by John Updike
President James Buchanan was in a severe and solemn mood. He had summoned his Secretary of War, John Floyd of Virginia, and asked him, “Mr. Floyd, are you going to send recruits to Charleston to strengthen the forts? What about sending reinforcements to Charleston?”
Floyd blinked his watery eyes, in equal parts languid and guilty, and responded, “Mr. President, I had not intended to strengthen the forts.”
“Mr. Floyd,” stated the President, “I would rather be at the bottom of the Potomac tomorrow than that those forts would be taken by South Carolina in consequence of our neglect to put them in defensible position. It will destroy me, sir. And if that thing occurs it will cover your name—and it is an honorable name, sir—with an infamy that all time can never efface, because it is in vain that you will attempt to show that you have not some complicity in handing over those forts to those who take them.”
The utterance, in its length and urgency, left the old chief a bit breathless, his head, with its erect flare of fine white hair, cocked more than ever to one side, and his eyes, mismatching, glittering with fatigue and the bright wariness of a captive old bird, a pinioned eagle, as he imagined himself on the bottom of the Potomac. Pearls that were his eyes.
“Sir,” said the Secretary of War, “I would risk my life and my honor that South Carolina will not molest the forts.”
“That is all very well,” responded the cagey veteran politico, cast in all his dignity of years into the maelstrom of heightening sectional tension. “But—pardon me for asking you—does that secure the forts?” Into something rich and strange.
“No, sir, but it is a guarantee that I am in earnest in the belief that they are secure. Governor Gist, advised of the conciliatory logic of your message to Congress to be delivered this December, has sent messages assuring me that, until the ordinance of secession is passed, everything is quiet and will remain so, if no more soldiers or munitions are sent on.”
“I dislike,” admitted the Chief Executive, “the way the Governor speaks as if matters all rest in his hands. And what do we hear from Major Anderson?”
“He has taken what I believe is undue alarm from the drilling of state troops in the streets of Charleston, amid public boasting of the intent to take Fort Moultrie. He prepared a requisition to draw one hundred muskets from the Charleston arsenal. Colonel Huger at the arsenal has asked the War Department for orders; I have informed him that authority to supply arms to the forts would be deferred for the present. I have replied to Major Anderson that any increase in the force under his command would add to the local excitement and might lead to serious results.”
Buchanan appeared to absorb the information, but with a twitch of his head affirmed, as if to himself, in a kind of daydreaming soliloquy the storm of events increasingly imposed upon him, “I am not satisfied.”
Floyd thought it expedient to declare, “Sir, as you already understand, if Congress decides upon a course of forcible coercion, it will become my duty to resign.”
“Nevertheless, it is your clear duty now to be certain that the forts are secure. But let us see what General Scott will advise. He should be telegraphed to come to Washington at once.” The old hero of Veracruz and Chapultepec was in his dotage, and all but immobilized by his physical complaints. As Floyd had expected, any threat of resignation, of disruption within a Cabinet that Buchanan had pieced together as a model of the enduring Union, led the President to pull in his horns.
[Based upon a theatrical speech Floyd himself gave in Richmond, in January of 1861, after his resignation. Quoted in abridged form in Auchampaugh, prev. cit., and refracted with various distortions in history texts. Stilted as it is, it comes as close as we will get to how these men talked to one another, and how the great shifts underfoot traced themselves in personal conversation. Auchampaugh dates this exchange probably in the latter part of November but Klein puts it definitely two days before the Cabinet meeting of November 9th. Well before, in any case, South Carolina’s actual secession on December 20th. On November 27th a long dispatch arrived from Anderson reporting rising determination in South Carolina to take the three federal forts and asking for reinforcements—two companies for Sumter and Pinckney, and a reinforcement for his own Moultrie garrison. Each time the Cabinet discussed the forts, Black and Secretary of State Lewis Cass argued for reinforcement, and Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd argued against. Floyd was later quoted as saying to William Trescot, the South Carolinian Assistant Secretary of State, that he would cut off his right hand before signing any order to reinforce. Meanwhile, Buchanan’s exquisitely balanced message to Congress on December 3rd, his fourth annual message, angered the South by refusing to grant a state’s right of secession and angered the North by denying the federal government’s power to make war on a state. The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. In this he was echoing Andrew Jackson’s farewell address, in March of 1837: the Constitution cannot be maintained, nor the Union preserved, in opposition to public feeling, by the mere exertion of the coercive powers confided to the General Government. The foundations must be laid in the affections of the people. But would Jackson have taken this fatalistic tone in Buchanan’s situation? Certainly he gave no encouragement to the would-be nullifiers of 1832. But you know all this as well as I, Retrospect eds.]
On December 8th, four of the Representatives from South Carolina were received by the President. The most voracious and radical of the fire-eaters, Laurence (he thus signed himself) Massillon Keitt, darkly handsome [a short Clark Gable, let’s say], with a sensibility essentially literary and hence extravagant and ruthless, announced, striving to keep his tone respectful: “Sir: we are here as Congressmen from the sovereign state of South Carolina. In less than two weeks we expect that secession will be proclaimed in Columbia. When this occurs, we will send commissioners to treat with you over the future relations between our two independent republics.”
