WASHINGTON

Blood and Dishonor

DECEMBER 27

IN WASHINGTON THAT THURSDAY MORNING, WILLIAM HENRY TRESCOT, the former assistant secretary of state, raced to the Senate chamber and told the news to two senators, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter of Virginia, or R.M.T. Hunter for short. The three immediately left and drove by carriage to the White House, where they asked to meet with Buchanan.

The president walked in a few moments later, clearly nervous, according to a later account by Trescot. “I knew his manner too well to be mistaken,” Trescot said.

Buchanan, profoundly unhappy at the prospect of getting bad news from the men, made some discursive remark about the U.S. consul in Liverpool.

“Mr. President,” Senator Davis said, “we have called upon an infinitely greater matter than any consulate.”

“What is it?” Buchanan asked. He stood beside the fireplace. His eye disorder imparted a look of particular wariness—chin down, face turned, left eye acutely focused.

“Have you received any intelligence from Charleston in the last two or three hours?” Davis asked.

“None.”

“Then, I have a great calamity to announce to you.”

Davis told him of Anderson’s move from Fort Moultrie to Sumter. “And now Mr. President you are surrounded with blood and dishonor on all sides.”

As Buchanan listened, he broke a cigar into pieces in his hand, a habitual act that Trescot had witnessed many times in the past. Buchanan sat down. This news of Anderson had come on the heels of South Carolina’s secession and revelations of Floyd’s financial scandal. “My God,” Buchanan said, “are calamities never to come singly. I call God to witness—you gentlemen better than anyone know—that this is not only without but against my orders, it is against my policy.”

So unlikely was the news the men brought that Buchanan doubted its accuracy. If true, he said, why had he heard nothing from War Secretary Floyd? He dispatched a messenger to summon the secretary.

Floyd, on arrival, told Buchanan that no official telegram had been received by the War Department, and that his senior men doubted the report could possibly be true; Floyd added that he had just sent a telegram to Anderson expressing his incredulity. He had not yet seen Anderson’s reply.

Buchanan postponed his planned meeting with the three South Carolina commissioners and called a cabinet meeting, an extraordinary and fateful session that would span, at intervals, three days and four nights.

IT CONVENED ON THURSDAY, December 27, with new men filling the posts left by the resignations of Howell Cobb and Lewis Cass. The men who comprised the new cabinet were Jeremiah S. Black, formerly Buchanan’s attorney general, now replacing Cass as secretary of state; Edwin M. Stanton, an assistant attorney general who now stepped into his former boss’s seat as attorney general; Philip F. Thomas, replacing Cobb at Treasury (he would last all of a month); Joseph Holt, postmaster; Isaac Toucey, secretary of the Navy; Floyd, war secretary; and Jacob Thompson, Interior. A former congressman from Mississippi, Thompson favored secession and cast himself rather openly in the role of court spy on behalf of South Carolina. By now the news of Anderson’s move had been confirmed.

That War Secretary Floyd even dared to attend the meeting was a surprise, given that a few days earlier Buchanan, through an intermediary, had asked him to resign. But not only did Floyd dare—he behaved with an aggravating hauteur. He read aloud a three-paragraph statement that began: “It is evident now, from the action of the commander of Fort Moultrie, that the solemn pledges of the Government have been violated by Major Anderson.” Having lost the confidence of South Carolina, he read, “one remedy only is left, and it is to withdraw the garrison from the harbor of Charleston altogether. I hope that the President will allow me to make that order at once. This order, in my judgment, can alone prevent bloodshed and civil war.”

Secretary of State Black forcefully disagreed and declared his own support for Anderson’s occupation of Sumter. A former Supreme Court justice whose most salient physical features were eyebrows that resembled cumulonimbus clouds, he was often referred to as Judge Black. “Good,” Black said of Anderson’s move. “I am glad of it. It is in precise accordance with his orders.”

“It is not,” Floyd said.

“But it is,” Black countered. “I recollect the orders distinctly word for word.” The written original of these orders—the “last extremity” directive delivered verbally to Anderson by Buell but issued first in writing by Floyd himself—was then retrieved; it explicitly refuted Floyd’s charge.

