XVIII. 1860—December…

XVIII. 1860—December

GENERAL SCOTT AGAIN ADVISES THE PRESIDENT—MAJOR ANDERSON'S REMOVAL FROM FORT MOULTRIE TO FORT SUMTER—ARRIVAL OF COMMISSIONERS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA IN WASHINGTON—THEIR INTERVIEW AND COMMUNICATION WITH THE PRESIDENT—THE SUPPOSED PLEDGE OF THE STATUS QUO—THE “CABINET CRISIS” OF DECEMBER 29TH—REPLY OF THE PRESIDENT TO THE SOUTH CAROLINA COMMISSIONERS—THE ANONYMOUS DIARIST OF THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CONFUTED.

On the 12th of December General Scott arrived in Washington from New York, where he had been ill for a long time. Since the presentation of his “views” of October 29th-30th, the President had not heard from him on the subject of the Southern forts. On the 11th of December Major Anderson, then at Fort Moultrie, and in no danger of attack or molestation by the authorities of South Carolina, had received his instructions from Major Buell, Assistant Adjutant General of the Army, who had been sent by the President expressly to Fort Moultrie, in order that Anderson might be guided in his course with reference to all probable contingencies.[83] The South Carolina convention had not assembled when Anderson received his instructions. General Scott, on the 15th of December, had an interview with the President, in which he urged that three hundred men be sent to reinforce Anderson at Fort Moultrie. The President declined to give this order, for the following reasons: First, Anderson was fully instructed what to do in case he should at any time see good reason to believe that there was any purpose to dispossess him of any of the forts. Secondly, at this time, December 15th, the President believed—and the event proved the correctness of his belief—that Anderson was in no danger of attack. He and his command were then treated with marked kindness by the authorities and people of Charleston. Thirdly, the President, in his annual message, had urged upon Congress measures of conciliation by the adoption of certain amendments of the Constitution; and Mr. Crittenden’s propositions, of substantially the same character as those of the President, called the “Crittenden Compromise,” were before the Senate. Strong hopes were at this time entertained throughout the country that Congress would adopt these or some other measures to quiet the agitation in the South, so that South Carolina, in case she should “secede,” would be left alone in her course. Under all these circumstances, to have sent additional troops to Fort Moultrie would only have been, as Mr. Buchanan afterward said, “to impair the hope of compromise, to provoke collision and disappoint the country.”[84]

Footnote 83:

The instructions will be quoted hereafter.

Footnote 84:

See the controversy between General Scott and Mr. Buchanan in 1862; Mr. Buchanan’s letter of October 28, 1862.

On the same day, General Scott sent a note to the President, reminding him of General Jackson’s measures in regard to the threatened nullification of the tariff in 1833; an occasion, the circumstances of which bore little resemblance to the situation of the country in December, 1860, as I have already had reason to say in commenting on General Scott’s “views” of October 29th-30th.

In the controversy which General Scott had with Mr. Buchanan in 1862, in the National Intelligencer, the General reported the President as saying to him, on the 15th of December, 1860, among other reasons for not reinforcing Anderson at that time, that he should await the action of the South Carolina convention, in the expectation that a commission would be appointed and sent to negotiate with him (the President) and Congress, respecting the secession of the State, and the property of the United States within the borders of that State; and that if Congress should decide against the secession, he would then send a reinforcement, and would telegraph to Anderson to hold the forts against any attack. General Scott made two palpable mistakes in thus representing what the President said to him on the 15th of December, 1860.[85] In the first place, as will presently appear, the President never gave any person or persons claiming to represent South Carolina to understand that he would receive a commission to negotiate with him for an admission of the right of secession, or for a surrender of the forts. In his annual message, he had most distinctly and emphatically declared that, as an executive officer, he had no power whatever to hold such a negotiation, but that it belonged to Congress to deal with the property of the United States as it should see fit; and that it was his duty to maintain the possession of the forts until Congress should authorize and direct him to surrender them. When commissioners were subsequently appointed by the State of South Carolina, they were told by the President that he could not receive them in a diplomatic character, and that he would not himself negotiate with them for a surrender of the forts. In the next place, the President could not have told General Scott that he would send a reinforcement to Anderson in a certain contingency, and would then telegraph him to hold the forts. Anderson had already received instructions to hold them, and had been directed how to act.

Footnote 85:

Mr. Buchanan said, in 1862, that he had no recollection of some of the details of the conversation imputed to him by General Scott, and that the General’s memory must be defective. See Mr. Buchanan’s letters of 1862, in the National Intelligencer.

Mr. Buchanan has said—and it deserves to be quoted—that “it is scarcely a lack of charity to infer that General Scott knew at the time he made this recommendation (on the 15th of December), that it must be rejected. The President could not have complied with it, the position of affairs remaining unchanged, without at once reversing his entire policy, and without a degree of inconsistency amounting almost to self-stultification.” He adds:

This, the General’s second recommendation, was wholly unexpected. He had remained silent for more than six weeks from the date of his supplemental “views,” convinced, as the President inferred, that he had abandoned the idea of garrisoning all these forts with “the five companies only” within his reach. Had the President never so earnestly desired to reinforce the nine forts in question, at this time, it would have been little short of madness to undertake the task with the small force at his command. Without authority to call forth the militia, or accept the services of volunteers for the purpose, this whole force now consisted of six hundred recruits, obtained by the General since the date of his “views,” in addition to the five regular companies. Our army was still out of reach on the remote frontiers, and could not be withdrawn during midwinter in time for this military operation. Indeed, the General had never suggested such a withdrawal. He knew that had this been possible, the inhabitants on our distant frontiers would have been immediately exposed to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the Indians.

While he was unwilling at this moment to send reinforcements into the harbor of Charleston, and thereby to incur the risk of provoking the secession of other States, the President did not neglect the use of any means that were in his power to prevent the secession of South Carolina. He sent the Hon. Caleb Cushing to Charleston, with a letter to Governor Pickens, in which he said:

From common notoriety I assume the fact that the State of South Carolina is now deliberating on the propriety and necessity of seceding from the Union. Whilst any hope remains that this may be prevented, or even retarded, so long as to enable the people of her sister States to have opportunity to manifest their opinion regarding the matters which may have impelled the State to take this step, it is my duty to exert all the means in my power to avoid so dread a catastrophe. I have, therefore, deemed it advisable to send to you the Hon. Caleb Cushing, to counsel and advise with you, in regard to the premises, and to communicate such information as he may possess concerning the condition of public opinion in the North touching the same. I need scarcely add, that I entertain full confidence in his integrity, ability, and prudence. He will state to you the reasons which exist to prevent, or to delay, the action of the State for the purpose which I have mentioned.

But notwithstanding the efforts of the President to induce the authorities and people of South Carolina to await the action of Congress and the development of public opinion at the North on the recommendations of his message, events were hurrying on in that State with fearful rapidity. The leading spirits in the secession movement did not desire the success of the President’s recommendations. Encouraged, not by anything that they could find in the message, or by anything that they could learn of the President’s intentions, but by what they had learned of the “views” of the General in Chief of the Federal army, and by other indications of the same kind, they determined to try secession, in the belief that the people and Government of the United States would not resort to war. They initiated and conducted their measures with a supreme and lofty disregard of all the consequences, because they believed that they could throw the onus of those consequences upon the Government of the Union. It was in vain that they were warned by the President that their doctrine of secession, pushed to its results, would oblige him to meet their claim, by virtue of a State ordinance, of dispossessing the United States of the property which belonged to the Government, with all the means at his disposal. It is one of the most singular political phenomena recorded in history, that under such a system of Government as ours, men should have believed not only that a State ordinance of secession would dissolve all the relations between the inhabitants of that State and the Government of the United States, but that it would ipso facto transfer to the State property which the State had ceded to that Government by solemn deeds of conveyance. The principle of public law on which this claim was supposed to be based, involved in its application the assumption that South Carolina, becoming by her own declaration a nation foreign to the United States, was entitled to take peaceable possession of all the property which the United States held within her limits, and to forbid the vessels of the United States from entering her waters in order to reach that property. Upon any view of the nature of the Federal Constitution, even upon the theory that it was a mere league between sovereign States, dissoluble in regard to any State at the will of its people, it would not have followed that the ordinance of dissolution would divest the title of the United States to their property. Yet it is an undeniable fact that the people and authorities of South Carolina initiated and carried out their secession, upon the claim that their interpretation of the Federal Constitution must be accepted by the whole country; that their fiat alone made them an independent nation; that it divested the United States of whatever property the Government held within their borders; and that if these claims were not submitted to, the consequence would be that South Carolina must make them good by all the power she could use. The subsequent change of attitude, by which it was proposed to negotiate and pay for the possession of the property, or the theory that the forts were built by the Federal Government for the protection of the State, should not lead any historian to overlook the demand which the authorities of the State first presented at Washington, or the manner in which it was met by President Buchanan.

On the 20th of December, the Convention of South Carolina, without a dissenting voice, adopted an ordinance of secession, which purported to dissolve the connection between the State of South Carolina and the Government of the United States. A copy of the ordinance, with the signatures of all the members, and with the great seal of the State, was formally transmitted to the President. On the 22d, three eminent citizens of the State, Robert W. Barnwell, James H. Adams and James L. Orr, were appointed to proceed to Washington, to treat with the Government of the United States concerning the new relations which the ordinance was supposed to have established between that Government and the people of South Carolina. The commissioners arrived in Washington on the 26th. On the next morning, intelligence reached them that on the night of the 25th, Major Anderson had secretly dismantled Fort Moultrie, spiked his cannon, burnt his gun-carriages, and transferred his troops to Fort Sumter, as if he were about to be attacked. This information they sent to the President.

Before proceeding with an account of what followed this occurrence, in the interview between the President and the commissioners, this movement of Major Anderson must be carefully described. It has been much praised as a bold, skillful and wise act, dictated by a purpose to make the people of South Carolina feel that the Government of the United States was not to be trifled with; and the merit of Major Anderson has been magnified by the suggestion that if he had been promptly reinforced, after the removal, he never would have been driven out of Fort Sumter and out of the harbor of Charleston. The simple truth is, that Anderson was a brave, vigilant and faithful officer, acting under instructions which had been carefully given to him, and which allowed him a considerable latitude of judgment in regard to remaining in Fort Moultrie or removing to any other of the forts within the limits of his command. He was a man of Southern birth, and all his sympathies were with the South on the questions pending between the two sections. This is avowed in a private letter written by him on the 11th of January, 1861, to a friend in Washington, a copy of which is now lying before me. But he was as true as steel to his military duty as an officer of the United States. He had lost, as he says in this letter, all sympathy with the persons then governing South Carolina, and he had now begun to distrust the purposes of the State authorities. Fort Moultrie was the weakest of all the forts in that harbor belonging to the United States. From the erection of batteries on the shore which commanded this fort, and from other indications taking place after the adoption of the secession ordinance, Anderson believed that the State authorities were about to proceed to some hostile act, and therefore thought the contingency contemplated by his instructions had arrived. He may have been mistaken in this; but neither the appearances at the time, nor the subsequent action of South Carolina, show that he was so. At all events, he acted as any prudent and faithful officer would have acted under the same circumstances; and in order to be able to defend himself better than he could in Fort Moultrie, and with no purpose of attacking the city of Charleston or of making any aggression whatever, he transferred his command to Fort Sumter. The people and authorities of South Carolina chose to consider that his occupation of this fort was an aggressive act, and that he must be ordered back again to Fort Moultrie, or be dislodged; a demand which of itself shows that the State of South Carolina, in the event that her secession should not be submitted to by the Federal Government, expected a civil war and meant to be in the best condition to meet it.

The intelligence of Anderson’s removal to Fort Sumter was received by the President with surprise and regret. He was surprised, because all his previous information led him to believe that Anderson was safe at Fort Moultrie. He regretted the removal, because of its tendency to impel the other cotton States and the border States into sympathy with South Carolina, and thus to defeat the measures by which he hoped to confine the secession to that State. But he never for an instant, then or afterwards, doubted that Anderson’s removal was authorized by his instructions; although he did not suppose that the authorities of the State would attack him, while their commissioners were on the way to Washington for the avowed purpose of negotiating. It is scarcely needful to discuss the question whether South Carolina had good reason to regard this movement of Anderson’s as an act of aggression. In such a state of affairs and of men’s feelings, it was to be expected that complaints would be made of hostile intentions, if any plausible reason could be found for them. But any indifferent person, looking back upon the events, and considering that Anderson was acting under a President who was doing everything in his power to prevent a collision of arms, must see that even if the President had specifically ordered the removal, it was nothing more than a defensive act, done in order to secure the forces of the Government in the occupation of its own forts, and that it could not have been an aggressive movement, unless it should be conceded that those forces had no right to be in Charleston harbor at all.

But there is one assertion which it is now necessary to examine, in relation to this removal, because it has been made the foundation of a charge against the personal good faith and the sound judgment of President Buchanan. It is the charge that previous to Anderson’s removal, the President had pledged himself to preserve the status quo in Charleston harbor, until commissioners to be appointed by the convention of South Carolina should arrive in Washington, and some result of a negotiation should be reached. The first and only interview between the President and the commissioners occurred on the 28th of December. What occurred should be related in the President’s own words:

It was under these circumstances that the President, on Friday, the 28th December, held his first and only interview with the commissioners from South Carolina. He determined to listen with patience to what they had to communicate, taking as little part himself in the conversation as civility would permit. On their introduction, he stated that he could recognize them only as private gentlemen and not as commissioners from a sovereign State; that it was to Congress, and to Congress alone, they must appeal. He, nevertheless, expressed his willingness to communicate to that body, as the only competent tribunal, any propositions they might have to offer. They then proceeded, evidently under much excitement, to state their grievances arising out of the removal of Major Anderson to Fort Sumter, and declared that for these they must obtain redress preliminary to entering upon the negotiation with which they had been entrusted; that it was impossible for them to make any proposition until this removal should be satisfactorily explained; and they even insisted upon the immediate withdrawal of the Major and his troops, not only from Fort Sumter, but from the harbor of Charleston, as a sine qua non to any negotiation.

In their letter to the President of the next day, they repeat their demand, saying;[86] “And, in conclusion, we would urge upon you the immediate withdrawal of the troops from the harbor of Charleston. Under present circumstances they are a standing menace which renders negotiation impossible, and, as our recent experience shows, threatens to bring to a bloody issue questions which ought to be settled with temperance and judgment.” This demand, accompanied by an unmistakable threat of attacking Major Anderson if not yielded to, was of the most extravagant character. To comply with it, the commissioners must have known, would be impossible. Had they simply requested that Major Anderson might be restored to his former position at Fort Moultrie, upon a guarantee from the State that neither it nor the other forts or public property should be molested; this, at the moment, might have been worthy of serious consideration. But to abandon all the forts to South Carolina, on the demand of commissioners claiming to represent her as an independent State, would have been a recognition, on the part of the Executive, of her right to secede from the Union. This was not to be thought of for a moment.

Footnote 86:

Ex. Doc., H. R., vol. vi, No. 26, p 6.

The President replied to the letter of the commissioners on Monday, 31st December. In the meantime information had reached him that the State authorities, without waiting to hear from Washington, had, on the day after Major Anderson’s removal, seized Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, the custom house, and post office, and over them all had raised the Palmetto flag; and, moreover, that every officer of the customs, collector, naval officer, surveyor, appraisers, together with the postmaster, had resigned their appointments; and that on Sunday, the 30th December, they had captured from Major Humphreys, the officer in charge, the arsenal of the United States, containing public property estimated to be worth half a million of dollars. The Government was thus expelled from all its property except Fort Sumter, and no Federal officers, whether civil or military, remained in the city or harbor of Charleston. The secession leaders in Congress attempted to justify these violent proceedings of South Carolina as acts of self-defence, on the assumption that Major Anderson had already commenced hostilities. It is certain that their tone instantly changed after his removal; and they urged its secrecy, the hour of the night when it was made, the destruction of his gun-carriages, and other attendant incidents, to inflame the passions of their followers. It was under these circumstances that the President was called upon to reply to the letter of the South Carolina commissioners, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops of the United States from the harbor of Charleston. In this reply, he peremptorily rejected the demand in firm but courteous terms, and declared his purpose to defend Fort Sumter by all the means in his power against hostile attacks, from whatever quarter they might proceed. (Vide his letter of the 31st December, 1860, Ex. Doc. No. 26, H. R., 36th Congress, 2d Session, accompanying President’s message of 8th January, 1861.) To this the commissioners sent their answer, dated on the 2d January, 1861. This was so violent, unfounded, and disrespectful, and so regardless of what is due to any individual whom the people have honored with the office of President, that the reading of it in the cabinet excited indignation among all the members. With their unanimous approbation it was immediately, on the day of its date, returned to the commissioners with the following indorsement; “This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character, that he declines to receive it.” Surely no negotiation was ever conducted in such a manner, unless, indeed, it had been the predetermined purpose of the negotiators to produce an open and immediate rupture.

