Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

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, [15] And yet he seems miscast as villain. In the photograph of Buchanan with his Cabinet taken by W. H. Lowdermilk & Co. of Washington, D.C., sometime between the death of Aaron Brown and the resignation of Howell Cobb, Thompson is on the extreme left, blurred, looking stolid and, with his short haircut and clean shave, oddly modern. He was self-made, a poor boy from North Carolina who, Nichols says, in the young and growing state of Mississippi … amassed political power and a fortune . A frontiersman, if we remember that much of the Deep South was frontier, torn open by the rapid spread of cotton — a terrain for entrepreneurs and arrivistes. Romantically, he had fallen in love with a poor girl of fourteen, married her without consummating the marriage, and sent her off to Paris for four years of schooling; she was Kate Thompson, one of the social ornaments of Buchanan’s Washington, a special favorite of the old chief, and the author of lively letters that form an important illumination of the era and administration. When Thompson at last resigned ( I go hence to make the destiny of Mississippi my destiny ) Buchanan wrote a warm letter saying, No man could have more ably, honestly, & efficiently performed the various & complicated duties of the Interior Department than yourself.… I regret extremely that the troubles of the times have rendered it necessary for us to part . This billet-doux as late in the day as January 11, 1861! asserted, “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 en cour aging 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.