1860—December.
RECEPTION OF THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE IN THE CABINET, IN CONGRESS,
AND IN THE COUNTRY—THE FIRM ATTITUDE AND WISE POLICY OF MR.
BUCHANAN.
Reference has already been made to what took place when this annual
message was read to the cabinet, before it was transmitted to
Congress. Recent revelations made by Judge Black in the public
prints disclose the nature of an objection made by him to the
expression “to coerce a State into submission, which is attempting
to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn, from the Confederacy.” His
criticism did not apply to the legal proposition of the message, in
which he entirely concurred; but his apprehension was that the
expression would be read superficially, and be misunderstood. The
President did not think so, nor did the other members of the
cabinet. It is only necessary for me to repeat that the message
clearly and unequivocally pointed out that the coercive power of the
Federal Government was necessarily confined and must be applied to
the execution upon individuals of the laws of the United States; and
that it explicitly stated, with proper references to the proceedings
of the framers of the Constitution, that a power to coerce a State
by force of arms was expressly rejected by them, since it would, if
applied, be equivalent to a declaration of war against the State by
the Government of the Union. But the apprehension felt by the
learned Attorney General was caused, I presume, by his anxiety
concerning the reception of the message in the South and among the
secessionists. It was their misconstruction that he feared. He could
not well have supposed that Northern statesmen, grounded at least in
the fundamental principles of the Constitution usually accepted at
the North, and with the clear distinction put before them in the
message between coercing a State and coercing individuals, would
impute to the President an intention to renounce the right to use
force in the execution of the laws and the protection of the public
property of the Union. In point of fact, as the sequel will show,
nearly the whole Republican party, after the message became public,
without any rational excuse for such a misconstruction, saw fit to
treat the message as a denial by the President of any power to
enforce the laws against the citizens of a State after secession,
and even after actual rebellion. If this was what the Attorney
General anticipated, it would seem that the President, having taken
great care to make clear the distinction, was not bound to suppose
that a merely partisan spirit of misrepresentation would be applied
to such a document as this message, to the extent of utterly
perverting its meaning. On the other hand, the disunionists did not
misunderstand or misconstrue the message. They saw clearly that it
not only denounced secession, but that while it enunciated the
doctrine that the Federal Government could not apply force to
prevent a State from adopting an ordinance of secession, it could
and must use force, if need be, to execute its laws, notwithstanding
the secession. This was a doctrine opposed _toto cælo_, and in all
its branches, to the secessionist’s theory of the Constitution. It
met them upon their own ground, for it utterly denied that a State
ordinance of secession could absolve its people from obeying the
laws of the United States. Accordingly they denounced the message;
and upon their theory of the Constitution they denounced it rightly.
All friendly intercourse between the leading disunionists in
Congress and the President ceased after the message became public;
and from the multitude of private letters which reached the
President from the South, now lying before me, it is apparent that
throughout that section he was regarded, alike by the enemies and
the friends of the Union, as having made the issue on which the
secessionists desired to have the whole controversy turn. They were
just as ready to accept the issue of a constitutional power in the
Federal Government to enforce its laws after secession, as they were
to accept the issue of coercing a State to remain in the Union.
As soon as the message was published, “thick as autumnal leaves that
strew the brooks in Vallambrosa,” private letters of approbation
were showered upon the President from all quarters of the North. The
most diverse reasons for praising his policy marked this
heterogeneous correspondence. The Democrat, who was afraid to have a
civil war begin under a Democratic administration, predicted that it
would destroy his party forever. The pious “abolitionist,” who saw
the finger of God in everything, and who prayed daily for a
separation of the free and the slave States, so that the reproach of
tolerating slavery might no longer rest upon the Constitution of his
country, hailed the annunciation of a policy which he thought
destined, in the course of Providence, to work out the result which
he longed to see. The Quaker, who abhorred war and bloodshed, hoped
that “thee” would preserve peace at any price. The man of business,
looking to his material interests and to the commercial advantages
of the Union, deprecated a civil war which would disturb the natural
current of affairs, and would end where no man could foresee.
Thoughtful citizens, who comprehended more within their range of
reflection than was common with their neighbors, recognized the
wisdom and the necessity of the conciliatory steps which the
President had recommended. The speculative jurist, meditating in his
closet upon what he supposed might be a panacea for this disordered
condition of the body politic, sent his recommendations. Nearly all
of these classes, in their various ways of looking at such a crisis,
were on the whole gratified that the President had afforded to the
country a breathing spell, had solemnly called upon Congress to
reflect, and had at the same time called upon it to act in the
manner best adapted to meet the emergency. Very few desired
aggressive measures to be taken, which would put the Federal
Government in the attitude of making war upon a State.
