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LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MEMORIAL 
 
 the Class of 1901 
 
 founded by 
 
 HARLAN HOYT HORNER 
 
 and 
 
 HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER 
 
c Books by Burton J. Hendrick | 
 
 Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 3 vols. 
 
 The Education of an American 
 
 The Lees of Virginia 
 
 Bulwark of the Republic 
 
 Statesmen of the Lost Cause 
 
 Life of Andrew Carnegie, 2 vols. 
 
 Lincoln's War Cabinet 
 
 The Age of Big Business (Tale Chronicles of America) 
 
 The Victory at Sea (With William S. Sims) 
 
 William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work 
 (With Marie Doughty Gorgas) 
 
 Letters of Andrew Carnegie, 2 vols. (Editor) 
 
LINCOLN'S WAR CABINET 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/lincolnswarcabinOOhend 
 
Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Newcomb Carlton of New York 
 
 Evening Reception at the White House 
 
 From a painting probably by Francis B. Carpenter. The date was 
 March 1, 1864, when General Grant, coming to Washington to 
 receive his commission as Lieutenant General, was the hero of the 
 occasion. Grant stands next to Lincoln, who is greeting Mrs. 
 Grant. At the extreme left is William H. Seward, Secretary of 
 State. In the center is secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, 
 with his daughter Kate. To the immediate right of Lincoln is 
 Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, and still further to the right 
 (profile with white whiskers) is Gideon Welles, Secretary of the 
 Navy. The second figure to the right of Welles is Simon Cam- 
 eron, ex-Secretary of War, and next to him Montgomery Blair, 
 Postmaster General. In the right foreground is Mrs. Lincoln sit- 
 ting with General Scott 
 
War Cabinet 
 
 by Burton J. Hendrick 
 
 ^^tf^^^tf^* 
 
 c 
 
 3 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ^JV ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOOK 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY • BOSTON 
 
 1946 
 
COPYRIGHT I946, BY BURTON J. HENDRICK 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT 
 
 TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS 
 
 THEREOF IN ANY FORM 
 
 FIRST EDITION 
 
 Published November 1946 
 
 ATLANTIC-LITTLE, BROWN BOOKS 
 
 ARE PUBLISHED BY 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY 
 
 IN ASSOCIATION WITH 
 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
12>K 2 
 
 
 
 U< 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Book I A Ministry of All the Talents 1 
 Book II William Henry Seward: "Prime Minister" 125 
 
 Book III Exit Cameron; Enter Stanton 111 
 
 Book IV The Cabinet and McClellan 265 
 
 Book V Senate versus Cabinet 321 
 
 Book VI Chase and "The Blairs" 367 
 
 Book VII End of the Coalition 419 
 
 Index 465 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Evening Reception at the White House Frontispiece 
 
 The Original Lincoln Cabinet 72 
 
 Gideon Welles, 1802-1818 73 
 
 William Henry Seward, 1801-1812 111 
 
 Thurlow Weed, 1191-1882; Caleb Blood Smith, 1808- 
 
 1864 133 
 
 Simon Cameron, 1199-1889 232 
 
 Edwin McMasters Stanton, 1814-1869 233 
 
 General George Brinton McClellan, 1826-1 88 S; Francis 
 
 Preston Blair, Jr., 1821-1815 284 
 
 War and Navy Department Buildings in 1861 285 
 
 Montgomery Blair, 1813-1883 332 
 
 Zachariah Chandler, 1813-1819; William Pitt Fessenden, 
 1806-1869; Benjamin Franklin Wade, 1800-1818; 
 
 Charles Sumner, 1811-1814 333 
 
 Reading of the First Emancipation Proclamation, July 22, 
 
 1862 350 
 
 Edward Bates, 1193-1869 3 5 1 
 
 Salmon Portland Chase, 1808-1813 374 
 
 Kate Chase Sprague, 1840-1899; Francis Preston Blair, 
 
 Sr., 1191-1816 375 
 
BOOK ONE 
 
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 * (F*!) <PS> ^ ^ d*^ (f^ <FS> ^ tf 5 ^ ^ ^^^^^(T^cT^^^^^cF 5 ^ 
 
 c 
 
 C ^4 Ministry of All the Talents 5 
 
a 
 
 I 
 
 T WAS a matter of frequent remark with Abraham Lincoln that the 
 cabinet which, in completed form, he submitted to the Senate on March 
 5, 1861, was essentially the same as the one he had selected on Novem- 
 ber 7, 1860, the day following his election. In the construction of his 
 official family Lincoln displayed the qualities that were to distinguish 
 his administration. Independence of opinion, absolute reliance on his 
 own judgment, a willingness to listen to advice, a readiness to compro- 
 mise, so long as the main object was achieved, and a logically thought 
 out scheme of action — all these well-known Lincoln characteristics 
 were ultimately brought to bear in making this, his first great decision. 
 The original choice of counselors was made on Lincoln's own initiative, 
 with no broader outlook on the national field than could be obtained 
 from the window of his little shabby law office in Springfield. In after 
 years Lincoln liked to relate the story to his favorite intimates. One of 
 them, Gideon Welles, has left an account in Lincoln's own words, inci- 
 dentally giving the first close-up picture we have of Lincoln after his 
 election to the Presidency. He spent the evening of that fateful Novem- 
 ber 6, 1860, in the telegraph office at Springfield, the superintendent 
 having placed the room at his exclusive disposal. "I was there without 
 leaving, after the returns began to come in until we had enough to sat- 
 isfy us as to how the election had gone. I went home, but not to get 
 much sleep, for I felt then, as I never had before, the responsibility that 
 was upon me. I began to feel at once that I needed support — others to 
 share with me the burden. This was on Wednesday morning, and, be- 
 fore the sun went down, I had made up my cabinet. It was almost the 
 same that I finally appointed." x 
 
 True as was this statement of the case, the selection of the cabi- 
 net was not the simple process that Lincoln's words imply. Probably no 
 President underwent such anguish in organizing an administration as 
 
 1 Welles, Gideon, Diary. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925. I, 82. The selec- 
 tions from this book are used by permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin 
 Company. 
 
4 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 the one elected on the eve of the Civil War. Though the new depart- 
 ment heads had been chosen before the sun went down November 7, 
 the cabinet, in definite form, was not complete even on the day of in- 
 auguration. When Lincoln, on February 11, 1861, began his journey to 
 Washington, only two cabinet members had been offered appointments 
 and had accepted them. While the somewhat drab inaugural proces- 
 sion was advancing on March 4 from the White House to the cere- 
 monies in front of the domeless Capitol, the most important post, that 
 of Secretary of State, was still hanging in suspense. When the com- 
 pleted list reached the Senate the following day, five nervous expectant 
 statesmen obtained the first official news of their selection. 
 
 The reasons for this deliberation are found both in the critical state of 
 public affairs at the moment and in the complex character of the party- 
 placed in Lincoln's hand for their solution. By March 4, 1861, seven 
 states had seceded from the Federal government and established what 
 they persisted in calling a new and independent Republic. Lincoln's 
 task was to bring this so-called Confederacy to an end and re-establish 
 the Union. The means which had been allotted for this purpose was the 
 political organization known as the Republican Party. Wise statesman- 
 ship called upon the new leader to transform this agency into a har- 
 monious and compact mass, using it as a powerful, homogeneous unit 
 for the achievement of the great purpose. Had the party, in 1860, been 
 a solid, well-established entity, strengthened by decades of tradition 
 and loyalty, the objective would have been a difficult one. But the ag- 
 gregation of which Lincoln had suddenly found himself the captain was 
 something new — only four years old; and had never before won a na- 
 tional election. Moreover, it was by no means united or composed of 
 sympathetic elements. In fact, hardly any such unit as a Republican 
 Party existed on the day of Lincoln's election. An organization bear- 
 ing that official title, it is true, had assembled in Chicago in early May 
 1860, and launched the campaign for the control of Federal affairs that 
 had now proved successful. But it was not a coherent nor, except on 
 one issue, a congenial, smoothly working association. The so-called 
 party comprised several groups, under chieftains personally hostile and 
 full of jealousy and rivalry, who had come together upon one ques- 
 tion only. The determination of Southern cotton planters to extend 
 slavery into the territories, and the appalling success their program had 
 achieved in the preceding fifteen years, formed the danger that had 
 brought under one standard many otherwise conflicting forces, resolved 
 to check the aggression by political action. In 1860 no certainty ex- 
 isted that the Republican Party represented a permanent movement. 
 Failure to achieve its announced intention would have meant its speedy 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 5 
 
 end. In 1840 and 1844 the Liberty Party, pledged to the abolition of 
 slavery in every region where it prevailed, had unsuccessfully contested 
 for the Presidency. It had promptly disappeared as a political power. 
 In 1848 the Free-Soil Party, committed against the extension of slavery 
 into the new territory recently acquired from Mexico, had similarly 
 gone down to defeat, and had similarly vanished as an organized force. 
 The Republican Party of 1860 had carried the country on the platform 
 of no new slave territories and no more slave states, but it contained so 
 many various and antagonistic elements, and so many jealous aspiring 
 leaders, that even the most hopeful did not confidently predict a long 
 existence. Old-line Whigs, old-line Democrats, Abolitionists, Free- 
 Soilers, Know-Nothings, and other factions had for the time united, 
 but how long they could be kept enrolled under a single leadership and 
 how successful they could be in achieving their aims, no man was bold 
 enough to prophesy. 
 
 The Chicago Convention of May 1860 has been described as "a loose 
 aggregation of free thinkers," and it was indeed a collection of inde- 
 pendent, stubborn men, holding no general orthodox creed, agreeing 
 only in opposition to slavery, and even on that topic entertaining a va- 
 riety of opinions. Nothing more suggestively emphasized discord than 
 the unpopularity of the word "Republican." In the minds of most 
 Americans the term signified the same thing as abolitionism, yet the 
 majority of the new party members, including Lincoln himself, repudi- 
 ated that sect. From 1856 to 1860, there was a general shrinking from 
 the name. The hosts assembled in the Chicago Wigwam had been or- 
 ganized under several designations. In Missouri they called themselves 
 simply the Opposition. In that locality several of the factions which 
 made up the anti-Democratic forces refused to enter state and county 
 conventions that had enrolled under the "Republican" banner. In Ohio 
 and Pennsylvania the same forces chose to be known as the "People's" 
 or the "Popular" Party. Union Party, Anti-Nebraska Party, Antislavery 
 Party, Free-Soil Party, were a few of the other denominations which 
 the enemies of slavery extension preferred to the newfangled standard. 
 Even in 1864, when the clans assembled in Baltimore to nominate Lin- 
 coln for a second term, the gathering adopted the name of National 
 Union Party. Not until 1868 did the word "Republican" definitely fix 
 itself in the political glossary of the nation. Slavery had then been ex- 
 tinguished, new issues were claiming attention, and no fear any longer 
 prevailed that to be called a Republican was to write oneself down as 
 another John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison. 
 
 Thus the organization whose members came to refer to it as the 
 Grand Old Party was certainly not old, and perhaps not "grand," in 
 
6 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 1860, but something entirely new. The mere lust for public office had 
 led a considerable number into the new amalgamation, especially those 
 Whig politicians who, after the disappearance of that party, could find 
 no other refuge. Most of the famished cormorants who followed the 
 rail splitter to Washington in February 1861 had never tasted the 
 spoils of office. Not a well-co-ordinated army of conquest, but a 
 disharmonious potpourri of factions, each demanding "recognition" — 
 such was the Joseph's coat of a party which an inexperienced stranger 
 from the prairie was expected to transform into a well-articulated ma- 
 chine for solving mighty problems. To the extent that this fact gave 
 Lincoln a free hand, it was an advantage. In the main, however, it 
 added to the difficulties of the problem, for to create a happy family 
 of discordant rivals, most of them having their own personal ambitions 
 and their own favorite plan for solving the nation's ills, could tax the 
 ablest diplomatic skill. Nor did the attitude of the party leaders towards 
 Lincoln make the problem easier. Few conventions have left such bit- 
 terness as that held in Chicago in May 1860. Of all the candidates pre- 
 sented to the noisy congregation the one that seemed to be the least 
 promising had carried off the prize. Great Senators like William H. 
 Seward and Salmon P. Chase, for thirty years the nation's leaders in the 
 antislavery crusade, and old war horses like Edward Bates, Simon Cam- 
 eron, and William L. Dayton, had gone down to defeat before a man 
 whose national prominence, such as it was, had been the development 
 of two or three years. Of the seven men whom Lincoln finally gath- 
 ered around his council table there was probably not one who did not 
 regard himself, in experience, intellect, and capacity to lead, superior 
 to the nominal chieftain. 
 
 For a President to appoint a rival for nomination to his cabinet was 
 not unprecedented, but to collect under his wing nearly all the dis- 
 appointed men whom he had defeated in the convention represented a 
 new experiment in party conciliation. The fact that Lincoln success- 
 fully performed this feat indicates traits of character not suspected at 
 the time, though they were to become evident enough in the trying 
 times ahead. In this the man displayed supreme self-reliance and a con- 
 scious sense of leadership. Lincoln was not one of those Presidents who 
 hesitate to surround themselves with men as strong as or stronger than 
 themselves. He deliberately sought the most commanding associates he 
 could find, not at all fearful that they would gain the upper hand, en- 
 tirely confident of his own ability to control and direct and to retain 
 complete authority in his own hands. Personal likes and dislikes had 
 nothing to do with Lincoln's choice of advisers. He seriously put him- 
 self to what he regarded as his supreme task, that of organizing a com- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 7 
 
 pact working force that could best destroy the Confederate States of 
 America and preserve the Union. The only instrument available to his 
 hand was that discordant congeries of men and principles which called 
 itself, almost half-ashamed, the Republican Party. 
 
 Once having formed this general plan, certain choices for the cabinet 
 became almost automatic. From the day of nomination, Lincoln had 
 fixed upon the men for the two most important posts. Excepting the 
 new President himself — and probably neither of these two statesmen 
 would have granted the exception — William H. Seward and Salmon 
 Portland Chase outranked all Republican statesmen of the day, in the 
 brilliancy of their careers, in the predominant leadership evinced in 
 the antislavery crusade, in their intellectual attainments, in gifts of 
 oratory, capacity as legislators, and strength of character. Their courses 
 in public life had followed similar lines. Both had gained national fame 
 by opposing the growing power of slavery, both had served their states 
 as governors for two terms, Seward in New York and Chase in Ohio, 
 and as Senators of the United States. The fame of the two men stood so 
 high that Lincoln in the early days felt for them a kind of awe. That 
 the new Republican Party should have turned to him for leadership, 
 and ignored the claims of his most prominent rivals, was something that 
 he had found it hard to understand. "What's the use of talking of me 
 for President," Lincoln had said to Jesse W. Fell, when that enterpris- 
 ing presidential boomer 2 had held up the splendid prospect of the 
 White House, "when we have such men as Seward, Chase, and others, 
 who are so much better known and whose names are so intimately asso- 
 ciated with the principles of the Republican party? Everybody knows 
 them. No one, scarcely, outside of Illinois, knows me. Besides, is it not, 
 as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have carried this move- 
 ment forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, per- 
 sonal abuse and bad names? I think so." Lincoln coupled Seward and 
 Chase in this comparison, but there is little doubt that Seward was the 
 man who had first claim upon his respect, and not many Americans of 
 the time would have disagreed with this preference. 
 
 Seward entered the Senate in 1849 at the time when Webster, Clay, 
 and Calhoun were fighting their last battles on the slavery issue. The 
 illustrious trio all died in the next two or three years, and thus left a 
 vacant space for new leaders. Of the group that quickly sprang into 
 
 2 Fell was an active member of the Illinois group who had Lincoln's candidacy 
 in hand. He is famous as the correspondent to whom Lincoln addressed his letter 
 of December 20, 1859, giving a three-page biographical sketch. See Works, 
 V, 286. 
 
8 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 fame, Seward, Chase, Sumner, from the North, Judah P. Benjamin, 
 Jefferson Davis, and John Slidell from the South, the New Yorker 
 probably found the greatest favor with the public. For Seward was 
 then a forceful, hard-hitting debater and party leader; he was an in- 
 tense human being, and like that exotic figure in the English House 
 of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli, had an unusualness in manner and 
 appearance which made him the most interesting member of the as- 
 sembly. Certainly the man whom visitors to Washington in the late 
 fifties most wished to see and hear was the senior Senator from New 
 York. The sight itself justified a visit to Washington. By 1860 the "red- 
 headed upstart" who had sought to be governor of the largest state in 
 the Union at the age of thirty- three had considerably aged; but the 
 gangling body moved among his colleagues with all its youthful swift- 
 ness. Seward's stature, only five feet four, and his clothes, old-fashioned 
 even then — oaken-colored trousers, popularly known as pantaloons, 
 long-tailed coat whose skirts hung listlessly from his chair, lofty col- 
 lar, encircled by a black stock with huge expanse of white shirt bosom 
 below — always attracted the fixed gaze of the visitors' gallery. The 
 feature that most impressed the same observers was the nose, large, 
 elongated, beaklike, subtended by thick lips, the under one protrud- 
 ing, and a weak recessive chin. In one respect this face departed from 
 the favored type of the sixties and clung to the Clay- Webster pattern, 
 for Seward never fell victim to the Civil War passion for a beard; his 
 countenance, always scrupulously shaved, high cheekboned, in his 
 latter years slightly shriveled, was long and narrow; the head, com- 
 pared by a contemporary to a haystack, was crowned by a mass of 
 tousled hair — red in Seward's youth, rather straw-colored in middle 
 age, practically white in the final years. Huge ears, heavy brows, blue- 
 gray eyes that were at the same time shrewd and dreamy, neck as 
 small as a woman's, slender shoulders that sloped at an angle of at least 
 forty-five degrees, long, dangling arms, spindly legs, gracefully con- 
 tracted waistline — when this Dickensian figure disentangled itself and 
 rose to address the Senate the torrent of powerful though slightly 
 husky eloquence came as a surprise. A speech by Seward was an ex- 
 perience, not only for the address itself, but for the ritual that accom- 
 panied it. Inevitably when the orator finished and sat down, he would 
 reach for his snuffbox, take a pinch, emit a tremendous sneeze, and con- 
 clude the ceremony by the application to his hawklike nose of a huge 
 yellow silk handkerchief. 
 
 In speech Seward possessed few old-fashioned qualities. He repre- 
 sented the transition that was taking place from resounding declama- 
 tion to restrained lawyer-like arguments. His voice had little carrying 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 9 
 
 power, and the gestures were awkward; the intellectual content, the 
 wide reading and grasp of principles, and the persuasive reasoning, gave 
 Seward's deliverances far more influence when read than when spoken. 
 A certain Disraelian cynicism, sometimes at the expense of the Southern 
 states, added to their literary value. An occasional biting aside did not 
 increase his popularity south of the Potomac. Once a Virginia states- 
 man interrupted to declare that the "pestilent" agitation of slavery was 
 depreciating the value of that type of "property." "No," gently re- 
 plied the New Yorker, hitting the South in one of its most sensitive 
 spots, "I think youth and beauty still bring the accustomed high 
 prices." That Seward was more of a scholarly than a popular speaker 
 is evident in the fact that his Works, in five large volumes, were pub- 
 lished in his own lifetime. His most famous speeches circulated in 
 printed form like popular novels, one of them, made on the meeting 
 of the Congress in 1861, reaching a distribution of more than a million 
 copies. 
 
 To the prevailing petty vice of American statesmen of the time, es- 
 pecially that of the South — tobacco chewing — Seward was not ad- 
 dicted, but he was a continuous smoker of cigars. In conversation his 
 disorganized frame usually sat hunched up in an armchair, one yellow- 
 sheathed leg thrown over the other, the rest of the person concealed 
 by mighty eruptions of smoke. Since he was pre-eminently the social 
 man, solitary smoking did not accord with Seward's taste. "The Secre- 
 tary lit his cigar, then gave me one" — so William Howard Russell, 
 correspondent of the London Times, begins his account of a famous 
 interview with Seward, in the early days of the war. This liberality 
 indicated a side of Seward almost as important as his statesmanship. As- 
 sociation with human beings was a necessity of his nature. He was on 
 easy terms, not only with his party associates and the diplomatic body, 
 but with his political foes. Jefferson Davis was one of his closest friends 
 and remained such up to the time he became President of the Con- 
 federate states. Men of as divergent opinions as Charles Sumner and 
 Pierre Soule, little as they frequently sympathized with Seward's opin- 
 ions, found him a delightful companion. Conversation, constant, un- 
 restrained, frequently reckless, gave him more pleasure than the finest 
 senatorial debate. Seward was one member of the cabinet who was 
 not shocked by Lincoln's "undignified" yarns, for he was an irreclaim- 
 able storyteller himself. Dining, wining, table gossip, personal discus- 
 sion, were the gifts that made the New York statesman the most 
 affable of the cabinet group. Though well versed in more difficult liter- 
 ature — for Seward was a student of Burke, Bacon, Bolingbroke, and 
 other political philosophers, as well as of the classics, Tacitus and 
 
10 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Cicero being particular favorites — he had also a fondness for light liter- 
 ature, frequently passing whole evenings reading aloud with his wife, 
 and his addiction to the theater startled his more somber associates, such 
 as Chase and Bates, who held the conventional attitude of the day 
 towards that Satanic diversion. Seward never missed performances of 
 the Booths, of James H. Hackett, Edmund Kean, Edwin Forrest, Sheri- 
 dan Knowles, and other favorite contemporaries. Charlotte Cushman, 
 whenever she came to Washington, was usually a guest in the Seward 
 home, and the Senator once caused a minor scandal by calling upon 
 the lustrous Adah Isaacs Menken, in her dressing room, to express the 
 pleasure derived from her performance. 
 
 Seward had the charming, but not too common talent of revealing his 
 inmost self in his letters. His wife was too much of an invalid to stand 
 the hard life of Washington and almost daily letters to her, lover-like 
 in devotion, reveal the Senator in a variety of moods. In these and 
 other letters it appears that Seward's real home was not the house he 
 maintained in Washington so many years, but the considerable estate 
 acquired as a young man in Auburn, New York, whose development 
 was the delight of his existence. The flowers, the vegetables, the dogs, 
 cats, chipmunks, and birds, the days passed with his friends in the gar- 
 den, the long drives with Mrs. Seward in the beautiful country of the 
 Finger Lakes — hardly any letters give so pleasant a view of American 
 rural life. "The advance of spring in the country," he writes one April 
 morning, "was always interesting to me; and this is the first time I have 
 enjoyed it in four years. I watch the development of vegetables with a 
 lover's interest. I have my hot bed in delightful success. My cucumbers 
 are commencing their ramblings. The radishes begin to gather rough- 
 ness upon the leaf. The saps start from my grapes, and the polyanthus 
 is in full bloom. . . . The crocus has flourished in bright yellow flow- 
 ers, and is drooping beneath the gaudy rivalry of the daffodils which 
 burst upon us in full splendor with the rising sun this morning. The 
 little border flower, with the pretty name that I cannot remember, dis- 
 closed its petals at the same time. The lilac buds are bursting and the 
 gooseberries almost in leaf. ... I am writing with my window open 
 into the shrubbery and the air is redolent of sweets and the birds are 
 in full chorus." Seward would write pages about "Bob," his mocking- 
 bird, and describe at length the antics of other animals. On his return 
 from Europe in 1859, of all the honors received, the one that apparently 
 gave him most satisfaction was that his cat — an animal not usually re- 
 sponsive to the softer virtues — displayed the utmost joy and insisted 
 on sitting on his shoulder for the larger part of the first day. 
 
 Evidently in William Henry Seward we have a public man who was 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 11 
 
 also very much of a human being; and this attractive personality 
 formed the background of one of the most influential and puzzling 
 careers of his time. With that literary gift which provided the chief 
 stock in trade for his public work, Seward, in his Autobiography, 8 has 
 pictured his early days — an important contribution, though unfortu- 
 nately the narrative stops at the year 1834, when the author's political 
 days had hardly begun. The foundation, however, had been laid. The 
 village of Florida in which Seward was born in 1801 was only about 
 seventy-five miles from the city of New York. Seward's father, a suc- 
 cessful farmer, physician, banker, politician, and judge, rich enough 
 to endow the Seward Institute, an educational foundation which had a 
 long and prosperous existence, owned three Negro slaves, two women 
 and a boy, whom the childish Seward found the most entertaining part 
 of the household. They were the boy's perpetual delight; he reveled in 
 their ghost stories, their familiarity with witches and the devil, with 
 the criminal history of the region — the men who had been hanged, and 
 the disreputable and drunken Negroes who periodically ran away, and 
 were usually brought back with iron yokes about their necks. "What 
 wonder that I felt their apartment more attractive than the parlor, and 
 their conversation a relief from the severe decorum that prevailed 
 there?" New York did not abolish slavery until 1827; so most of the 
 families in Seward's region had as many bondmen as his own father, 
 or even more. Seward's personal experience with the institution as 
 boy and young man "determined me, at that early age, to be an abo- 
 litionist." By 1820, at the age of nineteen, however, an even more ar- 
 resting discovery was made. "I found that, after all, politics was the 
 important and engrossing business of the country." By this time his 
 education was complete. Diffident and awkward as a child, not over- 
 robust, a red-haired boy not pugnacious in disposition, Seward spent 
 most of his early time in study and reading. Books gave his mind a 
 turn that remained to the end, influencing even his course on the crisis 
 preceding Sumter. 
 
 Addison's Cato, which Seward as a child witnessed at a school exhibi- 
 tion, "made me a hater of military and imperial usurpation for life. I 
 think it is a misfortune that that great drama has lost its place on the 
 modern stage." 4 Prepared by local academies, Seward received his 
 bachelor's degree at Union College, Schenectady, in 1820 — an institu- 
 tion which, with characteristic loyalty and affection, remained close to 
 
 8 Seward, William Henry, Autobiography of William Henry Seward 1801-1834 
 with a memoir of his life and selections from his letters from 1831-1846. Ed. by 
 Frederick Seward. D. Appleton Co., 1877. 
 
 4 Ibid., p. 23. 
 
12 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 his heart all his life. At Union his rustic clothes, strange appearance, 
 and drawling speech at first provoked undergraduate ridicule, but 
 Seward quickly won popularity by his wit, his genial adaptability and 
 leadership, particularly in intellectual pursuits. The obvious career was 
 law; this Seward studied, after the practice of the time, in a lawyer's 
 office, finally determining, after a few skirmishes in Orange County, 
 to begin life in a new country — in other words, to go "West." The 
 particular "West" selected was the still log-cabin frontier lying be- 
 tween Lake Cayuga and Owasco in New York. Perhaps the natural 
 beauty of the region enticed the young man; but there was an even 
 more romantic explanation. Seward had fallen deeply in love with 
 Frances Miller, daughter of Judge Elijah Miller, the foremost lawyer 
 of Auburn. The girl was a schoolmate of Seward's sister at Miss Wil- 
 lard's Academy in Troy and, about 1822, came to Florida for a visit 
 at the Seward home. Seward believed that he could make better prog- 
 ress with the widowed father — the girl was quickly committed — if 
 the prospective son-in-law planned to live permanently near the pa- 
 ternal home. The plan succeeded perfectly; Judge Miller made his 
 son-in-law his partner, and the trio, Judge Miller, Frances, and "Henry," 
 lived a most harmonious life, for many years, under the same roof. 
 Mrs. Seward was an educated girl, intelligent and charming, with a 
 moral fervor on certain questions, especially slavery, that strongly in- 
 fluenced her husband at critical times. She became his closest adviser 
 in every important decision. And Seward's rapid success as a lawyer, 
 the political honors that in rapid succession came his way, and his genial 
 companionship naturally made him a favorite with his father-in-law. 
 At about the same time that Seward fixed upon politics as the most 
 entertaining phase of American life, he decided on two other desirable 
 spheres of conduct. A citizen having any regard for salvation, in this 
 world or the next, should join one of the two major political parties 
 and also some well-established church. He had no taste for innovation 
 in either mundane or spiritual concerns. In fulfillment of the latter re- 
 solve, he allied with the Episcopal communion — an allegiance which 
 was maintained steadily, though not demonstratively or fanatically, to 
 the end of his days. A choice in the more worldly field did not prove 
 so easy. For the first twenty-five years of Seward's life, only one politi- 
 cal party really prevailed in the United States. Seward was born a few 
 months after Thomas Jefferson hitched his horse and ostentatiously 
 walked, unescorted by military and civil pomp, to the new Capitol, still 
 smelling of fresh mortar, where John Marshall administered the presi- 
 dential oath. The Federal Party had disappeared under a blizzard of 
 adverse ballots, never to rise again, and the next twenty-four years of 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 13 
 
 Jefferson-Aiadison-Munroe supremacy offered a spectacle of one-party 
 rule almost as complete as that which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy 
 attained a century afterward. Seward attached himself as a stripling to 
 this Jeffersonian phalanx, then known as the "Republican" Party. 
 He had had the traditional young American's admiration for the 
 Declaration of Independence. Still, certain things in Jefferson's creed 
 he could not accept. For example, he did not like those Virginia and 
 Kentucky Resolutions, setting forth the doctrines of Nullification and 
 Secession, ultimately doomed to cause such universal havoc. But about 
 the time that Seward cast his first presidential vote, in 1824, a new light 
 was dawning in the east. The United States, like its political parent 
 England, is by nature a two-party country with plentiful family quar- 
 rels and factional eviscerations, and by the time Andrew Jackson, 
 Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams were engaged in a death grap- 
 ple for the great prize in 1824, signs of an inevitable bifurcation had 
 appeared. The long-entrenched Jeffersonian cohorts had split into 
 two fairly defined groups — one tracing descent to the still living patri- 
 arch, known as Democratic-Republicans, the other calling themselves 
 National Republicans. When the latter body succeeded, in 1824, in 
 placing in the White House that acrid Puritan, John Quincy Adams, it 
 really assumed the proportions of a second great political party. Young 
 Seward became an eager follower of the righteous New Englander. He 
 stumped for Adams in Cayuga County, prepared an address for De 
 Witt Clinton, the National Republican candidate for governor of New 
 York — still printed in Seward's Works — and also won his first laurels 
 in an occupation that soon made him indispensable — that of ghost 
 writer of speeches and resolutions for less literate defenders of correct 
 principles. One of these efforts gave him fame — an address denounc- 
 ing the Albany regency, a group of insiders who controlled the Demo- 
 cratic-Republican stronghold, which in 1824 and for several years after- 
 ward constituted a political machine whose main mission was the 
 advancement of the presidential aspirations — ultimately successful — of 
 Martin Van Buren. Seward had every reason to feel content with this, 
 his first participation in state and national politics. Both his candidate 
 for governor of New York and his candidate for President of the United 
 States, John Quincy Adams, were projected into office as the outcome 
 of what a historian of New York calls a "political tornado." By 1832, 
 the National Republicans, solidified as a great and strong second party, 
 proudly took to themselves the old cognomen of English Liberals, and, 
 as Whigs, for the next twenty years divided the allegiance of the Ameri- 
 can electorate. 
 Seward joined the Whig Party and remained with it as long as the 
 
14 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 party itself endured. Herein he illustrated, in his own course, the sec- 
 ond of his tenaciously held principles. Seward remained all his days an 
 unswerving partisan. Anyone desiring to influence public life and to 
 advance great causes, he insisted, must do it as a member of one of 
 the two majority parties. Select the aggregation in which you believe, 
 and stick to it through thick and thin. Never attempt the promotion 
 of reforms by organizing or joining third parties; that was the one sure 
 way of getting nowhere and defeating any purpose dear to your heart. 
 "My duty," he said afterward in the time of his political maturity, "is 
 to promote the welfare, interest and happiness of the people of the 
 United States, and I hold that I can do so in no effectual way by going 
 alone and independently. That is always the error of schismatics." 
 Herein we are brought face to face with the question that constantly 
 arises in reviewing Seward's career: to what extent was it directed by 
 an unselfish idealism, and to what by personal ambition? For while it is 
 true that he could set forth, ably enough, this philosophy of party- 
 loyalty, it is also true that advancement in public office could be most 
 expeditiously achieved by keeping strictly within the purlieus of the 
 machine. Seward shocked his admirers once by an address to young 
 men, advising them all "to join a political party — it doesn't much mat- 
 ter which" — an impartial attitude which at first smacks of cynicism, 
 but was certainly not so intended, for Seward meant that causes in 
 which one believed could be accomplished by a great popular political 
 organization and that either of them, if dominated by the right kind of 
 citizens, could be welded into a compact citizenry working for the 
 public good. At the time of Seward's remark, for example, the anti- 
 slavery elements were struggling for the control of both the Demo- 
 cratic and the Whig Party, an effort which failed in both quarters, but 
 the result was the ultimate coming together of all antislavery followings 
 in one earnest amalgamation that did accomplish the reform. 
 
 Perhaps Seward's allegiance to this belief reflected his own experi- 
 ence. In his political adolescence Seward did work as a third-party man 
 — and this as participant in one of the most absurd partisan develop- 
 ments in American history. In September 1826, one William Morgan 
 was abducted from a jail in Canandaigua, New York, in which he had 
 been confined on a trumped-up charge, and surreptitiously carried to 
 parts unknown. That he had been drowned in the Niagara River was 
 the common belief; the mystery of his disappearance, however, has 
 never been solved. "Where is Morgan?" was the question that for years 
 stirred the state of New York — a question always addressed to mem- 
 bers of the various Masonic orders. Morgan had for years belonged to 
 this secret society, but a short time before his exit had repudiated his 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 15 
 
 old-time fraternal associates, and had written a book — published some 
 time after his vanishing — "exposing" the whole Masonic brotherhood 
 as an organization which, unless it were checked, would undermine and 
 destroy the American nation. The hysterical excitement this proceed- 
 ing gave rise to can hardly be imagined. Beginning in western New 
 York, the anti-Masonic fury extended to the eastern section, then 
 moved into Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania; the thunderous 
 denunciation with which most pulpits raged against this ancient insti- 
 tution resembled somewhat the ecclesiastical crusade a century after- 
 ward against the liquor trade. A political party that quickly came into 
 existence for the purpose of exterminating Freemasonry made astonish- 
 ing progress. In 1827 it elected five senators and seventeen assembly- 
 men in New York. A year or two afterward, it elected a governor and 
 a majority of the legislature in Vermont; it achieved marked successes 
 in other states, and in 1830 the new party held a national convention in 
 Philadelphia, nominating for President William Wirt, one of the most 
 eminent Americans of the time. 
 