In the intended reply of the commissioners, dated January 2, 1861, which the President returned to them, it was asserted in a variety of offensive forms that the removal of Major Anderson to Fort Sumter was a violation of a pledge which the President had previously given not to send reinforcements to the forts in Charleston harbor, and not to change their relative military status. The same thing had been asserted in their letter to the President of December 28th, and it was emphatically and distinctly denied in his answer of the 31st. Is it true, then, as a matter of fact, that such a pledge had ever been given?

1. By his annual message of December 3d, the President stood pledged to the country to exercise all his constitutional powers to maintain possession of the public property, in case of the secession of any State or States. 2. There is no possible channel through which the President could have given the supposed pledge of the status quo, excepting at an interview which took place between him and the South Carolina members of Congress on the 10th of December. If the President then gave such a pledge, it follows that at the end of a week from the date of his annual message he tied his own hands, in advance of the secession of that State, in a manner utterly inconsistent with the purpose declared in his message. 3. The circumstances attending Major Anderson’s removal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, and the manner in which the President received and acted upon the information after it reached him and down through every succeeding day of his administration, repel the idea that before the removal he had said or done anything to warrant the authorities of South Carolina in assuming that he was bound to order Anderson back to Fort Moultrie, or not to reinforce him at Fort Sumter. Anderson received his instructions on the 11th of December, through Assistant Adjutant General Buell, to whom they were given verbally by the Secretary of War, and by whom they were reduced to writing, at Fort Moultrie, after he (Buell) arrived there. When reduced to writing, they became the President’s orders, by which Anderson was to be guided. The orders were given with reference to the following contingency: The President believed that, under existing circumstances, the State of South Carolina would not attack any of the forts in Charleston harbor, whilst he allowed their status quo to remain. But in this he might be mistaken. In order to be prepared for what might possibly happen after the State should have “seceded,” the Secretary of the Navy had stationed the war steamer Brooklyn, in complete readiness for sea, in Hampton Roads, to take on board for Charleston three hundred disciplined troops, with provisions and munitions of war, from the neighboring garrison of Fortress Monroe. In this attitude of the secret preparations of the Government, Anderson’s instructions were given to him, in the manner above described, and when they had been reduced to writing and delivered to him by Buell, they read textually as follows:

You are aware of the great anxiety of the Secretary of War, that a collision of the troops with the people of the State shall be avoided, and of his studied determination to pursue a course with reference to the military force and forts in this harbor, which shall guard against such a collision. He has, therefore, carefully abstained from increasing the force at this point, or taking any measures which might add to the present excited state of the public mind, or which would throw any doubt on the confidence he feels that South Carolina will not attempt by violence to obtain possession of the public works, or interfere with their occupancy. But as the counsel and acts of rash and impulsive persons may possibly disappoint these expectations of the Government, he deems it proper that you shall be prepared with instructions to meet so unhappy a contingency. He has, therefore, directed me verbally to give you such instructions. You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression, and for that reason you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude, but you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack on or an attempt to take possession of either one 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 defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.

The President, when the text of the instructions reached him, directed the Secretary of War to modify them in one particular. Instead of requiring Anderson to defend himself to the last extremity—which was not demanded by any principle of honor or any military rule—he was required to defend himself until no reasonable hope should remain of saving the fort in which he might happen to be. This modification was approved by General Scott.

The instructions, therefore, under which Anderson acted, authorized him to remove his force to any other of the three forts whenever either of them should be attacked, or an attempt should be made to take possession of it, or whenever he might have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act. In all this, the Government was acting on the defensive, and was empowering its officer to put his force into either of its forts where, in his judgment, his power of resistance would be most increased. To suppose, therefore, that after these instructions had gone to Anderson, the President made an agreement with certain members of Congress from South Carolina, that the status quo in Charleston harbor, in respect to the three forts, should not be changed, is to suppose something in the highest degree incredible.

4th. The communication between the President and the South Carolina members of Congress was both in writing and in two personal interviews. The written communication remains. Of what took place at the last interview there is an account by Mr. Buchanan himself, founded on memoranda which he made immediately after these gentlemen had left his presence. The first personal interview took place on the 8th of December. The conversation related to the best means of avoiding a hostile collision between the Federal Government and the State of South Carolina. The President desired that the verbal communication should be put in writing, and brought to him in that form. Accordingly on the 10th of December, the same gentlemen brought to him the following letter, signed by five members of Congress from South Carolina, and dated on the previous day:

TO HIS EXCELLENCY JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:

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.

JOHN MCQUEEN, WM. PORCHER MILES, M. L. BONHAM, W. W. BOYCE, LAWRENCE M. KEITT.

WASHINGTON, December 9, 1860.

The following memorandum is indorsed upon the original letter, in the handwriting of the President:

Monday morning, 10th December, 1860, the within paper was presented to me by Messrs. McQueen, Miles and Bonham. I objected to the word “provided,” as this might be construed into an agreement on my part which I never would make. They said nothing was further from their intention. They did not so understand it, and I should not so consider 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 completely in the wrong, and making them the authors of the civil war. They gave the same assurances to Messrs. Floyd, Thompson and others.

Mr. Buchanan’s subsequent account of the interview at which this letter was delivered to him in person, reads as follows:

Both in this and in their previous conversation, they declared that in making this statement, they were acting solely on their own responsibility, and expressly disclaimed any authority to bind their State. They, nevertheless, expressed the confident belief that they would be sustained both by the State authorities and by the convention, after it should assemble. Although the President considered this declaration as nothing more than the act of five highly respectable members of the House from South Carolina, yet he welcomed it as a happy omen, that by means of their influence collision might be prevented, and time afforded to all parties for reflection and for a peaceable adjustment. From abundant caution, however, he objected to the word “provided” in their statement, lest, if he should accept it without remark, this might possibly be construed into an agreement on his part not to reinforce the forts. Such an agreement, he informed them, he would never make. It would be impossible for him, from the nature of his official responsibility, thus to tie his own hands and restrain his own freedom of action. Still, they might have observed from his message, that he had no present design, under existing circumstances, to change the condition of the forts at Charleston. He must, notwithstanding, be left entirely free to exercise his own discretion, according to exigencies as they might arise. They replied that nothing was further from their intention than such a construction of this word; they did not so understand it, and he should not so consider it.[87]

Footnote 87:

This account, although written and published in 1866 (Buchanan’s Defence, p. 167), was founded on and embodied the substance of the private memorandum made by the President on the back of the letter, immediately after the termination of the interview. Two of the gentlemen who signed the letter, Messrs. Miles and Keitt, published at Charleston an account of this interview, in which they did not intimate that anything in the nature of a pledge passed on either side. (See Appleton’s “American Annual Cyclopedia” for 1861, p. 703.)

No one, therefore, I presume, will now question that I am fully justified in asserting, as I do, that Mr. Buchanan gave no pledge, express or implied, formal or informal, that no reinforcements should be sent into Charleston harbor, or that the military status, as it existed at the time of this interview, should remain unchanged, or that he in any way fettered himself on the subject.[88] To have done so in advance of the action of the South Carolina convention, or at any other time, would have been an act of inconsistency and folly quite beyond anything that the worst enemy of the President could have ever desired to impute to him.

Footnote 88:

Mr. Jefferson Davis, although not directly asserting that the President gave any pledge not to send reinforcements or not to permit the military status to be changed, says that “the South Carolinians understood Mr. Buchanan as approving of that suggestion, although declining to make any formal pledge;” and he adds, that after Anderson’s removal from Moultrie to Sumter, the authorities and people of South Carolina considered it “as a violation of the implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo,” and he gives this as a reason why the remaining forts and other public property were at once seized by the State. (Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, I., 212-213.) If the South Carolina members of Congress told Mr. Davis that the President assented to or approved of their proviso, they told him what was not true. He does not say that they ever did tell him so. If they gave their own people and State authorities to understand that there was any implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo, the fact was exactly the other way. They have never said that they gave their people and authorities so to understand Mr. Buchanan’s language.

But the South Carolina commissioners having asserted in their letter of December 28th, that the removal of Major Anderson from Moultrie to Sumter was a violation of a pledge that had been given by the President, it became important that the denial should instantly follow the assertion. The President, relying not only on his recollection, but on his written memoranda of his conversation with the South Carolina members of Congress, which completely refuted the assertion, did not, in the first draft of an answer to the commissioners, which he prepared with his own hand, repel the assertion as flatly and explicitly as he might have done. He evidently did not at once see that unless he expressly and pointedly denied the assertion, he might be construed as giving an implied assent to it. He was considering how he could best carry on this conference with persons whom he could not receive in the official character in which they came, and with whom he could only deal as distinguished citizens of South Carolina; and his first attention was directed to the means of convincing them that the people of South Carolina could have no excuse for breaking the peace, because it was not his purpose to reinforce Major Anderson unless the authorities of the State should make it absolutely necessary to do so. But to three members of his cabinet, Judge Black, Mr. Holt, and Mr. Stanton, the omission of the President to give a pointed and explicit denial to the assertion of a pledge not to change the military status, appeared a fatal defect in the paper which the President had drawn up. They were also apprehensive that the first and the concluding paragraph of his proposed answer would be regarded as acknowledging the right of South Carolina to be represented near the Government of the United States by diplomatic officers, as if she were a foreign nation. As the draft of an answer which the President had prepared is not in existence, and as the paper of objections presented by Judge Black to the President did not quote the paragraphs objected to, although that paper has been preserved, it is impossible to judge how far the criticism was right, or was called for. Certain it is that at the first and only interview which the President had with those commissioners, he told them in the plainest terms that he could only recognize them as private gentlemen, and not as commissioners of an independent State. He also told them that as to any surrender to South Carolina of the forts, within her limits, or any propositions concerning a sale of them, he, as President, had no authority, and that the only tribunal to which they could apply was Congress. I am inclined to believe that it was the repetition of this suggestion of an appeal to Congress, which caused the three members of the cabinet to fear that the paragraphs to which they objected might be considered as implicitly yielding to the commissioners the point of their diplomatic character. But it is not necessary to speculate about this, because the President’s draft of an answer is no longer accessible, and because it is evident from all that occurred that the President, in drawing up that form of his answer, meant to hold open a door to the commissioners which it would be perfectly proper for him to allow them to enter, if they chose. He meant to give them an opportunity to stipulate that if Major Anderson were restored to his former position, their State would not molest either Fort Moultrie or any of the other forts or property of the United States. Instead of this, their demand from first to last was the withdrawal of all the troops of the United States from the harbor of Charleston, and an abandonment of all the forts to South Carolina; which, if acceded to by the Executive, would have been a recognition by him of her right to secede from the Union. “This,” says Mr. Buchanan, “was not to be thought of for a moment;” and I know of no evidence that he thought of it or contemplated it, when he was writing his first draft of an answer to the South Carolina gentlemen. On the contrary, he steadily resisted it to the end of the conference, and ever afterward.

Another point on which the three members of the cabinet differed from the President was in regard to having any negotiation at all with these gentlemen. It would seem from the paper of objections presented to the President by Judge Black, that the President was at first disposed, in the answer which he had prepared, to express his regret that the commissioners were unwilling to proceed further with the negotiation, after they had learned that he would not receive them as diplomatic agents and would not comply with their extreme demands. Here, then, was a ground for a real, but temporary, difference of opinion between the President and three members of his cabinet. On the one side, the President, holding these South Carolina gentlemen firmly in the attitude of private citizens of great weight and influence in their State, but denying to them any diplomatic character which he could recognize, and making them to clearly understand that the Executive would not withdraw the troops or surrender the forts, might well and wisely have considered that if he could draw from them any proposition which it would be fit for him to present to Congress, that body would have to express an authoritative opinion on the asserted right of secession. The great object of preserving the peace of the country, and of gaining time for angry passions to subside, might thus be gained. On the other hand, Judge Black and his two colleagues, considering, as the President considered, that these South Carolina citizens could not be recognized as commissioners of a foreign State, held that there could legally be no negotiation with them, whether they were willing or not. Reduced to the ultimate difference, the question was whether there should be no further conference at all, because it could have no legal force, or whether there might still be useful further communication with them as private citizens, whose propositions, if they chose to make any in that capacity, the President could submit to Congress for such action as that body might think proper.

There was still another objection made to the President’s draft of an answer, which can be better appreciated, because the words which he proposed to use were quoted in Judge Black’s paper of objections. These were the words: “Coercing a State by force of arms to remain in the Confederacy—a power which I do not believe the Constitution has conferred upon Congress.” This was the same criticism which Judge Black had made upon the message of December 3d, in which none of his colleagues had agreed with him. He now renewed the objection, representing to the President that the words were too vague and might have the effect (which he was sure the President did not intend) to mislead the commissioners concerning his sentiments. Judge Black’s criticism was that to coerce the inhabitants of a State to obey the laws of the United States, a power which the President had always asserted, and meant still to assert, was in one sense to coerce the State to remain in the Union.

Another thing which Judge Black and his two colleagues deprecated was that the President’s answer should contain the most remote implication that Major Anderson acted without authority in removing his force to Fort Sumter. But what there was in the President’s draft of an answer to give rise to such an implication does not appear.

I should not have adverted to these objections to the President’s proposed answer to the South Carolina commissioners, if Judge Black’s paper of objections to it had not been given to the world; nor should I have deemed it necessary to consider or describe anything but the official answer that was actually sent. I hold that a supreme ruler, who acts with constitutional advisers, is entitled to be judged in history, not by what he may have written but did not use, nor by the greater or less necessity for a different paper, nor by the advice or the assistance which he received; but that he should be judged by his official act. But as this difference between President Buchanan and three members of his cabinet in regard to this particular paper, led to what has been called a “cabinet crisis,” and as the objections submitted to him have been published, it is my duty to meet the whole occurrence squarely and directly.

It might be an interesting inquiry, how far a “cabinet crisis” had become necessary. But of this, the gentlemen who composed the cabinet were entitled to judge, because their personal honor and patriotism were involved in the question of their remaining in the cabinet, if they believed that the President was about to change his policy. They appear to have at first supposed that the President, after South Carolina had adopted an ordinance of secession, was about to make such a change in his policy as would virtually reverse his position, and would finally lead to an admission of the right of secession, a result which would inevitably destroy him and his administration. In this, it is certain that they were mistaken. The President had not contemplated any such change in his position. I am justified in asserting this strongly.

Only four days before this cabinet crisis culminated, the President wrote a private letter to an editor in Washington whose paper was supposed to be his organ, strongly rebuking him for an editorial article favoring secession, and informing him that he (the President) must take steps to make known in some authentic way that the paper was not an organ of his administration.

Further than this, in every interview which the President had held before the 29th December, with any persons claiming to represent the people of South Carolina, he had uniformly and firmly declared that on the vital point of withdrawing the troops and surrendering the forts, he should make no concession whatever. But between the 17th and the 21st of December, an occurrence took place, which has a most important bearing upon the question whether the President had, before the 29th of December, determined to make any change in his attitude towards the people and authorities of South Carolina.

It will be remembered that the South Carolina ordinance of secession was adopted on the 20th of December. Before that time, however, the Governor of South Carolina, Mr. Pickens, saw fit to send a special messenger to Washington, with a letter from himself to the President, written at Columbia on the 17th of December, demanding that Fort Sumter be delivered into his (the Governor's) hands. This letter was written eight days before Major Anderson’s removal to Sumter.[89] The following memorandum in the President’s handwriting describes what took place when the Governor’s messenger arrived in Washington:

Footnote 89:

The remarkable fact that this demand was made before South Carolina had “seceded,” and before Anderson’s removal, although the demand was subsequently withdrawn, shows how early the Executive of South Carolina had formed the determination to treat the presence of the United States troops in Charleston harbor as an offence against the dignity and safety of the State.

On Thursday morning, December 20th, 1860, Hamilton, late marshal of South Carolina, sent especially for this purpose, presented me a letter from Governor Pickens, in the presence of Mr. Trescot, dated at Columbia, South Carolina, 17th December (Monday). He was to wait until this day (Friday afternoon) for my answer. The character of the letter will appear from the answer to it, which I had prepared. Thursday night, between nine and ten o'clock, Mr. Trescot called upon me. He said that he had seen Messrs. Bonham and McQueen of the South Carolina delegation; that they all agreed that this letter of Governor Pickens was in violation of the pledge which had been given by themselves not to make an assault upon the forts, but leave them in status quo until the result of an application of commissioners to be appointed by the State was known; that Pickens, at Columbia, could not have known of the arrangements. They, to wit, Bonham, McQueen, and Trescot, had telegraphed to Pickens for authority to withdraw his letter.

Friday morning, 10 o'clock, 21st December.—Mr. Trescot called upon me with a telegram, of which the following is a copy from that which he delivered to me:

December 21st, 1860.—You are authorized and requested to withdraw my letter sent by Doctor Hamilton immediately.