These numerous private communications, coming from the people, were
addressed to one of the most self-reliant of men, who had surveyed
the whole field that was before him, who had firmly settled the
general policy which it was his duty to follow, and who was as calm
and collected in this great trial as he had ever been in any
situation of his life, while he was neither insensible to or
careless of its weighty responsibilities. It has been one of the
fashionable errors concerning Mr. Buchanan to impute to him, from
age or some other cause, a lack of firmness and self-possession in
this perilous emergency. He has been spoken of as having lost his
faculties, or as being bewildered by the perplexities of his
situation. There never was a more unfounded imputation. It is an
imputation to which no one who was closely in contact with him gave
at the time any countenance whatever. It will appear, as I go on,
that, of the members of his cabinet who were most concerned in all
his official acts during the last months of his administration, not
one formed at that time the opinion that he was wanting in firmness,
decision, or energy, however any of them may have differed with him
from time to time in regard to particular steps or measures. The
President who sent to Congress the message on which I commented in
the last preceding chapter, was certainly equal to the occasion. How
he felt, and what he said of his situation, the reader will be
interested to learn by the following extract from a confidential
letter which he wrote to a gentleman in New York on the 20th of
December:
I have never enjoyed better health or a more tranquil spirit than
during the past year. All our troubles have not cost me an hour’s
sleep or a single meal, though I trust I have a just sense of my
high responsibility. I weigh well and prayerfully what course I
ought to adopt, and adhere to it steadily, leaving the result to
Providence. This is my nature, and I deserve neither praise nor
blame for it. Every person who served with me in the Senate in
high party times would avouch the truth of this statement.
Mr. Buchanan may have made mistakes. If I had discovered them I
should not have hesitated to point them out. But that his policy was
sound; that it was the only policy that could have had any chance of
preserving the Union without a civil war; that his motive was
eminently patriotic; that with a serene and superb patience he
incurred the risk of obloquy and misrepresentation for the sake of
his country; all this should be the judgment of any impartial mind.
Nay, more: I do not hesitate to say that no man can justly accuse
him of vacillation, weakness, or timidity. A statesman who has a
great task to perform in a national peril, does not always pursue a
rigid line of action, without regard to the varying course of
events. He determines, first of all, on the grand object which he
wishes to accomplish. If he keeps that object constantly in view, he
must necessarily vary his steps as the changing aspects of public
affairs require; and one supreme test of his capacity and wisdom as
a statesman is to be found in his ability to adapt himself to new
situations, and at the same time not to lose sight of the capital
object of all his exertions. As a diplomatist, in the highest sense
of that term, Mr. Buchanan had few equals in his time, nor have
there been many men in our history who were in this respect his
superiors. As his course in the inception and progress of the
secession movement is developed, it will be seen that the
explanation of many of his acts, which have been the most
misunderstood or misrepresented, is to be found in the necessity for
palliating the danger of an armed collision, at moments when such a
collision would have destroyed all hope of a peaceful solution of
the sectional difficulties. That at such moments he sacrificed any
principle to the management of the immediate question in hand, or
imperilled any national interest, or that he ever departed in any
essential respect from the great object of his policy, will not be,
or ought not to be, the judgment of those who may follow this
narrative to the end.
The dis-Unionists of South Carolina, aided by the leading
secessionists in Congress from other States of the South, as will
be seen hereafter, tried hard to entrap him. They never once
succeeded. They meant to draw from him an admission in some form
that a State could constitutionally secede from the Union; for
they were sorely provoked that he had denied the right of
secession in his message, and when South Carolina had actually
adopted her ordinance, it became with them a capital point to
extort from him a surrender of the forts in Charleston harbor,
which would imply that the ordinance had transferred them to the
State. They anticipated that if they could once drive him from the
position of his message, the Democratic party of the North,
looking upon him as its representative, would never encourage or
support a war for the recovery of those possessions. They knew
that he deprecated and was seeking to avoid a war; and they
believed that if he could be compelled to admit that South
Carolina was out of the Union, other States would quickly join her
in the same movement. But the truth is, that, with all their
astuteness, the secessionists were individually and collectively
no match for a man who had in former days contended with the most
crafty politicians of Russia, who had encountered and encountered
successfully the ablest among the British statesmen of that age,
and who knew more of public law and of our constitutional
jurisprudence than all the dis-Unionist leaders in the South. In
addition to all the resources which Mr. Buchanan had in his own
person and his experience as a statesman, he had a very important
resource in his Attorney General, and in some of the other
gentlemen who joined his cabinet after it became necessary to
reconstruct it; and if, in the pressure that was made upon him by
the secessionists, and in the hurry of encountering their devices,
there was any danger that his determinations might be unskillfully
shaped, it was abundantly guarded against by the suggestions of
his advisers.
