Appeasing the South: The Final Months of the Buchanan Presidency
The last year of Buchanan’s presidency was the worst time in his life. He had hoped after “solving” the crises of his administration in Utah and Kansas that he could turn to his specialty of foreign affairs. In matters of diplomacy, while the American chief executive certainly did not have unlimited power, at least under the Constitution Buchanan interpreted so narrowly, he had more authority than was the case in domestic affairs. Serving as his own secretary of state—for the septuagenarian holder of that title, Lewis Cass, was inattentive—the president intended to check British imperialism in Central America and to rewrite the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The latter he considered a colossal diplomatic mistake that limited America’s unilateral control over any future canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. He hoped as well to get the British out of the Western Hemisphere (with Canada a notable exception), or at least to minimize their presence.
Buchanan’s foreign initiatives favored the South, just as his domestic policy did. It seemed obvious to him that the expansion of the United States would proceed southward into Mexico and Central America. Other supporters of manifest
destiny had given up the raw American aspirations of the 1840s, but Buchanan stubbornly persisted until the British eventually began the process of ceding the Bay Islands to Honduras and giving sovereignty over the indigenous Mosquito Indians to Nicaragua. The president meant as well to buy Cuba, the island that for nearly thirty years had been his obsession. He continued to argue, as he had in the Ostend Manifesto, that the “Pearl of the Antilles” was essential to American security. And of course he knew that his southern friends eyed it as the Republic’s sixteenth slave state with its four hundred thousand slaves.
Hardly timid and vacillating, as he is sometimes considered, Buchanan went further in his imperial ambitions. He sought an American protectorate over parts of northwest Mexico in Chihuahua and Sonora where he described “hostile and Predatory Indians roam[ing] promiscuously.” Ahead of his time—for twentieth-century presidents relied on similar explanations for their incursions into Latin America—Buchanan pointed to the mistreatment of Americans as well as the security of their investments during a period of civil war in Mexico.
In his 1858 and 1859 messages to Congress, the president displayed his desire to shift the focus to foreign policy. In fact nearly half his comments in both these years centered on the relations of the United States with places formerly as remote as Japan, China, and Alaska. His proposal for Mexico was the most dramatic. He asked for authority to establish military posts across the Arizona border in Mexican territory, and he requested, from a skeptical Congress, the raising of a military force to enter Mexico, according to his 1859 message, “for the purpose of obtaining indemnity for the past and security for the future … I purposely refrain from any suggestion as to
whether this force shall consist of regular troops or volunteers or both.”
Of course Buchanan was too experienced in public affairs not to anticipate objections to any such action. Republicans and many northern Democrats considered the invasion of Mexico gross interference in the domestic affairs of another nation. Besides it was illegal to use American troops to invade another nation without a declaration of war by Congress. But the president held Mexico an exception to such constitutional strictures. It was a neighbor whose “anarchy and confusion” affected Americans. “As a good neighbor shall we not extend to her a helping hand to save her?”
Republicans, who held over 40 percent of the seats in the thirty-fifth House of Representatives and who found allies among a contingent of third-party representatives, were shocked. In the end Congress either avoided or opposed most of Buchanan’s agenda. No legislation ever reached the floor of either house for a vote on his Mexican or Cuban proposals. Even a few southerners and representatives from slave border states who had the most to gain feared the transformation of the federal government into an imperial state whose newly discovered powers might be used against them.
Even in his final annual message to Congress in December 1860, as the cotton states of the South prepared to secede, a stubborn president asked that body to appropriate $30 million for the purchase of Cuba, although it had never been clear that Spain was willing to sell the island. And in this same message, Buchanan repeated his call for funds for an expeditionary force to be sent into Mexico. But Congress continued to be deaf to the chief executive’s plans. Buchanan, a lame duck in a political climate favoring the Republicans, had used
up his goodwill in the brutal legislative fight over the Lecompton constitution. And after the 1860 elections, Republicans controlled both Congress and the executive.
Measured against other presidents, even those in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Buchanan is one of the most aggressive, hawkish chief executives in American history. Few slights from other nations or possible rationales for engagement overseas went unnoticed by this prickly chief executive. Buchanan aspired to be a decisive, aggressive president, even if his international agenda failed. Mostly Buchanan gained approval from southerners, many of whom supported filibustering operations into Central America that violated neutrality laws. Buchanan did not go this far.
The most persistent of these freebooters, William Walker, slipped by patrols, established himself as the unelected leader of Nicaragua, and was captured by Commodore Hiram Paulding and returned by the U.S. Navy to New Orleans. While Buchanan intended to follow the neutrality laws that made Walker’s activities illegal, the president considered the filibusterer’s arrest to be illegal because it had taken place on foreign soil in Nicaragua. Therefore Commodore Paulding had exceeded his instructions. So Paulding was reprimanded; Walker was released, only to return again to the Central American nation, where he was eventually killed. In this episode Buchanan again played to his southern audience.
In other international maneuvers, the president unhesitatingly sent U.S. troops to the Northwest when Americans and the British became entangled in a dispute over the boundary through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Off to the Puget Sound went troops under no less than the commander of the army, General Winfield Scott. Eventually a peaceful settlement was
negotiated. At the same time the president was asserting American power in another testy disagreement with the British, who were engaged in the practice of stopping and searching possible slave-trading vessels flying the American flag in the Caribbean. Buchanan vigorously opposed the slave trade, but despite an international treaty, the Americans were notoriously lax about ending it, compared to the British. Knowing this, slavers of every country ran up the American flag for protection from the British, and Her Majesty’s fleet sometimes stopped and searched them. Buchanan, remembering the reasons his nation had fought the War of 1812, protested such dishonor to the flag. The English had no right to stop any ship sailing under the Stars and Stripes, and eventually, after several strong pronouncements on the subject and the mobilization of the U.S. Navy, the British ordered their West Indies fleet home.
To those who complained that the war-making power belonged only to Congress, Buchanan anticipated modern presidents with his explanation that Congress often could act only “after the mischief has been done.” Buchanan wanted a preemptive authorization from Congress so that he could respond immediately to any challenge that he, as the chief executive in charge of foreign affairs, detected. He did not go quite as far as some twentieth-century presidents in asserting his power to use military force overseas, but he was only a step behind.
