1 A Rope of Sand They cannot expect to make us love slavery. --Rep. Thaddeus Stevens By any traditional measure, James Buchanan was one of the best qualified men ever to hold the presidency. Known fondly, if not alto­gether flatteringly as the "Old Public Functionary," beginning in the 1810s he had served in the Pennsylvania state legislature, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as ambassador to Russia under Andrew Jackson, secretary of state under James Polk, and ambassador to Britain under Franklin Pierce, before his election to the nation''s highest office in 1856. Although Northern by birth, his support for Southern interests, including the protection of slavery, was staunch, lifelong, and untainted, at least in public, by any evi­dence of moral doubt. As president, he behaved like a sort of maiden aunt, a national mollifier who disliked confrontation, and felt gen­uinely distressed when states, like badly behaved children, were at each other''s throats. Yet he had presided over one debilitating crisis after another: guerrilla warfare in Kansas, the inflammatory Dred Scott decision, the wildfire spread of Southern paranoia following John Brown''s 1859 raid, and now the incendiary aftermath of Abra­ham Lincoln''s election, which sent South Carolina hurtling toward secession. By December 1860, he was a lame duck facing the coun­try''s worst calamity ever.

Secession fever was sweeping South Carolina and percolating across the rest of the Deep South. Radical speakers were telling wildly cheering crowds that Lincoln''s election would lead to a race war that could be forestalled only by a united South that was pre­pared to defend itself, and the slavery on which it depended, with rifle and bayonet if necessary. In Charleston, the Stars and Stripes was everywhere replaced by the state''s palmetto flag. Young and old flocked to join the militia. Even children delivered secession speeches to their playmates and strutted the streets like soldiers. At the direction of the pro-secession secretary of war, John Floyd, tens of thousands of weapons were shipped to the South from fed­eral arsenals in the North. A new military committee in South Caro­lina was laying plans to fortify the coastline, and foreign consuls were said to be waiting for secession to open negotiations for recognition. The governor of Alabama called for the immediate secession of his state, as did Sen.

Robert Toombs of Georgia. From Virginia to Texas, volunteer units were arming. In his last State of the Union address, on December 3, Buchanan spoke as if lost in a political funk, retailing rhetorical bromides that swayed no one anymore. "The country has been eminently pros­perous in all its material interests," he declared sunnily. "The gen­eral health has been excellent, our harvests have been abundant, and plenty smiles throughout the land." He then asked, "Why is it, then, that discontent so extensively prevails?" The answer was simple: it was all the abolitionists'' fault. "Incessant and violent agitation" against slavery had wrought a "malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom." As a result, white Southerners lived in terror of a servile insurrection.

All that the slave states wanted, he asserted, was to be left alone to manage their "domestic institutions" in their own way. Instead, he claimed, "Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before the morning." In truth, if any whites in the South lived in real terror it was those few who dared to publicly imply, even inadvertently, that there was anything wrong with slavery. In the months since John Brown''s raid, reports of lynchings, assaults, and the tar-and-feathering of hapless travelers, Yankee peddlers, and dissenters had steadily percolated northward. Vigilantes arrested white strangers for being seen in con­versation with Negroes, drove out Northern-born schoolteachers, and tore open the U.S. mail in search of "subversive" literature. A South Carolina stonecutter was stripped naked, beaten, and covered with hot tar for having been heard to say that slavery caused white workers to be looked down upon; a Virginian was almost lynched in Alabama when he attempted to pass a banknote from Massachu­setts; a daguerreotypist was beaten because one of his samples was a picture of Abraham Lincoln; a Mississippian was hanged for wearing a red sash, the supposed symbol of a nonexistent secret abolition society.

Of such horrific events, Buchanan said nothing. He waved away secession and its consequences. There was no constitutional basis for separation, he admitted. But the federal gov­ernment was, sadly, a mere voluntary association, a "rope of sand" so fragile that any "adverse wave of public opinion" could wash it away. He was therefore helpless to stop the "demolition" of federal author­ity in South Carolina. There wasn''t even a federal marshal left in the state to execute his orders, even if he issued any. He had no choice, he said, but to hand over responsibility for finding a solution to the crisis to Congress. Unfortunately, he added, in his opinion Congress had no more authority to compel a state to abide by federal law than the president did.

But all was not lost. Fortunately, there was a solu­tion at hand: a comprehensive compromise that would reassure the South that its interests and institutions would be protected. Buchanan''s complacency rested on an amendment to the Consti­tution that had just been proposed by Sen. John Crittenden, a slave-owning Kentucky Unionist, who was sometimes called "the Nestor of the Senate." Crittenden considered himself heir to the conciliatory spirit of his mentor and fellow Kentucky Whig, Henry Clay, dead since 1852, who had engineered several of the great sectional com­promises of the past. Strictly speaking, Crittenden''s proposal was hardly a compromise, since it required all its concessions from the North, and none from the South. Declaring that his amendment--it would be the thirteenth if it was ratified--would form "a perma­nent and unchangeable basis for peace and tranquility among the people," he proposed that Congress explicitly recognize the right to own slaves in the states where slavery already existed or might some­day be established; that the right of slavery be guaranteed in every federal territory; that any state law which thwarted the recapture of fugitive slaves be automatically nullified; that the Constitution''s three-fifths clause, guaranteeing extra representation for the South by counting that proportion of the enslaved population for the pur­pose of assigning representatives in Congress, be permanently fixed; that the Missouri Compromise line dividing slave states from free be carried west to the Pacific Ocean; that Congress be prohibited from interfering with the interstate slave trade, and pay compensation to the owners of slaves who escaped their masters with assistance from antislavery activists; and that Congress be empowered to sue any Northern county in which a fugitive slave was deliberately saved from recapture. The capstone of the amendment was draconian: it stipulated that no future amendment to the Constitution could ever repeal the Crittenden amendment''s previous provisions.

Crittenden was racing against time. Seventeen days after Buchan­an''s State of the Union address, on December 20, South Carolina formally seceded, charging that the federal government had failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, and that the states of the North had expressed an intolerable hostility to slavery by permitting the formation of abolition societies and inciting "servile insurrection." In December, complaining of the "wrongs" to which the South had allegedly been subjected by Northern "despotism," a secession convention meeting in Charleston''s Hibernian Hall called on the slaveholding states to unite in "a great slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses." After the vote, the delegates flooded into the streets, shouting, "We are afloat!" as church bells rang, bonfires blazed, and fireworks shot through the sky. In breaking up the Union, the Carolinians claimed, they were but following in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers, who had established the United States as a "union of slaveholding States." State authorities quickly seized federal cus­toms houses, armories, and forts, and deployed militiamen against a possible assault by national troops. The only organized federal force remaining in South Carolina con­sisted of seventy-five soldiers commanded by Maj. Robert Anderson, based at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan''s Island, a key link in the city''s for­midable shore defenses.

The problem with Fort Moultrie was that its powerful guns pointed out to sea, whence any attack was expected to come. The fort was virtually defenseless on its landward side, an open invitation to capture by the Southern forces that were massing around the city. However, Anderson was a Kentuckian, a longtime friend of Jefferson Davis, and married to the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner. South Carolinians expected him to hand over the fort without resistance. But on the night of December 26, to the astonishment of the secessionists, Anderson proved his unwavering loyalty to the national government by leading his men under cover of darkness to the most defensible position available to him, a damp, gloomy brick fastness that rose upon an artificial island in the har­bor: Fort Sumter. Buchanan seemed oblivious to the deepening crisis. Public dis­gust with his passivity sank to new depths. "Old James Buchanan now stands lowest, I think, in the dir.