By the public press of the North, the message was of course received
according to party affinities. There were many leading articles
which regarded it as sound and wise; many which treated it as a kind
of “treasonable” giving away of the Union. The general tone,
however, of the more moderate journals was hopeful, and the papers
of this class based their hopes of a peaceful issue out of all the
difficulties upon the President’s recommendations. Still, the
utterances of the press did not show that even then the public mind
of the North fully grasped the extreme gravity of the situation; and
if these utterances of the press are to be taken as the best proof
of the state of the public mind in the North, without the aid of
one’s personal recollections and observation, it might be inferred
that the message had not produced the impression that it ought. But
the great mass of private letters which reached Mr. Buchanan are a
better index of what was passing in men’s minds; and they show
unmistakably that if the Congress had vigorously acted as he
advised, the public mind of the North was preparing to sanction and
to welcome the course which he recommended, however diverse were the
reasons or the motives which prevailed with the individual
writers.[80]
Footnote 80:
This mass of private letters is so great, and so fully represents
various classes of the community, that I have felt entirely
warranted in treating it as the best evidence of the currents of
public opinion, as they were setting immediately after the
publication of the message. The President could do nothing more
with such a correspondence than to have each letter carefully read
by a competent private secretary, and its contents duly noted for
his information. The whole of it gave him the means of knowing the
feelings of the people far better than he could know them by
reading the public prints.
The letters which reached the President from the South, after the
promulgation of his message, were almost as numerous as those which
came from the North, but they did not exhibit such a variety in the
motives and feelings that animated the writers. They were from men
who represented two principal classes of persons, the Unionists and
the dis-Unionists. The latter wrote in a bold, defiant and turbulent
spirit. They made it quite clear that they cared nothing for the
distinction between coercing a State and coercing individuals, and
that they held a State ordinance of secession to be perfectly
efficacious to absolve its people from obeying the laws of the
United States. They declared that any movement of troops or
munitions of war into the Southern States would instantly be
accepted as proof of a design to prevent peaceable secession, would
promote bloodshed and inaugurate civil war. Many of these persons
were terribly in earnest; but if any of them wrote in the
expectation that they could operate upon the President’s fears, and
thus prevent him from carrying out his announced purpose to execute
the laws and preserve the public property of the Union, they
“reckoned without their host.” While he made it apparent to Congress
that at that time he was without the necessary executive powers to
enforce the collection of the revenue in South Carolina, in case she
should secede, he did not fail to call for the appropriate powers
and means. And in regard to the application of all the means that he
had for protecting the public property, it will be seen hereafter
that he omitted no step that could have been taken with safety, and
that when the day for the inauguration of his successor arrived,
Major Anderson not only held Fort Sumter, but had held it down to
that time in perfect confidence that he could maintain his position.
The letters from Union men in the South evinced that there was in
all the cotton States, excepting in South Carolina, a strong body of
men who were not disposed to coöperate in a dismemberment of the
Union, and in the destruction of the Government under which they and
their fathers had always lived and prospered. They therefore, from
their positions, were able to tell Mr. Buchanan how important it was
that the Federal Government should not become the aggressor; how
vital it was that it should act on the defensive; and how necessary
it was that the North, acting through Congress, should adopt the
conciliatory measures which he had recommended; measures that would,
in regard to the Territories, give the South nothing but a barren
abstraction, and that would, in regard to the extradition of
fugitives, give the South only what it had a perfect right to
demand. Although all this was entirely apparent to the President
without the information which these letters gave him, these
expressions of the feelings, opinions and hopes of the Unionists of
that region were a strong confirmation of the wisdom of his policy.
The tone of the Southern press respecting the message was in general
violent and inflammatory, but with many noteworthy exceptions. But
as in the North, so in the South, the private letters to the
President were a better index of the currents of feeling and opinion
than anything that could be found in the utterances of the press.
