Memories of the Ford Administration (31 page)

King had a beautiful dark-eyed way of gazing, on the edge of anger, like Ann Coleman in the old days, as if a fathomless pool was welling up, and like Ann a spacious and strikingly white forehead, hers the effect of general feminine pallor and his the product of the broad-brimmed planter’s hat faithfully worn against the Southern sun. That lustrous black gaze appeared to interrogate and then to confirm Buchanan as he informed the assembled Senate, “The object cannot be to operate upon the slaveholders; because the Abolitionists must know, every person within the sound of my voice knows”—the crucial paradoxical point, the justification for the path of moderation and patient forbearance—“that their interference with this question has bound the slaveholding interest together as one man against abolishing slavery in their respective States.”

One man: King himself had often told his roommate how his views, barely distinguishable, when he was a youth in North Carolina, from those of a Pennsylvanian, favoring gradual emancipation followed by African resettlement in Liberia (of which hopeful young nation Buchanan’s cousin Thomas was presently Governor), had hardened in Alabama, as cotton plantations overspread the state, to an adamant patriotic defense of the peculiar institution from the assaults of those who, not living with the negro, quite fail to comprehend him—his limitations, uses, and needs. Buchanan yearned to protect King and his fellow Southerners from the slanders of the North much as he had unavailingly sought to shelter Ann from those sarcasms of her unfeeling parents and brothers which had crowded and blighted the space their tender union had required for proper ripening, for arranging its mutual sustenances with delicacy and patience. Giddiness at the chasm of time that memory opened under him threatened to weaken Buchanan at his very moment of pronouncing an incontrovertible fact: “Before this unfortunate agitation commenced, a very large and growing party existed in several of the slave States in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery; and now not a voice is heard there in support of such a measure. The Abolitionists have postponed the emancipation of the slaves in three or four States of this Union for at least half a century.”

King and his friends were, as Calhoun increasingly betrayed signs of not being, firm Union men, like Buchanan horrified by any attempt to rend the fabric of federal unity. Only madness, the madness of blood and fire and gunpowder that lurks in the wounded brains of some few marginal opportunists, could dream of destroying a fabric knit so circumspectly, with so cunning an interplay of checks and balances,
rights and obligations. “They have, by their interference, produced such a state of public opinion that no man within these States would now be bold enough to raise such a question before any of their Legislatures.” This fact, of doctrinaire extremism, given publicity by an irresponsible press, intimidating the voices of moderating reason, had been learned from King and other responsible Union men of the South. A certain pity for the black man, with the friendly images of his Daphne and little Ann Cook and Enoch the colored barber on Queen Street present to his mind, now shadowed Buchanan’s voice, as King gazed unwaveringly upon him, seeming to ask a public show of loyalty that would enrich this evening’s nightcap of claret.

“What, then,” the orator asked, and even the ladies in the gallery seemed to rustle themselves into silence, and the negro attendants grew still as they lounged in the doorways and along the back wall, where on this bitter winter day an arc of fireplaces was all alight and dancing with flame, “is the purpose of these societies—I will not say the purpose, for I cannot, and do not, attribute to them such unholy intentions—but what is the direct tendency of their measures? To irritate and exasperate the feelings of the slaves; to hold out to them vague notions and delusive hopes of liberty; to render them discontented and unhappy, and, finally, to foment servile insurrection, with all its attendant horrors, and to cover the land with blood.” Blood! He thought of his sister Jane spitting blood in Mercersburg. He thought of the misery wrought by last year’s financial panic and widespread collapse of banks, and of the dangers of war wrought by the seizure and sinking of the
Caroline
on the Niagara, and of the old King William IV dead and his willful eighteen-year-old niece now queen in a world
made perilous by Britain’s bullying ships, and of his own sister Harriet and her husband, Robert Henry, wasting away in Greensburg with all their children, and when he thought thus death indeed seemed to be steadily scything through the field of the world and our poor attempts to forestall the angels of ruin and destruction as pathetic as a voiceless outcry of grasses.

