CHAPTER TWO
“Still men and nations reap as they have strawn” …
O’er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?
—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL,
“The Washers of the Shroud” (1861)
Washington, January 1861
IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED an unusual transaction, hardly in the common line of business for a big auction house like Green & Williams, with its commodious premises just off Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The partnership’s stock-in-trade ran more to real estate, furniture, kitchenware. These were the sorts of valuables that the capital city’s transient denizens often left behind, as the ever-revolving wheel of congressional elections and presidential administrations, the waxing and waning of political parties, regularly returned large numbers of inhabitants to the far-flung provinces from which they had so recently arrived.
Still, the potential commission on this sale was tempting, since it might well prove substantial. A Negro male just past the prime of life could fetch a thousand dollars—the price of a modest house and lot in the city—and the one now on offer was no common field hand, but a first-rate house servant. If a sharp-eyed speculator or two attended the sale, the price might go even higher. Shipped down to the New Orleans market, this fellow could bring as much as fifteen hundred, or at least close to it, even if his eventual master only intended to put him to work cutting sugarcane.
A newcomer to Washington that winter might have been surprised, even shocked, to see a slave put on the block here in broad daylight. This was, after all, 1861—hadn’t the slave trade in the District of Columbia been abolished more than a decade earlier, as part of the Compromise of 1850? Indeed, it had been heralded at the time as the South’s most important concession to the North. For decades, abolitionists had been wailing about the moral stain of human traffic here in the capital of the republic. Their propaganda broadsides had shown coffles of black men and women, shackled together, being marched past the dome of the Capitol itself. Visiting foreigners had written letters and books telling their own countrymen—in tones of outrage permeated with more than a hint of smug satisfaction—about the squalid slave pens at the heart of the Americans’ supposed empire of liberty. Now all that was supposed to be a thing of the past.
Few people—at least outside of Washington—noticed that the 1850 law did not actually prohibit slave trading itself. It simply banned anyone from bringing Negroes into the District of Columbia for the purpose of selling them out of state. That took care of those embarrassing coffles: Washington would no longer be a major entrepôt for Negroes being shipped off to the slave-hungry Cotton Belt from the overstocked Chesapeake region. But it was still perfectly legal for a Washingtonian to put his house servant up for public auction, and even to advertise the offering, as Green & Williams did, in the pages of the Daily National Intelligencer, the city’s leading newspaper and a semi official chronicle of congressional proceedings. If the unlucky slave happened to turn up the following week in one of the Alexandria slave pens right across the Potomac, ready to be packed onto a New Orleans–bound schooner—well, that too was perfectly within the law.1
The Negro coming up for sale on this particular occasion was a thirty-three-year-old man named Willis. Selling him might even be called a prestige transaction for Green & Williams, which, though large, was by no means known as one of the more genteel auction houses in the capital. For this slave had been, as the firm boasted in its advertisement, the valued property of “the late Hon. Judge George M. Bibb deceased,” one of the District’s most distinguished longtime residents.2
The courtly, white-haired Judge Bibb—known also, depending on whom you spoke to, as Chancellor Bibb, Senator Bibb, Secretary Bibb—had been a fixture of Washington politics and society ever since his arrival as a young senator from Kentucky during President Madison’s first term.3As his respectful obituaries noted, he had been at various times United States attorney, secretary of the treasury under President Tyler, and—after retiring from government service and taking up practice as a leading Washington attorney—a habitué of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber. In his politics, the late judge had been admirably moderate: both a proslavery man and a Union man, in the hallowed tradition of his native Virginia. His most notable speech in the Senate had been back in 1833, when South Carolina had threatened to secede over nullification, one of those almost ceaseless sectional crises and compromises that had preoccupied the federal government throughout recent decades. “My voice is still for peace,” Bibb sonorously began, and then spent three and a half hours professing his belief in peace and the Union, the Union and peace. Making frequent allusions to the Founding Fathers, he spoke of states’ rights and “the horrors of civil war,” and of freedom-loving South Carolina “smarting under the rod of injustice and oppression”—a speech so worthy and so boring, one newspaper noted, that by the time it concluded, every living creature in the Senate chamber, with the exception of the satisfied orator himself, had either fallen asleep or fled.4
This is not to say that the late Judge Bibb had been a drab figure. Indeed, he was well known around town for his distinctive ways. Until the end of his life, he clung steadfastly to the fashions of Jefferson’s day: silk stockings, buckled knee breeches, and a ruffled white cravat. People saw him, sighed sentimentally, and knew beyond all doubt that they were gazing upon a true gentleman of the old school. The judge was an accomplished musician; his Georgetown neighbors were used to strolling past his fine brick house on a warm evening and hearing the strains of his violin through the open study windows. Then one spring the violin was heard no more.
As for Willis, the Negro, he had been for some years the old gentleman’s trusted body servant. It had been he who neatly laid out the silk stockings and knee breeches each morning; who put the violin away in its case; who shaved the grizzled jowls and attended faithfully by the bed during his master’s final illness. On the afternoon of the funeral, it was he who prepared refreshments for the distinguished mourners gathered in the judge’s parlor, including President Buchanan and most of his cabinet.5
Perhaps it was a bit unseemly for a fine family like the Bibbs to advertise their loyal household retainer for sale in the public prints—and then to make poor Willis stand on the block at that shabby auction house as Messrs. Green and Williams hovered assiduously, pointing out his finer qualities to whoever cared to look. As a man approaching middle age, Willis may well have had a wife and children, perhaps members of the District’s large free-Negro community, who would be heartbroken if he were sold south. But then, what use had the widow Bibb for a gentleman’s valet? Manumission was out of the question: had not the judge himself often declared his staunch opposition to the practice, calling free blacks “a nuisance to society”?6 There were estate taxes to think of, too; the deceased had left no fewer than seventeen children, and how, pray tell, was a Negro to be divided seventeen ways? Wasn’t the sale perfectly legal? Wouldn’t the good people of Washington, in any event, forget the matter quickly, remembering the late Hon. George M. Bibb only as a selfless public servant, a kindly neighbor, an honest gentleman?
Money, in the end, was money. So the advertisement appeared in the Intelligencer for “One Negro man, named Willis, about thirty-three years of age, and a slave for life.” Below that, a shorter line of type: “Also, one Gold Watch.”
WASHINGTON IN THE YEARS before the Civil War often seemed like a city of slaves and old gentlemen.7
Black men and women were everywhere: their labor, to a large degree, made the engine of the city run. Northern newcomers in the capital, imagining that slavery meant Negroes toiling by hundreds in the cotton fields, were often surprised at what they saw. Washington’s slaves shoveled coal and carried water; carved stone and split wood. Perched on the drivers’ seats of hackney cabs, enslaved men solicited fares outside the main railway station; trudging alongside creaking wagons, enslaved women converged on the Central Market each day before dawn, bringing their masters’ cabbages and country hams from Maryland farms. It was slaves who, to a considerable degree, were building the grand and gleaming new extensions of the Capitol, just as they had built the old Capitol and the White House more than half a century before. And it was slaves who hauled up Sixteenth Street the daily cartloads of human dung—patrician and plebeian waste all democratically commingled—to be dumped onto a stinking field ten blocks north of the presidential mansion.
