Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

He sleepily prayed, and the silence into which his brain poured its half-formed words, the sense melting like wax at the edge of the flaming wick, tonight seemed itself a message, tuned to his great weariness. He saw for a moment through not his own mismatched eyes [16] One hazel, one blue, according to Nichols. He cites no ophthalmological source. It’s hard to believe, but magical to picture. The portrait by Jacob Eichholtz, done when Buchanan was about to go off to Russia, is chromatically inconclusive. The one by George P. A. Healy, in the National Portrait Gallery, shows his eyes as both blue, with a slight cast (strabismus) in the left. Opposite this portrait in The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents the unsigned text parenthetically claims one eye [was] nearsighted, the other farsighted . See Kierkegaard, Journals , December 10, 1837. but through God’s clear colorless ones; he saw that sub specie aeternitatis nothing greatly matters: not his own life, his ambitions, his patient intricate craven search for power, nor, cruel as the thought might appear from a wakeful perspective, the lives of the nation, the millions as they strain toward him for rescue. The hordes of Sennacherib invaded Israel, and the Temple was destroyed stone by stone, and yet within the beautiful dispassion of God these cataclysms had been cradled, and now slept unremembered but by a few. While Buchanan had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James, British educated opinion had been considerably agitated by the apparent discoveries, within geology, of tracts of time vaster than any the Bible disclosed: Buchanan now perceived a cause for serenity here, a vastness that dwindled all our agitations to a scarcely perceptible stir, and our mountains and chasms to a prairie smoothness, a luminous smoothness like that of Greenland, or of the unexpected southernmost continent first sighted by Captain Cook. Having been long troubled by the silence into which his prayers seemed to sink without an echo, Buchanan in his majestic fatigue appreciated that the silence was an answer, the only answer whose mercy was lasting, impartial, and omnipresent. Just so, Lincoln’s silence from Springfield, was an answer, of a certain grandeur, after all the clamor of the Cabinet meetings. As if through the gimlet eye of an eagle soaring in God’s silent winds Buchanan saw the nation beneath him, a colorful small mountain meadow scurrying with frantic life; its life would perish but infallibly renew itself in the turning of seasons, in the great and impervious planetary motions. Thus reassured, the old man sank on a sustained note of praise into the void and woke with surprise into a still-stormy world where it seemed all but himself had tossed sleepless through the night.

The morning brought a note from General Scott, saying, It is Sunday, the weather is bad, & Genl. S. is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, &, if misled by zeal, he hopes for the President’s forgiveness .

Will the President permit Genl. S., without reference to the War Department, & otherwise as secretly as possible, to send two hundred & fifty recruits, from New York Harbor, to reinforce Fort Sumter, together with some extra muskets or rifles, ammunition, & subsistence stores?

It is hoped that a sloop of war & cutter may be ordered for the same purpose as early as to-morrow .

Their clangor muffled by the storm, which on long legs of visible, wind-swept sleet strode through the toy houses and monuments of Washington City, church bells called secessionist and abolitionist alike, master and mistress and thinly clad slave, to worship. Buchanan, content with his religious experience of the previous midnight, stayed dry at home, and enjoyed a perfect Union breakfast: Carolina hominy grits and Philadelphia scrapple drenched in Vermont maple syrup. An agitated Toucey, looking fluffy and alarmed, like a bird tossed from its nest, arrived at the White House, saying that Black and Stanton and probably Holt would resign if the President sent his reply as drafted to the Commissioners.

So Buchanan sent for Black, who, after what his reminiscence calls the most miserable and restive night of my life , was reluctant to appear, for I knew the temper of the appeal he would make to me. I felt that he would place his demand that I remain by his side upon such grounds of personal friendship that it would make it impossible for me to leave him without laying myself open to the charge of having deserted a friend who had greatly honored and trusted me at a time when he was under the shadow of the greatest trouble of his life . Having failed to respond the first time, Black answered a second summons.

Buchanan greeted him, “Is it true that you are going to desert me?”

“It is true that I am going to resign.”

This terrible light of day has brought back all the terrors, the seriousness, the precariousness, the unfathomable shame , the daily small losses that mask great loss. [Cf. my first winter after Genevieve’s kiss-off: I woke up every morning feeling hollow, inwardly sore with a desperate sense of having misplaced some huge thing.] He said, according to history, “I am overwhelmed to know that you of all other men are going to leave me in this crisis. You are from my own state, my closest political and personal friend; I have leaned upon you in these troubles as upon none other, and I insist that you shall stand by me to the end.”

After listening to more of such pleading, Black replied, working up to a charming metaphor: “Mr. President, from the start I had determined to stand by you to death and destruction if need be. I promised that as long as there was a button to the coat I would cling to it. But your action has taken every button off and driven me away from you.”

Buchanan appeared genuinely puzzled. “What do you refer to?”

“Your reply to the South Carolina Commissioners. That document is the powder that has blown your Cabinet to the four winds. The Southern members will leave because you do not concede what they ask, and your conclusions make it impossible for them to stay. The paper is even harder upon the Northern members of your political household.” Black and Stanton’s exact objections to the draft, which has not been preserved, can be roughly reconstructed. Black himself, interviewed by the Philadelphia Press in September of 1883, denied, as had been speculated, that Mr. Buchanan’s letter acknowledged the right of Secession . [Black’s] objections to the paper were that it dallied with the enemies of the Government, implied certain diplomatic rights of South Carolina that could not exist, and yielded points that were unfair to the President’s position .

Can we believe that, when Black had stated his objections, Buchanan replied, “ Judge, you speak the words of my heart. I recognize the force and justice of what you say. The letter to the South Carolina Commissioners my tongue dictated, but not my reason. But I feel that we must not have an open rupture. We are not prepared for war, and if war is provoked, Congress cannot be relied upon to strengthen my arm, and the Union must utterly perish ”?

No. We can more easily believe Black when he says, The President seemed surprised that I took this document so much to heart . Almost flippantly, like a hardened gambler folding a hand, Buchanan told him, “Your resignation is the one thing that shall not be. I will not — I cannot part with you. If you go, Holt and Stanton will leave, and I will be in a sorry attitude before the country. This is the greatest trouble I have had yet to bear. Here, take this paper and modify it to suit yourself; but do it before the sun goes down. Before I sleep this night I must know that this matter is arranged to your satisfaction.”