F. W. P.

Mr. Trescot read to me from the same telegram, that Governor Pickens had seen Mr. Cushing. The letter was accordingly withdrawn.

The following is the draft of the answer to Governor Pickens which the President was writing with his own hand when he was notified that the Governor’s letter was withdrawn. Of course the answer was not concluded or sent; but it shows with the utmost clearness that the President’s position on the subject of secession was taken, and was not to be changed by any menace of “consequences,” coming from those who were disposed to be, as they must be, the aggressors, if any attempt should be made to disturb the Federal Government in the possession of its forts.

WASHINGTON, December 20, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I have received your favor of the 17th inst., by Mr. Hamilton. From it I deeply regret to observe that you seem entirely to have misapprehended my position, which I supposed had been clearly stated in my message. I have incurred, and shall incur, any reasonable risk within the clearly prescribed line of my executive duties to prevent a collision between the army and navy of the United States and the citizens of South Carolina in defence of the forts within the harbor of Charleston. Hence I have declined for the present to reinforce these forts, relying upon the honor of South Carolinians that they will not be assaulted whilst they remain in their present condition; but that commissioners will be sent by the convention to treat with Congress on the subject. I say with Congress because, as I state in my message, “Apart from the execution of the laws, so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State. This would be to invest a mere executive officer with the power of recognizing the dissolution of the confederacy among our thirty-three sovereign States. It bears no resemblance to the recognition of a foreign de facto government, involving no such responsibility. Any attempt to do this would, on my part, be a naked act of usurpation.”

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. To do this, would on my part, as I have already said, be a naked act of usurpation. It is for Congress to decide this question, and for me to preserve the status of the public property as I found it at the commencement of the troubles.

If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States. It will not then be a question of coercing a State to remain in the Union, to which I am utterly opposed, as my message proves, but it will be a question of voluntarily precipitating a conflict of arms on her part, without even consulting the only authorities which possess the power to act upon the subject. Between independent governments, if one possesses a fortress within the limits of another, and the latter should seize it without calling upon the appropriate authorities of the power in possession to surrender it, this would not only be a just cause of war, but the actual commencement of hostilities.

No authority was given, as you suppose, from myself, or from the War Department, to Governor Gist, to guard the United States arsenal in Charleston by a company of South Carolina volunteers. In this respect you have been misinformed. I have, therefore, never been more astonished in my life, than to learn from you that unless Fort Sumter be delivered into your hands, you cannot be answerable for the consequences.

It was, then, on the President’s first draft of an answer to the South Carolina commissioners, after the secession ordinance had been passed, and upon nothing that had previously occurred, that the cabinet crisis arose. On the evening of December 29th, the President’s proposed draft of an answer to the commissioners was read to the cabinet. It was not much discussed, for it was not the habit of the ministers to criticise state papers which the President had himself prepared. But on the following day, Judge Black informed Mr. Toucey, the Secretary of the Navy, of his purpose to resign, if this paper, as written by the President, should be delivered to the commissioners. The President sent for Judge Black, and handed him the paper, with a request that he modify it to suit himself, and return it immediately. Judge Black then prepared his memorandum for the President’s consideration, in which Mr. Holt and Mr. Stanton concurred. The answer, which was to be sent to the commissioners, was modified accordingly, and when sent it read as follows:[90]

Footnote 90:

Mr. Jefferson Davis has erroneously given to this letter the date of December 30th. Its true date was December 31st. (See Mr. Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, vol. I., p. 592.)

[ANSWER OF THE PRESIDENT TO THE SOUTH CAROLINA COMMISSIONERS.]

WASHINGTON, December 31, 1860.

GENTLEMEN:—

I have had the honor to receive your communication of 26th inst., together with a copy of your “full powers from the Convention of the people of South Carolina,” authorizing you to treat with the Government of the United States on various important subjects therein mentioned, and also a copy of the ordinance bearing date on the 20th inst., declaring that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'the United States of America,' is hereby dissolved.”

In answer to this communication, I have to say that my position as President of the United States was clearly defined in the message to Congress of the 3d instant. In that I stated that, “apart from the execution of the laws, so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State. This would be to invest a mere executive officer with the power of recognizing the dissolution of the confederacy among our thirty-three sovereign States. It bears no resemblance to the recognition of a foreign de facto government—involving no such responsibility. Any attempt to do this would, on his part, be a naked act of usurpation. It is, therefore, my duty to submit to Congress the whole question, in all its bearings.”

Such is my opinion still. I could, therefore, meet you only as private gentlemen of the highest character, and was entirely willing to communicate to Congress any proposition you might have to make to that body upon the subject. Of this you were well aware. It was my earnest desire that such a disposition might be made of the whole subject by Congress, who alone possesses the power, as to prevent the inauguration of a civil war between the parties in regard to the possession of the Federal forts in the harbor of Charleston, and I, therefore, deeply regret that, in your opinion, “the events of the last twenty-four hours render this impossible.” In conclusion, you urge upon me “the immediate withdrawal of the troops from the harbor of Charleston,” stating that, “under present circumstances, they are a standing menace, which renders negotiation impossible, and, as our present experience shows, threatens speedily to bring to a bloody issue questions which ought to be settled with temperance and judgment.”

The reason for this change in your position is that, since your arrival in Washington, “an officer of the United States acting as we (you) are assured, not only without your (my) orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering, to a most important extent, the condition of affairs under which we (you) came.” You also allege that you came here “the representatives of an authority which could at any time within the past sixty days have taken possession of the forts in Charleston harbor, but which upon pledges given in a manner that we (you) cannot doubt, determined to trust to your (my) honor rather than to its own power.”

This brings me to a consideration of the nature of those alleged pledges, and in what manner they have been observed. In my message of the 3d of December last, I stated, in regard to the property of the United States in South Carolina, that it “has been purchased for a fair equivalent 'by the consent of the legislature of the State, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals,' etc., and over these the authority 'to exercise exclusive legislation' has been expressly granted by the Constitution to Congress. It is not believed that any attempt will be made to expel the United States from this property by force; but, if in this I should prove to be mistaken, the officer in command of the forts has received orders to act strictly on the defensive. In such a contingency, the responsibility for consequences would rightfully rest upon the heads of the assailants.” This being the condition of the parties on Saturday, 8th December, four of the representatives from South Carolina, called upon me and requested an interview. We had an earnest conversation on the subject of these forts, and the best means of preventing a collision between the parties, for the purpose of sparing the effusion of blood. I suggested, for prudential reasons, that it would be best to put in writing what they said to me verbally. They did so accordingly, and on Monday morning the 10th instant, three of them presented to me a paper signed by all the representatives from South Carolina, with a single exception, of which the following is a copy:

“TO HIS EXCELLENCY JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:

“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 shall remain as at present.

”JOHN MCQUEEN, “WILLIAM PORCHER MILES, ”M. L. BONHAM, “W. W. BOYCE, ”LAWRENCE M. KEITT.

“WASHINGTON, December 9, 1860.”

And here I must, in justice to myself, remark that, at the time the paper was presented to me, I objected to the word “provided,” as it might be construed into an agreement on my part, which I never would make. They said that nothing was further from their intention; they did not so understand it, and I should not so consider it. It is evident they could enter into no reciprocal agreement with me on the subject. They did not profess to have authority to do this, and were acting in their individual character. I considered it as nothing more, in effect, than the promise of highly honorable gentlemen to exert their influence for the purpose expressed. The event has proved that they have faithfully kept this promise, although I have never since received a line from any one of them, or from any member of the convention on the subject. It is well known that it was my determination, and this I freely expressed, not to reinforce the forts in the harbor and thus produce a collision, until they had been actually attacked, or until I had certain evidence that they were about to be attacked. This paper I received most cordially, and considered it as a happy omen that peace might still be preserved, and that time might thus be gained for reflection. This is the whole foundation for the alleged pledge.

But I acted in the same manner I would have done had I entered into a positive and formal agreement with parties capable of contracting, although such an agreement would have been, on my part, from the nature of my official duties, impossible.

The world knows that I have never sent any reinforcements to the forts in Charleston harbor, and I have certainly never authorized any change to be made “in their relative military status.”

Bearing upon this subject, I refer you to an order issued by the Secretary of War, on the 11th instant, to Major Anderson, but not brought to my notice until the 21st instant. It is as follows:

“Memorandum of verbal instructions to Major Anderson, First Artillery, commanding Fort Moultrie, South Carolina:

“You are aware of the great anxiety of the Secretary of War that a collision of the troops with the people of this State shall be avoided, and of his studied determination to pursue a course with reference to the military force and forts in this harbor, which shall guard against such a collision. He has, therefore, carefully abstained from increasing the force at this point, or taking any measures which might add to the present excited state of the public mind, or which would throw any doubt on the confidence he feels that South Carolina will not attempt by violence to obtain possession of the public works, or to interfere with their occupancy. But, as the counsel of rash and impulsive persons may possibly disappoint these expectations of the Government, he deems it proper that you should be prepared with instructions to meet so unhappy a contingency. He has, therefore, directed me, verbally, to give you such instructions.

“You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression; and, for that reason, you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude; but you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor and, if attacked, you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts; but an attack on, or an attempt to take possession of, either of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.

”D. P. BUTLER, Assistant Adjutant General.

“FORT MOULTRIE, SOUTH CAROLINA, December 11, 1860.

“This is in conformity to my instructions to Major Buell.

“JOHN B. FLOYD, Secretary of War.”

These were the last instructions transmitted to Major Anderson before his removal to Fort Sumter, with a single exception in regard to a particular which does not, in any degree, affect the present question. Under these circumstances it is clear that Major Anderson acted upon his own responsibility, and without authority, unless, indeed, he had “tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act” on the part of the authorities of South Carolina, which has not yet been alleged. Still he is a brave and honorable officer, and justice requires that he should not be condemned without a fair hearing.

Be this as it may, when I learned that Major Anderson had left Fort Moultrie, and proceeded to Fort Sumter, my first promptings were to command him to return to his former position, and there to await the contingencies presented in his instructions. This could only have been done, with any degree of safety to the command, by the concurrence of the South Carolina authorities. But before any steps could possibly have been taken in this direction, we received information, dated on the 28th instant, that “the Palmetto flag floated out to the breeze at Castle Pinckney, and a large military force went over last night (the 27th) to Fort Moultrie.” Thus the authorities of South Carolina, without waiting or asking for any explanation, and doubtless believing, as you have expressed it, that the officer had acted not only without, but against my orders, on the very next day after the night when the removal was made, seized by a military force two of the three Federal forts in the harbor of Charleston, and have covered them under their own flag, instead of that of the United States. At this gloomy period of our history, startling events succeed each other rapidly. On the very day (the 27th instant) that possession of these two forts was taken, the Palmetto flag was raised over the Federal custom house and post office in Charleston; and on the same day every officer of the customs—collector, naval officer, surveyor, and appraisers—resigned their offices. And this, although it was well known, from the language of my message, that as an executive officer I felt myself bound to collect the revenue at the port of Charleston under the existing laws. In the harbor of Charleston we now find three forts confronting each other, over all of which the Federal flag floated only four days ago; but now, over two of them this flag has been supplanted, and the Palmetto flag has been substituted in its stead. It is under all these circumstances that I am urged immediately to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that, without this, negotiation is impossible. This I cannot do; this I will not do. Such an idea was never thought of by me in any possible contingency. No allusion to it had ever been made in any communication between myself and any human being. But the inference is, that I am bound to withdraw the troops from the only fort remaining in the possession of the United States in the harbor of Charleston, because the officer then in command of all the forts thought proper, without instructions, to change his position from one of them to another. I cannot admit the justice of any such inference.

At this point of writing I have received information, by telegram, from Captain Humphreys, in command of the arsenal at Charleston, that “it has to-day (Sunday the 30th) been taken by force of arms.” It is estimated that the munitions of war belonging to the United States in this arsenal are worth half a million of dollars.

Comment is needless. After this information, I have only to add that, while it is my duty to defend Fort Sumter, as a portion of the public property of the United States, against hostile attacks from whatever quarter they may come, by such means as I may possess for this purpose, I do not perceive how such a defence can be construed into a menace against the city of Charleston.

With great personal regard, I remain, yours very respectfully,

JAMES BUCHANAN.

In all that related to this cabinet crisis of December 29th, I can see nothing but the prompt action of a wise statesman and a patriotic President, in preventing a disruption of his cabinet upon a draft of a State paper, in which expressions had been used that might have given rise to inferences which the President never intended should be drawn. Among all Mr. Buchanan’s claims to stand in history as a great man, be the criticisms made by the three members of his cabinet on his proposed answer to the South Carolina commissioners more or less important, there is no one act which better entitles him to that rank, than the sacrifice which he made on this occasion of all pride of opinion in respect to the best mode of doing what he and his advisers alike meant to do, in order that the country might not, at this critical juncture, be deprived of the services of men whose services were important to her, and in order that the Government of the Union might not be placed in a false position. He had formed no new policy on the subject of secession, or any new views of his public duty. He never had but one policy, from the beginning of the secession movement to the 4th of March, 1861. Of that policy no concession of the right of secession, or of any claim founded on it, ever formed a part.[91]

Footnote 91:

In the North American Review, during the year 1879, certain papers were published under the title of “Diary of a Public Man,” without disclosure of the authorship. These papers purported to be passages from a diary kept by a person in some public, or quasi public, position in Washington, during the autumn and winter of 1860-61. Inquiry by the author of this work has failed to elicit any information of the name of the writer, the editor of the Review declining to disclose it. The statements made in these papers are therefore anonymous, and readers will judge how far they should be regarded as reliable materials of history. There is, however, one of these statements, which it is my duty to notice, because the unknown writer professes to make it on the authority of Senator Douglas. It purports to have been committed to writing on the 28th of February, 1861, and is as follows: “Before going, Senator Douglas had a word to say about President Buchanan and the South Carolina commissioners. He tells me that it has now been ascertained that the President nominated his Pennsylvania collector at Charleston on the very day, almost at the very moment, when he was assuring Colonel Orr, through one of his retainers, that he was disposed to accede to the demands of South Carolina, if they were courteously and with proper respect presented to him. They rewrote their letter accordingly, submitted it to the President’s agents, who approved it and sent it to the White House. This, Senator Douglas says, was on January 3d, in the morning. The commissioners spent the afternoon in various places, and dined out early. On coming in, they found their letter to the President awaiting them. It had been returned to them by a messenger from the White House, about three o'clock P. M., and on the back was an indorsement, not signed by any one, and in a clerkly handwriting, to the effect that the President declined to receive the communication. They ordered their trunks packed at once, and left for home by way of Richmond, on the four o'clock morning train, feeling, not unreasonably, that they had been both duped and insulted.”—(North American Review, vol. cxxix, p. 269.)

There are a very few grains of truth in this story, mixed with a great deal of untruth. Mr. Douglas may have found it floating about Washington, and may have repeated it to the diarist who remains shrouded in mystery. The nomination of a collector for the port of Charleston was made to the Senate on the same day on which the President returned the letter of the commissioners. This was on the 2d of January, not the 3d. But it cannot be true that the President, through any channel, assured Colonel Orr that he was disposed to accede to the demands of South Carolina, if courteously and with proper respect presented to him; or that they had written one letter which was in improper terms, and then wrote another in proper terms, and sent it, after it had been submitted to “the President’s agents,” and been by them received. The actual occurrence was as follows: The sole personal interview which the President had with the commissioners was on the 28th of December. On the 29th they presented to him in writing their demand for the withdrawal of the troops from the harbor of Charleston as a preliminary step to any negotiation. On the 31st the President’s answer, settled in a meeting of the cabinet, was transmitted to them. It was a positive and distinct refusal to withdraw the troops. The reply of the commissioners, dated on the 2d of January, reached the White House at about three o'clock on that day, while the cabinet was in session. “It was,” says Mr. Buchanan, “so violent, unfounded, and disrespectful, and so regardless of what is due to any individual whom the people have honored with the office of President, that the reading of it in the cabinet excited much indignation among all the members.” (Buchanan’s Defence, p. 183.) The President thereupon wrote upon a slip of paper, which is now before me, the following words: “This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it.” This slip he handed immediately to his private secretary, to be indorsed on the commissioners' letter. Of what then happened, I find the following memorandum in the handwriting of the secretary:

JANUARY 2, 1861.

