Floyd, George P.

Died: 1910-03-06 Minneapolis, Minnesota

George P. Floyd was a hotel proprietor, railroad conductor, and an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln. Floyd worked as a railroad conductor on the Boston, Hartford, and Erie Railroad and participated in a strike in March 1855. In 1856, Floyd leased the Quincy House in Quincy, Illinois, and he employed Lincoln to draw up and execute the lease. Floyd purported to be at the Lincoln-Douglas debate in Quincy in October 1858 and claimed to have recommended a "rum sweat" to revive Lincoln, who supposedly was on the brink of collapse due to fatigue. Floyd also claimed to have escorted the Prince of Wales during the latter’s tour of the United States in 1860. Floyd moved to Montgomery, Alabama, sometime before 1860, became an owner of enslaved persons, and claimed to have driven Jefferson Davis to his inauguration as president of the Confederate States of America.

George P. Floyd, "The First Railroad Strike in this Country," The Railroad Conductor 24 (December 1907), 945-48; The Minneapolis Morning Tribune (MN), 11 March 1910, 9:4; George P. Floyd, “Abraham Lincoln’s Rum Sweat: A Vigorous Remedy that Helped him During his Presidential Campaign,” McClure’s Magazine 30 (January 1908), 303-4; Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, comps. and eds., Recollected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 161.