Like today’s Washington, the nineteenth-century capital attracted both foreign and American tourists. Visitors sometimes remarked that the big hotels—Willard’s, Gadsby’s, Brown’s—seemed like intricate machines run wholly by the Negro servants, who tended fireplaces, waited at table, emptied chamber pots and spittoons, and slept on the bare hallway floors outside guests’ rooms. In the city’s barbershops, it was almost exclusively black men who shaved the whiskers of lowly and mighty Washingtonians alike: “The senator flops down in the seat,” one traveler noted with amusement, “and has his noble nose seized by the same fingers which the moment before were occupied by the person and chin of an unmistakable rowdy.” When customers dined at Absolom Shadd’s National Eating House on Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the District’s finest restaurants, slaves tucked napkins into their collars before serving up specialties of the house: steamed Chesapeake crabs, spit-roasted game birds, and a buttery green soup made with sea turtle meat freshly imported from the Bahamas. Three of those slaves belonged to the hospitable Mr. Shadd himself—who happened to be a free colored man.8
Indeed, the usual categories of slave and free, black and white—terms that seemed so simple and stark in the speeches of abolitionist preachers or proslavery politicians—were all mixed up here in the shadow of the Capitol. Census takers recorded only a few thousand slaves in Washington just before the Civil War, a figure that nearly all modern historians have accepted unquestioningly. But most of the District’s slaves didn’t belong to Washingtonians, and so they weren’t counted in the census.9 Some were the property of Southern senators, congressmen, and even presidents, who brought them along as butlers, chefs, and body servants.10 Many more were owned by Maryland and Virginia planters who rented their Negroes out, often for years at a time, to work in the city. Other masters simply sent slaves off to seek employment on their own, demanding only a share of the earnings. The lives of such men and women, though often squalid and impoverished, could occasionally seem like freedom. The District’s large population of free Negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, lived in what sometimes seemed like slavery. In countless small ways each day, they were reminded that Washington was the capital of a country not their own. Any person of African descent was barred from entering the grounds of the Capitol—except, of course, for the servants and laborers whose work was in many respects more indispensible than that of the congressmen. Socializing publicly with whites was almost unthinkable: if Absolom Shadd had tried to sit down for a meal in his own restaurant, it might have sparked a riot. And each night at ten o’clock, when the bell of the Perseverance Fire Company at Eighth and Pennsylvania rang, all blacks—whether slave or free, ash haulers or restaurant owners—had to get off the streets or face arrest, followed sometimes by flogging.11
Curious foreign travelers often found themselves at a loss to understand the intricacies of local racial codes, or even to guess who was a slave and who wasn’t. Early in 1861, an English journalist was standing by the front window of Willard’s Hotel when he saw a tall, handsome young black man, elegantly attired from head to toe, strolling proudly up the Avenue. The Englishman turned to a white American who stood nearby: “I wonder what he is?” he inquired. “Well,” the stranger drawled, “that fellow is not a free nigger; he looks too respectable. I dare say you could get him for fifteen hundred dollars with his clothes off.”12
What, then, were these Negro men and women? The Supreme Court had ruled that they could never be citizens, and that they had no rights whatsoever that whites were bound to respect. Were they therefore simply property, as anyone might conclude from reading the classified ads in the Intelligencer or the ponderous folios kept by the recorder of deeds, where sales of human beings were duly inscribed among the real estate transactions? Or was it possible that they were simply people? Was it even possible that they could, one day, be Americans?
Such were the questions that had for decades bedeviled the capital city’s Old Gentlemen: the senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, justices, and presidents whose steady hands kept the ship of state on course. These matters had, indeed, bedeviled America’s elder statesmen ever since the nation’s founding, when a previous generation of wise men, sitting in a shuttered room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, had ruminated and decided that the new Constitution would reckon each slave as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, and more or less ignore them otherwise. That had seemed to settle the issue—at least to the extent of freeing the new federal union to turn its attention to other things.
Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the Old Gentlemen of the antebellum period were preoccupied not with the question of what black men and women were or might ever be, but with how to avoid the question entirely. Toward that end, they, and much of the nation, had mastered the art of circumlocution. In the best of times, in the politest Washington circles, slaves were mentioned rarely; the relative abstraction of slavery, only slightly more often; while “our peculiar institution,” “the domestic arrangements of the South,” and “a certain species of property” were among the euphemisms of choice. And when they talked about “Union,” it meant something very different from what it would come to mean a few years later. The word meant a nation united by compromise, preserved through the careful balancing of Southern interests and Northern ones, of slavery and freedom.
They were men of distinction, these Old Gentlemen—of nobility, even. One could see it immediately in their faces. Just down the avenue from Shadd’s restaurant, a glass-topped case outside Mathew Brady’s National Photographic Art Gallery displayed them in splendid array: “grave and reverent seignors,” an admiring reporter for the Daily National Intelligencer called them.13 Everyone came to sit for Mr. Brady in the prewar years. It was a political rite of passage no more optional than a new congressman’s taking the oath to support and defend the Constitution. No more partisan, either: men of every party and principle climbed the three flights of wooden stairs—some more nimbly than others—to arrive in a skylighted room where a flock of assistants, and sometimes even the famous proprietor himself, welcomed them. Brady, foppish and ingratiating, made the whole experience so pleasant. There was a little dressing room with a marble washstand where the client could mop his brow and arrange his hair—generally brushing the locks, scanty though they might be, forward in picturesque Caesarean fashion. When he emerged, a carved oak chair awaited, with a pedestal next to it ready to hold an appropriate prop: a thick gold-stamped volume of the Annals of Congress, for example. Occasionally the gentleman wrapped himself in a toga-like cloak, the better to hide a metal clamp that would keep his head from moving during the long exposure. (If he wished instead to rise and strike an oratorical pose—perhaps his recent speech on the tariff question had drawn favorable notice in the newspapers—a convenient metal armrest was also provided.) Then he drew his head back, knit his brows together, formed his mouth into a tight-lipped frown—and within thirty seconds, the Alabama cotton planter or Connecticut attorney was transformed into a veritable Cato the Elder, his visage suitable to be lithographed in a monthly magazine. Perhaps one day it might even be rendered in marble to adorn the state capitol back home.14
But anyone stopping by Brady’s gallery on the eve of the Civil War would have noticed that the noblest visages, though still ensconced honorably in their glass case, were no longer to be seen in the halls of the Capitol. The statesmen of restraint and moderation, the tongues that spoke in careful euphemisms or cried out eloquently for Union, Union, above all else, were becoming scarce. Webster and Clay, twin titans among the compromisers, were dead; so was Thomas Hart Benton, the lion of Missouri. John Bell had gone back to Tennessee, Sam Houston to Texas. Even the ranks of lesser men whose cautious ways had kept the Union safe—men like old Judge Bibb—were dwindling fast.
Brady’s studio now received a different sort of senator, in outlook and aspect: Ben Wade of Ohio, flinty-eyed and obdurate, a Republican whose radicalism went beyond antislavery to embrace women’s suffrage and trade unionism, and who was said to have carried a pair of horse pistols onto the Senate floor. Clement Clay of Alabama, lean and ascetic as an early Christian saint, who railed against Northern abolitionists for “seducing” gullible slaves away from their happy existence in the South, the better to satisfy a perverted appetite for interracial sex.15 Zachariah Chandler, Republican of Michigan, on whose saturnine head a Democratic colleague broke a milk pitcher one afternoon in the dining room of the National Hotel, this by way of correcting the legislator on a point of political doctrine.16 And Senator Davis of Mississippi, whom Brady shot standing in three-quarter profile: a figure unbending as ice, eyes distant and pale, like an astronomer gazing toward some far-off star.