The paper which, I am told, came in this envelope, was handed to me by the President at about 3:30 o'clock, with instructions to enclose it in an envelope and direct it to Hon. R. W. Barnwell, James H. Adams and James S. Orr, and to deliver it to them or either of them. I directed it accordingly, and proceeded to the lodgings of the gentlemen addressed in Franklyn Row. I was informed at the door by a servant that neither of the gentlemen were in. Having met Mr. Trescot at the door, I inquired whether he would receive the paper. He declined to do so, on the ground that he had no official connection with the gentlemen to whom it was addressed. At my request he then proceeded with me to the room which these gentlemen occupied for business purposes, and, also at my request, witnessed the deposit of the paper upon a table in that room; the same room in which I found two of the gentlemen—Messrs. Barnwell and Adams—on a previous occasion (Monday last), when I delivered to the first-named gentleman a letter similarly addressed from the President. While I was in the room Hon. Jefferson Davis and Senator Wigfall came in, the first of whom certainly, and the latter probably, did see the paper deposited, as stated. This memorandum made within an hour after the delivery or deposit of the paper. 68

A. J. GLOSSBRENNER, Private Secretary to the President.

EXECUTIVE OFFICE.

The next thing that happened was, that after the reading in the Senate of the President’s special message of January 8th, Mr. Jefferson Davis produced and had read in the Senate, a copy of the commissioners' insulting letter. “Such,” says Mr. Buchanan, “was the temper of that body at the time, that it was received and read, and entered upon their journal...... It is worth notice, that whilst this letter of the commissioners was published at length in the Congressional Globe, among the proceedings of the Senate, their previous letter to the President of the 28th of December, and his answer thereto of the 31st, were never published in this so-called official register, although copies of both had accompanied his special message. By this means, the offensive letter was scattered broadcast over the country, whilst the letter of the President, to which this professed to be an answer, was buried in one of the numerous and long after published volumes of executive documents.”[92] The story related to the unknown diarist, as he says, by Senator Douglas, implies that the commissioners, at some time between the 31st of December and the 2d of January, wrote an uncourteous and improper reply to the President’s letter of December 31st, and then substituted for it a courteous and proper one, which they submitted to “the President’s agents,” who approved of it and sent it to the White House! That the President, through any agent, had signified to the commissioners that he was disposed to accede to their demands, if presented in courteous and proper terms, is an assertion that is contradicted by the whole tenor of his letter of December 31st, and by his uniform and steady refusal to entertain the proposition of an executive surrender of the forts to South Carolina. Down to the moment when the commissioners received the President’s letter of December 31st, he had no occasion to make with them any condition relating to the manner of their reply; and to suppose that at any time he meant to allow his compliance with their demands to turn upon the language in which they presented them, is simply absurd. What he may have signified to them was, that he would refer their demands to Congress; not that he would entertain and act upon them himself. This we know that he did, at the personal interview on the 28th of December; and he did it in order “to bring the whole subject before the representatives of the people in such a manner as to cause them to express an authoritative opinion on secession and the other dangerous questions then before the country, and adopt such measures for their peaceable adjustment as might possibly reclaim even South Carolina herself; but whether or not, might prevent the other cotton States from following her evil and rash example.”[93] The President did not expect that Congress would authorize him to surrender the forts; but he did believe that it would be beneficial to have Congress declare that the whole doctrine of secession was one that could not be accepted by any department of the Federal Government, as he had declared that it could not be accepted by the Executive. The South Carolina commissioners, in their letter of December 28th, claimed that the State has “resumed the powers she delegated to the Government of the United States, and has declared her perfect sovereignty and independence;” that unless Major Anderson’s removal to Fort Sumter was explained in a satisfactory manner, they must suspend all discussion of the arrangements by which the mutual interests of this independent State and the United States could be adjusted; and then, as a preliminary to any negotiation, they urged the immediate withdrawal of the troops from the harbor of Charleston, with a distinct intimation of a “bloody issue” if this should be refused. The President was thus brought to the alternatives of an Executive admission of the independence of South Carolina, by reason of her secession, and a withdrawal of the troops as a consequence, or a bloody issue of questions that ought to be settled amicably. The President’s answer of the 31st of December, being a rejection of what was demanded of him, although entirely courteous, so irritated the commissioners that they wrote the reply which he returned to them.[94] The truth is, that this reply contained so many offensive and unfounded imputations of past bad faith on the part of the President, that it was impossible for him to receive it. The grossest of these imputations I have already dealt with.

Footnote 92:

Buchanan’s Defence, p. 184.

Footnote 93:

Buchanan’s Defence, p. 184.

Footnote 94:

A copy of this intended reply may be found in Mr. Jefferson Davis’s work, vol. i., Appendix G.

The diarist of the North American Review has related another story, on the authority of a person whose name, as well as his own, he conceals, which imputes to Major Anderson a motive of a most extraordinary character, for taking possession of Fort Sumter. We thus have the anonymous fortified by the anonymous—ignotum per ignotum—as the historical basis of belief. The statement is that the diarist’s informant, who had just come from Montgomery and had passed through Charleston, where he conversed with Major Anderson, told the diarist, on the 6th of March (1861), in Washington, that Anderson intended to be governed in his future course by the course of his own State of Kentucky; that if Kentucky should secede, Anderson would unhesitatingly obey the orders of a Confederate secretary of war; that he meant to retain the control of the position primarily in the interests of his own State of Kentucky; and that for this reason he removed from Fort Moultrie where he was liable to be controlled by the authorities of South Carolina.[95] The diarist took his informant to President Lincoln, who heard the tale repeated, but parried it by one or two of his characteristic jests, and the diarist was disappointed in not being able to divine how Mr. Lincoln was affected by the narrative. It will require something more than this kind of unsupported and unauthenticated nonsense to destroy Major Anderson’s reputation as a loyal officer of the United States. What he might have done with his commission, in case Kentucky had joined the Southern Confederacy, is one thing. What he would have done with Fort Sumter is a very different matter. His answer to a letter of General Dix does not accord with the account of his intentions given by the unknown informant of the unknown diarist.[96]

Footnote 95:

A North American Review, vol. cxxix, pp. 484-485.

Footnote 96:

See the correspondence between General Dix and Major Anderson, post.

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XIX. December, 1860,—January, 1861

RESIGNATION OF GENERAL CASS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE—RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CABINET WHICH FOLLOWED AFTER THE RESIGNATIONS OF MESSRS. COBB, THOMPSON, AND THOMAS.

Serious and embarrassing as was the situation of the country, it was not to have been expected that the first person to leave an administration, which had worked together with entire harmony for nearly four years, would be the Secretary of State, General Cass. I shall make but few comments on this occurrence. The correspondence which took place between General Cass and the President, and a memorandum made by the latter at the time, sufficiently show what degree of necessity there was for the General’s resignation. With reference to the reason which he assigned for it, the date of his letter is important to be observed. He tendered his resignation at a time when every consideration of prudence forbade the sending of further military or naval forces into the harbor of Charleston; after his advice on this point had been overruled by the opinions of all the other members of the cabinet, and of the President; before the State of South Carolina had adopted her ordinance of secession; and while the collector of the revenue at Charleston was still faithfully, and without molestation, performing his duties. If it was the General’s sagacity which led him to foresee that the State would “secede,” that the collector would resign, and that the revenue would have to be collected outside of the custom house, and by some other officer, his suggestions could not be carried out by the President without authority of law, and the whole subject was then before Congress, submitted to it by the President’s annual message, in which the General himself had fully concurred. That the General regretted his resignation, and would have withdrawn it, if permitted, is now made certain by the President’s memorandum, which I shall presently cite.

[SECRETARY CASS TO THE PRESIDENT.]

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, December 12th, 1860.

SIR:—

The present alarming crisis in our national affairs has engaged your serious consideration, and in your recent message, you have expressed to Congress, and through Congress to the country, the views you have formed respecting the questions, fraught with the most momentous consequences, which are now presented to the American people for solution. With the general principles laid down in that message I fully concur, and I appreciate with warm sympathy its patriotic appeals and suggestions. What measures it is competent and proper for the Executive to adopt under existing circumstances, is a subject which has received your most careful attention, and with the anxious hope, as I well know, from having participated in the deliberations, that tranquillity and good feeling may be speedily restored to this agitated and divided Confederacy.

In some points which I deem of vital importance, it has been my misfortune to differ from you.

It has been my decided opinion, which for some time past I have urged at various meetings of the cabinet, that additional troops should be sent to reinforce the forts in the harbor of Charleston, with a view to their better defence, should they be attacked, and that an armed vessel should likewise be ordered there, to aid, if necessary, in the defence, and also, should it be required, in the collection of the revenue; and it is yet my opinion that these measures should be adopted without the least delay. I have likewise urged the expediency of immediately removing the custom house at Charleston to one of the forts in the port, and of making arrangements for the collection of the duties there, by having a collector and other officers ready to act when necessary, so that when the office may become vacant, the proper authority may be there to collect the duties on the part of the United States. I continue to think that these arrangements should be immediately made. While the right and the responsibility of deciding belong to you, it is very desirable that at this perilous juncture there should be, as far as possible, unanimity in your councils, with a view to safe and efficient action.

I have, therefore, felt it my duty to tender you my resignation of the office of Secretary of State, and to ask your permission to retire from that official association with yourself and the members of your cabinet, which I have enjoyed during almost four years, without the occurrence of a single incident to interrupt the personal intercourse which has so happily existed.

I cannot close this letter without bearing my testimony to the zealous and earnest devotion to the best interests of the country, with which, during a term of unexampled trials and troubles, you have sought to discharge the duties of your high station.

Thanking you for the kindness and confidence you have not ceased to manifest towards me, and with the expression of my warmest regard both for yourself and the gentlemen of your cabinet, I am, sir, with great respect,

Your obedient servant, LEWIS CASS.

[THE PRESIDENT TO GENERAL CASS.]

WASHINGTON, December 15th, 1860.

SIR:—

I have received your resignation of the office of Secretary of State with surprise and regret. After we had passed through nearly the whole term of the administration with mutual and cordial friendship and regard, I had cherished the earnest hope that nothing might occur to disturb our official relations until its end. You have decided differently, and I have no right to complain.

I must express my gratification at your concurrence with the general principles laid down in my late message, and your appreciation, “with warm sympathy, of its patriotic appeals and suggestions.” This I value very highly; and I rejoice that we concur in the opinion that Congress does not possess the power, under the Constitution, to coerce a State by force of arms to remain in the Confederacy.

The question on which we unfortunately differ is that of ordering a detachment of the army and navy to Charleston, and is correctly stated in your letter of resignation. I do not intend to argue this question. Suffice it to say, that your remarks upon the subject were heard by myself and the cabinet, with all the respect due to your high position, your long experience, and your unblemished character; but they failed to convince us of the necessity and propriety, under existing circumstances, of adopting such a measure. The Secretaries of War and of the Navy, through whom the orders must have issued to reinforce the forts, did not concur in your views; and whilst the whole responsibility for the refusal rested upon myself, they were the members of the cabinet more directly interested. You may have judged correctly on this important question, and your opinion is entitled to grave consideration; but under my convictions of duty, and believing as I do that no present necessity exists for a resort to force for the protection of the public property, it was impossible for me to have risked a collision of arms in the harbor of Charleston, and thereby defeated the reasonable hope which I cherish of the final triumph of the Constitution and of the Union.

I have only to add that you will take with you into retirement my heartfelt wishes that the evening of your days may be prosperous and happy.

Very respectfully yours, JAMES BUCHANAN.

The following memorandum, relating to the resignation of General Cass, is now before me in the President’s handwriting:

Tuesday, Dec. 11th, 1860.

General Cass announced to me his purpose to resign.

Saturday, December 15th.

Judge Black, in the evening, delivered me General Cass’s letter of resignation, dated on Wednesday, December 12th.

I was very much surprised on the 11th December to learn from General Cass that he intended to resign. All our official intercourse up till this moment had been marked by unity of purpose, sentiment and action. Indeed, the General had always been treated by me with extreme kindness. This was due to his age and his high character. Most of the important despatches which bear his name were written, or chiefly written, for him by Mr. Appleton, Judge Black and myself. His original drafts were generally so prolix and so little to the point, that they had to be written over again entirely, or so little was suffered to remain as to make them new despatches. All this was done with so much delicacy and tenderness, that, to the extent of my knowledge, General Cass always cheerfully and even gratefully assented. So timid was he, and so little confidence had he in himself, that it was difficult for him to arrive at any decision of the least consequence. He brought many questions to me which he ought to have settled himself. When obliged to decide for himself, he called Mr. Cobb and Judge Black to his assistance. In the course of the administration I have been often reminded of the opinion of him expressed to me by General Jackson.

I had been at the War Department a short time before General Cass was appointed minister to France. In the course of conversation, he made particular inquiries of me as to what I thought an American minister would have to expend at the principal courts abroad. I told him what it had cost me at St. Petersburg, and what would be the probable cost at London and Paris.

The next time I met General Jackson, I said to him, “So you are going to send General Cass to Paris.” His answer was, “How do you know that?” I said, “I can't tell you, but I believe it.” His reply was, “It is true. I can no longer consent to do the duties both of President and Secretary of War. General Cass will decide nothing for himself, but comes to me constantly with great bundles of papers, to decide questions for him which he ought to decide for himself.”

His resignation was the more remarkable on account of the cause he assigned for it. When my late message (of December, 1860) was read to the cabinet before it was printed, General Cass expressed his unreserved and hearty approbation of it, accompanied by every sign of deep and sincere feeling. He had but one objection to it, and this was, that it was not sufficiently strong against the power of Congress to make war upon a State for the purpose of compelling her to remain in the Union; and the denial of this power was made more emphatic and distinct upon his own suggestion.

On Monday, 17th December, 1860, both Mr. Thompson and Judge Black informed me that they had held conversations with General Cass on the subject of his resignation, and that he had expressed a desire to withdraw it, and return to the cabinet. I gave this no encouragement. His purpose to resign had been known for several days, and his actual resignation had been prepared three days before it was delivered to me. The world knew all about it, and had he returned, the explanation would have been very embarrassing. Besides, I knew full well that his fears would have worried the administration as well as himself, in the difficult times which were then upon us. His great error was, that he would assume no responsibility which he could possibly avoid.

There is strong reason to think that General Cass was mistaken in saying in his letter to the President that he had proposed in the cabinet to remove the Charleston custom house to one of the forts or to appoint a new collector. In a draft of the President’s answer to General Cass, prepared by Judge Black, but which the President did not use, it is stated that none of the members of the cabinet had any recollection of such a proposal. But if it had been made, it would have been improper to collect the revenue in any other than the ordinary way, and at the proper place, without new legislation, or at least until circumstances had made a military collection absolutely necessary.

It is not to be doubted that the resignation of General Cass was a misfortune to the administration, because it gave to its enemies opportunity to say that he distrusted either the present or the future course of the President. But his place was immediately supplied by the appointment of Judge Black as Secretary of State. Edwin M. Stanton became Attorney General, in the room of Judge Black.[97]

Footnote 97:

How Mr. Stanton came to receive this appointment, may be learned by referring to a private letter from Mr. Buchanan, quoted hereafter.

In the early part of January, 1861, while the President was still engaged in considering the measures proper to be adopted in regard to Fort Sumter, other changes in the cabinet took place. After the resignations of General Cass, Governor Floyd, and Mr. Cobb, the cabinet stood as follows: Jeremiah S. Black, of Pennsylvania, Secretary of State, Philip F. Thomas, of Maryland, Secretary of the Treasury, Joseph Holt, of Kentucky, Secretary of War, Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy, Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, Horatio King, of Maine, Postmaster General, Edwin M. Stanton, of Pennsylvania, Attorney General. Mr. Thomas, who had been Commissioner of Patents, was made Secretary of the Treasury in the place of Mr. Cobb, on the 8th of December. He resigned on the 11th of January, and the President immediately invited General Dix to fill the office. General Dix at once repaired to Washington, and during the remainder of the administration he was the guest of the President at the White House. His society, and his important aid in the administration of the Government, afforded to Mr. Buchanan the highest satisfaction.[98] On the resignation of Mr. Thompson as Secretary of the Interior, that department was not filled, but the duties were ably and faithfully performed by Moses Kelly, the Chief Clerk, until the close of the administration. The circumstances attending the resignations of Messrs. Thompson and Thomas are sufficiently disclosed by the correspondence.

Footnote 98:

General Dix had for some time held the office of Postmaster in the City of New York; a place he consented to fill under the circumstances disclosed in the following letter to President Buchanan:

NEW YORK, May 14,1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I have received your favor of the 12th inst., and am greatly indebted to you for your kind suggestion in regard to the appointment of commissioners under the treaty with Paraguay. I should regret very much to decline any service in which you think I could be useful. I am at this moment very much occupied here with matters which concern the comfort of my family, and I should wish, before giving a final answer, to communicate with my wife, who is in Boston. I had scarcely read your letter before I received a note from Mr. Schell, who desired to see me in regard to the astounding defalcation in the city post office. He said it was deemed important to place some one in the office in whom the administration could confide, and that my name had been suggested among others. Now, my dear sir, you can readily understand that it is a place I do not want, and could not consent to hold for any length of time. But, as I said to Mr. Schell, if you desire it, and think I can be of any service to your administration, in cooperating with the proper department to put matters on a right footing, I should not, under the peculiar circumstances, feel at liberty to disregard your wishes. In other words, I think you have the right, under the exigencies of the case, to command the services of any friend. I am, dear sir, sincerely yours,

JOHN A. DIX.

