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]]
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.
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]]
CHAPTER XXI.
November, 1860-March, 1861.
THE ACTION OF CONGRESS ON THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL MESSAGE—THE “CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE”—STRANGE COURSE OF THE NEW YORK “TRIBUNE”—SPECIAL MESSAGE OF JANUARY 8, 1861.