CHAPTER XX.

1860—December.

THE RESIGNATION OF SECRETARY FLOYD, AND ITS CAUSE—REFUTATION OF THE STORY OF HIS STEALING THE ARMS OF THE UNITED STATES—GENERAL SCOTT'S ASSERTIONS DISPROVED.

Among the assertions made by the South Carolina commissioners in their letter to the President of December 28th, there was one to which it is now specially necessary to advert. “Since our arrival,” they said, “an officer of the United States, acting, as we are assured, not only without, but against your orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering to a most important extent the condition of affairs under which we came.” The person who assured them that Anderson had acted without and against the President’s orders, was Mr. Floyd, the Secretary of War, who had instructed Buell what orders to give to Anderson, and who knew well what the orders were. This brings me, therefore, to the point at which Mr. Floyd’s conversion took place, from an avowed and consistent opponent of secession to one of its most strenuous supporters:—a conversion which was so sudden, that between the 23d of December and the arrival of the South Carolina commissioners, on the 26th, the Secretary boldly assumed a position entirely at variance with all his previous conduct, and thereafter became an intimate associate with disunion Senators, who had always, to this point, condemned his official conduct. The cause of this remarkable change was the discovery, by the President, of an act implicating Mr. Floyd in a very irregular proceeding, which had no connection whatever with the relations between the Federal Government and the State of South Carolina, or with the subject of secession.

On the 22d of December, the President learned that 870 State bonds for $1,000 each, held in trust by the Government for different Indian tribes, had been abstracted from the Interior Department by one Godard Bailey, the clerk who had charge of them, and had been delivered to William H. Russell, a member of the firm of “Russell, Majors & Waddell.” Upon examination, it was found that the clerk had substituted for the abstracted bonds bills delivered to him by Russell, drawn by his firm on Floyd as Secretary of War, and by Floyd accepted and indorsed, for the precise amount of the bonds, $870,000. The acceptances were thirteen in number, commencing on the 13th of September, 1860, the last one of the series, dated December 13th, 1860, being for the precise sum necessary to make the aggregate amount of the whole number of bills exactly equal to the amount of the abstracted bonds. Bailey stated that he held the acceptances “as collateral security for the return of the bonds.”

What happened on this discovery should be told in Mr. Buchanan’s own words, as I find them in his handwriting, in a paper drawn up apparently for the information of some one who was entitled to know the facts.

I do not recollect the precise time when I had the only conversation which I ever held with Governor Floyd on the subject of your inquiry. It was most probably soon after Mr. Benjamin had the interview with myself, the particulars of which I cannot now recall; but it is proper to state that I learned from another source that acceptances of Mr. Floyd had been offered for discount in Wall Street.

When I next saw Secretary Floyd I asked him if it were true that he had been issuing acceptances to Russell & Company on bills payable at a future day. He said he had done so in a few cases. That he had done this in no instance until after he had ascertained that the amount of the bills would be due to them under their contract, before the bills reached maturity; that the trains had started on their way to Utah, and there could be no possible loss to the Government. That the Government at that time was largely indebted to Russell & Company, and the bills which he had accepted would be paid, when they became due, out of the appropriation for that purpose. I asked him, under what authority he had accepted these drafts. He said, this had been done under the practice of the Department. I said, I had never heard of such a practice, and if such a practice existed, I considered it altogether improper, and should be discontinued. I asked him if there was any law which authorized such acceptances. He said there was no law, he believed, for it, and no law against it. I replied, if there was no law for it, this was conclusive that he had no such authority. He said, I need give myself no trouble about the matter. That the acceptances already issued should be promptly paid out of the money due to Russell & Company, and he would never accept another such draft. I might rest perfectly easy on the subject. I had not the least doubt that he would fulfill his promise in good faith. He never said another word to me upon the subject. I was, therefore, never more astonished than at the exposure which was made that he had accepted drafts to the amount of $870,000, and that these were substituted in the safe at the Interior Department, as a substitute for the Indian bonds which had been purloined.

I took immediate measures to intimate to him, through a distinguished mutual friend, that he could no longer remain in the cabinet, and that he ought to resign. I expected his resignation hourly; but a few days after, he came into the cabinet with a bold front, and said he could remain in it no longer unless I would instantly recall Major Anderson and his forces from Fort Sumter.

