with an army to conquer the South, but we can, Whiting was dispatched by Jefferson Davis
make the war he will have begun as wide as the
to inspect the fortifications of Charleston.
ocean itself. It is said that New England made The "Floating Battery," of which great ex-
more money than she lost in the war of 1812, by pri-pectations were formed, was launched Feb-
ruary 25th. It was simply a floating fortifi-
cation about one hundred feet front, to

vateers on the British commerce. We of the Con-
federate States cannot be the greatest loser at such
a game. But, whatever may be our instrumentalities
of defence or aggression, the Provisional Govern-mount four to six heavy guns. It was low
ment was established to put them in full operation in the water, built of pine and palmetto logs
against our enemies of the North. It is a war gov- and ribbed with iron-thus supposed to be
ernment. It may be compelled to raise an unusual impervious to shot. The design was to an-
army. It may be compelled to lay unusual taxes-chor it in a commanding position off Sulli-
to call for unusual loans. Let the people of the Con- van's island, where it could enfilade the
federate States view with forbearance its imperfec- ramparts of Sumter.*
tions or irregularities, and be prepared to support
it in all its difficulties. Within one month we will
know what our necessities require. The Provisional
Government may be useless, and a permanent gov-
ernment, looking to all those guaranties which a
free government require, may supersede its tempo-

rary existence.

The terms here used-" our enemies of the North"-implied a fact which should be given due weight, viz.: that the Southern

populace had been educated to believe that the North was, an open and declared enemy of the South; hence, the unanimity with which they responded to the call to arms,

and submitted their necks to their rulers' yoke. The relative strength of each section became a subject of quite general attention, as well as the comparative courage and activity of the Northern and Southern people. The intelligent community never before took such interest in the census statistics. It is indicative of the extraordinary self-deception which the Southern people practised upon themselves, that they deemed their six millions of white population fully equivalent, in material force, to the nineteen millions of the North. It would have been considered an evidence of cowardice in the South for a person to have confessed the equality of the North with the South, man-for-man. The local and State prejudices which ever have prevailed in the Cotton-growing Statesowing as much to the want of general intelligence among the masses of the people, as to the egotism and dictatorial spirit engendered by long exercise of the rights of masters over slaves-served to strengthen this over-estimate of strength and the resources of war.

The fortress on Cumming's point was a
firm structure of green logs covered in sand,
mounting guns of a very heavy calibre, with
one or two very effective rifled cannon. The
other batteries strung along on Sullivan,
Morris and James islands, were located in
spots to command the channel approaches to
Sumter-thus to cut off all reenforcements by
sea. Fort Moultrie was a frowning fortress,

of a nameless number of guns, evidently pre-
pared for throwing shot and shell in an
of the "Invincible Eighty" which lay off in
appalling shower upon the sea-girt fastness
the harbor, as gullen, silent and dark as a
sleeping volcano.

This was the consideration which the Con

federate Government vouchsafed to the
maintain relations of peace."
Union, with which "its only desire was to

Audi alteram partem. We feel the force of the injunction when we are called to sit in judgment on the Administration of Mr. Buchanan. With the effects of his misrule we are so painfully impressed, that the impulse to pronounce a sweeping condemnation is in deed strong. The tragedy of war-the humiliation of our National prestige-the awful

The idea of this battery was by no means an
original one. At the seige of Gibralter, 1762, ten
floating forts were constructed, at a cost of upwards
of $500,000. They were so compactly built as to be

deemed invulnerable, and, mounting from ten to
eighteen guns each, truly were formidable engines

of destruction. They worked well and did great

execution, until the fortress threw hot shot, when
they were soon all in flames, and those on board

During the last days of February, Col. perished almost to a man.

1

MR. BUCHANAN AND HIS ERRORS.