A few men of the old cast remained in public life, however, keeping faith that the Union could be preserved through appeals to reason, history, and the rule of law. The scholarly chief justice of the United States, with encouragement from the president himself, had recently tried to resolve the slavery matter once and for all when the case of a Missouri slave named Dred Scott came before the high court. Judge Roger Taney, in fifty-four erudite and densely reasoned pages, had delved deep into English common law, colonial history, and constitutional precedent before reaching his elegantly simple conclusion: Africans could never, under any current or future circumstances, become Americans. Thanks to some quiet political pressure, two Northern justices had even concurred with Taney and his fellow Southerners on the court, lest the ruling seem simply a matter of sectional prejudices. And the result? Like every previous attempt to address slavery directly, this one had ended in disaster. “The Triumph of Slavery Complete,” proclaimed newspaper headlines in the North. “Wherever our flag floats,” cried William Cullen Bryant in his Evening Post, “it is the flag of slavery.”17 The delicate balance maintained for decades collapsed. The abolitionists grew shriller and more militant than ever. John Brown launched his bloody conspiracy. The Union pitched headlong toward dissolution, pushed over the brink by a ruthless paradox: the republic of liberty was also the single largest slaveholding nation in the world.18
Now, in the wake of Lincoln’s election, the nation’s only hope was to stitch together yet another new compromise, by which to continue sheltering both freedom and bondage beneath the same threadbare tent. A generation or two earlier, many Americans, Southerners and Northerners alike, had invested their hope in the gradual and peaceful elimination of slavery. Washington and Jefferson themselves had said this would be the only permanent solution. But by now it was impossible for the nation’s leaders to propose such an eventuality, or even to hint that it might be desirable. Not if they wanted to preserve the Union, that is. Slaveholding was now woven so tightly into the South’s culture and economy—indeed, into the whole nation’s economy—as to be almost inextricable. Even its foes acknowledged this. In 1858, Lincoln himself noted in a speech that the region’s four million slaves were valued at no less than two billion dollars. (Most recent historians have put the figure even higher.) This was an absolutely mind-boggling sum, greater than the value of all the nation’s factories and railroads, North and South, combined.19 Any scheme of compensated emancipation—like that adopted by Great Britain several decades earlier—would consume an impractically huge portion of the federal budget (then about 75 million dollars annually) for at least thirty years, without even accounting for the disruption of Southern agriculture and Northern industry. Slaves, even more than land, were the Southern planters’ most valuable and reliable capital asset: not only did they produce annual income (and increase in number over time); they also could be mortgaged, rented, or liquidated quite easily, at prices that were rising steadily each year. The more new territory was opened to slave agriculture, the greater the fresh demand for slave labor, and the higher the value of those human investments would soar.*
No wonder many Southerners, fully aware of these financial realities, so fiercely opposed any limit on slavery’s expansion: their stake was not merely in their individual holdings but in the system and market as a whole. No wonder they had long since begun maintaining that slavery was not a tolerable evil but rather a positive good. No wonder, indeed, that many even made a well-reasoned case that white Americans’ continued freedom depended on the blacks’ continued enslavement. “Actual liberty and equality [for] our white population has been approached much nearer than in the free states,” wrote one of the most extreme theorists, Virginia’s George Fitzhugh. “Few of our whites ever work as day laborers … or in other menial capacities. One free citizen does not lord it over another; hence that feeling of independence and equality that distinguishes us.” As for the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of universal equality, Fitzhugh professed disgust that a fellow Virginian and slaveholder could ever have written such a thing, calling the document “absurd and … dangerous.… Some were born with saddles on their backs,” he concluded, “and others booted and spurred to ride them—and the riding does them good.”20
In 1854, when Fitzhugh wrote those words, it had been easy enough for Northerners to dismiss him as a mere crank propagandist. But soon, even mainstream Southern politicians would be publicly espousing such views. In early 1861, ex-governor Richard Call of Florida—an old-line Unionist—wrote to a friend in Pennsylvania to explain why Northerners must accept slavery as a permanent feature of American life:
It should be considered as it is, an institution interwoven and inseparably connected with our social and political system, as a domestic institution of the States, and a national institution, created by the American people and protected by the Constitution of the United States.… The African seems designed by the Creator for a slave … with a mind incapable of a higher elevation than that which is required to direct the machinery of his limbs to useful action.21
By then, every American—whether Yankee or Southerner, abolitionist or slaveholder—knew that if the Union was to survive without bloodshed, it would have to remain a version of Washington, D.C., writ large. The squalid realities of slavery would continue their uneasy coexistence with the gleaming monuments of freedom or all would be lost. So, in the dark winter days when the states of the Deep South, one by one, lined up to follow South Carolina out of the Union, it was to the last surviving Old Gentlemen that the hopes of the nation turned.
THROUGH THE SLUSHY STREETS of Washington that January hurried a figure familiar to all the longtime residents of the capital: a white-haired man, his hollow cheeks and lantern jaw like a death’s-head on a slate gravestone, his black overcoat flapping around him in the wind. This was the Union’s unlikely guardian angel. Almost everyone in the city knew John J. Crittenden, and all who knew him were fond of him, whatever their political faction. He had the bluff good nature of a backcountry farmer: on meeting an acquaintance, the weatherbeaten senator would, surprisingly, flush with pleasure like a boy, his thin lips breaking into a lopsided grin to reveal a mouthful of splayed teeth stained mahogany by a lifetime of tobacco chewing. (At one of Senator Seward’s high-toned soirees, Crittenden once absentmindedly, though expertly, squirted an ample stream of brown juice onto the richly carpeted floor.)
Kentuckians had first sent Crittenden to the Senate more than forty years earlier. Throughout most of that long span, he had been content to remain in the shadow of his close friend and senior colleague, a man with whom he shared an appreciation for fast horses and fine bourbon: Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. After Clay’s death in 1852, Crittenden had, somewhat against his will, been anointed the moderates’ new chieftain. Though he had never made a notably brilliant speech, he hated neither slaveholders nor Republicans, and loved his united country with the unfeigned earnestness of one who had come of age in the days of Jefferson, dined with Lafayette, and fought to defend his nation’s sovereignty in 1812. While still a teenager, Crittenden had been a student and protégé of the late Judge Bibb, for whom he later named his eldest son. A Baltimore newspaperman once called him the Senate’s “connecting link between the glorious past and the doubtful present.”22
Now many people hoped Crittenden might be the connecting link that could hold together North and South. By the time the secession crisis broke, he was not only the Senate’s leading moderate but also its most senior member. In the days after the presidential election, some Republican newspapers predicted that Lincoln, as a gesture of national unity, would appoint him secretary of state. Other rumors had it that the seventy-four-year-old statesman was on a confidential mission to South Carolina, working behind the scenes to restore calm. Meanwhile, dozens of Crittenden’s influential friends—from former President Martin Van Buren to Winfield Scott, the army’s highest-ranking general—barraged him with letters proposing various schemes for reconciliation. One envisioned splitting the Union into two perfectly equal parts, while another suggested a law that would emancipate all America’s slaves by 1890, at a rate of precisely 3.3 percent each year. John B. Bibb, the brother of Crittenden’s old mentor, wrote from his Kentucky plantation to recommend—as many other correspondents did—that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be reinstated, drawing a line straight across the continent to separate slave territory from free. General Scott laid out a detailed plan that would amicably divide the entire country into four “new Unions,” with their capitals at Albany, New York; Columbia, South Carolina; Alton, Illinois; and some unspecified point on the Pacific coast. (If Crittenden found this an odd suggestion from the man in charge of defending the nation’s borders, he didn’t say.)23
Ordinary citizens sent missives, too, offering dozens of different solutions, many of them even more elaborate and far-fetched than Scott’s: surely the national puzzle could be solved with a bit of practical American ingenuity, like a mantelpiece clock that had stopped and just needed some tinkering to set it aright. Many forwarded petitions, resolutions, sermons. Appeals came from the concerned citizens of Dubuque, Iowa, and from the inmates of an asylum for “deaf mutes” in Georgia. One New Jerseyan spoke for many when he vented his disgust at abolitionists and Southern extremists alike, proposing that the middle states should together form their own new country, “leaving all the New England states out, to burn witches … and affiliate with Niggers. After we get rid of them we shall have peace.” There was one thing nearly all the letter writers had in common: they extolled Crittenden as the only person who could save the country. A Virginian addressed him as “one of the Fathers of the Republic.” Another called him “the patriarch of the Union.” A third man hailed “one of the last of our Country’s noblest Patriots,” adding, in parentheses, “Alas, for the old days!” An anonymous correspondent signing him-self “A Southerner & Lover of His Country” could not restrain his passion: “I love you God knows I love you,” his somewhat surprising letter to Crittenden began.24 Never in his long life had the genial Kentuckian been the object of so much attention, let alone adoration.