There were, as Mr. Buchanan states, besides the acceptances lodged in the Interior Department, other acceptances of Floyd’s, as Secretary of War, afloat in Wall Street. Of course, Mr. Floyd was aware of this; and having been told by the President that he must resign, he boldly determined to resign on a feigned issue, making for himself a bridge on which he could pass over to the secession side of the great national controversy.

The arrival of the South Carolina commissioners in Washington on the 26th December, afforded to the Secretary an opportunity to concoct his impudent pretext. It is impossible to suppose that he believed either that Anderson had acted without orders or against orders, or in violation of any pledge given by the President. The orders were, in one sense, his own; and as to any pledge, he could not have been ignorant of what really took place between the President and the South Carolina members of Congress on the 10th of December. When he instructed Major Buell in the orders that were to be given to Anderson, the Secretary was, in giving those orders, loyal to the Government whose officer he was, and his conduct in regard to the acceptances was unknown to the President. When the South Carolina commissioners arrived in Washington, he was a man whose resignation of office had been required of him by the President. He learned that the commissioners were about to complain that Anderson had violated a pledge. Taking time by the forelock, he entered a session of the cabinet on the evening of the 27th, the next day after the arrival of the commissioners, and, in a discourteous and excited manner, read to the President and his colleagues a paper which, on the 29th, he embodied in a letter of resignation, that read as follows:

[SECRETARY FLOYD TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WAR DEPARTMENT, December 29th, 1860.

SIR:—

On the evening of the 27th instant, I read the following paper to you, in the presence of the cabinet:

“COUNCIL CHAMBER, EXECUTIVE MANSION, } “DECEMBER 27TH, 1860. }

SIR:—

“It is evident now, from the action of the commander at Fort Moultrie, that the solemn pledges of this Government have been violated by Major Anderson. In my judgment, but one remedy is now left us by which to vindicate our honor and prevent civil war. It is in vain now to hope for confidence on the part of the people of South Carolina in any further pledges as to the action of the military. One remedy only is left, and that is to withdraw the garrison from the harbor of Charleston altogether. I hope the President will allow me to make that order at once. This order, in my judgment, can alone prevent bloodshed and civil war.

“JOHN B. FLOYD, “Secretary of War.

“TO THE PRESIDENT.”

I then considered the honor of the administration pledged to maintain the troops in the position they occupied; for such had been the assurances given to the gentlemen of South Carolina who had a right to speak for her. South Carolina, on the other hand, gave reciprocal pledges that no force should be brought by them against the troops or against the property of the United States. The sole object of both parties to these reciprocal pledges was to prevent collision and the effusion of blood, in the hope that some means might be found for a peaceful accommodation of the existing troubles, the two Houses of Congress having both raised committees looking to that object.

Thus affairs stood, until the action of Major Anderson, taken unfortunately while commissioners were on their way to this capital on a peaceful mission, looking to the avoidance of bloodshed, has complicated matters in the existing manner. Our refusal, or even delay, to place affairs back as they stood under our agreement, invites collision, and must inevitably inaugurate civil war in our land. I can not consent to be the agent of such a calamity.

I deeply regret to feel myself under the necessity of tendering to you my resignation as Secretary of War, because I can no longer hold it, under my convictions of patriotism, nor with honor, subjected as I am to the violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.

With the highest personal regard, I am most truly yours,

JOHN B. FLOYD.

In a subsequent note to the President, Mr. Floyd offered to perform the duties of the War Department until his successor had been appointed. Without taking any notice of this offer, and with the contemptuous silence that could alone have followed such conduct, the President instantly accepted his resignation, and Postmaster General Holt was transferred to the War Department _ad interim_. Thus passed out of the service of the United States John B. Floyd, once, like his father, Governor of Virginia. He was a man fitted by nature, by education, and by position, for better things than such an ending of an official career. He was no secessionist from conviction, and until the discovery of his irregular acts in issuing acceptances of his Department, he never pretended to be. He seems to have been stung by a consciousness that his letter of resignation was in a bad tone. On the 30th of December he addressed to the President a letter of apology, which, so far as I know, remained unanswered.

[MR. FLOYD TO THE PRESIDENT.]