 Seward, despite his antagonism to third parties, joined this one, at 
 first rather surreptitiously, acting as its secret penman in the produc- 
 tion of platforms and addresses, beginning in 1828, when he attended 
 the Antimasonic state convention at Albany; and became a delegate 
 from western New York to the national assemblage in Philadelphia. 
 To just what extent his allegiance represented fervent opposition to 
 Freemasonry, and to what extent he was tempted by it as a quick road 
 to public office, students of his career are not agreed. His brief associa- 
 tion with the party — it virtually passed from the scene in 1832 — is 
 mainly interesting for the two public men with which it brought the 
 young man in close communion. For the Antimasonic agitation made 
 Seward the friend of the two public characters whom he revered 
 above all others in American public life. Both Thurlow Weed and John 
 Quincy Adams became Antimasons of a sort, and Seward, on this di- 
 gression from a straight political path, found them most congenial 
 fellows. The fact that Seward had a conscience so flexible that it could 
 adopt Thurlow Weed and Quincy Adams as the two gods of his po- 
 litical idolatry tells much of the man. To the respectable citizen of that 
 time it would seem like bowing down simultaneously to Satan and the 
 angel Gabriel. No two men more unlike have figured upon the Ameri- 
 can stage. Adams was a man of fine intellect, dour temperament and 
 manners, unselfish principle, and idealistic purpose; Thurlow Weed 
 was a leader of nimble wit, genial, lovable personality, and utter un- 
 scrupulousness, so far as politics were concerned, in aim and method. 
 In the pursuits of party ends, Weed saw only one issue 'at stake — public 
 
16 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 office for his henchmen; other matters, such as the public interest, occu- 
 pied a minor place in his purview. New York had known political 
 bosses before Weed's ascendancy, but hardly one who had constructed 
 a machine so selfish in its purpose and so well oiled in its articulation. 
 By all accounts he was the ablest spoilsman who had thus far appeared 
 in the state whose politics, in the words of Seward's other guardian 
 angel, John Quincy Adams, were "the devil's own incomprehensibles." 
 
 The son of a shiftless farmer who occasionally spent periods in the 
 debtors' prison, Weed grew up with almost no schooling, starting to 
 earn his living as a child of eight as assistant to a blacksmith and ris- 
 ing, at eleven, to an apprenticeship as printer's devil; at thirty-three he 
 was a full-fledged editor, proprietor of the Albany Evening Journal. 
 This paper — still in existence — he established as an organ of the Anti- 
 masonic movement, serving as reporter, editor, frequently proofreader 
 and pressman, incidentally finding time to perform his duties as a 
 member of the New York legislature — almost the only public respon- 
 sibility which Weed ever assumed. All this time he was a sprightly 
 party worker — rapidly building up a machine of officeholders, large 
 and small, with which for the next thirty years he dominated the Anti- 
 masonic and subsequently the Whig and Republican Parties. The spoils 
 system incarnate, Weed cared nothing for official gold braid himself, 
 leaving such gewgaws to faithful followers who really coveted them, 
 as did Seward; at a time when his autocratic control gave him the pick 
 of all the jobs in the state, Weed accepted only that of state printer 
 — the least ornamental, but the one that yielded the largest money re- 
 turn. There are no indications that Weed used his power to accumulate 
 fortune for himself, but for party and friends his lack of scruple knew 
 no bounds. Bribery at the polls, the purchase and sale of legislators, 
 were things he regarded as normal and, indeed, inescapable in the con- 
 duct of public affairs. Almost any trick that would advance his par- 
 tisan purpose he unhesitatingly put to work. Just before the election of 
 1828, at the height of the Antimasonic fury, a drowned body appeared 
 on the surface of the Niagara River, not far from the accepted scene 
 of Morgan's disappearance. Naturally this macabre object developed 
 into a campaign issue, the Antimasons insisting that it was the mur- 
 dered Morgan, the other side just as fiercely scorning such an identifica- 
 tion. "It's a good enough Morgan until after the election" — such was 
 the comment attributed to Weed, an observation that followed the 
 great Boss to the end of his days, despite his denials. The words seemed 
 so perfectly to express Weed's politics that he never lived them down. 
 
 What can be thought of the principles of a young man — Seward 
 was in his middle twenties when the association began — who picked 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 17 
 
 out Thurlow Weed as his lodestar in politics and followed him for the 
 next fifty years? Affection explains, in part, this useful loyalty. For 
 the intimacy that began in Antimasonic days was as much personal as 
 political. Only four years separated the two in age, Weed being the 
 elder; both liked fishing and the out-of-doors, both were given to 
 travel, and both had a passion for political intrigue. Thus they became 
 good companions, went on journeys and vacations together; when 
 Seward was in Albany they dined together constantly and usually spent 
 their evenings in converse and smoke. In popular speech the dominant 
 faction in New York State was always described as the "Seward- 
 Weed" or "Weed-Seward" machine. Perhaps one reason for Seward's 
 admiration was that, at any rate in the earlier time, his political concep- 
 tions did not differ particularly from those of this, his other self. No 
 one ever accused Seward of dishonesty or corruption in the grosser 
 sense, but he accepted readily enough the pursuit of office, and the 
 division of spoils exclusively among party workers, as indispensable to 
 party politics. He also admired Weed's brain power and managerial 
 genius. That supreme talent impressed many of the foremost men of 
 the day. According to Horace Greeley, Thurlow Weed was "the great- 
 est man we have left, Seward not excepted." Even Samuel Bowles, in 
 1860, described his fellow journalist as "a great man — one of the most 
 remarkable men of our time. . . . He is cool, calculating, a man of ex- 
 pedients, who boasts that for thirty years he has not in political affairs 
 let his heart outweigh his judgment." Still another reason impelled 
 Seward to attach his fortunes to this consummate cavalier. Despite Mr. 
 Bowles's qualification, an element of selflessness entered into Weed's 
 relations with Seward. From the day of their first meeting the bril- 
 liant young man's advancement in public life seemed to have become 
 his chief reason for existence. Weed guarded the Seward career as a 
 hen does its chicks. Hardly had he landed him in one office before he 
 began laying plans for another. To Weed political intrigue was the 
 finest of the fine arts, and in this spirit he deliberately molded the man 
 of Auburn, designing him to be his ultimate masterpiece. He made 
 Seward state legislator, then governor, then United States Senator, all 
 these offices being merely gradations in what Weed planned for many 
 years as the splendid climax. His failure to place the crown of the 
 Presidency on his protege's head broke the old man's heart — for by 
 1860 Weed had become a tall, stately, white-haired, venerable figure, 
 one of the handsomest and most distinguished, at least to outward view, 
 of the politicians of this time. 
 
 The first attempt to make Seward governor failed, as noted above, 
 but in 1838, at the age of thirty-seven, Seward drove William L. Marcy 
 
18 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 from that commanding post and remained in it for the next four years. 
 This quadrennium forms an important one in the history of state and 
 nation. On the issue for which his predecessor, Marcy, has become so 
 notorious — "To the victors belong the spoils" — Seward's administra- 
 tion was quite as ravenous as the preceding one, Thurlow Weed stand- 
 ing constantly at the young governor's elbow to assist in the noble 
 business. To find fault with Seward on this ground may be rather cap- 
 tious, for few men, even the most politically devout, saw any sin in 
 the Roman proscriptions that accompanied each rotation in party con- 
 trol. Reform of the Spoils System was an emotion of a later, more 
 squeamish era. Two public issues figured largely in the new administra- 
 tion; these two may be taken as a portrait of Seward in his two antago- 
 nistic phases — in his Thurlow Weed and his John Quincy Adams 
 characters. Both questions had much to do with shaping the Seward 
 career in the national field. 
 
 In the eighteen-thirties and -forties, the foreign-born, especially Irish 
 and German immigrants, were every day making their influence felt in 
 politics. The antagonisms that were, in a few years, to give rise to the 
 American, or Know-Nothing Party, were already stirring in the breasts 
 of many of the "old American" element. A large proportion of im- 
 migrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, and this fact par- 
 ticularly frightened those conservatives who stood in mortal terror of 
 popish aggression. The school question in New York now for the first 
 time raised its head. In those days, as now, the Catholic hierarchy in- 
 sisted that education, above all in the primary grades, should be its 
 exclusive province, and resented the fact that children of Catholic 
 families, when they received any religious instruction at all in the pub- 
 lic schools, were subjected to Protestant ways of thought. The demand 
 that money for public education be distributed to schools conducted 
 by various religious denominations was the practical form the contro- 
 versy assumed then, as it has ever since. The story, so far as it affects 
 Seward, cannot be related in detail; it is enough to say that, in general, 
 the new governor officially sympathized with the Catholic contention. 
 He and Archbishop Hughes of New York became good friends. 
 Seward's first message to the legislature contained one sentence that 
 blew the smoldering fire of religious controversy into a blaze. Speak- 
 ing of the inadequate instruction given children of the foreign born, 
 the new governor wrote: "I do not hesitate to recommend the estab- 
 lishment of schools in which they may be instructed by teachers speak- 
 ing the same language and professing the same faith." Probably no 
 single sentence in all the several volumes of Seward's Works had a more 
 fatal influence — justly or unjustly — upon his career. In the opinion 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 19 
 
 of a diagnostician so expert as Alexander K. McClure, these few words 
 prevented Seward from becoming President of the United States. That 
 they aroused to fury citizens of old native origin who regarded the 
 American English-speaking public schools, in which religion was not 
 taught but reserved for the institution — the Church — especially estab- 
 lished for that purpose, as the one solid foundation stone of the Ameri- 
 can fabric may be taken for granted. Seward increased the unpopularity 
 he had aroused in these conservative quarters by further demonstrations. 
 He manifested an intense hostility to England; as governor he became 
 the favorite orator on St. Patrick's Day and other anti-John Bull dem- 
 onstrations. The time was one of what the English insisted on calling 
 "Irish agitation," and in gatherings assembled in the interests of Irish 
 reform Seward also took a leading part. However sincere the brilliant 
 young governor may have been in all this — and at least in his dislike 
 of England he was sincere — no public man could take such a stand 
 without being accused of political motives. There were too many votes 
 to be cultivated for him to escape charges of expediency. From the day 
 of his governorship to his death Seward was the great hero of the 
 foreign-born — a fact that caused one part of the population to regard 
 him as the most enlightened of statesmen and another to assail him as a 
 demagogue who was betraying American institutions to advance his 
 political fortunes. 
 
 The other conspicuous event in Seward's four years at Albany also 
 aroused excited controversy, but this followed sectional and not re- 
 ligious lines. Slavery, in the late eighteen-thirties, was daily assuming 
 greater importance as the one pressing question of the time. Seward's 
 early association with the institution in his father's home had displayed 
 it in its benign aspects, but in the summer of 1835, Seward and his wife 
 took one of those long carriage drives which formed their chief out- 
 door diversion — this time through Pennsylvania and Virginia. Four 
 years before the man who was to prove his successful political rival, at 
 that time an elongated flatboatman of New Salem, Illinois, had made his 
 celebrated trip down the Sangamon and Mississippi Rivers, finally land- 
 ing his cargo of hogs and produce in the market place of New Orleans. 
 On these voyages, near enough in time to give point to their observa- 
 tion, the two future statesmen had their first intimate view of that labor 
 system which was to shape the careers of both. Certain recorded im- 
 pressions reflect fundamental traits in the two men. The Shenandoah 
 Valley disclosed the darker phase of slavery on every hand, but it was 
 mainly the degenerate Kultur of the country — the run-xlown farms, 
 the unpainted, ramshackle homesteads, the poorly clad and hungry- 
 looking white gentry — that chiefly impressed Seward as the economic 
 
20 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 fruits of an outworn institution. "An exhausted soil," he wrote, "old 
 and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and, in every respect, 
 an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region 
 through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live. 
 Such has been the effect of slavery. And yet the people are unconscious, 
 not merely of the cause of the evil, but are in a great degree ignorant 
 that other portions of the country enjoy greater prosperity." Contrast 
 this observation, which emphasized the economic wrong in slavery, 
 with the familiar description of Lincoln's visit to New Orleans as set 
 forth in Herndon. The sight of a slave auction, especially the exhibition 
 of a young, comely mulatto girl to a crowd of coarse and brutal bid- 
 ders, aroused all the wrath of the young man's fiery soul — Lincoln was 
 only twenty-two at the time. '"By God, boys," Herndon quotes him as 
 saying to his companions, "let's get away from this. If I ever get a 
 chance to hit at this, I'll hit it hard." 5 The emotion attributed to Lin- 
 coln was adequately felt on this Shenandoah drive by Frances Seward, 
 whose nerves were unstrung by the sight of Negroes chained in gangs 
 like criminals, of naked Negro boys tied together like puppies and 
 driven to a horse trough for watering. Things like these aroused in 
 Seward's wife, the gentlest of human beings, a burning hatred of the 
 evil, and from that moment she was an influence at his side, constantly 
 stimulating his hostility to the encroachments of the slave power. 
 
 It is therefore not strange that Seward's several face-to-face conflicts 
 with the South on this issue gave him national reputation. As a candi- 
 date for governor, however, his attitude proved far from satisfactory 
 to the growing abolition sentiment in New York State. His replies to 
 three questions addressed to him by Gerrit Smith and Judge William 
 Jay, leaders of the antislavery forces, again illustrated the Seward habit 
 of expediency, rather than disinterested frankness, in meeting public 
 problems. Was the Whig candidate for governor — such was the first 
 item in the questionnaire — in favor of jury trial for Negroes charged 
 with being fugitive slaves? Seward replied to this directly and satisfac- 
 torily: Yes, he was. In those days, New York permitted slaveholders to 
 bring their "servants" into the state and keep them as slaves, provided 
 the sojourn did not exceed nine months. Thus this great commonwealth, 
 to the disgust of advanced abolitionists, was, with a limitation, itself a 
 protector of the hated thing. New York was a favorite vacation ground 
 of Southern cotton planters and their families, especially such watering 
 
 5 Herndon, W. H., and Weik, J. W., Abraham Lincoln. D. Appleton & Co., 1892. 
 I, 67. Herndon says that he obtained the story from John Hanks and Lincoln him- 
 self but most Lincoln scholars dismiss it as legendary. For a discussion of its 
 doubtful authenticity see Paul Angle's edition of Herndon and Weik, Life of 
 Lincoln. Albert and Charles Boni, 1930, p. 64. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 21 
 
 places as Niagara Falls and Saratoga Springs; Southern women always 
 brought their Negro maids and their husbands their Negro body 
 servants. Was Seward in favor of repealing that law? The candidate 
 did not seem to be; such a repeal, he insisted, would be an act of "inhos- 
 pitality" to the Southern brethren. At that time New York, and prac- 
 tically all Northern states, excluded — this was the practical effect of 
 the election laws — free Negroes from the franchise. Would Seward, 
 as governor, work for the repeal of all disqualifications based on "com- 
 plexion"? The reply seemed ambiguous and hedging. Seward, vic- 
 torious at the polls, thus entered office with no approval from anti- 
 slavery forces but after a few months became their favorite public 
 character. 
 
 In September 1839, Virginia demanded by requisition three black 
 men, at the time safe from its clutches in New York, who had promoted 
 the escape of a slave. Seward refused to surrender the culprits, on the 
 ground that the "felony" of which they had been accused was not 
 recognized as a crime by the laws of New York, and for two years a 
 lively, ill-natured correspondence followed between the astute gov- 
 ernor of New York and several executives of Virginia, in which the 
 constitutional rights involved were discussed to exhaustion. Virginia 
 passed retaliatory laws against New York — offering to repeal them 
 when the accused black men were given up; other Southern states, 
 especially Mississippi and South Carolina, participated in something re- 
 sembling a sympathetic strike against the Empire State. Seward remained 
 adamant. It was not only his firmness, but the brilliancy of his letters 
 that aroused general enthusiasm in the North. "I cannot," he wrote, "to 
 save the commerce of the state, or even the peace of the country, sub- 
 scribe to the faith prescribed to me. I cannot believe that a being of 
 human substance, form and image — endowed with the faculties, pro- 
 pensities and passions common to our race, and having the same ultimate 
 destiny, can, by the force of any human constitution and laws, be con- 
 verted into a chattel or a thing, in which another being like himself can 
 have property." In these words appears the first trace of that "law 
 higher than the constitution" for which Seward subsequently became 
 famous; on strict, constitutional interpretation probably Virginia had 
 the right in the argument, but the outcome of the matter was that 
 Seward, perhaps a little to his own surprise, found himself an antislavery 
 leader in the national field. The abolitionists even tried to nominate 
 him for President in 1840 — an offer Seward tactfully put aside. 
 
 Thus Seward remained true to his expressed dislike of third parties; 
 he preferred the private life that was his portion from 1842, when his 
 governorship expired, until 1 848, when his career as Senator began, to 
 
22 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 leadership of any such assortment of "schismatics." In this interim, 
 however, his fame steadily grew, both as a lawyer and as a political 
 influence. He made a superb jury pleader; his defense of the Negro 
 Freeman, unquestionably guilty of murder, but just as certainly a hope- 
 less imbecile, aroused interest abroad, especially in England; Gladstone 
 told Charles Sumner that Seward's defense of Freeman was "the finest 
 forensic effort in the English language." 6 He also defended — without 
 fee — several fugitive slaves and added to his reputation by speeches, 
 usually published and distributed in great quantities, on the slavery 
 issue, every day becoming more intense. When the Democratic ascend- 
 ancy of the forties came to an end in 1848, and the New York legisla- 
 ture again elected a Whig majority, there was no doubt as to who 
 would be chosen to the vacant seat in the United States Senate. By this 
 time Seward- Weed had gained such power in national politics that the 
 choice of Zachary Taylor as presidential candidate was laid at their 
 doors. The Whigs of New York really decided the question — and 
 Seward and Weed ruled the New York organization. The selection of 
 Taylor illustrates again Seward's twofold political character. "You 
 made General Harrison President," John Quincy Adams said to Seward 
 at their last interview in 1847. "You can make the next President. Will 
 you give us a man who is not for slavery? Tell me that. Assure me of 
 that, and I shall be prepared to make my testament." The slavery issue 
 had reached a new crisis in 1848, as a result of the new domain added 
 to the United States as spoils of the Mexican War — hence Mr. Adams's 
 almost deathbed injunction. Instead of the antislavery man Adams de- 
 manded, Seward and Weed, by their control of the New York delega- 
 tion, awarded the nomination to a man who knew nothing of public 
 affairs, had belonged to no political party, was a Southerner and a 
 slaveholder, and had never shown anything but orthodox Southern 
 views on the prevailing question. In the Mexican War he had led the 
 armies to victory, and had become a popular hero. Taylor was thus the 
 most available vote-catcher in sight, the presidential candidate who 
 could carry New York State for the Whigs and elect a legislature 
 which would send William H. Seward to the United States Senate and 
 to this expedient end he unquestionably owed his nomination and 
 election. 
 
 In the ten years that followed — the turbulent period of the 1850 
 Compromise measures, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Repeal of the 
 Missouri Compromise, the struggles in bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott 
 
 6 Despite Seward's plea, Freeman was convicted by the jury. The Supreme 
 Court, however, granted a new trial, but the maniac died in prison before it was 
 held. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 23 
 
 decision, and the organization of the Republican Party — Seward grew 
 to be one of the leaders of the antislavery cause, but again in a some- 
 what zigzag fashion, now making a speech that would set the nation 
 aflame, then again trimming his course to the political winds, always 
 having in view the ultimate prize of the White House. Seward was a 
 man of fine, even exalted instincts, who at first naturally put himself 
 on the right, unselfish course; after this had once been done, and the 
 adverse effects on his political ambitions appeared, he was too inclined 
 to modify, and qualify, and seek to accommodate his views to both 
 sides. Perhaps it was the malign influence of Thurlow Weed which 
 explained this tendency to face both ways. Certainly that decade from 
 1850 to 1860 tested a man's idealism. The fact that such subservient 
 double-dealers as Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan reached the 
 White House would seem to indicate that any open defiance of the 
 South on slavery extension meant political extinction. In Weed's mind 
 the attitude that gathered in the most votes was the one that Seward 
 should pursue. The outspokenness of many of his favorite's addresses 
 alarmed the veteran campaigner. Seward's speech on the Compromise 
 measures of 1850 might be hailed even by the Garrisonians, but it 
 aroused Weed's misgivings. When Seward climaxed his first Senate 
 speech by a declaration that there was a "higher law" than the Constitu- 
 tion to which the enemies of slavery could appeal, the supreme manipu- 
 lator of caucuses and elections took genuine fright. Seward was perhaps 
 winning fame in antislavery circles, but was he not destroying his 
 chances for the Presidency? A certain amount of negrophilism to 
 please a few cranks in New England and the Middle West would be 
 quite desirable, but to attack Daniel Webster to his face — as this reck- 
 less new Senator had done, for Seward's eleventh of March speech was 
 intended as a direct reply to the more gentle handling of the fugitive 
 slave question with which Webster had delighted the South and enraged 
 the North four days previously — to challenge the scowling John C. 
 Calhoun on what was almost the dying South Carolinian's last appear- 
 ance in the upper chamber — "a dangerous young man," he called 
 Seward — this was a little more independence of thought and rather 
 more moral courage than the nicely balancing Weed thought appro- 
 priate in a statesman already favorably looked upon as a promising 
 candidate for the highest office. Perhaps Weed's moderating influence 
 explains Seward's vacillating career for the next ten years, though that 
 Senator himself cannot be entirely acquitted, for ambition marched 
 side by side with moral enthusiasm in marking out his pathway. Thus 
 Seward stayed faithful to the Whig Party as long as any signs of vitality 
 remained in that discredited body, although the one apparent fact from 
 
24 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 1840 until the end, in 1856, was that that timid aggregation would never 
 meet flatly the overwhelming issue of the day, but with eyes fixed upon 
 the election booths would year after year follow a temporizing pro- 
 gram. The searcher of Seward's record in that period will find plenty 
 , of things to admire, and plenty of things to condemn. Strong antislavery 
 man as he appeared to be, Seward left to Salmon Chase the main burden 
 of opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act; on the other hand, he made a 
 vigorous speech denouncing the specific repeal of the Missouri Com- 
 promise. There were other outgivings in which the course of Southern 
 statesmen was denounced in phrases that resounded in all sections of 
 the country. 
 
 The most famous was the "irrepressible conflict" address of October 
 25, 1858. It is interesting, however, that Abraham Lincoln, just four 
 months before in Springfield, on his nomination for the Illinois senator- 
 ship, had made a speech expressing the same ideas; one wonders 
 whether the national acclaim raised by Lincoln's declaration did not 
 inspire Seward's emulation, perhaps unconscious plagiarism. 
 
 The two orations have an interest for the student of literary style; no 
 comparison could more eloquently bring out the difference in these 
 two men. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that 
 this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. 
 I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house 
 to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
 one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest 
 the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in 
 the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will 
 push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old 
 as well as new, North as well as South." Compare this with Seward's 
 four months afterward: "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing 
 and enduring forces and it means that the United States must and will, 
 sooner or later, become either entirely a slave holding nation or entirely 
 a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina 
 and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free 
 labor, or else the rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New 
 York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and 
 to the products of slaves and Boston and New York become once more 
 markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men." From the standpoint 
 of literature there is little comparison between the quiet majesty of 
 Lincoln's homely words and the more bookish, more labored phrase- 
 ology of Seward, but it is significant that in this address Seward boldly 
 cast his fortunes on the side of slavery restriction and that, in doing so, 
 he followed the lead of a previously disregarded new antagonist already 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 25 
 
 looming in the public mind as the possible Republican candidate in 
 1860. 
 
 Seward's backing and filling all through this decade caused him to 
 experience the usual fate of trimmers, and to become unpopular with 
 both sides. The South, still smarting from his tilt with Virginia some 
 years before, was roused to fury by the "irrepressible conflict" speech, 
 though it had not been particularly disturbed by Lincoln's milder, and 
 even more forcible, expression of the same idea. The great Seward, of 
 course, was looked upon as the more important man, and therefore the 
 one to be feared. A humorous, but still instructive incident of a feverish 
 time was an advertisement published in a Richmond newspaper a few 
 months after the "irrepressible conflict" speech, offering a reward of 
 twenty-five dollars for "the heads of the following traitors" — among 
 them being Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Henry 
 Ward Beecher, Joshua Giddings, and many other notorious antislavery 
 leaders. "For the head of William H. Seward," however, this Virginian 
 would raise the emolument to five hundred dollars. It is significant of 
 the little hostility — or perhaps the little notice — aroused in the South 
 by Lincoln that his name did not appear, even in the twenty-five-dollar 
 appraisement of "traitors," although the list was a long and inclusive 
 one. Unpopular as the genial, kindly Seward had become with slave- 
 owners, he was almost as obnoxious to the more extreme slavery restric- 
 tionists north of the Ohio and the Potomac. The bloc of senatorial and 
 cabinet allies who were destined to make miserable his life in Lincoln's 
 cabinet — Sumner, Hale, Fessenden, Wade, Chase, George W. Julian, 
 and others — was formed in the few years preceding the Civil War. 
 These men, extremists on the slavery issue — they figured in much sub- 
 sequent history as "radicals" — regarded Seward as opportunistic, as 
 completely under the thumb of one of the shrewdest and most unprin- 
 cipled politicians of the day, and as a candidate whose views were uni- 
 formly tempered to accord with the political breezes. Seward's strange 
 behavior in the few weeks following the murderous bludgeoning of 
 Sumner by Bully Brooks of South Carolina made a bad impression — for, 
 unlike most Northerners, Seward did not seem particularly outraged 
 and almost held aloof from the attempts of his Republican colleagues 
 to obtain something resembling redress. 
 
 After the proslavery Democrats, with Whig support, had triumphed 
 in their Kansas-Nebraska legislation, the eyes of all antislavery elements 
 were turned towards Seward as the leader in the organization of a new 
 antislavery party. But there was no response. Seward would take no 
 part in the Republican Party that was coming into being in his own 
 New York State. When old man Blair in 1855, sent him an invita- 
 
26 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 tion to join in a meeting at his Maryland home, Silver Spring, to dis- 
 cuss the formation of a new party, Seward sent a courteous refusal. 
 When the meeting came together in Pittsburgh, in February 1856, for 
 definite organization, Seward declined to be a delegate. That the New 
 Yorker always offered plausible reasons for his coyness is true; still his 
 hesitating mood did not enhance his standing as an unselfish champion 
 of the antislavery cause. When, as the time approached for the Phila- 
 delphia convention of 1856, it became evident that the Whig Party was 
 dead, past all hope of resurrection, Seward not only joined the new 
 organization scrambled together under the title "Republican," but 
 looked forth longingly to being its first candidate for the Presidency. 
 Weed, however, held him back; the candidate of 1856, that wise old 
 gentleman insisted, was sure to be defeated; he was holding Seward in 
 reserve for 1860, and did not wish his candidacy to be tainted with a 
 great failure. That Seward was profoundly disappointed when John C. 
 Fremont received that honor his letters to his most confidential friend 
 — his wife — make clear. "Greeley has struck hands with enemies of 
 mine and sacrificed me for the good of the cause, to be obtained by the 
 nomination of a more available candidate and Weed has concurred and 
 demanded my acquiescence. ... I shall submit with better grace than 
 others would." He thought that the proper course for him now was 
 "withdrawal from public and political life, at the close of the present 
 session of Congress." Nearly twenty years afterward Seward and Weed, 
 both old men, were driving up Broadway, New York, past Union 
 Square. "If it hadn't been for you, Weed," Seward remarked, pointing 
 to a bronze statue, "I would be up on that pedestal, instead of Abraham 
 Lincoln"; this was a reference to Weed's blocking his nomination in 
 1856, for Seward always declared — a conviction* in which few agreed 
 with him — that, had he received the prize instead of the unhappy 
 Fremont, he would have been elected, with consequences very different 
 to the history of his country. 
 
 Disappointed as Seward was in 1856, his chagrin was slight compared 
 to that which overwhelmed him four years afterward. That he was to 
 be the destined leader of his party in 1860 was not only his own con- 
 viction and that of Weed, but of nine out of ten Americans. What other 
 Republican compared with him in eminence in statesmanship and 
 world-wide reputation? Salmon Portland Chase, it is true, towered 
 above most Republican leaders; there was Edward Bates, of Missouri, 
 Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, a certain Caleb B. Smith of Indiana, 
 William L. Dayton of New Jersey, and several other "favorite sons" — 
 the expression was already in use — each with his own noisy company 
 of boomers. None of these had anything except a professional follow- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 27 
 
 ing of state politicians. The news from Illinois, where several news- 
 papers and local leaders were talking of the ungainly creature who, in 
 a series of debates, had lain low Stephen A. Douglas, the man up to that 
 time regarded as the ablest platform antagonist in the nation, was not 
 especially disturbing. Even when Lincoln, in February 1860, accepted 
 an invitation of New York Brahmins and appeared at Cooper Union, 
 in ill-fitting clothes, with hair askew, and delivered a speech which at 
 once marked him as the most forcible champion of the antislavery 
 cause, Seward still maintained his serenity. The only emotion the new 
 portent inspired was that of irritation. One day in late February 1860, 
 Seward called into his senatorial office Joseph Medill, Washington cor- 
 respondent of the Chicago News and Tribune, who had most auda- 
 ciously written an article extolling Lincoln as a presidential candidate, 
 incidentally pointing out why Seward would not be an ideal selection. 
 "The article irritated Seward," wrote Medill afterward, 7 "and he took 
 occasion to see me immediately after, and 'blew me up' tremendously 
 for having disappointed him — 'gone back on him' — and preferring 
 'that prairie statesman' as he called Lincoln. He then proceeded to de- 
 clare, with much heat of temper and expression, that if he was not 
 nominated as the Republican candidate for President at the ensuing 
 convention he would shake the dust off his shoes, and retire from the 
 service of an ungrateful party for the remainder of his days. He gave 
 me to understand that he was the chief teacher of the principles of the 
 Republican party before Lincoln was known other than as a county 
 lawyer of Illinois. ... He dismissed me from his presence, saying that 
 hereafter he and I would no longer be friends, but would each go his 
 own way in the future." There was at least one other Republican who 
 would have assented to this uncomplimentary tirade, and that was Lin- 
 coln himself. At this time, the coming man did not take seriously his 
 boom, launched by his parochial admirers in Illinois; he really aspired 
 to represent Illinois in the United States Senate, and was enough of a 
 politician to understand that the association of his name with the White 
 House would be excellent publicity in his campaign for that office. 
 
 The summer of 1859 Seward spent in Europe, and the reception re- 
 ceived in all countries and from all orders of society testified to the 
 world-wide distinction his antislavery activities had brought. The al- 
 most daily letters to Mrs. Seward disclosed that the statesman was 
 human enough to relish this acclaim. "Nor can I omit to say, for this 
 once, and to yourself, and to yourself alone, that there is a recompense 
 for long years of endurance of contumely at home, in the universal 
 respect and sympathy which my poor efforts for freedom and human- 
 
 7 Bancroft, Frederick, Life of William H. Seward. Harper & Bros., 1900. I, 531. 
 
28 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ity there, have won for me here." The interest in American slavery was 
 active in all the enlightened nations of Europe; Seward's personal quali- 
 ties, his wit and social adaptability, soon made him a general favorite. 
 Incidentally, the experience proved an educational preparation for the 
 office which, although he did not realize it at the time, was soon to fall 
 to his lot; for most of the European diplomats with whom he was to 
 come to grips as foreign secretary of Lincoln's cabinet showed him 
 cordial attention. In England, Lord Palmerston entertained him at his 
 Piccadilly home, Lord Lansdowne at Lansdowne House, Lord Gran- 
 ville at Chiswick, the Duke of Sutherland at Stafford House, and Lord 
 John Russell at Pembroke Lodge. Here were several present and future 
 Prime Ministers, two in particular — Palmerston and Russell — who 
 were to cause a good deal of trouble in the few years ahead. Queen 
 Victoria was not celebrated for her interest in the heroes of democracy, 
 but Seward proved an exception. When she was informed that eti- 
 quette prevented Mr. Seward from being invited to a great royal 
 function, because he had not been introduced at court, no courts 
 having been held during his visit, the gracious lady arranged for a pri- 
 vate presentation. Louis Napoleon, Eugenie, King Victor Emmanuel, 
 Count Cavour, the Pope — Pio Nono taking this opportunity to thank 
 Seward for a helping hand in the matter of New York parochial schools, 
 and requesting that he continue the good work — there was hardly a 
 crowned head, a statesman, or a literary light who failed to do the 
 famous American honor. There was another reason besides the slavery 
 question for this interest. Everyone apparently took it for granted that 
 this affable guest was the destined next President of the United States. 
 The reception accorded the returning traveler, in disembarking in New 
 York, formed a fitting climax. A salute of one hundred guns greeted 
 his arrival. An imposing public reception was tendered by the mayor 
 and common council, and Seward's journey north to Albany and west 
 to Auburn was one long ovation. Crowds gathered at every railway 
 station, and, as Seward landed in his home town, all the main streets 
 were decorated, a multitude of inscribed banners were waving in the 
 breeze, and even the school children were given a holiday to march in 
 the procession that escorted their hero to his home. Few towns ever 
 loved a fellow citizen as Auburn loved Seward and its pride rose high 
 that morning, for it was confident that the nation was reaching out to 
 this little western New York community for the man who was to suc- 
 ceed James Buchanan in the White House. 
 