It was as though these citizens believed that, by the sheer force of their hopes and prayers, they could somehow transform an elderly, mild-mannered legislator into some sort of reincarnation of George Washington, into a latter-day national saint. “The eyes of all good men in all sections are turned toward you,” a minister in Baltimore wrote. “The prospect looks dark, but the God of our Fathers will I believe yet in some way bring deliverance.… Unless indeed our national sins are so great that God must punish us.”25
Interestingly, few Americans pinned their hopes for compromise on either the outgoing president or the incoming one. Buchanan was a lame duck, while Lincoln remained at home in Springfield, still seemingly as mute about his plans and intentions as the inmates of that Georgia asylum.26(“We don’t know what Lincoln wants,” even a leading Republican congressman complained. “He communicates nothing even to his friends here & so we drift along.”)27 Anyhow, the federal government’s executive branch in the antebellum period had usually been far less powerful than its legislative branch. In nearly all past crises, the compromises that preserved the Union had been forged in Congress.
Four years earlier, when Preston Brooks had bludgeoned Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, it was Crittenden who tried to step between the two men, crying out, “Don’t kill him!”—only to have another Southern congressman brandish his cane to block the Kentuckian from intervening.28 He had failed to stop the bloodshed that day. Now the nation seemed to depend on whether he could succeed—this time on a far larger scale.
So the old man made his sedulous way around the city, pushing his blueprint for national harmony on almost any colleague who would listen. It was not quite as intricate as General Scott’s exercise in topographic geometry, but almost. The Crittenden Compromise, as it came to be known, proposed six amendments to the U.S. Constitution, all of them granting major concessions to the peculiar institution. The first of these amendments would reinstate the Missouri Compromise line, protecting slavery in all the states and territories south of it—including any territories that might be acquired in the future. The second would deny Congress the authority to abolish slavery anywhere under its jurisdiction within a slave state (a military base, for instance). The third specifically protected slavery’s existence in the District of Columbia. The fourth barred Congress from interfering with the interstate slave trade (and thus abrogated the Commerce Clause, which since 1787 had been a cornerstone of the Constitution). The fifth promised that slaveholders who had been forcibly prevented from recovering escaped slaves—prevented by abolitionists, that is—would receive full restitution for their “property” from the federal government. Crittenden’s sixth and final amendment would block all the other amendments from ever being altered, and deny Congress forever the power to abolish slavery.29
His mission was a lonely one. Since Congress had reconvened at the beginning of December—the first time since Lincoln’s election—sarcasm, invective, and histrionics had prevailed.30 Legislator re-opened old wounds at any opportunity, called one another “the honorable Senator” in tones communicating quite the opposite, and turned disagreements over minor points of order into occasions for roiling tirades against the treason of secession or the perfidy of abolition. About ninety seconds into the session’s first day, Senator Thomas Clingman of North Carolina, seizing the floor by responding to a routine motion about printing a document, swerved sharply into an hourlong attack on the president-elect as a “dangerous man” whose aim was “to make war on my section [of the country] until its social system is destroyed.” As soon as Clingman sat down, Senator Crittenden rose to beg his colleagues to maintain a tone of “calm consideration” in the face of impending national disaster. His entreaties were futile. The next morning, Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia arrived with a speech in hand that made Clingman’s sound measured: “Sir, disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Southern people that is deep and enduring, and you can never eradicate it—never!… We are enemies as much as if we were hostile States.” Southern politicians who opposed secession, Iverson intimated, should be assassinated if they did not submit. And he closed with a promise to “meet … all the myrmidons of Abolitionism and Black Republicanism everywhere, upon our own soil; and … we will ‘welcome you with bloody hands to hospitable graves.’ ”31
Perhaps the feistiest Southerner of all was Louis T. Wigfall, a freshman senator from Texas. If Crittenden represented the past, this new man from a new state might represent the future—though there were many who devoutly hoped not. His very face was that of a man who, whatever his other endowments might be, found it unbearable to hear more than three or four words spoken consecutively by anyone else. His beetling eyebrows clenched and unclenched when he talked (which was almost incessantly), and his pugnacious black beard seemed to jut out perpendicular to his face. Even his nose, an English journalist wrote, was somehow “argumentative.” But his eyes, the writer continued, were most dangerously transfixing: “of wonderful depth and light, such as I never saw before but in the head of a wild beast. If you look some day when the sun is not too bright into the eye of a Bengal tiger, in the Regent’s Park, as the keeper is coming round, you will form some notion of the expression I mean.”32
By the age of twenty-five, Wigfall had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into Texas politics. Of all the Southern fire-eaters in the Senate, Wigfall was the most flamboyant—and inflexible. He scorned the very idea of compromise, openly relished the prospect of spilling Yankee blood, and crowed the war would end only after Southern troops had cut a swath of destruction across the North, with the final capitulation signed in Faneuil Hall.33
Just before Christmas, when Crittenden first unveiled his proposal before the full Senate, a respectful calm fell over the chamber for the first time in weeks. Everyone knew that he had been laboring over a plan. When the senior senator rose, he began neither a philippic against secession nor a sentimental paean to the Union. Instead, he set forth his series of amendments as dryly as if he were introducing a bill to adjust domestic postage rates. Then he turned to the widening chasm over slavery. In such controversies, he assured his colleagues philosophically, “all the wrong is never on one side, or all the right on the other. Right and wrong, in this world, and in all such controversies, are mingled together.” Finally, he called on his countrymen, of every state and party, to set aside their differences in the name of the Constitution, of the flag, of the memory of Washington. Why consign all these to oblivion, he asked, when the alternative was “a comparative trifle”: simply drawing across the national map a perpetual “line of division between slavery and freedom” that would ensure a lasting peace? Hearing Crittenden’s peroration from the back of the chamber, one young Democratic congressman was deeply impressed. The old man spoke, he later wrote, “as if the muse of history were listening to him.”34
Would anyone besides Clio listen, though? Crittenden had no sooner sat down than John P. Hale, Republican from New Hampshire, sprang to his feet to praise “the purity of his motive, the integrity, the disinterestedness, and the fervor of his patriotism.” Surely Crittenden winced. After forty years in this chamber, he knew that such praise was only ever spoken as a kind of legislative eulogy. And in fact, Hale’s next words were like the coffin lid slamming shut: “Everybody accords to him that [much], whatever may be thought of the value or the practicability of the remedy he proposes, and I do not propose to discuss it.” The honorable body then fell back into bickering over the four-year-old Dred Scott case. Crittenden’s six amendments were respectfully lowered into the deep, dark grave known as a special bipartisan committee. The next morning’s newspapers confirmed his compromise dead and buried already. “There is no gleam of sunshine, no ray of hope,” began a typical report, in the New York Herald. The newspaper went on to suggest that the only chance for peace was a well-timed smallpox epidemic to wipe official Washington off the map.35
Soon enough, though, despite the dismissive pronouncements of journalists and politicians, many Americans would be calling for a resurrection of the Crittenden Compromise. Two days after the bill had been declared dead, news came from Charleston that South Carolina had seceded. Six days after that, Major Anderson—Crittenden’s friend and fellow Kentuckian36—moved his troops into Fort Sumter. Suddenly war felt like a much more imminent and real prospect than it had a week earlier, when it had seemed to many merely a phantasm of congressional bluster. The senator’s “comparative trifle” of safeguarding slavery might indeed be a bargain price for peace. So while Crittenden’s plan languished in the oblivion of the special bipartisan committee, his name became a rallying cry for people across the country. Each day, larger and larger bundles of mail arrived in the Capitol post office: sheaves of individual letters at first, and then parcels bound up in twine and brown paper, some of them quite bulky. The first of these mass petitions was from the citizens of Harrisburg and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, conservative towns in the southern part of the state. Before long, others were arriving from Philadelphia, from Illinois, even from New England. New York City’s two petitions bore 63,000 names. The appeal from St. Louis filled ninety-five pages of foolscap paper and came wrapped, literally, in the American flag. The one from Massachusetts—hit hard by the first economic shocks of the crisis—was a scroll so massive that it had to be rolled like a cartwheel onto the floor of the House. One particular petition especially pleased Crittenden: it was signed by 14,000 women in states from Vermont to North Carolina. (“I hope their interposition may have some influence upon the sterner nature of man,” he told the Senate.) So many entreaties eventually arrived that it required four pages of small type in the Senate Journal simply to list the names of all the towns and cities. Elsewhere massive outdoor rallies were held despite the January cold. On a snowy night in Philadelphia, six thousand “workingmen” gathered outside Independence Hall and unanimously endorsed Crittenden’s plan with throaty cheers.37
Part of the reason for such an outpouring is that people were starting to grasp the potential costs—the literal costs—of war. The first warning came from the stock market, which began to falter and then plunge in the first weeks after Lincoln’s election. Few ordinary citizens owned shares in those days, but when wealthy bankers like August Belmont began reporting that their investments were down as much as 30 percent, more democratic misery seemed certain to follow. Textile manufacturers and their shareholders panicked at the prospect of losing the South’s cotton shipments; by January, their stocks had fallen 40 percent from what they were a year earlier. Western merchants and steamboat lines faced the possibility that the entire lower Mississippi might be closed to commercial shipping indefinitely. And would secession mean that all the debts owed by Southern planters—many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows—would become uncollectable? Demand for new goods plummeted, and soon enough factories began laying off workers by the tens of thousands. “Boston streets to-day are full of discharged workmen,” reported the Boston Courier. “Our laboring population have a dreary winter before them.”38 Ads that began appearing in the major New York newspapers did not exactly help matters:
In consequence of the
PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!
