by John Updike
Perhaps it was this troubled day, or the day before, that Buchanan had the agitated conversation with Senator Robert Toombs reported in Trescot’s Narrative. Trescot reports it but provides as clue to the exact day only this opening remark by Toombs: “I am aware Mr President” said T “that the Cabinet is in session and that today is the annual dinner to the Supreme Court and that you have scarcely time to see me.” It would take a trip to Washington City, I fear, and the dampest dimmest depths of the Library of Congress, to ferret out the date of that Supreme Court dinner. [Retrospect eds.: Will make trip, if expenses covered. Just airfare and modest hotel—will pay for own meals and incidentals.] Toombs continued, “But while I apologize for the intrusion, it is an evidence what importance I attach to the interview. I would ask Mr President whether you have decided upon your course as to Fort Sumter?” [Italics indicate exact transcription of Trescot’s telegraphic style.]
“No Sir, I have not decided. The Cabinet is now in session upon that very subject.”
“I thank you Sir for the information that is all I wanted to know,” said T. retiring.
“But Mr T. why do you ask?”
“Because Sir my State has a deep interest in the decision.”
“How your State—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbour is abandoned?”
“Sir the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.”
“Good God Mr Toombs do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?”
“Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out” and he retired. [According to Trescot, whom Nevins admires uncritically, calling him the honest Trescot and asserting of this secessionist Alger Hiss that Few men had quicker insight than Trescot,] When the President returned to the Cabinet he seemed very much excited and said, “Gentlemen I really begin to believe that this is revolution.”
The Cabinet meeting of the evening of the 28th, a Friday, found Floyd, still ill, stretched out on a sofa between the windows of the Cabinet Room. The spotlight shifts to the other major Southerner, Jacob Thompson, as he argues soothingly, “Mr. President, South Carolina is a tiny state, with a sparse white population. The United States are a powerful nation with a vigorous government. This great nation can well afford to say to South Carolina, ‘See, we will withdraw our garrison as an evidence that we mean you no harm.’ ”
Stanton—that pharaonically bearded pepperpot, that fiery Laertes duelling Buchanan’s white-haired Hamlet!—expostulated, “Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the government is strong, and that we, as the public servants, have the confidence of the people. I think that is a mistake. No administration has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this has done. Only the other day it was announced that a million of dollars has been stolen from Mr. Thompson’s department. The bonds were found to have been taken from the vault where they should have been kept, and the notes of Mr. Floyd were substituted for them. Now it is proposed to give up Sumter. All I have to say is that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week!”h
Stanton’s account, which has become history, claims that Floyd made no reply in his own defense. It seems unlikely—it contravenes all dramatic principles—that Floyd did not arise from his couch of infirmity and protest, with suitable broad gestures, “Mr. President, this attorney has shared our counsels a few brief days and he presumes to sit in judgment upon those of us loyal to you and this administration for four years! The truth of the matter of these acceptances is that, had I not signed them, our troops, through the negligence of Congress, would have been left unequipped in the wilderness of Utah! Not a dollar has been lost to the government through my department; the malfeasances of the Yankee contractor Russell and Mr. Thompson’s appointee Bailey leave my honor untouched. And furthermore, to substantiate my loyalty, let me confide to you that, on Christmas Day, I was approached by a Senator from a state of the same latitude as Mr. Thompson’s, and wherein disunionist views are likewise proclaimed in public daily; this Senator, I swear, invited me to join a conspiracy, sir, to kidnap you, and to place Mr. Breckinridge in the Presidential chair!” Smiling wanly at the sensation his words produced at the Cabinet table, the ailing, impugned, yet persistently aristocratic Virginian made a curt bow in Buchanan’s direction and went on, “Of course, I indignantly refused; and from that same store of righteous indignation I hereby state that I cannot countenance your violation of solemn pledges respecting Fort Sumter!”
And then Black, that emotional and sharp Scotch-Irish son of thunder from Pennsylvania’s mountainous Somerset according to Nichols, must have leaped up, and, with an ironical small bow echoing Floyd’s, asked, “May we hope, Governor Floyd, to construe this lack of countenance, with its imputations of grave disrespect, as the long-delayed fulfillment of our expectations that you resign the post you have administered with such notorious incompetence?”
Stanton, his lipless mouth clamping on his words like a nutcracker, his eye sockets filling, now one and now the other, with blind ovals of reflected gaslight, would very likely have ringingly seconded: “You say incompetence; I say, with half the nation, treachery!”
In the event, on the next day, the 29th, Buchanan received a letter of resignation from Floyd. It read, Our refusal, or even delay, to place affairs back as they stood under our agreement, invites collision, and must inevitably inaugurate civil war in our land. I can not consent to be the agent of such a calamity.
I deeply regret to feel myself under the necessity of tendering to you my resignation as Secretary of War, because I can no longer hold it, under my convictions of patriotism, nor with honor, subjected as I am to the violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.
With the highest personal regard, I am most truly yours.
When loved ones kiss us off, the question arises, did they ever love us? Or has it all been illusion and cool scheming? That blow job in the hotel. That panicked mating, once, right in her back yard, on the damp grass, ejaculation and absorption, while the girls waited to be tucked into bed with prayers, their docilely glowing windows rectangling the lawn. The voluptuousness of Buchanan’s prayers. The floor of things: the worse things get, God draws closer, a sublime absence we conjure from the void, from beneath the floor. JB’s jouissance, praying. Events, and the Buddhist something that is not-event. Work this in? [Among my working notes as of late 1976.]
That day Buchanan also received, as requested, the written statement of the South Carolina Commissioners—lost, alas, to history—and presented it, with a draft of his proposed reply, at a meeting of the Cabinet that evening.
Stanton brandished the papers in question and declaimed, “These gentlemen claim to be Ambassadors. It is preposterous! They cannot be Ambassadors; they are lawbreakers, traitors. They should be arrested. You cannot negotiate with them; and yet it seems by this paper that you have been led into doing that very thing. With all respect to you, Mr. President, I must say that the Attorney General, under his oath of office, dares not be cognizant of the pending proceedings. Your reply to these so-called Ambassadors must not be transmitted as the reply of the President. It is wholly unlawful and improper; its language is unguarded and to send it as an official document will bring the President to the verge of usurpation!”
Nevins has the grace to footnote this piece of oratory with the sly demur, This quotation has the ring of truth even if not literally accurate.
The ring of truth, too, attaches to Buchanan’s placating answer: “I will allow the urgency of the days, Mr. Stanton, to excuse the heat of your words. I hold out to the Commissioners merely the hope of submitting a proposal from them to the Congress. If they will retreat from Moultrie, and guarantee our federal property immunity for the rest of our administration, I see no harm in considering the restoration of Major Anderson to where he was five days ago.”
Thompson, now the last of the original Southern members of the Cabinet,k a
sserted, “The subject for consideration, Mr. President, is the removal of Major Anderson from Charleston Harbor entirely. I urge it upon you as the only sane and magnanimous course.”
“For such magnanimity,” piped up Stanton, “they carve gallows timber!”
When the flurry of shouts died down, Black said soothingly, of Buchanan’s proposed response to the Commissioners, “Mr. President, the language of this paper is self-incriminatory. It appears to concede the right of negotiation, when the ownership of federal forts is beyond negotiation. It implies that Major Anderson might be at fault in regard to a pledge made by you, when any such pledge or bargain should be flatly denied.”
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 encouraging 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!”
ETC., ETC. BIFF. BANG. POOR OLD BUCK. 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 eyesl 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 w
oke 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.
