All impulses of prudence and patriotism ought to have moved the President to reconstruct his Cabinet.  But instead of some energetic executive act of this character, he seems to have applied himself to the composition of a political essay to teach the North its duty; as if his single pen had power to change the will of the people of the United States upon a point which they had decided by their votes only four days previously after six years of discussion.  In the draft of this document, which he read to his Cabinet on November 10, we have the important record that “it inculcated submission to Lincoln’s election, and intimated the use of force to coerce a submission to his rule”—­positions which Floyd records were “met with extravagant commendations from General Cass, Governor Toucey, Judge Black, and Mr. Holt.”  This was a true touchstone; it instantly brought out not only the open secessionism of Cobb and Thompson, but the disguised disloyalty of Floyd.

It is a strange historical phenomenon that, with the President and a majority of the Cabinet in this frame of mind, the South should have been permitted to organize rebellion.  The solution seems to lie in the temporizing feebleness of Buchanan and in the superior finesse and daring conspiracy of Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd.

Many indications make it evident that a long factional struggle took place over the preparation of the President’s message.  The telegraph announced several protracted Cabinet sessions; and as early as the 21st of November the points under discussion and the attitude of the President and his several official advisers were accurately foreshadowed in the newspapers.  Nor were these momentous deliberations confined to the Cabinet proper.  All the varieties of suggestion and contradictory counsels which were solicited or tendered we may never learn, and yet we know enough to infer the highest extremes and antagonisms of doctrine and policy.  Jefferson Davis, the future chief of the rebellion, came on the one hand at the urgent call of his fellow-conspirators; Edwin M. Stanton, afterwards Buchanan’s Attorney-General and Lincoln’s Secretary of War,[4] was on the other hand called in by Mr. Buchanan himself, to help him through, the intricate maze of his perplexed opinions and inclinations.  How many others may have come voluntarily or by summons it is impossible to guess.  Many brains and hands, however, must have joined in the work, since the document is such a heterogeneous medley of conflicting theories, irreconcilable doctrines, impracticable and irrelevant suggestions.  For at length the hesitating and bewildered President, unable to decide and impotent to construct, seems to have made his message a patchwork from the contributions of his advisers, regular and irregular, with the inevitable effect, not to combine and strengthen, but to weaken and confuse the warring thoughts and alien systems.