• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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