Note 88 — Chapter XVIII · 1860—December.

Mr. Jefferson Davis, although not directly asserting that the President gave any pledge not to send reinforcements or not to permit the military status to be changed, says that “the South Carolinians understood Mr. Buchanan as approving of that suggestion, although declining to make any formal pledge;” and he adds, that after Anderson’s removal from Moultrie to Sumter, the authorities and people of South Carolina considered it “as a violation of the implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo,” and he gives this as a reason why the remaining forts and other public property were at once seized by the State. (Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, I., 212-213.) If the South Carolina members of Congress told Mr. Davis that the President assented to or approved of their proviso, they told him what was not true. He does not say that they ever did tell him so. If they gave their own people and State authorities to understand that there was any implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo, the fact was exactly the other way. They have never said that they gave their people and authorities so to understand Mr. Buchanan’s language.