In Congress, when the message was received, there was a singular
state of parties. First, there were the Republicans, flushed with
their recent political triumph in the election of Mr. Lincoln, and
entirely indisposed to make any concessions that would militate, or
seem to militate, against the dogmas of the “Chicago Platform.” This
party was purely sectional in its composition, tendencies and
purposes. Next were the representatives of the Southern States, most
of whom held theoretically to the State right of secession. This
party was a sectional one, also; but, as will hereafter be shown,
there were a few Southern men in Congress who did not believe in the
doctrine of secession, who favored no extreme demands of the South,
and who acted throughout with a steady purpose to preserve the peace
of the country and the integrity of the Union. Thirdly, there were
the Northern Democrats, represented by such Senators as Mr. Douglas,
Mr. Bigler and Mr. Bright, who could act as mediators between the
extreme sectional parties of North and South. It was to such a
Congress that the President addressed his message, at a moment when
South Carolina was about to secede from the Union, and when the
danger was that all the other cotton States would follow her
example. He was convinced that an attempt of those seven States to
form a confederacy, independent of the United States, could not be
overcome without a long and bloody war, into which the other
Southern States, commonly called from their geographical situation
the border States, would sooner or later be drawn. A great army
would be needed to encounter even the cotton States, and no free
institutions in the world had ever survived the dangers to which
such an army had exposed them. To prosecute a civil war would entail
upon the Federal Government a debt which could not be calculated;
and although the taxation necessary to uphold that debt might be
thrown upon posterity, in part, yet the commercial, manufacturing,
agricultural, mechanical and laboring classes must be at once
exposed to ruinous burthens. To avert such calamities, by the
employment of all the constitutional powers of his office, was his
supreme desire.[81] It was the great misfortune of his position,
that he had to appeal to a Congress, in which there were two
sectional parties breathing mutual defiance; in which a broad and
patriotic statesmanship was confined to a small body of men who
could not win over to their views a sufficient number from either of
the sectional parties to make up a majority upon any proposition
whatever.
Footnote 81:
Buchanan’s Defence, pp. 112-113.
The message was unsatisfactory to both of the sectional parties. Mr.
Jefferson Davis, in the Senate the ablest and most conspicuous of
the secessionist leaders, now committed the grand error of his
career as a statesman in this national crisis. He denounced the
message because of its earnest argument against secession, and
because the President had expressed in it his purpose to collect the
revenue in the port of Charleston, by means of a naval force, and to
defend the public property. Mr. Davis did not need to make this
issue with the President, or to make any issue with him, unless he
was determined to encourage South Carolina to leave the Union, and
to encourage the other cotton States to follow her. His own State
had not then seceded, and whether she would do so depended very much
upon his course. However strongly and sincerely he may have believed
in the right of secession, the President had afforded to him and to
every other Southern statesman an opportunity to forestall any
necessity for a practical assertion of that right, by giving his
voice and his vote for measures of conciliation that ought to have
been satisfactory to every Southern constituency and every Southern
representative. It was a capital mistake, for Mr. Davis and the
other secessionist leaders, to separate themselves from the
President, and afterwards to endeavor to extort from him an
admission that South Carolina had gone out of the Union, and that
the laws of the United States could not be executed within her
limits, or the possession of the forts in her harbor be maintained.
Mr. Calhoun would not have thus acted. He would have exerted his
whole power to procure concessions fit to be offered by the North,
and to be received by the South, before he would have encouraged his
State to secede from the Union in advance of the decision that no
such concessions would be made.
The spirit of the Republican Senators towards the message may be
seen from the very unjust representation of its tenor made by Mr.
Hale of New Hampshire, who said that in substance its positions
were: 1. That South Carolina has just cause to secede from the
Union. 2. That she has no right to secede. 3. That we have no right
to prevent her. So far from saying or intimating that South Carolina
had just cause to secede from the Union, the President had in the
message carefully and explicitly drawn that distinction between the
right of revolutionary resistance to intolerable oppression, and the
supposed right of State secession from the Union on account of
anticipated danger; a distinction which Madison, Jefferson, Jackson
and Webster always made when dealing with the subject. That
distinction was not more clearly and emphatically made by Mr.
Webster in his encounters with Mr. Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, than it
was made by Mr. Buchanan in this message. And if Mr. Hale had been
disposed to do justice to the message, instead of employing a
witticism that might be remembered by persons who would not take the
pains to understand such a public document on a subject of such
fearful gravity, he would have admitted what all men should then
have admitted, and what afterwards became the only justifiable basis
of the civil war: that to coerce a State to remain in the Union is
not, but that to enforce the execution of the laws upon the
individual inhabitants of the States is, a power that the Government
of the United States can constitutionally exercise. There was one
member of that Senate, who was no disunionist, who understood the
President rightly, and who knew well what the Constitution would or
would not authorize. This was Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee,
afterwards President of the United States.