For an account of General Dix’s connection with the New York post office, and of his services to Mr. Buchanan’s administration as Secretary of the Treasury, see his Life, by his son, the Rev. Morgan Dix, S. T. D., recently published by Harper & Brothers.

[SECRETARY THOMPSON TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WASHINGTON, D. C., Jan 8, 1861.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY, JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT U. S.:—

SIR:—It is with extreme regret I have just learned that additional troops have been ordered to Charleston. This subject has been frequently discussed in cabinet council, and when on Monday night, 31st of December ult., the orders for reinforcements to Fort Sumter were countermanded, I distinctly understood from you, that no order of the kind would be made without being previously considered and decided in cabinet. It is true that on Wednesday, January 2d, this subject was again discussed in cabinet, but certainly no conclusion was reached, and the War Department was not justified in ordering reinforcements without something [more] than was then said. I learn, however, this morning, for the first time, that the steamer Star of the West sailed from New York on last Saturday night with two hundred and fifty men under Lieut. Bartlett, bound for Fort Sumter. Under these circumstances I feel myself bound to resign my commission as one of your constitutional advisers into your hands. With high respect your obedient servant,

J. THOMPSON.

[THE PRESIDENT TO MR. THOMPSON.]

WASHINGTON, January 9, 1861.

SIR:—

I have received and accepted your resignation on yesterday of the office of Secretary of the Interior.

On Monday evening, 31st December, 1860, I suspended the orders which had been issued by the War and Navy Department to send the Brooklyn with reinforcements to Fort Sumter. Of this I informed you on the same evening. I stated to you my reasons for this suspension, which you knew from its nature would be speedily removed. In consequence of your request, however, I promised that orders should not be renewed “without being previously considered and decided in cabinet.”

This promise was faithfully observed on my part. In order to carry it into effect, I called a special cabinet meeting on Wednesday, 2d January, 1861, in which the question of sending reinforcements to Fort Sumter was amply discussed both by yourself and others. The decided majority of opinions was against you. At this moment the answer of the South Carolina “commissioners” to my communication to them of the 31st December was received and read. It produced much indignation among members of the cabinet. After a further brief conversation I employed the following language: “It is now all over, and reinforcements must be sent.” Judge Black said, at the moment of my decision, that after this letter the cabinet would be unanimous, and I heard no dissenting voice. Indeed, the spirit and tone of the letter left no doubt on my mind that Fort Sumter would be immediately attacked, and hence the necessity of sending reinforcements there without delay.

Whilst you admit “that on Wednesday, January 2d, this subject was again discussed in cabinet,” you say, “but certainly no conclusion was reached, and the War Department was not justified in ordering reinforcements without something [more] than was then said.” You are certainly mistaken in alleging that no “conclusion was reached.” In this your recollection is entirely different from that of your four oldest colleagues in the cabinet. Indeed, my language was so unmistakable, that the Secretaries of War and the Navy proceeded to act upon it without any further intercourse with myself than what you heard or might have heard me say. You had been so emphatic in opposing these reinforcements, that I thought you would resign in consequence of my decision. I deeply regret that you have been mistaken in point of fact, though I firmly believe honestly mistaken. Still it is certain you have not the less been mistaken. Yours very respectfully,

JAMES BUCHANAN.

[MR. THOMPSON TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WASHINGTON CITY, January 10, 1861.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY, JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT OF U. S.:—

DEAR SIR:—In your reply to my note of 8th inst., accepting my resignation, you are right when you say that “you (I) had been so emphatic in opposing these reinforcements that I (you) thought you (I) would resign in consequence of my decision.” I came to the cabinet on Wednesday, January 2d, with the full expectation I would resign my commission before I left your council board, and I know you do not doubt that my action would have been promptly taken, had I understood on that day that you had decided that “reinforcements must now be sent.” For more than forty days, I have regarded the display of a military force in Charleston or along the Southern coast by the United States as tantamount to war. Of this opinion you and all my colleagues of the cabinet have been frankly advised. Believing that such would be the construction of an order for additional troops, I have been anxious, and have used all legitimate means to save you and your administration from precipitating the country into an inevitable conflict, the end of which no human being could foresee. My counsels have not prevailed, troops have been sent, and I hope yet that a kind Providence may avert the consequences I have apprehended, and that peace be maintained.

I am now a private citizen, and, as such, I am at liberty to give expression to my private feelings towards you personally.

In all my official intercourse with you, though often overruled, I have been treated with uniform kindness and consideration.

I know your patriotism, your honesty and purity of character, and admire your high qualities of head and heart. If we can sink all the circumstances attending this unfortunate order for reinforcements—on which, though we may differ, yet I am willing to admit that you are as conscientious, as I claim to be—you have been frank, direct, and confiding in me. I have never been subjected to the first mortification, or entertained for a moment the first unkind feeling. These facts determined me to stand by you and your administration as long as there was any hope left that our present difficulties could find a peaceful solution. If the counsels of some members of your cabinet prevail, I am utterly without hope. Every duty you have imposed on me has been discharged with scrupulous fidelity on my part, and it would give me infinite pain even to suspect that you are not satisfied.

Whatever may be our respective futures, I shall ever be your personal friend, and shall vindicate your fame and administration, of which I have been a part, and shall ever remember with gratitude the many favors and kindnesses heretofore shown to me and mine.

I go hence to make the destiny of Mississippi my destiny. My life, fortune, and all I hold most dear shall be devoted to her cause. In doing this, I believe before God, I am serving the ends of truth and justice and good government. Now, as ever, your personal friend,

J. THOMPSON.

[THE PRESIDENT TO MR. THOMPSON.]

WASHINGTON, January 11, 1861.

MY DEAR SIR:—

Without referring to any recent political question, your favor of yesterday has afforded me the highest degree of satisfaction. You know that for many years I have entertained a warm regard for you, and this has been greatly increased by our official and personal intercourse since you became a member of my cabinet. No man could have more ably, honestly, and efficiently performed the various and complicated duties of the Interior Department than yourself, and it has always been my pride and pleasure to express this opinion on all suitable occasions. I regret extremely that the troubles of the times have rendered it necessary for us to part; but whatever may be your future destiny, I shall ever feel a deep interest in your welfare and happiness.

From your friend, very respectfully, JAMES BUCHANAN.

[SECRETARY THOMAS TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WASHINGTON, D. C., January 11, 1861.

MY DEAR SIR:—

It has not been in my power, as you are aware, to agree with you and with a majority of your constitutional advisers, in the measures which have been adopted in reference to the present condition of things in South Carolina; nor do I think it at all probable that I shall be able to concur in the views which you entertain, so far as I understand them, touching the authority under existing laws, to enforce the collection of the customs at the port of Charleston.

Under such circumstances, after mature consideration, I have concluded that I cannot longer continue in your cabinet without embarrassment to you, and an exposure of myself to the just criticisms of those who are acquainted with my opinions upon the subject. I, therefore, deem it proper to tender my resignation of the commission I now hold as Secretary of the Treasury, to take effect when my successor is appointed and qualified. In doing so, I avail myself of the occasion to offer you the assurance of the high respect and regard which, personally, I entertain for you, and with which I have the honor to be,

Your friend and obedient servant, PHILIP F. THOMAS.

[THE PRESIDENT TO MR. THOMAS.]

WASHINGTON, January 12, 1861.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I have received your letter of yesterday, resigning the office of Secretary of the Treasury, to take effect when your successor shall be appointed and qualified.

I very much regret that circumstances, in your opinion, have rendered it necessary. Without referring to those circumstances, I am happy to state, in accepting your resignation, that during the brief period you have held this important office, you have performed its duties in a manner altogether satisfactory to myself.

Wishing you health, prosperity, and happiness, I remain,

Very respectfully, your friend, JAMES BUCHANAN.

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XX. 1860—December

THE RESIGNATION OF SECRETARY FLOYD, AND ITS CAUSE—REFUTATION OF THE STORY OF HIS STEALING THE ARMS OF THE UNITED STATES—GENERAL SCOTT'S ASSERTIONS DISPROVED.

Among the assertions made by the South Carolina commissioners in their letter to the President of December 28th, there was one to which it is now specially necessary to advert. “Since our arrival,” they said, “an officer of the United States, acting, as we are assured, not only without, but against your orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering to a most important extent the condition of affairs under which we came.” The person who assured them that Anderson had acted without and against the President’s orders, was Mr. Floyd, the Secretary of War, who had instructed Buell what orders to give to Anderson, and who knew well what the orders were. This brings me, therefore, to the point at which Mr. Floyd’s conversion took place, from an avowed and consistent opponent of secession to one of its most strenuous supporters:—a conversion which was so sudden, that between the 23d of December and the arrival of the South Carolina commissioners, on the 26th, the Secretary boldly assumed a position entirely at variance with all his previous conduct, and thereafter became an intimate associate with disunion Senators, who had always, to this point, condemned his official conduct. The cause of this remarkable change was the discovery, by the President, of an act implicating Mr. Floyd in a very irregular proceeding, which had no connection whatever with the relations between the Federal Government and the State of South Carolina, or with the subject of secession.

On the 22d of December, the President learned that 870 State bonds for $1,000 each, held in trust by the Government for different Indian tribes, had been abstracted from the Interior Department by one Godard Bailey, the clerk who had charge of them, and had been delivered to William H. Russell, a member of the firm of “Russell, Majors & Waddell.” Upon examination, it was found that the clerk had substituted for the abstracted bonds bills delivered to him by Russell, drawn by his firm on Floyd as Secretary of War, and by Floyd accepted and indorsed, for the precise amount of the bonds, $870,000. The acceptances were thirteen in number, commencing on the 13th of September, 1860, the last one of the series, dated December 13th, 1860, being for the precise sum necessary to make the aggregate amount of the whole number of bills exactly equal to the amount of the abstracted bonds. Bailey stated that he held the acceptances “as collateral security for the return of the bonds.”

What happened on this discovery should be told in Mr. Buchanan’s own words, as I find them in his handwriting, in a paper drawn up apparently for the information of some one who was entitled to know the facts.

I do not recollect the precise time when I had the only conversation which I ever held with Governor Floyd on the subject of your inquiry. It was most probably soon after Mr. Benjamin had the interview with myself, the particulars of which I cannot now recall; but it is proper to state that I learned from another source that acceptances of Mr. Floyd had been offered for discount in Wall Street.

When I next saw Secretary Floyd I asked him if it were true that he had been issuing acceptances to Russell & Company on bills payable at a future day. He said he had done so in a few cases. That he had done this in no instance until after he had ascertained that the amount of the bills would be due to them under their contract, before the bills reached maturity; that the trains had started on their way to Utah, and there could be no possible loss to the Government. That the Government at that time was largely indebted to Russell & Company, and the bills which he had accepted would be paid, when they became due, out of the appropriation for that purpose. I asked him, under what authority he had accepted these drafts. He said, this had been done under the practice of the Department. I said, I had never heard of such a practice, and if such a practice existed, I considered it altogether improper, and should be discontinued. I asked him if there was any law which authorized such acceptances. He said there was no law, he believed, for it, and no law against it. I replied, if there was no law for it, this was conclusive that he had no such authority. He said, I need give myself no trouble about the matter. That the acceptances already issued should be promptly paid out of the money due to Russell & Company, and he would never accept another such draft. I might rest perfectly easy on the subject. I had not the least doubt that he would fulfill his promise in good faith. He never said another word to me upon the subject. I was, therefore, never more astonished than at the exposure which was made that he had accepted drafts to the amount of $870,000, and that these were substituted in the safe at the Interior Department, as a substitute for the Indian bonds which had been purloined.

I took immediate measures to intimate to him, through a distinguished mutual friend, that he could no longer remain in the cabinet, and that he ought to resign. I expected his resignation hourly; but a few days after, he came into the cabinet with a bold front, and said he could remain in it no longer unless I would instantly recall Major Anderson and his forces from Fort Sumter.

There were, as Mr. Buchanan states, besides the acceptances lodged in the Interior Department, other acceptances of Floyd’s, as Secretary of War, afloat in Wall Street. Of course, Mr. Floyd was aware of this; and having been told by the President that he must resign, he boldly determined to resign on a feigned issue, making for himself a bridge on which he could pass over to the secession side of the great national controversy.

The arrival of the South Carolina commissioners in Washington on the 26th December, afforded to the Secretary an opportunity to concoct his impudent pretext. It is impossible to suppose that he believed either that Anderson had acted without orders or against orders, or in violation of any pledge given by the President. The orders were, in one sense, his own; and as to any pledge, he could not have been ignorant of what really took place between the President and the South Carolina members of Congress on the 10th of December. When he instructed Major Buell in the orders that were to be given to Anderson, the Secretary was, in giving those orders, loyal to the Government whose officer he was, and his conduct in regard to the acceptances was unknown to the President. When the South Carolina commissioners arrived in Washington, he was a man whose resignation of office had been required of him by the President. He learned that the commissioners were about to complain that Anderson had violated a pledge. Taking time by the forelock, he entered a session of the cabinet on the evening of the 27th, the next day after the arrival of the commissioners, and, in a discourteous and excited manner, read to the President and his colleagues a paper which, on the 29th, he embodied in a letter of resignation, that read as follows:

[SECRETARY FLOYD TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WAR DEPARTMENT, December 29th, 1860.

SIR:—

On the evening of the 27th instant, I read the following paper to you, in the presence of the cabinet:

“COUNCIL CHAMBER, EXECUTIVE MANSION, } “DECEMBER 27TH, 1860. }

SIR:—

“It is evident now, from the action of the commander at Fort Moultrie, that the solemn pledges of this Government have been violated by Major Anderson. In my judgment, but one remedy is now left us by which to vindicate our honor and prevent civil war. It is in vain now to hope for confidence on the part of the people of South Carolina in any further pledges as to the action of the military. One remedy only is left, and that is to withdraw the garrison from the harbor of Charleston altogether. I hope the President will allow me to make that order at once. This order, in my judgment, can alone prevent bloodshed and civil war.

“JOHN B. FLOYD, “Secretary of War.

“TO THE PRESIDENT.”

I then considered the honor of the administration pledged to maintain the troops in the position they occupied; for such had been the assurances given to the gentlemen of South Carolina who had a right to speak for her. South Carolina, on the other hand, gave reciprocal pledges that no force should be brought by them against the troops or against the property of the United States. The sole object of both parties to these reciprocal pledges was to prevent collision and the effusion of blood, in the hope that some means might be found for a peaceful accommodation of the existing troubles, the two Houses of Congress having both raised committees looking to that object.

Thus affairs stood, until the action of Major Anderson, taken unfortunately while commissioners were on their way to this capital on a peaceful mission, looking to the avoidance of bloodshed, has complicated matters in the existing manner. Our refusal, or even delay, to place affairs back as they stood under our agreement, invites collision, and must inevitably inaugurate civil war in our land. I can not consent to be the agent of such a calamity.

I deeply regret to feel myself under the necessity of tendering to you my resignation as Secretary of War, because I can no longer hold it, under my convictions of patriotism, nor with honor, subjected as I am to the violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.

With the highest personal regard, I am most truly yours,

JOHN B. FLOYD.

In a subsequent note to the President, Mr. Floyd offered to perform the duties of the War Department until his successor had been appointed. Without taking any notice of this offer, and with the contemptuous silence that could alone have followed such conduct, the President instantly accepted his resignation, and Postmaster General Holt was transferred to the War Department ad interim. Thus passed out of the service of the United States John B. Floyd, once, like his father, Governor of Virginia. He was a man fitted by nature, by education, and by position, for better things than such an ending of an official career. He was no secessionist from conviction, and until the discovery of his irregular acts in issuing acceptances of his Department, he never pretended to be. He seems to have been stung by a consciousness that his letter of resignation was in a bad tone. On the 30th of December he addressed to the President a letter of apology, which, so far as I know, remained unanswered.

[MR. FLOYD TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WASHINGTON, December 30th, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I understand from General Jefferson Davis that you regard my letter of resignation as offensive to you. I beg to assure you that I am deeply grieved by this intelligence. Nothing could have been further from my wish, and nothing more repugnant to my feelings. If there is any sentence or expression which you regard in that light, I will take sincere pleasure in changing it. The facts and the ideas alone were in my mind when I penned the letter, and I repeat that nothing could have been further from my intention than to wound your feelings. My friendship for you has been and is sincere and unselfish. I have never been called upon by an imperious sense of duty to perform any act which has given me so much pain, as to separate myself from your administration, and this feeling would be greatly aggravated by the belief that in this separation I had said anything which could give you pain or cause of offence.

