1858 (56 page)

“He expressed to me his abiding conviction that the American people would, in due time, come to regard his course as the only one which at that time promised any hope of saving the nation from a bloody and devastating war and would recognize the integrity and wisdom of his course in administering the government for the good of the whole people, whether North or South. His conviction on this point was so genuine that he looked forward serenely to the future, and never seemed to entertain a misgiving or a doubt,” said a friend, Dr. William Paxton of New York.

Buchanan told his niece, “Had I to pass through the same state of things again I do not see, before God, how I could act otherwise than as I did act.” The president told friends that future generations would honor him. “Posterity will do me justice. I have always felt, and still feel, that I discharged every duty imposed on me conscientiously. I have no regret for any public act of my life and history will vindicate my memory from every unjust aspersion.”
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History, however, has always viewed the fifteenth president as a spectacular failure. Buchanan spent the entire year of 1858, and all four years in the White House, ignoring the slavery controversy and becoming angry at anyone who brought it to his attention. Instead, he spent most of his time on Don Quixote-ish foreign policy adventures in a desire to create an American empire in North, South, and Central America, ignoring the wishes of the people who lived in countries he wanted to purchase, annex, or conquer. As president he made few efforts to bring the leaders of the slavery and antislavery factions together at the White House to attempt to discuss a resolution of the issue. He paid little attention to the views of newspaper editors. He was one of the least-effective heads of the Democratic Party in its history, doing little to help party members get elected during his administration, especially in 1858; thousands of Democratic Party members found his campaign to defeat Stephen Douglas deplorable.

His use of federal authority, especially his instructions to officials in Ohio to ignore any Ohio Supreme Court rulings concerning the Oberlin Rescuers, was a mockery of the Constitution. At the same time he tried to keep the Rescuers in jail, he did little beyond posting a tiny $300 bounty for John Brown, whose Christmas raiders had committed murder, violated the Fugitive Slave Act, the
Dred Scott
decision, inter-state commerce laws, and fired upon law enforcement officials.

President Buchanan’s magical thinking that slavery would go away not only prevented him from addressing the most important issue in the nation’s domestic history, but permitted firebrands on both sides of the issue, the John Browns as well as Southern radicals such as Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper editor Robert Rhett, to make slavery not just a political debate, but an all-consuming incendiary issue whose fires would shortly consume America.

In the waning days of his administration, following the election of Lincoln and the secession of seven Southern states, the President did made several efforts to salvage the country, appointing emergency congressional committees and issuing pleas to both North and South. These were too little and too late. None did any good and Buchanan was insulted by both sides, with Republican newspapers describing his speeches as “wretched drivel,” his statements “brazen lies,” and the president himself a “pharisaical old hypocrite.”
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James Buchanan was certainly not the sole cause of the Civil War that erupted three years later, just one of many causes, but his ineffectiveness as chief executive dealt a crippling blow to the nation.

Buchanan had failed as a president and as the moral leader of the nation.

On March 4, 1861, Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln, was inaugurated as the nation’s sixteenth president. The Capitol, where the next president would be sworn in following over a hundred threats on his life, was surrounded with soldiers, as were nearby buildings. Army sharpshooters took their places on the roofs of all the buildings overlooking the inaugural platform. The carriage carrying Lincoln to be sworn in stopped at the White House, by tradition, to pick up the outgoing president, Buchanan, to take him to the inauguration. Buchanan climbed into the carriage and faced the now-bearded Lincoln. He expected the incoming president, who would take office amid the threat of a Civil War, to ask him for his advice on how to run the country and avert the war.

Lincoln, whose tall, lanky body filled much of the carriage, ignored him. Ironically, all the incoming president told Buchanan as he looked at the soldiers on every block the carriage drove past was that he had no fear that he would ever be assassinated.
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Shortly after noon, Lincoln took the oath of office and was greeted by a long and loud roar of approval from an enormous crowd that had gathered to hear his inaugural address. At that moment, as he began his speech, President Abraham Lincoln swept into the history of the world as one of its most successful figures—and former president James Buchanan faded from it as one of its most colossal failures.

