Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

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.”