507

peril to Republican Government which he bequeathed as a legacy to his successor-all rise up, not like spirits, but like palpable presences, to cry out "anathema!" There are, too, minor sins for which partisans of the Democratic faith will not fail to hold him responsible. He assumed the Chief Magistracy as the representative of a powerful party whose rule has rarely been broken since Jefferson laid its bases in the National heart. He vacated the Chief Magistracy to leave that party broken, bruised, abased. He found the country prosperous-he left it weak. He found a Treasury overflowing he left it bankrupt. He trailed his robes of office in the dust of politicians' haunts, and made his high dignity a bye-word in caucuses and committee-rooms. In a word, he dishonored his country-dishonored his office-dishonored his trusts, and his memory promises not to be precious with mankind, nor honorable in history.

could demand, at his elbow were men as bra zen, as dangerous, as traitorous as their pa rent, the Prince of Darkness: all of whom watched, warned, plotted, promised, cajoled, threatened, until the President was wholly ob scured in the partisan. If he committed inexcusable errors the first was in his pledges of service; his next was the choice of his advisers; his third was in following their advice. Out of these sprang the terrible train of evils which now darken his name and load his memory with a weight of calamities which all the special pleading of special chroniclers will scarcely be able to transfer to other shoulders.

Following upon the Kansas imbroglio came his second blow to the Democracy, which still clung to him as its leader. His intrigues against Mr. Douglas and the persecution of his friends—his support of the irregular Southern nominee, irretrievably dissevered the two wings of the party and sent the antiLecompton or Northern wing over to the Republicans as their only means of defence against his attempted demoralization.* He triumphed by seeing his rival fall, but it was the triumph of madness; for, hardly had the deed of defeat been recorded ere he found himself betrayed by his Southern friends, and he opened his eyes to behold beneath his feet a mine which the creatures of his smiles had placed there not only for his own destruction but for the destruction of his country.

But, for all these miseries entailed, there still are some who offer a defence, if not in justification at least in palliation, of his acts. He was chosen Chief Magistrate to serve a party rather than to serve the country. He was both openly and secretly bound to men and to a policy, which, to have forsaken, would have required the moral and physical courage of a Jackson. He dared not "assume the responsibility:" and, in this dependance, is written much of the misery which followed upon his rule. He pledged Kansas to the South as the price of Southern support. To redeem that pledge he stultified himself, he outraged the first principles of true democracy, he caused human blood to be shed and a fair land to struggle into the Union through desolution and curses. To make Kansas a Slave State, and thus “preserve the balance of power," he pursued a course ealculated to inscribe the word "odious" over his name. His reward was to see the Re-right to pass any law to establish, impair, or abolish Slavery publican party grow into the public heart, flourishing and daily strengthened on his very errors and follies. What should he do? desert his Southern friends and bend before the unqestionable will of the people of the North?

He dared not desert! He could not if he would; for, in his Cabinet were men subtle and unscrupulous as an impious cause

* In a very undignified speech, made to a crowd of Breckenridge and Lane "ratifiers," the President unqualifiedly scoffed the idea of "Squatter Sover

eignty"-the very principle upon which he had sesured his promotion to office. He only recorded his own weakness in that desertion of principle at the behest of Southern men. He said:

"We have been told that non-intervention on the part of

Cong ess with Slavery in the Territories is the true policy.
Very well. I most cheerfully admit that Congress ha no

in the Territories. Let this principle of non-inte vention be
extended to the Territorial Legislatures, and let it b- declared

that they in 1 ke manner have no power to establish, impair, or destroy Slavery, and then the controversy is in effect ended. This is all that is required at present, and I verily beheve all that will ever be required. Hands off by Congress,

and hands off by the Territorial Legislature !''

Had he made this speech in 1856, James Buchanan never would have been President of the United States.

It is an impossible task to write the story | like beholding a ray shooting across dark of the Administration from the moment waters to read the names of Dix, Holt, Stanof that discovery down to the 4th of March. | ton; while the vision of Winfield Scott rises It is so full of good deeds and bad, of strength and weakness, of wisdom and folly, as to read like the alternate reign of a good and an evil genius. To disentangle the warp and woof required not only a master-hand, but more light than yet exists upon the Executive's conduct, and we must patiently bide the judgment which Time will surely send. Our record thus far, of outward facts, will stand the tests of evidence as far as they go; but, we must, after all, consider that it is necessary to read motives as well as acts in order to arrive at the full truth of events in an historical light. In most of the incidents of the revolution, the motive became apparent with the act. There are some things, however, concerning Mr. Buchanan's apparently contradictory course, which make it impossible to write the true history of his “decline and fall" at this early stage of the drama which his errors, not his genius, created. We shall await, with interest, his promised "Defence of his Administration;" and if, in aught, we have done him injustice, it will be with a pleasure unfeigned that our censures shall be qualified. It is our country which is injured by the abasement of its Chief Magistrate, and every patriotic heart will be glad to wipe away any stain upon the name of a President of the United States.

