in the War Department to send arms into the Southern States, and to make all possible arrangements for putting them in an advantageous position for hostilities.  Fortunately about this time the famous defalcation in the Indian Department, in which he was guiltily involved, destroyed his credit with the President, and at the same time he quarreled with his associates concerning Anderson’s removal to Fort Sumter.  On December 29 he resigned, and the duties of his place were laid for a while upon Judge Holt, the postmaster-general.

On Sunday morning, December 30, there was what has been properly called a cabinet crisis.  The South Carolina commissioners, just arrived in Washington, were demanding recognition, and to treat with the government as if they were representatives of a foreign power.  The President declined to receive them in a diplomatic character, but offered to act as go-between betwixt them and Congress.  The President’s advisers, however, were in a far less amiable frame of mind, for their blood had been stirred wholesomely by the secession of South Carolina and the presence of these emissaries with their insolent demands.  Mr. Black, now at the head of the State Department, had gone through much the same phases of feeling as General Cass.  In November he had been “emphatic in his advocacy of coercion,” but afterward had approved the President’s message and even declared forcible coercion to be “ipso facto an expulsion” of the State from the Union; since then he had drifted back and made fast at his earlier moorings.  On this important Sunday morning Mr. Buchanan learned with dismay that either his reply to the South Carolinians must be substantially modified, or Mr. Black and Mr. Stanton would retire from the cabinet.  Under this pressure he yielded.  Mr. Black drafted a new reply to the commissioners, Mr. Stanton copied it, Holt concurred in it, and, in substance, Mr. Buchanan accepted it.  This affair constituted, as Messrs. Nicolay and Hay well say, “the President’s virtual abdication,” and thereafterward began the “cabinet regime.”  Upon the commissioners this chill gust from the North struck so disagreeably that, on January 2, they hastened home to their “independent nation.”  From this time forth the South covered Mr. Buchanan with contumely and abuse; Mr. Benjamin called him “a senile executive, under the sinister influence of insane counsels;” and the poor old man, really wishing to do right, but stripped of friends and of his familiar advisers, and confounded by the views of new counselors, presented a spectacle for pity.

On January 8 Mr. Thompson, secretary of the interior, resigned, and the vacancy was left unfilled.  A more important change took place on the following day, when Mr. Thomas left the Treasury Department, and the New York bankers, whose aid was essential, forced the President, sorely against his will, to give the place to General John A. Dix.  This proved an excellent appointment.  General Dix was an old