I beg to assure you that I am very truly and sincerely your friend,

JOHN B. FLOYD.

But justice must be done to Mr. Floyd, badly as he conducted himself after the discovery of his irregular and unauthorized acceptances of drafts on his Department. The impression has long prevailed among the people of the North that the Confederate States did their fighting with cannon, rifles and muskets treacherously placed within their reach by Mr. Buchanan’s Secretary of War. The common belief has been that Mr. Floyd had for a long time pursued a plan of his own for distributing the arms of the United States in the South, in anticipation of a disruption of the Union at no distant day. General Scott, in 1862, took up this charge in his public controversy with Mr. Buchanan, and endeavored to establish it. He signally failed. The General, in 1862, thought that he had discovered that the revolt of the Southern States had been planned a long time before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and that it was to be carried out in the event of “the election of any Northern man to the Presidency.” It had become a sort of fashion, in 1862, in certain quarters, to believe, or to profess to believe, in the existence of this long standing plot. There never was a rational ground for such a belief. It is not true, as a matter of fact, that at any time before the nomination of Mr. Lincoln, there was any transfer of arms to places in the Southern States, to which any suspicion of an improper design ought to attach. It is not true that at any time after Mr. Lincoln’s nomination and before his election, there was any transfer of arms whatever from the Northern arsenals of the United States into the Southern States. The political history of the country, prior to the nomination of Mr. Lincoln and prior to the Democratic Convention at Charleston, does not warrant the belief that any considerable section of the Southern people, or any of their prominent leaders, were looking forward to a Presidential election likely to be so conducted and so to terminate, as to produce among them the conviction that it would be unsafe for them to remain in the Union. Even after Mr. Lincoln’s nomination, and after the division of the Democratic party into two factions, resulting in the nomination of two Democratic candidates (Breckinridge and Douglas), with a fourth candidate in the field, Mr. Bell, nominated by the “old line Whigs,” it was not so morally certain that the Republican candidate would be elected, as to give rise, before the election, to serious plots or preparations for breaking up the Union. Mr. Lincoln obtained but a majority of 57 electoral votes over all his competitors. It was the sectional character of his 180 electoral votes out of 303—the whole 180 being drawn from the non-slaveholding States—and the sectional character of the “platform” on which he was elected, and not the naked fact that he was a Northern man, that the secessionists of the cotton States were able to use as the lever by which to carry their States out of the Union. It is necessary to follow the precipitation of the revolt through the various steps by which it was accomplished, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, before one can reach a sound conclusion as to the causes and methods by which it was brought about. Whoever studies the votes in the secession conventions of the cotton States prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, will find that even in that region there was a strong Union party in all those States excepting South Carolina, which could not have been overborne and trampled down, by any other means than by the appeals to popular fears which the secessionists drew from the peculiar circumstances of the election. He will find reason to ask himself why it was that in these successive conventions, rapidly accomplished between December, 1860, and February, 1861, the Unionists were unable to prevail; and he will find the most important answer to this inquiry in the fact that it was because the advocates of secession were able, from the circumstances of the election, to produce the conviction that the whole North was alienated in feeling from the South, and determined to trample on Southern rights. It was this that worked upon a sensitive and excited people. It was not the accomplishment of a long meditated plot to destroy the Union.

But if there ever was such a plot, there is not the slightest ground for believing that Secretary Floyd, or any other member of Mr. Buchanan’s cabinet, was a party to it. It was, however, in 1862, one of the means resorted to in order to make the Buchanan administration odious, that this charge was made against the Secretary of War; and when it was adopted by General Scott, it was supposed that his authority had given weight to it. He saw fit to put it in his public controversy with Mr. Buchanan in the following form: That Secretary Floyd “removed 115,000 extra muskets and rifles, with all their implements and ammunition, from Northern repositories to Southern arsenals, so that on the breaking out of the maturing rebellion, they might be found without cost, except to the United States, in the most convenient positions for distribution among the insurgents. So, too, of the one hundred and forty pieces of heavy artillery, which the same Secretary ordered from Pittsburgh to Ship Island in Lake Borgne and Galveston in Texas, for forts not erected. Accidentally learning, early in March, that, under this posthumous order the shipment of those guns had commenced, I communicated the fact to Secretary Holt (acting for Secretary Cameron) just in time to defeat the robbery.”[99]

Footnote 99:

General Scott’s letter of November 8, 1862, published in the National Intelligencer.

The anachronisms of this assertion, when it met the eye of Mr. Buchanan in November, 1862, and its apparent ignorance of the facts, may well have amazed him. The whole subject had undergone a thorough investigation by a committee of the House of Representatives in the winter of 1860-61, in consequence of the rumors which had been sent afloat after the resignation of Secretary Floyd. The new Secretary of War, Mr. Holt, not waiting for the exercise of the power conferred on the committee to send for persons and papers, threw open all the records of the Ordnance Bureau. The resolution ordering the investigation was adopted on the 31st of December, 1860, and the committee were authorized to report in preference to all other business. It appeared that there were two Acts of Congress under which Secretary Floyd had proceeded. One was an Act of March 3d, 1825, authorizing the Secretary of War to sell any arms, ammunition, or other military stores, which, upon proper inspection, should be found unfit for the public service. The other was a long standing act for arming the militia of the States, by distributing to them their respective quotas of arms. Whatever was done under either of these laws was necessarily done by the officers and attachés of the Ordnance Bureau. Nothing could have been done clandestinely, or without being made a matter of record. At the head of the Ordnance Bureau was Colonel Craig, one of the most loyal and faithful of the many loyal and faithful officers of the army. Under him was Captain (afterwards General) Maynadier, as chivalrously true an officer as the United States ever had. Without the knowledge of these officers, the Secretary of War could not have sold or removed a musket. The investigations of the Congressional committee embraced four principal heads: 1st. What arms had been sold? 2d. What arms had been distributed to the States? 3d. What arms had been sent for storage in Southern arsenals of the United States? 4th. What ordnance had been transferred from Northern arsenals of the United States to Southern forts?

1. Under the first of these inquiries the committee ascertained and reported that, in the spring of 1859, 50,000 muskets, part of a lot of 190,000, condemned by the inspecting officers “as unsuitable for the public service,” were offered for sale. They reported the bids and contracts, some of which were and some were not carried out. The result of actual sales and deliveries left many of them in the hands of the Government. In speaking of these muskets generally, Colonel Craig testified before the committee that it was always advisable to get rid of them whenever there was a sufficient number of the new rifled muskets to take their places, the old ones not being strong enough to be rifled. In the spring of 1859, therefore, a year before the nomination of Mr. Lincoln, as Mr. Buchanan has well said, if the cotton States were then meditating a rebellion, they lost an opportunity to buy a lot of poor arms condemned by the inspecting officers of the United States.[100] The only Southern State that made a bid was Louisiana, which purchased 5000 of these condemned muskets, and finally took but 2500. One lot was bid for by an agent of the Sardinian government, who afterwards refused to take them on some dispute about the price which he had offered.

Footnote 100:

Buchanan’s Defence, p. 228.

2. In regard to arms distributed to the States and Territories since January 1st, 1860, the committee ascertained and reported that the whole number of muskets distributed among all the States, North and South, was 8423. These were army muskets of the best quality; but neither of the States of Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, North Carolina, or Texas, received any of them, because they neglected to ask for the quotas to which they were entitled. The other Southern and Southwestern States, which did apply for their quotas, received 2091 of these army muskets, or less than one-fourth. Of long range rifles of the army calibre, all the States received, in 1860, 1728. Six of the Southern and Southwestern States, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, received in the aggregate 758 of these long range rifles, and the two other Southern States received none. The eight Southern States received in the aggregate a less number of muskets and rifles than would be required to properly equip two full regiments.

3. In relation to arms transferred to the Southern arsenals of the United States, the committee ascertained that on the 29th of December, 1859, nearly eleven months before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and several months before his nomination, the Secretary of War ordered Colonel Craig to remove one-fifth of the old flint-lock and percussion muskets from the Springfield armory in Massachusetts, where they had accumulated in inconvenient numbers, to five Southern arsenals of the United States, for storage. The order and all the proceedings under it were duly recorded. No haste was resorted to: the arms were to be removed “from time to time, as may be most suitable for economy and transportation,” and to be placed in the different arsenals “in proportion to their respective means of proper storage.” This order was carried out by the Ordnance Bureau in the usual course of administration, without reference to the President. Of these muskets, entirely inferior to the new rifled musket of the United States army, 105,000 were transferred to the Southern arsenals under this order. There were also transferred under the same order, 10,000 of the old percussion rifles, of an inferior calibre to the new rifled muskets then used by the army. These constituted the 115,000 “extra muskets and rifles” which General Scott asserted, in 1862, had been sent into the South to arm the insurgents, who, he supposed, were just ready to commence the civil war eleven months before Mr. Lincoln’s election. Colonel Maynadier, in a letter which he addressed to a Congressional committee on the 3d of February, 1862, said of this order of December 29th, 1859, that it never occurred to him that it could have any improper motive, for Mr. Floyd was “then regarded throughout the country as a strong advocate of the Union and an opponent of secession, and had recently published a letter in a Richmond paper which gained him high credit in the North for his boldness in rebuking the pernicious views of many in his own State.” It should be added that no ammunition whatever was embraced in the order, and none accompanied the muskets.

4. On the subject of heavy ordnance ordered by Secretary Floyd to be sent from Pittsburgh to two forts of the United States then erecting in the South, the committee found and reported the following facts: On the 20th of December, 1860, nine days before his resignation, Secretary Floyd, without the knowledge of the President, gave to Captain Maynadier a verbal order to send to the forts on Ship Island and at Galveston the heavy guns necessary for their armament. Proceeding to carry out this order, Captain Maynadier, on the 22d of December, sent his written orders to the commanding officer of the Alleghany arsenal at Pittsburgh, directing him to send 113 “Columbiads” and 11 32-pounders to the two Southern forts. When these orders reached Pittsburgh, they caused a great excitement in that city. A committee of the citizens, whose letter to the President lies before me, dated December 25th, brought the matter to his personal attention, and advised that the orders be countermanded. The guns had not been shipped. Four days after this letter was written, Secretary Floyd was out of office. Mr. Holt, the new Secretary, by direction of the President, immediately rescinded the order. The city councils of Pittsburgh, on the 4th of January, 1861, sent a vote of thanks for this prompt proceeding, to the President, in which they included the new Attorney General, Mr. Stanton, and the new Secretary of War, Mr. Holt.

With this transaction General Scott had nothing whatever to do. Yet, in 1862, he at first thought that he discovered, early in March, 1861, something that happened in the December and January previous, and that he interfered just in time “to defeat the robbery!” It will be noticed that the General claimed to have given this information to Secretary Holt while he was acting for Secretary Cameron; that is, in March, after the close of Mr. Buchanan’s administration, and before Mr. Cameron, Mr. Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had taken possession of the Department. So that the inference naturally was that Mr. Buchanan had allowed his administration to expire, leaving this “posthumous order” of Secretary Floyd in force after Mr. Lincoln’s accession, and that but for General Scott’s interposition it would have been carried out; although the whole affair was ended before the 4th day of January, on information received from the citizens of Pittsburgh and promptly acted upon by President Buchanan and Secretary Holt, without any interference whatever by General Scott![101]

Footnote 101:

When this extraordinary blunder was brought to the General’s attention, in his controversy with Mr. Buchanan, in 1862, he said that the only error he had made was in giving March instead of January as the time when the order was countermanded, and that this error was immaterial! He still insisted that he gave the information to Mr. Holt that the shipment had commenced, and that he stopped it. It is certainly most remarkable that he did not see that time was of the essence of his charge against the Buchanan administration, for his charge imputed to that administration a delay from January to March in countermanding the order, and claimed for himself the whole merit of the discovery and the countermand. He would better have consulted his own dignity and character if he had frankly retracted the whole statement. But probably the story of the Pittsburgh ordnance, as he put it, has been believed by thousands, to the prejudice of President Buchanan. (See the letters of General Scott, published in the National Intelligencer.)

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XXI. November, 1860-March, 1861

THE ACTION OF CONGRESS ON THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL MESSAGE—THE “CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE”—STRANGE COURSE OF THE NEW YORK “TRIBUNE”—SPECIAL MESSAGE OF JANUARY 8, 1861.

It is now necessary to turn to what took place in Congress upon the recommendations of the President’s annual message. There were but two courses that Congress could pursue in this most extraordinary emergency. It must either preserve the Union by peaceful measures, or it must provide the President and his successor with the military force requisite to secure the execution of the laws and the supremacy of the Constitution. It was plain that in this, as in all similar cases of threatened revolt against the authority of a regular and long established government, mere inaction would be a fatal policy. After the State of South Carolina should have adopted an ordinance of secession, it would be too late to accomplish anything by merely arguing against the constitutional doctrine on which the asserted right of secession depended. That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable strength. To the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the measures of conciliation needful for one of the alternatives of a sound and safe policy, and to execute the laws by all the means with which the Executive was then or might thereafter be clothed by the legislature. But the Executive could not in the smallest degree increase the means which existing laws had placed in his hands.

There was all the more reason for prompt action upon the President’s pacific recommendations, in the fact that the Government of the United States was wholly unprepared for a civil war. The nature of such a war, the character of the issue on which it would have to be waged, and the natural repugnance of the people of both sections to have such a calamity befall the country, all tended to enhance the duty of preventing it by timely concessions which would in no way impair the authority of the Constitution. It is true that potentially the Government had great resources in its war making power, its taxing power, and its control over the militia of the States. But inasmuch as a sudden resort to its ultimate powers, and to their plenary exercise was at this moment fraught with the greatest peril, there can be no question that the duty of conciliation stood first in the rank of moral and patriotic duties incumbent upon the representatives of the States and the people in the two houses of Congress. Next in the relative rank of these duties, to be performed, however, simultaneously with the first of them, stood the obligation to strengthen the hands of the Executive for the execution of the laws and the preservation of the public property in South Carolina, which was manifestly about to assume the attitude of an independent and foreign State. Whether either of these great duties was performed by the Congress, to which President Buchanan addressed his annual message and his subsequent appeals; what were the causes which produced a failure to meet the exigency; on whom rests the responsibility for that failure, and what were the consequences which it entailed, must now be considered. Mr. Buchanan has said that this Congress, beyond question, had it in its power to preserve the peace of the country and the integrity of the Union, and that it failed in this duty.[102] Is this a righteous judgment, which history ought to affirm?

Footnote 102:

Buchanan’s Defence, chapter vii.

In the Senate, after the reading of the President’s message, so much as related to the present agitated and distracted condition of the country and the grievances between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States, was referred to a select committee of thirteen members. The composition of this committee was most remarkable. It consisted of five Republicans: Senators Seward, Collamer, Wade, Doolittle, and Grimes, all of them from non-slaveholding States, and all prominent adherents of that “Chicago platform” on which Mr. Lincoln had been elected; five members from slaveholding States, Senators Powell, Hunter, Crittenden, Toombs, and Davis, and three “Northern Democrats,” Senators Douglas, Bigler, and Bright. It was understood that the three last named Senators were placed upon the committee to act as mediators between the Northern and the Southern sections which the ten other members represented. Under ordinary circumstances, a committee would have shaped its report by the decisions of a majority of its members, if they could not be unanimous. But at the first meeting of this committee, on the 21st of December, the day after that on which South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession, an extraordinary resolution was adopted, that no proposition should be reported as the decision of the committee, unless sustained by a majority of each of the classes comprising the committee, and it was defined that the Senators of the Republican party were to constitute one class, and Senators of the other parties were to constitute the other class. Thus, while there were eight members of the committee who might, by concurring in any proposition, ordinarily determine the action of the body, it could not become the decision of that body unless it was supported by the votes of a separate majority of the five Republican members. It was said that the reason for this restriction was that no report would be adopted by the Senate, unless it had been concurred in by at least a majority of the five Republican Senators. Valid or invalid as this reason may have been, the restriction is a remarkable proof of the sectional attitude of the Northern Senators, of the responsibility which they assumed, and of the willingness of the majority of the Southern Senators to have the Republican members of the committee exercise such a power and bear such a responsibility. The sequel will show how a committee thus composed and thus tied down was likely to act.

