Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/386

348 a party convention, and voted down by nearly two-thirds of the people of the Union. The platform must now be taken as the condition of agreement and accepted as the policy of the general government. It must be insisted on as the substitute for the Crittenden Compromise; and it was thus presented as appears by the vote on the Clark amendment. The Buchanan cabinet had been first discordant, then disintegrated and afterward unified upon the policy finally adopted by the President. General Scott, the head of the army, had actively urged his proposition to relieve the President, Secretary of War and Congress from political responsibility by a movement on his own official account to strengthen the garrison at Fort Sumter. On the 3oth of December, he wrote to the President for permission &quot; without reference to the war department and otherwise as secretly as possible to send two hundred and fifty recruits from New York harbor to reinforce Fort Sumter, together with some extra muskets, rifles, ammunition and subsistence stores,&quot; and next day, the 3ist, he sent an order to the commanding officer at Fort Monroe "to put on the sloop of war, Brooklyn, four companies of at least four hundred men with twenty-five extra stands of arms complete, destined to reinforce Fort Sumter,&quot; adding, "manage everything as secretly and confidentially as possible. &quot; It is presumable that his suggestions of the day before had been agreed to.

The policy of coercion by sea having clearly been foreshadowed by the course of the administration, the secretary of war, Mr. Floyd, sent in his resignation, and the position was filled at once by Mr. Holt, who favored the President s plans. Thus the year 1 860 closed with a hostile order from the general commanding and a change in the head of the war department, which produced excitement and fears throughout the South. Mr. Wigfall telegraphed at once from Washington, &quot; Holt succeeds Floyd. It means war. Cut off supplies of Anderson and take Sumter as soon as possible.&quot;