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?

66

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.* 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,

Buchanan's Defence, p. 228.

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 interposi tion 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! *

*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.)

II.-27

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.

IT

sage.

T is now necessary to turn to what took place in Congress upon the recommendations of the President's annual mesThere were but two courses that Congress could pursue in this most extraordinary emergency. It must either preserve the Union by peaceful measures, or it must provide the President and his successor with the military force requisite to secure the execution of the laws and the supremacy of the Constitution. It was plain that in this, as in all similar cases of threatened revolt against the authority of a regular and long established government, mere inaction would be a fatal policy. After the State of South Carolina should have adopted an ordinance of secession, it would be too late to accomplish anything by merely arguing against the constitutional doctrine on which the asserted right of secession depended. That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable. strength. To the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the measures of conciliation needful for one of the alternatives of a sound and safe policy, and to execute the laws by all the means with which the Executive was then or might thereafter be clothed by the legislature. But the