Congressman William Porcher Miles, a former mathematics teacher at the College of Charleston, had come into politics by a curiously peaceable route: he had won such attention as a heroic volunteer nurse in a yellow-fever epidemic in Norfolk, Virginia, that he was elected Mayor of Charleston in 1855. Now, sensing a certain resistance in the old chief to Keitt’s implicit prediction of a diminished Union, Miles mildly interposed, “In the meantime during these dark and confused days, Mr. President, we desire to reach some agreement with you that will prevent bloodshed in Charleston.”
A third Representative, John McQueen from Queensdale, appealing to the President’s well-known weakness for close legal reasoning, pointed out that the forts occupied leased property, and that only the improvements on the property—the erected structures themselves—could be said to belong to the federal government.
The delegation’s fourth member, Milledge Luke Bonham, a veteran of the Seminole and Mexican Wars, had been appointed to fill the place vacated by his cousin Preston S. Brooks, who had died within a year of his honorably motivated (Buchanan and all the South felt) assault, in May of 1856, with a rubbery cane so fragile it broke in two, on Senator Sumner as the Massachusetts abolitionist sat at his desk, inflicting three cuts, two of which required two stitches each, in revenge for Sumner’s vile verbal attack upon Brooks’ uncle, Senator Andrew Butler, who had been absent from the Senate that day. Sumner, feigning lasting injury, was henceforth a greater nuisance than ever, for being a martyr, whereas poor “Bully” Brooks, once considered the handsomest man in the House, had curled up and died of the furor, at the age of thirty-seven. Bonham told Buchanan, in one of those silky Southern voices that soften every assertion to a pleasantry, “It is earnest token, indeed, of our sovereign state’s great good faith that, in anticipation of the sadly inevitable, we have come here today to parley over what we could seize in a half-hour’s fight. Major Anderson has a single sergeant at Pinckney, two small companies at Moultri
e, and a handful of engineers supervising the work force at Sumter! At most a hundred men, counting musicians and men under arrest! The major is well loved in Charleston; nobody there wishes harm to a Kentucky boy with a Georgia wife, and it is up to you, Mr. President, to prevent that from happening.”
Buchanan sat at his desk stiffly, as if the pressure of events were inflating his clothes from within, and freezing his joints with arthritic discomfort. The eager petitioners surrounded him like a gelatinous, vested wall, smelling of male sweat and the fumes of good living. “Gentlemen,” he responded at last, in a lawyerly voice squeezed up to an especially wheedling pitch, “put whatever you wish to recommend in writing. I warn you, I intend to collect the federal revenues in Charleston at all hazards. I am determined to obey the laws and fulfil the duties of the chief executive wherever these are unambiguously defined. I am bitterly grieved, let me confide to you, at your disposition to desert the Union before you have been in any particular injured, and when all the means of the defense of states’ rights lie in the Constitution and in the legislature as constituted; though this election gave us a Republican President, the Republicans are minorities in both houses and powerless by themselves.”
Keitt, impatient of passionless arguments he had heard a hundred times from the denatured wafflers of this artificial city, stepped forward to the edge of the President’s well-used black-walnut desk and demanded, “Tell us this, then: do you intend, grieved or no, to use force in collecting revenues in Charleston?”
Stung by his tone, Buchanan tremulously replied, looking up at Keitt with a cocked head and uncertain focus, “I will obey the laws. I am no warrior—I am a man of peace—but I will obey the laws.”
[This embroiders as much as was reported. But you and I know, Retrospect eds., how much more conversation, false starts and probes, idle courtesies and amiable chitchat, there must have been. Gone, gone into the air and the dust. The events of Buchanan’s final months were lit by the glare of hyperexcited newspaper coverage and retrospectively by the memoirs of Buchanan, Black, Stanton, Holt, and Trescot—even relatively late and minor members of the Cabinet like Philip Thomas and John Dix left accounts. And still we don’t know exactly what happened: Buchanan’s state of mind varies from hysterical to coolly determined depending on the source and slant; a crucial document like the rejected final letter of the South Carolina Commissioners is missing; more basically, the quotidian fluff, the living excelsior in which every event is packed, has evaporated, leaving old bone buttons and yellowing papers nibbled all over by silverfish. The past is as illusory as the future, and we exist in the present numbly, blind to the cloud formations, deaf to the birdsong. Yet there is something sacred about life that leads us to keep trying to resurrect it.]
The visit of the South Carolina Representatives left the President rattled and depressed; later that same day, he sought comfort from his closest Cabinet associate, Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, by saying, “The hottest fires burn out quickest. South Carolina has indulged herself in defiance before, and been isolated. What happens in Charleston Harbor little matters if Georgia holds firm—is that not so, my dear Howell?”
The short rotund man, with his appealing, well-oiled smoothness of movement and address, appeared uneasy, and wore the sallow glaze of sleeplessness. He began, “Mr. President, you know with what devotion I have furthered your advancement and advised your administration.”
