1861 (14 page)

Perhaps more important, the radical slave-state senators were making it clear that even the Crittenden plan would not satisfy them. Wigfall and others proclaimed a “Southern Manifesto”: “The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretense of new guarantees.… We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the
Southern people require the
organization of a Southern Confederacy.”
⁴⁵

Faced with such intransigence, and with news of the secession fever sweeping across the South, many Northerners began wondering what gain would come of abasing themselves yet again before the slave power. By mid-January, even such a moderate as
George Templeton Strong, who had cheered the
hanging of John Brown, and who since November had been hoping earnestly for a compromise, was ready to throw up
his hands. All the slave states seemed now to be tilting toward secession, he noted in his diary. “But what can we do? What
can
I
do? What could I do if I were Webster and Clay combined? Concession to these conspirators and the ignorant herd they have stimulated to treason would but postpone the inevitable crisis a year or two longer.”
⁴⁶

One by one, the states of the Deep South were already withdrawing. As they joined the new Confederacy, one Southern senator after another rose in the chamber to declaim his valedictory address. Some left bitter recriminations as their last entries in the congressional annals, others gave unctuous and regretful farewells. On January 7, Senator
Robert Toombs of Georgia used his departure speech to fire parting shots at “Black
Republicans” and abolitionists: “We want no negro
equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.” On January 21,
David Levy Yulee of Florida took his leave more genteelly, “acknowledging, with grateful emotions, my obligations for the many courtesies I have
enjoyed [from] the gentlemen of this body, and with most cordial good wishes for their personal welfare.” His fellow Floridian,
Stephen Mallory, blasted the North with brimstone: “You cannot conquer us. Imbrue your hands in our blood and the rains of a century will not wipe from them the stain, while coming generations will weep for your wickedness and folly.” Finally it was Jefferson Davis’s turn. In a low, hoarse voice,
weakened by recent illness and by the emotion of the moment, he offered a courtly godspeed to his longtime colleagues: “I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offence I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of parting, to offer my apology.… Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains to me to bid you a final adieu.”
⁴⁷

At these words, Davis and four of his fellow Southerners turned to make their way slowly up the aisle toward the door. It is said that spectators sobbed in the gallery, as stern legislators choked back tears. The Union seemed truly—perhaps irrevocably—dissolved.
Democrats and a few
moderate Republicans crowded around to shake the five men’s hands and wish them well. The rest of
the Northerners sat, hands folded, at their desks. Then the Senate returned to the rest of the day’s business:
Kansas statehood, the Crittenden amendments, sarcastic potshots, and occasional full-on broadsides of vilification and bombast.

The centrifuge was spinning faster and faster. Washington itself seemed to be coming apart. There was only one strange, surreal point
of calm at the center of the tempest: the old gentleman in the
White House.

N
EW
Y
EAR’S
D
AY
in the nation’s capital was, by tradition, a moment of partisan truce and the annual reenactment of a peculiar democratic ritual. On the first afternoon of each year, the doors of the White House were thrown open to any moderately respectable and decently washed citizens who wished to shake hands with their chief executive, wish him the compliments of the
season, and partake liberally of federally funded punch and cake.
⁴⁸

The mansion had achieved unprecedented splendor during
James Buchanan’s administration. Shortly after the inauguration, Miss
Harriet Lane, the bachelor president’s niece and White House hostess, had undertaken a costly redecoration using funds generously appropriated by Congress. The austerely classical furnishings dating back to President Monroe’s term were sent to auction,
replaced by heavy draperies, fine carpets, and amply stuffed settees and divans in the latest rococo style. Moreover, Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane entertained often and generously. Though the president had few, if any, close friends, he delighted in small talk, especially with the ladies, trading tidbits of gossip on the capital’s latest social scandals. It was a golden age of female fashions, and the state rooms’ gilded chandeliers shone on gowns of crimson velvet,
gloves trimmed with antique lace, and wreaths of clematis crowning the glossy hair of senators’ wives. The Democratic president was no snob, however. He opened his home to everyone from ambassadors to Indian chiefs, and held public levees quite frequently even when it did not happen to be New Year’s Day. During a recent reception for the
Japanese envoys, uninvited strangers had packed the East Room, some even clambering atop Miss
Lane’s precious pier tables for a glimpse of the exotic Orientals.
⁴⁹

But the last New Year’s levee of the Buchanan administration was a sadly diminished affair. Four years of indiscriminate hospitality had taken their toll on the White House. Its wallpaper was greasy in places where visitors had brushed against it with sweaty hands or pomaded hair; its carpets were worn down by muddy boots and stained with tobacco juice. (In antebellum days, one senator later remembered, brown spittle flowed so freely that “you had to wear
your overshoes into the best society of Washington.”) Moreover, the crowd was sparse and the mood anything but cheerful. As the strains of the marine band sounded from a nearby vestibule, political enemies squared off warily on opposite sides of the East Room as if for some elaborate quadrille.
Some men and women wore ribboned cockades on their chests as tokens of political sympathies: red, white, and blue for the
Union,
solid blue for
secession. More than a few from each faction had come for the punch and cake but disdained to shake their host’s hand. The president and his niece were receiving guests in the (solid) Blue Room, surely just an unfortunate coincidence. As at all their levees, the slim, blond Miss Lane was dressed to perfection, and Mr. Buchanan’s tall figure, at least from across the room, looked stately in its black frock coat and high
collar. His head, as usual, was cocked quizzically to one side from some odd nervous tic, as though he had always just failed to catch the last thing that was said. It was only when guests drew closer that they noticed the president’s customary aspect altered. His hair—which a female admirer had once found as silky and glistening as the tail feathers of the glass birds of paradise in Barnum’s Museum—was now shockingly white. Buchanan’s one good eye
was dull and unfocused, his head more askew than ever. “It was his last New Year as President,” the
New York World’
s correspondent mused afterward, “perhaps the last of our republic; and as he went through the hollow mockery of the occasion, he could not but feel how unreal it was.”
⁵⁰