Yet, it was crystal clear, the attempt at forestallment must be made, beneath God’s heavy heel, while the Abolitionists ignorantly clamored for absolutes the Constitution had disavowed. “However devoted to the Union the South may be,” Buchanan warned aloud, a pregnancy in his voice like a bulging tear about to overflow a lower lid, “the cup of forbearance may yet be exhausted. If the father of a family be placed in such a deplorable condition”—and the memory of his own father returned, his bulky shadow moving in the low dark log cabin at Stony Batter, moving swiftly as a bat flitting amid the sparks from the fireplace and the wavering candle over in the corner where baby Maria slept in her cradle, and little Jane on her trundle bed, their father moving things about just as he scrapingly moved barrels and boxes all day in the store, closing up the cabin for the night, against the Indians and wolves, the bears and drunken drovers and incited slaves—“that he cannot rest at night without apprehension that before the morning his house may be enveloped in flames, and those who are nearest and dearest to him may be butchered, or worse than butchered,”—the fair sex forced to submit, it might be, at an extremity of earthly misfortune, to the black man’s untamed animal appetites—“the great law of self-preservation will compel him to seek security by whatever means it may be obtained.” Killed, it is nearing twenty years
ago, that vigorous shadow of paternal protection, by a bolted carriage horse, the old man’s head striking the iron tire, and proving to be the less hard. Died without a will, leaving it to his overworked son, freshly elected to the Congress, to untangle the estate.

“Now, sir,” Buchanan told the Senate in the singular, as if all the manifold personalities, participating and witnessing, within the chamber were in fact gathered within the attentive, receptive masculine face at the etched oval center of his fluctuating field of vision, his two eyes ever contending in their impressions rather than, as with most men, effortlessly harmonizing, “I have long watched the progress of this agitation with intense anxiety, and”—the confidentiality of his voice dropped to the pitch of earnest intimate conversation—“I can say in solemn truth that never before have I witnessed such a deep pervading and determined feeling as exists at present upon this subject among the sober and reflecting men of the South.” Sober, reflecting—such was King.
He is among the best, purest, & most consistent public men I have ever known
, Buchanan will write fourteen years later to Franklin Pierce, a few months short of Pierce’s inauguration and King’s death,
& is, also, a sound judging and discreet counsellor
. Also in 1852 he will tell another correspondent,
I have written you such a letter as I have never written to any other friend except Col. King
.

What is it that enables us, in some few instances, to touch the walls of alien sensibility and inimical self-interest which surround us, and to discover a panel which yields to our faint pressure? The difference must be the intuition, backed by friendly evidences, that the other likes us. Not many did like Buchanan.
In his public life he elicited little warmth of friendship
, Roy Nichols—freely given to
ad hominem
assertion—tells us.
One looks almost in vain among his legion of correspondents for any who used informal address. Vice President William R. King, who died in 1853, was almost the last of the few who wrote him as “Dear Buchanan.”
In the year prior to his speech on the Calhoun resolutions, according to Klein,
Senator W. R. King had ribbed him during the early spring about neglecting his usual affairs from “the anxieties of love.”
King was somehow amused by the country lawyer with his big pale dishevelled head tilted as if by the pull of a scar of an old neck wound, an old emotional bafflement; King presumably liked not least in the other the affection Buchanan awarded the men and women of the South, as possessing the opposite of that clangorous appetitive quality which had wounded him in his hardware merchant of a father, in the iron-forging Colemans, in the politicians of New England and New York, who were tools of the manufacturing interests. There were two broad currents in the national enterprise, agriculture and manufacture, which for a time flowed side by side, as for a stretch do, African explorers report, the White and Blue Niles. Like Lancaster County, the South changed slowly, its rolling black-soiled tracts dozing within the sun-soaked haze of a stable agrarianism. When Buchanan looked at King, he saw safety and civility, he saw life, a flutter of an invitation to live, to enjoy, to laugh, to gossip, to arrive at sound and pure conclusions. He saw Dr. John King, the Presbyterian pastor at Mercersburg who took young Jamie into his counsel, and William Lowndes, the representative from South Carolina whose legalistic thoroughness and personal moderation served as a model for the novice Congressman of 1821.