In perhaps the most ludicrous assertion of American power during his administration, Buchanan ordered twenty-five hundred sailors and marines along with nineteen warships with two hundred guns to punish landlocked Paraguay. That nation’s transgression had been to appropriate property
claimed by Americans living in Paraguay, to fire on an American ship surveying in the country, and to kill its captain. It took months for this force, approved by Congress in a costly expedition, to move up the Paraná and Paraguay rivers into Asunción, and of course it took months more to come home in 1859. In the meantime these men and ships could have been employed in reinforcing American coastal forts, where they were needed to prevent attacks by seceding southern states, rather than fending off distant insults to the flag. Instead secession was only encouraged by the feeble response of the U.S. government.
In his final year as president Buchanan suffered further humiliations. For years he had unfairly stigmatized the Republicans as a party of treason—an organization whose positions on slavery he believed encouraged bloodthirsty zealots like John Brown and in turn made southern matrons terrified of potential slave uprisings. The president had always considered the Republicans to be not much more than a group of abolitionist preachers and fanatics. He hated New England (the only section of the United States he never visited) and decried its “isms.” Once he complained, no doubt with his proper, nonpolitical first lady as his model, that antislavery societies in New England fostered “haranguing” women and that Boston was a terrible place to live.
Partly because of Buchanan’s intransigence in Kansas, the Republicans became the nation’s majority party after the 1858 congressional elections. In Buchanan’s last two years as president Republicans controlled the Thirty-sixth Congress with 114 seats, an increase of 22 seats in two years. Meanwhile his own Democrats, who had dominated the House in the early 1850s, lost 28 seats, though none in the Senate. But the
Republicans still gained 5 seats there. Now in control of the House, Republican party leaders responded to Buchanan’s vitriolic antagonism by establishing a special committee investigating corruption in his administration.
Republicans chose “Honest John” Covode, a respected Pennsylvania congressman, to chair this examination into whether Buchanan or any of his administration “by money, patronage or other improper means” had tried to influence Congress. The focus was on the practices used by the president and his cabinet to pass the Lecompton constitution, but soon a wider net was cast. The administration’s use of patronage came under investigation, as did payroll taxes levied on patronage holders at election time, changes in post office personnel, bribing voters, and especially granting lucrative government printing contracts to supporters, who then returned a portion of their profits to the party. Of course many were accepted electoral features employed by all parties, but Buchanan’s extravagant use of them seemed even to some Democrats to cross the line from permissible practices to indictable offenses. If the president could be tied to them, impeachment was possible. Politicians and civil servants who had long observed the abuses of American politics believed that Buchanan’s Buchaneers—the inner circle of friends and members of his administration—had reached unacceptable levels in terms of the use of public authority and funds for private and party profit.
Buchanan dismissed the entire House investigation as an inquisition, calling the witnesses who appeared for five months in the spring of 1860 before the Covode Committee disappointed patronage seekers, informers, and parasites trying to curry favor. But they included several of his influential
allies and friends, whose testimony further diminished his credibility. Made up of three Republicans and one Democrat, the committee was undeniably partisan, and it afforded the president no opportunity to respond. Testimony taken in secret and information damaging to the president were leaked into the gossipy salons of Washington. Despite the unfairness, there was considerable evidence that the president’s reckless efforts to bulldoze the Lecompton constitution through Congress in the spring of 1858 had involved several forms of bribery, through third parties, of congressmen.
In 1858 relatives of Democrats in the House had received army contracts. Patronage holders had been ordered to vote for the administration bill on Lecompton or their relatives would be removed from office. Cash changed hands. Buchanan also had used appointive positions to punish Stephen Douglas. He had replaced the senator’s men with his own and, in clear violation of party unity, had run his pro-Lecompton followers against Douglas’s in an unsuccessful effort to take over the Democratic party in Illinois. There was testimony that the administration had used public funds to strengthen his faction of the Democratic organization.1
Buchanan pronounced himself above personal corruption. No doubt he was, for he was too rich to take money for himself. But he was never above employing public money in order to further the purposes of his administration and his place in history. His self-described frugality in government was compromised by lavish printing and binding contracts handed out during his years as president.
Certainly his cabinet officers were among the most corrupt in American history. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson sent agents to Kansas to further the administration’s interests,
paying for them out of his department’s funds. Secretary of War John Floyd undersold Fort Snelling, an army post in Minnesota, to a consortium that included a fellow Virginia Democrat and friend. In other instances the War Department bought worthless carbines from favored companies, agreed to pay inflated prices for desired real estate necessary for its installations, and overpaid Democratic contractors. One stalwart army officer, Montgomery Meigs, in charge of projects around Washington, became so outspoken about graft and inefficiency that his protests resulted in his exile to the miserable Florida islands of Dry Tortugas. The Navy Department, again through agents, bought prohibitively expensive coal from a politically well-connected company that give kickbacks to the national Democratic party. The scandals even reached into the president’s family when evidence surfaced that Buchanan’s nephew by marriage and the brother of the Philadelphia collector of the port, whose name never appeared on the official list of port employees, still turned up at the port—but only on paydays for work never observed by anyone else.
In the course of the investigation Buchanan sent two messages to the House denying on constitutional grounds that Congress had any authority over the executive branch of government. The only exception, said the president, occurred during impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee, but the Covode Committee was only an investigating committee on its way to a censure resolution. The president argued as well that, in the event of an impeachment, his accusers would become his judges. In his lofty constitutional style Buchanan noted that the executive and legislative branches were coordinate and had no authority to investigate
each other. “I defy all investigations. Nothing but perjury can sully my name.” The committee responded that there had been three earlier congressional investigations of corruption in the executive branch that had not risen to the level of impeachment, as indeed the Covode Committee’s findings did not. Buchanan exulted in the fact that no criminal charges were preferred, but many citizens were shocked at the amount of graft permeating all agencies and levels of the Buchanan government.
For any assessment of the Buchanan administration, the question remains why this particular president—so experienced in the ways of Washington and so insistent on probity—could have presided over such abuses. The most eloquent portion of Buchanan’s inaugural address in March 1857 had referred to the “duty of preserving the government free from the taint or even the suspicion of corruption. Public virtue is the vital spirit of republics and history shows that when this has decayed and the love of money has usurped its place, although the forms of free government may remain for a season, the substance has departed forever.”