It should never have ended thus. James Buchanan had been one of the best-qualified men ever to win the presidency: so long and diligent had been his career in government that he liked to refer to himself deprecatingly as “the Old Public Functionary.” Over the past half century, he had served his nation ably as representative to Congress, senator, and secretary of state. Though born the son of a country storekeeper, he had represented the United States with
distinction at the courts of Czar Nicholas and Queen Victoria, returning home with all the subtle expertise in diplomatic graces to be learned in
St. Petersburg and
London. At the Court of St. James’s, indeed, he had been so scrupulous as to agonize for weeks over what to wear when presenting his credentials to the Queen. Should he costume himself like
George Washington in
knee breeches and powdered wig? Carry the customary sword of a European envoy? In the end, he steered a prudent middle course, attiring himself in black like an ordinary American gentleman, but bringing the sword along, too. Some might have scoffed, but Buchanan’s admirers saw this as just the kind of evenhandedness that the country needed in its leading statesmen.
⁵¹
His domestic positions, too, were always judicious. Though a Pennsylvanian, he loathed abolitionist rabble-rousers, never spoke a disparaging word about slavery, and appointed a carefully balanced cabinet of Northerners and Southerners.
⁵²

Disunion had long seemed to him such a far-fetched proposition
as to be almost existentially impossible. Back in 1832, Buchanan had written in mild frustration to President Jackson about his first visit to the
Russian court. The czarina, he said, would not stop talking about the difficulties between the Northern and Southern states—rumors of which had reached even as far as
St. Petersburg. Was this not a serious threat to the young republic, she asked, perhaps worse even than the possibility of war with a European power? Buchanan told the president that his efforts to convince her otherwise had been in vain:

Now it seemed that Her Imperial Highness, surveying American politics from that distant Baltic shore, had been shrewder than he.

Buchanan’s inauguration in 1857 had come at a rare moment of relative concord, and was greeted with such pomp and fanfare that one observer said it resembled an imperial coronation. The swearing-in, another wrote, drew supporters “from every State and Territory in the Union; the pale-faced, sharp-set New England man jostled the thicker-skinned and darker-hued Southerner.”
⁵⁴
Then, just two days later, the Supreme Court—having received discreet encouragement from the president-elect—handed down its
Dred Scott
decision. So much for national unity. For the next four years, Buchanan buried himself in the minutiae of office, toiling sixteen-hour days at the White House; some called him the hardest-working president in history. He labored over multiple
handwritten drafts of even the most mundane letter, and each routine official document—whether a land grant, a military commission, or a consular appointment—could not receive the president’s signature without his careful perusal of every line. It surprised no one that he showed no desire to seek reelection in 1860. As Buchanan’s term drew toward its close, the president would tell anyone who would listen that he couldn’t wait to get out of the
accursed White House and back to his Lancaster County estate. In any case, there was little danger he would have been asked to remain. By then, millions of Northerners detested him as an appeaser of the slave power, while Southerners distrusted him as a weak and vacillating ally at best. Both sides despised the
corruption
that had seeped into federal officialdom under his stewardship. Neither would have wished the
secession crisis to happen on his watch.

Though Buchanan may already have proven a spectacularly ineffectual leader, he was neither a villain nor a coward, despite what his enemies said at the time and what his detractors have said since. When secession loomed in the weeks after Lincoln’s election, he stepped into the breach with the mightiest weapon at his disposal: his pen. He had always been a man who trusted pieces of paper to solve things—witness his misplaced faith in
Dred
Scott—
and so now he set out to compose a document that would freeze disunion in its tracks.

At the end of each year, it was the president’s responsibility to issue an annual message to Congress, the precursor to today’s State of the Union address. Buchanan began writing his just a day or two after Lincoln was elected, and for the next month he did little but work on the draft, anxious that the document should be ready to send to the lame-duck Congress when it opened its session on December 3. As chief executive of the nation, Buchanan felt it was
his role to serve as high arbiter of the unfolding conflict, expressing judgments that all factions would have to concede were wise and fair.

Toward that end he revised and polished the composition numerous times, reading various sections aloud to his Northern and Southern cabinet members and asking for comments, which were naturally so contradictory of one another that the poor president found himself doing far more scribbling and crossing out than he could have anticipated. (The only point on which everyone concurred was how felicitously written it was.) Toward the end of November, he welcomed Senator Davis
into his office to endure a full recitation. The Mississippian made many helpful suggestions—all of which Buchanan “very kindly accepted,” Davis would recall much later—although by the time the document was complete, it had gone through so many further drafts that Davis could no longer find in it much to agree with. Still, the president dutifully toiled, though he was now feeling increasingly unwell and, instead of going into his office, would work in his
private library, dressed in a silk robe and chewing on an unlit cigar. He at last finished his opus, now running to some fourteen thousand words, at the beginning of December. (To be fair, Buchanan expended some of those words addressing not merely the crisis of the Union but also such other pressing matters as crop failures in Kansas, Chinese-American diplomatic relations, and problems with mail delivery on the Pacific coast.) By this time, of course, South Carolina’s leaders
had set a date for their secession convention and were cheerfully making plans for
their state’s future as an independent republic, while the rest of the cotton states were preparing to follow suit.
⁵⁵