Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Buchanan passed the letter to Trescot to read. Able, intelligent Trescot quickly sensed that the President was offended. He had been pushed too hard, too soon. Buchanan invited Hamilton to return tomorrow morning for his reply.

On the same day, Buchanan wrote the sympathetic James Gordon Bennett of the New-York Herald , in implicit riposte to the Tribune ’s rumor, I have never enjoyed better health or a more tranquil spirit than during the past year. All our troubles have not cost me an hour’s sleep or a meal’s victuals, though I trust I have a just sense of my high responsibility. I weigh well and prayerfully what course I ought to adopt, and adhere to it steadily, leaving the results to Providence. This is my nature, and I deserve neither praise nor blame for it .

This same busy day, Buchanan attended the reception for the wedding of a Miss Parker to a Mr. Bouligny of Louisiana, a very Southern affair , Auchampaugh assures us: as Klein tells it, guests at a wedding reception on December 20 which the president attended found him proclaiming that he had never enjoyed better health and looking the part .

Out in the hall, however, there arose such a commotion that Buchanan asked another guest, “Madame, do you suppose the house is on fire?”

But the incendiary commotion was being created by one hot-blooded guest, Laurence Keitt, who was jubilantly leaping into the air and brandishing a piece of paper. “Thank God! Oh, thank God!” he cried. “South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram! I feel like a boy let out from school!”

Buchanan called for a carriage and went back to the White House. There, it seems, he composed an answer to Governor Pickens, saying: As an executive officer of the Government, I have no power to surrender to any human authority Fort Sumter or any of the other forts or public property in South Carolina.… If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States .

Meanwhile, Trescot, realizing that Pickens’ demand might lead to a rebuff and release the President from his informal pledge to preserve the status quo , had talked with Slidell, Jefferson Davis, and South Carolina Congressmen Bonham and McQueen, and all telegraphed Pickens to withdraw his letter. By ten o’clock the next morning, Trescot called at the White House with a telegram Pickens had sent — You are authorised & requested to withdraw my letter sent by Dr. Hamilton immediately — and Buchanan’s combative response was withheld.

This same day, December 21st, a Cabinet meeting considered the position of Major Anderson; Buchanan asked exactly what orders had been forwarded to Fort Moultrie ten days earlier, by way of Major Don Carlos Buell. Buell had had no written instructions and he and Anderson had together composed some, which were sent back to the War Department and authenticated by Floyd. Floyd could not remember what they were. A search turned up Buell’s memorandum. Buchanan did not like the sentence which directed Anderson to defend himself to the last extremity , since this seemed to ask for needless sacrifice of life. Black wrote out a revised copy and Floyd signed it and sent it by courier to Anderson at Fort Moultrie.

Floyd was unwell but not idle. On December 19th he sent instructions to Captain J. G. Foster, at Fort Moultrie, to return to the federal arsenal in Charleston some forty muskets he had two days earlier removed under an unfilled order of the Ordnance Department dated November 1st. On December 20th Floyd called his ordnance chief to his sickbed in Washington and gave verbal orders to dispatch a large shipment of heavy cannon from a Pittsburgh foundry down the Mississippi to some uncompleted Texas forts.

What meaning did Floyd’s actions — widely construed, by the Northern press, as an attempt to arm the South while keeping the Union disarmed — really have? None, or almost none, Auchampaugh argues. Floyd was a good man held up to too harsh a light. Considering the things Floyd could have done and did not do, points to much in his favor. He sent nothing to Virginia; he knew the efficiency of the Southern cavalry, but sent not a sabre; he knew the Southern need of artillery, but sent not a gun before December, 1860 . And indeed, why should Floyd’s actions have a meaning, if, as contemporary cosmologists virtually all agree, the universe itself has none?

An unusually inclement winter had set in , Nevins tells us, with the flair of a one-time journalist. The white marble buildings were cold-looking, the ailanthus trees bare, the waters of the Potomac leaden-colored. As snow and rain smote the town, streets were alternately sheets of dazzling white, and stretches of viscid yellow mud . This is history? This is word painting. This is history:

Christmas Day, 1860. Four events:

1. In the White House, James Buchanan pens a letter to William M. Browne of the runaway Washington Constitution , which, though founded and subsidized as a pro-administration newspaper, has come out stridently in favor of secession. Private , his tremulous but tireless pen traces in parenthesis, and then forms the salutation, My Dear Sir . The moving pen writes, I have read with deep mortification your editorial this morning in which you take open ground against my message on the right of secession. I have defended you as long as I can against numerous complaints.… I am deeply sorry to say that I must in some authentic form declare that the “Constitution” is not the organ of the administration . [The authentic form became the withdrawal of government advertising and printing contracts; by the end of January the Constitution had to suspend publication.]

2. Black tells Buchanan of Floyd’s cannon shipment from Pittsburgh and the President instantly cancels the order. Floyd, still capable of taking offense, is offended.

3. Floyd is approached by Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas and others to join their plot to kidnap Buchanan and make Breckinridge, the Vice-President from Kentucky, President. Floyd refuses. [But what an episode in the history books that would have made! Old Buck would have become not just the only bachelor President but the only kidnapped President!!]

4. In Charleston, Major Anderson and his men attend a Christmas party hosted by Captain J. G. Foster [see this page], giving no sign of the tactical surprise they had planned for the next night, that of the 26th; abandoning Fort Moultrie for the remoter, more defensible Fort Sumter.

Floyd [drat this ubiquitous, dilatory nonentity!], hearing the news on the morning of December 27th, said, “It is impossible,” and telegraphed Anderson for an explanation. He received the reply I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I was certain that if attacked my men must have been sacrificed and the command of the harbor lost .

That same morning, the President was visited by a trio of Southerners — Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Senator Robert Mercier Taliaferro Hunter of Virginia, and the former diplomat Trescot, who in February of 1861 composed an account of the visit, as part of his often-paraphrased Narrative , which he revised for publication in 1870.

Colonel Davis asked the President, “Have you received any intelligence from Charleston in the last three hours?”

“None,” was the cautious reply.

“Then I have a great calamity to announce to you. Major Anderson last night, under cover of darkness, spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie and moved his full force to Fort Sumter. Now, Mr. President, you are surrounded with blood and dishonor on all sides.”

Buchanan, who had been standing by the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in the palm of his hand, sat down. [13] Historians have generally treated this crushed cigar as a sign of great distress: e.g., Nichols has it that the Senators found the President greatly agitated. He stood by the hearth crushing a cigar in his shaking fingers and stammered that the move was against his policy . But Trescot, in the sentence that is the only source for the detail, takes the trouble to say that this untidy practice was a habit with Buchanan. His words are: The President was standing by the mantelpiece crushing up a cigar into pieces in his hand — a habit I have seen him practice often . The punctuation and emphases for Buchanan’s utterance considerably vary. Trescot’s original, hastily jotted memoir gives it as “ My God are calamities (or misfortunes, I forget which) never to come singly. I call God to witness — you gentlemen better than anybody know — that this is not only without but against my orders, it is against my policy .” Nevins dresses it up considerably: “ My God ,” wailed [ sic ] Buchanan, who stood at the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in his hand , “ are misfortunes never to come singly? I call God to witness, you, gentlemen, better than anybody, know that this is not only without, but against my orders. It is against my policy .” “My God,” he asked, “are calamities never to come singly? I call God to witness: you gentlemen, better than anybody, know that this is not only without but against my orders; it is against my policy.”