring in God’s silent winds Buchanan saw the nation beneath him, a colorful small mountain meadow scurrying with frantic life; its life would perish but infallibly renew itself in the turning of seasons, in the great and impervious planetary motions. Thus reassured, the old man sank on a sustained note of praise into the void and woke with surprise into a still-stormy world where it seemed all but himself had tossed sleepless through the night.

The morning brought a note from General Scott, saying,
It is Sunday, the weather is bad, & Genl. S. is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, &, if misled by zeal, he hopes for the President’s forgiveness
.

Will the President permit Genl. S., without reference to the War Department, & otherwise as secretly as possible, to send two hundred & fifty recruits, from New York Harbor, to reinforce Fort Sumter, together with some extra muskets or rifles, ammunition, & subsistence stores?

It is hoped that a sloop of war & cutter may be ordered for the same purpose as early as to-morrow
.

Their clangor muffled by the storm, which on long legs of visible, wind-swept sleet strode through the toy houses and monuments of Washington City, church bells called secessionist and abolitionist alike, master and mistress and thinly clad slave, to worship. Buchanan, content with his religious experience of the previous midnight, stayed dry at home, and enjoyed a perfect Union breakfast: Carolina hominy grits and Philadelphia scrapple drenched in Vermont maple syrup. An agitated Toucey, looking fluffy and alarmed, like a bird tossed from its nest, arrived at the White House, saying that Black and Stanton and probably Holt would resign if the President sent his reply as drafted to the Commissioners.

So Buchanan sent for Black, who, after what his reminiscence calls
the most miserable and restive night of my life
, was reluctant to appear,
for I knew the temper of the appeal he would make to me. I felt that he would place his demand that I remain by his side upon such grounds of personal friendship that it would make it impossible for me to leave him without laying myself open to the charge of having deserted a friend who had greatly honored and trusted me at a time when he was under the shadow of the greatest trouble of his life
. Having failed to respond the first time, Black answered a second summons.

Buchanan greeted him, “Is it true that you are going to desert me?”

“It is true that I am going to resign.”

This terrible light of day has brought back all the terrors, the seriousness, the precariousness, the unfathomable
shame
, the daily small losses that mask great loss. [Cf. my first winter after Genevieve’s kiss-off: I woke up every morning feeling hollow, inwardly sore with a desperate sense of having misplaced some huge thing.] He said, according to history, “I am overwhelmed to know that you of all other men are going to leave me in this crisis. You are from my own state, my closest political and personal friend; I have leaned upon you in these troubles as upon none other, and I insist that you shall stand by me to the end.”

After listening to more of such pleading, Black replied, working up to a charming metaphor: “Mr. President, from the start I had determined to stand by you to death and destruction if need be. I promised that as long as there was a button to the coat I would cling to it. But your action has taken every button off and driven me away from you.”

Buchanan appeared genuinely puzzled. “What do you refer to?”

“Your reply to the South Carolina Commissioners. That document is the powder that has blown your Cabinet to the four winds. The Southern members will leave because you do not concede what they ask, and your conclusions make it impossible for them to stay. The paper is even harder upon the Northern members of your political household.” Black and Stanton’s exact objections to the draft, which has not been preserved, can be roughly reconstructed. Black himself, interviewed by the Philadelphia
Press
in September of 1883, denied, as had been speculated, that
Mr. Buchanan’s letter acknowledged the right of Secession
. [Black’s]
objections to the paper were that it dallied with the enemies of the Government, implied
certain diplomatic rights of South Carolina that could not exist, and yielded points that were unfair to the President’s position
.

Can we believe that, when Black had stated his objections, Buchanan replied, “
Judge, you speak the words of my heart. I recognize the force and justice of what you say. The letter to the South Carolina Commissioners my tongue dictated, but not my reason. But I feel that we must not have an open rupture. We are not prepared for war, and if war is provoked, Congress cannot be relied upon to strengthen my arm, and the Union must utterly perish
”?

No. We can more easily believe Black when he says,
The President seemed surprised that I took this document so much to heart
. Almost flippantly, like a hardened gambler folding a hand, Buchanan told him, “Your resignation is the one thing that shall not be. I will not—I cannot part with you. If you go, Holt and Stanton will leave, and I will be in a sorry attitude before the country. This is the greatest trouble I have had yet to bear. Here, take this paper and modify it to suit yourself; but do it before the sun goes down. Before I sleep this night I must know that this matter is arranged to your satisfaction.”

Black went to Stanton’s office and in a long memorandum the two men revised Buchanan’s reply to suit themselves. Nevins, rejoicing in this hardening of the administration line, crows,
Seldom if ever have the advisers of a President administered, even by implication, so severe a rebuke
.

The softer-hearted Auchampaugh says of this period,
No President in American history ever spent so terrible a ten days
.

This same Sunday, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, on the turncoat Trescot’s advice, made one more Southern appeal to the President, proposing that Pickens abandon Moultrie so that Anderson could be restored. Hunter emerged from the interview and reported to Trescot,
Tell the Comm
[issioners]:
it is hopeless. The President has taken
his ground—I
cant
repeat what passed between us but if you can get a telegram to Charleston, telegraph at once to your people to sink vessels in the channel of the harbour
.

Buchanan rewrote his letter, mostly by editing out sections that Black and Stanton had resisted, and dispatched it to the Commissioners the next day, the last day of this fateful year. The message rehearsed the circumstances of the harbor and the unofficial negotiations and concluded, more ringingly than Buchanan’s usual style,
It is under all these circumstances that I am urged immediately to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that without this negotiation is impossible. This I cannot do; this I will not do
. Always a strict accountant, the President cited the seizure of the arsenal by South Carolina, estimated the worth of the arsenal as half a million dollars, and stated it as his
duty to defend Fort Sumter, as a portion of the public property of the United States, against hostile attacks, from whatever quarter they may come
.