“And you know, Mr. Cobb, with how much affection I have received your support and enjoyed your company. Though I have been honored with an acquaintanceship as wide as half the world, intimacy has been a rarity in my life, and I have leaned perhaps too heavily upon your friendship. My spies tell me that Mrs. Cobb more than once complained of the long hours during which the President demanded your attendance. I believe it was even said that while she was in Athens no wife could have been more watchful of your time than I.”
And yet, Buchanan acknowledged within, there had never quite been the magical fraternal affection—each speaking the other’s thoughts, or leaving their shared thoughts unspoken—that had existed between himself and Colonel King. King had taken the rôle of the older brother, such a sheltering, guiding brother as Buchanan, elder in fact, had never known; and Howell Cobb that of a younger, whose dependent role was already overfilled by the never-grateful, ever-demanding Reverend Edward Buchanan. Though none of his advisers had been fiercer than Cobb in mocking Douglas and keeping alive the rift between Douglas and the administration, Buchanan now sensed in the man, emanating from him in palpable waves like those of heat from a pot-bellied stove, something of the Little Giant’s egoistic, anarchic ambition—the ambition of short men, ever needing to prove themselves. Had Cobb not been unwilling to take the second Cabinet post with a man his own age in the first, Robert J. Walker instead of Cass could have had the State Department, a capable man instead of an obstructive relic.
Cobb responded graciously, “Mrs. Cobb knew that by serving you I was serving the nation, and with the nation our children’s future. However, sir,” he continued, at a lowered pitch, with an evasive sideways glance, “times are changed. Mrs. Cobb has returned to Georgia to await her confinement. My entire family there has mounted the blue cockade. My brother Thomas gives secessionist speeches that last for five hours, and my uncle John lets out that ‘resistance to oppression is obedience to God.’ ” He tried one last jest. “Squire, you know kin, they’re as hard to herd as chickens in a whirlwind.”
Buchanan failed to smile. A spark of fresh calculation lit up his lopsided gaze. He cocked his head to give Cobb a terminal beam of attention.
“I had hoped,” Cobb asserted, doing a small black-shod dance step on the Persian carpet imported by Harriet from London and already worn threadbare by the hordes seeking Presidential favors, “to persuade the people of Georgia to remain in the Union until March 4th, so that I could man my post in your Cabinet to the end. But—”
“But, Howell,” Buchanan cut in, “opportunity calls, in the perfidious new nation that is breeding, and your financial embarrassments have been mysteriously eased by a spate of philanthropy from your disunionist brother-in-law.”
Howell Cobb was impressed, as often before, by his chief’s ability to obtain and retain gossip; those who have lived life the least, perhaps, have the freshest curiosity. “Sir, let me finish. I have long proclaimed you to be the truest friend to the South that ever sat in the Presidential chair. But as you dealt with those gentlemen from South Carolina, and refused them satisfaction, I saw that you and I have parted in policy, and so must part in fact.”
Sea-change. On the wax-bedabbled desktop Buchanan saw his own hand trembling, like an unpleasant white animal, eyeless, with wrinkled white skin and an excess of feeble limbs. “The South has been a friend of mine,” he stated, “and I have long sought to preserve for it and its institutions those guarantees which our wise founders wrote into the Constitution. I have leaned over backwards to keep the balance between it and the North in these fearful and unsettled times. But I cannot give away national property and my right to defend it.” The President sighed, and removed his hand, suddenly ghastly in his eyes, from his field of vision. “Go, then, Cobb. I cannot bless your departure, nor can I prevent it.”
“A word more. Attorney General Black more than once has to my face impugned—”
“No more words. Black and I are left to deal with the wreck of policies you helped create. I deeply trusted you. We shall not speak again,” the President said, less as a threat than as a prophecy, uttered soliloquizingly.
On December 10th, the South Carolina Congressmen returned, with a fifth, W. W. Boyce, from Winnsboro, added to their number. As requested, they presented a written statement. It read, TO HIS EXCELLENCY JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In compliance with our statement to you yesterday, we now express to you our strong convictions that neither the constituted authorities nor any body of the people of the State of South Carolina will either attack or molest the United State
s forts in the harbor of Charleston previously to the action of the Convention, and, we hope and believe, not until an offer has been made through an accredited representative to negotiate for an amicable arrangement of all matters between the State and the Federal Government; provided that no reinforcements shall be sent into those forts, and their relative military status remain as at present.
Squintingly the old chief made his way through the verbiage. “I do not like the word ‘provided,’ ” he at last said. “I cannot restrict the Presidential freedom with guarantees. Further, your delegation has no official status and cannot bind anyone to its terms.”
Boyce said, “By ‘relative military status’ we mean that the transfer of the Moultrie garrison to Fort Sumter would be the equivalent of a reinforcement and would justify an attack.”
Buchanan’s squint narrowed, as if he were threading a needle eye. On the one hand, he devoutly wished to avoid tipping the South Carolinians into attack; on the other, he had a legal conception of the Presidency that was narrow yet vivid, a strip of prerogatives and duties the Constitution had left standing between the Congress and the courts. In his cracked wheezing tenor of a habitual compromiser’s voice, he at last offered, “Though I can pledge you nothing, I can state to you that it is my policy not to alter the status quo.”
