West Like Lightning by Jim DeFelice

Author:Jim DeFelice
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

FRAGMENTS OF THE REPUBLIC

The editors waiting eagerly for the arrival of the Pony with the election results added them to pages already typeset with stories about seething Southern sentiments. There was little in the pages yet about what was going on back in Washington, let alone Illinois. Lincoln steadfastly refused to make any statement about what he was planning; Buchanan fumed privately.

Just before the election, Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the seventy-four-year-old hero of the Mexican-American War and the commanding general of American forces, had sent a letter to the secretary of war with his “view” of the crisis. Scott, despite a reputation as anti-slavery, said states had a right to secede. While he wasn’t in favor of breaking up the country, he declared it would be a “smaller evil” if the “fragments of the great Republic” formed smaller units.12

Scott’s views had been leaked and quickly entered general circulation. Buchanan fretted, knowing they would encourage the South, especially since they rested not only on a belief that the government had no right to use force to keep itself together, but that it lacked that force to do it. This Scott had made clear in a second message, listing only five companies of soldiers that could be used to quickly reinforce forts on the Southern coast—South Carolina specifically.

The small size of the army had been one of the few things Buchanan and Scott agreed on; both men had urged Congress to increase the War Department’s budget, to little avail. Otherwise, the two men did not get along personally or politically—Scott was a Whig, and Buchanan had supported President Polk’s attempts to undermine Scott’s status during the war, hoping to prevent him from becoming a war hero and running for president. (He failed on all accounts; Scott ran in 1852, losing to Democrat Franklin Pierce.)

But Buchanan’s problems with Old Fuss and Feathers were mere blips compared with the distrust between him and his secretary of war, John B. Floyd. Floyd had grown increasingly moody and resented Buchanan’s criticisms that he was careless with department funds. His advice also shaded toward the South, or at least against taking strong action.

Attorney General Black was still researching the legalities of what could be done. In the meantime, Buchanan began working on an address to Congress on the crisis. He planned to blast abolitionists and the North in general, telling them to leave the South and slavery alone. But he would also say that the Union must be preserved.

Don’t act in the absence of action, he would tell the South. Don’t do anything unless your rights are violated. Which they have not been, election or no.

And then he might propose the only possible solution he saw to the problem: a constitutional convention to settle things on a quiet and fair basis, once and for all.

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