CHAPTER 22
Upon re-examination of the whole course of my administration from the 6th November, 1860, I can find nothing to regret. I shall at all times be prepared to defend it.
—JAMES BUCHANAN TO EDWIN STANTON
Buchanan ~ Lincoln ~ Pierce ~ Tyler ~ Fillmore ~ Van Buren
While the world outside Wheatland worried about more pressing affairs, James Buchanan was obsessed with clearing his name. Buchanan’s sense of immediacy was driven by several factors. First was the severe degree to which he had fallen in the public estimate. He noted that he received, “almost every day . . . violent, insulting, and threatening anonymous letters . . . I should like to know whether I am in danger of a personal attack . . . so that I may be prepared to meet it. They know not what they would do; because when my record is presented to the world, all will be clear as light.” If the attack on Fort Sumter had happened under his watch, Buchanan protested, he would have responded the same as Lincoln. Another reason for Buchanan’s urgency was his precarious health during this time. From his perspective, he could not afford the luxury of waiting until after the war to ensure his legacy. Perhaps Buchanan could have focused on other things if he had another outlet, but as he noted, “All social visiting is at an end. Men, women, and children are all engaged in warlike pursuits.”
A soldier stationed at nearby Camp Curtin left on a recruiting expedition and decided to visit Wheatland, to pay his respects to Buchanan. The house, he noted, “stands in a cluster of fine old pines, oaks, willows, and maples, about one hundred yards from the road.” He walked past the “dilapidated black wooden gate, with an old fashioned iron latch,” and pulled the bell to signal his arrival. While he waited, he took note of a flag atop a pine pole, and hickory armchairs on the portico, one with the “seat broken through.” Generally, he felt the home had a “discarded, broken-down and hopeless appearance.” After ringing the bell, he heard “shutting doors and hasty footfalls.” The well-wisher might have done him good, but Buchanan was increasingly isolated, sick, and concerned for his safety. The soldier left without getting any response.
Buchanan believed that he must quickly reduce to writing a defense of his administration. He asked an intermediary to sound out an influential publisher. “Although nearly all upon record, the public seem to have forgotten it,” he noted. “It has become necessary now to revive the public memory, and I know of no journal in the country so proper to do this as the Journal of Commerce.”
Buchanan complained “the whole force at my command was just five companies, and neither of them full [referring to forces in proximity to the capital, rather than the 16,000 spread throughout the country]. They did not exceed in the whole 300 men. TheHerald, however, from a spirit of malignity, and supposing that the world may have forgotten the circumstances, takes every occasion to blame me for my supineness. It will soon arrive at the point of denouncing me for not crushing out the rebellion at once, and thus try to make me the author of the war. Whenever it reaches that point, it is my purpose to indict [the publisher] for libel.” Buchanan called it “an attempt to bring not only my character but my life into danger by malignant falsehood.” A man who had been at the center of American life for four decades bemoaned “To be sick, while the whole world is alive.”
He wrote to Joseph Holt, his secretary of war, “The time has certainly arrived when in justice to myself and to the members of my cabinet I must prepare, or have prepared under my immediate direction, an authentic statement of the events of the administration . . . If Providence were to call me away from this world before such a statement, the truth in its full extent might never be known.” He asked Holt to come to Wheatland to help him prepare a defense, and to bring documents about Fort Pickens and the plans to saveSumter. “We are not a gay household, but we will give you a cheerful welcome,” he explained.
Holt responded, “The country is so completely occupied by the fearful and absorbing events occurring and impending, that you could not hope at present to engage its attention. While the country will accord to you a high patriotic purpose in the forbearing course you pursued, it has also, I am satisfied, arrived at the conclusion, from current events, that the policy was a mistaken one.” Holt referenced the traitors in Buchanan’s cabinet, and argued that if Buchanan had done in Charleston what Lincoln had done to secure St. Louis the rebellion would have “been dead as any antediluvian.”
Jeremiah Black was a visitor to Wheatland around this time. He later wrote to Buchanan, “I think you owe it to your friends and to your country to give them a full and clear vindication of your conduct and character. If this be not done, you will continue to be slandered for half a century to come.” No one would read a droll recitation of facts, Black argued. Rather, it should be “a compact narrative, readable, attractive, and interesting to all.” He advised that Buchanan publish what he needed to convey right away, but to take time with the fuller explanation he suggested. Black was willing to be hired for this purpose, in exchange for $1,500 up front, $2,500 in Buchanan’s will, and $3,500 to his family. “If you agree to this I will immediately move to York or Lancaster.”
It seemed that Black and Buchanan would have conflicting recollections of the ex-president’s time in office, however, and Black would end up departing Wheatland early, “very much to my surprise and regret,” Buchanan noted. “I presume the biography is all over. I shall now depend upon myself with God’s assistance.”
The western counties of Virginia, possessing few slaves and strong Union sentiment, met in convention to form their own state government. Not yet proclaiming themselves a separate state, they rather held themselves out as the legitimate government of all of Virginia. The Confederates were determined to hold the disputed territory, just as the Union was committed to driving them out.
