ned upon the President with angry reproaches. In
their rage they lost all sense of the respect due to the Chief
Magistrate of the Nation, and assaulted Mr. Buchanan with coarseness
as well as violence. Senator Benjamin spoke of him as "a senile
Executive under the sinister influence of insane counsels." This
exhibition of malignity towards the misguided President afforded
to the North the most convincing and satisfactory proof that there
had been a change for the better in the plans and purposes of the
Administration. They realized that it must be a deep sense of
impending danger which could separate Mr. Buchanan from his political
associations with the South, and they recognized in his position
a significant proof of the desperate determination to which the
enemies of the Union had come.

The stand taken by Judge Black and his loyal associates was in the
last days of December, 1860. The re-organization of the Cabinet
came as a matter of necessity. Mr. John B. Floyd resigned from
the War Department, making loud proclamation that his action was
based on the President's refusal to surrender the national forts
in Charleston Harbor to the Secession government of South Carolina.
This manifesto was not necessary to establish Floyd's treasonable
intentions toward the government; but, in point of truth, the plea
was undoubtedly a pretense, to cover reasons of a more personal
character which would at once deprive him of Mr. Buchanan's
confidence. There had been irregularities in the War Department
tending to compromise Mr. Floyd, for which he was afterwards indicted
in the District of Columbia. Mr. Floyd well knew that the first
knowledge of these shortcomings would lead to his dismissal from
the Cabinet. Whatever Mr. Buchanan's faults as an Executive may
have been, his honor in all transactions, both personal and public,
was unquestionable, and he was the last man to tolerate the slightest
deviation from the path of rigid integrity.

Mr. Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, followed Mr. Floyd
after a short interval. Mr. Cobb had left the Treasury a few days
before General Cass resigned from the Cabinet, and had gone to
Georgia to stimulate her laggard movements in the scheme of destroying
the government. His successor was Philip Francis Thomas of Maryland,
who entered the Cabinet as a representative of the principles whose
announcement had forced General Cass to resign. The change of
policy to which the Presi