“They love the Union,” he asserted aloud, of these sober and reflecting men of the South, “but if its blessings cannot
be enjoyed but in constant fear of their own destruction, necessity will compel them to abandon it. Such is now the southern feeling. The Union is now in danger, and I wish to proclaim the fact.” As if to soothe the gasp his assertion provoked in his audience, particularly in the feminine gallery, he announced, in prophetic echo of the critics of his own Presidency when it would come, “The brave man looks danger in the face, and vanquishes it; whilst the coward closes his eyes at its approach, and is overwhelmed. The Union,” he told his roommate’s staring face directly, as if foreseeing the day when even sober and reflecting men of the South might stand as his enemy, “is as dear to me as my heart’s blood. I would,” he ringingly avowed, “peril life, character, and every earthly hope, to maintain it.”

Coitus is the model of all passion: it pursues a curve of rise and fall, and nothing will sustain it on the highest level forever. The tone of Buchanan’s speech became less elevated, less heartfelt, more didactic and ominous. “And,” he asked, “if the Union should be dissolved upon the question of slavery, what will be the consequences?” He answered himself: “An entire non-intercourse between its different parts, mutual jealousies, and implacable wars. The hopes of the friends of liberty, in every clime, would be blasted; and despotism might regain her empire over the world. I might present in detail the evils which would flow from disunion, but I forbear. I shall not further lift the curtain. The scene will be too painful.”

And what, at the moment, might be done to forestall unbearably painful scenes? First of all, he proposed, the select committee might offer to the Senate a resolution affirming what the Constitution already grants, the right of slavery to
exist in any state where it is recognized by law. Not even the Abolitionists denied this principle, which had been solemnly announced by the first Congress, and is most clearly the doctrine of the Constitution. “This, then,” Buchanan stated, “is not a question of general morality, affecting the consciences of men, but it is a question of constitutional law.” A second resolution, he proclaimed, might assert that slaves like any other sort of property can be transferred from state to state. And a third might insist that slavery be maintained and not abolished in the District of Columbia, ceded to the Union by two slaveholding states whose good faith would be betrayed if abolition were “to convert this very cession into the means of injuring and destroying their peace and security.”

This language was rather far for a Northern politician, even a doughface like Buchanan, to go; the risk was his love offering. But King had turned his impassive, almost Seminole profile again, to murmur with his fellow Alabaman Senator Clay, a lesser Clay than the Great Pacificator from Kentucky—Clay the Whig, the anti-Jackson, with much of Jackson’s mad mulishness and more brains and eloquence yet with not enough of the people in his belly. Buchanan, still on his feet, conjuring up the select committee and its projected resolutions (“Let the resolutions be framed in a most conciliatory spirit, and let them be clothed in language which shall shock the opinions of no Senator”), felt himself in the position of a man who, having mounted to the heights of ecstasy with his mistress, and performed heroic feats in the lists of the bedroom, finds her still with unsatisfied needs, and practical expectations, and what seems an inhuman indifference to his own delicate situation. King had ceased to listen. His hatchet face was buried in his close colleague’s attending ear. “The
Middle and North States are the field upon which this great battle must be fought,” Buchanan concluded, his voice hoarse and exhausted. “I fear not, I doubt not, the result, if Senators from the South, where the people are already united, would but consent to adopt the counsels of those who must bear the brunt of the contest.” Thus he ended, as many do, by begging mercy of those whom he had dared to love.

In composing this segment of my never-to-be-completed opus, somewhere in the centennial-year struggle of Ford versus Carter, I had intended to model Buchanan’s love for King upon mine for Genevieve, but in truth my one-night stand with Mrs. Arthrop kept intruding—that supernatural quality her face had at first blush, not only its high albedo (cf. the glow of King’s planter’s forehead) but the something immaterial attached, a ghostly tag declaring that she would “put out.” Of course I entertained no such carnal notions of old Buck and Colonel King; nineteenth-century men, my belief was, loved one another with no more physicality than that of the companiable gourmanderie described by Melville in his “Paradise of Bachelors.” What I sought to convey in the out-of-focus chamber as seen through Buchanan’s mismatched eyes was the way in which the apparition of the beloved pulls an entire scene into life—like a sun in the sky, or like, perhaps, a live prey in the web. I remember, conversely, a party at which Genevieve’s absence made a great sensible hole.