Memories of the Ford Administration (40 page)

For a long time, things had not been right with Secretary of War John Floyd, whose middle name was Buchanan. A former Governor of Virginia, son of another governor, he had, like many men who have been born into a patrician eminence, that faint sleepwalking air of those who have not fully earned their lives. Dandified in dress, he wore his hair long, so it protruded from his balding skull in two crimped wings; his eyelids had a mournful droop and his mouth a maiden-auntish pucker; his furrowed and dry-skinned face testified to recurrent illnesses and intervals of exhaustion. A mere fifty at the time that Buchanan—on the advice of Slidell and his other friends Senator Bright and Governor Wise, all three of whom had declined Cabinet posts in deference to their own ambitions—had appointed him, Floyd had remained youthful in the President’s old eyes, and forgivably susceptible to the influence of harder, hungrier men than himself.

The Covode Committee, in its perjurious and malice-motivated workings, had uncovered disturbing bargains which Floyd had indifferently struck with some of the New York Hards [eds.: need explain Hards = Hardshell Democrats or Hard Shell Hunkers (pro-Buchanan) vs. Softs/Soft Shell/pro-Pierce faction, allied with old Barnburners?], John Mather and Augustus Schell, the collector of the Port of New York, and
Schell’s brother Richard: the purchase by the War Department for $200,000 of a site for fortifications, at Willet’s Point on Long Island, which had recently been rejected by army engineers at a price of $130,000, and, with some Virginia partners, the purchase for a mere $90,000 of the eight-thousand-acre Fort Snelling reservation in Minnesota, a site that had been declared essential. Buchanan himself had intervened to prevent the purchase of a California site at far too dear a price.

Floyd stood to profit financially by none of this, but he had the air of a man whose honor was slumping away from him, leaking away little by little, through one careless concurrence after another. The Meigs affair this summer had brought disgrace upon the administration. Captain Montgomery Meigs, a conscientious and efficient but abrasive official entrusted by Pierce’s Secretary of War Jefferson Davis with a number of construction projects in Washington, including the completion of the Capitol dome and wings, had for long been feuding with Floyd, whom he accused of using contracts as a means of awarding political and personal favors; for example, Floyd awarded the valuable contract for heating the Capitol to a Virginia doctor who knew nothing of heating and was intending to sublet his concession. Meigs, of a prominent Philadelphia family, more than once complained to Buchanan, who attempted to keep peace in this as in everything else; the Senate, however, on the instigation of the rigidly principled Jefferson Davis, passed amendments to the appropriate civil-appropriation bill requiring, in one case, that the half a million to complete an aqueduct could only be spent if Meigs supervised; this frustrated Floyd’s attempt, in January of 1860, to have Meigs transferred to a construction project in the Dry Tortugas.

So that when Floyd, looking languidly wan and bilious, appeared in the President’s office, in response to an urgent evening note to discuss the condition of the federal forts in Charleston Harbor, and the likelihood that they would be attacked, Buchanan had little reason to expect reassurance.

