But, in the second place, even if other good reasons did not exist, there were but five companies of regular troops, or four hundred men, available for the garrisoning of nine fortifications in six highly excited Southern States. How were they to be distributed? Distributed equally, they would have amounted to a reinforcement of forty-four men and a fraction in each fort. In whatsoever proportions they might be distributed, according to the conjectured degree of exposure of the various posts, the movement could have been nothing but an invitation of attack, which the force would have been entirely inadequate to repel. The whole army of the United States then consisted of only eighteen thousand men. They were, with the exception of the five companies named by General Scott, scattered on the remote frontiers and over the great Western plains, engaged in the protection of the settlers and the emigrant trains; and for this duty their numbers were, and had long been, and have ever since been, notoriously inadequate. At a later period, after President Buchanan had retired from office, General Scott, in a controversy in the public prints which he thought proper to provoke with the ex-President, referred to six hundred recruits in the harbor of New York and at Carlisle barracks in Pennsylvania, which, added to the five companies mentioned in his “views,” would have made a force of one thousand men; and while he admitted that this force would not have been sufficient to furnish “war garrisons” for the nine Southern forts, he maintained that they would have been quite enough to guard against surprises. But it is to be noted that in his “views” of October, 1860, he made known to the President that there were only the five companies, which he named, “within reach, to garrison the forts mentioned in the views;” and, moreover, he was mistaken, in November, 1862, in supposing that he had obtained these recruits when he wrote his “views,” nor did he, in October or November, 1860, in any manner suggest to the President that there were any more than the five companies available. Had he made any military representations to the President before the election, other than those contained in his “views,” it cannot be doubted that they would have received all the consideration due to his official position and his great military reputation.[[63]]
But General Scott’s “views” produced, and ought to have produced, no impression upon the mind of the President. That part of them which suggested a military movement was entirely impracticable. The political part, which related to the aspects of secession, its possible admission in one case and its denial in another, was of no value whatever to anybody but those who believed in the doctrine. With the exception of such circulation of these “views” as General Scott permitted by giving copies of them to his friends, they remained unpublished until the 18th of January, 1861. On that day they were published, by General Scott’s permission, in the National Intelligencer at Washington, the editors saying that they had obtained a copy of them for publication because allusion had been made to them both in the public prints and in public speeches. This document, therefore, in an authentic shape, was made public in the midst of the secession movement, after the States of South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama had adopted their ordinances of secession, and while the people of Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas were deliberating upon their course.[[64]] The President at that time passed over this publication in silence, for reasons which he afterwards assigned in the public controversy between General Scott and himself in October and November, 1862.
And here it may be appropriate, before proceeding farther with the narrative, to advert to a suggestion which has been again and again repeated in a great variety of forms, by those who have criticised Mr. Buchanan’s course in regard to the reinforcement of the Southern forts. General Scott himself, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, in the middle of December, 1860, in a note which he addressed to the President, referred to the course pursued by President Jackson in regard to nullification, in 1832-33; and it has long been one of the current questions, asked as if it were unanswerable,—why did not Mr. Buchanan imitate the firmness, boldness and decision with which General Jackson dealt with the “Nullifiers,” and proceed to garrison the Southern forts before the election of Mr. Lincoln? Having already shown the impracticability of such a step, from the want of the necessary forces, and its great political inexpediency even if the necessary force had been within his reach, it only remains for me to point out that there was no parallel between the situation of things under General Jackson in 1832-33, and the state of the country under President Buchanan in 1860-61. South Carolina stood alone in her resistance to the collection of the revenue of the United States, in 1832-33; nor, whatever might be the steps which she would have the rashness to take in preventing the execution of a single law of the United States within her borders, there was no danger that any other State would become infected with her political heresies, or imitate her example. What General Jackson had to do was to collect the revenue of the United States in the port of Charleston. For this purpose, prior to the issue of his proclamation, and while the so-called ordinance of nullification was pending in the convention of South Carolina, he took preliminary steps, by placing in the harbor a sufficient military and naval force to insure the execution of a single Federal statute, commonly called the “tariff.” For this purpose he had ample authority of law, under the Act of March 3, 1807, which authorized the employment of the land and naval forces, when necessary, to execute the laws of the United States through the process of the Federal tribunals. He had, moreover, the necessary forces practically at his disposal. So far as these forces would consist of troops, their proper destination was Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor; but their presence in that fort was deemed necessary, not to prevent an anticipated seizure of it by the State authorities, but to aid in the execution of the revenue law in case it should be resisted. For this purpose, in March, 1833, he sent a small military force to Fort Moultrie, and a sloop of war, with two revenue cutters, to Charleston harbor. General Scott was sent to Charleston to take the command of these forces, if it should become necessary for them to act. He arrived there on the day after the passage of the Nullification ordinance. The proclamation of General Jackson, the passage of Mr. Clay’s Compromise Tariff Bill, and the passage of the Force Bill, put an end to any actual collision between the State and the Federal authorities.
