Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Other Senators — Yulee, Mallory, Bigler, Slidell — came calling, urging the President to order Anderson back to Moultrie and thus honor his gentleman’s agreement to preserve the status quo. Buchanan paced nervously , Nevins tells us, telling his excited callers to keep calm and trust him . Amid the clamor and pressure his habitual indecision and elderly stubbornness served as a shield: he could not condemn Anderson, he said, without the facts. He must call a Cabinet meeting. “If our gentlemen’s agreement has indeed been broken,” he promised, “it will be repaired.”

In the Cabinet session, Floyd, overwrought, took the offensive. “Anderson has betrayed us all! He has compromised the President, and made war inevitable! This catastrophic maneuver was totally against his orders!”

But Black said calmly, “On the contrary, sir, it was in precise accordance with his orders.”

“Mr. Black, it was not. It could not have been.”

“Mr. Floyd,” responded Black, in a voice of iron, “I have sent to the War Department for these orders of December 11th, drawn up by Major Anderson and Major Buell and endorsed by you. I shall read. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack or an attempt to take possession of any of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper, to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act .”

Floyd said triumphantly, “Indeed so; I defy you to produce tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act .”

Stanton spoke up. Short, round, pugnacious, he sported the wire-rim glasses and pharaonic beard that would become famous during his term as Lincoln’s Secretary of War. “Sir,” he told Floyd, who, pale and ill, wilted a bit under this wind from a new direction, “a resolution has been publicly introduced into the South Carolina legislature for possession of all the forts! The Charleston Mercury insists on it daily! The very workmen employed at Fort Sumter openly sport the blue cockade!”

“Rumors and gestures, merely — not justification for a defiant military action,” Floyd argued. “Anderson left the guns at Moultrie spiked and burnt the carriages; such warlike tactics utterly violate the solemn pledge given by this government.”

Stanton asked, “When was any such pledge given? Where does it exist in writing?”

See this page — this page.

Black stood to his lanky height and warned, “Mr. Floyd, you are impugning the honor of the President of the United States.”

Buchanan attempted to defend his own honor. “I promised nothing certain. I said my intent was to preserve the status quo .” Had he said precisely that? It was so hard exactly to remember. Men’s bellies and voices, pressing, pressing. He turned for relief to the silent members of the Cabinet — the Secretary of the Navy, little old Isaac Toucey of Connecticut, a colleague from Polk’s Cabinet long ago, and pale, stocky Thompson, exhausted by his three days on the trail of the missing Indian bonds. The President mildly declared, “I agree that Major Anderson’s maneuver, though unexpected, was justified by the discretion granted him in explicit orders.”

Floyd, in a voice loud like that of a drunk or of an actor, stated, “If the letter of official orders is to replace honor among men, then one remedy alone is left, and that is to withdraw the garrison from Charleston Harbor altogether. I demand the right to order withdrawal. I will sit down here and write out the order.”

Black shook the papers holding Anderson’s orders in Floyd’s face and, overtopping the Virginian’s histrionics with his own, orated, “Mr. Floyd, there never was a moment in the history of England when a minister of the Crown could have proposed to surrender a military post which might be defended, without bringing his head to the block!”

Stanton added furiously, his excited spittle visible in the Cabinet Room gaslights, installed in 1848: “To accede to such a proposal would be a crime like Arnold’s, and all the participants should be hanged like André, and a President of the United States who would make such an order would be guilty of treason!”

Buchanan lifted his hands and cried out, as if wounded, “Oh, no! Not so bad as that, my friend — not so bad as that!”

[How dismayingly, arriving at this climactic crisis of my tale and of Buchanan’s life, did I find nothing but dried old words, yards of them strung together from accounts of suspect authenticity, concerning details that in retrospect seem ridiculously niggling — the exact terms of Anderson’s orders, and the legal propriety of how to deal with the Commissioners from South Carolina, who had arrived in Washington and whose first meeting with the President had been postponed a day by the excitement over Anderson’s move to Sumter. Are all great events as they occur hidden by details, first from the participants and then from us?]

The Cabinet meeting of the 27th wrangled on. They met again, after dinner, and into the night, while newspapermen waited for news and bands of Congressmen gathered to cast their weight into the battle for the President’s mind. The Tribune reported that the Cabinet voted four to three (Floyd, Thompson, and Philip F. Thomas, a pro-Southern Maryland politician who had replaced Howell Cobb as head of the Treasury Department, and who was to resign after a month of uneasy service) not to order Anderson back, with Black, Stanton, and Postmaster General Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, successfully bringing pressure to bear on Toucey, the member closest to the President’s extremely middling views. At last, midnight having come and gone, Buchanan decided to make no decision: In this state of suspense , to quote his own account, the President determined to await official information from Major Anderson himself . “He acted within the letter of his instructions,” Buchanan wearily told the Cabinet, “though against the trend of my policy. If, upon receipt and examination of his report, it appears he took alarm without cause, then we might think seriously of restoring for the present the former status quo .”

Late as it was, Secretary Black lingered in the Cabinet Room. He said, “With some ingenuity, sir, we have brought ourselves to stand upon a very narrow piece of ground.”

“It will suffice, if it serves to gain us time. Time, Mr. Black, time. Time is the great conservative force. We must buy it by the month, and it is sold only by the hour.” He explained a secret thread he had been spinning beneath the tumult of these days. “Since Lincoln will not come to Washington, I have sent Duff Green to Springfield, to gain the assent of the President-elect to a new national constitutional convention. Such a convention would become the voice of the people, who are overwhelmingly conservative, and whose terrorstricken letters pour in upon me like a hurricane of tears. Extend the Missouri Compromise line, and enforce the Fugitive Slave law — that is all we need for peace. Hourly I await for Green to telegram Lincoln’s reprieving statement.”

“But,” Black pointed out, in the face of the old man’s pathetic hope, “the Republican party was born of repugnance for the Missouri Compromise. The party is the free-soil delusion’s very child. Lincoln can scarcely disavow his own platform, when abolitionist fanaticism has at last secured in him its national instrument.”

“But he will be President . If only he would come to Washington and smell the blood in the air! Seward now smells it, and was ready to assent to the Crittenden Compromise, until the radicals renewed their hold on Lincoln. Wall Street is panicking, and that will speak to the Republicans.”