Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE

CHAPTER VI

THE CABINET RÉGIME

HE ultimatum presented by the commission- CHAP. VI. ers was at once made the subject of a Cabinet discussion, continued in the evening of the same day. No decision was arrived at, and the meetings would be without special interest, were it not for the report of one of the incidents that shows the feeling which divided the members into two irreconcilable factions. The scene is given in the language of one of the participants in the evening session of Friday, December 28th, who afterwards recounted the event in the council-room of the White House. Secretary Stanton said:

The last I saw of Floyd was in this room, lying on the sofa which then stood between the windows yonder. I remember it well-it was on the night of the 28th of December, 1860. We had had high words, and had almost come to blows, in our discussion over Fort Sumter. Thompson was here-Thompson was a plausible talker and as a last resort, having been driven from every other argument, advocated the evacuation of the fort on the plea of generosity. South Carolina, he said, was but a small State with a sparse white population we were a great and powerful people, and a strong vigorous government. We could afford to say to South Carolina, "See, we will withdraw our garrison as an evidence that we mean you no harm."

CHAP. VI.

Stanton replied to him, "Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the Government is strong, and that we, as the public servants, have the confidence of the people. I think that is a mistake. No administration has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this has done. Only the other day it was announced that a million of dollars had been stolen from Mr. Thompson's department. The bonds were found to have been taken from the vault where they should have been kept, and the notes of Mr. Floyd were substituted for them. Now it is proposed to give up Sumter. All I have to say is, that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week." Floyd remained silent and did not reappear Memoran in that chamber.

Stanton conversation,

J. G. N.,
Personal

da. MS.

Moore,

Record,"

uments, p. 10.

The Cabinet was again convened on the evening of Saturday, December 29th; but when it met, there was one vacant seat at the council-board.1 During that day, Floyd sent in his formal resignation, complaining that he had been subjected "to a violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith." The resignation was accepted on the following "Rebellion Monday, and the War Department placed proVol. I. Doc- visionally under the charge of Postmaster-General Holt. To the six assembled councilors, Mr. Buchanan now submitted the draft of his reply to the commissioners. The precise terms and substance of this document remain unpublished, and we are compelled to gather its import from a rather elaborate written criticism of it by a member of the Cabinet. This indicates, however, with sufficient clearness, that the paper, like all Mr. Buchanan's writings and conversations of that period, was contradictory, loose in expression, and entirely lacking

1 Floyd's resignation is dated Dec. 29th (Saturday), and the President's acceptance Dec. 31st (Monday), 1860.

in any clear presentation of issues, or straightfor- CHAP. VI. ward decision of pending questions; a half-defense and half-apology, seeking simply to evade and shift just official responsibility. Of all the Cabinet members, Mr. Toucey alone approved the reply; Thompson and Thomas, with active sympathies in behalf of secession, assailed it as being hostile to South Carolina and calculated to provoke a conflict; while Black, Stanton, and Holt insisted that it ignobly yielded the rights and honor of the Government to the rebellion which had assailed its flag and property.

To all appearance unmoved by these searching and acrimonious discussions, the President seemed to adhere inflexibly both to the form and substance of the reply he had sketched, and the conference ended with every indication of a new, and this time radical, Cabinet crisis. It is not probable that either the Chief Magistrate or any or all of his constitutional advisers comprehended the novel relations and changing aspects of national politics. The heat of their daily strife warped their judgment, and the rancor of their discords obscured their vision too much for correct analysis. Upon a more remote and dispassionate study of these men, it comes out that President Buchanan's was a cold, secretive, rigid, unsympathetic character, in which the two opposing qualities of stubbornness and timidity met and neutralized each other; leaving a colorless personality peculiarly subject to be moved by political drifts, which he lacked the insight to perceive and the courage to resist. Two opposing currents in the Cabinet, one towards active disunion, represented by Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd,

Black, "Es

says and pp. 13, 14.

Speeches,"

CHAP. VI. and recently Thomas, and the other towards a conservative unionism, represented by Cass, Black, Holt, and recently Stanton, had kept the President in an eddy, with his darling political paradoxes about secession and coercion, enforcement and violence, executive duty and Congressional power, revolution and compromise forever on his lips, and the ghastly and overwhelming phantom of civil war forever before his eyes. The end of December, therefore, when he was called upon to decide the fate of Anderson and Sumter, found him no further advanced than when, at the beginning of the month, he was writing his message. All the great political events which had happened-the significant Congressional debates, his truce with rebellion, the rupture of his Cabinet, proclamation of the insurrection, South Carolina secession, Anderson's movement, the Charleston seizures, and the actual presence of the insurrection in the Executive Mansion in the persons of the three commissioners had swept by him, not indeed unnoted, but utterly uncomprehended. Though seized by friend and foe alike, and dragged time and again into the broad light of his state duties and responsibilities, he as constantly shrank back into the obscurity of his personal fears, refusing to exercise his executive functions.

The wide drift in politics, however, now sweeping unresisted and with a rising current, not only in South Carolina, but in other Cotton States as well, from discontent to conspiracy and from conspiracy to insurrection, while it left the President stationary in attitude and resolve, had quite a different effect upon the members of his Cabinet. We

have already seen how it drew out Cobb to personal CHAP. VI. service in rebellion, and drove out Cass as a protest against Executive indifference and neglect. The same influence had now forced out Floyd, much against the inclination of that double-dealing politician. Nor did the influence end here. Though the king be dead, the king must live. A nation of thirty millions is a daily force with daily needs, and if the President refuse his office, the next in authority must take up the task. With all Buchanan's protests that it was not his work, the national questions grew daily in magnitude and portent. On the 26th it was the query of receiving the commissioners; on the 27th, the question of remanding Anderson to Moultrie; on the 28th, the demand to withdraw the garrison altogether. In a week it might be civil war; and in a month an army at the gates of the capital. Though the President might shirk the pressing issues, South Carolina and the Union assuredly would not.

From the Presidential election to the evacuation of Moultrie, Mr. Buchanan's policy had been, in substance, an effort to abstain as far as possible from affairs of state; and his written reply to the commissioners was a simple continuation of that policy. But this was now approved by only one member of his Cabinet; the other five condemning it, though from motives radically unlike. Thompson and Thomas, importuned by their friends, could no longer postpone decisive action to favor the conspiracy; while Black, Holt, and Stanton dared no longer defer energetic efforts to maintain the Government. With the adjournment of that Cabinet meeting on Saturday night,

Dec., 1860.

« PreviousContinue »