WASHINGTON, December 30th, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR:—

I understand from General Jefferson Davis that you regard my letter of resignation as offensive to you. I beg to assure you that I am deeply grieved by this intelligence. Nothing could have been further from my wish, and nothing more repugnant to my feelings. If there is any sentence or expression which you regard in that light, I will take sincere pleasure in changing it. The facts and the ideas alone were in my mind when I penned the letter, and I repeat that nothing could have been further from my intention than to wound your feelings. My friendship for you has been and is sincere and unselfish. I have never been called upon by an imperious sense of duty to perform any act which has given me so much pain, as to separate myself from your administration, and this feeling would be greatly aggravated by the belief that in this separation I had said anything which could give you pain or cause of offence.

I beg to assure you that I am very truly and sincerely your friend,

JOHN B. FLOYD.

But justice must be done to Mr. Floyd, badly as he conducted himself after the discovery of his irregular and unauthorized acceptances of drafts on his Department. The impression has long prevailed among the people of the North that the Confederate States did their fighting with cannon, rifles and muskets treacherously placed within their reach by Mr. Buchanan’s Secretary of War. The common belief has been that Mr. Floyd had for a long time pursued a plan of his own for distributing the arms of the United States in the South, in anticipation of a disruption of the Union at no distant day. General Scott, in 1862, took up this charge in his public controversy with Mr. Buchanan, and endeavored to establish it. He signally failed. The General, in 1862, thought that he had discovered that the revolt of the Southern States had been planned a long time before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and that it was to be carried out in the event of “the election of any Northern man to the Presidency.” It had become a sort of fashion, in 1862, in certain quarters, to believe, or to profess to believe, in the existence of this long standing plot. There never was a rational ground for such a belief. It is not true, as a matter of fact, that at any time before the nomination of Mr. Lincoln, there was any transfer of arms to places in the Southern States, to which any suspicion of an improper design ought to attach. It is not true that at any time after Mr. Lincoln’s nomination and before his election, there was any transfer of arms whatever from the Northern arsenals of the United States into the Southern States. The political history of the country, prior to the nomination of Mr. Lincoln and prior to the Democratic Convention at Charleston, does not warrant the belief that any considerable section of the Southern people, or any of their prominent leaders, were looking forward to a Presidential election likely to be so conducted and so to terminate, as to produce among them the conviction that it would be unsafe for them to remain in the Union. Even after Mr. Lincoln’s nomination, and after the division of the Democratic party into two factions, resulting in the nomination of two Democratic candidates (Breckinridge and Douglas), with a fourth candidate in the field, Mr. Bell, nominated by the “old line Whigs,” it was not so morally certain that the Republican candidate would be elected, as to give rise, before the election, to serious plots or preparations for breaking up the Union. Mr. Lincoln obtained but a majority of 57 electoral votes over all his competitors. It was the sectional character of his 180 electoral votes out of 303—the whole 180 being drawn from the non-slaveholding States—and the sectional character of the “platform” on which he was elected, and not the naked fact that he was a Northern man, that the secessionists of the cotton States were able to use as the lever by which to carry their States out of the Union. It is necessary to follow the precipitation of the revolt through the various steps by which it was accomplished, after the election of Mr. Lincoln, before one can reach a sound conclusion as to the causes and methods by which it was brought about. Whoever studies the votes in the secession conventions of the cotton States prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, will find that even in that region there was a strong Union party in all those States excepting South Carolina, which could not have been overborne and trampled down, by any other means than by the appeals to popular fears which the secessionists drew from the peculiar circumstances of the election. He will find reason to ask himself why it was that in these successive conventions, rapidly accomplished between December, 1860, and February, 1861, the Unionists were unable to prevail; and he will find the most important answer to this inquiry in the fact that it was because the advocates of secession were able, from the circumstances of the election, to produce the conviction that the whole North was alienated in feeling from the South, and determined to trample on Southern rights. It was this that worked upon a sensitive and excited people. It was not the accomplishment of a long meditated plot to destroy the Union.