It is a relief to turn from the Cabinet' of December to the Cabinet of February. It is

like a luminary out of the troubled sea, to draw to it all faith and confidence. We feel like crying "Oh, why so late?" and the country might well mourn that they were not summoned to the President's side at the first alarm of danger. That Mr. Buchanan called them at all is proof that the President loved the Union well :-that he did not always follow their counsels, but trimmed and veered to the gale like a timid man, was proof rather of his desire to avoid danger than of his disloyalty. Had he had one year to serve, instead of forty days, his diplomatic scruples in regard to coercion probably would have been cast aside as unworthy of the crisis which the law-makers never had conceived possible; and he might have pursued the course so wisely prescribed and so sagaciously followed by his successor. But, the brevity of his term gave no opportunity for the laying down and elaboration of a defensive policy; and all the honor which attaches to his latter days comes from little acts of patriotism-evidences of what he might have done, in a more eminent degree, had there been a year before him in which to act. We say, might have done. The spirit of his entire administration forbids us to say would have done. What he would have done toward "his Southern friends" is one of the secrets which his expected history may, and, we hope, will record.

APPENDIX.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE BUCHANAN ADMINISTRATION.

We are informed that the venerable ex-President | I agreed with hlm in denying the right of coercion. is busily engaged upon his "History of his Admin-I agreed with him, that it was his duty to enforce the istration." As one object of our labors is to throw the law, and to hold and preserve the public properall possible light upon the secession movement, we ty. And believing as I did, that in enforcing law in have an interest in the latter portion of his reign this free Government, where our fathers took the which warrants us in submitting for his considera- greatest pains to subordinate the military to the tion, and that of the public who take an interest in civil authorities, the army and navy could only be secret histories, the documents relating to Judge called on as posse comitatus to aid the civil officers Thompson's resignation as Secretary of the Interior. in executing the processes and orders issuing from The Judge, on his arrival at Oxford, Miss., after the civil magistrates. And that in preserving prophis withdrawal, was given a reception by his fellow erty his duty and his power only extended to a citizens and there made a speech wherein he de- resistance to all marauders, to the driving back and tailed his version of the Cabinet history during De- defeating all the approaches of mobs and unlawful cember and January. We subjoin the material and unauthorized combinations of individuals. portion: With an ardent desire to preserve peace, to avoid all conflict, and to give a full and free opportunity in all sections for the public opinon to develop itself, so that if possible our institutions might be preserv ed I retained my place.

"No serious difficulty or division occurred in Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet, until after the late Presidential election. As soon as it was known that the sectional candidate was elected President, by a sectional vote, on a platform of principles in direct conflict with the Constitution, which, by denying a right of protection to a vast property in the Southern States, overthrew the equality of the States, and passed all the States of the South to a state of outlaw, it was perceived that a new class of questions would arise. The extent of the reserved powers of the States was the first great question, and the power of the general government to use military force upon the people of a sovereign State undertaking to resume the powers delegated in the Constitution of the United States-to enforce obedience to the mandates of the Government of the Union was the next great question. On the first, that is on the power of a State to secede, there was soon developed an irreconcilable difference of opinion. On the power to coerce a State to remain in, or to return to the Union, there were found to be unanimity and harmony. Hence it was, fellow-citizens, that I continued a member of the Cabinet after the delivery of the President's message. I differed with him in his argument on the right of secession.

"Looking at the subject practically, I believed with a due exercise of caution and moderation, conflict could be avoided. Without a civil magistrate there could be no process; without a writ or process there could be no arraignment and no justification for the calling in the military force, and hence enforcing the laws was an impossibility, inasmuch as the machinery for its accomplishments was wanting! Forts had been erected within the limits of the States with their consent, for the purpose of enabling the United States to fulfil its duties to protect the States, by repelling invasion and suppressing insurrection. To hold a fort as a menace upon a State, with a view of controlling her political action or of endangering her power, was such a perversion of the grant of jurisdiction by the States, that, in the judgment of all true men, it would be viewed as a crying outrage, an act of war. The forts, then, in the Seceding States can be rightfully regarded only as property. To hold them as military posts, to thus threaten the peace of the State is at war with the theory of our Government.