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]]
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.
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]]