 On May 16, 1860, the day of the Chicago Convention, the citizens 
 once more assembled almost en masse. Great crowds gathered before 
 the Seward home, as many as could get in crowded the grounds, 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 29 
 
 cordially received and entertained by the affable and confident states- 
 man. A large cannon had been placed at the gateway to boom the salute 
 of triumph when the expected news, announcing Seward's nomina- 
 tion, came over the wire. Materials for bonfires, bunting for decora- 
 tions, had been prepared for celebrating fittingly the greatest day in 
 Auburn's history. How could that possibly fail to come to pass? Great 
 sections of the nation, parts of New England, all of New York, nearly 
 all the Northwest — excepting those states which, like Pennsylvania, 
 New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, had instructed their 
 delegates for eminent citizens of their own — had already spoken for 
 William H. Seward. Weed was in Chicago in charge of operations; the 
 program, as he and most other observers saw it, was evident and simple. 
 On the first ballot Seward would so outdistance all competitors that 
 most of the delegates would switch from local candidates, and cast their 
 ballots for the New Yorker. That it would be Seward on the second 
 ballot w r as the confident expectation. That certain forces were arrayed 
 in deadly opposition was no secret. In particular it was known that 
 Horace Greeley, in low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat and linen duster, 
 was in Chicago as a delegate from Oregon, industriously canvassing all 
 the delegations, telling them that Seward would not carry New York 
 and certainly not Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois; but it was be- 
 lieved that not much consideration would be shown him, for his intense 
 enmity to Seward, springing from no higher motive than revenge 
 against the "governor" and Weed for failing to satisfy his unquench- 
 able thirst for public office, was understood. Any fears of Seward ad- 
 mirers that Greeley's hostility would influence the Convention were 
 silenced when the Tribune appeared on the morning of May 18, with 
 Greeley's own statement that the opposition to Seward had not been 
 able to concentrate on any candidate and that he would therefore be 
 the nominee. The newspapers, full of accounts of the tremendous 
 cheering that greeted Seward's name, of the crowds of "irrepressibles," 
 as Seward's supporters were called, everywhere stirring up enthusiasm 
 for their favorite, increased the confidence. The first telegram, handed 
 to Seward as he was surrounded by friends, lowered no one's spirits. 
 On the first ballot Seward had received 173 V4 votes — it required 234 
 to nominate — Lincoln 102, Cameron 50Y 2 , Chase 49, Bates 48, and 
 other candidates "scattering." In a short time the telegraph messenger 
 handed Seward another envelope, containing the results of the second 
 ballot — Seward 184 ! /4, Lincoln 181, while most of the other contest- 
 ants lost ground. That tally was an ominous piece of news; it really 
 spelled Seward's doom. He had gained, but only slightly, whereas Lin- 
 coln had ascended to a point where his support nearly equalled that of 
 
30 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the leading competitor. But Seward was smiling and assured. "I shall 
 be nominated on the next ballot," he told the assembled neighbors. 
 
 Soon the messenger came running toward Seward again, handing 
 him another slip of paper. After Seward opened it and read, his face 
 turned ashen. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois had been unanimously nomi- 
 nated for President of the United States. The third ballot had given 
 Seward 180, Lincoln 23 \ l /i\ as soon as that result was announced, the 
 five Ohio delegates had changed their votes, thus giving the rail splitter 
 the needed majority. The usual scramble for the bandstand followed, 
 delegation after delegation changing its votes from Seward to Lincoln, 
 until finally William M. Evarts, the great New York lawyer who had 
 placed Seward's name in nomination, advanced to the platform and, 
 in a graceful speech, moved that the nomination of Abraham Lincoln 
 be made unanimous. The yells of men, the screams of women, the 
 salvos of cannon, the throngs of frenzied enthusiasts, inside the Con- 
 vention Hall and out, were something different from the deathlike quiet 
 that fell on Seward and the gathering on his lawn. His neighbors silently 
 dispersed, the field piece that was to boom on the expected triumph 
 was dragged away, its powder unburnt, and Auburn was like a grave- 
 yard. This condition of stunned sorrow lasted for several days. "I had 
 the rare experience," Seward wrote a friend, describing the atmosphere, 
 "of a man walking about town, after he is dead, and hearing what 
 people would say of him. I confess I was not prepared for so much real 
 grief as I heard expressed on every corner." When Seward returned to 
 Washington to resume his duties in the Senate, his friends gathered 
 around him to console, and to speak of "ingratitude" and "vindication"; 
 even those Southern Democrats with whom he had so frequently 
 clashed on the slavery question — Jefferson Davis and John Murray 
 Mason — showed friendly sympathy. To the outward world, Seward 
 maintained a dignified serenity — "He's the only cheerful person in 
 Auburn," his neighbors said — but his letters to Airs. Seward show that 
 the iron had bitten deep. "The journey and the re-appearance," he 
 wrote her from Washington, May 30, 1860, "in the character of a 
 leader deposed by my own party, in the hour of organization for 
 decisive battle, thank God are passed — and so the last of the humili- 
 ations has been endured." 
 
 Thurlow Weed, after the failure of his life's ambition, retired alone 
 to his room in the Richmond House and there burst into tears. Judge 
 David Davis and Leonard Swett, who had had charge of Lincoln's 
 campaign, sought him out. After the nomination, the Lincolnians had 
 approached the Seward forces and offered to let them name the candi- 
 date for Vice-President, but had met with a contemptuous refusal. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 31 
 
 They evidently wanted nothing further to do with the campaign. 
 Weed received Davis and Swett courteously, but coldly; the visitors 
 invited the disheartened man to call upon Mr. Lincoln on his return to 
 New York, and he agreed to consider the matter. But to representatives 
 of the state of Pennsylvania, whose swing to Lincoln on the second 
 ballot did more than anything else to determine the outcome, Weed 
 showed his disgust. "I called on Weed during the evening after the 
 nomination," wrote Alexander K. McClure, chairman of the State Com- 
 mittee, "expecting that, with all his disappointment, he would be ready 
 to co-operate for the success of the ticket. ... I found him sullen and 
 offensive in both manner and expression. He refused even to talk about 
 the contest, and intimated very broadly that Pennsylvania, having de- 
 feated Seward, could now elect Curtin and Lincoln." The Mr. Curtin 
 in question was the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, 
 who, as a delegate to Chicago, had been most outspoken in opposition 
 to Seward; McClure insisted that he, above all others, was responsible 
 for Lincoln's nomination. Curtin, also, on this same evening, made a 
 propitiatory visit to Weed. "He was very rude indeed," said Curtin 
 afterward. "You have defeated a man," said Weed, "who of all others 
 was most revered by the people and wanted as President. You and Lane 
 [candidate for governor in Indiana] want to be elected, and to elect 
 Lincoln you must elect yourselves." Curtin subsequently made a bril- 
 liant record as war governor of Pennsylvania, but Seward, all through 
 the four years, treated him, whenever the two met, with frigid for- 
 mality. Several times, in the course of the presidential campaign, Curtin 
 had occasion to write to Weed, but Weed never answered his letters. 
 A few days after the convention, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the 
 New York Times, paid a visit to Seward in Auburn. He reported to his 
 readers that there was no possibility that Seward would accept a post 
 in Lincoln's cabinet in the event of success. 
 
II 
 
 I 
 
 F SEWARD suggested in several ways Benjamin Disraeli, his chief 
 rival for ascendancy in the Republican Party might be compared to 
 Gladstone. Salmon P. Chase, like his British contemporary, was a man 
 of fine, even majestic, presence — tall, straight, massive in figure, with 
 a finely shaped head and piercing blue eyes, with features of a classic 
 regularity, and a kind of imperious manner that demanded, and usually 
 received, universal attention. This impressive outward man clothed a 
 spirit as austere and unbending as Gladstone's own. Like his British 
 exemplar, Chase was profoundly religious, and religious in ways that 
 appeal least to the modern mind. He was sanctimonious and ritualistic, 
 addicted to theology and distinctions fairly Byzantine in character, and 
 to a daily routine of prayer, sermon reading, and soul-searching intro- 
 spection. Like Gladstone, he had also intellectual tastes, facility with 
 foreign languages, ancient and modern, and was extensively read in the 
 more serious branches of literature. Similar motives inspired both men in 
 their public careers. Rigid morality, the advocacy of great principles 
 rather than the desire for high office, are virtues which their admirers 
 have attributed to both men. On the other hand, their detractors have 
 assailed them as not altogether sincere, as casuists who could always 
 persuade themselves that what they personally desired represented the 
 best interests of the state, and as proud, vain, selfish, and ambitious for 
 distinction. In another quality attributed to Gladstone, that of changing 
 political convictions with changing times, Chase far outdistanced the 
 great English liberal. 
 
 Gladstone started life, in Macaulay's words, as the "rising hope of 
 the unbending tories" and ended as the advocate of most of the things 
 they detested, but the career of Chase discloses far more vacillations. 
 As a young man of twenty, he drafted for Quaker friends an appeal 
 requesting Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. His 
 first view of the democracy of Andrew Jackson filled him with disgust 
 for its "savage spirit." The Whig Party that came into existence in 1832 
 proved more attractive; Chase supported Harrison in 1836 and 1840, 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 33 
 
 but in 1841 made his first switch in allegiance, becoming one of the 
 organizers of the Liberty, or Abolition, Party, stumping for its candi- 
 date, James G. Birney, in 1844. Four years afterward, Chase again 
 changed, going over to the Free-Soilers, supporting for President that 
 Martin Van Buren whom he had previously assailed as "cold, selfish, 
 base, and faithless." The next year, 1849, found Chase enrolled as a 
 Democrat, having been elected to the United States Senate from Ohio 
 by a Democratic-Free-Soil coalition. In 1852 he went back to the Free- 
 Soilers, endorsing for President that forlornest of all forlorn hopes, the 
 Abolitionist John P. Hale. In 1855, the resilient gentleman accepted a 
 nomination for governor of Ohio from the American, or "Know-Noth- 
 ing" convention, thus joining that antiforeign element of the fifties 
 against which Seward had so fiercely protested. In 1856 Chase entered 
 that new catch-all, the Republican Party, and was disappointed, like 
 Seward, in not becoming its presidential nominee. A canvass of Chase's 
 affiliations after 1860 would show the same disposition to change. That 
 he sedulously solicited the Republican nomination in 1864, in opposi- 
 tion to Lincoln, was one of the scandals of the time. In 1868, though 
 Chief Justice of the United States, Chase was openly seeking it. Even 
 in 1872, though desperately ill — he died in May 1873 —the poor man 
 was receptive for the nomination of the new Liberal Party that went 
 to the unfortunate Horace Greeley. Thus, in the forty years from 
 1832 to 1872, Chase belonged to at least nine parties or groups of parties. 
 Two facts must not be overlooked in connection with these fluctuating 
 allegiances. One is that Chase could always find most plausible reasons, 
 based on good citizenship and the public interest, for every change. 
 The other is that his personal political fortunes were involved in each 
 transition. 
 
 From these and other circumstances it would be a simple matter to 
 draw the portrait of a hypocritical self-seeker, a man with no convic- 
 tions that could not be changed when self-advantage pointed the more 
 expedient way. The same hasty criticism was made of Gladstone. Such 
 a sweeping condemnation would be unjust to both men, for Chase's 
 career discloses the truth that a man may be eaten by ambition and led 
 by it into what seem dishonorable compromises, and yet at the same 
 time pursue throughout his life one lofty purpose. Whatever may be 
 thought of the man's divagations in the pursuit of the unattainable — 
 the Presidency — there is no question that his championship of the black 
 man was sincere, even fanatical. 
 
 The fundamental spring of action throughout Chase's sixty-five years 
 of life was religion, and religion of theological type. Chase, like Glad- 
 stone, was not only a twenty-four-hour-a-day Christian and pietist, but 
 
34 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 a rigid churchman. Born in 1808, in a particularly puritanical section 
 of New Hampshire, he was marked, as a boy, for good behavior, 
 scholarly tastes, and sobriety in conduct and religious observance. As 
 such he fell into the good opinion of his uncle, Bishop Philander Chase, 
 one of the great names in the history of the American Episcopal Church. 
 Here was a hopeful, that dignitary concluded, divinely set apart for the 
 ministry. So Uncle Philander, a harsh, autocratic, determined man of 
 God, removed the promising novitiate, at the age of twelve, from his 
 mother's farm, carried him off to Worthington, Ohio — afterward to 
 Cincinnati — and proceeded to give him that severe training in books 
 and theology necessary in preparation for the destined career. Chase's 
 father — Ithamar — never a very successful man, but one of high stand- 
 ing for character and public spirit, had died three years before, finan- 
 cially ruined by the War of 1812, leaving his widow with eleven chil- 
 dren. Probably therefore the uncle's offer to take Salmon into his 
 family and educate him had come as something of a relief. Chase him- 
 self afterward wrote that he was regarded as "quite a prodigy," for, 
 although only twelve, he had already read most of Virgil, had gone 
 through a large part of the Greek testament, and resolved many propo- 
 sitions of Euclid. Though he was given to the usual diversions of a 
 New England boyhood — fishing in the Connecticut in summer, sleigh 
 riding and bobsledding in winter, and the like — the religious instinct 
 was strong in Chase, even then. "It shocked me greatly," he reminisced 
 afterward, "to hear boys swear, and I obeyed my mother's injunctions 
 to keep away from them as much as I could." 
 
 Despite these favorable early signs, the plan to make an Episcopal 
 minister out of Philander's nephew did not succeed. After three years 
 under the Bishop's forbidding roof, increasing his stock of learning, he 
 gained admittance into the junior class of Dartmouth College in 1824. 
 Yet Chase's years under the Bishop's guardianship exercised the pro- 
 foundest influence upon his life and character. They made even more 
 intense his personal relation to God and the Church and gave him his 
 first experience with slavery. Cincinnati and the surrounding region, 
 as Mrs. Stowe was learning at almost the same time, formed an ideal 
 school for the study of this institution. Not only were fugitive slaves 
 constantly crossing the river that formed the only barrier between them 
 and liberty, but from his uncle's Cincinnati farm, Chase, while milking 
 the cows or pitching hay — for Uncle Philander believed in making 
 the boy work for his keep — could obtain a fair view of Kentucky and 
 its black helots toiling in tobacco fields. It is suggestive that, after 
 having completed his law studies and been admitted to the bar, the 
 young man went back to Cincinnati and made it his permanent home. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 35 
 
 The interim between Dartmouth and this renewed residence in the 
 West, however, gave Chase an opportunity to develop in other ways. 
 He spent three years in Washington, from 1826 to 1829, opening, as a 
 means of livelihood, a "select classical seminary"; his real purpose in 
 Washington, however, was to prepare himself in law. It speaks much 
 for a personality that afterward impressed friends and foes alike that 
 the young man — he was only eighteen on arrival in the Capital — at 
 once began to make influential friends. That Chase had a tropism for 
 the "best people" is true — all his life he was to be accused of being a 
 snob — yet it must be said that his inclination was not for the merely 
 ostentatious, but for men and women of solid qualities and intellectual 
 interests. For the new rich, indeed, destitute of "culture," absorbed 
 mainly in the "mechanical" rewards of self-seeking, his letters breathe 
 contempt. His "select classical seminary" attracted the children of 
 leading citizens. One of them — the son of William Wirt — at once 
 introduced the young pedagogue to perhaps the most distinguished 
 family in Washington. William Wirt was a leader of the American 
 bar — in several cases that gave definitive interpretations to the Consti- 
 tution, such as McCulloch v. Maryland and Ogden v. Gibbons, he had 
 been chief counsel for the government — and was at the time of Chase's 
 arrival, Attorney General in the cabinet of John Quincy Adams. He 
 was also one of the most popular authors of the day. Chase became 
 almost a member of the Wirt family, and a delightful family it was, 
 the two daughters in particular, Agnes and Alice, adding to the amenity 
 of the young man's days. He became their escort to presidential and 
 other functions, and in their honor he composed a long poem in blank 
 verse, the "Sisters," as well as other verses, some of which the fickle 
 rhymster afterward warmed over for a girl with whom he had genu- 
 inely fallen in love. The Wirt association had more than a social and 
 sentimental interest. Mr. Wirt gladly accepted Chase as a student in 
 his office. After a few months reading of Blackstone, he gained an easy 
 admission to the bar, packed his bag, and returned to that Cincinnati, 
 where, under Uncle Philander's wing, he had passed the critical years 
 of boyhood. 
 
 Chase was now twenty-one, and though in appearance not the really 
 splendid figure of a man that subsequently awed all beholders, he al- 
 ready had a presence and an intelligence that again paved his way into 
 the best life of the town. He was quickly on familiar terms with the 
 Longworths, the Burnetts, the Caswells, and other rich and enlightened 
 clans. Though Chase had attained the more than six feet of stature, 
 with the massive shoulders, the Jovelike head, the expansive round face, 
 with pink complexion and gray-blue eyes, and the firm aggressive jaw 
 
36 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 that made him look like the sculptor's ideal of a President of the United 
 States, a certain tinge of New England rusticity still clung to his person. 
 When his friendship with Katherine Garniss grew to be a matter of 
 sentimental gossip, some of the girl's companions bewailed a certain 
 awkwardness in Chase's manners, as contrasted with what one of her 
 admirers described as "the superb carriage and bearing of Katherine, 
 one of the most beautiful and brilliant women of the West." Even 
 Kitty herself occasionally ridiculed the stark Puritan. "He is so uncouth 
 and has such an unmanageable mouth. Wait till I polish him up a little!" 
 Chase's character, or at least certain phases of it, can best be studied in 
 his relations with women, especially the three whom he married — for 
 it was his tragic fate to become a widower three times in seventeen 
 years. The man's religiosity comes out in its least attractive side. His 
 Diary records most solemnly the reason why he failed to fall in love 
 with another promising girl. "Every word and tone of hers is sweet 
 music" — so runs the entry for January 7, 1830, when Chase was 
 twenty-two — "sweeter because, like the tones of the wind through the 
 harp, they are unsubjected to the rules of art. . . . Her face is beautiful 
 in feature and still more beautiful in expression. Even her looks of 
 anger and scorn have a pretty gracefulness which half disarms them. 
 Her form is light and frail, but exquisitely molded. Her motion is free 
 as the summer's breeze, and, like it, soft and gentle, or animated and 
 unreserved." Evidently Chase could appreciate feminine charms, but 
 the outcome is disappointing. "I was very near falling in love with this 
 lady — nay, I would certainly have done so, had not our tastes been, in 
 one particular, wholly dissimilar. She is fond of the gay world — I have 
 no desire to partake in its vanities. She is disinclined to religion and its 
 duties. I value them more than any earthly possession." 
 
 One could easily point out other traits in the young man that placed 
 him in a class apart from Seward. He cared nothing for the theater 
 and shrank from cards, his one game being chess; early in life he 
 took the vow of temperance so popular at the time, and even looked 
 kindly upon its political manifestations. Afterward that pitiless analyst 
 of cabinet comrades, Gideon Welles, liked to point out that his fellow 
 New Englander had not a particle of humor. "Chase's jokes are always 
 clumsy; he is destitute of wit." But religion took precedence over every- 
 thing, even love affairs. The story of that first marriage, to Katherine 
 Garniss, is heart-rending. The girl — she was only twenty at the time 
 of her death — was dominated by two men, her father and her hus- 
 band, both of whom regarded this earthly life as important mainly as 
 preparation for the next. A year after the marriage, on the birth of a 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 37 
 
 daughter, Kitty fell desperately ill of childbed fever. In these times her 
 life could easily have been saved, but the crude medical procedure of 
 the early eighteen-thirties — especially profuse bleeding of the patient 
 
 — resulted in what was little less than murder. In Kitty's last moments, 
 her father hung over the bed, fiercely catechizing her as to the state of 
 her soul, her willingness to die, and her hope of salvation. Chase himself 
 was in Philadelphia, having been called away on a law case. For this 
 absence he was hardly blameworthy; the physician had informed him 
 that the crisis had been passed, that his wife was rapidly recovering, 
 and that his refusal to meet an important legal engagement would have 
 a bad effect upon her. But the husband's remorse, as set forth in page 
 after page of his Diary, was terrible. Entire days spent in prayer and 
 Bible reading offered little relief. That Kitty had died without "the 
 opportunity of publicly testifying to her faith in Christ" tormented 
 Chase the rest of his life. For months he haunted the grave, and the 
 three remaining members of the household — father, mother, and Chase 
 
 — began and ended every day on their knees. "I rose this morning with 
 a heavy heart" — so reads one of countless entries of the kind in Chase's 
 journal — "I had been dreaming of accompanying my dear wife to the 
 church, and I awoke to the mournful conviction that never more would 
 we walk in the House of God or take sweet counsel together. The day 
 was very fine and it pained my heart to think that never more would 
 my dear wife be gladdened by the brightness of the sun. At length I 
 endeavored to seek God in prayer. I read the last chapter in the first 
 Epistle of John, in which he sets forth so strongly the pre-eminent 
 necessity and excellence of Christian love, and I went downstairs, 
 where I was soon joined by my mother-in-law and father-in-law, and 
 we united in family prayer. Oh! that God would give me a deeper 
 sense of my own sinfulness and destitution, that I might pray with 
 more earnestness and humility; greater love for others, that I might 
 pray for them more heartily. . . . What grieves me most is that I was 
 not, while my dear wife lived, so faithful with her on the subject of 
 religion as I should have been; and I have now no certain assurance that 
 she died in the faith. I am not, blessed be God, without strong hope; 
 but I have not that clear evidence of her salvation which might reason- 
 ably have been expected to result from more faithful and diligent efforts 
 on my part for her conversion. Oh! if I had not contented myself with 
 a few conversations on the subject of religion, with a few recommenda- 
 tions of religious books, with faint prayers; if I had incessantly followed 
 her with kind and earnest persuasion; if I had ceaselessly brought God's 
 blessing upon my efforts; if I had even exhibited before her an example 
 
38 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 of the Christian life, she might have been, before her death, enrolled 
 among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and 
 now she is gone." 
 
 To add to Chase's tragedy, the child, named Katherine, died about 
 four years after the mother. Soon afterward, Chase married Eliza Ann 
 Smith, who survived the wedding only six years, and, in November 
 1846, Sarah Dunlop Ludlow, who also remained with the now distin- 
 guished man six years. In these ten years of married life Chase became 
 the father of six children, of whom only two girls grew to womanhood. 
 To the daughter of his second wife Chase gave in memoriam the name 
 of his first — the vivacious child who grew up to be the famous Kate 
 Chase Sprague, the most dazzling social leader of the Lincoln adminis- 
 tration, as celebrated for beauty and brains as for the assiduity with 
 which she worked for her father's political advancement. The death of 
 three wives and four children in a comparatively short time naturally 
 increased the somber phases of Chase's character. "What a vale of 
 misery this world is!" he wrote Charles Sumner, January 28, 1850, on 
 the death of a favorite sister. "To me it has been emphatically so. . . . 
 Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five. My 
 path has been — how terribly true it is — through the region of his 
 shadow. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up — as if I must give up. 
 And then after all I rise and press on." Two things forced him to re- 
 newed desire to live — an ambition that knew no limit and a zealot's 
 devotion to the cause. For in this period of domestic sorrow, with brief 
 intervals of happiness, Chase's stature was growing, both as lawyer and 
 as public man. 
 
 The times ideally suited a man of his rigid moral conviction. In him 
 was concentrated all the essential material of the Abolitionist. At mo- 
 ments Chase would deny his membership in this uncompromising 
 school; by this disclaimer evidently meaning that he did not accept the 
 Garrisonian attitude in all its wild insistencies — that is, he did not be- 
 lieve in tearing up the Constitution, in secession by the North from the 
 "hellish" Federal Union; nor was he opposed to political action, as 
 were the Garrisonians, as a means of ridding the nation of a great evil. 
 Lincoln, however, in forming his cabinet, turned to Chase as represent- 
 ing the Abolitionists, and the Ohioan's thirty years' activity as an anti- 
 slavery man justified the choice. And certainly the leaders of the 
 radical wing, such as Charles Sumner, Ben Wade, Joshua R. Giddings, 
 and George W. Julian, regarded Chase as one of themselves. Chase's 
 ideal of a public man, indeed, was Sumner. The close co-operation be- 
 tween these two contentious zealots that was to endure all through the 
 Lincoln administration — frequently to its embarrassment — began as 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 39 
 
 far back as 1847. The correspondence started at that time continued 
 until Chase's death in 1873. The basis for this alliance Chase set forth 
 in a letter to Sumner, using the language in which both men were com- 
 pletely at ease: "Idem velle et idem nolle." 1 One of the points on which 
 these extremists agreed, several years before the Civil War, was in giv- 
 ing the franchise to Negroes. That definitely fixed the standing of both 
 men as die-hards on the slavery issue. "Laus Deof Chase writes 
 Sumner on the latter's election to the Senate in 1851. "Now, I feel as if 
 I had a brother-colleague — one with whom I shall sympathize and be 
 able fully to act." "We all remember you," he writes some years after- 
 ward, "with love and admiration. Your picture hangs alone in my li- 
 brary over a framed autograph of Charles Carroll. It hangs with others, 
 all of earnest men, in my dining room. I put them up as a defiance to 
 the pro-slavery men — as symbols of my faith and purpose." The cor- 
 respondence betrays a distrust of a contemporary Senator, a dislike 
 which boded ill for the future. "I don't know what Seward will do. I 
 have never been able to establish much sympathy between us. He is 
 too much of a politician for me. It is said that he is disinclined to agita- 
 tion. . . . Seward, though meaning to maintain his own position as an 
 anti-slavery man, means to maintain it in the Whig party and only in 
 the Whig party." 
 
 Yet Chase had made his most famous appearance as "attorney general 
 for fugitive slaves" in association with Seward. The two men appeared 
 in 1842, before the Supreme Court of the United States as unpaid law- 
 yers for John Vanzanda, charged with harboring runaways. Both men 
 in this suit not only won wide fame for eloquence and legal skill but 
 gave Mrs. Stowe material for the Van Trompe incident in Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin. Seward and Chase at this time were facing the crisis of their 
 careers. Political parties and political leaders could no longer evade the 
 slavery question. The years that Chase spent with these extremists, 
 1841-1848, probably represent the sincerest period of his public life. 
 He was fighting with all the earnestness of his evangelistic spirit, on the 
 stump, in the courts, and on the platform, for the cause in which he 
 devoutly believed, and it was this championship that made his name 
 one of the best known in the nation. 
 
 But Chase had one failing that made him also sometimes an object of 
 execration: an insatiable lust for public office. In 1850 he announced 
 boldly, anticipating a similar boast made nearly forty years afterward 
 by the egregious David B. Hill of New York: "I am a democrat." As the 
 Democratic Party was the one most subservient to the South and its 
 proslavery interests, this announcement scandalized many. As a result of 
 
 1 To wish the same things and to dislike the same things. 
 
40 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 a three-cornered fight in the senatorship contest in Ohio in 1849, a 
 struggle that lasted several months and demoralized the state, Chase had 
 been elected to the United States Senate. The legislature, in addition to 
 its Democratic and Whig members, contained thirteen Free-Soilers, the 
 party in which Chase had been one of the chief pillars in 1848. These 
 Free-Soilers, by combining with the Democrats, had mustered the ma- 
 jority that won the coveted honor for the distinguished antislavery 
 leader. The story is a most complicated one — of deals, intrigues, dis- 
 puted elections, trading of jobs and out of it all Chase emerged as 
 Senator, but with a clouded title. Though he now proclaimed himself a 
 Democrat, his new party associates in the United States Senate did not 
 acclaim him as a brother. He was not invited into the Democratic caucus 
 and his committee assignments were inconsequential. He was also treated 
 at times cavalierly on the Senate floor. More than once his new-found 
 fellows expatiated on the circumstances of his election, one of the most 
 biting critics being that noble scion of Louisiana, Judah P. Benjamin. 
 Chase justified his change of party on two grounds. The old Jacksonian 
 organization, he insisted, comprised an element he called the "old line 
 democrats," and this would ultimately prevail and win the party for 
 the antislavery cause — an optimistic view of the future that made the 
 cynics smile. Again, on all questions except slavery, Chase accepted 
 Democratic principles, especially the high tariff — an item in his creed 
 which caused still more confusion when, in 1860, he aspired to the 
 presidential nomination of the Republican Party, strongly pledged to 
 protection. 
 
 Even Warden, Chase's worshipful official biographer, can find no 
 excuse for his "hero" when he accepted a nomination for governor of 
 Ohio in 1855, from what was virtually a Know-Nothing Convention — 
 with a small sprinkling of Whigs. "I do not attempt to vindicate his 
 coalition with the Know-No things. Then he seemed to me most dan- 
 gerously wrong; and now I find no reason for supposing that my judg- 
 ment, then, did him an injustice." But Chase, unlike the man to whom 
 he entrusted all his papers for biographical use, had no such difficulty. 
 He did not call the body which nominated him a Know-Nothing Con- 
 vention, as everybody else did, but an "Anti-Nebraska Convention, in 
 which the Americans [Know-Nothings] so called, had a decided ma- 
 jority." The party was more interested, he explained, in opposing slav- 
 ery than in promoting its antiforeign program — was this not reason 
 enough why he should accept a nomination at its hands? His various 
 party affiliations did not lower him in the eyes of Sumner and other 
 "radicals," and it must be said that Chase survived a chameleon-like 
 career of thirty years with his standing as an impassioned anti-slavery 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 41 
 
 leader unimpaired. Perhaps the best that can be said for Chase in these 
 disputed episodes he said himself. In a letter written soon after that 
 first dubious election as Senator, he reviews the political maneuverings 
 that culminated in success: "I will not say that in the counsels I gave 
 last winter I was not uninfluenced by personal considerations; but I can 
 say I do believe that I was not influenced by such considerations to any 
 extraordinary degree. Certainly I neither modified nor compromised in 
 any way my political principles." The same double motive can be 
 found in most of his critical decisions — an inordinate desire for office 
 caused a certain myopia as to ways and means of attaining it. Yet 
 through all his life Chase did stand as an effective leader in the cause to 
 which he had devoted his splendid talents from youth. 
 
 And this fact made him one of the leading candidates for the great 
 prize in 1860. Chase, however, was never a formidable contestant. 
 Prominent as he had been, eloquent as he had shown himself to be in 
 the great senatorial debates of the fifties — that on the Compromise 
 measures of 1850 and the Nebraska Act of 1854 — the man had none 
 of the necessary qualities of a commanding party leader. In this respect 
 he does not resemble Gladstone. He was too austere and too humorless 
 in bearing, too averse to human companionship, too theological and 
 too ostentatiously moral, to be ever liked, not to say loved; no crowds 
 and brass bands ever spontaneously gathered to greet Chase as they 
 did Seward; nor did his neighbors ever weep over his political 
 misfortunes. Thus Chase never built up a real political following, and, 
 above all, never attached to his fortunes an adroit, personally devoted 
 manager, like Thurlow Weed. He was always a distant, lonely figure, 
 regarding public office, even the highest, as a right, and believing that 
 it should come to him as a kind of law of nature. When Chase's ambi- 
 tion became manifest in the Chicago Convention of May 1860, there 
 was really no man, except Chase himself, inordinately attached to his 
 interests. The Ohio State Convention did adopt him as the favorite son, 
 but that convention controlled only four delegates-at-large, and Chase 
 could not get all of the remaining forty-two. This ruined his chances 
 at the start, for a favorite son who does not command the undivided 
 allegiance of his own state can hardly hope for support outside. Thus, 
 on the first ballot, Chase obtained only 34 of Ohio's 46 votes, eight of 
 them ominously going to Lincoln. On the third ballot, when Lincoln 
 needed only two and one-half more votes to attain the needed majority 
 of 234, they came with a tremendous shout from Ohio. Chase always 
 attributed his failure to get the nomination to this lack of unanimity in 
 his own state. "It may be," he wrote soon after Lincoln's nomination, 
 "that I had no chance at Chicago, but I suppose that nobody doubts that 
 
42 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 had the Ohio delegates manifested the same disregard of personal pref- 
 erences, which was exhibited by the New York, Illinois and Missouri 
 delegations, and given to me, as the nominee of Ohio, the same earnest 
 and genuine support which was given to Mr. Seward, Mr. Lincoln and 
 Mr. Bates by those delegations respectively, that my vote on the first 
 ballot would have largely exceeded Mr. Lincoln's." Had that hap- 
 pened, the embittered man reasoned, the candidate on whom the anti- 
 Sewardites finally united would have been himself. Though he spoke 
 pleasantly enough of Lincoln at that time, Chase really never forgave 
 him for his own presidential collapse. That this failure to obtain the 
 unanimous support of his homeland represented any criticism of him- 
 self or his career, the self-righteous statesman never apparently sus- 
 pected. 
 