We are determined to offer our very large stock of fall importations for the balance of the season at such prices as will command an immediate sale.
E. WILLIAMS & CO.
Owing to the troublesome times into which our country has fallen we have made a
FURTHER REDUCTION
in our prices, in order to convert our goods into cash before the
UNION GOES TO PIECES!
W.J.F. Dailey & Co.39
One day in early January, when a rumor reached Wall Street that “the compromise measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden had been agreed to unanimously,” stocks shot instantly back up, only to drop again when the report proved erroneous. In the weeks that followed, as grassroots support for the Crittenden plan surged, the market began gradually rising once more. “ ‘It is said’ and ‘perhaps’ are quite sufficient to give stocks a lift,” noted the editor of one commercial newspaper.40
It was a month of hearsay, anonymous leaks, and contradictions; a month when everything seemed to be happening much too fast, and when many of the strangest reports were the ones that turned out to be true. In Washington, there was talk of an impending coup d’état against the federal government, a popular uprising against the “official imbecility” that was letting the nation drift toward the brink of catastrophe. Hastily formed militia units drilled by night in the remoter reaches of the District, pledging that they would sooner reduce the entire capital to ashes than permit the inauguration of a Black Republican president.41 In New York, Mayor Fernando Wood declared his support for secession: not just of the South but also of his own city, which was to become an independent trading republic. (One presumes that the mayor himself would have become its president.) Wood even had a name for his imaginary nation: “Tri-Insula,” since it would consist of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. New York’s city council endorsed the idea, as did a number of leading businessmen. “I would have New York a free city,” one of them wrote, “not a free city with respect to the liberty of the negro, but a free city in commerce and trade.”42
The national disaster seemed to have unleashed all manner of explosive energies, sending the planets spinning out of their accustomed orbits. Every day brought fresh astonishments. One morning in late January, Northern readers opened their newspapers to discover support for Southern secession coming from the very last place they would have expected. At a Boston abolitionist meeting, Wendell Phillips had rejoiced at the slave states’ departure and the Constitution’s demise. “The Covenant with Death is annulled—the Agreement with Hell is broken to pieces,” he cried. “The chain which has held the slave system since 1787 is parted.” The closing words of his speech seemed calculated to provoke howls of rage—and did: “All hail, then, Disunion!”
Telegraphic dispatches brought Phillips’s speech to readers across the North, most of whom—even those who spared no sympathy for slaveholders—branded him a traitor. (“THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE,” screamed a typical headline in the usually staid and solidly Republican New York Times. “The Abolitionists Giving the Right Hand of Fellowship to the Disunionists.”) Less than a week later, when Phillips again stepped onto a public stage at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, several hundred rough-looking characters—clearly not dues-paying members—packed the balconies. As soon as he tried to speak, they drowned him out with hisses, jeers, foot-stomping, barnyard noises, cheers for Crittenden and the Union, and even a sarcastic chorus or two of “Dixie.” Next, no less a luminary than Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped up warily with a sheaf of lecture notes in hand, only to be hooted and heckled off the speakers’ platform. At last, after the mayor of Boston ordered the hall cleared to avert a full-on riot and abolitionists scattered in all directions, several hundred infuriated demonstrators chased Phillips back to his house on Essex Street, waving brickbats and howling “Carve him out!” as policemen struggled to restrain the mob. For weeks afterward Phillips was a virtual prisoner, with bodyguards standing vigil outside his front door and Boston toughs prowling nearby, vowing vengeance.43
Back in Washington, however, Crittenden’s cause—despite such warm support in the North—was growing more and more desperate. Time and again he took to the Senate floor with his latest armload of petitions. He hosted a dinner party for thirty people at the National Hotel—hospitality that stretched the limits of his modest pocketbook—including such potential allies as General Scott and the justices of the Supreme Court, as well as influential senators and congressmen from both parties. When that availed him little, he made an unprecedented proposal: Congress, instead of voting on the compromise package, should submit it to a nationwide popular referendum. Finally, to render his legislative ideas yet more alluring to the South, he added two new constitutional amendments that had originally been suggested by Stephen Douglas. One would bar free blacks from voting in elections or holding public office, while the other guaranteed that if any state wished to eliminate its population of free blacks entirely, the federal government would pay to have them shipped off to Africa or South America. “Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate,” Crittenden pleaded to his Northern colleagues, sounding more than ever like a rug merchant trying to unload the last odds and ends of his shopworn stock. A few weeks earlier, he had called the price a comparative trifle; now he compared it to “a barleycorn” and “a little atom.”44
But fewer and fewer of Crittenden’s fellow senators from the free states seemed much interested in his merchandise, no matter how low the price. The entire existence of the Republican Party was predicated on a commitment to containing slavery within its present bounds. Were its leaders to abrogate this fundamental principle, at the very hour of their electoral triumph? The cartloads of petitions in support of compromise must be weighed against the grassroots fervor of the recent campaign: nearly two million Americans in the North had voted for Lincoln, despite all the Southern warnings that his victory would mean disunion. Although it was true that the Republican candidate had carried the nation as a whole with fewer than 40 percent of the votes cast, all but three of the Northern states had given him solid majorities—in some cases, overwhelming ones. It was clear which way the wind was blowing above the Mason-Dixon Line; Major Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter had made him a hero precisely because he had refused to yield to Southern threats.