There were two principal reasons why Buchanan encouraged, or at the very least tolerated, corruption during the Lecompton crisis and did not police his subordinates, thereby destroying his own reputation. First, his pugnacious activism as a chief executive overrode any restraint during the catastrophic fight over the Lecompton constitution. He believed that he could go home to Wheatland having saved the Union by ending the controversy over slavery in the territories. And that required moving Kansas to statehood. His experience and age delivered him into a cocoon of overconfidence, as the end came to justify any means. Second, as the protector of the South and
the benefactor of that section’s electoral college largesse, he wished to keep southerners in his cabinet. If he fired Floyd, the ever-irascible South would erupt and accuse him of disloyalty. His best opportunity for keeping the Union intact was to maintain the status quo; his best friends in this project were, ironically, southerners.
But increasingly Buchanan’s Union was an untenable proposition. It seemed to most nineteenth-century Americans a republic of contradictions—a free nation for whites with slavery for all blacks in the territories and, according to the Dred Scott decision, in the future even in nonslaveholding states. It was as well a democracy dedicated to majority rule controlled by an aggressive sectional minority of southerners. As a consequence of his certitude and his prosouthernism, Buchanan exceeded the normal limits of mid-nineteenth-century partisan behavior. But as was the case with his strong-arm tactics in Kansas, his refusal to deal with the misdeeds of the members of his administration gave the Republicans more ammunition.
During this trying period of his presidency, Buchanan further soured his relations with Congress, from whom he sought appropriations and agreement for his overseas policies, by vetoing several prize pieces of Republican legislation including the Homestead Act. A popular policy in the Northwest, the Homestead Act gave 160 acres of public land free to each settler after five years. Buchanan, on the wrong side of this scintillating expression of American democracy, argued in his veto message that it was not fair to previous settlers to give away free land, that the federal government had no constitutional power to do so, and that the bill was especially unfair to the older states of the Union—a group that included many southern
states. Earlier he had vetoed a bill to use public lands to establish land-grant agricultural colleges. Both were measures opposed by southern congressmen and senators, and in both cases, despite congressional approval, Buchanan held that the federal government was exceeding its constitutional authority.
During the presidential election year of 1860 Buchanan paid an obvious price for his intransigence. As voting day approached, Republicans circulated thousands of copies of the Covode Committee’s investigation as a campaign document. In the West and Northwest, where the homestead principle was endorsed by some Democrats, Buchanan was excoriated by members of his own party. And to the many Americans who viewed education as an important lever for progress, his veto of legislation to establish land-grant colleges seemed regressive.
The president paid an additional price in credibility when at his party’s 1860 nominating convention in Charleston, South Carolina, Democrats divided over their platform concerning slavery in the territories. With the two-thirds rule protecting the South and after several walkouts and reconvenings, the party split. In this dispute the legacy of Buchanan’s Kansas policy appeared in the candidacy of two Democrats: Buchanan’s enemy Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, the southern candidate and Buchanan’s vice president whom the president had so nonchalantly overlooked throughout his presidency. Douglas and Breckinridge agreed about nearly everything, including the authority of the Dred Scott decision to protect slavery in the territories. But Breckinridge’s faction went further to demand that the federal government protect slavery in the territories—in other words, those who voted for Breckinridge favored a federal slave code.
Neutrality would have been the more politic stance for the president, given the possibility of a fusion ticket or the withdrawal of one of the candidates or perhaps both, with Buchanan favoring his Georgia-born secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb, as a replacement. An effective president would have influenced his party members to redo the failed nomination process. But nobody listened to Buchanan anymore. So he tepidly supported Breckinridge, who received the fund-raising aid of the presidency as well as the in-kind services of numerous clerks in various executive departments. In a speech delivered from the White House portico in the summer of 1860, Buchanan explained to a cheering crowd that he favored the Kentuckian because Breckinridge stood for a federal slave code. Slaves in the United States were private property, and as property the rights of white masters must be protected in the territories. Territorial legislatures had no power to abolish slavery, and when the right of property was violated, the federal government must redress the trespass. Under this doctrine Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty was dead, killed by both president and Supreme Court.
In the voting that followed in November 1860 the Republican Abraham Lincoln won both the electoral vote and a plurality of the popular vote in a four-way election that featured the two Democrats, along with John Bell of the Constitutional Union party. The election ushered in Republican domination of national politics; Buchanan was the last Democratic president for twenty-four years, until Grover Cleveland was elected in 1884. Lincoln won because his support was concentrated in heavily populated northern states with high electoral counts. But as historians have noted, he would have won the electoral vote without the split in the Democratic party,
although the combined popular vote for Douglas and Breckinridge of 2,225,000 was more than his 1,866,452.
Such a conclusion overlooks the significance of the division in the Democratic party, which with one candidate—and that candidate was obviously Stephen Douglas, who even campaigned in the South—would have been more attractive to voters. Douglas had appealed to Unionists in the South, campaigning vigorously against secessionists, who seemed to have the upper hand only in South Carolina. Not only would Democratic resources have been more efficiently mobilized behind one man, but states that voted for Bell like Tennessee and Virginia might well have supported a single Democratic candidate, who might also have carried states like Indiana and Ohio. In fact a united Democratic party might have forestalled Bell’s candidacy entirely.
Buchanan had been largely responsible for this split in his party. He had done nothing after the fury over Lecompton to try to reunite the Democratic wings. Indeed he had continued his vendetta against Douglas by opposing any Democrat who supported the Illinois senator’s position on popular sovereignty, and nowhere more vehemently than in his home state of Pennsylvania. Buchanan disdained any reunion of the factions, calling on all Democrats—not just those in the South—to support the Dred Scott decision and its doctrine of protection of slavery in the territories. Northern Democrats must give up popular sovereignty, for “without self-degradation the Southern States cannot abandon this equality of states.” A southern slogan of the time, “the equality of states” held that property in slaves must be on the same footing as all other property, from gold to horses, from pianos to mattresses. For Buchanan there would be no waffling on the issue of prohibiting
territorial legislatures from outlawing slavery at any stage before statehood. Thus the president who cared so much about the Union had done a great deal to destroy one of the instruments for its survival—the Democratic party.2
Disruption of the Union was not yet inevitable. Before the election of Lincoln, secession even among the seven states of the lower South that formed the Confederacy in February 1861 depended on a series of events and decisions in which Buchanan’s appeasement of the South figured prominently. In fact, after their success in the off-year congressional elections in 1858, Republicans had lost nine seats in the House in 1860, and given the number of third-party legislators, they did not control either house—provided the southerners stayed in Washington. In four years another presidential election might reverse political fortunes and bring a united Democratic party to power, a point that the ultrapartisan Buchanan made in his address to Congress in 1860.
