James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War

8. Joseph Holt, James Buchanan, and the Secession Crisis

8 Joseph Holt, James Buchanan, and the Secession Crisis daniel W. crofts Nothing is likely to rehabilitate President James Buchanan’s reputation. At best, we recall an inept chief who dithered ineffectually while blindly allowing disloyal underlings to betray his trust and imperil the very integrity of the nation. A more scathing version sees the president himself as a knowing ally of those who conspired to gain Confederate independence. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observed,Buchanan“deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and,with the agreement of those around him, did nothing to prevent the secession of the Confederate states.”1 Goodwin’s dismissal has a long history. Republican newspapers and spokesmen said the same thing a century and a half ago. Like all too much of what we think we know about the political crisis that led to war, the conventional wisdom regarding Buchanan is shaped by the providential nationalism that pervaded the postwar North, which is to say, the postwar Republican North. If Abraham Lincoln was the martyr who saved the Union and abolished slavery, then his predecessor must have been the polar opposite—either a dupe or a traitor. The conventional wisdom includes an unmistakable set of villains. Three Southern members of his cabinet did much to stigmatize Buchanan ’s presidency as a tainted failure.Secretary of theTreasury Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, and Secretary of War John B. Floyd of Virginia all became secessionists. They made common cause with Southern leaders in the U.S. Senate, most notably Jefferson Davis, who soon departed to lead the Confederate States of America.Although Cobb,Thompson,and Floyd all resigned from the cab- Joseph Holt, James Buchanan, and the Secession Crisis · 209 inet in December and early January,they stayed long enough to weaken the Union cause and give Confederate architects a chance to start building.2 A conventional wisdom that is replete with bad guys must also have virtuous counterparts wearing white hats.Three Northern Union Democrats get credit for demanding that Buchanan resist the secessionists. Pennsylvania ’s Jeremiah Black, the attorney general, was appointed secretary of state as the crisis intensified in December. He persuaded Buchanan to name Ohio’s Edwin M. Stanton to the vacated attorney general slot. Black and Stanton soon were reinforced by a new secretary of the treasury, New York’s John A. Dix. The good guys could not reverse the fatal drift toward disunion. But they did at least end the pattern of surrendering federal installations in the Deep South. In particular, they stiffened the heretofore spineless Buchanan to hold Fort Sumter, the ticking time bomb in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.3 This essay will attempt a reconsideration. While any conventional wisdom contains elements of truth,it also tends to obscure what actually happened . The focus here will be on the one member of Buchanan’s cabinet whose role did not fit the North-South dichotomy. Postmaster General Joseph Holt of Kentucky, who replaced Floyd as secretary of war at a pivotal juncture, followed a course that differed dramatically from that of his three Southern colleagues.Holt started as an anxious moderate and ended as an outspoken, unconditional Unionist. This has earned him a white hat from the custodians of conventional wisdom. But if Holt gets a white hat—and he certainly deserves it; after all, being a pro-Union Southerner was much tougher than being a pro-Union Northerner—then an intriguing anomaly develops. Holt’s course closely paralleled that of his oft-criticized chief. The two worked shoulder to shoulder during the last two-plus months of Buchanan’s presidency. They stood ready to defend Sumter against secessionist assault. In March, however , they both hoped that Sumter might be evacuated to preserve the peace and keep the Upper South on the Union side. But once the war began, Holt and Buchanan each saw that Lincoln had no choice but to fight and they both fully supported the Union war effort. The affinity between Holt and Buchanan will be the central idea that holds this essay together—and that affinity is hard to square with conventional put-downs of Buchanan. 210 · Daniel W. Crofts Figure 8.1. Joseph Holt, James Buchanan’s Abraham Lincoln’s judge advocate general. Painting (c. 1889) by Louis P. Spinner, completed about five years before Holt’s death, and based on...