Perhaps more important, the radical slave-state senators were making it clear that even the Crittenden plan would not satisfy them. Wigfall and others proclaimed a “Southern Manifesto”: “The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union … is extinguished, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretense of new guarantees.… We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people require the organization of a Southern Confederacy.”45
Faced with such intransigence, and with news of the secession fever sweeping across the South, many Northerners began wondering what gain would come of abasing themselves yet again before the slave power. By mid-January, even such a moderate as George Templeton Strong, who had cheered the hanging of John Brown, and who since November had been hoping earnestly for a compromise, was ready to throw up his hands. All the slave states seemed now to be tilting toward secession, he noted in his diary. “But what can we do? What can I do? What could I do if I were Webster and Clay combined? Concession to these conspirators and the ignorant herd they have stimulated to treason would but postpone the inevitable crisis a year or two longer.”46
One by one, the states of the Deep South were already withdrawing. As they joined the new Confederacy, one Southern senator after another rose in the chamber to declaim his valedictory address. Some left bitter recriminations as their last entries in the congressional annals, others gave unctuous and regretful farewells. On January 7, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia used his departure speech to fire parting shots at “Black Republicans” and abolitionists: “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.” On January 21, David Levy Yulee of Florida took his leave more genteelly, “acknowledging, with grateful emotions, my obligations for the many courtesies I have enjoyed [from] the gentlemen of this body, and with most cordial good wishes for their personal welfare.” His fellow Floridian, Stephen Mallory, blasted the North with brimstone: “You cannot conquer us. Imbrue your hands in our blood and the rains of a century will not wipe from them the stain, while coming generations will weep for your wickedness and folly.” Finally it was Jefferson Davis’s turn. In a low, hoarse voice, weakened by recent illness and by the emotion of the moment, he offered a courtly godspeed to his longtime colleagues: “I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offence I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of parting, to offer my apology.… Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains to me to bid you a final adieu.”47
At these words, Davis and four of his fellow Southerners turned to make their way slowly up the aisle toward the door. It is said that spectators sobbed in the gallery, as stern legislators choked back tears. The Union seemed truly—perhaps irrevocably—dissolved. Democrats and a few moderate Republicans crowded around to shake the five men’s hands and wish them well. The rest of the Northerners sat, hands folded, at their desks. Then the Senate returned to the rest of the day’s business: Kansas statehood, the Crittenden amendments, sarcastic potshots, and occasional full-on broadsides of vilification and bombast.
The centrifuge was spinning faster and faster. Washington itself seemed to be coming apart. There was only one strange, surreal point of calm at the center of the tempest: the old gentleman in the White House.
NEW YEAR’S DAY in the nation’s capital was, by tradition, a moment of partisan truce and the annual reenactment of a peculiar democratic ritual. On the first afternoon of each year, the doors of the White House were thrown open to any moderately respectable and decently washed citizens who wished to shake hands with their chief executive, wish him the compliments of the season, and partake liberally of federally funded punch and cake.48
The mansion had achieved unprecedented splendor during James Buchanan’s administration. Shortly after the inauguration, Miss Harriet Lane, the bachelor president’s niece and White House hostess, had undertaken a costly redecoration using funds generously appropriated by Congress. The austerely classical furnishings dating back to President Monroe’s term were sent to auction, replaced by heavy draperies, fine carpets, and amply stuffed settees and divans in the latest rococo style. Moreover, Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane entertained often and generously. Though the president had few, if any, close friends, he delighted in small talk, especially with the ladies, trading tidbits of gossip on the capital’s latest social scandals. It was a golden age of female fashions, and the state rooms’ gilded chandeliers shone on gowns of crimson velvet, gloves trimmed with antique lace, and wreaths of clematis crowning the glossy hair of senators’ wives. The Democratic president was no snob, however. He opened his home to everyone from ambassadors to Indian chiefs, and held public levees quite frequently even when it did not happen to be New Year’s Day. During a recent reception for the Japanese envoys, uninvited strangers had packed the East Room, some even clambering atop Miss Lane’s precious pier tables for a glimpse of the exotic Orientals.49
But the last New Year’s levee of the Buchanan administration was a sadly diminished affair. Four years of indiscriminate hospitality had taken their toll on the White House. Its wallpaper was greasy in places where visitors had brushed against it with sweaty hands or pomaded hair; its carpets were worn down by muddy boots and stained with tobacco juice. (In antebellum days, one senator later remembered, brown spittle flowed so freely that “you had to wear your overshoes into the best society of Washington.”) Moreover, the crowd was sparse and the mood anything but cheerful. As the strains of the marine band sounded from a nearby vestibule, political enemies squared off warily on opposite sides of the East Room as if for some elaborate quadrille. Some men and women wore ribboned cockades on their chests as tokens of political sympathies: red, white, and blue for the Union, solid blue for secession. More than a few from each faction had come for the punch and cake but disdained to shake their host’s hand. The president and his niece were receiving guests in the (solid) Blue Room, surely just an unfortunate coincidence. As at all their levees, the slim, blond Miss Lane was dressed to perfection, and Mr. Buchanan’s tall figure, at least from across the room, looked stately in its black frock coat and high collar. His head, as usual, was cocked quizzically to one side from some odd nervous tic, as though he had always just failed to catch the last thing that was said. It was only when guests drew closer that they noticed the president’s customary aspect altered. His hair—which a female admirer had once found as silky and glistening as the tail feathers of the glass birds of paradise in Barnum’s Museum—was now shockingly white. Buchanan’s one good eye was dull and unfocused, his head more askew than ever. “It was his last New Year as President,” the New York World’s correspondent mused afterward, “perhaps the last of our republic; and as he went through the hollow mockery of the occasion, he could not but feel how unreal it was.”50
It should never have ended thus. James Buchanan had been one of the best-qualified men ever to win the presidency: so long and diligent had been his career in government that he liked to refer to himself deprecatingly as “the Old Public Functionary.” Over the past half century, he had served his nation ably as representative to Congress, senator, and secretary of state. Though born the son of a country storekeeper, he had represented the United States with distinction at the courts of Czar Nicholas and Queen Victoria, returning home with all the subtle expertise in diplomatic graces to be learned in St. Petersburg and London. At the Court of St. James’s, indeed, he had been so scrupulous as to agonize for weeks over what to wear when presenting his credentials to the Queen. Should he costume himself like George Washington in knee breeches and powdered wig? Carry the customary sword of a European envoy? In the end, he steered a prudent middle course, attiring himself in black like an ordinary American gentleman, but bringing the sword along, too. Some might have scoffed, but Buchanan’s admirers saw this as just the kind of evenhandedness that the country needed in its leading statesmen.51 His domestic positions, too, were always judicious. Though a Pennsylvanian, he loathed abolitionist rabble-rousers, never spoke a disparaging word about slavery, and appointed a carefully balanced cabinet of Northerners and Southerners.52
Disunion had long seemed to him such a far-fetched proposition as to be almost existentially impossible. Back in 1832, Buchanan had written in mild frustration to President Jackson about his first visit to the Russian court. The czarina, he said, would not stop talking about the difficulties between the Northern and Southern states—rumors of which had reached even as far as St. Petersburg. Was this not a serious threat to the young republic, she asked, perhaps worse even than the possibility of war with a European power? Buchanan told the president that his efforts to convince her otherwise had been in vain:
I endeavored in a few words to explain this subject to her; but she still persisted in expressing the same opinion, and, of course, I would not argue with her. The truth is, that the people of Europe, and more especially those of this country, cannot be made to understand the operations of our Government. Upon hearing of any severe conflicts of opinion in the United States, they believe what they wish, that a revolution may be the consequence.53
Now it seemed that Her Imperial Highness, surveying American politics from that distant Baltic shore, had been shrewder than he.
Buchanan’s inauguration in 1857 had come at a rare moment of relative concord, and was greeted with such pomp and fanfare that one observer said it resembled an imperial coronation. The swearing-in, another wrote, drew supporters “from every State and Territory in the Union; the pale-faced, sharp-set New England man jostled the thicker-skinned and darker-hued Southerner.”54 Then, just two days later, the Supreme Court—having received discreet encouragement from the president-elect—handed down its Dred Scott decision. So much for national unity. For the next four years, Buchanan buried himself in the minutiae of office, toiling sixteen-hour days at the White House; some called him the hardest-working president in history. He labored over multiple handwritten drafts of even the most mundane letter, and each routine official document—whether a land grant, a military commission, or a consular appointment—could not receive the president’s signature without his careful perusal of every line. It surprised no one that he showed no desire to seek reelection in 1860. As Buchanan’s term drew toward its close, the president would tell anyone who would listen that he couldn’t wait to get out of the accursed White House and back to his Lancaster County estate. In any case, there was little danger he would have been asked to remain. By then, millions of Northerners detested him as an appeaser of the slave power, while Southerners distrusted him as a weak and vacillating ally at best. Both sides despised the corruption that had seeped into federal officialdom under his stewardship. Neither would have wished the secession crisis to happen on his watch.