Immediately after Lincoln’s election Buchanan faced the last, most devastating, and personally most wrenching crisis of his life. For months the extreme wing of the prosouthern party in the lower South, especially in South Carolina, had warned that the election of Lincoln, whom they exaggerated into an abolitionist, would justify secession. Under a so-called Black Republican, slavery would not be safe. Of course there were latent reasons for this outbreak of secessionism in 1860: a long-brewing independence movement; the internal dynamics of southern politics that challenged control by planters; fierce antagonism toward northerners; the vaunted southern pride and honor waiting to spill over into martial action; and even the hot, dry, aggravating summer that set tempers on edge. Some said that Lincoln’s election was only a pretext.
Southerners had threatened secession for years. In South Carolina the crisis had been simmering since the 1830s nullification fight over federal tariff legislation, though threats to leave the Union had never been as explicit or vehement as in 1860. Buchanan’s southern friends had warned a skeptical president during the fall that the election of Lincoln would trigger the end of the Union. They also informed him of the growing restiveness of their slaves, knowing that the danger of slave insurrection was of particular concern for him. Buchanan agreed that northern agitation had inspired slaves with “vague notions of freedom” and had undermined “the sense of security around the family altar,” and said so in his message to Congress after Lincoln’s election. Rebellious southerners also intimated that any challenge to their departure would lead to a bloody civil war, unless Buchanan kept the peace by handing over government property.
As early as October the president heard from his wary General-in-Chief of the Army, Winfield Scott, who advised that several states would secede if Lincoln was elected. Accordingly Scott, amid other less practical ideas, called for the immediate garrisoning of the federal forts in the South with sufficient troops as to prevent a surprise attack. Showing the flag in any way during this uncertain period was good counsel, though it came with the advisory that only five regiments were available. Of course there were units that could quickly be recalled from western outposts, where many of the sixteen thousand army troops were stationed. But Buchanan disliked both Scott and the advice, and so did nothing. Perhaps to expect that he would do anything before secession is unreasonable, although he was responsive and activist in his foreign policy. One wonders if Stephen Douglas had been president whether he would have
been so complacent. Certainly Buchanan’s inactivity, like much of his performance in the 120 days left in his administration, reflected his consistent prosouthernism. For it was indubitably to the advantage of the future Confederacy first to have as many states as possible secede, and then to have time to organize a government and prepare an army without challenges from the federal government.
South Carolina wasted no time and joyfully seceded on December 20. The state had always been the most radical southern community in the United States. In the 1830s its state legislature had called a federal tariff act null and void. It was the home of John C. Calhoun, who had promoted the idea of a federal slave code as early as the 1830s and who had argued for a concurrent presidency, one chief executive from the North and one from the South, in order to protect the minority rights of a section that was rapidly losing ground in population and states. Because of its archaic electoral procedures—the state’s presidential electors were still chosen by the state legislature—the South Carolina assembly remained in session after the presidential election in November, primed not just to cast its votes for Breckinridge but also to call for a secession convention. Delegates to the latter were duly elected, and in turn they passed a secession ordinance, dissolving ties with the United States and taking their place “as a separate and independent state.” Like an untreated contagious disease, the movement spread to other states of the lower South, which also began the process of calling secessionist conventions.
Yet in every one of these states there was a significant pro-Union party, whose members counseled patience. Even in South Carolina radicals like Robert Barnwell Rhett faced opposition from those who continued to revere the Union and
to recoil from the possibility of civil war. It was to these men, some of whom were in Washington, that Buchanan needed to turn if he would isolate South Carolina, limit the number of seceding states, and, in his personal ambition, keep the peace, at least until Abraham Lincoln became president in March. To accomplish this, he would need moderates among his advisers. They would need to get the patronage positions that the president had shuffled with such brutal haste during the Lecompton struggle. Clearly Buchanan knew how to do this. Since Andrew Jackson no president had so effectively demonstrated the ways in which the patronage could be marshaled to change the minds of public officials.
Buchanan addressed the legality of secession in his annual message to Congress in early December. Disappointing southern members of his cabinet as well as his friends throughout the South who had every reason to expect a more acquiescent approach to their disloyalty, Buchanan denied the constitutional right to secede. No government installed an entitlement to its own suicide, argued Buchanan. The United States was not a rope of sand to be broken into fragments “whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course.” Of course Abraham Lincoln’s election was not a minor incident. For Buchanan it represented the culmination of years of northern agitation against the South, but it was a reversible decision. Revolutionary resistance to the federal government, said Buchanan, required “a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of powers not granted by the Constitution.” Lincoln’s election did not rise to this level, although Buchanan was suspicious that his actions as president probably would. Soon angry southern congressmen including Jefferson Davis, the senator from Mississippi and future president of the Confederacy,
flooded the White House to argue with the president. His favorite cabinet officer, Howell Cobb, who had often shared Buchanan’s White House quarters, resigned in protest of the president’s position on secession, well before his home state of Georgia left the Union.
At the same time Buchanan extended an encouraging olive branch to seceding states in his denial of federal authority over their actions. They could go in peace, for neither he nor Congress had the power to declare and make war on them. In the view of this presidential student of the Constitution, the power to coerce a state (even though secession was illegal) could not be found among the enumerated powers granted to Congress or president. “It is,” argued Buchanan in his December message, “equally apparent that its exercise is not ‘necessary and proper for carrying into execution’ any one of these powers.” Nor did Congress have such authority.