It was 4:00 a.m. on July 12, the sixth time that night Lincoln was awoken by a knock on the door from Colonel Daniel Butterfield, his military secretary.* Wearing nothing but a red flannel shirt, which he struggled to hold down in front of him, Lincoln answered the door. “Colonel, do you ever sleep?”
* Butterfield’s lasting legacy is as the composer of the song “Taps,” played most often at military funerals.
“Mr. President,” he replied, “I was about to ask you the same question.”
“I have not slept much since this civil war began,” he admitted.
The colonel apologized for yet another disturbance, but he was there under orders from General Scott. Lincoln explained that his dressing gown was twisted around his wife’s feet and, not wanting to wake her, he came out in this shirt instead. “Either I have grown too long or the shirt has grown too short, I know not which,” he said, still struggling to hold the shirt down in front of him.
“Mr. President,” said Butterfield, “the telegram I hold in my hand will give you the greatest pleasure; it is the announcement of the first victory of the Union Army.”
But Lincoln, whose hands remained holding his shirt, asked, “What am I to do?”
“If you will allow me for once in my life to turn my back on the President of the United States, you can let go and I can pass the telegram over my shoulder.”
“Do so, Colonel.”
Butterfield turned around, handing him the dispatch over his shoulder.
Lincoln read over the news of Union victory at Rich Mountain, Virginia, then read it out loud, asking Butterfield if this had been corroborated, to which he answered affirmatively.
“Colonel,” Lincoln said joyfully, “if you will come to me every night with such telegrams as that, I will come out not only in my red shirt, but without any shirt at all. Tell General Scott so.” Handing back to him the first good news of the war, the president wished Butterfield goodnight and went back to bed for the sixth time. Lincoln’s guards would remember his getting but little sleep, but when it happened, his fearful moans “seemed to betray his real sentiments and it was frightful to hear him then.”
In the memory of one general, the battle to come was “the climax of a campaign undertaken at the dictation of a clique in the press led by the New York Tribune,” and the excited state of the country “was enough to override the President, the Secretaries, and the General-in-Chief.” This cry of “On to Richmond,” the general recalled, “forced the Bull Run campaign on the country, with all its sequence of disaster and depression.” The only good effect, he believed, was to teach the public “to be a little patient.”
On the eve of Bull Run, Franklin Pierce reflected that he had always believed “aggression by arms is neither a suitable nor possible remedy for existing evils . . . I cannot find my way through the thick darkness. May God grant that light break up us with some unexpected quarter.” Bureaucratic wrangling had delayed General Irvin McDowell and his army’s departure by eight days. The unseasoned troops took three days to cover what veterans would cover in one. The slog caused the Union forces to run out of food, and they were forced to wait in Centreville to be replenished from the 18th through the 21st. Many spectators passed through the Union ranks during this time—members of Congress, members of the cabinet, and ordinary citizens. They would stay and watch the battle, “as they would have gone to see a horse race or to witness a Fourth of July procession.”
The Union idling also permitted Confederate general Joseph Johnston’s army in western Virginia to evade General Robert Patterson, and join Beauregard on the 20th and 21st, swelling his ranks by nine thousand soldiers. The soldiers who fought lacked any consistency with their uniforms, underscoring the amateur nature of the early war. The multicolored forces’ garments varied by militia or state, “according to the aesthetic taste of place.” Some regiments were in plain clothes.
The Confederates, led by General Beauregard, McDowell’s West Point classmate and bombarder of Fort Sumter, were arrayed south of the Bull Run, “a sluggish, tree choked river a few miles north of Manassas.” Beauregard positioned guards on the bridge to his right, on a turnpike bridge to his left six miles upstream, and at six fords in between. At 2:00 a.m. on July 21, McDowell’s men crossed miles north of where they were anticipated, seeking to turn the Confederate left flank. The Confederates got the worst of it that morning, and fell back as the battle continued in front of Henry House Hill. The sun was scorching that day, and men’s faces were blackened by “powder, smoke, and dust.” Union artillery were “the prime features of the fight,” according to one general. The Confederate line may have broken here, were it not for the bravery of Thomas Jackson, now practicing what months ago he taught as a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. By standing firm and keeping his forces in line, he earned the nickname “Stonewall,” and a piece of martial immortality. Shot in the hand but dismissing it as “a mere scratch,” Jackson told another officer, “My religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me.”
In the heat of the late afternoon, to the right of the Union artillery there emerged from the woods an infantry unit. About to open fire, the commander was dissuaded by his chief of artillery, certain that the new troops were Union reinforcements. The unit revealed themselves by firing a deadly volley at the batteries, killing or wounding every cannon operator and many of their horses, rendering the massive Union guns silent.
