1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [45]
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