[82]. Speech in the Senate, December 18, 1860. Congressional Globe, p. 119.
[83]. The instructions will be quoted hereafter.
[84]. See the controversy between General Scott and Mr. Buchanan in 1862; Mr. Buchanan’s letter of October 28, 1862.
[85]. Mr. Buchanan said, in 1862, that he had no recollection of some of the details of the conversation imputed to him by General Scott, and that the General’s memory must be defective. See Mr. Buchanan’s letters of 1862, in the National Intelligencer.
[86]. Ex. Doc., H. R., vol. vi, No. 26, p 6.
[87]. This account, although written and published in 1866 (Buchanan’s Defence, p. 167), was founded on and embodied the substance of the private memorandum made by the President on the back of the letter, immediately after the termination of the interview. Two of the gentlemen who signed the letter, Messrs. Miles and Keitt, published at Charleston an account of this interview, in which they did not intimate that anything in the nature of a pledge passed on either side. (See Appleton’s “American Annual Cyclopedia” for 1861, p. 703.)
[88]. Mr. Jefferson Davis, although not directly asserting that the President gave any pledge not to send reinforcements or not to permit the military status to be changed, says that “the South Carolinians understood Mr. Buchanan as approving of that suggestion, although declining to make any formal pledge;” and he adds, that after Anderson’s removal from Moultrie to Sumter, the authorities and people of South Carolina considered it “as a violation of the implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo,” and he gives this as a reason why the remaining forts and other public property were at once seized by the State. (Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, I., 212-213.) If the South Carolina members of Congress told Mr. Davis that the President assented to or approved of their proviso, they told him what was not true. He does not say that they ever did tell him so. If they gave their own people and State authorities to understand that there was any implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo, the fact was exactly the other way. They have never said that they gave their people and authorities so to understand Mr. Buchanan’s language.
[89]. The remarkable fact that this demand was made before South Carolina had “seceded,” and before Anderson’s removal, although the demand was subsequently withdrawn, shows how early the Executive of South Carolina had formed the determination to treat the presence of the United States troops in Charleston harbor as an offence against the dignity and safety of the State.
[90]. Mr. Jefferson Davis has erroneously given to this letter the date of December 30th. Its true date was December 31st. (See Mr. Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, vol. I., p. 592.)
[91]. In the North American Review, during the year 1879, certain papers were published under the title of “Diary of a Public Man,” without disclosure of the authorship. These papers purported to be passages from a diary kept by a person in some public, or quasi public, position in Washington, during the autumn and winter of 1860-61. Inquiry by the author of this work has failed to elicit any information of the name of the writer, the editor of the Review declining to disclose it. The statements made in these papers are therefore anonymous, and readers will judge how far they should be regarded as reliable materials of history. There is, however, one of these statements, which it is my duty to notice, because the unknown writer professes to make it on the authority of Senator Douglas. It purports to have been committed to writing on the 28th of February, 1861, and is as follows: “Before going, Senator Douglas had a word to say about President Buchanan and the South Carolina commissioners. He tells me that it has now been ascertained that the President nominated his Pennsylvania collector at Charleston on the very day, almost at the very moment, when he was assuring Colonel Orr, through one of his retainers, that he was disposed to accede to the demands of South Carolina, if they were courteously and with proper respect presented to him. They rewrote their letter accordingly, submitted it to the President’s agents, who approved it and sent it to the White House. This, Senator Douglas says, was on January 3d, in the morning. The commissioners spent the afternoon in various places, and dined out early. On coming in, they found their letter to the President awaiting them. It had been returned to them by a messenger from the White House, about three o'clock P. M., and on the back was an indorsement, not signed by any one, and in a clerkly handwriting, to the effect that the President declined to receive the communication. They ordered their trunks packed at once, and left for home by way of Richmond, on the four o'clock morning train, feeling, not unreasonably, that they had been both duped and insulted.”—(North American Review, vol. cxxix, p. 269.)