John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[25] that of Cass. Seizing adroitly upon a phrase of Buchanan's message, which affirmed the duty of the President to protect public property, he said: True, it is simply a question of property. You need no army to assert that. Place an ordnance sergeant in the fort ; he will represent the sovereignty and the proprietary rights of the United States as well as a regiment. This was a subtle and skilful thrust. Mr. Buchanan's slow intellect was both flattered and confused by having his own misstatement of a vital political principle quoted and turned upon him. He had not the wit to rejoin that neither political sovereignty nor proprietary right were longer complete if possession was once lost. Nevertheless, Buchanan had a dim consciousness of treachery. He continued to plead with his secretary that he ought to send reinforcements; warning him that a loss of the forts under the circumstances would cover the name of Floyd “with an infamy that all time can never efface.”

Floyd was well nigh in despair. He turned upon the President all his florid Southern rhetoric, all the final armory of offended Southern dignity, and the ever-ready threats of Southern resort to violence. Send troops to Charleston, he concluded, and the swarming and enraged South Carolinians would not leave one brick of Moultrie upon another. Nor was Floyd content to risk the issue upon his own eloquence. He gave the note of alarm to every prominent traitor in Washington, and without delay they flocked around the doubting, hesitating President-Hunter, Mason, Jefferson Davis — the whole busy cabal of plotting, caucusing conspirators, filling him alternately with such deceitful promises of good behavior and such terrible visions of revolutionary violence, that Mr. Buchanan was both frightened and soothed into a reluctant compliance with their advice. It was the scene of the wily Vivien and the yielding Merlin re-enacted;