Memories of the Ford Administration (41 page)

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.”

Buchanan sat at his desk stiffly, as if the pressure of events were inflating his clothes from within, and freezing his joints with arthritic discomfort. The eager petitioners surrounded him like a gelatinous, vested wall, smelling of male sweat and the fumes of good living. “Gentlemen,” he responded at last, in a lawyerly voice squeezed up to an especially wheedling pitch, “put whatever you wish to recommend in writing. I warn you, I intend to collect the federal revenues in Charleston at all hazards. I am determined to obey the laws and fulfil the duties of the chief executive wherever these are unambiguously defined. I am bitterly grieved, let me confide to you, at your disposition to desert the Union before you have been in any particular injured, and when all the means of the defense of states’ rights lie in the Constitution and in the legislature as constituted; though this election gave us a Republican
President, the Republicans are minorities in both houses and powerless by themselves.”

Keitt, impatient of passionless arguments he had heard a hundred times from the denatured wafflers of this artificial city, stepped forward to the edge of the President’s well-used black-walnut desk and demanded, “Tell us this, then: do you intend, grieved or no, to use force in collecting revenues in Charleston?”

Stung by his tone, Buchanan tremulously replied, looking up at Keitt with a cocked head and uncertain focus, “I will obey the laws. I am no warrior—I am a man of peace—but I will obey the laws.”

[This embroiders as much as was reported. But you and I know,
Retrospect
eds., how much more conversation, false starts and probes, idle courtesies and amiable chitchat, there must have been. Gone, gone into the air and the dust. The events of Buchanan’s final months were lit by the glare of hyperexcited newspaper coverage and retrospectively by the memoirs of Buchanan, Black, Stanton, Holt, and Trescot—even relatively late and minor members of the Cabinet like Philip Thomas and John Dix left accounts. And still we don’t know exactly what happened: Buchanan’s state of mind varies from hysterical to coolly determined depending on the source and slant; a crucial document like the rejected final letter of the South Carolina Commissioners is missing; more basically, the quotidian fluff, the living excelsior in which every event is packed, has evaporated, leaving old bone buttons and yellowing papers nibbled all over by silverfish. The past is as illusory as the future, and we exist in the present numbly, blind to the cloud formations, deaf to the birdsong. Yet there is something sacred about life that leads us to keep trying to resurrect it.]

The visit of the South Carolina Representatives left the
President rattled and depressed; later that same day, he sought comfort from his closest Cabinet associate, Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, by saying, “The hottest fires burn out quickest. South Carolina has indulged herself in defiance before, and been isolated. What happens in Charleston Harbor little matters if Georgia holds firm—is that not so, my dear Howell?”

The short rotund man, with his appealing, well-oiled smoothness of movement and address, appeared uneasy, and wore the sallow glaze of sleeplessness. He began, “Mr. President, you know with what devotion I have furthered your advancement and advised your administration.”

“And
you
know, Mr. Cobb, with how much affection I have received your support and enjoyed your company. Though I have been honored with an acquaintanceship as wide as half the world, intimacy has been a rarity in my life, and I have leaned perhaps too heavily upon your friendship. My spies tell me that Mrs. Cobb more than once complained of the long hours during which the President demanded your attendance. I believe it was even said that while she was in Athens no wife could have been more watchful of your time than I.”

And yet, Buchanan acknowledged within, there had never quite been the magical fraternal affection—each speaking the other’s thoughts, or leaving their shared thoughts unspoken—that had existed between himself and Colonel King. King had taken the rôle of the older brother, such a sheltering, guiding brother as Buchanan, elder in fact, had never known; and Howell Cobb that of a younger, whose dependent role was already overfilled by the never-grateful, ever-demanding Reverend Edward Buchanan. Though none of his
advisers had been fiercer than Cobb in mocking Douglas and keeping alive the rift between Douglas and the administration, Buchanan now sensed in the man, emanating from him in palpable waves like those of heat from a pot-bellied stove, something of the Little Giant’s egoistic, anarchic ambition—the ambition of short men, ever needing to prove themselves. Had Cobb not been unwilling to take the second Cabinet post with a man his own age in the first, Robert J. Walker instead of Cass could have had the State Department, a capable man instead of an obstructive relic.

Cobb responded graciously, “Mrs. Cobb knew that by serving you I was serving the nation, and with the nation our children’s future. However, sir,” he continued, at a lowered pitch, with an evasive sideways glance, “times are changed. Mrs. Cobb has returned to Georgia to await her confinement. My entire family there has mounted the blue cockade. My brother Thomas gives secessionist speeches that last for five hours, and my uncle John lets out that ‘resistance to oppression is obedience to God.’ ” He tried one last jest. “Squire, you know kin, they’re as hard to herd as chickens in a whirlwind.”

Buchanan failed to smile. A spark of fresh calculation lit up his lopsided gaze. He cocked his head to give Cobb a terminal beam of attention.

“I had hoped,” Cobb asserted, doing a small black-shod dance step on the Persian carpet imported by Harriet from London and already worn threadbare by the hordes seeking Presidential favors, “to persuade the people of Georgia to remain in the Union until March 4th, so that I could man my post in your Cabinet to the end. But—”

“But, Howell,” Buchanan cut in, “opportunity calls, in the
perfidious new nation that is breeding, and your financial embarrassments have been mysteriously eased by a spate of philanthropy from your disunionist brother-in-law.”

Howell Cobb was impressed, as often before, by his chief’s ability to obtain and retain gossip; those who have lived life the least, perhaps, have the freshest curiosity. “Sir, let me finish. I have long proclaimed you to be the truest friend to the South that ever sat in the Presidential chair. But as you dealt with those gentlemen from South Carolina, and refused them satisfaction, I saw that you and I have parted in policy, and so must part in fact.”