The same inhibition that had inspired his vetoes of congressional legislation, and the same prosouthern sentiment that had infused his political thinking for years, supported Buchanan’s extraordinary contradiction—that he held no coercive power to prevent or overturn an illegal act by a state. In this same message Buchanan disclaimed any power to decide what the government’s relation to the seceding states might be. Suddenly a previously forceful executive had withdrawn into a crabbed reading of the Constitution that overlooked those parts of that document that could have been used to sustain federal action. In any case, concluded Buchanan, presidents only executed the laws.
Americans during the secession winter of 1860-61 recalled other presidents who had differently interpreted their oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States and to execute its laws. During the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, when Pennsylvanians refused to pay taxes on whiskey, President George Washington, under the authority of the Federal Militia Act and after his proclamation “against combinations subversive of the just authority of the government,” had called up the militia and even led it into battle against a group of Pennsylvanians.
Under even the most constrained reading of the militia acts of 1794 and 1807, the president did not have to wait for a request from a federal officer to call up the South Carolina militia in order to execute federal laws such as collecting the revenue, delivering the mail, surveying the public lands, and controlling forts and ordinance facilities. Most northern congressmen believed that the president had the authority, if all federal officers in South Carolina resigned, to appoint new officials in Washington who would ask for help in putting down insurrection. (This was a sticking point because all federal officials in South Carolina resigned, and in a legalism that Buchanan insisted on, no one had asked him—as they must—to intervene.)
If Congress would not confirm his selection of a new federal marshal—for by this time few northern or southern congressmen had any confidence in the president—he could make an emergency appointment and follow the path of his successor, who justified violating one law in order to support the larger, more significant purpose of preserving the Union. And if the power of secessionist public opinion was so strong as to prevent any men from serving in the militia, he could nationalize other militia units. New York had already offered volunteer units he could commission as a posse comitatus. Assuredly Buchanan had authority to organize an expeditionary force
against a state, as well as against individuals. As he had said in his remarks about the Covode investigation in March 1860, “The people have not confined the presidency to the exercise of executive duties. They have also conferred upon him a large measure of legislative discretion”—discretion he had employed in other episodes during his presidency. Moreover, from another perspective, he could accept South Carolina’s definition of itself as a foreign nation, now subject to the same federal authority as Buchanan had imposed on Paraguay.
Northern newspapers recalled Andrew Jackson and his vigorous reaction to South Carolina’s ordinance nullifying the 1832 federal tariff and that state’s subsequent preparations for war. Jackson had responded forcefully with an immediate presidential proclamation. He had warned South Carolina that states had no right to invalidate any federal law; he had encouraged Congress to pass the Force Bill mobilizing the army; and he had begun readying the navy at Norfolk, along with three units of artillery, to counter South Carolina’s actions. Jackson also established communications with Unionists in the state, who worked for an ultimately successful compromise, and he sent his own agents into South Carolina to find ways to protect federal property and even to jail leaders of the nullification movement. He quickly moved collection offices and protected federal agents from assaults by state officials. Simultaneously he prepared the fortifications in Charleston Harbor for attack. Later at least one South Carolinian acknowledged that the president’s energy and initiative had chilled the state’s taste for nullification and had encouraged compromise.
Though a disciple of Jackson and a model of strong executive power, Buchanan did nothing for two months after Lincoln’s election. There was no stern proclamation to South
Carolina, only his annual address to Congress in December. Privately, quoting from the book of Job, the president explained that he intended to come between the factions of the North and South as a daysman (an archaic reference to an arbitrator) “with one hand on the head of each counseling patience.” While northern Republican newspapers complained that he brought dishonor to the nation and should be impeached, the New York senator William Henry Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s secretary of state, observed that what Buchanan espoused was that no state had a right to secede unless it wanted to and that the government must save the Union unless somebody opposed it.3
During December, before six additional states left the Union in January and February, Buchanan’s contradiction of illegal state secession cobbled with unlawful federal coercion was enacted into public policy during the struggle over the federal forts, especially those in Charleston Harbor. In the thinking of secessionists state governments owned federal property under the doctrine of eminent domain. Accordingly, throughout the lower South southerners seized forts, customhouses and armories, post offices, and even courtrooms, in some cases before secession and in all cases with no response from the federal government. In Texas southern-sympathizing Major General David Twiggs of the U.S. Army and commander of the Department of Texas, simply surrendered all federal property to the new Confederate government, an action that Buchanan did protest by dismissing the general. But that was in February, not in the early crucial weeks of the crisis. It was in Charleston that the controversy between aggressive secessionists and an appeasing chief executive erupted. For both Buchanan and his successor,
Lincoln, control of Charleston’s Fort Sumter became the test of resolve.
In early December General Scott again argued for sending troops and supplies to reinforce the new commander of the federal forces in Charleston, Major Robert Anderson, who was headquartered at Fort Moultrie, one of several federal installations in Charleston Harbor. Located on a peninsula, Fort Moultrie was surrounded by high sand dunes that made it indefensible, unless reinforced, from a land attack that the local militia was increasingly capable of mounting. Across the bay, Fort Sumter, a brick pentagon built on a man-made island three miles from the heart of the city, dominated the harbor. A recent congressional appropriation had underwritten the completion and armament of both installations, and soldiers along with civilian laborers were hard at work.
As the work progressed, South Carolinians raised the ante. Sending commissioners to Washington, they sought a truce of sorts—at least a truce until after their formal secession, when a new government would take over and they would send different agents. If Buchanan promised not to reinforce the forts, they would not attack either. But such a diplomatic maneuver greatly benefited South Carolina and as well the entire secessionist movement throughout the lower South. At the time the state had little artillery and armaments and few soldiers. Local leaders were hurrying to arm and train the militia in Charleston, and while local mobs had already interfered with the efforts of U.S. Army officers to take ammunition from a federal armory, South Carolina needed time. Buchanan gave it to them. Despite his experience as a diplomat, he placed himself in the unfortunate position of implicitly admitting that any reinforcement of the Charleston forts was coercion, even as he maintained the
government’s defensive right to stay in the forts. In a move that bordered on impropriety, he negotiated with the commissioners as private gentlemen, not authorized emissaries. But any meeting, no matter what their status, gave further encouragement to the South Carolinians. Buchanan should not have had any discussions with men intent on treason. Refusing to promise that he would not reinforce, the president gave every indication that he would do nothing. And he also sent a personal ambassador to Charleston, asking the governor to postpone the state’s secession until Lincoln was inaugurated.