On the 22d, Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, a Senator whose name will be forever venerated for the patriotic part which he took throughout the proceedings of this Congress, submitted to the committee a “Joint Resolution,” which he had already offered in the Senate, and which became known as “the Crittenden Compromise.” It proposed certain amendments of the Constitution which would reconcile the conflicting claims of the North and the South, by yielding to the South the right to take slaves into the Territories south of the parallel of 36° 30´, and excluding slavery from all the Territories north of that line: with the further provision that when any Territory north or south of that line, within such boundaries as Congress might prescribe, should contain a population requisite for a member of Congress, it should be admitted into the Union as a State with or without slavery, as the State constitution adopted by the people might provide. When it is considered that the people of the slaveholding States claimed that the Supreme Court of the United States had already decided that slaves might be taken as property into any Territory and be there held as property, under a constitutional right resulting from the common ownership of the Territories by the States composing the Union, the “Crittenden Compromise,” if accepted, would be a sacrifice by the South with which the North might well be content. Whatever were the technical reasons which could be alleged to show that the Supreme Court had not made a determination of this question that was binding as a judicial decision, it was nevertheless true that a majority of the judges had affirmed in their several opinions the claim of every Southern slaveholder to carry his slaves into the Territories of the United States and to hold them there as property, until the formation of a State constitution. President Buchanan always regarded the case of “Dred Scott” as a judicial decision of this constitutional question. But whether it was so or not, the claim had long been asserted and was still asserted by the people of the Southern States; and if it was still open as a judicial question, as the Republican party contended, and if it could be resisted as a political claim by one section of the Union, it was equally open to the other section to treat it as a political controversy, which required to be disposed of by mutual concession between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. The Republican party, confined exclusively to the non-slaveholding States, had, by their political platform in the late Presidential election, treated the action of the Supreme Court as a nullity, and had affirmed as a cardinal doctrine of their political creed that slavery should forever be excluded, by positive law, from all the Territories of the United States. The circumstances under which the Democratic party came into the political field in that election did not show that this party universally took the opposite side; but the votes of the Southern States in the election show most clearly that the people of those States still asserted the claim which they held to have been affirmed by the highest judicial tribunal in the country.

If, therefore, the Crittenden Compromise should be accepted by the South, it could not be denied that the South would sacrifice a claim which her people were practically unanimous in asserting as a right. On the other hand, what would the North lose by that compromise? It would lose nothing but an abstraction; for there was no Territory south of 36° 30´ but New Mexico, and into that Territory slave labor could never be profitably introduced, on account of the nature of the country.[103] While, therefore, the North would by this compromise yield nothing but a useless abstract concession to the South, and would gain, in fact, all the vast territory north of the compromise line as free territory forever, the Republican party would undoubtedly have to sacrifice the dogma of the “Chicago platform.” Whether that dogma ought to have been held paramount to every other consideration, is a question on which posterity will have to pass.

Footnote 103:

All the remaining territory south of the line of 36° 30´ was an Indian reservation, secured to certain tribes by solemn treaties.

It was not yet too late to make this peace-offering to the South. Mr. Crittenden’s proposition was offered to the committee before any of the Government forts in the Southern States had been seized, when no State excepting South Carolina had “seceded,” and when no convention of the six other cotton States had assembled. Well might Mr. Buchanan say that the moment was propitious. Well might the patriotic Crittenden say, in addressing his colleagues on the committee: “The sacrifice to be made for its preservation (the Union) is comparatively worthless. Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate as we now have it in our power to do. It is a scruple only, a scruple of as little value as a barleycorn, that stands between us and peace, and reconciliation, and union; and we stand here pausing and hesitating about that little atom which is to be sacrificed.”

But this admirable and unselfish statesman was then to learn that there are states of men’s minds and characters when, fixed by the antecedents and committals of party, eloquence does not convince, facts are powerless; when the “barleycorn” becomes a great and important object; when mole hills become mountains, and when fear of constituents dominates over all other fears. Yet it cannot be doubted that there was really very little reason to fear that the constituencies of Northern Senators would hold them to a strict account for voting in favor of the Crittenden Compromise. Public feeling almost everywhere hailed it as the promise of peace and of the perpetuity of the Union. Nevertheless, all the five Republican members of the committee voted against it. This secured its rejection, under the resolution that had been adopted by the committee. But the singular fact is to be added that two Senators from the cotton States, Messrs. Davis, of Mississippi, and Toombs, of Georgia, also voted in the same way.

Readers will look in vain through Mr. Jefferson Davis’s recent work for a satisfactory explanation of this vote. But an explanation may perhaps be found in his whole course from the beginning of the session to his withdrawal from the Senate in the month of January, 1861, after the State of Mississippi had seceded. No impartial person can, it seems to me, read Mr. Davis’s own account of his public conduct at this crisis, without reaching the conclusion that whatever aid he may at any time have been disposed to render in the pacification of the country was at all times neutralized by his attitude in regard to the right of secession. From first to last he insisted that South Carolina, after she had adopted an ordinance of secession, should be regarded by the Government of the United States as an independent power. He was active in promoting the objects for which her commissioners came to Washington in the last week of December. He demanded that the troops of the United States should be withdrawn from the forts in Charleston harbor; that those forts should be surrendered to the paramount sovereignty of a State now become a foreign nation; and he scouted and ridiculed the idea that the Federal Executive could employ a military force in executing the laws of the United States within the dominion of a State which had withdrawn the powers that she had formerly deposited with the General Government. There was something singularly preposterous in this demand that a great government, which had subsisted for more than seventy years, and had always executed its laws against all combinations of an insurrectionary character, whether created by individuals or by State authority, should now “thaw and resolve itself into a dew,” before the all-consuming energy of a State ordinance; should accept the secession theory of the Constitution as the unquestionable law of the land, at the peril of encountering a civil war. How could measures of conciliation and concession be of any value, though tendered by the Federal Government, if that Government was in the same breath to admit that it had no constitutional power to enforce its authority if the offer of conciliation and concession should be rejected? Yet Mr. Davis’s ground of quarrel with President Buchanan was that he would not admit the right of secession. He could not either persuade or drive the President into that admission; and surely there can be no stronger proof of the integrity, fidelity and firmness of the President than this one fact affords.

Mr. Davis takes credit to himself and other Southern Senators for having intervened to prevent the authorities of South Carolina from making any attack upon the forts, so that a civil war might not be precipitated while measures for the settlement of the sectional difficulties were pending. No one need deny that those Senators are entitled to all the credit that justly belongs to such efforts. But why were those efforts made, and by what were they all along accompanied? They were made in order that there might be no bloodshed brought about, which would cause the other cotton States to recoil from the support of South Carolina in her assertion of the right of secession; and they were always accompanied by the demand that the Federal Government should permit the peaceable secession of any State, even to the extent of refraining from enforcing its laws and from holding its property within the dominions of any State that should choose to secede. This idea of peaceable secession, and all that it comprehended, was founded on the wild expectation that the two classes of States, slaveholding and non-slaveholding, after an experimental trial of separate confederacies, would find some system of union, some basis of reconstruction, other than the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Whatever claims of statesmanship may belong to those who entertained this chimerical project, they could hardly press it upon others as a reason for treating the Constitution of the United States as a system of government confessedly destitute of any authority or power to execute its own laws or to retain its own existence. But this is just what Mr. Davis denounced President Buchanan for not admitting; and he therefore, to the extent of his influence, counteracted the President’s great object of isolating the State of South Carolina by measures that would quiet the agitation in other slaveholding States, and at the same time would prepare the necessary means for executing the laws of the United States within the limits of that one State, in case she should adopt an ordinance of secession.

On the other hand, the Republican Senators on the Committee of Thirteen who voted against the Crittenden Compromise had no such policy to actuate them as that which governed Mr. Davis. They had no reason for refusing their aid to the President that could be founded on any difference of opinion as to the constitutional duty of the Executive. They knew that he was asking for means to uphold the authority of the Constitution in South Carolina, at the same time that he was urging measures which would prevent other States from joining her in the secession movement. What explanation of their conduct is possible and will leave to them the acquittal of patriotic purposes, I am not aware. But the fact is, that at no time during the session did a single Republican Senator, in any form whatever, give his vote or his influence for the Crittenden Compromise, or for any other measure that would strengthen the hands of the President either in maintaining peace or in executing the laws of the United States. Whether the spirit of party led them to refuse all aid to an outgoing President; whether they did not believe that there would be any necessity for a resort to arms; whether they did not choose, from sectional animosity, to abate anything from the “Chicago platform;” whatever was the governing motive for their inaction, it never can be said that they were not seasonably warned by the President that a policy of inaction would be fatal. That policy not only crippled him, but it crippled his successor. When Mr. Lincoln came into office, seven States had already seceded, and not a single law had been put upon the statute book which would enable the Executive to meet such a condition of the Union.

Not only is it manifest that the Crittenden proposition was reasonable and proper in itself, but there is high authority for saying that it ought to have been embraced by every Republican Senator. While it was pending before the Committee of Thirteen, General Duff Green, a prominent citizen of Mississippi, visited Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Mr. Green took with him a copy of Mr. Crittenden’s resolutions, and asked Mr. Lincoln’s opinion of them. The substance of what Mr. Lincoln said was reported on the 28th of December to President Buchanan, in the following note:

[GENERAL DUFF GREEN TO PRESIDENT BUCHANAN.]

SPRINGFIELD, ILL., December 28, 1860.

DEAR SIR:—

I have had a long and interesting conversation with Mr. Lincoln. I brought with me a copy of the resolutions submitted by Mr. Crittenden, which he read over several times, and said that he believed that the adoption of the line proposed would quiet, for the present, the agitation of the slavery question, but believed it would be renewed by the seizure and attempted annexation of Mexico. He said that the real question at issue between the North and the South was slavery “propagandism,” and that upon that issue the Republican party was opposed to the South, and that he was with his own party; that he had been elected by that party, and intended to sustain his party in good faith; but added, that the question on the amendments to the Constitution and the questions submitted by Mr. Crittenden belonged to the people and States in legislatures or conventions, and that he would be inclined not only to acquiesce, but to give full force and effect to their will thus expressed. Seeing that he was embarrassed by his sense of duty to his party, I suggested that he might so frame a letter to me as to refer the measures for the preservation of the Union to the action of the people in the several States, and he promised to prepare a letter, giving me his views, by 9 a.m. to-morrow. If his letter be satisfactory, its purport will be communicated to you by telegraph.

Yours truly, DUFF GREEN.

I know of no evidence that Mr. Lincoln prepared the letter which he promised. No account of it appears to have reached Mr. Buchanan by telegraph or otherwise. It is probable that Mr. Lincoln, feeling more strongly the embarrassment arising from his party relations, reconsidered his determination, and excused himself to General Green. But what his opinion was is sufficiently proved by the note which General Green dispatched from Springfield, and which must have reached Mr. Buchanan at about the time when the committee of thirteen made their report to the Senate that they were unable to agree upon any general plan of adjustment of the sectional difficulties. This report was made on the 31st of December.

The last ten days of the year were thus suffered to elapse without anything being done to arrest the rising tide of secession in the seven cotton States. Most of these States had suspended or delayed their action until it could be known whether there was to be any concession made by the Republican party as represented in Congress. They now rapidly accomplished their secession measures. The conventions of Florida on the 7th of January, Mississippi on the 9th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 25th, and Texas on the 5th of February, adopted ordinances of secession by great majorities. These ordinances were followed by a general seizure of the public property of the United States within the limits of those States, after the example of South Carolina.

Among the discouraging influences which now operated with a double mischief to counteract the efforts of those who aimed to confine secession to the State of South Carolina, must be mentioned the course of one of the most prominent papers of the North. No journal had exercised a greater power in promoting the election of Mr. Lincoln upon the “Chicago platform” than the New York Tribune. It was universally and justly regarded as a representative of a large section of the Republican party. Its founder and chief editor, Horace Greeley, was a man of singular mould. Beginning life as a journeyman printer, he learned in the practice of type-setting the compass and power of the English language. In the course of a long experience as a public writer, he acquired a style of much energy, and of singular directness. But, without a regular education and the mental discipline which it gives, he never learned to take a comprehensive and statesmanlike view of public questions. His impulses, feelings, and sympathies were on the side of humanity and the progress of mankind. But these generous and noble qualities were unbalanced by a sense of the restraints which the fundamental political conditions of the American Union imposed upon philanthropic action. He was, therefore, almost incapable of appreciating the moral foundations on which the Union was laid by the Constitution of the United States. He felt deeply the inherent wrong of African slavery, but he could not see, or did not care to see, that the Union of slaveholding and non-slaveholding States under one system of government for national purposes was caused by public necessities that justified its original formation, and that continued to make its preservation the highest of civil obligations. He did not, like many of the anti-slavery agitators, renounce the whole of the Constitution. But while he was willing that the North should enjoy its benefits, he was ever ready to assail those provisions, however deeply they were embedded in the basis of the Union, which recognized and to a qualified extent upheld the slavery existing under the local law of certain States. When, therefore, the long political conflict between the two sections of the country culminated in a condition of things which presented the alternatives of a peaceful separation of the slave and the free States, or a denial of the doctrine of secession and the consequences claimed for it, Mr. Greeley threw his personal weight, and the weight of his widely circulated journal, against the authority of the General Government to enforce in any way the obligations of the Constitution. He did not much concern himself with the distinction between coercing a State by force of arms from adopting an ordinance of secession, and coercing individuals after secession to obey the laws of the United States. From the period immediately before the election of Mr. Lincoln, after his election, and for a time after his inauguration, Mr. Greeley opposed all coercion of every kind. He maintained that the right of secession was the same as the right of revolution; and after the cotton States had formed their confederacy and adopted a provisional constitution, he tendered the aid of his journal to forward their views. He thus, on the one hand, joined his influence to the cry of the professed abolitionists who renounced the Constitution entirely, and on the other hand, contributed his powerful pen in encouraging the secessionists to persevere in separating their States from the Union.

Mr. Greeley’s secession argument, drawn from the Declaration of Independence and the right of revolution, was a remarkable proof of the unsoundness of his reasoning powers. Because the right of self-government is an inherent right of a people, he assumed that men cannot be required to perform their covenanted obligations. He could not see, he said, how twenty millions of people could rightfully hold ten, or even five, other millions in a political union which those other millions wished to renounce. But if he had ever been in the habit of reasoning upon the Constitution of the United States as other men reasoned, who did not accept the doctrine of State secession, he could have seen that when five millions of people, exercising freely the right of self-government, have solemnly covenanted with the twenty millions that they will obey the laws enacted by a legislative authority which they have voluntarily established over themselves and over all the inhabitants of the country, the moralist and the publicist can rest the right to use compulsion upon a basis which is perfectly consistent with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and which those principles do in truth recognize.

In fact, however, Mr. Greeley, by his public utterances at this great crisis, bettered the instructions of the secessionists themselves. He taught them that the Crittenden Compromise, or any other measure of conciliation, need not be considered. They had only to will that they would leave the Union, and they were out of it, and at liberty to care nothing about concessions from the North. And in the same way, he taught those of the North, on whom rested the immediate duty of preventing the spread of the secession movement, that all measures of conciliation were useless, for the right of secession, as he maintained, was bottomed on the Declaration of Independence, and neither persuasion nor coercion ought to be used against the exercise of such a right. Such political philosophy as this, proclaimed by a leading organ of the Republican party, created difficulties for a President situated as Mr. Buchanan was after the election of his successor, which posterity can not overlook.[104]

Footnote 104:

Mr. Greeley’s utterances must be cited, that I may not be supposed to have in any way misrepresented him. But three days after Mr. Lincoln’s election, the New York Tribune announced such sentiments as the following: “If the cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, BUT IT EXISTS NEVERTHELESS...... We must ever resist the right of any State to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof. TO WITHDRAW FROM THE UNION IS QUITE ANOTHER MATTER; and whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, WE SHALL RESIST ALL COERCIVE MEASURES DESIGNED TO KEEP IT IN. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to another by bayonets.”

And again on the 17th December, three days before the secession of South Carolina: “If it [the Declaration of Independence] justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? For our part, while we deny the right of slaveholders to hold slaves against the will of the latter, we cannot see how twenty millions of people can rightfully hold ten, or even five, in a detested Union with them by military force. ...... If seven or eight contiguous States shall present themselves authentically at Washington, saying, ‘We hate the Federal Union; we have withdrawn from it; we give you the choice between acquiescing in our secession and arranging amicably all incidental questions on the one hand, and attempting to subdue us on the other,’ we would not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of self-government, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others. So much for the question of principle.”

In this course the Tribune persisted from the date of Mr. Lincoln’s election until after his inauguration, employing such remarks as the following: “Any attempt to compel them by force to remain would be contrary to the principles enunciated in the immortal Declaration of Independence, contrary to the fundamental ideas on which human liberty is based.”

Even after the cotton States had formed their confederacy, and adopted a provisional constitution at Montgomery, on the 23d February, 1861, it gave them encouragement to proceed in the following language: “We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just; and that if the slave States, the cotton States or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, THEY HAVE A CLEAR MORAL RIGHT TO DO SO. Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it, WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO FORWARD THEIR VIEWS.”

Seeing how fatally wrong was the course of this erratic journalist, and how much depended on the success of the Crittenden Compromise, the President endeavored to enlist in its behalf another great journal of the North, which was conducted by a person on whom he thought he could rely, and whose paper was professedly independent of party politics. The following private letter to the editor of the New York Herald attests how earnestly Mr. Buchanan was bent upon the improvement of every chance by which the spread of secession might be prevented:

[MR. BUCHANAN TO JAMES GORDON BENNETT.]