Though Buchanan may already have proven a spectacularly ineffectual leader, he was neither a villain nor a coward, despite what his enemies said at the time and what his detractors have said since. When secession loomed in the weeks after Lincoln’s election, he stepped into the breach with the mightiest weapon at his disposal: his pen. He had always been a man who trusted pieces of paper to solve things—witness his misplaced faith in Dred Scott—and so now he set out to compose a document that would freeze disunion in its tracks.
At the end of each year, it was the president’s responsibility to issue an annual message to Congress, the precursor to today’s State of the Union address. Buchanan began writing his just a day or two after Lincoln was elected, and for the next month he did little but work on the draft, anxious that the document should be ready to send to the lame-duck Congress when it opened its session on December 3. As chief executive of the nation, Buchanan felt it was his role to serve as high arbiter of the unfolding conflict, expressing judgments that all factions would have to concede were wise and fair.
Toward that end he revised and polished the composition numerous times, reading various sections aloud to his Northern and Southern cabinet members and asking for comments, which were naturally so contradictory of one another that the poor president found himself doing far more scribbling and crossing out than he could have anticipated. (The only point on which everyone concurred was how felicitously written it was.) Toward the end of November, he welcomed Senator Davis into his office to endure a full recitation. The Mississippian made many helpful suggestions—all of which Buchanan “very kindly accepted,” Davis would recall much later—although by the time the document was complete, it had gone through so many further drafts that Davis could no longer find in it much to agree with. Still, the president dutifully toiled, though he was now feeling increasingly unwell and, instead of going into his office, would work in his private library, dressed in a silk robe and chewing on an unlit cigar. He at last finished his opus, now running to some fourteen thousand words, at the beginning of December. (To be fair, Buchanan expended some of those words addressing not merely the crisis of the Union but also such other pressing matters as crop failures in Kansas, Chinese-American diplomatic relations, and problems with mail delivery on the Pacific coast.) By this time, of course, South Carolina’s leaders had set a date for their secession convention and were cheerfully making plans for their state’s future as an independent republic, while the rest of the cotton states were preparing to follow suit.55
Unsurprisingly, Buchanan’s message ended up satisfying no one, either within Congress or without it. The Southern states, he firmly declared, had no legal right to secede from the Union. If they elected to do so, he suggested, they really ought to call it “revolution” instead of “secession.” And even if they did have a right to leave the Union, why do so simply because a man they didn’t like had been elected president? And even if they did feel compelled to leave the Union because Lincoln had been elected president, why not wait until after he took office, to see whether he was truly as awful as they feared? The North, meanwhile, needed to realize that the slaveholders’ only real wish was “to be let alone.” So why not oblige them? As for the federal government’s role in averting the disaster, Buchanan admitted regretfully that “it is beyond the power of any president, no matter what may be his own political proclivities, to restore peace and harmony among the states,” since this would be a violation of state sovereignty. In other words, while the Constitution forbade secession, it also forbade the federal government to prevent it. Buchanan’s final suggestion: What if the United States bought Cuba from Spain? That would help the South by adding a major new slave state, but it would also please the abolitionists. Under Spanish rule, the island imported thousands of slaves each year from Africa, but U.S. law would forbid this. Everybody (except perhaps the Cuban slavers) could be happy.
“Seldom,” wrote the editors of the Cincinnati Enquirer, “have we known so strong an argument come to so lame and impotent a conclusion.” The Atlantic’s James Russell Lowell was even harsher: President Buchanan’s message, he wrote, was “the last juiceless squeeze of the orange.”56
WHILE BUCHANAN HAD BEEN off squeezing his orange, members of his administration had been playing rather more influential roles in the developing crisis, and not necessarily in support of the government they were sworn to uphold.
At the center of the intrigue was an urbane Charlestonian named William Henry Trescot, who had been serving for the past six months as assistant secretary of state. During most of that time, he had more or less run the State Department. The venerable secretary himself, Lewis Cass, was a crumbling monument to another age whom Buchanan had appointed as a sop to the North, which considered Cass a hero for his gallantry in the Michigan Territory during the War of 1812. Trescot was the administration’s only high-ranking South Carolinian; he was also perhaps its only truly industrious and enterprising member. Two days after the presidential results came in, he called on Secretary Floyd at the War Department, bearing a purchase order for ten thousand muskets to be sent to his native state, which Floyd was happy to execute. As the Fort Moultrie confrontation began to take shape, Trescot also took it upon himself to open a channel of private communication with South Carolina’s governor, William Henry Gist, whom he kept apprised of the Buchanan administration’s plans.
After Buchanan finished his message to Congress, still completely unaware of Trescot’s machinations, he summoned the assistant secretary to carry a copy to Governor Gist. (Little did he know that Gist had been informed of its basic substance weeks earlier, possibly sooner than Buchanan knew it himself.) The president was confident that the message would prove persuasive. Trescot hinted gently that such optimism was unwarranted, but went to Columbia anyhow, taking the occasion to familiarize himself thoroughly with South Carolina’s strategy for winning its independence without resistance or bloodshed. A crucial part of that strategy was making sure federal troops did not reinforce the forts in Charleston Harbor. Trescot assured Governor Gist that Floyd and his fellow Southerners in the Buchanan cabinet would never let this happen. (The fact that Trescot’s family owned a summer cottage a hundred yards from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island may have been further inducement to forestall an artillery barrage.)57
Floyd himself, while believing in the justice of slavery and loathing the Black Republicans, may not yet have been fully convinced that secession was in the South’s best interests. Still, if hostilities did break out, he was in little doubt as to which side he would support. It was not difficult for the glib Trescot to maneuver him—and, through him, the president.58
Buchanan was now beset from several sides at once. A delegation of South Carolina congressmen, knowing that their days in Washington were numbered, visited the White House. They sought Buchanan’s assurance that Major Anderson would stay where he was until an amicable settlement could be worked out, while the other two Charleston forts would be left unoccupied. In return, they said, they would try to ensure that no one attacked Moultrie—at least for the next ten days, until South Carolina could secede officially. Ever the courteous diplomat, Buchanan nodded, smiled gravely, and assured them that he was in complete sympathy with their views. “After all, this is a matter of honor among gentlemen,” he told his visitors as they rose to depart. “We understand each other.”
No doubt Buchanan was satisfied with himself: he had won at least an extra week and a half of peace with little more than a handshake and a few reassuring words. But what exactly had he promised in return? The Carolinians were certain that they understood the arrangement, but there is little evidence that Buchanan did.59
The tacitly arranged truce—unknown, of course, to Major Anderson and his officers at Charleston—did last the ten days until South Carolina’s secession, and even a week after that. Then one morning at the end of the month, President Buchanan was upstairs in the White House when a servant brought him word that three gentlemen were calling unexpectedly: Assistant Secretary Trescot, Senator Davis, and another Southern senator, R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia. Buchanan found the visitors seated in his office. Anxious that something unpleasant was afoot, he began toying with his cigar, making nervous small talk about a certain thorny problem he had just been addressing, a vexing issue that concerned the American consul at Liverpool. Jefferson Davis cut him off. “Mr. President,” he said, “we have called upon you about an infinitely greater matter than any consulate.” “What is it?” Buchanan asked. Davis asked if he had heard any reports from Charleston in the past two or three hours. The president had not. “Then,” said Davis, “I have a great calamity to announce to you.”