T„ 
 
 HUS SEWARD, in the political amalgamation which came into 
 power March 4, 1861, represented the steady old-line Whig turned 
 Republican, and Chase the Democratic element which had abandoned 
 the party of Jackson and Buchanan, and joined the new party solely 
 on the question of slavery. Edward Bates, the third member of the 
 trio which loomed large as the first inevitable cabinet choices, typified 
 a different following. This lifelong "old fogy" Whig, as Bates described 
 himself, rather took pride in the fact that he had never been a Repub- 
 lican and never intended to become one. A mild opponent of the 
 slavery extensionists who, by 1856, had gained absolute control of the 
 Federal government in all three departments — the Presidency, Con- 
 gress, and the Supreme Court — Bates still had declined to follow 
 Seward and other Whig leaders into the Republican Party, supporting 
 in 1856 the candidate of the Americans, or Know-Nothings, Millard 
 Fillmore. The old gentleman tenaciously retained his favorite Whig 
 allegiance long after the party having that name had ceased to exist, 
 presiding over the last convention held in Baltimore in 1856. When 
 Bates's admirers in the Southwest, under the leadership of the Blair 
 family, proposed him as a presidential leader for 1860, they did not 
 press him specifically as a Republican, but as the candidate of the "Op- 
 position" — opposition, that is, to the Buchanan and Douglas Demo- 
 crats and all their works. To nominate as a Republican candidate a 
 man who had rejected Fremont in 1856, and who, in short, had en- 
 listed in a cause so discredited as that of the Know-Nothings, put a 
 severe strain on the groups who had decided that the time had finally 
 come to fight a straight antislavery issue. Bates's nomination and elec- 
 tion, however, seemed to a more compromising element to be the one 
 way of preventing Civil War. Long after Lee's surrender, his admir- 
 ers bewailed Bates's failure to head the Republican ticket in 1860; 
 had he been the standard-bearer, they always insisted, the dangerous 
 controversy would have been peacefully and equitably adjusted. For 
 Bates was perhaps the leading man in the great Southwest, the region 
 
44 
 
 that formed the connecting link between North and South, and with 
 him in the White House all that debatable land — Missouri, Arkansas, 
 Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, perhaps even Virginia and North 
 Carolina — could have been kept within the Union. Bates's unques- 
 tioning loyalty to the Federal compact no one ever questioned. A sim- 
 ilar reason made almost inevitable his inclusion in the Lincoln cabinet. 
 The great problem facing the administration in March 1861 was that 
 of keeping the Border states in the Union. At that time, Maryland, 
 Kentucky, and Missouri were tottering on the brink of secession; in 
 each state a powerful minority was working night and day to accom- 
 plish its withdrawal from the Union. Had these disrupting efforts not 
 failed, the new Confederacy would have had more than even chances 
 of success. As an essential part of Lincoln's statesmanship, two cabinet 
 members were selected from these critical commonwealths — Edward 
 Bates from Missouri and Montgomery Blair from Maryland. 
 
 Bates was an ideal choice for this purpose, not only because of his 
 high personal character, his prominence as a lawyer, his widespread 
 reputation in the Southwest for sagacity and public spirit, but because 
 he was, in birth, training, and to a large extent in sympathy, a South- 
 erner. He was born in Virginia, of a long line of "old" Virginia an- 
 cestors, had spent the first twenty-eight years of his life in the Old 
 Dominion, and was, despite an active career in his adopted Missouri, 
 throughout life Southern in manner and feeling. His wife was a South 
 Carolinian of ancient stock; one of his sons, to Bates's grief, served 
 as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Not inappropriately did Bates 
 take the conservative side on all questions, for he was born in 1793, 
 in the administration of George Washington, and, despite Quaker 
 antecedents, had served as a soldier in the War of 1812. His opposition 
 to slavery could probably be explained on the same grounds, for Bates 
 came of that Virginia stock, and was indeed not far removed from that 
 Virginia generation — the generation of Washington himself, Jefferson, 
 Madison, the Lees, George Mason — who regarded slavery as an evil 
 which it was the duty of the coming century to correct. Soon after 
 leaving this paternal soil and starting life anew in St. Louis — then a 
 straggling trading post, not far advanced from the log-cabin stage — 
 Bates, just under thirty, took part in framing Missouri's constitution. 
 That famous enactment known as the Missouri Compromise — which 
 excluded slavery forever from all that part of the Louisiana Purchase 
 lying north of 36° 30' degree of latitude — was as sacred in Bates's 
 mind as the articles of the Christian creed in which he so devoutly be- 
 lieved. From 1820, Missouri's two leading citizens were Thomas Hart 
 Benton and Edward Bates, and as Benton, being United States Senator, 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 45 
 
 was absent practically all the time in Washington, priority undoubtedly 
 belonged to the ex- Virginian. Always more Hamiltonian than Jef- 
 fersonian in political conceptions, he broke away from the Jacksonian 
 wing in the late eighteen-twenties and joined that Whig Party, from 
 which he could never be dissociated. This allegiance in itself made 
 impossible any great political career in Missouri, for the new state 
 became overwhelmingly Democratic and has remained so up to the 
 present writing. 
 
 Bates unsuccessfully contested the United States Senatorship with 
 Benton in 1828, a failure that confined his career on the national stage 
 to a single session in the lower house. But his law practice and his life- 
 long position as "sage" — what today would be called elder statesman — 
 caused President Fillmore, in 1850, to select him as Secretary of War — 
 an offer which Bates declined. He preferred, so the President was in- 
 formed, to devote his energies to his profession, to the affairs of his 
 community, and to his domestic concerns. The last item catalogued in 
 this renunciation would seem adequate in itself. In 1823, Bates had 
 married Julia Davenport Coalter, a union that had been blessed with a 
 family of seventeen children, of whom eight were living in 1860. 
 Bates all his life displayed a patriarchal devotion to his section. St. Louis, 
 not Chicago, he believed, would grow to be the great entrepot of the 
 Middle West; river transportation would make inevitable the flow 
 of traffic north and south; even the newfangled railroad would never 
 divert it east and west. This conviction he insisted made impossible an 
 independent Southern Confederacy; would the powerful and rapidly 
 growing Middle West ever permit the control of this vast river system 
 to rest in the hands of an "alien" nation? On this issue Bates became 
 what is usually described as a "national figure." His speech as president 
 of the Rivers and Harbors Convention in 1844 produced an effect not 
 unlike that of William Jennings Bryan's cross-of-gold oration in 
 Chicago in 1896. The present generation can hardly imagine a great 
 crowd going wild on a topic so little suggestive of the higher life as 
 that of dredging rivers and harbors, but on this theme Bates's oratory 
 waxed really Demosthenic. 
 
 After that address Edward Bates remained for years the leading 
 citizen of the Southwest — a position which Harvard recognized in 
 1858 by making him an honorary doctor of laws. His separation from 
 the ferocious battles of the fifties added to his usefulness as the 
 possible peacemaker of 1860. Not that his attitude on the issues had 
 ever been concealed. Benton's opposition to the Compromise of 1850 
 shocked his onetime rival, who joined in the movement that led to 
 "Old Bullion's" defeat for re-election to the Senate. The repeal of the 
 
46 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Missouri Compromise in 1854 — a measure which Bates, like all loyal 
 Whigs, had always regarded as the final solution of the slave question, 
 at least in the Louisiana country — proved an even greater disillusion- 
 ment. Yet in the main, on slavery and other matters, Bates still re- 
 mained faithful to his Virginian tradition. In him there was nothing 
 of the radical; Seward and Chase, closely identified with the antislavery 
 cause, Bates regarded as politicians guilty of using an inflammatory issue 
 for personal ends; "abolitionists," such as Garrison, Sumner, and Wen- 
 dell Phillips, represented an accursed tribe. The views he entertained 
 on the Negro to the end of his days were those of the traditional 
 Southerner — the black man belonged to an inferior race, unfitted for 
 the higher civilization, and any suggestion of endowing him with civic 
 obligations, above all the franchise, was a wild proposal originating in 
 the brains of those whom Bates stigmatized as "Jacobins." Still slavery, 
 he agreed, was an evil, barbarous and unchristian, which might be tol- 
 erated for a time in the old slave states but which must not be per- 
 mitted to extend into the new national domain. Quite naturally, 
 therefore, Bates, when the Whig Party disappeared, joined the "opposi- 
 tion" — never the "Republicans" — and when Missouri became the re- 
 cruiting ground of "border ruffians," stampeding into Kansas in the 
 mad chase to make it another slave state, Bates took his stand with the 
 comrades in the North and West who were determined that it should 
 be free. During this tumultuous decade, however, the old Missourian 
 held no office and served in no lawmaking bodies; he was simply the 
 influential citizen whose words, in press and platform, acquired a na- 
 tionwide audience. 
 
 A prevailing contemporary estimate of Bates is echoed in a character- 
 ization by Joseph Medill, who described him as "a fossil of the Silurian 
 era — red sandstone at least — who should never have been quarried out 
 of the rocks in which he was embedded." The Missourian's old- 
 fashioned exterior justified somewhat this irreverent classification. 
 Bates, in his Missouri home, with an unending cavalcade of sons and 
 daughters and grandchildren, really did suggest another geologic 
 period. Even in the Lincoln cabinet a kind of classic antiquity envel- 
 oped him; he was its oldest member, sixty-eight when the adminis- 
 tration began, seventy-two on his voluntary retirement in 1864. A cer- 
 tain quiet sobriety in appearance and behavior harked back to the 
 country's prime. In a cabinet which, in the main, was as closely shaved 
 as Julius Caesar, Bates shared honors with Welles for a shrubby white 
 beard — though, in strange contrast, his hair retained its dark and 
 ruddy aspect almost to the end. "That's because Bates uses his chin 
 more than his head," Lincoln, personally very fond of his friend, would 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 47 
 
 remark. The joke, however, was one of those which depend for effect 
 upon misrepresentation, for cerebral labor, not idle conversation, had 
 been Bates's main characteristic all his life. A man of slight build — in 
 Carpenter's stodgy picture of the Emancipation reading Bates seems 
 almost the smallest and certainly the most retiring figure — with thin 
 shoulders and a neck which appears hardly separate from the head, 
 Bates's gentle but rugged face, vigorous nose, heavy brows, pensive 
 and questioning eyes, faithfully indicate the man — the literal logician, 
 utterly lacking in imagination, the conservative whose sole reliances 
 in his earthly course were God, the law, and the Constitution. 
 
 Bates was another of the statesmen of that time given to diary keep- 
 ing. His output, in five bulky volumes, now reposing in the Library 
 of Congress, 1 offers a queer melange of manuscript entries, newspaper 
 clippings, letters, speeches, broadsides, election handbills, and printed 
 pamphlets — all grouped by himself under the general heading of 
 "Notes." One feature is an amazing disregard of spelling — for the 
 man who gained such eminence at the American bar preferred "gits" 
 to "gets," usually insisted on "Byrnside" and "Farrigat" as designations 
 of certain military and naval chieftains, and constantly treated the 
 most commonplace words in a similarly cavalier fashion. Yet at the 
 same time Bates was deeply immersed in classic lore; when analyzing 
 what he regarded as fallacies in Jefferson's Preamble to the Declara- 
 tion, he falls back on Aristotle's Politics, and when contemplating 
 the excesses of the democratic system, he turns to Cicero's Letters, 
 which, in his view, in their account of the declining days of the 
 Roman Republic, contained valuable lessons for his own age. As a 
 diarist, Bates falls far behind the standards of John Quincy Adams and 
 Gideon Welles, for his crabbed pen did not flow readily and his 
 insight into men and actions was not keen. Yet the self-portrait, un- 
 consciously set forth, does survive. As the picture of a philosophic 
 farmer, living in rural elegance not far from St. Louis, whose interest in 
 the minutiae of life is fairly Washingtonian, the volume is a precious 
 document. The progress of his beans, corn, wheat, and also of the 
 animals, is devoutly set down from day to day, as well as the appear- 
 ance of the "first crocus of the season"; the morning when "the earlier 
 trees, such as maple, box elder, etc. are in full leaf — almost," and one 
 when "the elms have been shedding seed and the oaks are in full tassel" 
 and the "flowers, Hyacinthe, Johnquils [sic] are gone," are religiously 
 noted. When it comes to larger things, Bates's occasional grief over the 
 excesses of the time, the frequently unflattering comments passed upon 
 
 1 It was published as Vol. II in the Annual Report of the American Historical 
 Association for 1933. 
 
48 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 cabinet associates, the loyalty always evident towards Lincoln himself, 
 make his Diary a permanent social and political record. 
 
 The Diary also gives perhaps the best inside picture we have of that 
 psychological phenomenon in American politics — the expectant presi- 
 dential candidate. The infection, once instilled into the human system, 
 acts apparently somewhat like the poet's oft-quoted description of 
 vice — at first hated and ignored, but by the gradual process of fa- 
 miliarity, ultimately endured and finally embraced. Bates was honestly 
 astonished when his name was first broached. "I must try," he writes 
 on July 5, 1859, "to resist the temptation and not allow my thoughts 
 to be drawn off from the common channels of business and domestic 
 cares. Ambition is a poison, at once strong and insidious, and is very 
 apt to cheet [sic] a man out of his happiness and his true respectability 
 of character." Yet soon the chronicler is noting with eagerness indica- 
 tions that appear in several sections in his favor. Connecticut seems to 
 incline in his direction — in fact, seven of its twelve delegates did vote 
 at Chicago for the Missourian on the first ballot. Greeley, of the 
 Tribune, is loudly advocating Bates — but the victim does not appraise 
 that support at its true worth, for Greeley, a venomous enemy of 
 Seward, is scanning the horizon for some promising candidate with 
 whom to effect his "irrepressible's" ruin. Newspaper editorials, endors- 
 ing Bates or speaking kindly of him, are excised and carefully pasted 
 in the bulky record, and resolutions passed by political groups, to the 
 same effect, are similarly enshrined. Soon Bates is not only completely 
 reconciled to this dazzling future but is confident that he will be the 
 man. "Without some great change before next spring," he ventures to 
 predict, "my nomination for the Presidency is more probable than that 
 of any other man, but I will not set my heart upon it, so as to be pain- 
 fully disappointed in the event of failure." But as convention time draws 
 near, he really has set his heart upon it. "I think now," he writes on De- 
 cember 1, 1859, "that the probabilities of my nomination are strengthen- 
 ing every day. In the present state of public feelings the Republican 
 party (even if they desire it which I think they do not) will hardly 
 venture to nominate Mr. Seward. And I have many and strong assur- 
 ances that I stand second — first in the northwest and in some states in 
 the northeast, and second in New York, and Pa. In the latter (Pa.) Mr. 
 Cameron for local reasons shows first but he has not strength else- 
 where." 
 
 The contest, the diarist is confident, lies between Seward of New 
 York and Bates of Missouri. Is there any likelihood of Chase? Seward, 
 in case he fails of the nomination, will never accept the Ohioan. Lin- 
 coln's name does not appear in the Diary until April 20, 1860 — less 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 49 
 
 than a month before the convention meets. "As a matter of state pride" 
 Illinois will support Lincoln on the first ballot, and, after that, "there 
 is a good feeling for me." By this time Bates, who at first was flabber- 
 gasted that anyone should think of him for the Presidency, is not only 
 convinced that he will be nominated but believes that he should be. He 
 is by all odds the best man "they" — this is the distant way in which 
 he refers to the Republicans from whom he expects this honor — could 
 put forward. The chief argument for his selection by the Repub- 
 licans is, paradoxically enough, that he is not a Republican. He kept 
 away from that miasma, even in 1856, when practically all "old fogy 
 Whigs" like himself had succumbed to the taint. That will make him 
 popular in the Border states and other regions where Republican "abo- 
 litionists" are anathema. Again Bates had been identified with the 
 "Know-Nothing" Party in 1856, when what was left of the Whigs 
 put forth Fillmore as their candidate; that will reinforce him greatly 
 in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and other states where the feeling against 
 immigrants and Catholics is becoming more bitter every day. 
 
 Bates appeared openly the candidate — though he denied the allega- 
 tion — when, in reply to certain admirers in New York, he wrote a let- 
 ter setting forth his views on the state of the Union. In this he strongly 
 opposed fighting the election of 1860 on the slavery issue. It was time 
 that that pestilential "agitation" should come to an end. What were the 
 really burning questions at stake? The Pacific railroad, the tariff, the 
 improvement of harbors and rivers, the homestead laws, immigration, 
 and many questions of internal improvement. This pronouncement 
 somewhat disheartened the Blairs, Greeley, Charles A. Dana, and other 
 Bates boomers, but that canny gentleman looked upon it as the acme 
 of wisdom. A great point, he noted, was that "it keeps me separated 
 from the Republican party and yet not so far removed as to prevent 
 their support." Verily the antique Cato of the Missouri farm was now 
 behaving much like a presidential candidate. Unremitting efforts of 
 friends to detach him from this position and to say something to the 
 point about slavery had little effect. When Henry J. Raymond, editor 
 of the New York Times, called on Bates February 4, 1860 — three 
 months before the convention — and attempted to get a more satisfac- 
 tory expression of views, the same discretion of the receptive candi- 
 date was evident. "Doubtless a most intelligent man," Bates confided 
 to his Diary, "but he seemed reserved and rather watching me than 
 displaying himself. / talked freely and I supposed he thought imponder- 
 ably. But, knowing his political Status, I talked so on purpose. Seem- 
 ing to be very open and bold, I took care to say nothing that I had 
 not said and published often before." 
 
50 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Obviously the body which Bates insisted on calling "The National 
 Union Convention" could not select as its candidate in 1860 a man who 
 thought that antislavery was a "pestilential agitation" and that the cam- 
 paign should be waged on the Pacific railroad and the Homestead Law. 
 Bates, however, unlike Seward and Chase, showed no bitterness over 
 the outcome. He was nearing his seventieth year, and had no intention 
 of wasting his few remaining days in self-pity and recrimination. He 
 still believed that "they" — the new Republican Party — were a tempo- 
 rary apparition that would disappear after the manner of all previous 
 antislavery groups. "The party will henceforth subside into weak- 
 ness and then break into pieces, its fragments seeking each its own 
 safety in new affiliations and other organizations." He did not like the 
 Chicago platform: it was "exclusive and defiant. . . . To please the 
 Germans especially it galls (not to say insults) the Americans [that 
 is, the Know-No things] and all the Republicans who came in through 
 the American party — such as Gov. Banks, Mr. Colfax and the like." 
 It also needlessly exposed "the party to the specious charge of favor- 
 ing negro equality — and this only to gratify a handful of extreme 
 Abolitionists, led on by Mr. Giddings." Mr. Lincoln "personally is un- 
 exceptionable but politically is as fully committed as Mr. Seward is 
 to the extremist doctrines of the Republican party." When the Lin- 
 colnites appealed to the Missourian to take the stump, he declined 
 on the valid ground of old age; but he promised to write a letter en- 
 dorsing the candidate in the strongest terms — a letter that was most 
 gratefully received and had a powerful effect. For Bates, despite his 
 reservations on abolitionism, still continued to be a strong Union man. 
 His comment on the situation, however, shows how far he was re- 
 moved from the spirit of the time. Even as late as the secession of South 
 Carolina he refused to take seriously the threat of national disruption. 
 "I think that, except for a few demented fanatics, it is all brag and 
 bluster"; Jefferson Davis and his like "were only hoping to make a 
 better compromise with the timid patriotism of their opponents. In 
 playing this dangerous game they may go further than they now in- 
 tend and actually commit their states to open rebellion and civil war." 
 
A 
 
 .LL THAT I am in the world," Lincoln remarked to a friend, in a 
 moment of despondency over his cabinet situation, "the Presidency 
 and all else, I owe to the opinion of me which people express when 
 they call me 'honest old Abe.' Now, what would they think of their 
 'honest old Abe' if he should make such an appointment as the one 
 proposed?" The President-elect was referring to Simon Cameron of 
 Pennsylvania, who aspired to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Lin- 
 coln was not the only President who had entertained an unfavorable 
 view of this lithe Pennsylvanian. Cameron had been closely associated 
 with three Presidents, Jackson, Polk, and Buchanan — all of whom have 
 left on record most unflattering views of his character. Jackson de- 
 scribed him as a man "not to be trusted by anyone in any way, and as 
 a renegade politician who got elected Senator by selling himself to the 
 Whiggs [sic]" 1 James K. Polk, to whose party — at that time — Cam- 
 eron belonged, regarded him not more kindly, confiding to his Diary 
 an inability to express his "contempt for a Senator capable of such 
 coarseness and vulgarity. . . . Cameron is a managing tricky man in 
 whom no reliance is to be placed. He professes to be a Democrat but 
 he has his own personal and sinister purposes to serve." 2 In the first 
 half of his political life Cameron's closest associate in the Democratic 
 ranks had been James Buchanan, President from 1857 to 1861, and 
 after twenty years of the most intimate companionship this eminent 
 authority referred to his one-time manager as "a scamp," "an unprin- 
 cipled rascal," and as always a "disorganizer" when his "personal in- 
 terest came into conflict with the success of the party." Certain cele- 
 brated anecdotes have given Cameron his own niche in the national 
 portrait gallery. To him is usually ascribed that immortal definition 
 of an "honest politician" as one who, "when bought, stays bought." 
 
 1 Jackson, Andrew, Correspondence. Ed. by John Spencer Bassett. Carnegie 
 Institute, 1926-1927. VI, 395. 
 
 2 Diary of James K. Polk, Quaife, Milo M., ed. A. C. McClurg & Co., 1910. 
 I, 426. 
 
52 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Another Lincoln story — one of his favorites — the world will never 
 willingly let die. "Is Cameron an honest man?" the President asked 
 Thaddeus Stevens, whose opinion, as a contemporary Pennsylvanian, 
 should certainly have had value. "I don't think he would steal a red 
 hot stove," Stevens replied. The aphorism having reached Cameron's 
 ears, that gentleman demanded an apology. "Oh, well," Stevens re- 
 torted, "I apologize. I said Cameron would not steal a red hot stove. 
 I withdraw that statement." 
 
 Most of the epithets directed at Cameron, it will be observed, imply 
 a certain untrustworthiness of character — a lack of faithfulness to the 
 spoken word, a tendency to betray friends and to sacrifice parties and 
 principles in the pursuit of personal aims. To the present generation 
 it probably comes as a surprise that Simon Cameron ever occupied a 
 high position in the political party founded by Thomas Jefferson. Ever 
 since the Civil War, Simon and his son and co-worker James Donald 
 — more colloquially "Don" — have enjoyed national fame as creators 
 of the Republican imperium of Pennsylvania, a despotism which, 
 under them and their successors, Matthew S. Quay and Boies Penrose, 
 kept the land of William Penn securely in the Republican ranks for 
 seventy-five years, until it met destruction in the Roosevelt debacle 
 of 1932. Yet the historic truth is that, from about 1844 to 1856, Simon 
 Cameron held lofty place as party chieftain in the Jeffersonian — or 
 Jacksonian — stronghold. This domination became so strong that on 
 two occasions Cameron wrested from unwilling associates election to 
 the United States Senate. Not until 1856 did he enroll in the Republi- 
 can Party, and then he did so halfheartedly, for no public reason, least 
 of all because of a moral revolt against slavery, but simply because this 
 transition would best promote the purposes of the moment. Like Chase, 
 Cameron also cultivated the Know-Nothings, but unlike Chase, he 
 never troubled himself about finding a reason for the change based 
 on principle. That politics was the exclusive end of his public life 
 Cameron would have been the last man to deny, and by politics he 
 did not mean the use of parties for advancing great causes but for 
 furthering personal and business advantage. 
 
 The offices, great and small, and legislation that would enhance 
 private business, even at the expense of the body politic — to Cameron 
 public life meant these things and these things only. Almost any meth- 
 ods that would bring such desirable results were their own justifica- 
 tion. For the twenty-four years preceding 1860 one great cause had 
 monopolized the attention of Americans in both public and private 
 station, yet in all that time Cameron's voice was practically never 
 raised on the slavery issue. One can read his letters, so far as they are 
 available, and study his legislative performances without ever sus- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 53 
 
 peering that the nation was being rocked by the most disturbing pub- 
 lic question in its history. No speeches from Pennsylvania's Senator 
 can be quoted for or against the Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso, 
 and related issues. Only one address of more than trifling consequence 
 graces the Cameronian record in his two senatorial terms and that was 
 devoted to the protective tariff. This subject began to assume impor- 
 tance in the early forties, with the dawn of Pennsylvania's industrial 
 age, and Cameron, now a manufacturer, mine owner and railroad op- 
 erator himself — already launched on his progress to millionairedom — 
 made it his chosen legislative child. In this he perhaps faithfully repre- 
 sented his state, for Pennsylvania, though the problems rising out of 
 the extension of slavery were not entirely ignored, gave chief empha- 
 sis to a high tariff as the real question of the time. This absorption in 
 the tariff and kindred business legislation provided the ruling motif 
 of Cameron's career. Many candidates are forthcoming when an at- 
 tempt is made to point to some one man as the founder of the Boss 
 system in politics, but a good case can be made for Simon Cameron as 
 the man who, above all others, laid the basis of that alliance of business 
 and politics which has reached its finest development in his native state. 
 The beginnings of this system Cameron laid in the two decades pre- 
 ceding Sumter, and brought to its present perfection in the great in- 
 dustrial expansion that followed Appomattox. His influence did not 
 end with the war. His last two terms in the Senate followed that event, 
 and then came three for his son. 
 
 That two such seasoned veterans as Thurlow Weed and Simon 
 Cameron should join hands in something resembling a conspiracy 
 against the rustic Lincoln was natural enough. Both in their experi- 
 ences and in their conceptions, the two men had much in common, 
 though, on the human side, Weed unquestionably had the greater ap- 
 peal. Like Weed, Cameron was born in poverty, obtained little school- 
 ing, and was cast out at a tender age to earn his living. The printer's 
 office attracted this boy, as it had Weed; he became a printer's devil 
 in a newspaper office, and rose by stages to be proprietor and editor 
 of prosperous weekly and daily journals. Cameron could never have 
 been a real editor even to the degree that Weed became, for his New 
 York exemplar did have a taste for reading, with considerable interest 
 in public questions, whereas Cameron cared nothing for books or 
 ideas. The Pennsylvanian's journalism, from all accounts, had the same 
 practical quality as his politics; soon dropping active work in that 
 field — although he remained a newspaper proprietor all his days — 
 Cameron gave his time to more mundane concerns. Prosperity in busi- 
 ness, as intimated above, soon crowned his efforts. Political activity had 
 contributed largely to this result. The man's real education may be 
 
54 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 said to have begun about 1822, the year that found him in Washington, 
 working in the printing office of Gales & Seaton, publishers of the 
 National Intelligencer, and of the Annals of Congress — the Congres- 
 sional Record of the day. In this employment the twenty-two-year-old 
 apprentice evidently made the same discovery that took possession of 
 Seward at about the same time — that, after all, the most absorbing 
 business of a rapidly developing democracy was politics. 
 
 It was an excellent period to gain schooling of the kind. The long 
 Jeffersonian era was coming to a close in the last years of James Mon- 
 roe, and the splitting of the Jeffersonian amalgam into two groups had 
 already begun. In this division Seward and Weed joined the Whigs, 
 but Cameron remained faithful to the Jacksonian Democrats. Cameron 
 spent much time in the halls of the Capitol, making friends with poli- 
 ticians — two years that definitely fixed his career. Returning to Har- 
 risburg about 1824, Cameron started work on the Republican, to such 
 good purpose that in a year or two he owned the paper. Appointed to 
 the governor's staff in 1826, he acquired that title of "General" which 
 followed him all his life. Like Weed in New York, Cameron obtained 
 the lucrative post of state printer, and his yeoman service in Pennsyl- 
 vania for Martin Van Buren resulted in his appointment as agent for 
 the settlement of the claims of the Winnebago Indians. This proved 
 an unhappy stroke of fortune, for it involved Cameron in a mercenary 
 scandal which he never lived down. Even while Lincoln was strug- 
 gling with the man as a cabinet problem certain embarrassing cartoons 
 appeared in the comic press, picturing the tall, lank Cameron dressed 
 up in full Indian regalia, and labeled the great "Winnebago Chief." 
 The story is too long and tedious for repetition in this place. Briefly 
 the scandal charged that Cameron, through third parties, had acquired 
 at ridiculously low figures the claims of these half-breeds and had 
 sought to collect at face value for his own benefit. Despite Camer- 
 on's spirited denials for the rest of his days, the truth remained 
 that the Indian Commissioner had refused to honor his warrant for 
 payment on the ground of fraud, that Cameron was dismissed from 
 his post, and that a new man was sent west to do his work all over 
 again. 
 
 The events that made Cameron so odious to Democrats and Re- 
 publicans alike were his two elections to the United States Senate, one 
 in 1844 and the other in 1857. Scandal in plenty involved both these 
 triumphs. In 1844, the Democrats, having won a majority of the legis- 
 lature, supposedly controlled the election of the new Senator. The 
 Democratic caucus had nominated for this post George W. Woodward, 
 a man of ability and character; under the circumstances a caucus nomi- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 55 
 
 nation amounted to an election. When the votes of the assembled 
 legislators were counted, however, Simon Cameron, whose name had 
 hardly been mentioned in connection with the honor, had a majority. 
 It was Cameron's first exploit in that field of political legerdemain for 
 which he was to become so celebrated. How had he performed the 
 miracle? In part his handling of the tariff issue gives the explanation. 
 Woodward, an orthodox Democrat, was a low-tariff man — he was 
 even accused of being a free trader; the large business interests of 
 Pennsylvania, outraged by the tariff of 1842, were already exercising 
 a strong influence in politics. With their aid, Cameron manipulated a 
 combination of high-tariff Democrats and Whigs — the "Whiggs" 
 who so aroused the anger of Andrew Jackson — and walked away with 
 the seat. Popular resentment proved so strong that Cameron stood no 
 chance of reelection in 1849 and was forced to spend some years in 
 retirement — very profitably, for his business and fortune increased in 
 the interval. In 1855, having made arrangements with the Know- 
 Nothings, Cameron tried again for the Senate, but succeeded only in 
 deadlocking the legislature, Pennsylvania being forced, thanks to his 
 activities, to rest content with only one United States Senator for 
 about a year. In 1857 — Cameron was now a Republican — better luck 
 attended his efforts. The situation that existed in the state legislature 
 that year would have discouraged a man of inferior ability, but it 
 furnished precisely the medium in which Cameron felt most at home. 
 Again the legislature was Democratic, but by a small majority, and 
 again it would naturally have chosen the new Senator. Cameron, who 
 became the accepted Republican candidate, needed three Democratic 
 votes to win — and he obtained exactly the three required. How? Such 
 a question would have caused a smile in any group of Pennsylvanians 
 of the time. It would have been a hard task to persuade any of them 
 that the votes had not been bought for cash. 
 
 So deeply entrenched at the head of affairs was Cameron in 1860 
 that he actually became Pennsylvania's official candidate for the Re- 
 publican nomination at Chicago. Of course no one, not Cameron him- 
 self, took this seriously; it was merely the usual method of consolidat- 
 ing the Pennsylvania delegation to use for trading purposes. One reason 
 that Cameron could not really aspire to the highest office was that, like 
 Chase in Ohio, he did not command the wholehearted support of his 
 own state. Powerful as Cameron seemed, another man had recently 
 come to the front and was challenging his dictatorship. Young An- 
 drew Curtin had not only much of Cameron's skill as a tactician, but 
 many desirable qualities which the older man lacked. Curtin was bril- 
 liant, magnetic, honest, and popular, so popular that, in 1860, he gained 
 
56 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the Republican nomination for governor, against the fiercest opposi- 
 tion of Cameron himself. Since 1857, when Curtin led the forces 
 attempting to defeat Cameron's election to the Senate, the two men 
 had been locked in deadly feud — a feud that reached the floor of the 
 Chicago presidential convention with historical results. At one time 
 Cameron sought a compromise: he would accept Curtin as candidate 
 for the governor's chair, if Curtin would accept him seriously as Penn- 
 sylvania's candidate for the successorship to James Buchanan in the 
 White House. Nothing indicates more clearly Curtin's rising power 
 than his success in winning the gubernatorial nomination without defi- 
 nitely committing himself to Cameron's aspiration. The latter secured 
 Pennsylvania's endorsement, it is true, but everyone knew that this 
 commitment would endure only for one ballot and that after that the 
 delegation would swing to another man. That the man on whom Penn- 
 sylvania finally fixed approval would become the nominee seemed 
 fairly certain. Who, then, would be Pennsylvania's second choice? Up 
 to the time the convention came to order, Curtin's position was not 
 generally known, but everybody believed that Cameron's favorite — 
 next to himself of course — would be William H. Seward. Seward and 
 Weed apparently had every reason to count upon these fifty and one- 
 half votes. In fact, Seward believed they had been definitely pledged. 
 In the latter part of March 1860, Seward had visited Cameron at 
 Harrisburg, for a general discussion. "He took me to his house," 
 Seward reported to Weed, "told me all was right. He was for me and 
 Pennsylvania would be. It might happen that they would cast the first 
 ballot for him, but he was not in, etc. He brought the whole legisla- 
 ture of both parties to see me, feasted them gloriously, and they were 
 in the main so generous as to embarrass me." 3 
 
 Today, as we scan the proceedings of that Chicago Convention, the 
 fact stands forth clearly that the nomination of Abraham Lincoln was 
 inevitable from the start. After that first ballot, when Seward obtained 
 only 173 Vi votes of a needed majority of 234, there could have been 
 no other outcome. With Seward eliminated, as he had been eliminated 
 by this unsatisfactory showing, the choice narrowed to three men - 
 Lincoln, Chase, and Bates. Nobody wanted Chase except, of course, 
 Chase himself and his ambitious daughter Kate. Bates quickly dropped 
 out for causes set forth above. Had Cameron been able to deliver 
 Pennsylvania's delegation to Seward on the second ballot, as, accord- 
 ing to Seward's understanding, he had promised to do, then Seward 
 would probably have attained his great objective. But Andrew Curtin 
 
 8 Crippen, Lee F., Simon Cameron: Ante Bellum Years. Mississippi Valley Press, 
 1942. P. 209. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 57 
 
 stood in the way. Curtin spent a large part of Wednesday and Thurs- 
 day visiting important delegations, pounding into their heads endlessly 
 the one pre-eminent fact: Seward, he declared, could never carry 
 Pennsylvania. Seward's extreme antislavery record did not constitute 
 the chief argument against him. In Pennsylvania, antiforeign and anti- 
 Catholic sentiment raged more fiercely than in any other state. In the 
 land of William Penn the Know-Nothings had displaced the Whigs 
 as the second political party; their votes could easily turn the election, 
 and to them Seward was the most odious of public men. His associa- 
 tion with Archbishop Hughes of New York, and his attempt to obtain 
 public money for parochial schools, would prove impossible hurdles 
 in November — so Curtin insisted. That Curtin was sincere in this 
 belief — and correct in his contention — no one questioned. He had 
 every reason for sincerity. He was a candidate for governor at the 
 coming election; he could not win, the delegates were informed, with 
 Seward on the same ticket. In struggling to keep Seward off the Penn- 
 sylvania ballot, Curtin was thus promoting his own election as well 
 as that of the nominee for President. Thus the fact that his motives 
 were in part selfish added to the impressiveness of his arguments. 
 
