In February, Andrew came to Washington to attend an unsurprisingly fruitless meeting with Sumner and the lame-duck president Buchanan. Buchanan had been blaming the North’s “intemperate interference” with slavery for South Carolina’s secession. Hoping to craft a political solution with the rebels, he wanted Andrew to crack down on fugitive slaves with mass deportation and Sumner to support it. Sumner angrily retorted that the Bay State would rather “sink below the sea & become a sandbank.” A few days later, several ex-Whig Bostonians—including Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett—visited Sumner
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