What, Me Worry?
Notable Scumbags Of The Civil War – The Third In A Series
General John B. Floyd, CSA 1806-1863
sad-sack
sad sack
noun Slang.
a pathetically inept person, especially a soldier, who continually blunders in spite of good intentions.
Origin:
after the cartoon character created in 1942 by U.S. cartoonist George Baker (1915–75)
For this entry in my series about deplorable characters during the War of the Rebellion, my choice can really be described as more pitiful than despicable, one of those poor, bumbling fools who, despite high birth and every advantage, still makes a complete mess of everything he touches. You might know someone like this.
John Floyd was the son of a Virginia governor of the same name, a distinguished surgeon, soldier, and landowner. After attending college, Floyd practiced law briefly in Virginia. A disastrous attempt at cotton planting in Arkansas left Floyd desperately ill and ate most of his fortune. Floyd returned to Virginia where he followed his father’s footsteps and entered politics. A gregarious, backslapping good old boy of the type found down South since the flowing bowl first passed around (a guise often used by the weak to cover incompetence), Floyd seemed to have matched his father when elected 31st governor of the state in 1849.
Well liked for his affable manner, allegations arose even then about financial irregularities under Floyd’s administration. Rather than being fundamentally dishonest, however, I suspect Floyd was instead simply heedless, careless, a man of limited intellect without the necessary focus and ability to properly fulfill a responsible executive position. His personal affairs were disastrous so it comes as no surprise his professional life was also a shambles. At the end of his term, nothing was proven to lay discredit at Floyd’s feet. He went on to new heights of political grandeur.
Floyd was appointed as President Buchanan’s Secretary of War in 1857. When it came to the Peter Principle, anything beyond the position of state delegate was plainly beyond Floyd. This soon became evident when he made a logistical hash of the Utah Expedition, a U.S. Army punitive force sent to bring the errant Church of Mormon to heel. Floyd was a flathead, pure and simple, and every man in the Cabinet from Buchanan on down knew it too. Luckily for Floyd, Buchanan was elderly, indecisive, and above all dreaded confrontation (excellent presidential qualities!). He let Floyd stay on. The grinning Virginian’s reign of error continued.
A Secretary of War had to ensure that U.S. armed forces were properly equipped, supplied, and fed, and was consequently responsible for millions of dollars in contracts even in that remote, pre-military-industrial complex age. A firm the War Department contracted with was Russell, Majors, & Waddell. Among other jobs, they supplied remote Western forts and ran the pony express. The firm’s lead principal, William H. Russell, visited Floyd in 1858, poor mouthed about the firm’s short term financial difficulties, and plaintively asked if there were some way the War Department could help them through this rough patch.
Floyd should have told Russell the War Department wasn’t a charitable institution and kicked him out of his office. Instead, like the prime sap he was, he pitied Russell and offered to endorse his drafts in advance payment for future work to be performed by the firm for the Department. With the Secretary of War’s signature on the drafts and thus apparently backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government, Russell used them as security for loans from other suckers. The firm was also paid for fulfilled contracts.
This money was supposed to be used to pay the drafts off, but Russell instead kept it and pestered Floyd for more drafts, the old shuck and jive again, just enough to tide him over. If Floyd was the quintessential hapless boob, Russell was the archetypal con man who fleeces suckers left and right, but somehow never profits from his own business schemes. Floyd was a money making machine for Russell, simply sing the blues and pick up more drafts.
News of the unauthorized transactions spread until even the hesitant Buchanan directly ordered Floyd to stop. After agreeing to do his President’s bidding, Floyd continued to write drafts. It was as if he had no sense of self preservation. Russell continued to sink deeper into debt. If he went bankrupt, the drafts would be exposed as worthless and Floyd revealed as no better than a forger or check kiter, in other words, complete and utter social death for a gentleman in that day and age. Like shooting junk into an addict’s veins, there always had to be more.
That’s when a new sucker entered the picture, yet another boob, motivated by the powerful code of Southern blood ties and honor to preserve an embarrassed kinsman from ruin and disgrace. Accounts differ as to Godard Bailey’s exact connection to Floyd, either married to his cousin or his wife’s nephew, but agree that, in his position as a clerk at the Interior Department, he had access to bonds held in trust for several Indian tribes. Russell conned Bailey into giving him some bonds. The spigot was turned wide again. In a short time, Russell extracted almost $900,000 worth of bonds from Bailey, approximately $90 million in 2014 currency.
While the sordid affair festered, the crisis at Fort Sumter worsened. Civil war loomed and the President’s War Secretary was distracted by his own financial shenanigans. A loyal Southerner although personally opposed to secession, Floyd urged defeatism upon Buchanan, told him to withdraw the garrison and surrender Fort Sumter. Buchanan rejected Floyd’s advice. Floyd did more during this period than counsel surrender and appeasement. Late in December 1860, he ordered a significant quantity of heavy ordnance, columbiads and 32-pounders, sent to Southern coastal defense forts where rebels could easily seize them.