Throughout the critical month of December, a nervous president expended time and energy in long sessions with his cabinet. Those around him noticed a new twitch of his cheek as if “spirits were pulling at his jaw.” His hair was askew. Usually well informed, he forgot orders that he had given and dispatches that he had read. He gave up his recreational walks around Washington and made his advisers come to the upstairs library, unable some days to lift himself out of bed. He cursed and wept, and his hands trembled. Like Wilson during his campaign for the League of Nations in the summer of 1919 and Nixon in the summer of 1974 before his resignation over Watergate, Buchanan gave every indication of severe mental strain affecting both his health and his judgment.
Buchanan had always been a chief executive who lectured to his advisers, paying limited attention to their ideas, because he was intent on being his own president. But after Cobb’s resignation and then that of Cass, who had left because Buchanan had not reinforced the forts, he spent more time listening. When Mississippi chose Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi as its agent to discuss secession with North Carolina officials, Buchanan approved Thompson’s trip from Washington
to Raleigh. The government even paid the secretary’s expenses in a mission undertaken to discuss the destruction of that government. Then unexpectedly in late December 1860 an internal emergency overtook his administration.
The president should have long ago gotten rid of Secretary of War Floyd, a known incompetent suspected of fraud. Now it came to light that Floyd had used funds, illegally obtained, in order to pay civilian contractors who did work for the U.S. Army. Floyd had taken negotiable bonds from the Indian trust funds, kept in a wooden chest in the Interior Department, in exchange for drafts from the contracting firm. The firm then sold the bonds and paid its creditors. When funds were received for the army, in a plan that permitted grossly unsupervised accounting, Floyd would repay the money into the Indian funds. But the embezzlement was discovered; a complicit clerk in the Interior Department, who happened to be a cousin of Floyd’s wife, was arrested, and the connivance of two secretaries of Buchanan’s cabinet was exposed. Buchanan, ever loyal to a cabinet that remained his official and personal family and fearful of disturbing southern opinion, did not fire the Virginian Floyd immediately. Instead he asked the often-reprimanded Floyd for a resignation, which turned out to be slow in coming.
In fact Floyd continued to offer his advice from the sofa he claimed in the president’s office during cabinet meetings. In Washington the Virginian was quoted as saying he would cut off his hand before he would order the resupplying and reinforcement of southern coastal forts, which Major Anderson as well as General Scott now sought. Only at the end of December did Floyd resign, deceptively giving as his reason Buchanan’s opposition to secession, when in fact it was the result of his fraud. But
in another display of his appeasement, Buchanan had not asked for the secretary’s resignation because of his obvious disloyalty to the government.
Floyd was responsible for another scandal when it was discovered that he had sent disproportionate numbers of small arms along with ammunition to southern states. In the historical (and later congressional) indictment against Floyd that must include a negligent Buchanan, the Confederates did their fighting with arms sent by one of the more treacherous public officials in American history during one of the nation’s most disloyal administrations. Buchanan, in his rationalization of his presidency published in retirement, denied the charge on the grounds that the orders came before southern states contemplated secession, that the firearms were inferior, and that the numbers sent south were not an unreasonable amount. Perhaps, but Floyd, soon to become a Confederate general, undermined the president’s case with his later claims in Virginia that he had personally been responsible for sending to southern states many of the arms the Confederate army later used. No one could doubt that Floyd sent significant numbers of the powerful, long-range artillery called Columbiads and thirty-two pounders, along with other heavy ordnance, to two forts in Texas the very day that South Carolina seceded. Only the intervention of a group of angry citizens in Pittsburgh, who informed Buchanan the day before the arms were shipped south, prevented another episode of gross dereliction by a president immobilized by the conflict between his duty to the nation and his preference for the South.
As disunion proceeded and it became clear that seceding states would join in a confederacy, Buchanan continued to surround himself with southerners. He had nothing to do with
Republican leaders. He remained entirely dismissive of their ideas. Throughout November and December, the administration newspaper, the Washington Constitution, supported by government printing and widely viewed in Washington as the voice of the president, continued to support secession. Only in January did the president remove his patronage and close down the paper. Not only was his cabinet still dominated by future Confederates (Cass and Black were exceptions who proposed reinforcing the forts), but his informal circle of counselors on which all presidents depend was overwhelmingly from the Deep South. Senator Jefferson Davis, furious over Buchanan’s denial of secession on constitutional grounds, continued to advise; so did Robert Toombs of Georgia, Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, and, most dangerously, William Henry Trescot, an assistant secretary of state and a Charleston native, who reported on his conversations with Buchanan to his state government while still a federal officer.
In the informal southern clubs sufficiently organized as to have names like Dixies, Coral Reefers, and Spartans, sensitive information about administrative plans was leaked and sent southward, as federal employees advised southern governors as to how to buy arms from local arsenals and private arms dealers. Even Rose O’Neal Greenhow, the future Confederate spy and a friend of Buchanan’s, tried her hand at insider information gathering and trading. And from officials in the seceded states came word to their informants to stay in Washington. No new government ever had so effective an information system about its future enemy.
On Christmas night 1860 Major Anderson moved to Fort Sumter. In a night operation that eluded South Carolinian patrols, sixty soldiers spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie, burned
their wooden carriages, and then quietly rowed across the bay from Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Sumter with its fifty-foot walls. There they immediately began the process of strengthening the gun casemates, mounting guns, and closing embrasures. When the news came to Washington, Buchanan despaired: “My God, are calamities never to come singly!” He referred to the growing turmoil within his cabinet and to his special dilemma over the disgraced Floyd.
At the time he was also meeting with a group of postsecession South Carolinian commissioners, and he had let it be known that he would support a truce in Charleston Harbor until Congress, a national convention, or even a special convention—anyone but him—could find a workable compromise acceptable to both sides. Of course Buchanan had his own ideas for appeasing the South. They depended on the passage of constitutional amendments guaranteeing slavery in the states and in the territories and enforcing the right of southerners to reclaim their escaped slaves in the North. In all his plans, the rest of the United States and especially the Republicans must make adjustments to the South’s interests.
