BUCHANAN

Aunt Fancy Speaks

DECEMBER 3

BUCHANAN SPENT MORNINGS WORKING ON HIS ANNUAL MESSAGE and from time to time summoned his assistant secretary of state, William Henry Trescot, to bring him copies of treaties and other documents. Born in Charleston into one of Carolina’s loftiest families, Trescot was a member of the state’s aristocracy, the chivalry. His nominal superior was Secretary of State Lewis Cass, seventy-eight years old, a former U.S. senator from Michigan, but Cass occupied the post mainly as a figurehead; Buchanan himself, with Trescot’s help, fulfilled the State Department’s responsibilities. Now, with South Carolina seemingly on the verge of secession, Trescot, thirty-eight, was proving an invaluable source of intelligence about the state’s attitudes and grievances.

Buchanan was convinced South Carolina would in fact secede, and he feared the conflict that was likely to result over the federal forts in Charleston Harbor. “I assured him,” Trescot wrote, “that I did not think he had much to apprehend in the way of unlawful force, that the people of So.Ca. not only held the right of Secession but that they took special pride in carrying out that right quietly, regularly, peaceably as a right not as a revolutionary measure—that I really believed it would mortify them to be compelled to resort to force.” In Trescot’s treacly view, South Carolina’s exit would be no more fraught than a routine business negotiation. Once the state passed its ordinance of secession, Trescot told Buchanan, it would send envoys to Washington to work out details of the separation.

“But,” Buchanan interrupted, “you know I cannot recognize them, all I can do is to refer them to Congress.”

As long as Buchanan did so “courteously” and “in good faith,” Trescot assured him, the state would be content to wait for a congressional decision. But Buchanan, Trescot saw, remained “very cautious and his great hope seemed to be by temporizing to avoid an issue before the 4th March.”

When Buchanan had completed a draft of his message, he invited U.S. senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to the White House and read it to him. Davis, the South’s leading statesman, suggested various changes, which Buchanan “very kindly accepted,” according to Davis’s later recollection. Davis left the meeting feeling confident that Buchanan’s final address would affirm that South Carolina did indeed have a constitutional right to exit the Union. But Buchanan, as it happened, had not yet finished tinkering.

Once the speech was complete, he decided to send a copy as a courtesy to South Carolina’s Governor Gist and to have Trescot deliver it to him in person. The governor and his family were such ardent believers in the Southern cause that Gist’s brother’s given name was States Rights Gist.

At about nine o’clock on Sunday night, December 2, with his address due in Congress the next day, Buchanan sent for Trescot. Buchanan told him that the speech spoke “the truth boldly and clearly” and that the South ought to find it acceptable.

Trescot disagreed. Having read the address, he forecast that South Carolina “would not only secede but that it would secede immediately.”

The next morning, Trescot set out for South Carolina bearing Buchanan’s courtesy copy.

The following day, Tuesday, December 4, Buchanan’s address—all three thousand words—was read in the House chamber by a clerk, after which printed copies were distributed to each member. “Never was any document listened to with such marked attention before,” the New-York Times reported. “Not an eye was turned from the reading Clerk; not a word or look passed between the members until the close of that portion relating to secession.”

A DEMOCRAT FOR NEARLY four decades, Buchanan had always been a problematic candidate in the eyes of the electorate, but this had nothing to do with his political competence. On paper, at least, he had one of the most illustrious records of any politician anywhere. From the age of twenty-three, when he won a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly, he had won eleven straight elections, which moved him firmly into the heart of federal politics. James K. Polk made him secretary of state; Franklin Pierce selected him as his vice presidential running mate, though Buchanan declined the opportunity. Buchanan was tall, handsome, blond, and apparently never had to shave. He did have one conspicuous imperfection: a misalignment of his eyes that caused his gaze to diverge in an alarming fashion. To compensate, he would tip his head forward and to the side with one eye focused on his listener, thereby imparting a look of skepticism or keen interest. One Sunday Edmund Ruffin spotted Buchanan on Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of one of the president’s solo walks through Washington. “As we first passed,” Ruffin wrote in his diary, “he had one eye shut, (as is his frequent habit,) and with the other he stared at me as if he thought he knew me.”

Otherwise, Buchanan seemed to be an ideal catch for any woman, but therein lay the problem: He had no particular interest in being caught. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, a phenomenon American voters could not quite grasp. His one brush with marriage had occurred in 1819 when he became engaged to a young woman named Ann Coleman. She broke it off, complaining that he spent too much time attending to his public activities and not enough to her. Invariably, broken engagements raised public speculation. Coleman fled to Philadelphia both to recover her emotional health and to restore her social standing, but she died soon after her arrival, at twenty-three years of age, her demise attributed to “hysterical convulsions.” Speculation further intensified when it became known that her father would not allow Buchanan to attend the funeral. The mystery of it all gave rise to questions as to whether Coleman might have killed herself or overdosed on some kind of sleep elixir, like laudanum, or had committed that worst of public sins, gotten pregnant out of wedlock, for clearly something had caused her father’s callous treatment of Buchanan.