As the president listened to Davis’s news—that Major Anderson had transferred his force to Fort Sumter—he slumped against the marble mantelpiece, crumpling the cigar between his fingers. “My God,” Buchanan said, “are misfortunes never to come singly? I call God to witness—you gentlemen better than anybody know—that this is not only without, but against my orders. It is against my policy.”60
But the following days would show that all Buchanan’s assurances and apologies were in vain. It was not long before the South Carolina congressmen complained publicly that the president had broken his solemn word. He had tried to be a friend to all, to settle things as a matter of honor among gentlemen. Now both sides called him not merely a weakling, but a traitor. There was not much left for James Buchanan to do but wait—like millions of other Americans—and see what other hands might arrange.
IN THOSE LAST ANTEBELLUM DAYS, the White House was overshadowed in its role of governing the country by another institution, two blocks away. This was the Willard Hotel. The folds and ravels of its endless corridors sheltered more political intrigue than the presidential mansion, while on any given morning, far more business was legislated at its breakfast tables than in either chamber of Congress. A morning repast at the Willard might include oysters, roast pigeons, fresh shad, pigs’ feet, and robins on toast—all washed down, perhaps, with official Washington’s two favorite digestifs: strong cigars and stronger whiskey. The cocktail hour, guests noticed, began early and ended late—often, indeed, sometime after sunrise the following day.61
Since its beginnings in President Madison’s time as a humble inn, the hotel had, through a characteristically American process of incessant self-aggrandizement, grown to encompass almost an entire block. Rather than demolish any buildings that stood in its path, the Willard strangled them like some relentless jungle vine, sending out shoots and tendrils of faux marble, carved oak, and polished brass until the unfortunate structures were wholly engulfed. In the winter of 1861, it had recently swallowed up God himself, in the form of a handsome little Greek Revival church that the Presbyterians hastily vacated, paying due reverence to the superior claims of America’s nascent hospitality industry.62
During the first days of February, employees of Willard’s could be seen fussing over the nave of that church, which had been reconsecrated as a conference room with the secular name of Willard’s Hall. At the altar end they installed three portraits: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay.63 Soon afterward, a fourth figure from American history was installed beneath the other three: John Tyler. The former president appeared not as a lithographed engraving but in the actual—now fairly diminished—flesh. In most important respects, though, he had a great deal in common with those other heroes. Like Washington, Jackson, and Clay, he was a slaveholder. Like them, he was a border-state man—in his case, a Virginian, a scion of the Cavaliers, not one of those swaggering Gulf Coast parvenus who had lately made such mischief on the congressional floor. And like them, Tyler loved, at least for the time being, the Union. On the basis of these claims, the last one especially, he was selected by unanimous acclamation president of the Peace Conference of 1861.
This meeting was Virginia’s idea. The Old Dominion, after all, had once invested heavily in the concept of the United States as … well, united states. (Wizened Mr. Tyler, as a boy, had shaken the great Washington’s hand.) In 1787, when the loose-jointed American confederation was tottering precariously, it had been the Virginians who stepped forward to steady things, orchestrating a new form of government that balanced North and South, states and nation, freedom and slavery. So the concept of a Virginia-led “solemn family council”—as the Charlottesville patriarchWilliam Cabell Rives, once Thomas Jefferson’s law student, put it—seemed, at least to its organizers, to be blessed by history itself. (Nor were such men as Rives unmindful of self-interest. They knew that in the event of all-out war, their state would be the battleground.) Virginia’s state legislature issued the call to convene; her fellow border states and all but a few Northern ones answered it.
The delegates assembled in the winter of 1861 with the summer of 1787 foremost in mind, and with a grave self-consciousness born of the prospect that their names would be handed down to futurity. They were, indeed, the best that the old Union had to offer: not only the ex-president, but also senators, congressmen, former ambassadors, war heroes, and railroad owners. “Our godlike fathers created,” President Tyler exhorted his fellow delegates, “we have to preserve. They built up, through their wisdom and patriotism, monuments which have eternized their names. You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally grand, equally sublime, quite as full of glory and immortality.… If you reach the height of this great occasion, your children’s children will rise up and call you blessed.”64
Not everyone in Washington shared such optimism. Twenty-two-year-old Henry Adams was in town serving as secretary to his father, a powerful congressman closely allied with Seward. In early February, he attended a ball hosted by Senator and Mrs. Douglas. Half the capital seemed to be there, packing the stifling parlors; Adams attempted to waltz with a female acquaintance, but finally was “obliged to drag her from the room in a suffocating condition, and administer ice to her.” He surveyed the room with a jaundiced eye and afterward described the scene to his brother Charles:
A crowd of admiring devotees surrounded the ancient buffer Tyler, another crowd surrounded that other ancient buffer Crittenden. Ye Gods, what are we, when mortals no bigger—no, damn it, not so big as—ourselves, are looked up to as though their thunder spoke from the real original Olympus. Here is an old Virginia politician, of whom by good rights, no one ought ever to have heard, reappearing in the ancient cerements of his forgotten grave—political and social—and men look up to him as they would at Solomon, if he could be made the subject of a resurrection.
In another letter, Adams spoke for many Americans—especially those not on the Douglases’ guest list—when he predicted of the Peace Conference, “I suppose they will potter ahead until no one feels any more interest in them, and then they may die.”65
Out in the expanses of the Republic, beyond the Douglas mansion and Willard’s Hotel, troubling omens could be perceived on all sides. The states of the far Northwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan—refused even to send delegates to the Peace Conference. “We have fed the [Southern] whiners with sugar plums long enough,” one Michigan newspaper declared. A paper in Minnesota framed its position in more alarming terms: “Before this rampant fever of disunion will abate, THERE MUST BE BLOOD-LETTING!”66
Public opinion was shifting throughout the North; newspapers that only weeks earlier had been frantic for compromise now mocked the Peace Conference as “the old gentlemen’s convention.” The New-York Tribune, for all its perceived radicalism, had been a staunch advocate of reaching an accord with the South. Now each morning’s edition bore the motto no compromise! no concessions to traitors! The Constitution As It Is.67 Yet the idea that anything could remain “as it is” for very much longer seemed dubious at best. The familiar, if not quite comfortable, old Union was making way for something new—even if no one was at all sure what this would be.
In the White House, President Buchanan rarely even ventured downstairs anymore, let alone tried to intervene in the secession crisis; he was hard at work settling diplomatic issues with Venezuela and Paraguay regarding some valuable guano deposits, finalizing a treaty with the Delaware Indians, and resolving a disputed water boundary in the San Juan Islands. When a deputation of Peace Conference members paid him a courtesy visit—marching to the White House “with the solemnity of a funeral procession,” one would later recall—they found the president “advanced in years, shaken in body, and uncertain in mind.” To their embarrassment, he physically embraced each of the men, many of them complete strangers, as he begged them each to save the country from “bloody, fratricidal war.”68
At the Capitol, meanwhile, Senator Wigfall was telling his colleagues: “It is the merest balderdash—that is what it is—it is the most unmitigated fudge for any one to get up here, and tell men who have any sense, who have brains, that there is any prospect of two-thirds of this Congress passing any amendment to the Constitution, that any man who is white, twenty-one years old, and whose hair is straight, living south of Mason and Dixon’s line, will be content with.”69
And just down Pennsylvania Avenue, as the Peace Conference of 1861 entered its second day, as Mr. Tyler was exhorting his colleagues to courageously take up “the great work of conciliation and adjustment,”70 a Negro named Willis went to the auction block and was duly sold to an unknown bidder for an unrecorded sum.
*As late as 1931, a Florida congressman named R. A. Green introduced a bill in the House that would have paid reparations to former slaveholders and their descendants for the loss of their human “property.”