But if there ever was such a plot, there is not the slightest ground for believing that Secretary Floyd, or any other member of Mr. Buchanan’s cabinet, was a party to it. It was, however, in 1862, one of the means resorted to in order to make the Buchanan administration odious, that this charge was made against the Secretary of War; and when it was adopted by General Scott, it was supposed that his authority had given weight to it. He saw fit to put it in his public controversy with Mr. Buchanan in the following form: That Secretary Floyd “removed 115,000 extra muskets and rifles, with all their implements and ammunition, from Northern repositories to Southern arsenals, so that on the breaking out of the maturing rebellion, they might be found without cost, except to the United States, in the most convenient positions for distribution among the insurgents. So, too, of the one hundred and forty pieces of heavy artillery, which the same Secretary ordered from Pittsburgh to Ship Island in Lake Borgne and Galveston in Texas, for forts not erected. Accidentally learning, early in March, that, under this posthumous order the shipment of those guns had commenced, I communicated the fact to Secretary Holt (acting for Secretary Cameron) just in time to defeat the robbery.”[99]

Footnote 99:

General Scott’s letter of November 8, 1862, published in the _National Intelligencer_.

The anachronisms of this assertion, when it met the eye of Mr. Buchanan in November, 1862, and its apparent ignorance of the facts, may well have amazed him. The whole subject had undergone a thorough investigation by a committee of the House of Representatives in the winter of 1860-61, in consequence of the rumors which had been sent afloat after the resignation of Secretary Floyd. The new Secretary of War, Mr. Holt, not waiting for the exercise of the power conferred on the committee to send for persons and papers, threw open all the records of the Ordnance Bureau. The resolution ordering the investigation was adopted on the 31st of December, 1860, and the committee were authorized to report in preference to all other business. It appeared that there were two Acts of Congress under which Secretary Floyd had proceeded. One was an Act of March 3d, 1825, authorizing the Secretary of War to sell any arms, ammunition, or other military stores, which, upon proper inspection, should be found unfit for the public service. The other was a long standing act for arming the militia of the States, by distributing to them their respective quotas of arms. Whatever was done under either of these laws was necessarily done by the officers and attachés of the Ordnance Bureau. Nothing could have been done clandestinely, or without being made a matter of record. At the head of the Ordnance Bureau was Colonel Craig, one of the most loyal and faithful of the many loyal and faithful officers of the army. Under him was Captain (afterwards General) Maynadier, as chivalrously true an officer as the United States ever had. Without the knowledge of these officers, the Secretary of War could not have sold or removed a musket. The investigations of the Congressional committee embraced four principal heads: 1st. What arms had been sold? 2d. What arms had been distributed to the States? 3d. What arms had been sent for storage in Southern arsenals of the United States? 4th. What ordnance had been transferred from Northern arsenals of the United States to Southern forts?

1. Under the first of these inquiries the committee ascertained and reported that, in the spring of 1859, 50,000 muskets, part of a lot of 190,000, condemned by the inspecting officers “as unsuitable for the public service,” were offered for sale. They reported the bids and contracts, some of which were and some were not carried out. The result of actual sales and deliveries left many of them in the hands of the Government. In speaking of these muskets generally, Colonel Craig testified before the committee that it was always advisable to get rid of them whenever there was a sufficient number of the new rifled muskets to take their places, the old ones not being strong enough to be rifled. In the spring of 1859, therefore, a year before the nomination of Mr. Lincoln, as Mr. Buchanan has well said, if the cotton States were then meditating a rebellion, they lost an opportunity to buy a lot of poor arms condemned by the inspecting officers of the United States.[100] The only Southern State that made a bid was Louisiana, which purchased 5000 of these condemned muskets, and finally took but 2500. One lot was bid for by an agent of the Sardinian government, who afterwards refused to take them on some dispute about the price which he had offered.

Footnote 100:

Buchanan’s Defence, p. 228.

2. In regard to arms distributed to the States and Territories since January 1st, 1860, the committee ascertained and reported that the whole number of muskets distributed among all the States, North and South, was 8423. These were army muskets of the best quality; but neither of the States of Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, North Carolina, or Texas, received any of them, because they neglected to ask for the quotas to which they were entitled. The other Southern and Southwestern States, which did apply for their quotas, received 2091 of these army muskets, or less than one-fourth. Of long range rifles of the army calibre, all the States received, in 1860, 1728. Six of the Southern and Southwestern States, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, received in the aggregate 758 of these long range rifles, and the two other Southern States received none. The eight Southern States received in the aggregate a less number of muskets and rifles than would be required to properly equip two full regiments.

