There could be no doubt in the mind of any one that the destruction of the Union would be deplored by Mr. Buchanan as profoundly as by any living man. His birth and rearing as a Pennsylvanian leave no other presumption possible. In the original Union, Pennsylvania was appropriated denominated the Keystone of the arch, supported by, and in turn supporting, the strength of all. Of the "old thirteen" there were six free States north of her, and six slave States south of her. She was allied as warmly by ties of friendship and of blood with her Maryland and Virginia neighbors on the one side as with those of New Jersey and New York on the other. Her political and social connection on both sides were not more intimate than those of a business and commercial character. As the Union grew in power and increased in membership, Pennsylvania lost nothing of her prestige. She held to the new States as intimate relations as she held to the old. The configuration of the country and the natural channels of communication have bound her closely to all sections. Her northern border touching the great lakes, connected her by sail and steam, before the era of the railway, with the magnificent domain which lies upon the shores of those inland seas. Her western rivers, whose junction marks the site of a great city, form part of the most extensive system of interior water-communications on the globe, affording a commercial highway twenty thousand miles in length through seventeen States not included in the original Union. Patriotic tradition increased Pennsylvania's attachment to the National Government. It was on her soil that the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. It was in her Legislative halls that the Constitution was formed and the "more perfect Union" of the States ordained. From geographical position therefore, from material interest, from inherited pride, from every association and sympathy, from every aspiration, and from every hope, Pennsylvania was for the Union, inviolable and indissoluble. No threat of its destruction ever came from her councils, and no stress of circumstances could ever seduce her into a calculation of its value, or drive her to the contemplation of its end.
With all his attachment to the Union, Mr. Buchanan had been brought under influences which were hostile to it. In originally constituting his Cabinet, sinister agencies had controlled him, and far-seeing men anticipated trouble when the names were announced. From the South he had selected Howell Cobb of Georgia for the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia for Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Missouri for the Interior, and Aaron V. Brown of Tennessee for Postmaster- General. From the North he had selected Lewis Cass of Michigan for the State Department, Isaac Toucey of Connecticut for the Navy, and Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania for Attorney-General. It seemed extraordinary that out of seven Cabinet officers four should be given to the South, when the North had a vast preponderance of population and wealth. It was hardly less than audacious that the four departments assigned to the South should be those which dealt most intimately and most extensively with the finances, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country. The quiet manner in which the North accepted this inequitable distribution of political power added only another proof of the complete ascendency which the South had acquired in the councils of the Democratic party.
Mr. Buchanan had always looked to the statesmen of the South as a superior class; and after a political life wholly spent in close association and constant service with them, it could not be expected that, even in a crisis threatening destruction to the Union, he would break away from them in a day. They had fast hold of him, and against the influence of the better men in his Cabinet they used him for a time to carry out their own ends. Secessionists and Abolitionists Mr. Buchanan no doubt regarded as equally the enemies of the Union. But the Secessionists all came from the party that elected him President, and the Abolitionists had all voted against him. The Abolitionists, in which phrase Mr. Buchanan included all men of anti-slavery conviction, had no opportunity, even if they had desired, to confer with the President, while the Secessionists from old and friendly association, were in daily and intimate relations with him. They undoubtedly persuaded the President by the most plausible arguments that they were not in fault; that the whole responsibility lay at the door of the Northern anti-slavery men; and that, if these disturbers of the peace could be suppressed, all would be well. It was under these influences, artfully insinuated and persistently plied, that Mr. Buchanan was induced to write his mischievous and deplorable message of the first Monday of December, 1860,—a message whose evil effect can never be estimated, and whose evil character can hardly be exaggerated.