During this session, Interior Secretary Thompson likewise proposed that Sumter be evacuated, but as a gesture of generosity to South Carolina. The state, he argued, was a small one, “with a sparse white population,” while the Union was large and powerful. “We could afford to say to South Carolina, ‘See, we will withdraw our garrison as an evidence that we mean you no harm.’”

At this, Stanton, the new attorney general and a staunch unionist, turned to Buchanan. “Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the Government is strong, and that we, as the public servants, have the confidence of the people.” Nothing was further from the truth, Stanton later recalled saying. “No administration has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this has done.” With Floyd still present, Stanton went on to allude to Floyd’s financial scandal. “Now it is proposed to give up Sumter. All I have to say is, that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week.”

Floyd said nothing.

This proved to be Floyd’s last cabinet meeting. With his dismissal by Buchanan still not disclosed, Floyd now saw a way to craft his exit as a decision of his own, in high moral terms, to restore his reputation among the public—or at least that portion of the public living below the Mason-Dixon Line. He raised anew Buchanan’s alleged pledge to maintain the military status quo in Charleston Harbor and charged that in now breaking that pledge, Buchanan had engaged in an act of dishonor that Floyd (overlooking for the moment his own scandal) could not abide.

“Our refusal or even our delay to place affairs back as they stood under our agreement, invites a collision and must inevitably inaugurate civil war,” Floyd wrote in his formal letter of resignation on Saturday, December 29. “I cannot consent to be the agent of such a calamity. I deeply regret to feel myself under the necessity of tendering to you my resignation as Secretary of War, because I can no longer hold the office under my convictions of patriotism, nor with honor, subjected, as I am, to a violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.”

In a one-paragraph reply two days later, Buchanan accepted Floyd’s resignation and told him he had appointed Postmaster Holt, a strong unionist, as his provisional replacement.

AT ONE POINT WHILE the cabinet was in session, Sen. Robert Toombs of Georgia came to the White House and asked to see Buchanan, who stepped out to meet with him in an adjacent room. Toombs told him that he had received inquiries from several leading citizens of Savannah as to whether Anderson would continue to occupy the fort, and whether the United States intended to retain possession. It was this meeting, according to William Trescot, that first brought home to Buchanan the true magnitude of what was occurring in the South—“the first time he seemed really to begin to believe in what was so near at hand.” Until then, Buchanan “thought it likely that South Carolina would secede but that she would not be supported by any other state.”

Buchanan told Toombs he had not yet decided how to proceed with regard to Sumter. “The Cabinet is now in session upon that very subject.”

“I thank you Sir for the information that is all I wanted to know,” Toombs said, and prepared to exit.

“But Mr. Toombs, why do you ask?”

“Because Sir my State has a deep interest in the decision.”

This perplexed Buchanan. “How your state—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbor is abandoned?”

“Sir,” Toombs answered, “the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.”

“Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?”

“Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”

PRESSURE ON BUCHANAN WAS mounting, and not just from the South. Anderson’s move galvanized the North, where his lone and courageous act was all the more striking when juxtaposed against the behavior of an administration whose salient feature was inaction. The major became an immediate hero. One admirer called him America’s “one true man.” The legislature of the Nebraska Territory unanimously passed a resolution of thanks to Anderson and wished him a happy New Year. Requests for autographs poured in from Boston; New York; St. Louis; Philadelphia; Chicago; and Batavia, New York. One even came from a man in Charlotte, North Carolina, who explained that while he sided with the South, he nonetheless approved of Anderson’s move for the sake of the Union. A publisher, Rudd and Carleton, asked Anderson and his officers to keep notes on their experiences following the move to Sumter for a later book, to be called tentatively, and optimistically, “‘A Month’ or ‘Two Months at Fort Sumter.’” The book, they said, “would sell like wild-fire.”

Buchanan recognized that the rising outcry from the North proscribed his range of options and made his own peaceful exit less and less likely. “If I withdraw Anderson from Sumter,” he said, “I can travel home to Wheatland by the light of my own burning effigies.”