3. In relation to arms transferred to the Southern arsenals of the United States, the committee ascertained that on the 29th of December, 1859, nearly eleven months before the election of Mr. Lincoln, and several months before his nomination, the Secretary of War ordered Colonel Craig to remove one-fifth of the old flint-lock and percussion muskets from the Springfield armory in Massachusetts, where they had accumulated in inconvenient numbers, to five Southern arsenals of the United States, for storage. The order and all the proceedings under it were duly recorded. No haste was resorted to: the arms were to be removed “from time to time, as may be most suitable for economy and transportation,” and to be placed in the different arsenals “in proportion to their respective means of proper storage.” This order was carried out by the Ordnance Bureau in the usual course of administration, without reference to the President. Of these muskets, entirely inferior to the new rifled musket of the United States army, 105,000 were transferred to the Southern arsenals under this order. There were also transferred under the same order, 10,000 of the old percussion rifles, of an inferior calibre to the new rifled muskets then used by the army. These constituted the 115,000 “extra muskets and rifles” which General Scott asserted, in 1862, had been sent into the South to arm the insurgents, who, he supposed, were just ready to commence the civil war eleven months before Mr. Lincoln’s election. Colonel Maynadier, in a letter which he addressed to a Congressional committee on the 3d of February, 1862, said of this order of December 29th, 1859, that it never occurred to him that it could have any improper motive, for Mr. Floyd was “then regarded throughout the country as a strong advocate of the Union and an opponent of secession, and had recently published a letter in a Richmond paper which gained him high credit in the North for his boldness in rebuking the pernicious views of many in his own State.” It should be added that no ammunition whatever was embraced in the order, and none accompanied the muskets.

4. On the subject of heavy ordnance ordered by Secretary Floyd to be sent from Pittsburgh to two forts of the United States then erecting in the South, the committee found and reported the following facts: On the 20th of December, 1860, nine days before his resignation, Secretary Floyd, without the knowledge of the President, gave to Captain Maynadier a verbal order to send to the forts on Ship Island and at Galveston the heavy guns necessary for their armament. Proceeding to carry out this order, Captain Maynadier, on the 22d of December, sent his written orders to the commanding officer of the Alleghany arsenal at Pittsburgh, directing him to send 113 “Columbiads” and 11 32-pounders to the two Southern forts. When these orders reached Pittsburgh, they caused a great excitement in that city. A committee of the citizens, whose letter to the President lies before me, dated December 25th, brought the matter to his personal attention, and advised that the orders be countermanded. The guns had not been shipped. Four days after this letter was written, Secretary Floyd was out of office. Mr. Holt, the new Secretary, by direction of the President, immediately rescinded the order. The city councils of Pittsburgh, on the 4th of January, 1861, sent a vote of thanks for this prompt proceeding, to the President, in which they included the new Attorney General, Mr. Stanton, and the new Secretary of War, Mr. Holt.

With this transaction General Scott had nothing whatever to do. Yet, in 1862, he at first thought that he discovered, early in March, 1861, something that happened in the December and January previous, and that he interfered just in time “to defeat the robbery!” It will be noticed that the General claimed to have given this information to Secretary Holt while he was acting for Secretary Cameron; that is, in March, after the close of Mr. Buchanan’s administration, and before Mr. Cameron, Mr. Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had taken possession of the Department. So that the inference naturally was that Mr. Buchanan had allowed his administration to expire, leaving this “posthumous order” of Secretary Floyd in force after Mr. Lincoln’s accession, and that but for General Scott’s interposition it would have been carried out; although the whole affair was ended before the 4th day of January, on information received from the citizens of Pittsburgh and promptly acted upon by President Buchanan and Secretary Holt, without any interference whatever by General Scott![101]

Footnote 101:

When this extraordinary blunder was brought to the General’s attention, in his controversy with Mr. Buchanan, in 1862, he said that the only error he had made was in giving March instead of January as the time when the order was countermanded, and that this error was immaterial! He still insisted that he gave the information to Mr. Holt that the shipment had commenced, and that he stopped it. It is certainly most remarkable that he did not see that time was of the essence of his charge against the Buchanan administration, for his charge imputed to that administration a delay from January to March in countermanding the order, and claimed for himself the whole merit of the discovery and the countermand. He would better have consulted his own dignity and character if he had frankly retracted the whole statement. But probably the story of the Pittsburgh ordnance, as he put it, has been believed by thousands, to the prejudice of President Buchanan. (See the letters of General Scott, published in the _National Intelligencer_.)