After Anderson’s move to Sumter, a dismayed president faced angry commissioners, who sought the surrender of Fort Sumter, a position that several of his cabinet officers supported. Secretary of the Interior Thompson noted that South Carolina was a small state with a sparse white population. Why not evacuate property that southerners believed they owned under the doctrine of eminent domain? They would buy the fort. Moreover, Anderson had violated the earlier agreements with South Carolina that the state had made with Buchanan—or at least thought that it had made.
But Buchanan could not go this far. Even as his Unionism
clashed with his strong prosouthernism, he knew that he must hold federal property; it was treason to surrender a military post. Nor could the fort, now a symbol of national authority, be quietly taken over, as had happened earlier throughout the coastal South. In his proposed memorandum to the commissioners Buchanan agreed to what he thought would be a peace-keeping compromise, though all his adjustments favored the South: he ordered Anderson back to Fort Moultrie, a death sentence given the ease with which the local militia could invade that installation and, as well, an implicit acknowledgment of the right of secession. In return South Carolina must pledge that it would not molest the forts, and the commissioners must meet with Congress. This latter recommendation gave seditious diplomatic standing to an insurrectionary group. The president also reiterated his earlier noncoercion pledge and, in a further play to the commissioners, agreed with them that Anderson had exceeded his orders. The president was wrong about this last point. When Anderson’s orders were produced from the War Department, the commander at Fort Sumter had indeed been authorized to move his force to the most defensible of the Charleston forts, if he had “tangible evidence” of a hostile threat.
By this time the cabinet included three strong Union voices, and Buchanan, less and less in control, depended especially on Attorney General Jeremiah Black, a fellow Pennsylvanian. The departure of southerners had forced Buchanan to choose cabinet officers from the North, whose differences with him revealed just how extreme the president’s prosouthern views were. Unable to tolerate the appeasement of South Carolina in the president’s draft, Black (appointed secretary of state on December 17), Joseph Holt, and new attorney general
Edwin Stanton argued that to order Anderson back to Moultrie was treason. They would resign if Buchanan did not modify his memorandum. Like several documents and one tape in presidential history, this state paper, conveniently for Buchanan, has disappeared from the record, but, resurrected from other sources, it demonstrated the loyalties of this president. In one account a distraught president asked Black if he too would leave him. Black replied that Buchanan’s memorandum “swept the ground from our feet” and placed the president where “no man can stand with you.”
Buchanan, in an unusual gesture, asked Black to rewrite the document. The confrontation ended with the president’s poignant acknowledgment that he had no friends and could not part with Black, Stanton, and Holt. So the three stayed, and Black’s more forceful response denied the right of South Carolina to take over federal property. When the South Carolina commissioners heard this version, they accused Buchanan of not honoring his pledge to them. Rudely, they demanded the evacuation of Sumter. Such arrogance was too much even for Buchanan. The president refused to see them, and they left for a state that was busily mobilizing and planning to seize all the federal facilities in Charleston.4
In these crisis-filled days of December the president faced a crossroads and turned onto the pathway of Unionism. Later he would argue that his policies had been consistent throughout. But he deceived himself, for he had been willing to give up Fort Sumter, according to his cabinet officers. Sending Anderson back to the indefensible Moultrie was tantamount to surrendering the national presence in South Carolina. Soon it became impossible because South Carolina had taken over all the federal fortifications in Charleston, including Moultrie.
Keeping the fort was a minimal gesture from the point of view of asserting the power of the federal government. Some historians argue that Buchanan deserves credit for having left Lincoln a hand to play, for without the salvaging of Sumter, the Confederacy could have gone in peace, its principle of lawful secession acknowledged in practice, if not theory. Empowered by the abandonment of any authority over them, certainly the Confederates would have tried to take over the slave border states. As it was, secessionists throughout the South found encouragement in Buchanan’s policies—the best president they would ever have, many believed. In assessing the Buchanan presidency, one should note how long it took the president to resist the southerners and even mount a defensive claim on Sumter, how important several cabinet officers were in this decision, and how much Buchanan’s delay, grounded in his sectional prejudice, cost the nation. Buchanan was significant in presidential annals for what he did not do and for how slowly he did what he did do. Only if the supposition that the existence of two nations, one holding slaves from shore to shining shore, is justified are Buchanan’s policies commendable.
The question remains why Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian educated in a free state whose wealth came from the practices of capitalism, not plantations, was so prosouthern. The answer goes beyond the political support the South extended to him in the election of 1856. Rather, it rests in his social and cultural identification with what he perceived as the southern values of leisure, the gentleman’s code of honor, and what George Cary Eggleston, a Virginia writer, once called “a soft dreamy deliciously quiet life … with all its sharp corners removed.” Throughout his life James Buchanan enjoyed the
company of southerners. Their grace and courtesy, even their conversational talents, attracted him. With slavery unimportant—indeed Buchanan became convinced that slavery helped “civilize” blacks—he sought out the company of these white aristocrats and soon absorbed their ideals. He believed that southern legislators were often statesmen, protecting that icon of his faith—the U.S. Constitution. And in his early years in Washington his mentor, Senator William King, had left an indelible impression on him.
The crisis the South had precipitated forced Buchanan to convert to a sterner Unionism. Now the president supported what General Scott and most of his cabinet had been demanding for weeks: he would reinforce Fort Sumter. On January 5, 1861, the Star of the West, carrying 250 men and supplies belowdecks, slipped from its anchorage in New York and headed south on the very day that Anderson informed Scott he felt secure and did not need reinforcements. The countermanding order came too late, but a powerful naval vessel, the Brooklyn, was ordered to assist if the chartered merchant vessel the Star of the West was damaged by battle in Charleston Harbor.