 Another anti-Seward advocate, Henry S. Lane of Indiana, put up a 
 similar plea. Lane was candidate for governor in Indiana just as Curtin 
 was in Pennsylvania. He too w r ould lose, he declared, if Seward ran 
 upon the same ticket; for the New Yorker was just as unpopular in 
 Indiana as in Pennsylvania, and for the same reasons. Any Republican 
 who could not carry Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania would lose the 
 election; had Fremont been victorious in these states in 1856, he would 
 have won. Another fact added to the strength of the Curtin-Lane 
 demonstration: both Pennsylvania and Indiana were "October states" 
 — that is, elections took place there a month before the nationwide 
 assize in November; for the Republicans to lose these states at this 
 critical time would have a demoralizing effect upon the presidential 
 contest. Curtin and Lane were eloquent, persuasive talkers, and by the 
 time the sun went down Thursday evening, they had convinced the 
 brethren that to nominate Seward was to insure Republican defeat. 
 Thus Seward was really dead as a candidate before the balloting 
 began. 
 
 Such a situation gave a rare opportunity to a politician of Camer- 
 on's skill. He had promised Seward his delegation on the second bal- 
 lot, it is true, but such commitments did not disturb this leader. Besides, 
 Cameron could not have delivered a unanimous delegation had that 
 been his desire, for Curtin's large contingent would not have obeyed 
 his instructions. Yet, though Cameron certainly could not nominate 
 
58 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 himself, and almost as certainly could not nominate Seward, there 
 still remained an ample field for pickings of another kind. Cameron 
 had played a dominating part in several presidential conventions and 
 understood their most labyrinthine workings. The two bucolic states- 
 men acting as Lincoln's captains lacked this experience. Could not the 
 adroit Pennsylvanian manipulate these two backwoods politicians in 
 ways to serve his own ends? It may safely be assumed that Cameron, 
 by Thursday evening, after the convention had been in session for two 
 days, clearly saw that Lincoln was the coming man. That other less 
 shrewd observers had not grasped this was true; Horace Greeley, as 
 noted above, had failed to gauge events — but that was only one of 
 countless occasions when Greeley displayed his unparalleled talent for 
 guessing wrong. 
 
 Neither had the truth apparently penetrated the obtuseness of David 
 Davis and Leonard Swett, in charge of Lincoln's interests. That these 
 two nervous and perspiring gentlemen would go to almost any extremes 
 to gain the Pennsylvania delegation Cameron understood. What hap- 
 pened has been told — though not completely — in a letter written 
 years afterward by Leonard Swett. 4 "In the small hours of Friday morn- 
 ing" — the day of balloting — "two of Lincoln's friends" — the writer 
 did not name them, but they were, of course, Swett himself and David 
 Davis — "and two of Cameron's friends" — also not named, but they 
 were John P. Sanderson and Alexander Cummings — met in a room of 
 the Tremont House and made the deal. "Our arguments prevailed," 
 says Swett, "and the Cameron men agreed to come to us on the second 
 ballot. They did so most nobly and gave us forty-eight votes." Among 
 the details Swett omitted in this relation were the nature of "our argu- 
 ments." From abundant sources, we know precisely what they were. 
 Only definite "practical" arguments would bring over a veteran like 
 Simon Cameron. Swett and Davis promised, in so many words, that if 
 Pennsylvania's forty-eight votes went to Lincoln on the second ballot, 
 Cameron would become a member of his cabinet. Swett forgot another 
 important detail in his revelation. In making what proved to be a most 
 embarrassing bargain, he had acted not only without the consent of 
 Lincoln, but in defiance of Lincoln's explicit instructions. Before this 
 Tremont Hotel conclave, Davis had telegraphed Lincoln that the offer 
 of a cabinet post for Cameron might secure the Pennsylvania delega- 
 tion. "I authorize no bargain and will be bound by none," was Lin- 
 coln's emphatic reply; it certainly could not have been made stronger. 
 It was followed by another message, scribbled in Lincoln's handwrit- 
 
 4 Weed, Thurlow, Autobiography of Thurloiv Weed. Ed. by H. A. Weed. 
 Boston, 1884. II, 291. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 59 
 
 ing on the margin of a newspaper, and sent to Davis by William H. 
 Herndon, Lincoln's law partner: "Make no contracts that will bind 
 me" — the words having been underscored for good measure. The 
 corpulent Davis, said to be losing almost a pound of flesh a minute in 
 his excitement and anxiety, was furious at Lincoln's injunctions. "Lin- 
 coln ain't here," he shouted, "and don't know what we have to meet. 
 So we will go ahead as if we hadn't heard from him, and he must 
 ratify it." 
 
 Essentially the same situation prevailed in the Indiana delegation, 
 that other "doubtful" state without which no Republican candidate 
 could succeed at the polls. The name of Caleb Blood Smith does not 
 fill a large space in American history though some perhaps vaguely 
 remember that a man of that name occupied an inconspicuous place in 
 Lincoln's cabinet for a short time. In the Chicago Convention of 1860, 
 however, Caleb Smith became an important character. His record up 
 to that time had not been particularly distinguished. An inflexible 
 Whig, as hostile to third-party movements as Seward himself, a one- 
 time newspaper editor, lawyer, and railroad man, Smith had served 
 two or three times in Congress creditably enough, but had attained 
 no eminence. He enjoyed a political reputation as a stump speaker — 
 at which he was fluent and persuasive. In 1860 he became a delegate 
 at large to Chicago, and chairman of the Indiana delegation, in which 
 capacity he had seconded the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. A good 
 deal of backstairs work had preceded this open pronouncement for 
 the Illinois candidate. In the main it had followed the Pennsylvania 
 pattern. Indiana's twenty-six votes would go for Lincoln — and on 
 the first ballot — in case Caleb B. Smith could obtain a cabinet posi- 
 tion. To sit in a presidential council had long been Mr. Smith's ruling 
 ambition; he had unsuccessfully tried to become Postmaster General 
 under Zachary Taylor, but now David Davis and Leonard Swett, again 
 in utter disregard of Lincoln's command against "bargains," promised 
 him such a post. And the parallel with Pennsylvania held good in an- 
 other particular. 
 
 Smith, as clever as Cameron himself, promised a delegation to the 
 Lincoln managers which he did not control. The feeling against 
 Seward among the Indiana delegates was even greater than among the 
 Pennsylvanians. "The Indianans," wrote Murat Halstead, "were heart- 
 sick" at the probability of Seward's nomination. "They look heart- 
 broken at the suggestion that Seward has the inside track and throw 
 up their hands in despair. They say that Lane will be beaten, the leg- 
 islature pass entirely into the hands of the Democrats and the two 
 Republican senators hoped for heard of no more." The delegation was 
 
60 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 thinking of Seward at no time; its choice, from the first day at Chi- 
 cago, lay between Lincoln and Bates, and such interest as the latter 
 inspired quickly disappeared. Thus Indiana would have gone for Lin- 
 coln irrespective of the foolish pledges made by Davis and Swett. "I 
 have frequently heard," writes Matilda Gresham, in the Life of her 
 father, Walter Q. Gresham, "Judge Otto tell how Caleb B. Smith im- 
 posed on Judge David Davis and Joseph Medill when the latter, dur- 
 ing the Convention, was pledging everything in sight to insure Mr. 
 Lincoln's nomination. 'Mr. Smith,' Judge Otto said, 'made Judge Davis 
 believe that the Indiana delegation would go to Seward unless Smith 
 was promised a place in the cabinet; when the truth was that none of 
 us cared for Smith and after we got to Chicago and looked over the 
 ground all were for Lincoln.' That the pledge was made I have heard 
 from Judge Davis. That it was kept everybody knows." 5 
 
 5 Gresham, M., Life of Walter Quintin Gresham. Rand, McNally & Co., 1919. 
 I, 110. 
 
M, 
 
 .EANWHILE claims persistently put forth from another source 
 — claims as obnoxious to Seward and Cameron as those of Chase him- 
 self — could not be ignored. Two houses in Washington and adjoin- 
 ing Maryland had for the previous fifteen years wielded powerful 
 influence in the early tentative days of the Republican Party. Today 
 the stately brick "mansion" at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, diagonally 
 opposite the White House, is a cherished possession of the Federal gov- 
 ernment. Yellow-stuccoed, green-shuttered, white-linteled, it is half 
 museum and half official residence, held in reserve for distinguished 
 guests of Uncle Sam. Visitors today usually pause to read the tablet 
 that gives the tale of its eventful history — high light of all being the 
 information that within its walls Robert E. Lee was offered the post 
 of commander-in-chief of the Union Army in 1861, a few days before 
 reaching the decision that made him serve under the Confederate flag. 
 Built in 1810, it passed in 1836 into the hands of Francis Preston Blair, 
 to a large extent the brains of the Jackson Administration, and for the 
 eight years preceding Lincoln's accession had been the home of his 
 son Montgomery. As such, it was for years one of the most cultivated 
 social centers of Washington, and at the same time a vital meeting 
 place for the nation's political and intellectual life. Here had been the 
 favorite headquarters of Jackson's kitchen cabinet, and to this same 
 niche of wisdom, perhaps of intrigue, Martin Van Buren had for many 
 years turned for inspiration. 
 
 When the elder Blair gave this residence to Montgomery in 1853, 
 he himself withdrew to his new country estate in Maryland, about 
 seven miles from the Capitol — itself visible from certain elevations of 
 ground — at Silver Spring. Few country homes have formed the back- 
 ground of so much political history as this secluded retreat. Even be- 
 fore Lincoln, in the harried days of civil war, sought privacy and 
 comfort under its friendly chestnuts, pines, and poplars, Silver Spring 
 had been intimately associated with all the great Americans since 
 Jackson's day. Buchanan, Thomas Hart Benton, Van Buren, Thomas 
 
62 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Ritchie, Jefferson Davis, Seward, William C. Rives, Chase — these were 
 men of discordant convictions and inharmonious allegiances but all 
 liked to get away from official duties, bask in the coolness of their 
 old friend's "grottoes," drink his wines, eat his well-cooked food, 
 loiter in the shrubbery-lined walks, enjoy the hospitality of his wife, 
 Violet Gist, granddaughter of Washington's famous friend Christopher 
 Gist — and of the lovely daughter, Betty, whose portrait by Sully, 
 hanging today in the drawing room of the still well-preserved family 
 home, substantiates all the agreeable things said of her in her lifetime. 
 Silver Spring was more than a house of genial and cultured entertain- 
 ment. Historians point to Francis Preston Blair as the man more re- 
 sponsible than any other for the founding of the Republican Party, and 
 it was at Silver Spring that the consultations were held which led to 
 the Philadelphia Convention of 1856. 
 
 Naturally Silver Spring could not escape comparison with Horace's 
 Sabine Farm, and in this case the resemblance had merit, for, in addi- 
 tion to the essential ingredients of a rustic villa — gardens for both 
 vegetables and flowers, orchards, graperies, herds, dairies, mills, and the 
 like — its f ons Bandusiae formed the center of the scene, the sparkling 
 vantage point about which the whole place had been created. It was 
 the discovery of this crystal water, in a section of Maryland utterly 
 primeval, never turned to use by tobacco planters or cultivators of any 
 sort, which led the Blair family to settle in these woods in 1845. A true 
 son of Kentucky, Blair was an expert horseman, and his wife and 
 daughter displayed a similar proficiency in the saddle. Cantering one 
 day along the old Seventh Street road, his mount, a spirited Arab, dis- 
 engaged his rider and started on a wild run into the forest. Blair fol- 
 lowed in pursuit; the animal's bridle was caught by a branch of a tree, 
 and his master overtook him in a dense growth of pines and chestnuts. 
 It was not the beauty of the richly overundulating ground that first 
 fascinated Blair. He was brought to a halt near a gently rising, gently 
 falling fountain of the clearest water; the visible bottom of white sand, 
 in which small pieces of sparkling mica were embedded, gave a dia- 
 mond-like effect. Blair was entranced. At that time the editor-states- 
 man was suffering a temporary eclipse of influence. James K. Polk, 
 who had come to the Presidency in 1845, did not favorably regard 
 this Southern man who had no zeal for the extension of slavery, and 
 was lukewarm on the Mexican aggression. But Blair, in Polk's eyes, had 
 committed a more positive sin: he had worked hard for Van Buren's 
 renomination in 1844, and had written disrespectfully of Polk in his 
 Globe. The new President had no use for Jacksonians, of whom Blair, 
 next to the old warrior himself, was the most conspicuous, and pro- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 63 
 
 ceeded to reorganize the Democrats on an extreme State rights, pro- 
 slavery and pro-Southern basis. There could be only one fate for mal- 
 contents like Blair. Polk summoned the unwilling Thomas Ritchie from 
 Richmond, forced Blair to sell the Globe, the party organ, made Ritchie 
 editor, and attempted meanwhile to ease Blair's descent by offering 
 him the mission to Madrid — which the stranded editor declined. Simon 
 Cameron played a part — as usual an underhanded one — in this transac- 
 tion, thereby starting the Blair-Cameron feud that boded ill for har- 
 mony in 1860. 
 
 Though Blair, in 1845, was a rich man, the Globe and government 
 printing having recouped his fortunes, his spirits were naturally de- 
 pressed. A lodge in some vast political wilderness fitted well into the 
 veteran's mood. As a result he purchased several hundred acres sur- 
 rounding this unfailing gush of water, built a large frame house a con- 
 siderable distance away — still standing in excellent preservation and 
 in use by his descendants — laid out his walks and "grottoes" and sum- 
 merhouses, planted his shrubs and ivies, and moved his household 
 treasures into the country. The house at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue 
 was leased to a number of tenants — the most distinguished being 
 George Bancroft, his turgid History already three volumes complete, 
 who gave to its further prosecution in the Blair House such time as he 
 could spare from his duties as Secretary of the Navy in Polk's adminis- 
 tration — and Blair, although only a little more than fifty, established 
 himself as a "sage," a gentleman supposed to be above the hurly-burly 
 of contention, but to be full of recollection and wisdom which would 
 be useful to those more actively engaged. And such proved to be the 
 case. The most frequented shrine at Silver Spring was a wooden con- 
 struction called, from its shape, the "Acorn," a sequestered nook in 
 which Blair's friends gathered to discuss problems of state and politics, 
 and lay plans for the triumph of correct causes. Twenty or thirty visi- 
 tors a day were not unusual; a visitor's book of the Acorn, had one been 
 kept, would be rarely prized by autograph hunters today. The memo- 
 ries of its walls would give far more knowledge of the events of 
 1850-1860 — and after — than thousands of "documents" and manu- 
 scripts gathering dust in great libraries. For this information would be 
 alive, full of the hates, jealousies, loyalties, friendships, and ambitions 
 that constitute the flesh and blood of history. Not all the visitors came 
 to plot stratagems or to promote noble principles. Some came for rest 
 and surcease. One of these was Charles Sumner, who, after the assault 
 of Bully Brooks, was brought by Blair to Silver Spring in the hope 
 that its quiet would aid his restoration. Nor did Blair's retirement to 
 his Alban Hills lessen the bond between him and his son Montgomery. 
 
64 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Not only did the younger man build a home of his own, called Falk- 
 land, on the same estate — it was burnt in 1864 by Jubal Early in his 
 raid on Washington — but the, father made frequent trips on horse- 
 back, usually accompanied by Betty, to his old home opposite the White 
 House. William Lyon Mackenzie, the Canadian revolutionist, wrote of 
 Montgomery's splendid Washington mansion in which he "gave din- 
 ners and suppers to presidents, foreign ambassadors, cabinet ministers 
 and congressmen in a style of oriental magnificence." The sight which 
 old Washingtonians chiefly loved to recall was that of Francis Blair 
 and son Montgomery standing with bared heads before the equestrian 
 statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square. They admired this, not 
 only as an appropriate memorial to their idol, but as a work of art — 
 a judgment on which less reverential Americans today are not 
 unanimous. 
 
 The servants who served Francis Blair's cool vintages and much 
 prized food to an avalanche of friends were Negro slaves — and they 
 remained such until the Fourteenth Amendment set them free. Silver 
 Spring, indeed, had many characteristics of a Southern plantation — 
 though the profit motive was absent; it had its "quarters" for the black 
 folk, its outdoor kitchens, its mills, blacksmith and carpenter's shops, 
 and other appurtenances of a self-sufficient economy. These facts fix 
 Blair's position amid the disturbing complications of the time. For Blair 
 was a Southerner, born in Kentucky, of Virginia forebears, in 1791 — 
 thus being another of the Lincoln group who dated back to Washing- 
 ton's administration — and until the crisis demanded new alignments 
 in 1848 and 1856, a lifelong Democrat. When Amos Kendall, who had 
 been his personal crony and newspaper partner in Frankfort, Ken- 
 tucky, called the hard-up young journalist — he appeared" in the Capi- 
 tal in threadbare garments that aroused the pity or consternation 
 of his new associate — to Washington in 1830, to assume the editorship 
 of the new Jacksonian mouthpiece, the Globe, he launched one of the 
 greatest of American journalists on a long, profitable career. Impartial, 
 independent journalism is an ideal of a modern age; in that time news- 
 papers were all organs and editors partisan spokesmen whose business 
 it was to see only good in their friends and only evil in their foes. Thus 
 the White House had its generally recognized papers, to which loyal 
 party followers were expected to subscribe; any financial shortcomings 
 the party usually provided for by awards of government printing; in 
 Blair's case he became publisher of the Congressional Globe, successor 
 to the Annals of Congress that had been the province of Joseph Gales, 
 and predecessor of the present Congressional Record. These party 
 editors were not looked upon, in Bismarck's phrase, as a "reptile press"; 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 65 
 
 they were usually close to the party chiefs, and frequently powers in 
 public affairs. 
 
 Of these Blair became the most influential. He performed his duties 
 so eloquently that Jackson took him closely to his bosom, not only in 
 an official but in a personal sense. He was soon elevated into that posi- 
 tion of presidential penman — the irreverent call this character "ghost 
 writer" — not unfamiliar in more recent times. Some of Jackson's most 
 important state papers were the work of Francis P. Blair. He also be- 
 came the President's most confidential adviser: practically no impor- 
 tant decision, in politics or statecraft, was decided on without his 
 approval. Jackson's warfare on the United States Bank is commonly 
 attributed to this at times ferocious scribe. "Take it to Bla'r," Jackson 
 would exclaim, when a particularly knotty problem fell on his desk. 
 The grizzled old lonely bereaved man all but adopted the Blair chil- 
 dren; Betty, as a little girl, lived a large part of the time in the White 
 House, and, as she advanced in her teens, became his favorite amanu- 
 ensis; it was noted that the backwoods statesman never smoked in the 
 presence of his "little Democrat," as he called her, and was never 
 known to use his favorite oath, "by the Eternal." Montgomery, a much 
 more staid youngster, but brilliant in mind and persistent in industry, 
 Jackson always regarded as a son. Readers of Jackson's letters do not 
 need to be told of Blair's importance; more are written to him than to 
 any other man; those phrases expressing his views on Simon Cameron, 
 quoted above, appear in letters to this favorite correspondent. Jackson 
 willed all his papers and literary effects to the former editor of the 
 Globe, "a bequest I esteem higher," remarked the appreciative legatee, 
 "than the fortunes of John Jacob Astor." 
 
 This association gave Blair the one undeviating principle of his life. 
 The Federal Union became Blair's lodestar as it had been Jackson's. 
 Southerner and slaveholder that he was, the central government had 
 enlisted no more devout adherent. Someone has said that Lincoln's 
 feeling for the Union had a tinge of the mystical, and the same could 
 be said of Blair. His attitude towards slavery was not unlike Lincoln's 
 own — it was an outmoded evil, and must in course of time disappear, 
 but it should be tolerated for the present in the old states, for the sake 
 of the preservation of the Union, but must not be permitted to extend 
 its power into new fields. As long as he could Blair fought the en- 
 croachment of slavery behind the Democratic bulwarks, but in 1848 
 he joined the Free-Soilers, chiefly because his repudiated friend, Van 
 Buren, was the candidate. However, he dropped back into the regular 
 fold in 1852, on the nomination of Pierce. That new proslavery regime 
 so affronted Blair that in 1856 he again abandoned his lifelong organ- 
 
66 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ization and, as already noted, played a leading role in the movement for 
 Fremont. From 1845 onward, however, Blair was an influence, and a 
 powerful one; he held no public office, resting content with his power- 
 ful position as philosopher of Silver Spring. More lively participation 
 in public affairs he left to his two famous sons, the calm, intellectual 
 Montgomery and the energetic and sparkling Frank Preston, Jr. The 
 senior Blair had long entertained ambitions for both these young men: 
 Montgomery he had set aside for cabinet office, while for Frank his 
 aspirations rose higher; some day he expected to see his namesake — 
 unquestionably the old man's favorite — installed in the White House. 
 The first plan succeeded, but the nearest Frank came to accomplishing 
 his father's dream was a nomination for Vice-President on the Demo- 
 cratic ticket in 1868 — and that ended in defeat. 
 
 By 1860 the senior member of the family — then nearing seventy — 
 had become "old man" Blair; the Blair political activity at that time was 
 embodied chiefly in the two ' 'Blair boys," Monty, forty-seven, and 
 Frank, forty-one. Both had had conspicuous careers, in politics and in 
 professional life. Devoted as the brothers were, no two men could have 
 been more unlike. Montgomery was stolid, dignified, learned — accord- 
 ing to Noah Brooks the best-read man in the Lincoln cabinet, and 
 Seward, Chase, Bates, and Welles were by no means illiterate. His father 
 and a few intimates called him "Monty" but most followed the ex- 
 ample of his own wife — daughter of Levi Woodbury, of New Hamp- 
 shire — who always referred to him as "the Judge." Surviving pictures 
 make him look stiff and ministerial; in fact, he was deeply religious and 
 a lay reader in St. John's Church; his six feet of slender body always 
 stood erect — possibly the result of military training, for President 
 Jackson had insisted on sending him to West Point, a career in which 
 he was certainly miscast. His blue, steadily gazing eye, smoothly shaven 
 face, high forehead, strong chin, signified a reposeful spirit, and por- 
 trayed the man for precisely what he was — an able, well-documented 
 lawyer, at his best in his frequent appearances before the United States 
 Supreme Court. He had great financial ability, too, as became evident 
 when he took charge of the affairs of his brother James, who died in 
 1852, managing them so skillfully that the widow was assured of a 
 large competence for life. 
 
 This James, like Frank, Jr., represented the more adventurous strain 
 in the Blair blood. As young men James and Frank came into romantic 
 conflict, both having fallen in love with the same Kentucky girl; 
 neither brother, however, would pursue his suit in rivalry with the 
 other, and, to forget their disappointment, both departed to distant 
 lands. Frank settled in St. Louis, Missouri, to build up a law practice 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 61 
 
 and embark on a turbulent political career, while James took to the 
 sea. Through Jackson's influence, James was commissioned a lieutenant 
 in the navy, and joined in the famous Wilkes South Polar expedition, 
 in the course of which he suffered frostbites that caused his premature 
 death some years afterward. He served in the Mexican War, and on 
 the outbreak of the California gold mania in 1848 hastened to the 
 Pacific Coast, leading a kind of Mark Twain existence in mining camps 
 and as steamboat pilot, accumulating in a reasonably short time, by 
 virtue of the $1000 boat trip exacted from the eager competition of 
 passengers to the gold fields, a considerable sum of money, which, sent 
 to brother Frank, was invested in St. Louis real estate and — as noted 
 above — ultimately brought the widow a substantial fortune. When 
 James died, Montgomery went to California and brought the body 
 home; it was buried at Silver Spring, the father Blair helping to build 
 with his own hands the mound over the grave. 
 
 Though the Blair mansion opposite the White House and the Mary- 
 land country estate figure conspicuously in the family annals, the state 
 of Missouri claims the Blairs — at least the two sons — as its own. Two 
 statues stand today in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, as 
 Missouri's most illustrious citizens — one that of Thomas Hart Benton, 
 the other that of Frank Blair. No fitter companion in marble could 
 have been found for Frank than "old Bullion"; the lives — prof essional 
 and political — of both the "Blair boys" revolved about this famous 
 Democratic Senator. In 1837 Montgomery — surrendering his commis- 
 sion in the United States Army — went to St. Louis, studied law in 
 Benton's office, and soon started practice as his partner. A few years 
 afterward Frank joined his brother in the same firm. Both made rapid 
 progress. Montgomery quickly acquired a profitable practice as lawyer 
 for railroads and other corporations, and became mayor of St. Louis 
 and judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Frank, after undermining 
 his health by too close application to books, suddenly took to the wild 
 country along the Santa Fe Trail, and spent a considerable time in 
 friendly association with Indians, half-breeds, Mexicans, and miscel- 
 laneous traders and outlaws, sometimes even thumping his banjo for 
 their all-night dances and carousings. Delightful as all this was, and 
 beneficial as it proved to Frank's health, it did not satisfy his ambitions 
 for a career — and all Blairs, of course, must have a career; in 1847 
 Frank returned to St. Louis, married Appoline Alexander — his lifelong 
 beloved "Apo" who, plain-featured but charming, proved more than 
 a satisfactory substitute for the Kentucky maiden whom he had refused 
 to court in fraternal competition — and presently became a rival to 
 
68 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Montgomery in a more prosaic field — the practice of law. Something 
 of the frontier clung to Frank in the more polite existence he lived 
 henceforth; his drooping mustache, for example, seemed to offer hor- 
 rendous defiance to the smooth, ecclesiastical visage of brother Monty. 
 The ruddy complexion acquired in the Cimarron country Frank never 
 lost, nor the powerful, lithe, slender, muscular frame, six feet high, 
 which had come as an inheritance of the same outdoors. A capacious 
 appetite for hard liquor also remained a lifelong possession. 
 
 Frank was the only one of the Blairs who could be described as "mag- 
 netic," his honest hazel eyes, light hair, long, typically Saxon face, high 
 forehead suggestive of brains, making him as welcome in the social 
 circles of Montgomery's Washington home as in the rough-and-tumble 
 political Missouri rostrums of the fifties. In politics, indeed, Frank Blair 
 was something of a sagacious firebrand — a fierce orator, a sledgeham- 
 mer rhetorician. Yet he had an intellectual basis for his polemics, and 
 a moral purpose, unselfish and determined. His gift for repartee made 
 Frank the terror of hecklers, yet on quieter occasions his humor — usu- 
 ally accompanied by strokings of that bristling upper lip — had a subtle 
 quality. Frank needed all these traits — especially his most conspicuous 
 one, unflinching courage — in the struggle on which he presently em- 
 barked. Despite his Southern inheritance, the man abominated slavery 
 with a hate deep and ineradicable and the struggle of the cotton 
 planters to extend their system into new countries fairly set him aflame. 
 It was one thing to fight this battle from the sympathetic breastworks 
 of New England, and quite another to take up the challenge in Missouri. 
 That was the great border of contention where pistol shots and bowie 
 knives often turned out to be the final arbiters. 
 
 When Frank took the stump for Lincoln in 1860, friends and ene- 
 mies alike warned that these popular instruments of discussion in Mis- 
 souri might bring his campaign to a sudden end. To settle matters at 
 once he issued a general challenge to all whom it might concern, offer- 
 ing to meet them at any time and in any spot and with any kind of 
 firearms they might select. There were no takers. Frank had never 
 hesitated to oppose current opinion. He even broke away from his 
 venerated Benton in 1848 and became the great Free-Soiler of Missouri, 
 and in 1856, when Benton refused to support Fremont, despite the fact 
 that that candidate was the husband of his darling daughter Jessie, 
 Frank went over to the new Republican Party. Nothing brings out 
 better the difference in the two brothers than the part they played in 
 the antislavery crisis. Frank upheld the fiery cross in the open field, on 
 the stump in Missouri and other states, slave and free, in his newspaper 
 writings and in the halls of Congress — to which he was elected in 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 69 
 
 1858 — while Montgomery's fame as an antislavery man rests chiefly 
 on his work as counsel for Dred Scott in one of the most fateful pro- 
 ceedings of the United States Supreme Court. Montgomery did not 
 win that case — no man could have won it before the pro-Southern and 
 proslavery Supreme Court as constituted in 1856 — but his argument 
 was an intellectual performance that, in itself, laid the ground for his 
 membership in Lincoln's cabinet. Frank Blair's work as an "agitator" 
 produced more affirmative results. His speeches and writings and po- 
 litical campaigns laid a foundation in Missouri of understanding and 
 influence which enabled him, in 1860, to prevent the state from joining 
 the Confederacy. For to Frank Blair, Jr., historians attribute the "sav- 
 ing" of Missouri for the Union. 
 
 In the political sense the Blairs had no personal claims on Lincoln. 
 All three attended the Chicago Convention as delegates, but their can- 
 didate was Edward Bates. The Bates boom, indeed, was largely a Blair 
 performance. The Blairs favored him first as a Missouri man, and as the 
 one man of those suggested who might heal the widening breach in 
 party and nation. But for several years the Blairs and Lincoln had been 
 on understanding terms. After Fremont's lamentable showing in the 
 campaign of 1856, and after, old man Blair, rather weary of his 
 protege and with his eye searching for more promising material, went 
 to Springfield, in order to get acquainted, as he said, with "this new man 
 Lincoln." Their talks disclosed an identity of opinion; both believed 
 in gradual emancipation; both opposed slavery extension; and both 
 leaned to colonization of Negroes as the only permanent solution of 
 the problem. Frank Junior also visited Lincoln just before the "new 
 man" began his battle for the Illinois senatorship in 1858. Frank Blair 
 took the stump and his paper, the Missouri Democrat, supported Lin- 
 coln in that contest. A young man then studying law — or pretending 
 to — in Lincoln's office, John Hay, became Blair's Springfield corre- 
 spondent and wrote descriptions of the debates which naturally did 
 not minimize Lincoln's part in them. After the battle ended, Hay con- 
 tinued his sprightly letters, frequently writing with Lincoln at his 
 elbow; tradition says that Lincoln would occasionally seize the pen 
 himself, indite certain paragraphs or black out others. And so, although 
 the Blairs remained faithful to Bates throughout the convention, Mis- 
 souri's eighteen votes going to the "pre-Adamite" on all three ballots, 
 the transition to Lincoln as a candidate proved an easy one. After all, 
 was not Lincoln a denizen of the great Mississippi Valley so dear to 
 the Blair following? Were not Illinois and Missouri bordering states, 
 and Springfield and St. Louis close neighbors as cities? Certainly few 
 campaign speakers did more effective work for Lincoln than Frank 
 
70 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Blair. After the election Frank wrote Lincoln several times, keeping 
 the President-elect authentically informed about the position of the 
 Border states and undoubtedly now and then putting in a word for 
 brother Monty in the new administration. 
 