[No—stopped here—too much like other people’s history—Nevins and Nichols especially, full of pro-Northern, anti-administration innuendo. Floyd was more complex a case than a corruptible if not corrupt Tidewater aristocrat. Though a Southerner, he was against secession, and may have tried to warn Buchanan, after the election of Lincoln, against the influence of secession-minded Cobb and Thompson. Floyd was also the one Cabinet member somewhat sympathetic with Douglas, and anxious to heal the breach that brought on the ruin of the Democratic party. Philip Gerald Auchampaugh, in his
James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession
, even thinks he wasn’t a bad administrator:
Floyd was a man of real personality and ability, save perhaps in dealing with contractors. He was active, alert, always attending to his duties except when utterly unable to be about. The administration of his office force seems to have been able. The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow
. Auchampaugh defends or dismisses the action that brought about Floyd’s fall: his continuing endorsement, even after Buchanan ordered him not to, of bills presented by the Western contractor Russell, Majors, and Waddell, who had supplied the troops of the Utah War while Congress was tardy with appropriations. These “acceptances” were then presented by the contractor to banks as securities on loans. However, the amounts mounted—by the calculations of the investigating House committee, Floyd’s acceptances totalled close to seven
million dollars—to the extent that banks ceased to discount them, and William H. Russell of the firm sought an illegal expedient: he connived with a minor clerk in the Land Office, Godard
Bailey, a gambler and kinsman of Mrs. Floyd, to substitute these by now worthless acceptances for Indian-trust funds, locked in a chest, consisting of over three million dollars in unregistered, negotiable bonds. As Russell required money, Bailey substituted more, and eventually thus disposed of $870,000 worth. January 1, 1861, approached, however; the coupons on the bonds must be presented for payment. Bailey, panicking, wrote a confessional statement to his superior, Secretary of the Interior Thompson, and sent a copy to Floyd, who was lying sick of other causes. Thompson, a Mississippian with Snopesian energy, spent three sleepless nights tracking down Russell, who was then jailed with Bailey. This financial scandal, in which monies generated and absorbed in our Western expansion were cavalierly mishandled by Southerners, broke at the very time that the Buchanan Cabinet was wrestling with the explosive immediate matter of the Charleston Harbor forts and the ultimate constitutional conundrum of the states’ right of secession—did it exist?—and the federal government’s right to resist secession.

[Against the background of national disunion and impending fratricidal war, climaxing decades of mounting regional tension over the underlying moral question of whether or not this society should continue to include and protect black slavery in its fabric, Floyd’s and Russell’s and Bailey’s malfeasances’ coming home to roost is an irrelevancy almost comic. It was a great embarrassment to Buchanan and continues to be one to American historians, who in writing of these suspenseful last months of his administration must trouble to
understand and explain what “acceptances” and Indian-trust bonds were. These economic details, though properly reminding us that our Manifest Destiny had a shaky and overextended financial underside, and that personal gain is the prime American mover, are a considerable headache to non-Marxians like myself. Yet the scandal was momentous at the time and cannot be isolated from the struggle within Buchanan’s Cabinet, for it heightened the fever and clangor and finally compelled Buchanan to request the Virginian’s resignation, though he was too cowardly or kind-hearted to do it himself, asking his fellow Pennsylvanian, Attorney General Jeremiah Black, to do it instead. Black refused, and then JB asked Breckinridge, who
did
approach his kinsman Floyd, who—but I get ahead of my story, thanks to the muddling Floyd, who kept a diary, by the way. I
hate
history! Nothing is simple, nothing is consecutive, the record is corrupt. Further, the
me
inside these brackets appears no wiser than the one outside them, though he (the former) is fifteen years older. I tried to begin again:]

President James Buchanan was in a severe and solemn mood. He had summoned his Secretary of War, John Floyd of Virginia, and asked him, “Mr. Floyd, are you going to send recruits to Charleston to strengthen the forts? What about sending reinforcements to Charleston?”

Floyd blinked his watery eyes, in equal parts languid and guilty, and responded, “Mr. President, I had not intended to strengthen the forts.”

“Mr. Floyd,” stated the President, “I would rather be at the bottom of the Potomac tomorrow than that those forts would be taken by South Carolina in consequence of our neglect to put them in defensible position. It will destroy me, sir. And if
that thing occurs it will cover your name—and it is an honorable name, sir—with an infamy that all time can never efface, because it is in vain that you will attempt to show that you have not some complicity in handing over those forts to those who take them.”

The utterance, in its length and urgency, left the old chief a bit breathless, his head, with its erect flare of fine white hair, cocked more than ever to one side, and
his
eyes, mismatching, glittering with fatigue and the bright wariness of a captive old bird, a pinioned eagle, as he imagined himself on the bottom of the Potomac.
Pearls that were his eyes
.

“Sir,” said the Secretary of War, “I would risk my life and my honor that South Carolina will not molest the forts.”

“That is all very well,” responded the cagey veteran politico, cast in all his dignity of years into the maelstrom of heightening sectional tension. “But—pardon me for asking you—does that secure the forts?”
Into something rich and strange
.

“No, sir, but it is a guarantee that I am in earnest in the belief that they are secure. Governor Gist, advised of the conciliatory logic of your message to Congress to be delivered this December, has sent messages assuring me that, until the ordinance of secession is passed, everything is quiet and will remain so, if no more soldiers or munitions are sent on.”