“I do not believe,” said Mr. Johnson, “the Federal Government has
the power to coerce a State, for by the eleventh amendment of the
Constitution of the United States it is expressly provided that you
cannot even put one of the States of this Confederacy before one of
the courts of the country as a party. As a State, the Federal
Government has no power to coerce it; but it is a member of the
compact to which it agreed in common with the other States, and this
Government has the right to pass laws, and to enforce those laws
upon individuals within the limits of each State. While the one
proposition is clear, the other is equally so. This Government can,
by the Constitution of the country, and by the laws enacted in
conformity with the Constitution, operate upon individuals, and has
the right and the power, not to coerce a State, but to enforce and
execute the law upon individuals within the limits of a State.”[82]
Footnote 82:
Speech in the Senate, December 18, 1860. _Congressional Globe_, p.
119.
It was well for the country that at this early period Mr. Buchanan
had the wisdom to foresee and the firmness to enunciate the only
doctrine that could save the Government of the United States from
the consequences of making war upon a State, and at the same time
enable it to suppress all insurrectionary resistance to its
constitutional authority. It might suit the secessionists to claim
that their States would become, by their ordinances of secession,
independent nations, capable as such of waging war against the
United States, or of having it waged upon them by the United
States, if such was the pleasure of the latter. It might suit them
to put the alternative of such a war against the consent of the
United States to their peaceful renunciation of their connection
with the Federal Government. It might suit them to confound all
the distinctions between revolutionary resistance to a government
because some actual oppression has been suffered from it, and the
secession of States from the American Union because future
oppression is to be feared. It might suit them to say that to
coerce the individual inhabitants of a State to obey the laws of
the United States, after the State has absolved them from that
obligation by its sovereign will, is the same thing as to coerce a
State to remain in the Union. But this was not a dispute about
words; it was a controversy about the substantive powers of a
constitutional Government; a great question of things, and of
things drawing after them the most important consequences. If
there was to be a war, it was a matter of supreme importance what
that war was to be, in its inception. Mr. Buchanan did not mean
that its character, if it must come, should be obscured. He did
not mean that it should be a war waged aggressively by the United
States to prevent a State from adopting an ordinance of what she
might call secession. He did not mean to concede the possibility
that the Federal Government could begin or carry on a war against
a State, as a power which could by its own act erect itself into a
nation to be conquered and subdued and destroyed, as one nation
may conquer, subdue and destroy another. Knowing that such a
recognition of the potency of an ordinance of secession would be
fatal to the future of the whole Union, and knowing from long
study of the Constitution how the laws of the United States may be
enforced upon individuals notwithstanding that their State has
claimed a paramount sovereignty over them, or a paramount
dispensing power, he left upon the records of the country the
clear line of demarcation which would have to be observed by his
successor, and which would make the use of force, if force must be
used, a war, not of aggression, but of defence; a war not for the
conquest and obliteration of a State, but a war for the assertion
of the authority of the Constitution over the individuals subject
to its sway. It was only by treating secession as a nullity, and
by acting upon the principle that the people of a State would be
equally bound to obey the laws of the United States after
secession as they had been before, that the President could
furnish to Congress any principle on which force could be used. It
is not remarkable that the secession leaders should have rejected
his doctrine. But it is strange, passing strange, that Northern
men should have misrepresented it. Yet there was not a single
public man in the whole North, in all the discussion that followed
this message, on the Republican side, who saw, or who, if he saw,
had the candor to say, that the President had furnished to
Congress a principle of action that would alone prevent secession
from working the consequences which its advocates claimed for it,
or that could prevent the conquest and subjugation of States as
foreign nations. And now, when we look back upon the war that
ensued, and when we measure the disparity of force that enabled
the United States eventually to prevail over the exhausted
Southern Confederacy, there are no people in the whole Union who
have more cause than the secessionists themselves, to be grateful
to President Buchanan for not having admitted the possibility of
legitimate war upon the States that seceded; while for the people
of the whole Union there remains a debt of gratitude to him, for
having laid down the principle that saved them from crushing the
political autonomy of those States, in a war that could have had
no result but to reduce them to the condition of subjugated
provinces.