Part of the reason for such an outpouring is that people were starting to grasp the potential costs—the literal costs—of war. The first warning came from the stock market, which began to falter and then plunge in the first weeks after Lincoln’s election. Few ordinary citizens owned shares in those days, but when wealthy bankers like August Belmont began reporting that their investments were down as much as 30 percent, more democratic misery seemed certain to follow. Textile manufacturers and their shareholders panicked at the prospect of losing the South’s cotton shipments; by January, their stocks had fallen 40 percent from what they were a year earlier. Western merchants and steamboat lines faced the possibility that the entire lower Mississippi might be closed to commercial shipping indefinitely. And would secession mean that all the debts owed by Southern planters—many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows—would become uncollectable? Demand for new goods plummeted, and soon enough factories began laying off workers by the tens of thousands. “Boston streets to-day are full of discharged workmen,” reported the Boston Courier. “Our laboring population have a dreary winter before them.”38 Ads that began appearing in the major New York newspapers did not exactly help matters:
In consequence of the
PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!
We are determined to offer our very large stock of fall importations for the balance of the season at such prices as will command an immediate sale.
E. WILLIAMS & CO.
Owing to the troublesome times into which our country has fallen we have made a
FURTHER REDUCTION
in our prices, in order to convert our goods into cash before the
UNION GOES TO PIECES!
W.J.F. Dailey & Co.39
One day in early January, when a rumor reached Wall Street that “the compromise measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden had been agreed to unanimously,” stocks shot instantly back up, only to drop again when the report proved erroneous. In the weeks that followed, as grassroots support for the Crittenden plan surged, the market began gradually rising once more. “ ‘It is said’ and ‘perhaps’ are quite sufficient to give stocks a lift,” noted the editor of one commercial newspaper.40
It was a month of hearsay, anonymous leaks, and contradictions; a month when everything seemed to be happening much too fast, and when many of the strangest reports were the ones that turned out to be true. In Washington, there was talk of an impending coup d’état against the federal government, a popular uprising against the “official imbecility” that was letting the nation drift toward the brink of catastrophe. Hastily formed militia units drilled by night in the remoter reaches of the District, pledging that they would sooner reduce the entire capital to ashes than permit the inauguration of a Black Republican president.41 In New York, Mayor Fernando Wood declared his support for secession: not just of the South but also of his own city, which was to become an independent trading republic. (One presumes that the mayor himself would have become its president.) Wood even had a name for his imaginary nation: “Tri-Insula,” since it would consist of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. New York’s city council endorsed the idea, as did a number of leading businessmen. “I would have New York a free city,” one of them wrote, “not a free city with respect to the liberty of the negro, but a free city in commerce and trade.”42
The national disaster seemed to have unleashed all manner of explosive energies, sending the planets spinning out of their accustomed orbits. Every day brought fresh astonishments. One morning in late January, Northern readers opened their newspapers to discover support for Southern secession coming from the very last place they would have expected. At a Boston abolitionist meeting, Wendell Phillips had rejoiced at the slave states’ departure and the Constitution’s demise. “The Covenant with Death is annulled—the Agreement with Hell is broken to pieces,” he cried. “The chain which has held the slave system since 1787 is parted.” The closing words of his speech seemed calculated to provoke howls of rage—and did: “All hail, then, Disunion!”