“I dislike,” admitted the Chief Executive, “the way the Governor speaks as if matters all rest in his hands. And what do we hear from Major Anderson?”

“He has taken what I believe is undue alarm from the drilling of state troops in the streets of Charleston, amid public boasting of the intent to take Fort Moultrie. He prepared a requisition to draw one hundred muskets from the Charleston
arsenal. Colonel Huger at the arsenal has asked the War Department for orders; I have informed him that authority to supply arms to the forts would be deferred for the present. I have replied to Major Anderson that any increase in the force under his command would add to the local excitement and might lead to serious results.”

Buchanan appeared to absorb the information, but with a twitch of his head affirmed, as if to himself, in a kind of daydreaming soliloquy the storm of events increasingly imposed upon him, “I am not satisfied.”

Floyd thought it expedient to declare, “Sir, as you already understand, if Congress decides upon a course of forcible coercion, it will become my duty to resign.”

“Nevertheless, it is your clear duty now to be certain that the forts are secure. But let us see what General Scott will advise. He should be telegraphed to come to Washington at once.” The old hero of Veracruz and Chapultepec was in his dotage, and all but immobilized by his physical complaints. As Floyd had expected, any threat of resignation, of disruption within a Cabinet that Buchanan had pieced together as a model of the enduring Union, led the President to pull in his horns.

[Based upon a theatrical speech Floyd himself gave in Richmond, in January of 1861, after his resignation. Quoted in abridged form in Auchampaugh,
prev. cit.
, and refracted with various distortions in history texts. Stilted as it is, it comes as close as we will get to how these men talked to one another, and how the great shifts underfoot traced themselves in personal conversation. Auchampaugh dates this exchange
probably in the latter part of November
but Klein puts it definitely two days before the Cabinet meeting of November
9th. Well before, in any case, South Carolina’s actual secession on December 20th. On November 27th a long dispatch arrived from Anderson reporting rising determination in South Carolina to take the three federal forts and asking for reinforcements—two companies for Sumter and Pinckney, and a reinforcement for his own Moultrie garrison. Each time the Cabinet discussed the forts, Black and Secretary of State Lewis Cass argued for reinforcement, and Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd argued against. Floyd was later quoted as saying to William Trescot, the South Carolinian Assistant Secretary of State, that he would
cut off his right hand
before signing any order to reinforce. Meanwhile, Buchanan’s exquisitely balanced message to Congress on December 3rd, his fourth annual message, angered the South by refusing to grant a state’s right of secession and angered the North by denying the federal government’s power to make war on a state.
The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish
. In this he was echoing Andrew Jackson’s farewell address, in March of 1837:
the Constitution cannot be maintained, nor the Union preserved, in opposition to public feeling, by the mere exertion of the coercive powers confided to the General Government. The foundations must be laid in the affections of the people
. But would Jackson have taken this fatalistic tone in Buchanan’s situation? Certainly he gave no encouragement to the would-be nullifiers of 1832. But you know all this as well as I,
Retrospect
eds.]

On December 8th, four of the Representatives from South Carolina were received by the President. The most voracious and radical of the fire-eaters, Laurence (he thus signed himself) Massillon Keitt, darkly handsome [a short Clark Gable,
let’s say], with a sensibility essentially literary and hence extravagant and ruthless, announced, striving to keep his tone respectful: “Sir: we are here as Congressmen from the sovereign state of South Carolina. In less than two weeks we expect that secession will be proclaimed in Columbia. When this occurs, we will send commissioners to treat with you over the future relations between our two independent republics.”

Congressman William Porcher Miles, a former mathematics teacher at the College of Charleston, had come into politics by a curiously peaceable route: he had won such attention as a heroic volunteer nurse in a yellow-fever epidemic in Norfolk, Virginia, that he was elected Mayor of Charleston in 1855. Now, sensing a certain resistance in the old chief to Keitt’s implicit prediction of a diminished Union, Miles mildly interposed, “In the meantime during these dark and confused days, Mr. President, we desire to reach some agreement with you that will prevent bloodshed in Charleston.”