 Lincoln had no illusions about the Blairs. He knew that they always 
 acted as a unit, at times a selfish unit, and that, zealous as they might be 
 for the triumph of the cause, the political advancement of the family 
 was never far in the background. "The Blairs," wrote John Hay in his 
 Diary, in a passage that reflects Lincoln's own view, "have to an un- 
 usual degree the spirit of a clan. Their family is a closed corporation. 
 Frank is their hope and pride. They have a way of going with a rush 
 for anything they undertake; especially have Montgomery and the old 
 gentleman." That they would "go with a rush" for Montgomery in the 
 Lincoln cabinet the new President expected; Frank's ambition in the 
 war took a different turn, and a natural one, for he donned a uniform 
 and fought in the Federal army. Old man Blair had labored with 
 Franklin Pierce to make Montgomery Attorney General; and this fail- 
 ure, it was believed, did not diminish his enthusiasm when he cham- 
 pioned the new Republican Party. On the whole, the Blairs were not 
 popular in political circles, and in any really partisan allotment in dis- 
 tributing plums would not have had many backers. Judge David Davis, 
 Lincoln's good angel and also his evil one, never suspended his opposi- 
 tion to Blair, or his advocacy of his cousin, Henry Winter Davis. But 
 this hostility was largely personal and political. Lincoln's interest in 
 Montgomery rested on more public grounds. He regarded old man 
 Blair as one of the most masterful politicians of the age, a man who 
 could be of infinite use to him as counselor and friend. With Frank, 
 Lincoln was at the moment formulating plans for keeping Missouri in 
 the Union. The whole future of the nation depended on saving all the 
 Border states. No human agencies could be so useful in this task as the 
 Blair triumvirate. Their influence was paramount in two of the 
 most critical Border states — Maryland and Missouri — the combined 
 existence of which as members of the Federal Union would be worth 
 a large army to the Federal cause. This is the chief reason why the 
 clamorous protests of Blair enemies — of which the years had accumu- 
 lated a goodly supply — did not cause Lincoln to change the decision 
 he had formed, on that day following the election, of putting the Blair 
 family into his cabinet. For to name one of the three, so far as influence 
 in the Border states was concerned, amounted to the same thing as 
 naming all three. The main key to the Border-state problem, Lincoln 
 well understood, would be found at Silver Spring. 
 
ii 
 
 N, 
 
 - . 1 EW ENGLAND, a section that had gone unanimously for Lincoln 
 in the electoral college, and had contributed many of the ideas on which 
 the campaign had been fought, could not be ignored in forming the 
 new cabinet. The necessities of party balance required the selection of 
 a former Democrat as its representative. This consideration eliminated 
 two men who were early pressed upon the President-elect. Charles 
 Francis Adams and Seward were friends of long standing; their inti- 
 macy w r as personal as well as political; together they had stumped the 
 Northwest for the Lincoln and Hamlin ticket, and they were also both 
 advocates of compromise in face of secession. Naturally, Adams was 
 Seward's first choice as New England's cabinet member. But Mr. 
 Adams, like Seward himself, was a Whig of Whigs, and his presence 
 in the cabinet would, Lincoln thought, unduly emphasize the pre- 
 dominance of that element in the Republican Party. A similar objection 
 held, with even greater force, against the other New Englander who 
 was moving heaven and earth for a seat at the new council table. 
 Nathaniel P. Banks had started his opportunistic career in 1848 by 
 election to the Massachusetts legislature as the coalition candidate of 
 Democratic and antislavery forces; since then any party or faction that 
 would promote his political ambitions had been indiscriminately 
 adopted. His greatest triumphs, an election to Congress in 1853— a 
 success that made him ultimately speaker of that body — and his eleva- 
 tion to the governorship of Massachusetts in 1857, were achieved as 
 favorite of the Know-Nothings. Whatever political attribution could 
 be made for Banks in 1861, he was emphatically not the old-line Demo- 
 crat for whom Lincoln was looking to uphold the dignity of Yankee- 
 dom at his official board. Despite the man's reputation as a trimmer, he 
 had obtained impressive backing. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Spri?ig- 
 field Republican, and George S. Boutwell, governor of Massachusetts 
 1851-1852, afterward Secretary of the Treasury, supported him in his 
 native state. Seward, if his favorite Adams proved impossible, was 
 willing to accept Banks as a fairly satisfactory substitute. 
 
72 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Seward's acquiescence in Banks was probably not inspired by any 
 undue admiration for that kaleidoscopic statesman, but by the hostility 
 with which he regarded the candidate who held first place in Lincoln's 
 mind. For on the original Springfield list of cabinet officers had ap- 
 peared the name of Gideon Welles. For him Seward and Weed felt a 
 loathing almost as deep as that aroused by Salmon P. Chase. In the pre- 
 convention angling for New England delegates, the Sewardites had 
 met not only opposition at the hands of this Hartford editor, but an 
 iciness of revulsion of which only the Puritan temperament is capable. 
 Seward indeed regarded Welles as one of the chief architects of his 
 humiliation at Chicago, and almost any other man in the whole expanse 
 of New England would have been more acceptable as a colleague in 
 the new administration. Yet Welles unquestionably possessed the two 
 attributes which, in addition to character and ability, Lincoln regarded 
 as indispensable in the New England member. So far as New England 
 was concerned, Welles was a veritable autochthon of the soil. The 
 farm on which he had been born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, in 1802, 
 was the land which his American ancestor, Thomas Welles, an early 
 governor of Connecticut, had purchased from the Indians in 1632, and 
 which had remained in uninterrupted possession of his descendants 
 ever since. Again there was no question about Welles's democratic 
 antecedents. He had joined the JefTersonian wing of that party as a 
 young man, and had remained faithful to it until the great issue of 
 slavery extension, and the subserviency of the Pierce administration to 
 proslavery dominance, had compelled him to transfer his allegiance to 
 the Republicans in 1856. He had not made this transition, as had Seward 
 and others, reluctantly, almost hoping for a new turn in the political 
 whirligig that would restore both the name and the power of the old 
 party allegiance, but with all the zeal for a holy cause one would expect 
 from his upbringing. In an activity that, by 1860, had absorbed his chief 
 energies for nearly forty years, Welles had manifested qualities that 
 had attracted respect, if not much personal popularity. He was honest, 
 sincere, fearless and just, never a timeserver, and never agitating a cause 
 in which he did not believe. He was also shy, averse to close association 
 with his fellow humans, severely critical of their faults, with the 
 Puritan's talent for detecting their failings rather than their virtues. He 
 was equally gifted in looking into his own motives, and laying them 
 bare to his conscience, and in analyzing the characters of all with whom 
 he was thrown into association. This gift, which was to have historic 
 consequences in the Lincoln cabinet, Welles had displayed from his 
 earliest days. Nothing ever interested him quite so much as men, and 
 his ability to appraise them, and to phrase that appreciation in words 
 

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Gideon Welles (1802-1878) 
 Secretary of the Navy 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 73 
 
 that at times fairly became literature, is perhaps his greatest claim to 
 immortality. He describes himself in an early Diary as one "with feel- 
 ings easily given to irritation and a man that is often lost in gloomy 
 melancholy." Probably his constant dissatisfaction with human nature 
 as it unfolded before his eyes was the chief reason for this pessimism. 
 Yet he found an artist's delight in observing these phenomena and con- 
 veying his impressions to paper. "I like to catch people in the suds," 
 was the way he described this diversion, "to fall upon them by sur- 
 prise, when it is washing day, not only with their hands, but with their 
 temper." 1 It is perhaps not strange that the debonair and mercurial 
 Seward, who sometimes boasted of his lack of fixed principles, and 
 Thurlow Weed, whom Welles dismissed angrily as a "lobby jobber," 
 did not survive this "suds" treatment in any too immaculate a fashion. 
 The rise of Jacksonian democracy presented two incongruous per- 
 sonal spectacles in New England. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, 
 the most conservative of New England states,, the leaders of this move- 
 ment belonged to old traditional Federalist and Brahmin families. In 
 Massachusetts George Bancroft, member of the clan which looked 
 upon Jackson as Antichrist, as it had upon Jefferson in an earlier day, 
 emerged as virtual "boss" of the Jacksonian party, and in Connecticut, 
 Gideon Welles, inheritor of a similar attitude, occupied a correspond- 
 ing position of vantage. The two men had certain things in common: 
 the main interest of the two, outside politics, was literature and writing. 
 Welles never achieved a literary fame comparable to that of the first 
 important American historian — unless his great Diary elevates him to 
 that class — but, from his earliest days, no career appeared to him worth 
 while except one carved out by his pen. A writer of "poetry" and ro- 
 mances in his days at the Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, Welles, 
 as a young man, enjoyed some fame as a man of letters. He had written 
 a good many sketches and stories which had been accepted by one of 
 the fugitive magazines of the day, an initial success which determined 
 his profession. A more sordid field than tales of lovelorn Indian maid- 
 ens and shipwrecked adventurers was to enlist Welles's maturing tal- 
 ents. Newspaper writing was not looked upon by his family and friends 
 as an entirely reputable, not to say lucrative, occupation; indeed, when 
 Welles fell in love with his cousin, Mary Ann Hale — and with an ardor 
 and persistent pursuit surprising in one of his stolid temperament — 
 the girl's mother seriously objected to the match on the ground that he 
 was editor of the Hartford Times, a position hardly in keeping with 
 the girl's social standing. Welles had started on this paper writing ro- 
 
 1 West, Richard S., Jr., Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Navy Department. Bobbs 
 Merrill, 1943. P. 28. 
 
74 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 mantic trifles that could be printed among the advertisements as a decoy 
 to readers; but about 1826 he purchased an interest in the paper, and 
 settled down solemnly as a journalistic eulogist of the Jackson adminis- 
 tration. His vigorous editorial style and unbridled championship soon 
 made the Times one of the leading Democratic organs. Perhaps the 
 fervor of Welles's pen was excited by the prospect facing him, for, 
 from the third-floor window at which he sat preparing his copy, a 
 good view could be obtained of the old red brick Connecticut capitol, 
 the building in which had met the Hartford Convention, symbol of 
 everything odious in a Federalism which the youthful scribe was de- 
 nouncing in most uncompromising style. At moments Welles had 
 aspirations for a life of action. This led him, in 1826, to write Henry 
 Clay, Secretary of State in Adams's administration, asking for an ap- 
 pointment as Secretary of Legation in London; Clay turned down the 
 application on the ground that Welles's "credentials" were not in 
 proper form; if this snub did not accentuate the fluency of Welles's 
 detractions of the regime in power, it certainly did not mollify it. At 
 another time Welles sought — this time successfully — election as a 
 member of the Connecticut General Assembly. His main performance 
 in this capacity gave him a black mark forever in the estimate of the 
 most pious people of the state. At that time a man could not qualify 
 as a witness in court unless he professed belief in God and in a future 
 life. Welles was a steady churchgoer and a deeply religious man, but 
 he denounced this law as contrary to religious liberty and freedom of 
 thought and pushed through a "witness bill" which drastically modified 
 the prevailing court procedure. What better could be expected, ex- 
 claimed every Presbyterian pulpit, from a devotee of the pagan 
 Jefferson and the barbarian Jackson? The episode well illustrates 
 Welles's courage and honesty, but in itself it blocked any political 
 career in Connecticut. He therefore became reconciled to a future as 
 observer and polemic, not an active participant in the political hurly- 
 burly. Indeed no pride Welles may have felt in his native state blinded 
 him to the evils of its public affairs. With a frankness worthy of his 
 best days in Washington he remarked — as usual in writing — after this 
 brief sojourn in its legislative chamber, "I am ashamed to say of the 
 civil and political complexion of my state, that a degraded, bigoted, 
 hidebound, aristocratic, proud, arrogant, and contemptible policy 
 governs her, through designing hypocrites, and artful and unprincipled 
 knaves." 2 He also put a sacrilegious finger on the fountain of corrup- 
 tion. "Every measure that is agitated in our legislature and generally in 
 
 2 West, op. cit., p. 32, quoted from Gideon Welles's Copy Book, p. 96. Library 
 of Congress. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 75 
 
 our state, has a political spice from old Yale College." Thus early had 
 Welles developed the gift for depreciation for which he was to find 
 so promising a field in the Lincoln cabinet. 
 
 Jackson appointed Welles postmaster at Hartford, a position held in 
 greater estimation in those days than now; it made him virtually leader 
 of the Jacksonian forces in Connecticut. In 1845 Polk called him to 
 Washington as Chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing in the 
 Navy Department. This assignment did not impress Welles as a par- 
 ticularly brilliant one; indeed, he underwent some humiliation in ac- 
 cepting it, but the experience had important results not appreciated at 
 the time. Among the many naval officers whom he met frequently one 
 above all the rest left an indelible memory. A certain Lieutenant David 
 Glasgow Farragut, who at that time was struggling for some important 
 duty in the Mexican War, and attracting little attention, seemed to 
 Welles keen, resourceful, energetic, the plans he had formulated for an 
 attack on Vera Cruz especially enlisting Welles's admiration. Sixteen 
 years after when Welles, as Secretary of the Navy, was seeking the 
 right man to command an expedition against New Orleans, his mind 
 immediately reverted to this young man. This again illustrates Welles's 
 most valuable talent, his insight into men. It was this quality that gave 
 him, in the twenty years preceding the Civil War, a wide acquaintance 
 with influential Americans. His political career, if such it can be called, 
 was an unusual one; outside of his own parish few of the American 
 rank and file had ever heard his name, but he enjoyed a kind of confi- 
 dential reputation in high circles. This he owed, as he did most things 
 that came his way, to his literary gifts. Welles early learned that his 
 lack of geniality and forensic talents would preclude him from political 
 activity of the usual sort. As a young man he began writing letters, on 
 subjects of current interest, with a variety of correspondents, great and 
 small. The practice was a useful one for the editor of a live newspaper, 
 for in this way Welles obtained opinions and facts that served him 
 profitably in framing his daily editorials. His letters also must have 
 contained a good deal of meat, for several of the most powerful Jack- 
 sonians of the day, especially Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and above all, 
 Francis P. Blair, came to depend upon him as the most reliable source 
 of information on matters in the Eastern states. These men invited him 
 to Washington for additional enlightenment; the visits became an an- 
 nual event in Welles's life, with the result that he became, so far as a 
 man of his unsocial manners could, a friend and confidant of many of 
 the men who were making history. Especially did his friendship with 
 Francis P. Blair serve as appropriate prologue to Welles's work in the 
 Lincoln cabinet. Welles was Blair's sympathizer in one of the great 
 
16 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 political disturbances of the time. In 1830, Duff Green, editor of the 
 United States Telegraph, the mouthpiece of Andrew Jackson, fell un- 
 der suspicion as a "traitor" to his chief, who had not only made him 
 newspaper spokesman of the administration organ, but had given him 
 vast largess in the shape of government printing, pap without which no 
 Washington journalist could attain virility. The ungrateful Duff 
 Green was supposed to be working secretly in behalf of Jackson's chief 
 enemy — the one whom Hickory threatened to hang as "high as Ha- 
 man" — John C. Calhoun, for the presidential nomination in 1832. 
 When Green began mousing around Gideon Welles, in the hope of 
 winning the Connecticut delegates for Calhoun, Welles at once re- 
 ported the facts to Francis P. Blair — who himself aspired to Green's 
 job, especially to the government printing that accompanied it — and a 
 terrific explosion ensued. As a result, Duff Green was thrown into the 
 abyss. Blair became administration editor and began the career that led 
 to wealth, power, and the estate at Silver Spring. The friendship thus 
 cemented with Blair — and with "the Blairs" — lasted unbroken until 
 the end. Welles, on his annual visits to Washington, became one of the 
 most favored habitues of the Acorn on the Maryland estate and deep 
 in the confidence of all the bigwigs in the new Republican Party. 
 
 When the time approached for the Chicago Convention, Welles had 
 really become a political force, not to be overlooked by any aspirant 
 for the Republican nomination. He was Connecticut member of the 
 national committee, member of its executive committee, and chairman 
 of the Connecticut delegates at the Wigwam. Though few citizens in 
 the broad country knew of his existence, there were two men who 
 rated at its true value his influence and laid plans to conciliate it. Wil- 
 liam H. Seward and Thurlow Weed believed they had a natural claim 
 upon the allegiance of New England. What interest had this province 
 contiguous to New York in such outlanders as Edward Bates, Salmon 
 P. Chase, and Abraham Lincoln? Naturally this steady area fell into the 
 Knickerbocker sphere of influence. Thurlow Weed, making a prelimi- 
 nary survey in the spring of 1860, found a good deal of encouragement 
 in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, even in Maine. Connecticut, how- 
 ever, the political satrapy of Gideon, proved a harder nut to crack. 
 There was more than one reason for his recalcitrance. In the first place, 
 Welles hated political corruption. A few years previously, he had re- 
 signed the presidency of Charter Oak Life Insurance Company, to 
 which he had been recently elected, when certain bills were placed 
 before him for approval — bills awarding compensation to particular 
 gentry for "legislative services." He would not be concerned in such 
 dirty business, he exclaimed, leaving the office in dudgeon. It was this 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 77 
 
 phase of public life, he believed, that Thurlow Weed, if not William 
 H. Seward, had made a specialty. In recent years Welles had been 
 drawn within the orbit of William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Eve- 
 ning Post of New York; from Hartford he sent editorials and political 
 correspondence to Bryant, who eagerly sought and published them. 
 Welles's newspaper style, he wrote at the time, "is much better than 
 that of any newspaper correspondent we have." In consequence Welles 
 was drawn into the confidence of the Bryant-George Opdyke-David 
 Dudley Field-Hiram Barney coterie in New York, whose chief reason 
 for existence was to oppose the Seward- Weed machine. These men 
 kept Welles up to date on Weed's obliquities, laying particular empha- 
 sis on the "railroad grab" which Weed had just jammed through the 
 Albany legislature. Welles believed also that the nomination of Seward 
 would be a serious tactical mistake. It was the split in the Democratic 
 Party in 1860 that made certain Republican success. Seward was so 
 detested in the South that the Democrats would very likely put aside 
 their internal quarrels, close ranks, and unite on a single candidate in 
 its zeal for his defeat. Welles's favorite candidate was Salmon P. Chase 
 — perhaps Chase's New England origin had something to do with the 
 preference. Thus Weed's attempt to win over the saturnine publicist 
 in Hartford got nowhere. At the Chicago Convention this distant atti- 
 tude became open warfare. Largely owing to Welles's assiduous button- 
 holing of the New England delegates, Seward's showing in that region, 
 on the first ballot, fairly appalled his friends. Connecticut and Rhode 
 Island did not give him a single vote. Neither did Vermont, its ten 
 going to a favorite son, Jacob Collamer. Maine, which was expected to 
 be all-Seward, cast ten for the New Yorker and six for Lincoln. New 
 Hampshire stood one for Seward and seven for Lincoln. Even Massa- 
 chusetts, which Weed thought unanimous for his candidate, threw 
 four votes for Lincoln. This poor showing — especially the manifest 
 leaning to Lincoln, who, at the start of proceedings, was dismissed as 
 having no strength in New England — proved a crushing blow to the 
 Seward boom. Both Seward and Weed attributed it to Welles's cam- 
 paigning, and never forgave him. 
 
 Though Welles did not support the Lincoln candidacy at Chicago — 
 even on the fateful third ballot the Illinoisan secured only four of 
 Connecticut's twelve votes — the final choice afforded him great satis- 
 faction. In Lincoln's tall, gaunt form he detected a resemblance to the 
 idol of his youth, Andrew Jackson, and the rail splitter's insistence on 
 the preservation of the Union as the one great question of the time 
 seemed to Welles's appreciative ears an echo of the stirring events of 
 1832. In February of 1860, the Hartford editor had had an opportunity 
 
78 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 for one of those searching analyses of character of which he was so 
 fond. And never had he exercised his pre-eminent talent so incisively. 
 After the Cooper Union speech Lincoln made a rapid tour of New 
 England, reaching Hartford on the evening of March 5. Weary and 
 travel-stained — and the grime of railroads was a more disfiguring 
 blemish then than now — Lincoln was rushed from the station to a 
 large meeting awaiting him; his speech, largely a repetition of the same 
 ideas that had entranced the New York gathering a few nights before, 
 made the audience quickly forget his unpressed garments and his be- 
 draggled collar. Next morning Lincoln spent an hour with Welles in 
 the office of the Hartford Evening Press, of which he was one of the 
 proprietors, elaborating his remarks of the previous evening, and enter- 
 taining the not too humorous Welles with the usual jokes and stories. 
 Next day, in the Evening Press, Welles gave his impressions of his vis- 
 itor. "This orator and lawyer has been caricatured. He is not Apollo, 
 but he is not Caliban. He was made where the material for strong men 
 is plenty; and his loose, tall frame is loosely thrown together. He is in 
 every way large — brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, 
 generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination. . . . He is an 
 effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, 
 and clear as crystal in his logic." One can almost sense Welles, as he 
 wrote these lines, judiciously weighing each adjective. One must keep 
 in mind that this characterization was committed to paper two months 
 before Lincoln's nomination, almost exactly a year before he took up 
 his duties in the White House. Yet the portrait sketched by Welles, 
 after an hour's confidential chat, differs little with that upon which 
 history is now agreed. Thus Gideon Welles, of all the seven men whom 
 Lincoln called to his council, was the only one who had anything 
 approaching an accurate appreciation of his caliber. Not one of them, 
 except this Connecticut Yankee, saw in him any possibilities of great- 
 ness. Most of them looked upon Lincoln with contempt, sometimes not 
 too carefully concealed, as a kind of Christopher Sly, who had gone 
 to bed one night a ragged tinker, and had awakened the next morning 
 to find himself clothed in magnificent finery and chief lord of his 
 region. In fact, some such conception remained with most of the cabi- 
 net members until the end. It is one of Welles's greatest claims to re- 
 spect that to him alone, in four years of close association, was Lincoln, 
 to use Welles's favorite expression, "that illustrious man." 
 
VI 
 
 S 
 
 UCH WERE the names that loomed largest for the cabinet in the 
 last months of this presidential year. Five of them — Seward, Chase, 
 Welles, Bates, and Blair — were, in Lincoln's mind, practically selected; 
 the two others — Cameron and Smith — were presenting difficult prob- 
 lems. Two of them, Seward and Bates, represented the old Whig 
 element in the Republican Party; two, Bates and Blair, as definitely 
 represented old-line Democrats; one, Chase, if not technically an abo- 
 litionist, was acceptable as an extreme antislavery man to that usually 
 uncompromising group; if Cameron and Smith should succeed in forc- 
 ing themselves upon the hesitating President-elect, one would probably 
 go in as a Democrat, the other as an unquestionable Whig. Thus would 
 Lincoln gather together the many groups that had combined to curb 
 the aggressions of the South and form an impregnable political power 
 for enforcing the people's will. He believed that a new political era had 
 dawned; that the Whig Party was as dead as the Federalist; that a new 
 organization, destined to permanence, had come into being, of which 
 he had been chosen the head, and with which, discarding all past affilia- 
 tions, he was prepared to face the future. 
 
 His most powerful rival for the nomination, and the man he had 
 assigned for first place in his cabinet, did not accept this simple reading 
 of events. It was as a Whig that Seward contemplated the organization 
 of the new regime. The party that had contributed the largest number 
 of votes to Lincoln's election — perhaps two thirds — should dominate 
 the administration. The cabinet should be an all- Whig cabinet. Anti- 
 slavery Democrats, Free-Soilers, Abolitionists, "Americans," and the 
 rest should have no representatives in that sacred society. These groups, 
 it was true, had rallied to Lincoln's support at the ballot box; without 
 their votes, indeed, he could not have succeeded — this Seward grudg- 
 ingly admitted; they were therefore entitled to "recognition" of a 
 minor kind — a foreign legation of secondary rank here and there, 
 perhaps an occasional collectorship, more postmasterships, but they 
 should never hope to enter the inner shrine. The cabinet that Seward 
 
80 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 had previsioned would contain four or five old-line Whigs from the 
 Northern and Western states and two or three from the South. Thus 
 would the old Whig Party be born again. That party had been national 
 in scope; the inclusion in the new formation of old-time Southern 
 Whigs like John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, John M. Botts of Vir- 
 ginia, Emerson Etheridge of Tennessee— and there were plenty of oth- 
 ers who could be called upon if necessary — would not only symbolize 
 the restoration of the ancient regime, but give the so-called Republicans 
 something they desperately needed, a national character. Such a cabinet 
 would also strengthen Seward's hands in his plans for healing the breach 
 that was widening between North and South, for the example of his 
 great former chieftain, Henry Clay, seemed to Seward to indicate the 
 one safe road open to the nation in the crisis of 1860. To put into the 
 cabinet Democrats like Blair and Welles and Free-Soilers like Chase 
 would not only destroy the harmony Seward regarded as essential to 
 his plan of conciliation, but would amount to little less than a challenge 
 hurled at the seceding states. 
 
 Thus there was a certain flavor of statesmanship in Seward's insistence 
 on an all- Whig cabinet — visionary as was his solution of a crisis infi- 
 nitely greater than those that Henry Clay had failed to settle with his 
 "compromises" — but, as was usually the case with Seward, personal 
 ambition as well as principle was involved. For his cabinet was to be 
 not only "all-Whig" but "all-Seward." The leadership of the Whig 
 Party which had been his dearest possession in its prosperous days he 
 was determined to maintain. The strange behavior of the Chicago Con- 
 vention had not changed this leadership. Seward declined to admit that 
 the election of Abraham Lincoln had in any way deposed him from his 
 political throne. Let Lincoln live in the White House and ostensibly 
 perform the functions of his office; the real seat of authority would be 
 wherever Seward saw fit to establish himself. A new conception of the 
 American Constitution now began to take shape in his resourceful 
 mind. His imagination evolved a kind of British cabinet system in the 
 place of the one handed down by the fathers. One of the most popular 
 diplomats at Washington in those days was Baron Schleiden, Minister 
 from the Republic of Bremen. Seward especially was likely to unbosom 
 himself at times to this companionable gentleman. On February 18, 
 1861, Baron Schleiden reported to his government a conversation in 
 which Seward had set forth his recently improvised theory of the 
 presidential office. "Seward consoled himself with the clever remark 
 that there is no great difference between an elected President of the 
 United States and an hereditary monarch. The latter is called to the 
 throne through the accident of birth, the former through the chances 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 81 
 
 which make his election possible. The actual direction of public affairs 
 belongs to the leader of the ruling party, here as well as in any heredi- 
 tary principality." x Properly understood, Lincoln could have accepted 
 this constitutional theory, only he would have added that the President, 
 merely by the fact of having been elected, becomes the "leader of the 
 ruling party," but Seward — although he was of course really too wise 
 and experienced a man to believe his own interpretation — meant it in 
 a different sense. He meant that Lincoln was to be sovereign on the 
 British model, while he was destined Prime Minister. Just as the British 
 Prime Minister had almost autocratic power in naming the members of 
 the cabinet, so Seward believed that, as Secretary of State and head of 
 the party, he should select the men who were to form the presidential 
 council. At least he was convinced Lincoln should take counsel with 
 him and appoint no one to whom he was opposed. All Seward's refer- 
 ences to the political crisis in the winter of 1860-1861 imply that the 
 coming regime was to be a Seward administration and that the supreme 
 task of saving the Union rested on his shoulders. How could he accom- 
 plish this huge task unless he had sympathetic associates around the 
 council board, men of his own selection identified with Seward princi- 
 ples and ready to support him in all important decisions? All this seems 
 grotesque today, yet the fact remained that in 1861 most thoughtful 
 citizens entertained practically the same view of Seward's role in the 
 counsels of Abraham Lincoln. Everyone took it for granted that Sew- 
 ard would be the brains and engine of the new dispensation. 
 
 Lincoln himself, however, was one of the minority who entertained 
 radically different ideas. The election of 1860, he believed, had marked 
 a turning point in American history. A national crisis had called into 
 existence a new party, made him its head, and elected him President; 
 he intended to accept the mandate and the responsibility thus con- 
 ferred. With the plan for an all- Whig cabinet, still less an all-Seward 
 one, he had not the slightest sympathy, and he certainly had no inten- 
 tion of abdicating the Presidency and transferring it to a political clique 
 dominated by Seward and Thurlow Weed. He sincerely desired to give 
 Seward first place in the cabinet; that formed an indispensable part of 
 his plan of a composite administration; to leave out the Whigs, the 
 most numerous branch of the new alignment, were to leave out Hamlet 
 indeed. But Lincoln intended to have Seward on his own terms, not on 
 Seward's. Intimations had come in in plenty that it would be difficult 
 to accomplish this. Immediately after the triumph at the polls the news 
 was conveyed to Lincoln in several ways that Seward did not wish to 
 
 1 Adams, Ephraim D., Great Britain and the American Civil War. Longmans 
 Green, 1925. I, 116. 
 
82 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 enter the cabinet; but that, as recognition of his personal eminence and 
 his influential following, he was entitled to an offer of the Secretaryship 
 of State — an offer that would be declined. It was more than broadly 
 hinted that Seward expected to be consulted on the selection of the 
 cabinet as a whole: his own decision as to accepting Lincoln's proffer 
 would depend largely on whether he was to have a voice in choosing 
 his colleagues. This came pretty close to being an ultimatum. The cabi- 
 net must be a Seward, and a Whig, cabinet, or he would have no part 
 in the new era. Lincoln afterward explained the situation to Gideon 
 Welles, who made a written memorandum of the conversation, which 
 he placed among his papers. 2 It had seemed proper, Lincoln told Welles 
 on this occasion, that Seward be offered first place "in view of his ad- 
 mitted talents and great public services." For the same reason he should 
 take into his administration "Chase and Bates, men of undoubted ability 
 though less conspicuous. . . . But he did not think it came within the 
 scope of his duty or courtesy to turn over to either of them the selec- 
 tion of the men with whom he was to be associated as advisers, and who 
 were to' compose his official family. He was willing to hear suggestions 
 from any of them, or their friends, and to give their opinions for or 
 against any individual all the weight and consideration to which they 
 were entitled, but he reserved to himself the appointment of the men 
 whose assistance he needed, with whom he was to confer, and to whom 
 he was to give his confidence. . . ." Lincoln desired each of the "par- 
 ties of the past" to be represented in his cabinet. "His administration 
 was not to be Whig or Democratic or Abolitionist or so-called Ameri- 
 can [Know-No thing] but a Republican administration. . . . To select 
 representative men of each of the old parties, Democratic and Whig, 
 but who nevertheless were recognized and earnest Republicans, was a 
 primary starting point, a basis on which to build." Lincoln gave Welles 
 the names of the men he had selected as cabinet timber the day follow- 
 ing the election. They were Seward, Chase, Welles, Bates, and Dayton; 
 two others that were favorably regarded were Blair and N. B. Judd. 
 Dayton, for whom Lincoln had high regard, had been one of his 
 minor competitors at Chicago — he was reconciled for his exclusion by 
 a handsome appointment as minister to France. Judd had been a friend 
 for many years, and one of the managers of the Lincoln nomination 
 campaign; his name was dropped, because he came from Illinois, a state 
 which Lincoln decided had been sufficiently recognized by having the 
 Presidency, because he was pushed aside to make room for Caleb B. 
 Smith, and because Mrs. Lincoln, who hated him with real feminine 
 
 2 This was not published until 1925, in the Magazine of History. Extra number 
 105, Vol. XXVII. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 83 
 
 intensity, would give her distracted husband no peace until he was cast 
 into outer darkness — in other words, the legation in Berlin. To three 
 names on this list, Lincoln told Welles, the Seward party showed tena- 
 cious hostility. These were Chase, Welles, and Blair. Chase, they argued, 
 could not be regarded as an appropriate representative of the Demo- 
 cratic Party; he was really an Abolitionist; that the Liberty Party man 
 of 1844, the Free-Soiler of 1848, and the Know-Nothing of 1855 did 
 fall somewhat short of Democratic orthodoxy Lincoln was forced to 
 admit. But the Democrat the Sewardites preferred as Secretary of the 
 Treasury afforded Lincoln little comfort: for Simon Cameron's record 
 as a consistent Democrat was also clouded, to say nothing of his not 
 too savory personal standing. Welles the Seward crowd hated for the 
 part he had played in turning New England against their favorite in 
 Chicago; besides he was a disagreeable person and a hidebound State 
 rights man; in comparison with Charles Francis Adams, ex-Governor 
 Banks, or Governor Andrew he had little to recommend him. "The 
 name of Mr. Montgomery Blair was quite as distasteful to the repre- 
 sentatives of the Albany policy as that of Mr. Welles. Two such men, 
 it was asserted, would give the administration undue Democratic bear- 
 ing and their association with the Secretary of State would be so un- 
 comfortable that it was represented that Mr. Seward would hardly 
 consent to go into the cabinet with them. His [Seward's] voice, it was 
 claimed, ought to be so potential as to exclude men who were not 
 acceptable to him." W 7 ith Lincoln's purpose of including Blair as a 
 friendly gesture to the Border states Seward was sympathetic, but 
 "others from the same locality might be substituted, Mr. Gilmer, of 
 North Carolina, or Mr. Emerson Etheridge, of Tennessee" — both old- 
 line Southern Whigs — "were named as preferable to Mr. Blair." 
 
 This same distrust of Seward and his monopolistic ambitions was 
 manifest when Lincoln met Edward Bates and offered him a cabinet 
 post. The urbane Missourian was one of the few men on Lincoln's list 
 who aroused no opposition in the Seward camp. The reasons for this 
 friendly disposition are evident. Mr. Bates was an old-line Whig — an 
 even more persistent one than Seward himself; for he had not gone 
 through even the form of joining the Republicans; he had not been 
 identified with active politics for years and had no ambitions that 
 would run afoul of Seward's; he was sixty-seven years old in 1860, and 
 could probably — at least so the New Yorker fancied — be brought 
 within the Seward sphere of influence. About a month after the elec- 
 tion, Bates received a message from Springfield: the President-elect was 
 contemplating a visit soon to St. Louis, and wished to talk with its most 
 distinguished citizen on future plans. The old-fashioned nature of Bates 
 
84 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 is well illustrated by his response to this invitation; to say that he was 
 shocked puts it mildly: a prospective Sovereign taking a long river 
 trip to call upon him, a private citizen! The proposal argued ill for the 
 new standard of official dignity and manners about to be installed in 
 the White House. Did not the rail-splitting statesman understand that 
 he was now the future ruler of his people, and that it was his duty 
 to summon to the presence such ordinary mortals as he deigned to 
 consult? Evidently the punctilious Bates did not understand Lincoln's 
 practical reason for disregarding etiquette. Lincoln's official headquar- 
 ters in the Springfield capitol and his home were so crowded with 
 rapacious visitors that his only chance of a quiet talk was in some 
 secluded spot. But Bates at once telegraphed that he would appear in 
 Springfield the following Saturday and place himself at executive dis- 
 posal. On the appointed morning the grizzled veteran informed John 
 Nicolay, Mr. Lincoln's secretary, that he could not think of permitting 
 the President-elect to come to St. Louis, but that he esteemed it a great 
 honor "to wait upon" his chief. Lincoln did his best to secure privacy 
 by calling upon Bates at his hotel, and secreted in his bedroom they had 
 a fairly satisfactory talk. "He is not of impressive exterior," Nicolay 
 noted of Bates in his Diary, but his first unfavorable impression changed 
 when Bates began to talk. "His flow of words in conversation is very 
 genial and easy, seeming at first to verge upon extreme politeness, but 
 soon becoming very attractive." Afterwards, in serious conversation 
 with Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Bates became "earnest and spoke his thoughts 
 in clear, concise language, indicating a very definite and intellectual 
 grasp of ideas and a great facility in their expression." 
 