How different was the state of the country in 1860, before the election of Mr. Lincoln! A generation of men had grown up in the South, many of whom held the supposed right of State secession from the Union as a cardinal feature of their political and constitutional creed. The sole ground for any apprehension of a practical assertion of this doctrine was the contingent election of a President nominated upon a “platform” obnoxious to the people of the slaveholding States. In such a state of affairs, was it for a President, whose administration was to expire in five months, to adopt the foregone conclusion that the Republican candidate would be elected, and to add to this the further conclusion that his election would be followed by a secession of States, which the people of the North would take no conciliatory steps to prevent after the Republican candidate had been elected? Was President Buchanan to throw a military force into the Southern forts, even if he had had a sufficient force within his reach, and thus to proclaim to the whole people of the South, the loyal and the disloyal, that in his judgment there would be but one issue out of the election of Mr. Lincoln—an issue of physical force between the two sections of the country? In what condition would this have placed his successor, and the great political party which was aiming to obtain for that successor the control of the Government? Surely Mr. Lincoln and his political supporters would have had the gravest reason to complain, if Mr. Buchanan, before the election, had, by any act of his own not palpably and imperatively necessary, caused it to be believed by the whole Southern people that there was and could be no alternative but to put their anticipated dangers, their alleged grievances, and the doctrine of secession along with them, at once to the arbitrament of the sword. We have it on Mr. Buchanan’s own solemn assertion, the sincerity of which there can be no reason to doubt, that he considered it his highest duty so to shape his official course during the remainder of his term, as to afford to the secessionists of the South no excuse for renouncing their allegiance to the Federal Union, and to hand the government over to his successor, whoever he might be, without doing a single act that would tend to close the door of reconciliation between the two sections of the country, then unfortunately divided by the political circumstances of the pending election. This was the keynote of his policy, formed before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and steadily followed through every vicissitude, and every changing aspect of the great drama enacting before his eyes. It is easy to reason backward from what occurred, and to say that he should have garrisoned the Southern forts, in anticipation of their seizure. History does not, or should not, pass upon the conduct of statesmen in highly responsible positions, by pronouncing in this ex post facto manner on what they ought to have anticipated, when men of equally good opportunities for looking forward did not anticipate what subsequently occurred. It was not the belief of the leading public men in the Republican party, before the election of Mr. Lincoln, the men who were likely to be associated with him in the Government, that there would be any secession. If they had believed it, they would certainly have been guilty of great recklessness if they had not acted upon that belief, at least so far as to warn the country, in their respective spheres, to be prepared for such an event. It is one of the most notorious truths in the whole history of that election, that the political supporters of Mr. Lincoln scouted the idea that there was any danger of secession to be apprehended.
General Scott’s suggestion of such danger to Mr. Buchanan, in the month of October, 1860, and the impracticable advice which he then gave, if it had been published before the election, would have been laughed at by every Republican statesman in the country, or would have been indignantly treated as a work of supererogation, unnecessarily suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate was to be followed by an attempted disruption of the Union. Undoubtedly, as the event proved, the political friends of Mr. Lincoln were too confident that no secession would be attempted; and into that extreme confidence they were led by their political policy, which did not admit of their allowing the people of the North to believe that there could be any serious danger to the country in their political triumph. If the people of the North had believed in that danger, the Republican candidate would not have been elected. It did not become the Republican leaders, therefore, after the election, and it never can become any one who has inherited their political connection, to blame Mr. Buchanan for not taking extraordinary precautions against an event which the responsible leaders of the party, prior to the election, treated as if it were out of all the bounds of probability.[[65]]
And here, too, it is well to advert to a charge which relates to Mr. Buchanan’s administration of the Government prior to the election of his successor. This charge, to which a large measure of popular credence has long been accorded, is, that the Secretary of War, Mr. Floyd, had for a long time pursued a plan of his own for distributing the troops and arms of the United States in anticipation of a disruption of the Union at no distant day. But such a charge is of course to be tried by a careful examination of facts, and by a scrupulous attention to dates. One of the most important facts to be considered is, that Secretary Floyd, who came in 1857 into Mr. Buchanan’s cabinet from Virginia—a State that never had, down to that time and for a long period thereafter, many secessionists among her public men—was not of that political school until after he left the office of Secretary of War. He was a Unionist, and a pronounced one, until he chose, as a mere pretext, to say that he differed with the President in regard to the policy which the President thought proper to pursue.[[66]] But from the fact that he became a secessionist and denounced the President, after he left the cabinet, and the foolish boast which he made that he had, while Secretary of War, defeated General Scott’s plans and solicitations respecting the forts, the inference has been drawn that he had good reason for advancing that claim upon the consideration of his new political allies in the Southern section of the country. Mr. Floyd by no means appears to me to have been a man of scrupulous honor. The fact that he had been compelled to resign his place on account of a transaction in no way connected with the secession of any State, led him, in a spirit of sheer self-glorification, to give countenance to a charge which, if it had been true, would not only have reflected great discredit on the President, but which would have involved the Secretary himself in the heinous offence of treachery to the Government whose public servant he was. No man could have thus overshot his own mark, who had a careful regard for facts which he must have known: for no one could have known better than Mr. Floyd that he had no influence whatever in defeating any plans which General Scott proposed to the President in his “views” of October, 1860, and no one could have known better than he that the troops and arms of the United States had not been distributed with any sinister design. But Mr. Floyd’s subsequent vaporings, after he left the cabinet, misled General Scott into the belief that there had been great wrong committed while he was Secretary of War, and caused the General, in October and November, 1862, to give his sanction to charges that were quite unfounded.
It is proper to hear Mr. Buchanan himself, in regard to his refusal to garrison the Southern forts in October or November, 1860, according to the recommendations in General Scott’s “views.”
This refusal is attributed, without the least cause, to the influence of Governor Floyd. All my cabinet must bear me witness that I was the President myself, responsible for all the acts of the administration; and certain it is that during the last six months previous to the 29th December, 1860, the day on which he resigned his office, after my request, he exercised less influence on the administration than any other member of the cabinet. Mr. Holt was immediately thereafter transferred from the Post Office Department to that of War; so that, from this time until the 4th March, 1861, which was by far the most important period of the administration, he [Mr. Holt] performed the duties of Secretary of War to my entire satisfaction.[[67]]
Finally, it only remains for me to quote Mr. Buchanan’s more elaborate account of his reasons for not acting upon General
Scott’s “views” of October, 1860, which he gave in the account of his administration, published in 1866.[[68]]