The events of 1858 changed the lives of dozens of important people throughout the United States and, within a few short years, the history of the nation. These events, such as John Brown’s raid and the Oberlin slave rescue, helped to dramatize slavery, which became one of the major underlying causes of the Civil War. Many of the people who suffered both triumph and defeat in their lives in 1858 became key players in that huge conflict, and all found themselves in important roles because of what happened to them in that troubled year.

The inability of Colonel Robert E. Lee to make up his mind whether to resign from the United States Army and run Arlington House and the Custis family plantations in Virginia left him living in the gorgeous hilltop mansion overlooking Washington, DC, throughout 1858 and 1859. In October 1859, John Brown and a small band of raiders attacked Harper’s Ferry, the U.S. military arsenal on the southern banks of the Potomac River in Virginia. The federal government was stunned by the raid and Southerners were panic-stricken that it was just the first of many abolitionist raids into Southern states to free slaves. President Buchanan immediately decided to send troops to Harper’s Ferry to seize the facility, capture the raiders, and put down the insurrection that he and other national leaders feared would escalate into war.

Who to send to lead the troops? There were very few army officers in the nation’s capital with any experience from America’s last military engagement, the Mexican War of 1846. Then someone remembered Colonel Robert E. Lee. Lee was a longtime officer, West Point graduate, heralded veteran of the Mexican War, and cavalry leader. Lee was not only the perfect man for the job, but he was still on leave at Arlington House, right across the Potomac from the White House.

Lee was ordered to Harper’s Ferry with a detachment of U.S. Marines and promptly ended the violent occupation, captured John Brown and his men, and supervised their hanging. In the raid and executions, Lee not only showed his considerable military experience, but admirable leadership and bravery. He exemplified the veteran officer who works well under intense pressure. Lee’s actions at Harper’s Ferry earned him enormous national publicity and, overnight, made him one of the most famous military figures in the country.

His newfound fame was such that when the Civil War began, Lee was offered the command of the Union Army, but turned it down to lead the forces of his native Virginia. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when Lee was the superintendent at West Point, was the newly elected president of the Confederacy. Davis made Lee a general in the Confederate Army. In 1862, Lee was promoted to commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the South’s strongest force. General Lee went on to become the most notable general in the Confederate Army and, after the war, a genuine American hero. He remains so today.

The Union Army seized and occupied Arlington House and its grounds and used it as a camp throughout the war. The Lee family never lived there again. Later, Arlington House was turned into a museum, and today the lovely Lee and Custis family mansion overlooks Arlington National Cemetery, the burial ground for thousands of America’s soldiers who died in its wars.

Just as 1858 proved a pivotal year in the life of Lee, who became a legendary Southern commander in the Civil War, it was equally critical for Northerner William Tecumseh Sherman. He found himself lost at the end of 1858. His financial career had ended in shambles when his bank went out of business in the panic of 1857 and its aftermath; he had failed as a lawyer, too, and wound up the year running a roadside food stand in Kansas where he sold corn to prospectors.

His life settled down in 1859 after he became the head of a military academy in Louisiana. Sherman warned friends that Louisiana was making a mistake when it seceded from the Union in January 1861, to join the new Confederacy. He had seen the damage that splinter groups of any kind had caused when he confronted the vigilantes in San Francisco. The former United States army officer refused to have anything to do with the Confederacy, left the military academy, and traveled back to St. Louis, where he was given a job as president of a small railroad company.

Sherman quit his railroad post and joined the U.S. Army once again in April 1861, following Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand troops to put down the rebellion. He was made a colonel and saw action in the summer of 1861. In 1862 he was reunited with Ulysses Grant, whom he had last seen selling firewood on a street corner in St. Louis. Grant made Sherman one of his top generals. Sherman, whom the army rejected in 1858, went on to distinguish himself at numerous battles. He and Grant were close friends throughout the war and continually defended each other against critics. Sherman said of Grant later, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other always.”
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When Lincoln named Grant to lead the entire U.S. Army, he named Sherman head of the army in the South. Starting in Chattanooga on May 7, 1864, Sherman’s force of over ninety thousand men swept southward, earning a succession of victories, culminating with the capture of Atlanta and Savannah and the well-publicized “March to the Sea.” These efforts were instrumental in the Union victory the following spring. General Grant was elected president in 1868 and the following year named Sherman the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, a post he held for fourteen years. The man who desperately loved an army that had forsaken him in 1858 is remembered today as one of the nation’s most remarkable military leaders.