 Bates wrote in his Diary, after the interview with Lincoln, "I found 
 him free in his communications and candid in his manner." Lincoln was 
 especially candid on the question which, he admitted to the Missourian, 
 was causing him much trouble — what to do about Mr. Seward? From 
 the beginning, it had been his wish to tender Bates a position in his 
 cabinet; if he had been free to do so, he would have offered him the 
 prime place — that of Secretary of State. But there was Seward; Lincoln 
 regarded himself "as under moral, or at least party duress" to offer the 
 New Yorker that distinguished office. Mr. Seward, said Lincoln, was a 
 man of great ability and integrity, and his fitness for the post was com- 
 manding. Not to make Mr. Seward Secretary of State would probably 
 cause a rupture in the Republican Party at the start of the new adminis- 
 tration; his large and influential following was insistently demanding 
 such an appointment. Yet, said the President-elect, such a decision 
 would invite dangers of another kind. The South regarded Mr. Seward 
 "as the embodiment of all that they hold odious in the Republican 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 85 
 
 party," and with Seward at the head of the cabinet would stiffen its 
 resistance to conciliation. Again, though a large element in the party 
 was demanding the New Yorker's elevation, another large and 
 weighty group was opposed. These factions had defeated Seward for 
 the presidential nomination and they feared that, should this enemy 
 succeed to this powerful office, he might use it for purposes of revenge. 
 Lincoln was evidently referring to the factions in New York State led 
 by Hiram Barney, David Dudley Field, and William Cullen Bryant, who 
 were determined to keep Seward out of the cabinet. The impression 
 Bates apparently gathered from Mr. Lincoln's disturbed state of mind 
 was that he would offer Seward the State Department, but that he 
 hoped the offer would be declined. That this represented Lincoln's real 
 desire is not likely, but there were undoubtedly times, such as the 
 morning of this talk with Bates, when such a solution of his problem 
 would have been not unwelcome. Under these circumstances, Lincoln 
 said that he could not appoint Mr. Bates to the "Premiership," but 
 would be most grateful if he would accept the post of Attorney 
 General. Should he consult his own inclinations, Bates replied, he would 
 decline this opportunity, as he had a similar one proposed by President 
 Fillmore in 1850; but in view of the critical state of affairs he would 
 accept any office in which the President-elect thought he might be 
 useful. This disclaimer, this call to duty, in most cases would have been 
 merely perfunctory, but not in the case of so sincere a patriot as Ed- 
 ward Bates. Though Virginia born, with views on the Negro and his 
 future far less radical than were acceptable to some of his future 
 colleagues, Bates's loyalty to the Union was steadfast, as he showed 
 when discussing the dangers then facing the country. The South, he 
 thought, could not really secede, but if it did, he saw his duty clear. 
 "I am a man of peace," Bates said to the President-elect, "and will 
 defer fighting as long as possible, but, if forced to do so against my will, 
 I have made it a rule never to fire blank cartridges." 3 
 
 A few days after this visit an item appeared in the Missouri Demo- 
 crat, as follows: "We have the permission of both Mr. Lincoln and Mr. 
 Bates to say that the latter will be offered, and accept, a place in the 
 new cabinet, subject, of course, to the action of the Senate. It is not yet 
 definitely settled which department will be assigned to Mr. Bates." 
 Lincoln himself wrote these lines, which were printed as an editorial. 
 It shows his uncertainty at the time over Seward as Secretary of State 
 — a post that he was possibly holding in reserve for Bates, should the 
 New Yorker decline appointment. 
 
 s Bates, Diary, pp. 164-166. 
 
A, 
 
 .CCORDING TO Gideon Welles, Thurlow Weed was "chief 
 engineer of the Albany plan" — the plan, that is, of sidetracking a con- 
 stitutionally elected President and elevating his foremost competitor 
 to the supreme control of the party. This "Albany plan" evidently 
 took form in Weed's mind as soon as the shouts had subsided in the 
 Chicago Wigwam. As soon as Weed's grief over the collapse of a life 
 ambition died down, like a good politician he began to take stock; 
 perhaps, after all, some salvage could be gathered from the wreck. 
 The propitiatory visit of Andrew Curtin, who had dealt such a death- 
 blow to Seward in helping the transfer of Pennsylvania's delegates to 
 Lincoln on the second ballot, has already been noted. David Davis and 
 Leonard Swett similarly paid a call on the disgruntled Titan. Davis 
 and Swett recognized the need of harmony in the approaching cam- 
 paign, and were willing to go to almost any extreme to soothe the 
 feelings of the New York delegation. Their olive branch was received 
 more politely than the friendly advances of Curtin. They were met 
 with sorrowful reproaches indeed, but not with ferocious discourtesy. 
 The reason is plain. Swett and David Davis of all men stood closest 
 to Lincoln's ear, and no wise politician would antagonize such ascend- 
 ant luminaries on the Republican horizon. 
 
 Swett invited Weed to visit the new nominee on his way back to 
 New York. The suggestion was eagerly accepted. He was about to go 
 to Iowa for a week or two, Weed replied, and on his return would take 
 pleasure in dropping off for a few hours at Springfield. This trip to 
 Iowa was probably a fiction. That a vast deluge of visitors would over- 
 whelm Lincoln's home immediately after the nomination Weed well 
 knew; he did not wish to be one of a crowd, but preferred to have his 
 session with Lincoln after the rush had quieted, and all rival bigwigs 
 had left. Gideon Welles, one of the committee sent to Springfield to 
 notify Lincoln officially of his nomination, also spent a few days after 
 the excitement had died down, in western and southern Illinois. One 
 evening, a few days after leaving Springfield, he boarded what he 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 87 
 
 called an "irregular" boat at Rock Island, on the way to Quincy. The 
 Connecticut Yankee, who seemed to have the habit of turning up un- 
 expectedly on embarrassing occasions, was astonished to find Thur- 
 low Weed a fellow passenger. "I had supposed he was at that time in 
 Minnesota, and he probably believed me in Connecticut when we found 
 ourselves face to face on the Mississippi steamer." Welles was no more 
 rejoiced than Weed over the accidental rencontre. "I at once saw," 
 Welles adds, "that the meeting afforded him no gratification," and the 
 interchange of recognition was perfunctory on both sides. Evidently 
 Weed had been spending several days sailing up and down the Missis- 
 sippi, killing time and thus giving his competitors for future favor at 
 Springfield a chance to visit Mr. Lincoln and depart. In Welles's own 
 words, Weed "performed a circuit of many hundred miles to obtain 
 a private interview with Mr. Lincoln." 
 
 So far as reaching any understanding with Lincoln, Weed's visit, 
 when he finished his roundabout journey and landed in Springfield, was 
 not fruitful. "As the representative of his friend in Auburn," says 
 Welles, Weed was "somewhat presuming and officious yet he was 
 treated with considerate courtesy. He accomplished, however, noth- 
 ing that was decisive or satisfactory in regard to the influence which 
 Mr. Seward might be allowed to exercise in forming the cabinet or 
 shaping the policy of Mr. Lincoln. The comments of the self-appointed 
 ambassador on individuals and their relation to the Albany policy were 
 "listened to kindly but without any satisfactory answering response. 
 No commitments for or against anyone were obtained from Mr. Lin- 
 coln and Weed returned in a not very complacent state of mind to 
 Albany." * But twenty-five years afterward, Weed, in his Autobiog- 
 raphy y recalled this preliminary visit as a happy one — a rosy remem- 
 brance perhaps enhanced by the lapse of time and Lincoln's un- 
 anticipated immortality. "I found Mr. Lincoln sagacious and practical. 
 He displayed throughout the conversation so much good sense, such 
 intuitive knowledge of human nature, and such familiarity with the 
 virtues and infirmities of politicians that I became impressed very 
 favorably with his fitness for the duties which he was not unlikely to 
 be called upon to perform." 
 
 In one respect, however, Weed's Springfield visit did have important 
 results. David Davis and Leonard Swett came down from Bloomington 
 and were present at the interview. At this time the basis was laid for an 
 alliance of the three leaders that was to embarrass Lincoln seriously 
 at the outset of his administration. In political ideals, the trio had much 
 in common. Both Davis and Swett embodied all those conceptions of 
 
 1 Memorandum previously cited. See p. 82. 
 
88 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 partisanship and spoils which Weed had practiced so successfully and 
 so long in New York. For many years the two had been on the closest 
 terms with Lincoln. On the famous Eighth Circuit in Illinois, the 
 triumvirate of Lincoln, Davis, and Swett had for years enjoyed a fame 
 all their own. Together they had "ridden" the circuit; had eaten their 
 meals at the same table; had slept in the same room and, when pinched 
 for accommodations, in the same bed. Their arrival was always eagerly 
 anticipated by the rustics who gathered nightly around the stove in 
 the common room, and their conversation and stories afforded far more 
 entertainment than the occasional theatrical troups that played the 
 frontier towns. While Lincoln outranked his fellows in anecdote and 
 humor, Davis in those days easily held first place in dignity and position. 
 He had already embarked on that career as speculator in public lands 
 that was to make him a millionaire; besides, he was generally looked 
 upon as a man of education, having spent four years at Kenyon Col- 
 lege, Ohio, under the supervision of Philander Chase. Indeed Davis 
 enjoyed considerable prestige in that rough country as an "aristocrat." 
 The Davis family, old Federalists and Episcopalians, had for genera- 
 tions held high state in Maryland; in the early nineteenth century, 
 Dr. David Davis was an esteemed physician in Cecil County, while his 
 brother, Reverend Henry Lyon Davis, was President of St. John's Col- 
 lege at Annapolis. Both these men had sons who, for good or ill, were 
 to figure large in the new Republican Party. The first was the father 
 of David Davis, Lincoln's friend, the second of Henry Winter Davis, 
 who was to become one of the most brilliant orators of his time and 
 one of Lincoln's most implacable foes. Henry Winter Davis remained 
 in Maryland, rose high in Maryland politics, fought with the Blairs a 
 lifelong battle for the control of the Republican Party in the state, and 
 at this very moment was an aspirant for the seat in Lincoln's cabinet 
 which his enemy obtained. 
 
 His cousin David was one of the many "southern aristocrats" who 
 had left the ancestral home to carve out a career in the western wil- 
 derness. In due course he arrived at Bloomington, Illinois, and began 
 the practice of law with a capital, as he was always proud to remem- 
 ber, of "two bits." Davis's rise was not due to any profound knowledge 
 of the law. Neither in his Illinois period nor in after years when, by 
 grace of Abraham Lincoln, he sat on the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, did he impress his observers as a learned jurist. But he was able 
 to find opportunities in foreclosed sales to pick up farms and other 
 properties at a nominal investment, and these, increasing in value with 
 the years, made him more than prosperous. Previously to this judge- 
 ship he served one term in the Illinois legislature as an uncompromising 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 89 
 
 Whig; and the taste for politics this engendered never left him, not 
 even after he donned his judicial robes on the nation's highest court. 
 All his life Davis exemplified that doubtful character in American pub- 
 lic life, the politician-judge; even when sitting on the supreme tribunal 
 in Washington, he spent much of his time angling for a presidential 
 nomination, and in 1872 he actually received ninety- two votes at the 
 Liberal convention, ultimately losing the dubious prize to Horace 
 Greeley. 
 
 Great public questions never much interested Davis; the slavery issue 
 aroused only perfunctory attention, and he hated abolitionists with a 
 fervor worthy of his Southern origin. Politics, in his view, amounted 
 simply to spoils. Davis had the personal qualities essential to success 
 in this field. He was jovial, interested in people, Lincolnian in his love 
 of laughter and yarn-swapping. In court one day, one of the ornaments 
 of the bar burst out into a loud guffaw — Lincoln had just told him in 
 whispers a side-splitting story. His Honor promptly fined the offender 
 for contempt of court. After adjournment he called the disrespectful 
 person to the bar. "What was the story Lincoln told you?" he asked. 
 On hearing it Davis himself doubled up with mirth. "Fine remitted!" 
 he shouted in appreciation. The episode suggests the rollicking quali- 
 ties of the man. Another thing that contributed to his fame was his 
 "physical enormity." Davis weighed, at his peak, three hundred pounds; 
 it was a matter of common remark that he was never measured for his 
 clothes, but "surveyed." At Chicago, in May 1860, his wallowing form, 
 his long black coat and round white hat became almost as familiar a 
 sight as the wind-blown, undulating garments of Horace Greeley. At 
 Lincoln headquarters in the Tremont House — for which Davis paid 
 the rent out of his own pocket — he majestically presided, issuing 
 orders right and left. 
 
 This occasion represented the supreme moment in the judge's life. 
 Lincoln had been an object of admiration for several years. Fond of 
 talking himself, Davis would always keep silence when Lincoln was 
 discoursing. Nor would he permit any interruptions. If, in the tavern 
 symposiums which formed the chief diversion of circuit riding, some 
 third person tried to get in a word, Davis would quiet him with a wave 
 of his hand. "Be still! Lincoln is speaking!" He liked his companion 
 both in his droll and in his serious moments. "Lincoln," he said, "is the 
 best speaker in the state. He shows the want of early education, but 
 he has great power on the stump." Among the many claimants as 
 "original Lincoln man," Davis naturally took high rank. Though Davis 
 had strong support from Leonard Swett and Joseph Medill, he was 
 generalissimo of the Lincoln campaign, but scored his triumph on 
 
90 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 terms that made Lincoln himself mourn. "They have gambled on me 
 all around," said the successful candidate. "Bought and sold me a hun- 
 dred times. I cannot begin to fill the pledges made in my name." 2 
 That Davis should offer Simon Cameron and Caleb B. Smith seats in 
 Lincoln's cabinet in exchange for the Pennsylvania and Indiana dele- 
 gates accorded with the kind of politics he had practiced all his life. 
 
 Leonard Swett participated in this unhappy bargain, but he was of 
 considerably finer strain than the Maryland blueblood. A man of 
 benign presence, with white chin beard and long, meditative face, this 
 gentle promoter of Lincolnian ambitions might easily have been mis- 
 taken for a Methodist bishop. He too was a man college trained, an 
 able lawyer, with a personal charm that from the first made him one 
 of Lincoln's favorites on the circuit. Lincoln always liked to have 
 Swett as associate in a case, especially a murder trial, for his magnetic 
 qualities had an almost irresistible effect upon juries. These same talents 
 served him well as politician, a career in which he more skillfully 
 advanced others' interests than his own, for, though Swett made a 
 large fortune in practice, his two life ambitions, to represent his district 
 in Congress and to become governor of his state, were not realized. 
 Though much closer in affection to Lincoln than Davis, he sought no 
 appointment at his hands, resigning all claims to "recognition" in favor 
 of Davis. For he held to the prevailing custom of the time and regarded 
 Davis's elevation to the Supreme Bench as an appropriate reward for 
 the labors the two had performed in Lincoln's nomination. 
 
 Like Seward and Weed, Davis and Swett were old-line Whigs, and 
 accepted the Albany plan as the appropriate basis for the new cabinet. 
 They had a personal interest too; for they had made the bargain with 
 Cameron and Caleb B. Smith, and were bound in honor, as they 
 thought, to secure its fulfillment. Thus, unfortunately for the new 
 President, the all- Whig, all-Seward program found troublesome recruits 
 at his own political fireside. Weed completely won over these allies 
 at that first interview in the Richmond House, Chicago, in May 1860. 
 "Mr. Weed did not talk angrily as to the result," Swett afterwards 
 wrote, "nor did he complain of anyone. I remember the substance of 
 his words, as with much feeling, and confessing to the great disappoint- 
 ment of his life, he said, 'I hoped to make my friend, Mr. Seward, 
 President and I thought I could serve my country in so doing.' He was 
 a larger man intellectually than I anticipated and of finer fibre. There 
 was in him an element of gentleness and a large humanity which won 
 me and I was pleased no less than surprised." This admiration for Weed 
 increased as time went on. "We all feel," Swett wrote Weed Decem- 
 
 2 Hollister, O. J., Life of Schuyler Colfax. Funk and Wagnalls, 1887. P. 147. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 91 
 
 ber 26, 1860, after the election and when cabinet plans were taking 
 shape, "that New York and the friends of Seward have acted nobly. 
 They have not only done their whole duty to the party, but they have 
 been most generous and magnanimous. We should be exceedingly glad 
 to know your wishes and your views and to serve you in any way in 
 our power." 
 
 Despite this good understanding, the Seward-Weed wing of the 
 Republican Party in New York had shown no undiplomatic haste in 
 supporting the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket. Up to late August, Seward re- 
 mained secluded in Auburn and Weed in Albany, giving a certain 
 amount of lip service to the candidates of their party, but postponing 
 any energetic action in their behalf unril fall. Because of the rivalries 
 that were rending the party in twain in the Empire State, Lincoln 
 felt great anxiety as to the outcome in November — for without New 
 York's electoral vote, success, even with a divided Democratic Party, 
 was by no means assured. In August, a kind of Lincolnian embassy 
 of Davis and Swett therefore started east, to survey the troubled waters 
 and discover, if possible, some way of calming the storm. Naturally, 
 as designated emissaries of the presidential candidate, they met all the 
 big men in the Republican high command and received most encourag- 
 ing reports on the outlook for November. 
 
 The chief purpose of the Davis-Swett eastern pilgrimage was to 
 obtain the whole-souled support of Seward in the election of the man 
 who had humiliated him at Chicago. This Seward was disposed to 
 grant, but on a quid pro quo. Weed invited Davis and Swett to meet 
 him at Saratoga, where a kind of Potsdam Conference was to be held 
 of this "Big Three" to discuss the future of the party and to apportion 
 the spoils of expected victory. That certain changes in personal rela- 
 tions had been accomplished since the national convention was evident 
 from the fact that two other men, not New Yorkers, had been invited 
 to this secret confabulation. Simon Cameron had left his country estate 
 at Lochiel in the Pennsylvania mountains, and had brought with him 
 one of his favorite henchmen — just which one is not specified, but 
 the probability is that it was either Alexander Cummings or John P. 
 Sanderson, the men who, at Chicago, had managed the great deal that 
 transferred Pennsylvania's votes to Lincoln. Seward and Weed, at the 
 end of the Chicago battle, had entertained about as revengeful emo- 
 tions towards Cameron as towards Curtin, his rival in the Pennsylvania 
 domain. Cameron, Seward insisted, had personally guaranteed him the 
 fifty-four Pennsylvania delegates, on the second ballot, and then had 
 shamelessly turned them over to the gentleman from Illinois. In the 
 three months' interval, however, certain practical considerations had 
 
92 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 drawn Cameron and Seward closer together. In the new administra- 
 tion Pennsylvania would have to be represented and Seward, much as 
 he resented Cameron's "treason," preferred him in the cabinet to any 
 adherent of the Curtin phalanx. As a practical politician, Seward re- 
 garded Lincoln as already committed; Lincoln's agents had promised 
 Cameron a post, and how could any honorable man refuse to indorse 
 such an obligation? 
 
 "Cameron's desire for relief from his awkward position," Seward 
 wrote Weed on January 26, 1861, when that statesman's fortunes were 
 still hanging in the balance, "seems so reasonable and the consequences 
 of a feud if it is not obtained so fearful" that he could not understand 
 Lincoln's hesitation. Seward disliked the suggestion of any Democrat 
 in the new cabinet, but if a Democrat could not be avoided he pre- 
 ferred one of the Cameron type — a practical politician, like himself, 
 a man fond of combinations and intrigue, who would naturally form 
 one of the Seward party. The one thing above all which Seward had 
 determined to prevent was the appointment of Chase to the Treasury. 
 Chase was the one man who could presume to rival the Auburn states- 
 man. There could never be two MacGregors sitting at the Lincoln 
 table. 
 
 Such was the background of the "Saratoga Conference," a meeting 
 between the friends of Lincoln and Seward to fix the terms on which 
 the Sewardites would join heartily the Lincolnian ranks. The fact that 
 there is no record of the conversation is one of the most tragic lapses 
 in Lincoln literature. On the main results, however, there seems little 
 question. Seward was to be Secretary of State in the new administra- 
 tion and Simon Cameron Secretary of the Treasury. These were the 
 main points settled in the Saratoga pact, and with these as a founda- 
 tion, involving as they did Chase's banishment into limbo, Seward felt 
 secure of the future. "As the representative of Mr. Seward," Welles 
 remarks, "the great object of Weed was to exclude Mr. Chase from the 
 cabinet, if possible, and failing in this, to secure, at all events, the 
 Treasury for Mr. Cameron. This was the Saratoga arrangement, but 
 Mr. Lincoln did not consummate it." Intimations — perhaps more than 
 intimations — were forthcoming that Mr. Seward also expected to be 
 consulted about his colleagues, and the first hint was conveyed of the 
 ultimatum-like position of Seward in the coming months — that only 
 if he were permitted to influence these selections would he himself 
 consent to serve. However, there was nothing irritating or menacing 
 in the attitude of Weed or Cameron or the latter's so-far-anonymous 
 henchman. The five men parted with the friendliest of feelings and 
 Davis and Swett departed for Springfield, entirely complacent over the 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 93 
 
 results. It is not likely that Lincoln regarded the embassy as an un- 
 qualified success. With certain details — Seward as Secretary of State — 
 he was content, but the proposal of Cameron for the Treasury did not 
 accord with his intentions. However, the time — the middle of a presi- 
 dential campaign — was not a favorable one for stirring up dissensions, 
 and Lincoln decided to play a little politics himself. After all, Davis and 
 Swett had no right to commit the potential President on such important 
 matters and his decision could wait until after the election. The Sara- 
 toga "arrangement," commented Gideon Welles, was "for the time 
 apparently acquiesced in by Mr. Lincoln or at least was not em- 
 phatically repelled." So far as taking an active part in the campaign 
 Seward certainly kept his side of what he apparently regarded as a 
 definite bargain. In an October stumping campaign through the North- 
 west, he threw all the weight of his oratory into the Lincoln cause. On 
 the passage through Illinois, his train passed by Springfield; Lincoln 
 met him at the station, the two men shook hands most cordially in the 
 face of an applauding multitude, and this sign of reconciliation between 
 the great contenders at Chicago was hailed by loyal Republicans as an 
 omen of a November triumph. The same cannot be said of Cameron, 
 whose listless behavior in the most critical political campaign the na- 
 tion had engaged in up to that time augured ill for his loyal support 
 of the administration in war. 
 
 Immediately after the electoral triumph in November, the Sewardites 
 kept up their pressure. Thurlow Weed suggested that Lincoln pay a 
 visit to Seward at Auburn to discuss the policy of the new administra- 
 tion and the selection of the cabinet. As a precedent for this remarkable 
 proposal, Weed called to mind that William Henry Harrison, after his 
 election to the Presidency in 1840, had gone to Frankfort, Kentucky, 
 for a "conference" with Henry Clay. The historical parallel probably 
 did not impress Lincoln as an auspicious one. That Seward should have 
 detected a vivid resemblance between his position in 1860 and Clay's in 
 1840 was natural enough. In the former time Clay, like Seward in 1860, 
 was the leader of the Whig Party — and that party, in 1840, was as 
 much a coalition as the Republicans in the year preceding the Civil 
 War. In 1840 Clay was the leading candidate for the presidential 
 nomination; indeed he entered the convention with the necessary votes 
 in hand, and was maneuvered out of it by the machinations of an adroit 
 intriguer from New York — none other than Thurlow Weed himself, 
 even then boss of the Whigs in his own state. Clay was embittered 
 when the prize, his by personal pre-eminence and party strength, went 
 to an obscure aspirant whom practically all his countrymen regarded — 
 and he regarded himself — as utterly unfit for the office. Clay was as 
 
94 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 determined to dominate the first Whig administration — to name the 
 cabinet, or most of it, and control policy — as was Seward after the 
 accession of Abraham Lincoln. Hence his imperious summons to Har- 
 rison for a party consultation at his own home — a command which 
 Harrison did his best to avoid, but which, fearing the power of his 
 haughty rival, he did not dare disregard. Out of this meeting, as Lincoln 
 of course knew, for he was active in politics then himself, emerged 
 practically an all-Clay cabinet; Daniel Webster, a Clay foe, became 
 Secretary of State, it is true, but four of the other five members of 
 Harrison's council were Clay men. 
 
 Lincoln showed more backbone than had Harrison on the former 
 occasion. He understood what the invitation meant — and was intended 
 to mean. It was Seward's rather crude way of displaying his pre- 
 dominance. To force the recently elected President to take a long 
 journey from his western home to Auburn, New York, there spend 
 several days in consultation with Seward and Weed, would almost 
 amount to giving up the Presidency and making Seward regent. The 
 spectacle would be a public one, too, held in full view of the nation, 
 the central item of news in several thousand newspapers. "But no argu- 
 ment or urging," notes Welles, "could persuade him to such a step. 
 He had too much self-respect and self-reliance to listen to those who 
 approached him on the subject ... to put himself in training in the 
 keeping of any man or men." Then Weed made another approach. 
 He suggested that Lincoln and Seward meet at a neutral spot — say 
 Chicago. This also the President-elect flatly declined. On November 21, 
 two weeks after the election, he had gone to Chicago to discuss cabinet 
 appointments with Hannibal Hamlin and other friends, and this widely 
 publicized visit probably led Seward and Weed to believe that a sim- 
 ilar opportunity would be extended to them. But again Lincoln refused. 
 
 There was thus left only one way of obtaining an understanding 
 with Lincoln. Weed must go to Springfield himself. His eagerness to 
 receive an invitation rather belied the reports that were constantly 
 forthcoming from Seward's friends and the Seward press. Seward 
 desired no place in the Lincoln administration, it was said, and would 
 accept no cabinet post. But Weed's sudden appearance in Springfield 
 on December 20 was evidence that Seward did desire a cabinet post, 
 and hoped to force Lincoln at the same time to accept his conditions. 
 The probability was that Lincoln did not welcome this visit. By 
 December 10 a whole month had passed since election, and no invi- 
 tation to an audience had come to Seward or Weed. And no spon- 
 taneous invitation came even then. To get even an indirect summons 
 Weed was obliged to enlist as intermediaries his friends David Davis 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 95 
 
 and Leonard Swett. On December 10 Weed received a letter from 
 Swett informing him that "Mr. Lincoln would be very glad to see you. 
 He asks me to tell you so. . . . Mr. Lincoln wants your advice about 
 his cabinet and the general policy of his administration and I would 
 greatly like to have him have it." In the same mail came a letter from 
 David Davis, also conveying Lincoln's pseudo-invitation. "I would 
 advise you, inasmuch as Mr. Lincoln requests it, to go to Springfield 
 at once." When Lincoln had really wished to see Bates and Chase he 
 wrote them cordial letters in his own hand. 
 
 Before Weed could reach Springfield, an important development had 
 taken place. All this time Lincoln had not departed from his original 
 intention of making Seward Secretary of State. But he wanted him as 
 Secretary of State only, not as generalissimo of his administration. That 
 step had been definitely determined at his consultation with Vice- 
 President-elect Hamlin in Chicago. At this session, Lincoln informed 
 the gentleman from Maine that he intended to offer first place in his 
 cabinet to Seward, and, according to Hamlin's biographer, seemed 
 somewhat disturbed about the reports constantly appearing in the press 
 that Seward would decline. 3 The discussion ended by Hamlin's becom- 
 ing Lincoln's go-between in approaching the difficult Auburn states- 
 man. Lyman Trumbull, Senator from Illinois, was a third party to the 
 negotiation. Hamlin, in carrying out Lincoln's mission to "sound" 
 Seward, at first approached the task indirectly, through Preston King, 
 Seward's colleague as Senator from New York. On King's obvious 
 and wise suggestion that Seward be approached in person, Hamlin 
 wrote Lincoln for further instructions. "Shall I confer with the Gov- 
 ernor directly, and ask him what are his wishes and desires?" Hamlin 
 wrote Lincoln on December 4. "My impression is that he will not de- 
 sire a place in your cabinet, but he may." Probably the conviction 
 rankled in Seward's breast that the Lincolnian offer, when it came, 
 would be intended merely as a compliment, and that self-respect would 
 demand a declination. To settle the question, Lincoln, in answering 
 Hamlin's questions, sent him two letters sealed in one envelope ad- 
 dressed to William H. Seward, and, in another envelope, unsealed copies 
 for Hamlin's personal inspection. "Consult with Judge Trumbull," 
 Lincoln wrote, "and if you and he see no reason to the contrary, de- 
 liver the letter to Governor Seward at once." 4 As soon as Senator 
 Trumbull read the Lincoln letters, he advised that Hamlin present 
 them immediately to the gentleman most concerned. 
 
 3 Hamlin, Charles Eugene, Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin. Riverside Press, 
 1899. P. 371. 
 *Ibid. } p. 272. 
 
96 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 The scene between Hamlin and Seward that now took place can 
 be reconstructed from several sources. Hamlin gave some of the details 
 to Senator George Fogg of New Hampshire, who passed them on to 
 Gideon Welles 5 for incorporation in that catch-all of a Diary. Other 
 items appear in the account given in the official life of Hamlin by his 
 grandson. One afternoon, soon after the arrival of Lincoln's letter, 
 Seward and Hamlin, the Senate having adjourned, found themselves in 
 each other's company, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in most 
 friendly fashion. When they reached Hamlin's hotel, the latter invited 
 Seward to his rooms for a private talk. The New Yorker seemed to 
 be — perhaps affected to be — in a despondent frame of mind; he was 
 tired of public life — so he said — intended soon to resign his seat in 
 the Senate and retire for the rest of his days to his home at Auburn. 
 Again Seward insisted that there was no place in Mr. Lincoln's gift 
 that he would accept; over and over again he repeated that he would 
 not go into the cabinet. "If that is what you have come to talk to me 
 about, Hamlin, we might as well stop here. I don't want the place, and, 
 if I did, I have reason to know that I could not get it. Let us have no 
 more talk about it." This was really good news to Hamlin, who from 
 the first believed that Seward in the cabinet would be a constant em- 
 barrassment and irritation to the President. Very well, he replied, he 
 would not pursue the matter further; Mr. Lincoln, however, had sent 
 him a letter for Mr. Seward, and he suggested that the New Yorker 
 read it before his refusal was made explicit. Hamlin related that Sew- 
 ard, "pale with excitement," opened the communication with trem- 
 bling hands. The first of Lincoln's two letters would have chilled any 
 man. "My dear Sir: With your permission I shall at the proper time 
 nominate you to the Senate for confirmation as Secretary of State for 
 the United States. Please let me hear from you at your own earliest 
 convenience. Your friend and obedient servant, A. Lincoln." Such a 
 cold, concise offer, standing by itself, would have justified Seward's 
 worst apprehensions and would certainly have invited a declination; 
 but there was a second missive, and when Seward read this, he became 
 a changed man. He reached forth and grasped Hamlin's hand. "This is 
 remarkable," he said. "I will consider the matter, and, in accordance 
 with Mr. Lincoln's request, give him my decision at the earliest prac- 
 ticable moment." 
 
 Lincoln's letter was about as gracious and dignified as any he ever 
 penned. "In addition to the accompanying and more formal note, in- 
 viting you to take charge of the State Department," wrote the Presi- 
 
 5 Welles, op. cit., II, 389. 
 
 6 Hamlin, op. cit., pp. 372-373. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 97 
 
 dent-elect, "I deem it proper to address you this. Rumors have got into 
 the newspapers to the effect that the department named above would 
 be tendered you as a compliment, and with the expectation that you 
 would decline it. I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to 
 justify these rumors. On the contrary, it has been my purpose, from 
 the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, 
 this place in the administration. I have delayed so long to communicate 
 that purpose in deference to what appeared to me a proper caution in 
 the case. Nothing has developed to change my view in the premises; 
 and I now offer you the place in the hope that you will accept it, and 
 with the belief that your position in the public eye, your integrity, 
 ability, learning, and great experience, all combine to render it an ap- 
 pointment pre-eminently fit to be made. One word more. In regard 
 to the patronage sought with so much eagerness and jealousy I have 
 prescribed for myself the maxim, 'Justice for all'; and I earnestly be- 
 seech your co-operation in keeping the maxim good. Your friend and 
 obedient servant, A. Lincoln." 7 
 
 Seward at once acknowledged Lincoln's letter, thanking him for the 
 proffer, and saying that he would definitely reply as soon as he could 
 consult his friends. There were only two intimates whose advice was 
 desired — Thurlow Weed and Mrs. Seward. Seward received Lincoln's 
 letters on December 1 3 — almost the same time that Lincoln's "invita- 
 tion" to Weed, via Davis and Swett, reached its destination. He at 
 once left Washington for Albany for a talk with Weed. Then Weed 
 took the train for Springfield. 
 
