in such comments as this, "Buchanan, it is said, divides
his time between praying and crying. Such a perfect imbecile never held
office before."

With the question what to do about the forts hanging over his bewildered
soul, Buchanan sent a message to Congress on December 4, 1860, in which
he sought to defend the traditional evasive policy of his party. He
denied the constitutional right of secession, but he was also denied his
own right to oppose such a course. Seward was not unfair to the mental
caliber of the message when he wrote to his wife that Buchanan showed
"conclusively that it is the duty of the President to execute the
laws--unless somebody opposes him; and that no State has a right to go
out of the Union unless it wants to."

This message of Buchanan's hastened the inevitable separation of the
Democratic party into its elements. The ablest Southern member of the
Cabinet, Cobb, resigned. He was too strong an intellect to continue
the policy of "nothing doing" now that the crisis had come. He was too
devoted a Southerner to come out of political evasion except on one
side. On the day Cobb resigned the South Carolina Representatives called
on Buchanan and asked him not to make any change in the disposition
of troops at Charleston, and particularly not to strengthen Sumter,
a fortress on an island in the midst of the harbor, without at least
giving notice to the state authorities. What was said in this interview
was not put in writing but was remembered afterward in different ways
with unfortunate consequences.

Every action of Buchanan in this fateful month continued the
disintegration of his following. Just as Cobb had to choose between his
reasonings as a Democratic party man and his feelings as a Southerner,
so the aged Cass, his Secretary of State, and an old personal friend,
now felt constrained to choose between his Democratic reasoning and
his Northern sympathies, and resigned from the Cabinet on the 11th of
December. Buchanan then turned instinctively to the strongest natures
that remained among his close associates. It is a compliment to the
innate force of Jeremiah S. Black, the Attorney-General, that Buchanan
advanced him to the post of Secretary of State and allowed him to name
as his successor in the Attorney-Generalship Edwin M. Stanton. Both were
tried Democrats of the old style, "let-'em-alone" sort; and both had
supported the President in his Kansas policy. But each, like every
other member