Buchanan had remained single ever since. Newspapers called him “Aunt Fancy.” For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.

During the 1856 presidential election the Democratic Party wrestled with the problem of his bachelorhood and came up with a solution. Introducing him at the party’s 1856 national convention, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat announced, “Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to THE CONSTITUTION, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy.” Which prompted some wags to note that this particular wife was rather old. Others likened him to a spinster. Even Polk said that he “sometimes acts like an old maid.” There was something fusty about him. A popular term of the day, “old fogey,” seemed to apply. The press came to refer to him routinely as the “Old Public Functionary,” or OPF for short.

None of this seemed to bother Buchanan, who on occasion even referred to himself as OPF, but his situation often left him feeling isolated. Upon occupying the White House, he recruited his vivacious niece, Harriet Lane, to come live there as his companion and social hostess, a role she embraced wholeheartedly.

From the start of his political career Buchanan had demonstrated a pronounced affinity for Southerners and the South, despite having lived his whole life in Pennsylvania, where he owned a three-story, seventeen-room mansion called Wheatland situated on twenty-two acres of plantation-like grounds outside Lancaster. In the political vernacular of the time, this made Buchanan a “dough face,” someone who seems outwardly to be one thing but is actually another. The South returned the affection: In the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan won almost universal support from the slaveholding states, with only Maryland choosing to stray. Four of Buchanan’s cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states’ rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family. This closeness had the effect of limiting his ability to view the political landscape with any degree of impartiality and caused him to act in ways that skirted the line between mere favoritism and treason.

As Senator Seward noted in a letter to his wife, Frances, “The White House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink, and sleep with him.”

BUCHANAN’S ADDRESS OPENED WITH a question that captured the perplexity many felt about Southern unrest. After observing that the country had experienced a greater surge in prosperity than any nation before it, Buchanan asked: “Why is it, then, that discontent now so extensively prevails, and the Union of the States, which is the source of all these blessings, is threatened with destruction?”

He promptly answered: It was all the North’s fault.

What caused the current crisis, he said, was Northern antislavery agitation that had inspired “vague notions of freedom” among enslaved people. “Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar,” he said, meaning the Southern family altar. In its place had risen a fear of slave insurrections. “Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning,” he wrote. If this fear deepened and became pervasive, he warned, “then disunion will become inevitable.”

But the crisis had not yet reached that point, he argued; happily the solution was simple and near at hand: “All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave states have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.” The North had no more right to interfere with slavery in these “sovereign States” than in Russia or Brazil. It was up to the “good sense and patriotic forbearance” of the North to restore harmony, for no president, whatever his politics, had the power to do so on his own.

By the same token, Buchanan said, the mere election of a new president, meaning of course Lincoln, did not provide sufficient cause to break up the Union. Only some overt act—not the mere fear of future actions—could justify secession. “It is said, however, that the antecedents of the President-elect have been sufficient to justify the fears of the South that he will attempt to invade their constitutional rights. But are such apprehensions of contingent danger in the future sufficient to justify the immediate destruction of the noblest system of government ever devised by mortals?”

No constitutional right to secession existed, he said. If it did, the Union would be merely “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States.” But, he noted, states confronted by egregious federal behavior could follow another path. In that case secession would be justified by a higher law of “revolutionary resistance” that superseded even the Constitution. “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution,” he wrote. “It may or it may not be a justifiable revolution, but still it is revolution.”

He further argued that if a state did ultimately secede, there was nothing he or the federal government could do about it. “Without descending to particulars,” he wrote, “it may be safely asserted that the power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution.”

The address pleased no one. Jefferson Davis, angered by Buchanan’s denial of a right to secede, vowed to sever all “friendly intercourse” with him, both social and political. Lincoln professed to be stunned by Buchanan’s attribution of blame to the North and took particular offense at his insinuation that “the antecedents of the President-elect” provided ample justification for Southern fears. The address left William Seward baffled. “It shows conclusively that it is the duty of the President to execute the laws—unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union—unless it wants to.”

The New-York Times denounced the message as “an incendiary document” that would only deepen sectional conflict. “It backs up the most extravagant of the demands which have been made by the South,—endorses their menace of Disunion if those demands are not conceded,—and promises the seceding States that the power of the Federal Government shall not be used for their coercion.” The Times accused Buchanan of a “flagrant dereliction of duty” and groaned, “The country has to struggle through three months more of this disgraceful imbecility and disloyalty to the Constitution.”