Aware an audit would soon uncover the missing bonds, Bailey confessed his theft in writing to the Interior Secretary. The safe was checked and the bonds found missing, replaced by the useless drafts. His face rubbed in the scandal and with no way to ignore it this time, Buchanan acted with his usual coolness and mastery. He asked someone else to tell Floyd to resign. Floyd agreed to resign, but then remained in office, hoping like suckers have throughout human existence some bolt from the blue, a deus ex machina, would suddenly rescue him from the hell of his own devising. He finally seized on his insulted honor as an excuse to insist he’d left out of principle rather than being forced out in disgrace, claiming Buchanan betrayed his trust on Fort Sumter. Aside from Floyd, absolutely no one believed this.
At this point, if justice had been done, Floyd, Bailey, and Russell would have been tried and sentenced to long prison terms for fraud and malfeasance. By a legal quirk, however, the two marks and the con man who bled them got off scot free. They’d been compelled to testify about the drafts before a House committee before charges were filed. Under a federal statute, such testimony rendered the witnesses immune to prosecution. This neatly illustrates how, even over a hundred-and-fifty years ago, the U.S. Congress was one of the most supremely incompetent, useless legislative bodies in human history.
Penniless, Floyd returned to Virginia with borrowed funds. Northern newspapers reviled him as corrupt and a traitor. They spread the rumor Floyd fled to the Confederacy to escape prosecution, a canard that persists to the present day. After making a royal bollix of his career and only escaping prison by sheer dumb luck, Floyd should have retreated to a country estate and taken up some leisurely, gentlemanly pursuit that posed little risk, something where he wouldn’t be around anything sharp like landscape painting. Instead, like the idealistic, earnest putz he was, Floyd joined the Confederate Army. Biographers of Sherman and Grant have described how, after years of frustration and failure in civilian life, both men found their proper sphere and everlasting glory in the crucible of war. Since this series is devoted to worthless rather than admirable figures of the terrible conflict, I will instead conversely note that, while Floyd showed considerable incompetence in civilian life, only when he held military command did his spectacular capacity for mediocrity truly come to light.
Because he was an ex-Governor, Floyd was given a general’s rank despite his lack of military service, a good example of the Confederate high command’s old boys club. He lost a battle in present day West Virginia and unwisely and unprofessionally blamed another general for his failure. The feud escalated to the point of dueling, but was defused when President Davis transferred the other general. Shortly afterward, however, Floyd was himself sent to the Western Theater under Albert Sidney Johnston’s command. Johnston put Floyd in command of Fort Donelson, a key post that commanded access to the Cumberland River and ensured Confederate control of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. This was undoubtedly the worst single mistake of Johnston’s military career.
Ft. Donelson was besieged by Grant himself, still an obscure brigadier general, with the same dogged tenacity that later reduced Vicksburg. A breakout was attempted. Reb troops struck southward while Grant was away. Yank soldiers lacked leadership in Grant’s absence and the breakout initially made good progress. At the first sign of reversal, Floyd lost what nerve he had and called off the attack. Rallied by Grant’s return, Yanks crashed through the fort’s outer lines on the opposite flank from the breakout attempt and held their ground despite repeated efforts to repulse them. Defeat was now inevitable, sure to occur with the rising of the next day’s sun.
An undoubtedly tense council of war was held late that night, presided over by Floyd. Justly fearful of indictment for treason if he should surrender, Floyd handed over command to the next most senior officer, General Gideon Pillow, the leader of the ill fated breakout. This was the most pitiful, gutless act in Floyd’s life. Pillow promptly outdid Floyd in cravenness by handing command in turn to the next most senior officer, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, a perfectly marvelous, mid-19th Century American name.
In the morning, Floyd commandeered the two available steamboats and left. If it can be deemed to be to his credit, he also took Virginia troops with him. Soldiers from other states were left high and dry without a thought. Pillow exceeded Floyd again and rowed a boat across the Cumberland to freedom on his lonesome. In the annals of poltroonery, I think even the most ardent Lost Cause Neo-Confederate will agree that Pillow bested Floyd in this respect. Buckner asked Grant for terms only to receive the immortal demand for unconditional surrender. Fort Donelson fell shortly after Floyd’s ignominious departure.
Like a wounded animal headed to his lair, Floyd returned to Virginia. Any hope of a real career, military or civil, was ended after the debacle at Ft. Donelson. Davis relieved him of command. Floyd still had the fig leaf of a generalship in the Virginia militia and some face saving talk was made about recruiting and training duties, but even Floyd knew he was washed up. In 1863, in the first discreet, sensible move in his whole adult life, he had the good sense to die, thus sparing himself further humiliation and the knowledge that his beloved Dixie would finally be dragged down to utter, ruinous defeat.
To sum up, Floyd was a worthless, useless, upper class sprig, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and two left feet; a hopeless soft touch, sucker, and mark; a remarkably bad executive even for the federal government; a military incompetent and despicable poltroon; and, worst of all, a traitor to his country and his oath to uphold the Constitution, as shown by his attempt to provide the Rebels with heavy artillery before war broke out. He was a sad sack supreme, the sort of doofus who, despite all the good will and fine intentions in the world, can’t tie his own shoelaces without help. On the positive side, during the course of my admittedly cursory research on Floyd, I found no evidence he ever said anything mean to his mother or hurt a dog or a horse. So there is that in his favor.
For those interested in reading further about Floyd, the link below will take you to the best short account that I was able to find online:
http://www.jcs-group.com/military/war1861people/floyd.html