Sea-change
. On the wax-bedabbled desktop Buchanan saw his own hand trembling, like an unpleasant white animal, eyeless, with wrinkled white skin and an excess of feeble limbs. “The South has been a friend of mine,” he stated, “and I have long sought to preserve for it and its institutions those guarantees which our wise founders wrote into the Constitution. I have leaned over backwards to keep the balance between it and the North in these fearful and unsettled times. But I cannot give away national property and my right to defend it.” The President sighed, and removed his hand, suddenly ghastly in his eyes, from his field of vision. “Go, then, Cobb. I cannot bless your departure, nor can I prevent it.”

“A word more. Attorney General Black more than once has to my face impugned—”

“No more words. Black and I are left to deal with the wreck of policies you helped create. I deeply trusted you. We shall not speak again,” the President said, less as a threat than as a prophecy, uttered soliloquizingly.

On December 10th, the South Carolina Congressmen returned, with a fifth, W. W. Boyce, from Winnsboro, added to their number. As requested, they presented a written statement.
It read, T
O
H
IS
E
XCELLENCY
J
AMES
B
UCHANAN
, P
RESIDENT OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES:
In compliance with our statement to you yesterday, we now express to you our strong convictions that neither the constituted authorities nor any body of the people of the State of South Carolina will either attack or molest the United States forts in the harbor of Charleston previously to the action of the Convention, and, we hope and believe, not until an offer has been made through an accredited representative to negotiate for an amicable arrangement of all matters between the State and the Federal Government; provided that no reinforcements shall be sent into those forts, and their relative military status remain as at present
.

Squintingly the old chief made his way through the verbiage. “I do not like the word ‘provided,’ ” he at last said. “I cannot restrict the Presidential freedom with guarantees. Further, your delegation has no official status and cannot bind anyone to its terms.”

Boyce said, “By ‘relative military status’ we mean that the transfer of the Moultrie garrison to Fort Sumter would be the equivalent of a reinforcement and would justify an attack.”

Buchanan’s squint narrowed, as if he were threading a needle eye. On the one hand, he devoutly wished to avoid tipping the South Carolinians into attack; on the other, he had a legal conception of the Presidency that was narrow yet vivid, a strip of prerogatives and duties the Constitution had left standing between the Congress and the courts. In his cracked wheezing tenor of a habitual compromiser’s voice, he at last offered, “Though I can pledge you nothing, I can state to you that it is my policy not to alter the
status quo
.”

McQueen stepped forward, like the paw of a predator instinctively shooting out. “May we have that in writing, Mr. President?”

But the old man was not to be so easily caught. Though
weariness rested on his face like a veil of cheesecloth, he looked up with an alertness excited by technical parrying. “After all,” he purred, “this is a matter of honor among gentlemen. You have no status, until South Carolina declare independence, and only Congress, not the President, has the power to deal with federal property. I do not know that any paper or writing is necessary. We understand each other.”

Keitt stated in his barking baritone, “I doubt that we do. Mr. President, you have determined to let things remain as they are, and not to send reinforcements; but suppose you should hereafter change your policy for any reason, what then?”

Buchanan smiled, and tapped their written assurance on his desk. “Then I would first return to you this paper.”

When the men had gone, he took their memorandum and wrote on the back his version of the meeting, and of a little meeting that followed it:
Afterwards Messrs. McQueen and Bonham called, in behalf of the delegation, and gave me the most positive assurance that the forts and public property would not be molested until after commissioners had been appointed to treat with the Federal Government in relation to the public property, and until the decision was known. I informed them that what would be done was a question for Congress and not for the Executive. That if they
[the forts]
were assailed, this would put them
[the South Carolinians]
completely in the wrong, and making them the authors of the civil war. They
[McQueen and Bonham]
gave the same assurances to Messrs. Floyd, Thompson, and others
.

The next day he wrote the brief memorandum
Tuesday, 11th December, 1860, General Cass announced to me his purpose to resign
. The same day, Senators Gwin and Slidell came calling. Slidell did almost all the talking. “Buchanan,” he said, “I
am astounded to be told that you refused the South Carolina delegation a simple promise not to reinforce the forts, after they had extended to you any number of manly and generous assurances!”

“Which they had no authority to extend. And they asked, Senator, for what the President cannot give.”

“Your hand is weak, and growing weaker. Georgia is going, and the Gulf States cannot stay. Why stick at these forts, when a continent teeters?” [Slidell: The wily and unscrupulous political king of Louisiana, a native New Yorker with a tempestuous and irregular youth. Just two years younger than Buchanan, he displayed white hair, a red, whiskey-scorched complexion, and an occasional glint, above the sharp arched nose, of the steely-eyed glamour that had hypnotized the slightly older, more cautious and scrupulous man. Slidell by ingenuities of voter transfer had assured Louisiana for Polk in ’44; in ’45 had acted as emissary to Mexico from Buchanan’s State Department, as the two nations approached war; in ’53 he had seized upon the Senate seat impetuous Soulé had to vacate in accepting the mission to Spain. Pierce had won his enmity by prosecuting a henchman; in ’56 he and Bright and Bayard and Benjamin had engineered Buchanan’s nomination. Slidell will be appointed the Confederacy’s Ambassador to France; he will be seized in the famous
Trent
affair aboard a British vessel heading out of Nassau; his machinations in the court of Napoleon III will not achieve French recognition or significant assistance; he will die in Cowes, England, in 1871, his request in 1866 for permission to return to Louisiana having been left unanswered by the first President Johnson.]