His major artillery gone, McDowell attempted to retreat back across Bull Run Creek. The Union forces slowly lost cohesion, as men set aside their muskets and began to walk, and finally to run away. The first arrived in Washington close to midnight. Two hours later, Winfield Scott called on the White House and asked that Mary Lincoln and the children leave the city. Mary turned to her husband and asked, “Will you go with us?” certain of his response.
“Most assuredly I will not leave at this juncture,” he replied.
“Then I will not leave you at this juncture,” she answered.
When morning came, Lincoln was still meeting with eyewitnesses, taking notes, planning his next move.
John Tyler was bedridden, but when he learned of the victory at Manassas, he called for champagne and made others drink to the health of Confederate generals.
Stanton wrote to Buchanan, “The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be mentioned. The imbecility of this administration culminated in that catastrophe—an irretrievable misfortune and national disgrace never to be forgotten are to be added to the ruin of all peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy, as the result of Lincoln’s ‘running the machine’ for five months. The capture of Washington now seems inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance. The rout, overthrow, and utter demoralization of the whole army is complete. Even now I doubt whether any serious opposition to the entrance of the Confederate forces could be offered.”
On July 23, Millard Fillmore received a letter from his stockbrokers, with bad news about his portfolio, noting “the times have interfered with their business very badly.”
In terms of losses, the first major battle of the Civil War was more evenly distributed than suggested by its chaotic conclusion. The Union lost sixteen officers, 444 enlisted men with 1,046 wounded; the Confederates, twenty-five officers and 362 enlisted, with 1,519 wounded. Otherwise it was an embarrassing defeat for the North. As Beauregard put it, “It established as an accomplished fact [the Confederacy] . . . which before was but a political assertion.” The three-month Union enlistees went home, their time having expired. The Civil War would not be the short, decisive conflict that both sides anticipated. Virginia’s interior would not be invaded for eight more months.
After the battle, one resident remembered, “Washington seemed to me to be utterly demoralized. I did not see one really cheerful face, nor did I hear one encouraging word. The President was criticized; the manner in which the battle was fought was criticized; criticism was the order of the day.” This visitor was also shocked at the vulnerability of Washington, saying that if the Confederates had known, “they might have captured the city and placed their banners upon its public buildings.”
Buchanan believed that “nothing but a vigorous prosecution of the war can now determine the question between the north and south. It is vain to talk of peace at the present moment. The Confederate States, flushed with their success at Bull’s Run, would consent to nothing less than a recognition of their independence, and this it is impossible to grant under any conceivable circumstances.” He resisted allowing its publication, but by the fall was willing to publish a letter to a Union meeting of Chester and Lancaster Counties. “Our recent military reverses,” Buchanan wrote, “so far from producing despondency in the minds of a loyal and powerful people, will only animate them to more mighty exertions in sustaining a war which became inevitable by the assault upon Fort Sumter.
“This is the moment for action, prompt, energetic, united action, and not for discussion of peace propositions. These would be rejected by the states that have seceded, unless we should offer to recognize their independence, which is entirely out of the question.” Buchanan made “a solemn and earnest appeal to my countrymen, and especially those without families, to volunteer for the war and join the many thousands of brave and patriotic volunteers who are already in the field.” Widely republished, the letter even led to some rare praise for Buchanan, such as that which came from the Hartford Daily Courant, pronouncing “‘Old Buck’ Sound at the Core!” But one friend did not think his remarks were wise. “Your endorsement of Lincoln’s policy,” Black wrote, “will be a very serious drawback upon the defense of your own.” The January 9, 1861, firing on the Star of the West was as serious as against Fort Sumter, he argued, and the taking of Forts Moultrie and Pinckney “was worse than either . . . if this war is right and politic and wise and Constitutional, I cannot but think you ought to have made it.”
Martin Van Buren, in his final statement on the war, reaffirmed his earlier support for Lincoln, despite the initial setbacks. His positions “have, at no time, undergone the slightest change and have been freely repeated in conversation to my friends and neighbors and to all others who have asked to be informed of them.”
If Washington was downtrodden, the North responded to this defeat with overwhelming support for the war effort. As late as November Lincoln would write that there were more soldiers than guns. “The plain matter-of-fact is, our good people have rushed to the rescue of the government, faster than the government can find arms to put into their hands.”
To equip, train, and lead these new men, General George McClellan was put in command, bringing badly needed professionalism and discipline, turning raw recruits into a professional fighting force. The son of a Philadelphia doctor and a graduate of West Point who had served with the Corps of Engineers in the Mexican War, he was one of three officers sent to Europe to study the logistics of organizing an army. Three years earlier he had resigned his commission to accept a position with the Illinois Central Railroad Company, first as chief-engineer, then vice president, and then president of the Eastern Division of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad Company. As for so many others, the war meant a change of plans. After leading Union forces in Western Virginia, McClellan was brought to Washington in the wake of Bull Run and placed in charge of the Army of the Potomac.
“I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands,” he wrote, and “I was called to it; my previous life seems to have been unwittingly directed to this great end; and I know that God can accomplish the greatest results with the weakest instruments.”