And here, too, it is well to advert to a charge which relates to Mr. Buchanan’s administration of the Government prior to the election of his successor. This charge, to which a large measure of popular credence has long been accorded, is, that the Secretary of War, Mr. Floyd, had for a long time pursued a plan of his own for distributing the troops and arms of the United States in anticipation of a disruption of the Union at no distant day. But such a charge is of course to be tried by a careful examination of facts, and by a scrupulous attention to dates. One of the most important facts to be considered is, that Secretary Floyd, who came in 1857 into Mr. Buchanan’s cabinet from Virginia—a State that never had, down to that time and for a long period thereafter, many secessionists among her public men—was not of that political school until after he left the office of Secretary of War. He was a Unionist, and a pronounced one, until he chose, as a mere pretext, to say that he differed with the President in regard to the policy which the President thought proper to pursue.[66] But from the fact that he became a secessionist and denounced the President, after he left the cabinet, and the foolish boast which he made that he had, while Secretary of War, defeated General Scott’s plans and solicitations respecting the forts, the inference has been drawn that he had good reason for advancing that claim upon the consideration of his new political allies in the Southern section of the country. Mr. Floyd by no means appears to me to have been a man of scrupulous honor. The fact that he had been compelled to resign his place on account of a transaction in no way connected with the secession of any State, led him, in a spirit of sheer self-glorification, to give countenance to a charge which, if it had been true, would not only have reflected great discredit on the President, but which would have involved the Secretary himself in the heinous offence of treachery to the Government whose public servant he was. No man could have thus overshot his own mark, who had a careful regard for facts which he must have known: for no one could have known better than Mr. Floyd that he had no influence whatever in defeating any plans which General Scott proposed to the President in his “views” of October, 1860, and no one could have known better than he that the troops and arms of the United States had not been distributed with any sinister design. But Mr. Floyd’s subsequent vaporings, after he left the cabinet, misled General Scott into the belief that there had been great wrong committed while he was Secretary of War, and caused the General, in October and November, 1862, to give his sanction to charges that were quite unfounded. Footnote 66: See _post_, for the history of Secretary Floyd’s resignation.