| James Buchanan...Secession Is Legal, In Effect |
"The question fairly stated is, Has the
Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into
submission which is attempting to withdraw or has actually withdrawn
from the Confederacy? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the
principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and
to make war against a State. After much serious reflection I have
arrived at the conclusion that no such
power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the
Federal Government. It is manifest upon an inspection of the
Constitution that this is not among the specific and enumerated powers
granted to Congress, and it is equally apparent that its exercise is not
"necessary and proper for carrying into execution" any one of these
powers.
More @ NamSouth
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President
Buchanan was keenly aware that he had no constitutional means to stop a
State from withdrawing from the Union, and could command no military
force to do so. Lincoln’s use of force was enabled by Republican
governors who put armed force at his disposal and with which to wage
war. The author below cites Buchanan’s careful analysis of the powers of
the three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial,
that this “could perhaps be called the valedictory of the first seventy
years of constitutional government in the United States.” Buchanan’s
real concern with preserving of the Union resided in attempts at
arbitration, and fundamental to any understanding of Buchanan’s policy
is his clear concept of the rights of a minority group in a republican
form of government.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Buchanan for Arbitration, Lincoln for War
“[There]
is good reason to believe that President James Buchanan, as well as
many other leaders, expected to avoid open conflict. The mood of the
country had sobered at the realization that a sectional party had
elected a president. Public opinion, in general, was entirely remote
from the thought of war. Forty years of public service, in both houses
of Congress, in the cabinet, and in the courts of Europe, suggested
arbitration of the crisis to Buchanan. War he believed, “ought to be
the last desperate remedy of a despairing people, after every other
constitutional means of conciliation had been exhausted.”
Buchanan
remained firm in his conviction that “justice as well as sound policy
requires us still to seek a peaceful solution.” If the tall shadow of
the president-elect [Lincoln] lay across every discussion, then it will
be remembered that Lincoln remained, during this period, a shadow
indeed, without a voice of assurance or warning.
Buchanan’s
conciliatory stand has, until recently, been buried under the avalanche
of post-war attitudes which show him only as the inept and weak man who
stepped down for Lincoln’s administration. An able scholar. . .
Professor James G. Randall, comments succinctly, “If . . . preservation
of the Union by peaceable adjustment was possible, then unionists were
not faced with a choice of war or disunion, but rather a choice between a
Union policy of war and a Union policy in the Virginia sense of
adjustment and concession.”
Especially
suggestive to students of the period is Randall’s recent statement that
“the wars that have not happened” should be studied. Judged in the
light of “historical relativity” rather than in the concept of the
“irrepressible conflict,” Buchanan’s policy, particularly as outlined in
his December 3rd [1860] address to the nation, is subject to fresh interpretation.
[President
Buchanan’s] course was, rather, that of a man trained in a political
school of compromise, whose viewpoint was shaped by his legalistic
interpretation of the executive power as it was limited by the
Constitution. Summarizing the President’s careful exposition of this
stand, [biographer George Ticknor] Curtis concluded with him that, “To
the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the
measures of conciliation. . . But the Executive could not in the
smallest degree increase the means which existing laws had placed in his
hands.”
The
concept of “historical relativity” was at the core of the defense
offered by Buchanan’s most recent biographer, Philip Gerald Auchampaugh,
who, in 1926, openly attacked the “staff of arm-chair Generals of
History Departments who, for the most part, have taken up their pens for
the winning side”. . . . .
His brief for Buchanan’s policy is unqualified and specific:
“His
main aim, to give things a peaceful direction, and prevent the opening
of a terrible “Brother’s War,” had been accomplished midst terrific
difficulties. No stone had been left unturned to promote measures of
compromise that would be fair to all concerned. The President had also
escaped the pitfalls of the Republicans, by standing firmly on his
constitutional prerogatives, both in dealing with Congress and the
Southern States.”
Edward
Channing pointed out that Buchanan had no power, “either constitutional
or material,” to use coercive measures and suggested that, especially
in view of the small military force at his disposal, “If he had wished
to coerce the South or any individual within its boundaries, it is
difficult to see how he could do so.”
Randall
discounts the theory of the “irrepressible conflict,” recognizes the
President’s dilemma in its implications for that time, and appraises the
long-term validity of compromise and conciliation. Assessing the
terrific losses on both sides of the conflict, from war to
reconstruction, he suggests “a fuller measure of democracy would
probably have prevented the war or at least have mitigated its abuses.”
Backed by the accumulating mass of evidence, he states with conviction
that “There is little doubt that at the moment the majority of the
American people wished for conciliation to be tried.”
“Time
is a great conservative power. Let us pause at this momentous point and
afford the people, both North and South, an opportunity for
reflection,” said Buchanan on January 8, 1861. This strategy was also
within the framework of a tradition, which had, as in the case of the
[New England’s 1814] Hartford Convention, seen active resistance and
threat of secession avoided with time as a moderating force. In modern
terms, Buchanan might be said to have viewed secession as sort of a
“sit-down strike,” to be solved by arbitration rather than by force.
Facts
and events were, in truth, shaping the destiny of the plantation system
and, as Arnold Toynbee has suggested, were tending to outlaw slavery.
Already the slave system in the United States, as a labor supply, was in
competition with the ever-growing tide of immigrant labor in the
factories of New England.
Geographic
boundaries were being set quite as much by the advance of the free
farming frontier. . . . these factors suggest that Buchanan’s strategy
of time, perhaps even a delay of ten years, might have avoided the war.
He was not unaware that a precedent for the peaceful solution of the
complex problem of emancipation had been set by England in 1833.
With
war as an easy alternative, the eventful one hundred and fifty days
before [Fort] Sumter offered a fertile field for study of the technique
of arbitration, for here the uncertain balance between compromise and
conflict was maintained. . . . his conviction that the Union could not
be cemented by the blood of its citizens, it is difficult to see how
Buchanan could have chosen another course.”
(James
Buchanan and the Crisis of the Union, Frank Wysor Klingberg, Journal of
Southern of Southern History, Vol. IX, Number 4, November 1943, pp.
455-457, 459, 466-468, 470-474)
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