ations and intercourse with the leaders of
the Breckinridge wing of the Democratic party during the progress of
the Presidential canvass, and that party being made up so exclusively
of the extreme Southern Democrats, the President must have had constant
information of the progress and development of the disunion sentiment
and purpose in the South. He was not restricted as the other parties
and the general public were to imperfect reports and doubtful rumors
current in the newspapers.

But in addition there now came to him an official warning which it was
a grave error to disregard. On October 29, one week before the election,
the veteran Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott, General-in-Chief of
the Army, communicated to him in writing his serious apprehensions
of coming danger, and suggested such precautions as were then in the
power of the Administration. Beginning life as a farmer's boy,
collegian, and law student, General Scott from choice became a
soldier, devoting himself to the higher aims of the profession of
arms, and in a brilliant career of half a century had achieved
world-wide renown as a great military captain. In the United States,
however, the military is subordinated to the civic ambition, and Scott
all his life retained a strong leaning to diplomacy and statesmanship,
and on several important occasions gave his country valuable service
in essentially civic functions. He had been the unsuccessful
Presidential candidate of the Whig party in 1852, a circumstance which
no doubt greatly increased his personal attention to current politics,
then and afterwards. As the first military officer of the nation, he
was also the watchful guardian of the public peace.

[Sidenote] Lieut.-General Winfield Scott, "Autobiography," Vol. I.,
p. 234.

The impending rebellion was not to him, as it was to the nation at
large, a new event in politics. Many men were indeed aware, through
tradition and history, that it was but the Calhoun nullification
treason revived and pushed to a bolder extreme. To General Scott it
was almost literally the repetition of an old experience. A generation
before, he was himself a prominent actor in opposing the nullification
plot. About the 4th of November, 1832, upon special summons, he was
taken into a confidential interview by President Jackson, who, after
asking Scott's military views upon the threatened rebellion of the
nullifiers in Charleston harbor, by oral orders charged him with the