Telegraphic dispatches brought Phillips’s speech to readers across the North, most of whom—even those who spared no sympathy for slaveholders—branded him a traitor. (“THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE,” screamed a typical headline in the usually staid and solidly Republican New York Times. “The Abolitionists Giving the Right Hand of Fellowship to the Disunionists.”) Less than a week later, when Phillips again stepped onto a public stage at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, several hundred rough-looking characters—clearly not dues-paying members—packed the balconies. As soon as he tried to speak, they drowned him out with hisses, jeers, foot-stomping, barnyard noises, cheers for Crittenden and the Union, and even a sarcastic chorus or two of “Dixie.” Next, no less a luminary than Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped up warily with a sheaf of lecture notes in hand, only to be hooted and heckled off the speakers’ platform. At last, after the mayor of Boston ordered the hall cleared to avert a full-on riot and abolitionists scattered in all directions, several hundred infuriated demonstrators chased Phillips back to his house on Essex Street, waving brickbats and howling “Carve him out!” as policemen struggled to restrain the mob. For weeks afterward Phillips was a virtual prisoner, with bodyguards standing vigil outside his front door and Boston toughs prowling nearby, vowing vengeance.43
Back in Washington, however, Crittenden’s cause—despite such warm support in the North—was growing more and more desperate. Time and again he took to the Senate floor with his latest armload of petitions. He hosted a dinner party for thirty people at the National Hotel—hospitality that stretched the limits of his modest pocketbook—including such potential allies as General Scott and the justices of the Supreme Court, as well as influential senators and congressmen from both parties. When that availed him little, he made an unprecedented proposal: Congress, instead of voting on the compromise package, should submit it to a nationwide popular referendum. Finally, to render his legislative ideas yet more alluring to the South, he added two new constitutional amendments that had originally been suggested by Stephen Douglas. One would bar free blacks from voting in elections or holding public office, while the other guaranteed that if any state wished to eliminate its population of free blacks entirely, the federal government would pay to have them shipped off to Africa or South America. “Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate,” Crittenden pleaded to his Northern colleagues, sounding more than ever like a rug merchant trying to unload the last odds and ends of his shopworn stock. A few weeks earlier, he had called the price a comparative trifle; now he compared it to “a barleycorn” and “a little atom.”44
But fewer and fewer of Crittenden’s fellow senators from the free states seemed much interested in his merchandise, no matter how low the price. The entire existence of the Republican Party was predicated on a commitment to containing slavery within its present bounds. Were its leaders to abrogate this fundamental principle, at the very hour of their electoral triumph? The cartloads of petitions in support of compromise must be weighed against the grassroots fervor of the recent campaign: nearly two million Americans in the North had voted for Lincoln, despite all the Southern warnings that his victory would mean disunion. Although it was true that the Republican candidate had carried the nation as a whole with fewer than 40 percent of the votes cast, all but three of the Northern states had given him solid majorities—in some cases, overwhelming ones. It was clear which way the wind was blowing above the Mason-Dixon Line; Major Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter had made him a hero precisely because he had refused to yield to Southern threats.
Perhaps more important, the radical slave-state senators were making it clear that even the Crittenden plan would not satisfy them. Wigfall and others proclaimed a “Southern Manifesto”: “The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretense of new guarantees.… We are satisfied the honor, safety, and
independence of the Southern people require the organization of a Southern Confederacy.”45
Faced with such intransigence, and with news of the secession fever sweeping across the South, many Northerners began wondering what gain would come of abasing themselves yet again before the slave power. By mid-January, even such a moderate as George Templeton Strong, who had cheered the hanging of John Brown, and who since November had been hoping earnestly for a compromise, was ready to throw up his hands. All the slave states seemed now to be tilting toward secession, he noted in his diary. “But what can we do? What can I do? What could I do if I were Webster and Clay combined? Concession to these conspirators and the ignorant herd they have stimulated to treason would but postpone the inevitable crisis a year or two longer.”46
One by one, the states of the Deep South were already withdrawing. As they joined the new Confederacy, one Southern senator after another rose in the chamber to declaim his valedictory address. Some left bitter recriminations as their last entries in the congressional annals, others gave unctuous and regretful farewells. On January 7, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia used his departure speech to fire parting shots at “Black Republicans” and abolitionists: “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.” On January 21, David Levy Yulee of Florida took his leave more genteelly, “acknowledging, with grateful emotions, my obligations for the many courtesies I have enjoyed [from] the gentlemen of this body, and with most cordial good wishes for their personal welfare.” His fellow Floridian, Stephen Mallory, blasted the North with brimstone: “You cannot conquer us. Imbrue your hands in our blood and the rains of a century will not wipe from them the stain, while coming generations will weep for your wickedness and folly.” Finally it was Jefferson Davis’s turn. In a low, hoarse voice, weakened by recent illness and by the emotion of the moment, he offered a courtly godspeed to his longtime colleagues: “I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offence I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of parting, to offer my apology.… Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains to me to bid you a final adieu.”47
At these words, Davis and four of his fellow Southerners turned to make their way slowly up the aisle toward the door. It is said that spectators sobbed in the gallery, as stern legislators choked back tears. The Union seemed truly—perhaps irrevocably—dissolved. Democrats and a few moderate Republicans crowded around to shake the five men’s hands and wish them well. The rest of the Northerners sat, hands folded, at their desks. Then the Senate returned to the rest of the day’s business: Kansas statehood, the Crittenden amendments, sarcastic potshots, and occasional full-on broadsides of vilification and bombast.
The centrifuge was spinning faster and faster. Washington itself seemed to be coming apart. There was only one strange, surreal point of calm at the center of the tempest: the old gentleman in the White House.
