Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

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 Moultrie, 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.”