The President informed Congress that "the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at last produced its natural effect. . . . The time has arrived so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed." He declared that he had "long foreseen and often forewarned" his countrymen of "the impending danger." Apparently arguing the case for the Southern extremists, the President believed that the danger "does not proceed solely from the attempt to exclude slavery from the Territories, nor from the efforts to defeat the execution of the Fugitive-slave Law." Any or all of these evils, he said, "might have been endured by the South," trusting to time and reflection for a remedy. "The immediate peril," Mr. Buchanan informed the country, "arises from the fact that the long-continued agitation in the free States has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections, and many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before morning." The President was fully persuaded that "if this apprehension of domestic danger should extend and intensify itself, disunion will become inevitable."
PRESIDENT BUCHANAN AND THE SOUTH.
Having thus stated what he believed to be the grievances of the South, Mr. Buchanan proceeded to give certain reasons why the slave- holders should not break up the government. His defensive plea for the North was worse, if worse were possible, than his aggressive statements on behalf of the South. "The election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President," Mr. Buchanan complacently asserted, "does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union." And then he adds an extraordinary qualification: "This is more especially true if his election has been effected by a mere plurality, and not a majority, of the people, and has resulted from transient and temporary causes, which may probably never again occur." Translated into plainer language, this was an assurance to the Southern Disunionists that they need not break up the government at that time, because Mr. Lincoln was a minority President, and was certain to be beaten at the next election. He reminded the Southern leaders moreover that in the whole history of the Federal Government "no single Act had ever passed Congress, unless the Missouri Compromise be an exception, impairing in the slightest degree the rights of the South to their property in slaves." The Missouri Compromise had been repealed, so that the entire body of national statutes, from the origin of the government to that hour was, according to President Buchanan, guiltless of transgression against the rights of slave-holders. Coming from such a source, the admission was one of great historic value.
The President found that the chief grievance of the South was in the enactments of the free States known as "personal liberty laws." When the Fugitive-slave Law subjected the liberty of citizens to the decision of a single commissioner, and denied jury trial to a man upon the question of sending him to lifelong and cruel servitude, the issue throughout the free States was made one of self-preservation. Without having the legal right to obstruct the return of a fugitive slave to his servitude, they felt not only that they had the right, but that it was their duty, to protect free citizens in their freedom. Very likely these enactments, inspired by an earnest spirit of liberty, went in many cases too far, and tended to produce conflicts between National and State authority. That was a question to be determined finally and exclusively by the Federal Judiciary. Unfortunately Mr. Buchanan carried his argument beyond that point, coupling it with a declaration and an admission fatal to the perpetuity of the Union. After reciting the statutes which he regarded as objectionable and hostile to the constitutional rights of the South, and after urging their unconditional repeal upon the North, the President said: "The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event, the injured States, after having used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government of the Union."
By this declaration the President justified, and in effect advised, an appeal from the constitutional tribunals of the country to a popular judgment in the aggrieved States, and recognized the right of those States, upon such popular judgment, to destroy the Constitution and Union. The "constitutional means" of redress were the courts of the country, and to these the President must have referred in the paragraph quoted. After an appeal to the courts, and a decision upon the questions presented, it would have been the plain duty of the parties to accept the decision as authoritative and final. By the advice of the President, the States of the South were to accept the decision obtained by constitutional means, in case it was favorable to them, and to disregard it, and to destroy both the Constitution and the Union, if it should prove to be adverse to the popular opinion in those States.
It is not improbable that the President's language conveyed more than his real meaning. He may have intended to affirm that if the free States should refuse to repeal their obnoxious statutes after a final decision against their constitutionality, then the slave States would be justified in revolutionary resistance. But he had no right to make such an argument or suggest such an hypothesis, for never in the history of the Federal Government had the decision of the Supreme judicial tribunal been disobeyed or disregarded by any State or by any individual. The right of "revolutionary resistance" was not so foreign to the conception of the American citizen as to require suggestion and enforcement from Mr. Buchanan. His argument in support of the right at that crisis was prejudicial to the Union, and afforded a standing-ground for many Southern men who were beginning to feel that the doctrine of Secession was illogical, unsafe, untenable. They now had the argument of a Northern President in justification of "revolutionary resistance." Throughout the South, the right of Secession was abandoned by a large class, and the right of Revolution substituted.