(Private and confidential.) WASHINGTON, December 20, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

You wield the most powerful organ in the country for the formation of public opinion, and I have no doubt you feel a proportionate responsibility under the present alarming circumstances of the country. Every person here has his own remedy for existing evils, and there is no general assent to any proposition. Still, I believe the tendency is strong, and is becoming stronger every day, towards the Missouri Compromise, with the same protection to slaves south of 36° 30´ that is given to other property. The South can lose no territory north of this line, because no portion of it is adapted to slave labor, whilst they would gain a substantial security within the Union by such a constitutional amendment. The Republicans have for some years manifested indignation at the repeal of this compromise, and would probably be more willing to accept it than any other measure to guarantee the rights of the South. I have stated my favorite plan in the message, but am willing to abandon it at any moment for one more practicable and equally efficacious. If your judgment should approve it, you could do much by concentrating and directing your energies to this single point. My object, when I commenced to write, was simply to express my opinion that existing circumstances tended strongly toward the Missouri Compromise; but, with pen in hand, I shall make one or two other remarks.

I do not know whether the great commercial and social advantages of the telegraph are not counterbalanced by its political evils. No one can judge of this so well as myself. The public mind throughout the interior is kept in a constant state of excitement by what are called “telegrams.” They are short and spicy, and can easily be inserted in the country newspapers. In the city journals they can be contradicted the next day; but the case is different throughout the country. Many of them are sheer falsehoods, and especially those concerning myself......

With my kindest and most cordial regards to Mrs. Bennett, I remain, very respectfully, your friend,

JAMES BUCHANAN.

Although defeated before the Committee of Thirteen, Mr. Crittenden did not abandon the cause of peace and Union. His proposed compromise, it was now apparent, could not be carried as an amendment of the Constitution by the requisite two-thirds vote of Congress. But an appeal could be made to the people, if a majority of both Houses would send the question to them; and if this majority could be obtained in time, he and others had good reason to believe that the course of secession in the six remaining cotton States could be stayed. He therefore postponed by his own motion the further consideration of his proposed amendment, and on the 3d of January, 1861, before any State excepting South Carolina had seceded, he introduced a substitute for it, in the shape of a joint resolution, by which he proposed to refer his compromise to a direct vote of the people in the several States, so that they could instruct their representatives to give it the initiatory shape of a constitutional amendment. This course of action was not provided for in the amending clause of the Constitution, and it was, without doubt, extraordinary. But there was nothing in the Constitution inconsistent with it; it would not set aside any of the forms by which amendments of the Constitution must be initiated and adopted; and the circumstances of the country were so extraordinary that any means of reaching public opinion would be entirely proper. Moreover, it was not an unprecedented step, for State legislatures and other public bodies had frequently recommended various amendments of the Constitution. Mr. Crittenden’s resolution justified itself by its own terms. It read as follows:

“Whereas, the Union is in danger, and, owing to the unhappy divisions existing in Congress, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for that body to concur in both its branches by the requisite majority, so as to enable it either to adopt such measures of legislation, or to recommend to the States such amendments to the Constitution, as are deemed necessary and proper to avert that danger; and, whereas, in so great an emergency, the opinion and judgment of the people ought to be heard, and would be the best and surest guide to their representatives: Therefore, Resolved, That provision ought to be made by law, without delay, for taking the sense of the people and submitting to their vote the following resolution [the same as in his former amendment], as the basis for the final and permanent settlement of those disputes that now disturb the peace of the country and threaten the existence of the Union.”

The President now interposed the weight of his office, by a special message to Congress, dated on the 8th of January. What had occurred between him and the South Carolina commissioners has been detailed. Of this occurrence, and of the position of affairs in Charleston harbor, Congress was now officially informed by the special message; the residue of it was devoted to the expediency and necessity of allowing the people to express their sentiments concerning the proposition of Mr. Crittenden.

TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:

At the opening of your present session I called your attention to the dangers which threatened the existence of the Union. I expressed my opinion freely concerning the original causes of those dangers, and recommended such measures as I believed would have the effect of tranquilizing the country and saving it from the peril in which it had been needlessly and most unfortunately involved. Those opinions and recommendations I do not propose now to repeat. My own convictions upon the whole subject remain unchanged.

The fact that a great calamity was impending over the nation was even at that time acknowledged by every intelligent citizen. It had already made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the land. The necessary consequences of the alarm thus produced were most deplorable. The imports fell off with a rapidity never known before, except in time of war, in the history of our foreign commerce; the Treasury was unexpectedly left without the means which it had reasonably counted upon to meet the public engagements; trade was paralyzed; manufactures were stopped; the best public securities suddenly sunk in the market; every species of property depreciated more or less; and thousands of poor men, who depended upon their daily labor for their daily bread, were turned out of employment.

I deeply regret that I am not able to give you any information upon the state of the Union which is more satisfactory than what I was then obliged to communicate. On the contrary, matters are still worse at present than they then were. When Congress met, a strong hope pervaded the whole public mind that some amicable adjustment of the subject would speedily be made by the representatives of the States and of the people, which might restore peace between the conflicting sections of the country. That hope has been diminished by every hour of delay; and as the prospect of a bloodless settlement fades away, the public distress becomes more and more aggravated. As evidence of this, it is only necessary to say that the Treasury notes authorized by the act of 17th December last were advertised, according to the law, and that no responsible bidder offered to take any considerable sum at par at a lower rate of interest than twelve per cent. From these facts it appears that, in a government organized like ours, domestic strife, or even a well-grounded fear of civil hostilities, is more destructive to our public and private interests than the most formidable foreign war.

In my annual message I expressed the conviction, which I have long deliberately held, and which recent reflection has only tended to deepen and confirm, that no State has a right by its own act to secede from the Union, or throw off its Federal obligations at pleasure. I also declared my opinion to be that, even if that right existed and should be exercised by any State of the Confederacy, the Executive Department of this Government had no authority under the Constitution to recognize its validity by acknowledging the independence of such State. This left me no alternative, as the Chief Executive officer under the Constitution of the United States, but to collect the public revenues and to protect the public property so far as this might be practicable under existing laws. This is still my purpose. My province is to execute, and not to make the laws. It belongs to Congress, exclusively, to repeal, to modify, or to enlarge their provisions, to meet exigencies as they may occur. I possess no dispensing power.

I certainly had no right to make aggressive war upon any State, and I am perfectly satisfied that the Constitution has wisely withheld that power even from Congress. But the right and the duty to use military force defensively against those who resist the Federal officers in the execution of their legal functions, and against those who assail the property of the Federal Government, is clear and undeniable.

But the dangerous and hostile attitude of the States toward each other has already far transcended and cast in the shade the ordinary executive duties already provided for by law, and has assumed such vast and alarming proportions as to place the subject entirely above and beyond executive control. The fact cannot be disguised that we are in the midst of a great revolution. In all its various bearings, therefore, I commend the question to Congress, as the only human tribunal, under Providence, possessing the power to meet the existing emergency. To them, exclusively, belongs the power to declare war, or to authorize the employment of military force in all cases contemplated by the Constitution; and they alone possess the power to remove grievances which might lead to war, and to secure peace and union to this distracted country. On them, and on them alone, rests the responsibility.

The Union is a sacred trust left by our revolutionary fathers to their descendants; and never did any other people inherit so rich a legacy. It has rendered us prosperous in peace and triumphant in war. The national flag has floated in glory over every sea. Under its shadow American citizens have found protection and respect in all lands beneath the sun. If we descend to considerations of purely material interest, when, in the history of all time, has a confederacy been bound together by such strong ties of mutual interest? Each portion of it is dependent on all, and all upon each portion, for prosperity and domestic security. Free trade throughout the whole supplies the wants of one portion from the productions of another, and scatters wealth everywhere. The great planting and farming States require the aid of the commercial and navigating States to send their productions to domestic and foreign markets, and to furnish the naval power to render their transportation secure against all hostile attacks.

Should the Union perish in the midst of the present excitement, we have already had a sad foretaste of the universal suffering which would result from its destruction. The calamity would be severe in every portion of the Union, and would be quite as great, to say the least, in the Southern as in the Northern States. The greatest aggravation of the evil, and that which would place us in the most unfavorable light both before the world and posterity, is, as I am firmly convinced, that the secession movement has been chiefly based upon a misapprehension at the South of the sentiments of the majority in several of the Northern States. Let the question be transferred from political assemblies to the ballot-box, and the people themselves would speedily redress the serious grievances which the South have suffered. But, in Heaven’s name, let the trial be made before we plunge into armed conflict upon the mere assumption that there is no other alternative. Time is a great conservative power. Let us pause at this momentous point and afford the people, both North and South, an opportunity for reflection. Would that South Carolina had been convinced of this truth before her precipitate action! I, therefore, appeal through you to the people of this country to declare in their might that the Union must and shall be preserved by all constitutional means. I most earnestly recommend that you devote yourselves exclusively to the question how this can be accomplished in peace. All other questions, when compared with this, sink into insignificance. The present is no time for palliatives; action, prompt action, is required. A delay in Congress to prescribe or to recommend a distinct and practical proposition for conciliation may drive us to a point from which it will be almost impossible to recede.

A common ground on which conciliation and harmony can be produced is not unattainable. The proposition to compromise by letting the North have exclusive control of the territory above a certain line, and to give Southern institutions protection below that line, ought to receive universal approbation. In itself, indeed, it may not be entirely satisfactory; but when the alternative is between a reasonable concession on both sides and a destruction of the Union, it is an imputation upon the patriotism of Congress to assert that its members will hesitate for a moment.

Even now the danger is upon us. In several of the States which have not yet seceded, the forts, arsenals, and magazines of the United States have been seized. This is by far the most serious step which has been taken since the commencement of the troubles. This public property has long been left without garrisons and troops for its protection, because no person doubted its security under the flag of the country in any State of the Union. Besides, our small army has scarcely been sufficient to guard our remote frontiers against Indian incursions. The seizure of this property, from all appearances, has been purely aggressive, and not in resistance to any attempt to coerce a State or States to remain in the Union.

At the beginning of these unhappy troubles, I determined that no act of mine should increase the excitement in either section of the country. If the political conflict were to end in a civil war, it was my determined purpose not to commence it, nor even to furnish an excuse for it by an act of this Government. My opinion remains unchanged, that justice as well as sound policy requires us still to seek a peaceful solution of the questions at issue between the North and the South. Entertaining this conviction, I refrained even from sending reinforcements to Major Anderson, who commanded the forts in Charleston harbor, until an absolute necessity for doing so should make itself apparent, lest it might unjustly be regarded as a menace of military coercion, and thus furnish, if not a provocation, a pretext for an outbreak on the part of South Carolina. No necessity for these reinforcements seemed to exist. I was assured by distinguished and upright gentlemen of South Carolina[105] that no attack upon Major Anderson was intended, but that, on the contrary, it was the desire of the State authorities, as much as it was my own, to avoid the fatal consequences which must eventually follow a military collision.

Footnote 105:

Messrs. McQueen, Miles, Bonham, Boyce, and Keitt, members of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, on the 8th of December, 1860.

And here I deem it proper to submit, for your information, copies of a communication, dated December 28, 1860, addressed to me by R. W. Barnwell, J. H. Adams, and J. L. Orr, “commissioners” from South Carolina, with the accompanying documents, and copies of my answer thereto, dated December 31.

In further explanation of Major Anderson’s removal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, it is proper to state that, after my answer to the South Carolina “commissioners,” the War Department received a letter from that gallant officer, dated December 27, 1860, the day after this movement, from which the following is an extract:

“I will add, as my opinion, that many things convinced me that the authorities of the State designed to proceed to a hostile act” [evidently referring to the orders dated December 11, of the late Secretary of War]. “Under this impression, I could not hesitate that it was my solemn duty to move my command from a fort which we could not probably have held longer than forty-eight or sixty hours to this one, where my power of resistance is increased to a very great degree.” It will be recollected that the concluding part of these orders was in the following terms: “The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts; but an attack on, or attempt to take possession of either one 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 defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.”

It is said that serious apprehensions are, to some extent, entertained, in which I do not share, that the peace of this District may be disturbed before the 4th of March next. In any event, it will be my duty to preserve it, and this duty shall be performed.

In conclusion, it may be permitted to me to remark that I have often warned my countrymen of the dangers which now surround us. This may be the last time I shall refer to the subject officially. I feel that my duty has been faithfully, though it may be imperfectly, performed; and whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.

JAMES BUCHANAN.

WASHINGTON CITY, Jan. 8, 1861.

It is a painful part of an historian’s duty to reflect upon the conduct of public men, who had it in their power at least to show a willingness to save their country from the calamity of civil war, and who appear to have been indifferent to everything but the dogmas of a party platform. This special message of President Buchanan, in the circumstances of the moment, was entitled to the gravest attention and respect. It ought to have produced immediate assent to its recommendation, on the part of Republican Senators, whom it would have relieved from their previous committals to the “Chicago platform” by a reference of the questions in dispute to the people of the country. The venerable age of the President, his long experience in public affairs, his unquestionable patriotism, his approaching retirement from public life, his manifest desire to leave the Government to his successor unembarrassed by anything but the secession of South Carolina, should have conciliated the support of some at least, if not of all, of the Republican Senators. But, as it is now my melancholy duty to show from the record, not one Republican Senator ever voted for Mr. Crittenden’s resolution, the adoption of which the President so strongly recommended. Memorials of the most earnest character, coming from all quarters of the North, even from New England, urging the passage of the Crittenden Compromise, were heaped upon the table of the Senate.[106] On the 14th of January, Mr. Crittenden made an unsuccessful effort to have his resolution considered. It was postponed to the following day. On the 15th, every Republican Senator voted for its further postponement, to make room for the Pacific Railroad Bill. On the 16th, Mr. Crittenden obtained, by a majority of one vote—all the Republican Senators voting nay—the consideration of his resolution. Parliamentary tactics were then resorted to by the Republicans to defeat it. Mr. Clark, a Republican Senator from New Hampshire, moved to strike out the whole preamble and body of the resolution, and to substitute in its place another preamble and resolution of an entirely opposite character, and affirming the dogma of the Chicago platform in relation to slavery in the Territories. For this motion there were 25 yeas to 23 nays; all the Republican Senators voting in the affirmative.[107] Buried under the Clark amendment, Mr. Crittenden’s resolution remained for more than six weeks, until the 2d of March, when it was too late for final action upon it. But on that day a vote was taken upon it, and it was defeated by 19 votes in the affirmative and 20 in the negative.[108]

Footnote 106:

See the Index to the Journal of the Senate for this session, pp. 494, 495, 496. One of these memorials, coming from the City Councils of Boston, had the signatures also of over 22,000 citizens, of all shades of political character. Senate Journal of 1860-’61, p. 218.

Footnote 107:

The Clark amendment, which smothered Mr. Crittenden’s resolution, prevailed, because six secession Senators refused to vote against it, preferring to play into the hands of the Republicans. They were Messrs. Benjamin and Slidell, of Louisiana; Iverson, of Georgia; Hemphill and Wigfall, of Texas; and Johnson, of Arkansas. Had they voted with the Senators from the border States and the other Democratic members, the Clark amendment would have been defeated, and the Senate would on that day, before the secession of any State excepting South Carolina, have been brought to a direct vote on Mr. Crittenden’s resolution.

Footnote 108:

“It is proper,” Mr. Buchanan said, “for future reference that the names of those Senators who constituted the majority on this momentous question, should be placed upon record. Every vote given from the six New England States was in opposition to Mr. Crittenden’s resolution. These consisted of Mr. Clark, of New Hampshire; Messrs. Sumner and Wilson, of Massachusetts; Mr. Anthony, of Rhode Island; Messrs. Dixon and Foster, of Connecticut; Mr. Foot, of Vermont; and Messrs. Fessenden and Morrill, of Maine. The remaining eleven votes, in order to make up the 20, were given by Mr. Wade, of Ohio; Mr. Trumbull, of Illinois; Messrs. Bingham and Chandler, of Michigan; Messrs. Grimes and Harlan, of Iowa; Messrs. Doolittle and Durkee, of Wisconsin; Mr. Wilkinson, of Minnesota; Mr. King, of New York; and Mr. Ten Eyck, of New Jersey. It is also worthy of observation, that neither Mr. Hale, of New Hampshire, Mr. Simmons, of Rhode Island, Mr. Collamer, of Vermont, Mr. Seward, of New York, nor Mr. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, voted on the question, although it appears from the journal that all these gentlemen were present in the Senate on the day of the vote. It would be vain to conjecture the reasons why these five Senators refrained from voting on an occasion so important.” (Buchanan’s Defence, p. 143.)

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