NEW YEAR’S DAY in the nation’s capital was, by tradition, a moment of partisan truce and the annual reenactment of a peculiar democratic ritual. On the first afternoon of each year, the doors of the White House were thrown open to any moderately respectable and decently washed citizens who wished to shake hands with their chief executive, wish him the compliments of the season, and partake liberally of federally funded punch and cake.48
The mansion had achieved unprecedented splendor during James Buchanan’s administration. Shortly after the inauguration, Miss Harriet Lane, the bachelor president’s niece and White House hostess, had undertaken a costly redecoration using funds generously appropriated by Congress. The austerely classical furnishings dating back to President Monroe’s term were sent to auction, replaced by heavy draperies, fine carpets, and amply stuffed settees and divans in the latest rococo style. Moreover, Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane entertained often and generously. Though the president had few, if any, close friends, he delighted in small talk, especially with the ladies, trading tidbits of gossip on the capital’s latest social scandals. It was a golden age of female fashions, and the state rooms’ gilded chandeliers shone on gowns of crimson velvet, gloves trimmed with antique lace, and wreaths of clematis crowning the glossy hair of senators’ wives. The Democratic president was no snob, however. He opened his home to everyone from ambassadors to Indian chiefs, and held public levees quite frequently even when it did not happen to be New Year’s Day. During a recent reception for the Japanese envoys, uninvited strangers had packed the East Room, some even clambering atop Miss Lane’s precious pier tables for a glimpse of the exotic Orientals.49
But the last New Year’s levee of the Buchanan administration was a sadly diminished affair. Four years of indiscriminate hospitality had taken their toll on the White House. Its wallpaper was greasy in places where visitors had brushed against it with sweaty hands or pomaded hair; its carpets were worn down by muddy boots and stained with tobacco juice. (In antebellum days, one senator later remembered, brown spittle flowed so freely that “you had to wear your overshoes into the best society of Washington.”) Moreover, the crowd was sparse and the mood anything but cheerful. As the strains of the marine band sounded from a nearby vestibule, political enemies squared off warily on opposite sides of the East Room as if for some elaborate quadrille. Some men and women wore ribboned cockades on their chests as tokens of political sympathies: red, white, and blue for the Union, solid blue for secession. More than a few from each faction had come for the punch and cake but disdained to shake their host’s hand. The president and his niece were receiving guests in the (solid) Blue Room, surely just an unfortunate coincidence. As at all their levees, the slim, blond Miss Lane was dressed to perfection, and Mr. Buchanan’s tall figure, at least from across the room, looked stately in its black frock coat and high collar. His head, as usual, was cocked quizzically to one side from some odd nervous tic, as though he had always just failed to catch the last thing that was said. It was only when guests drew closer that they noticed the president’s customary aspect altered. His hair—which a female admirer had once found as silky and glistening as the tail feathers of the glass birds of paradise in Barnum’s Museum—was now shockingly white. Buchanan’s one good eye was dull and unfocused, his head more askew than ever. “It was his last New Year as President,” the New York World’s correspondent mused afterward, “perhaps the last of our republic; and as he went through the hollow mockery of the occasion, he could not but feel how unreal it was.”50
It should never have ended thus. James Buchanan had been one of the best-qualified men ever to win the presidency: so long and diligent had been his career in government that he liked to refer to himself deprecatingly as “the Old Public Functionary.” Over the past half century, he had served his nation ably as representative to Congress, senator, and secretary of state. Though born the son of a country storekeeper, he had represented the United States with distinction at the courts of Czar Nicholas and Queen Victoria, returning home with all the subtle expertise in diplomatic graces to be learned in St. Petersburg and London. At the Court of St. James’s, indeed, he had been so scrupulous as to agonize for weeks over what to wear when presenting his credentials to the Queen. Should he costume himself like George Washington in knee breeches and powdered wig? Carry the customary sword of a European envoy? In the end, he steered a prudent middle course, attiring himself in black like an ordinary American gentleman, but bringing the sword along, too. Some might have scoffed, but Buchanan’s admirers saw this as just the kind of evenhandedness that the country needed in its leading statesmen.51 His domestic positions, too, were always judicious. Though a Pennsylvanian, he loathed abolitionist rabble-rousers, never spoke a disparaging word about slavery, and appointed a carefully balanced cabinet of Northerners and Southerners.52
Disunion had long seemed to him such a far-fetched proposi
tion as to be almost existentially impossible. Back in 1832, Buchanan had written in mild frustration to President Jackson about his first visit to the Russian court. The czarina, he said, would not stop talking about the difficulties between the Northern and Southern states—rumors of which had reached even as far as St. Petersburg. Was this not a serious threat to the young republic, she asked, perhaps worse even than the possibility of war with a European power? Buchanan told the president that his efforts to convince her otherwise had been in vain:
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