Four days later, warned by their spy network in Washington, the Charleston batteries opened fire on the Star of the West as it entered the channel. Several cannonballs skipped across the water, in firing sailors on the Union ship claimed was wild but frightening. Hoping for covering artillery fire from the guns at Sumter, the vessel desperately dipped its flag, a signal of distress. But under orders to keep the peace, the Star turned around and moved out to sea without delivering either troops or supplies. Astonishingly, Buchanan had not instructed Major Anderson to respond with covering fire. In
fact the president had not informed him of the expedition at all. Lacking any orders, the commander of Fort Sumter did not respond. Later, in a message to South Carolina governor Francis Pickens, Anderson hoped the hostile fire was “without [Pickens’s] sanction or authority.” Otherwise it was an act of war, but Anderson had no authority to start a war. And in Washington a defiant southern senator, Louis Wigfall of Texas, taunted northerners on the floor of Congress: “[Your] flag ha[s] been insulted; redress it if you dare.”5
Buchanan had no intention of redressing the humiliation at Sumter, as a period of calm took over. Anderson did not need any reinforcements for the moment, and now the president could turn his attention to supporting the compromise efforts under way in Washington. Another president might have followed up on the January incident, for the flag had been fired on. And in February another plan to reinforce Sumter with warships, proposed by Captain Gustavus Fox, gained the approval of General Scott and others in the administration. Buchanan at first agreed and then withdrew his consent because he considered the truce established after the Star of the West incident to be binding. Instead the president sought only to support the feckless compromise efforts of Congress and the Washington Peace Conference, the latter called by the Virginia legislature, which met without any of the seceded states attending.
Finally in March Buchanan’s 120 days of agony ended, although he even hesitated about the need for troops in Washington to protect the transfer of power to the new Republican administration. Such a military presence might upset the southerners still in the city, but Scott had no such qualms. The ancient general stationed himself in a carriage on a hill
overlooking the Capitol, scanning the horizon for any efforts to disrupt the inauguration. When Buchanan and Lincoln rode to the Capitol, Washington was well defended. On the ride back Buchanan turned to Lincoln and said, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland you are a happy man.”
Buchanan had a new reason for this sentiment. The night before, a message had come from Major Anderson that he was running out of supplies. Earlier Anderson had warned that he could last for only five months. But given South Carolina’s guns and a new floating battery in the harbor, any relief expedition would now require twenty thousand troops and significant naval forces. Instead it was Lincoln who must deal with the problems that Buchanan’s inactivity had exacerbated.
Some historians and Buchanan himself insist that Lincoln followed Buchanan’s policies insofar as Fort Sumter was concerned. In his inaugural address Lincoln pledged no more than “to hold, occupy, and possess” the forts, and while he declined to go so far as Buchanan to deny the right of coercing the Confederacy, he would not invade. The South would have to attack, which it did six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration when another expedition was nearing the fort.
But the similarities are superficial. Lincoln inherited the effects of Buchanan’s appeasement. These had made the Confederacy far more powerful than it might have been. The new president faced an organized government that was as wealthy as many European nations. Buchanan had faced only South Carolina, until the second week of January. Lincoln confronted a Confederacy with a constitution and leaders who were already making their case for diplomatic support in France and Great Britain, and more dangerously in the eight
slaveholding states that had not seceded. These states were constrained by the power of southern Unionists and their attachment to the Union. A vigorous reaction to the secession of South Carolina, indeed a strong response to the taking of federal property throughout the cotton states, would have stanched the departure of others. Virginian Edward Pollard used a sailing metaphor to make the point: James Buchanan “drew the wind for southern sails by his complacent attitude.” Certainly after the firing on the Star of the West, a legitimate casus belli existed, about which Buchanan did nothing. Throughout his presidency Buchanan so exaggerated what the South might do that he was often immobilized, and as Lincoln overestimated the spirit of Unionism in the border states, so Buchanan underestimated it in the South.
It is also worth noting that Lincoln understood the emergency powers of the federal government in a way that Buchanan did not. As the new president wrote in a letter to Erastus Corning in 1863, in cases of rebellion and invasion, he could never be persuaded that the government could not take strong measures not available in peacetime. To illustrate the point, Lincoln used the commonplace analogy of a drug not given to a healthy man, but entirely appropriate to save a sick man.
Americans have conveniently misled themselves about the presidency of James Buchanan, preferring to classify him as indecisive and inactive. According to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “He prayed, and frittered and did nothing.” In fact Buchanan’s failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity, but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in an officer pledged to defend all the United States. He was that most dangerous of chief executives, a stubborn,
mistaken ideologue whose principles held no room for compromise. His experience in government had only rendered him too self-confident to consider other views. In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history.
What the president did not do was avoided in the name of prosouthernism, for in other matters his was not a presidency hampered by either feebleness or the lack of understanding of an old public functionary. When he confronted the crisis of Anderson’s move to Sumter, he showed his true colors. Only the intervention of his cabinet officers saved the fort. But Buchanan’s reputation has been shielded by the need for reconciliation with the South after the Civil War and a version of national history that overemphasizes patriotic visions of chief executives. Better an incompetent than a near traitor.
In his study at Wheatland, where he spent most of his time after the presidency (“age loves home” was one of his sayings), Buchanan worked hard to vindicate his administration. Only Nixon matched his strenuous after-the-fact effort to rehabilitate a failed presidency. Buchanan had hoped that Jeremiah Black, his attorney general and secretary of state, would undertake this project. But Black soon encountered such differences with the former president’s version of events, especially those after Lincoln’s election, that he withdrew. So the former president worked alone, collecting documents, arguing for the necessity of his policies, and angrily noting the defection of cabinet officers like Stanton, Holt, and Dix who joined the Lincoln administration.
Throughout the war Buchanan was a good Unionist. He supported the draft, but not the Emancipation Proclamation, and he never publicly criticized what he considered Lincoln’s
violations of the Constitution. Actually the freeing of the slaves gave him an opportunity to join the Presbyterian Church, which he did in 1865. Earlier he had refused to do so, considering that denomination too abolitionist. Buchanan was working on his version of his presidency when the epic battle of Gettysburg took place some twenty miles away, and he wrote a friend that if he were younger, he would take up arms to defend the Union.
In 1866 Buchanan’s exculpatory three-hundred-page Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion appeared. The volume was notable for the attention given to northern antislavery agitation and “the malign influence of the Republican party” as the causes of secession and a last chapter that highlighted his foreign policy successes. The world might criticize his performance but, ever stubborn, he was “completely satisfied” with his actions, even those in the frenzied last days of his administration. But the former president found plenty of other culprits—including Major Anderson, who should never have moved to Fort Sumter; General Scott, with whom he carried on an angry newspaper exchange; and especially Congress, which had not heeded any of his warnings or requests for more authority. Two years after his defense was published, his mission complete, James Buchanan died in his bedroom at Wheatland of pneumonia, aged seventy-seven.