 7 Lincoln, Abraham, Complete Works, Comprising His Speeches, Letters, State 
 Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. 
 Century Company, 1894. VI, 192-220. 
 
w, 
 
 EED HAD several purposes in making this wintry pilgrimage. 
 Really, he was seeking to learn the terms on which Seward was to 
 enter the cabinet. To what extent was Lincoln disposed to accept the 
 Albany plan, as formulated at the Saratoga Conference? Would it be 
 an all-Seward, all- Whig cabinet? Would the Southern Whigs whom 
 Seward favored form part of the new administration? Or would Lin- 
 coln persist in his determination to include those odious outsiders, 
 Chase, Blair, and Welles, in what would certainly be a disharmonious 
 family? There were other questions also to be settled. Seward desired 
 control of the administration, not only from motives of ambition, but 
 to enforce his favorite policy of dealing with the seceding South. 
 Would Seward be permitted to play the role of Henry Clay and come 
 forth, at the critical moment, with another compromise that would 
 conciliate the South and at least postpone the "irrepressible" conflict? 
 It was known that Lincoln was "inflexible" against any new legislation 
 that contemplated any extension of slavery. Would he abandon this 
 attitude as part of his price for Seward's acceptance of the State 
 Department? 
 
 Weed's first stopping place on this voyage of exploration was not 
 Springfield, but Bloomington. Here he met the two men who had 
 become his partisan intimates, Leonard Swett and David Davis, and the 
 trio proceeded to Lincoln's home. In the conversations that lasted for 
 the better part of two days, Davis and Swett were always present 
 though their contributions to the discussions were not important. 
 Unfortunately no stenographic report of the sessions is at hand, though 
 hardly any record could have shed such light upon the inner po- 
 litical workings of the time. Two participants have indeed left ac- 
 counts, Weed himself and Leonard Swett 1 — both of them embodied 
 in the Life of Thurlonjo Weed, published by that statesman's family; 
 these transcripts, however, are not contemporary, having been written 
 
 1 Weed gave his version of the talks in his Autobiography, I, 603-614. Leonard 
 Swett's appears in the same work, pp. 293-296. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 99 
 
 several years after Lincoln's death, and are colored by a conscious- 
 ness of subsequent events, above all by Lincoln's fame, and by the 
 understandable desire of their authors to make the best possible show- 
 ing in history. Thus Weed's memorandum seems to evince more con- 
 cern for the great public issues involved in the new aspect of affairs 
 than for such egoistic matters as the assignment of patronage. Yet his 
 recollections have considerable vividness and, in a measure, make pos- 
 sible the reliving of what must have been a picturesque scene. For 
 gathered there in the rococo parlor of the Lincoln home, with its hair- 
 cloth furniture and whatnots, ornamented with sea shells and other 
 genteel bric-a-brac of the day, Lincoln and Weed — Davis and Swett 
 putting in an occasional word — discussed the new administration. Both 
 Lincoln and Weed made striking human figures. Both were more than 
 six feet high, both spare of frame, both bearing in a rugged exterior 
 signs of that hard fight each had had with poverty. Weed, twelve years 
 Lincoln's elder, seemed the less worldly looking object and indeed 
 the more venerable. His nimbus of white hair, surmounting a finely 
 shaped head, and accentuating the innocent impression conveyed by a 
 cherubic face, large-featured and pink, contrasted strikingly with the 
 rough-hewn, deeply seared, dry, parchment-like countenance of Lin- 
 coln. Weed's gentle voice, enticing smile, and friendly blue eyes en- 
 hanced the general benignity which the man radiated at every pore. 
 If the purpose of his visit was to put a collar about Lincoln's neck, 
 and lead him captive into the Seward- Weed compound, there was 
 nothing in his benevolent behavior indicating any such intention. 
 Weed was no longer the crushed, beaten, angry stalwart of the last 
 hours of the Chicago Convention, but the accommodating, ingratiating 
 politician, determined to manipulate such advantage as he could from 
 an unfortunate turn of fortune. Weed knew precisely what he wanted 
 from Lincoln. Equally important was the fact that the President-elect 
 also knew, so that the talks resembled something in the nature of a 
 sparring match, disguised as they might be by good temper, happy 
 turns of speech, breakfast of sausages and cakes at the Lincoln house, 
 and an always pertinent flow of anecdotes and jokes from the prospec- 
 tive head of the nation. 
 
 Lincoln showed his firmness too, and his determination in certain 
 prime matters. His first statement must have disconcerted Weed, espe- 
 cially as it was made unequivocally, as a matter absolutely fixed in 
 Lincoln's mind. Long before November, he told his visitor, he had de- 
 cided, in case of success at the polls, to make William H. Seward Secre- 
 tary of State and Salmon P. Chase Secretary of the Treasury. Lincoln 
 could at times say things with a discouraging finality — indeed almost 
 
100 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 arrogance. He evidently wished Weed to understand at the start that 
 Chase was to be a member of the cabinet, and soon said so with a 
 directness that left no room for argument. And Weed attempted no 
 rejoinder. That was that, and the discussion at once went on to can- 
 didates for other seats in the council. What was Mr. Weed's opinion 
 of Edward Bates for Attorney General? Was there any objection to 
 him? "None," replied Weed, with real cordiality. "Not a shadow or a 
 shade of an objection. That is a selection, as Mr. Webster might have 
 said, eminently fit to be made." Lincoln's proposal of Gideon Welles 
 as Secretary of the Navy was not so amiably received. New England, 
 said Lincoln, should have a place in the cabinet; its representative should 
 be a former Democrat, and Welles by all odds seemed to be the best 
 choice. Not at all, Weed replied; he thought that several men would 
 be more acceptable to New England than this old Jacksonian editor. 
 In discussing Mr. Welles, just before leaving Springfield, Weed became 
 entertaining and contemptuous. He suggested that Mr. Lincoln, when 
 on his way to the inauguration, get off at New York long enough to 
 select a wooden ship figurehead. He should take this to Washington, 
 adorn it with whiskers and a wig, and place it over the entrance to the 
 Navy Department. This would, said Weed, prove quite as serviceable 
 a secretary as Gideon Welles — and less expensive. Lincoln was 
 amused — or pretended to be — but said that, after all, he would have 
 to have "a live Secretary of the Navy." 
 
 Another appointment Lincoln was seriously considering aroused 
 even more anguish. Judge Blair had been suggested, he said. 
 
 "What Judge Blair?" 
 
 "Judge Montgomery Blair." 
 
 "Has he," asked Weed, "been suggested by anyone except his father, 
 Francis P. Blair, Sr.?" That remark, Lincoln said, reminded him of a 
 story, which he told — though Weed, in his account, does not repeat 
 the anecdote, fearing that "its spirit and effect would be lost." But 
 Montgomery Blair he was sure would never do. These Blairs — father 
 and two sons — were an impossible lot. Wherever they might be they 
 always made trouble. They would make trouble for the new President 
 if he removed them from Maryland and put them at his council table. 
 Everybody, like Weed, always referred to any member of the Blair 
 family as "they," for there was little doubt that, in putting one Blair 
 into the cabinet, Lincoln would really put in the trio — for they always 
 acted as a unit. Lincoln said that he felt it necessary to include one or 
 two men from the Border states, for keeping them in the Union was 
 really a matter of life and death. Weed endorsed this idea — but any- 
 one except a Blair! Whom would he propose? "If we were legislating 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 101 
 
 on this question," said Weed, "I would move to strike out the name 
 of Montgomery Blair and insert that of Henry Winter Davis." 
 
 Judge David Davis, present at the conclave in all his sublime rotun- 
 dity, must have beamed satisfaction at this proposed substitution. From 
 the beginning he had been pestering Lincoln to take his distinguished 
 cousin into the presidential circle. He had no more use for the tribe of 
 Silver Spring than had Seward and Weed. Perhaps David Davis also 
 foresaw — what came to be the fact — that Henry Winter, if rebuffed 
 by Lincoln and passed over in favor of his bitterest political opponent, 
 Montgomery Blair, would be a dangerous thorn in Lincoln's side. 
 If the Maryland Davis had been present at this interview, his fierce, 
 excitable nature would certainly have had something to work upon, for 
 Lincoln refused to regard him seriously as a cabinet candidate and 
 passed the whole thing off as a joke. "Davis has been posting you up on 
 this question," he replied with a laugh, turning to his friend from 
 Bloomington. "He has got Davis on the brain. Maryland must be, I 
 think, a good place to come from." This was a pleasant thrust at the 
 politician-judge who had left his native state to seek better opportu- 
 nities in Illinois. Weed's suggestion reminded Lincoln of the witness 
 in court who gave his age as sixty, only to be called to account by the 
 judge, who happened to know that he was seventy-five. "Oh, you are 
 thinking about that fifteen years that I lived down by the eastern shore 
 of Maryland; that was so much time lost and don't count." Weed did 
 not greatly relish the anecdote; he thought the President-elect was 
 injecting it into the discussion to ease what was getting to be a tense 
 situation. It was evident that the selection of Montgomery Blair was a 
 fixed fact, and it was a disturbing fact to Weed; "and, although I sub- 
 sequently ascertained the reasons and influences that controlled the 
 selection of other members of the cabinet I never did find out how 
 Mr. Blair got there." 
 
 Now came the most difficult question of all. How about the re- 
 doubtable Simon Cameron? In the conversation on that subject, both 
 Lincoln and Weed were clearly trying to feel each other out. Neither 
 was frankly committal. It was only on the subject of Cameron, Leonard 
 Swett says in his paragraphs devoted to this meeting, "upon which Mr. 
 Weed, as it seemed to me, did not speak with entire freedom." Good 
 reasons existed for this hesitation. Lincoln, in declaring his intention of 
 making Chase Secretary of the Treasury, had spiked Weed's guns, for 
 that was the post the Albany plan had assigned to Simon Cameron. 
 Pennsylvania, Lincoln argued, was the second largest state in the Union, 
 and could not be ignored in assembling the cabinet. If it were recog- 
 nized, it was difficult to see how Cameron could be passed by. What 
 
102 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 did Weed think of Cameron for such a post? His relations with Cam- 
 eron, Weed replied, had always been pleasant; he had known him for 
 twenty-five years, and had towards him a most friendly feeling. 
 
 "But you do not say what you think of him for the cabinet," per- 
 sisted Lincoln. 
 
 Lincoln of course knew very well that Weed favored him as Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury, but Weed continued to evade the question. 
 Lincoln's pronouncement on Chase had clearly tied the New Yorker's 
 tongue. No flat statement on the subject could the President-elect elicit. 
 Presently, therefore, all parties to the discussion dropped Cameron and 
 took up other questions. Weed particularly desired that one or two 
 places be given to loyal Union men in certain slave states — Virginia, 
 North Carolina, or Tennessee. 
 
 "Could you rely upon such men if their states should secede?" asked 
 Lincoln. 
 
 "Yes, sir; the men whom I have in mind can always be relied on." 
 
 "Well," said Lincoln, "let us have the names of your white crows, 
 such ones as you think are fit for the cabinet." Weed mentioned again 
 Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland, and he thought that John M. Botts 
 of Virginia, John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, and Bailey Payton 
 of Tennessee would also fit into the situation. The only one of these 
 names which much interested Lincoln was Gilmer of North Carolina, 
 with whom he did enter into negotiation, but the impending secession 
 of North Carolina made it impossible for Lincoln to offer him a place, 
 or for Mr. Gilmer to accept. 
 
 Weed pointed out the most serious mistake Lincoln was making. The 
 cabinet, as outlined in this tentative fashion, would contain more for- 
 mer Democrats than Whigs. Was that fair to the element that con- 
 tributed the largest number of voters to the Republican Party? Lincoln 
 replied that, as a Whig, he thought he could afford to be liberal to a 
 section of the Republican Party without whose votes he could never 
 have been elected. It might be all right to have Democrats in the cabinet, 
 argued Weed, but after all, why not recognize the preponderance of 
 Whigs? Four Democrats and three Whigs — was that the right repre- 
 sentation? Why not reverse the formula? That would more equitably 
 represent the situation. "You seem to forget," replied Lincoln, "that I 
 expect to be there; and counting me as a Whig, you see how nicely the 
 cabinet would be balanced and ballasted." 
 
 Though the two men spent the better part of two days together in 
 the friendliest fashion, Weed left Springfield a disgusted man. He had 
 failed in every object aimed at. Seward was to have a place in the 
 cabinet, but was to have little influence in selecting the other members. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 103 
 
 Lincoln clearly intended to be the head of the administration. It was 
 not to be all- Whig, but a coalition. The three men whom, as cabinet 
 associates, Seward most abhorred — Chase, Welles, and Blair — stood 
 high in Lincoln's favor. About including some distinguished Southerner 
 Lincoln was more acquiescent, but he still apparently thought that the 
 Border states were adequately represented by Bates and Blair. 
 
 Seward was defeated. Yet as soon as Weed had reported the facts, 
 he wrote Lincoln, accepting the Secretaryship of State. "I have after 
 due reflection and with much self-distrust, concluded that, if I should 
 be nominated to the Senate for the office of Secretary of State, and the 
 nomination should be confirmed, it would be my duty to accept the 
 appointment." But in his own heart he accepted no position sub- 
 ordinate to Lincoln. He had failed in his first attempt to dictate terms, 
 but he did not look upon the loss of this preliminary skirmish as final. 
 "I have advised Mr. Lincoln," he wrote his wife on the same day as 
 his letter to the President-elect, "that I will not decline. It is inevitable. 
 I will try to save freedom and my country." 
 
 Thus Seward took for granted, even after Weed's failure, that na- 
 tional salvation rested in his hands, not Lincoln's. 
 
E 
 
 IVIDENTLY THE Seward problem had been settled, at least for 
 the time being, but that of Cameron and Chase still remained. In early 
 January another deputation started for Springfield, representing the 
 influential wing of New York politicians who for years had been dag- 
 gers drawn against the Seward-Weed machine. These gentlemen, 
 George Opdyke, Judge Hogebloom, and Hiram Barney, came pri- 
 marily to protest against Seward in the cabinet, but they were equally 
 emphatic in denouncing Cameron and in advocating Chase. They had 
 also an appreciative word for Gideon Welles. 
 
 The two most powerful Republican papers in New York City, the 
 Tribune and the Evening Post, had joined hands in this twofold cam- 
 paign to keep Seward and Cameron out of the administration and to 
 get Chase and Welles in. "Now I am even with Seward," Horace 
 Greeley had exclaimed after the defeat of his enemy at the Chicago 
 Convention, but his appetite for revenge had not been satiated. The 
 motives of William Cullen Bryant, of the Evening Post, possibly had a 
 more elevated character. The Evening Post represented the views of a 
 faction which for years had been fighting the Seward-Weed machine 
 as a corrupting force in the state. Cameron ranked second as an odious 
 public character while their admiration for Chase knew no bounds. 
 Already the Bryant faction had approached Lyman Trumbull, Senator 
 from Illinois, and close to Lincoln in cabinet consultations, to save the 
 country from the Albany "plunderers." Replying to Trumbull's letter 
 conveying this information, Lincoln declared that the New Yorkers, 
 who had so loyally supported Seward at Chicago, "ought not and must 
 not be snubbed as they would be by the omission to offer Governor 
 Seward a place in the cabinet. I will myself take care of the question of 
 'corrupt jobs' and see that justice is done to all our friends of whom 
 you wrote as well as others." 
 
 The newest delegation stopped off at Columbus, Ohio, for consul- 
 tation with Chase, then occupying the governor's chair, and resumed 
 their journey, apparently reinforced in enthusiasm for that statesman 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 105 
 
 as head of the Treasury Department. Up to this time, opposition to 
 Seward had always been accompanied by eager endorsement of Chase 
 and Welles, and by similarly eager antagonism to Cameron. "There is 
 no more truly upright man and few men in public life are so intel- 
 ligent," Bryant had written Lincoln concerning Welles, but of Cam- 
 eron his opinion was not so complimentary: "The general sensation 
 aroused by the suggestion of Cameron in the cabinet," wrote Mr. Bry- 
 ant, "is one of consternation. Mr. Cameron has the reputation of being 
 concerned in some of the worst intrigues of the Democratic party. 
 Those who favor his appointment in this state are the men who last 
 winter so shamefully corrupted our Legislature" 1 — another slap at 
 Weed, and through him, at Seward. Thus Lincoln had been well pre- 
 pared for the visit of the protesting New Yorkers, to whom he listened 
 patiently but to whom he refused to make any commitments. By this 
 time — early January — the weary man at Springfield was rather tired 
 of these importunate delegations, and had reached a conclusion which 
 he now imparted to the Opdyke-Barney mission. The whole matter, 
 he said, of cabinet selections would be postponed until his arrival in 
 Washington. Lincoln evidently did not impart to these two anti- 
 Seward guests that about a week before he had received a letter from 
 Seward, accepting the offer of the State Department. 
 
 The friends of Cameron displayed the same persistence. They con- 
 stantly prodded at Lincoln's elbow, making his days and nights mis- 
 erable. Seward pressed Weed to make another trip to Springfield, for 
 the express purpose of pushing Cameron's pretensions, but Weed, prob- 
 ably still smarting under his not too successful efforts with Lincoln 
 in late December, declined. David Davis, the man chiefly responsible 
 for the Cameron predicament, left his home in Bloomington and 
 camped in Springfield, sticking to Lincoln, in the words of Horace 
 White, "like a burr." Lincoln's hesitation in honoring the unholy 
 bargain Davis had concluded at Chicago irritated this judicial Warwick, 
 and his insistence frequently aroused Lincoln's anger. An avalanche of 
 letters from Pennsylvania were also demanding Cameron's preferment, 
 Lincoln remarking in a letter to Lyman Trumbull that for some strange 
 reason the Pennsylvania boss was "more amply recommended for a 
 place in the cabinet than any other man." Lincoln's use of the word 
 "strange" was probably ironical, for the most pressing of these recom- 
 mendations came from gentlemen — like David Wilmot of the famous 
 Proviso — who were ambitious of succeeding to Cameron's seat in the 
 Senate, and this fact was not likely to elude a student of human nature 
 
 1 Godwin, Parke, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant. D. Appleton & Co., 
 1883. II, 152. 
 
106 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 and politics so acute as the distracted President-elect. And influential 
 voices in plenty were lifted up on the opposing side. Lincoln asked the 
 opinion of Henry C. Carey, of Philadelphia, and obtained a quick 
 response. "There exists throughout the state," wrote Mr. Carey, "an 
 almost universal belief that his fortune has been acquired by means that 
 are forbidden to the man of honor. There stand upon the records of 
 the courts and but a very few years old charges that would, if proved, 
 involve the commission of serious crime. Most of all well disposed fel- 
 low citizens look upon him as the very incarnation of corruption. . . . 
 His appointment would be a signal to all the vultures of the Union to 
 flock around the Treasury." 2 
 
 Charles Sumner, uttering vivid phrases, as always, was storming 
 around Washington. Cameron, he declared, was "reeking with the 
 stench of a thousand political battles." He was "this political Judas 
 from Pennsylvania, whom Providence had marked with the capillary 
 sign of his character and who might have sat to Leonardo da Vinci 
 for the picture in the Milanese refectory." 3 Other anti-Cameronians 
 were sending elegant extracts from Congressional documents detail- 
 ing the sorrows of the swindled Winnebagos. Chase was attacking his 
 future cabinet associate in a Columbus paper he controlled; Lyman 
 Trumbull and other powerful anti-Sewardites were doubling the effort 
 to prevent the impending scandal. "Another very serious objection to 
 Cameron," wrote Trumbull, "is his connection with Gov. Seward. 
 The latter is a man who acts through others, and men believe that 
 Cameron would be his instrument in the cabinet." 4 One anecdote tells 
 how Lincoln, in desperation, burst into the office of his Springfield 
 friend, Gustave Koerner. "I am in a quandary," he said. "Pennsylvania 
 is entitled to a cabinet office. But whom shall I appoint?" "Not Cam- 
 eron!" shouted Koerner and others present in chorus. He was a "tricky 
 and .corrupt politician." "I know, I know," said Lincoln, "but can I 
 get along if that state should oppose my administration?" "Lincoln is 
 in a fix," wrote his sympathetic law partner, William H. Herndon, to 
 Lyman Trumbull. "Cameron's appointment to an office in his cabinet 
 bothers him. If Lincoln do appoint Cameron, he gets a fight on his 
 hands, and if he do not, he gets a quarrel deep abiding and lasting. Poor 
 Lincoln! God help him." 
 
 2 Carman, Harry J., and Luthin, Reinhard H., Lincoln and the Patronage. 
 Columbia University Press, 1943. P. 39. 
 
 3 Diary of a Public Man; an intimate view of the national administration, Dec. 
 28, 1860 to March 15, 1861. Privately printed. Abraham Lincoln Bookshop. Chicago, 
 1945. P. 64. 
 
 4 White, Horace, Life of Lyman Trumbull. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913. 
 Pp. 146-147 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 107 
 
 How deep a "fix" had engulfed the new President perhaps even 
 Herndon did not understand, and certainly few of those besieging 
 Springfield had all the facts. In the weeks following the selection, Cam- 
 eron, determined on the redemption of his bond, had been angling for 
 an invitation to Springfield, and the mere fact that Lincoln showed no 
 disposition to extend hospitality did not daunt his intrepid spirit. Of all 
 aspirants for presidential favor, indeed, Cameron was the one whom 
 Lincoln least desired to meet face to face. Gideon Welles sheds light on 
 this matter, as on so many others. Cameron, he says, 5 summoned 
 Leonard Swett to Lochiel and, plying him with entertainment, ex- 
 pressed an ambition to visit the new seat of political power. Swett him- 
 self, knowing that the initiative would not be forthcoming from 
 Springfield, extended the sign of welcome in Lincoln's name. On al- 
 most the last day of that epochal year, 1860, Simon Cameron presented 
 himself at Lincoln's door. Another guest reached Springfield simul- 
 taneously — this one, Edward Bates, in response to a personal invitation 
 from Lincoln. Bates's attitude towards public office differed from 
 Cameron's; when Lincoln told him of his cabinet troubles, the Mis- 
 sourian at once offered to retire, thinking that another great office at 
 his disposal might assist Lincoln in satisfying the voracious party appe- 
 tite. Lincoln immediately brushed aside the suggestion. 
 
 Bates met Cameron and was apparently somewhat puzzled by him. 
 "After Mr. Lincoln retired," Bates wrote in his Diary, "I remained 
 in company with Mr. Cameron and a Mr. Sanderson, of Philadelphia 
 (who tells me that he was a member of the Whig Convention of Balti- 
 more of 1856). I did not find out what brought Senator Cameron to 
 Springfield. It is generally surmised, however, that he is a strong can- 
 didate for Secretary of the Treasury. I found him pleasant enough in 
 conversation, but rather reticent about politics or parties. There was 
 nothing private or confidential between us, and I suppose he did not 
 wish me to know the object of his visit — our meeting there was ac- 
 cidental." 6 The most significant feature of this meeting Bates clearly 
 did not understand. That was the presence with Cameron of John P. 
 Sanderson, the same Sanderson who, in the back-room meeting at the 
 Chicago Convention, had pledged the Pennsylvania delegation to David 
 Davis for Lincoln, in exchange for the "recognition" of Cameron in 
 Lincoln's cabinet. He had now come to Springfield with his party chief 
 to exact the payment of that debt. 
 
 No account has been preserved of the interview or interviewers; 
 all that we know is the result. After discussing the matter at length 
 
 5 Welles, op. cit., II, 390. 
 
 6 Bates, op. cit., p. 171. 
 
108 
 
 with Cameron and his companions — for others than Sanderson had 
 joined in the attack — Lincoln gave Cameron a letter, now duly printed 
 in all editions of his works. "I think fit to notify you, now" — the date 
 is December 31, 1860 — "that, by your permission I shall at the proper 
 time nominate you to the United States Senate for confirmation as 
 Secretary of the Treasury or as Secretary of War — which of the two 
 I have not yet definitely decided. Please answer at your own con- 
 venience." That Lincoln had permitted himself to be browbeaten — 
 almost blackmailed — by the Cameronian onslaught seems a fair con- 
 clusion; yet certain extenuating circumstances must be set down on 
 the other side. Lincoln would have been the last man to deny that he 
 was a practical man, even a practical politician. And an extremely prac- 
 tical question confronted the Republican Party and the nation at that 
 moment. One Southern state was following another in secession; only a 
 great opposition, strong and united, could successfully deal with the cri- 
 sis. To ignore Cameron, Lincoln sincerely believed, would split the Re- 
 publican administration in two. Not only would Pennsylvania, the 
 most powerful state in the Union next to New York — in many ways 
 more powerful — be hopelessly divided. The strongest element in the 
 national organization, Seward- Weed, was besieging Lincoln in the in- 
 terest of Cameron. To have sent Cameron away from Springfield un- 
 satisfied might have been a slap in the face of the New Yorker whose 
 support was regarded as indispensable. 
 
 This compromise, however, did not solve the problem, but really 
 brought a new sea of troubles. Cameron, usually the most discreet and 
 silent of men, could not restrain his satisfaction over this turn of for- 
 tune. Returning to Harrisburg, he proudly exhibited Lincoln's letter, 
 confidential as it was, to his intimates, and in a few hours the news had 
 spread all over the state. A terrific explosion resulted, the reverbera- 
 tions reaching as far as Springfield. In the feud that had been rocking 
 Republican Pennsylvania for several years, the new President, the anti- 
 Cameronians declared, had gone over to the enemy! With Cameron 
 in the cabinet, and with a vast patronage at his disposal, what would 
 become of Curtin and his friends? Clearly, nothing remained for them 
 but political death. These sentiments presently began speeding over the 
 telegraph wires to Lincoln's home. The regular Republican organiza- 
 tion, led by the state chairman, Alexander K. McClure, telegraphed a 
 most energetic protest. Cameron's appointment to the Treasury, 
 Colonel McClure informed the President, would destroy the Repub- 
 lican Party in Pennsylvania — in other words, the very calamity that 
 nomination was intended to prevent would come to pass. Lincoln, star- 
 tled, summoned McClure to Springfield for further elucidation. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 109 
 
 Colonel McClure, in his reminiscences of Lincoln, tells the story of 
 this visit, but only in general outline. 7 For three hours, in the "parlor" 
 of Lincoln's home, the two men discussed Cameron and Pennsylvania 
 politics; yet just what were the charges against Cameron laid before the 
 President by McClure has never been disclosed. They evidently were 
 more serious than those that had been associated with Cameron's name 
 since the days of Andrew Jackson, for when Lincoln asked McClure 
 to put his accusations in writing, with the evidence supporting them, 
 that cautious politician declined to do so. He did not care to appear as 
 "an individual prosecutor of Cameron" — such was McClure's somewhat 
 unsatisfactory reply to this request. McClure's review of Cameron's 
 career and his account of the distracted state of Pennsylvania politics, 
 and the further demoralization that would result from Cameron's ele- 
 vation, however, had the desired effect. McClure left Lincoln's home 
 at eleven o'clock on the night of January 3, and, inasmuch as Lincoln's 
 second letter to Cameron carried this same date, it was evidently writ- 
 ten immediately after the interview. "Since seeing you," Lincoln wrote 
 Cameron, "things have developed which make it impossible to take 
 you into the cabinet. You will say this comes from an interview with 
 McClure; and this is partly, but not wholly true. The more potent mat- 
 ter is wholly outside Pennsylvania, and yet I am not at liberty to 
 specify it. Enough that it appears to me to be sufficient. And now I 
 suggest that you write me declining the appointment, in which case I 
 do not object to its being known that it was tendered you. Better do 
 this at once, before things so change that you cannot honorably de- 
 cline, and I be compelled to openly recall the tender. No person living 
 knows or has an intimation that I write this letter. Yours truly, A. Lin- 
 coln. P. S. Telegraph me instantly on receipt of this, saying 'All right.' " 
 
 That "all right" message, which Lincoln anxiously awaited the next 
 few days, never came. This information that his presence in the cab- 
 inet was not desired apparently did not affect Cameron as it would 
 have a man of ordinarily sensitive nature. It seemed rather to stimulate 
 his determination to attain the goal. The fact is that, with a man of 
 Cameron's ideals, this cabinet seat was not an honor, not a summons 
 to serve the nation in the impending crisis, but something in the nature 
 of a vested right, for which he had given his consideration, and in- 
 tended to demand payment. Instead, therefore, of accepting the situa- 
 tion as Lincoln urged, Cameron kept pounding on the Lincolnian door. 
 All the time-honored machinery of insistence and persuasion was 
 pressed into service. The Pennsylvania legislature passed resolutions 
 
 7 McClure, Alexander K., Abraham Lincoln and War Time. Times Publishing 
 Company, 1892. Pp. 48, 151-154. 
 
110 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 eulogizing Cameron and urging his claims to a cabinet seat. Leonard 
 Swett and David Davis renewed their campaign in Cameron's behalf. 
 Swett especially objected to the abrupt English used by Lincoln in 
 ejecting Cameron from his forthcoming council table. Cameron was 
 pictured as grieving over this insult to his dignity, and surely Lincoln, 
 the kindest of men, could not have intended to wound so sorely the 
 feelings of this loyal supporter! Telegrams and letters again began in- 
 undating the Lincoln home. On January 1 1 John P. Sanderson, Cam- 
 eron's other self, left for another uninvited visit to Springfield. With 
 him came Edgar Cowan, recently, by Cameron's favor, elected United 
 States Senator from Pennsylvania. They protested against the "blunt- 
 ness" of Lincoln's letter and asked for a reconsideration. On the main 
 point Lincoln refused to change his mind but he granted two conces- 
 sions. One was another letter to Cameron, expressing regret that the 
 previous one, written under "great anxiety," was "not so guarded in 
 terms" as it should have been and disclaiming "any intention of giving 
 offense." It was suggested that Cameron destroy this letter and substi- 
 tute another — w r hich Lincoln now sent — containing the same request 
 that Cameron withdraw from the cabinet contest, but expressed in 
 gentler terms. The second request was expected to mollify still further 
 Cameron's perturbed spirit. "If I should make a cabinet appointment for 
 Pennsylvania before I reach Washington, I will not do so without con- 
 sulting you and giving all the weight to your wishes which I con- 
 sistently can. This I have always intended." 
 
 On the very day of the Sanderson-Cowan visit Lincoln wrote Seward 
 that he was "being teased to insanity" over cabinet matters and saying 
 that no more appointments would be made for the present. Another 
 problem was now causing anxiety — that of Salmon Portland Chase. 
 From the beginning Chase had been Lincoln's almost automatic choice 
 for the Treasury Department, but, as set forth above, both the Seward 
 and the Cameron elements disliked this prospect. That January 3, the 
 date of Lincoln's evening talk with Colonel McClure, and his "blunt" 
 letter to Cameron had been a busy one in other ways. In reply to Lin- 
 coln's written request to Chase, that "in these troublous times I should 
 like a conference with you. Please visit me here at once," Chase came 
 to Springfield, arriving on January 4. 
 
 Chase, like Cameron, though for different reasons, was suffering 
 from wounded vanity, to which Lincoln's letter had come somewhat as 
 a balm. Two months had passed since the election, and not a word had 
 reached him from Springfield as to any plans Lincoln might have for 
 his future. The well-advertised visit of Weed and the certainty that 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 111 
 
 Seward would receive — or at least be offered — first place in the ad- 
 ministration did not tend to soothe the feelings of the haughty Ohioan. 
 Why should Seward be regarded as the first man in the Republican 
 Party? Did not Chase's long record of service to the cause, and his 
 eminence as an individual, entitle him to that distinction? From the 
 beginning of the new era Chase had made no secret of his ambition; 
 though he felt no particular yearning for a cabinet seat — so he in- 
 formed his friends — still, if he was to become an inner member of 
 the administration, he looked upon the first place as his due. For 
 diplomacy and the general conduct of foreign affairs Chase fancied that 
 he had particular talents — and perhaps he had — but Lincoln had already 
 set aside that supreme post for Seward, and this meant that Chase, if he 
 went into the cabinet at all, must do so in a secondary position. Yet 
 there is no doubt that, despite his deprecating attitude, Chase really de- 
 sired an appointment. It was true he frequently said, in letters and con- 
 versations, that his work as Senator from Ohio — to which he had been 
 recently chosen for a second term — was preferable to administration 
 routine, but he always expressed a willingness to serve wherever he 
 might be most useful. Perhaps Seward's preferment itself stimulated 
 his desire for a cabinet place — such a position would enable him to keep 
 an eye upon his rival and counteract his influence with the head of 
 state. "It would be rather superfluous to decline what has not been of- 
 fered," Chase wrote Charles A. Dana, November 10, 1860. "Neither do 
 I say that I would accept it: — but only this: — that is, that if the offer 
 were made ... I should be bound to consider it honestly and care- 
 fully, with the help of the best advisers I could consult and should be 
 governed in my decision, not so much by my personal inclination as by 
 my obligations to the cause and its true and faithful friend." 
 
 Chase had several talks with Lincoln in the two days following his ar- 
 rival in Springfield. Lincoln went to extremes to show cordiality and 
 respect; took him to church; called upon him at his hotel, and, at the 
 beginning of the discussion, thanked him for the support he had brought 
 Lincoln in his contest with Douglas in 1858, and for the effective as- 
 sistance in the campaign just closed. For all Lincoln's attempts to be 
 agreeable and conciliatory, the consultation proved awkward and em- 
 barrassing to both men. Lincoln referred to the expectation of Chase's 
 friends that first place in the cabinet should be his by right, and, as 
 tactfully as he could, expressed his dissent. The Department of State, 
 he said, had from the first been assigned to Mr. Seward; had the New 
 Yorker declined, then, Lincoln added, it had been his intention to offer 
 it to Mr. Chase. However, this remark was not to be misconstrued. 
 Lincoln did not wish Mr. Seward to refuse; in fact, in Chase's own 
 
112 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 words, he was glad that Seward "had accepted" for Seward "was the 
 generally recognized leader of the Republican party." One can imagine 
 how these frank words must have made the vain and haughty Ohioan 
 writhe. As Lincoln went to the next point the tension became more 
 acute. "I have done with you," said Lincoln, "what I perhaps would 
 not have ventured to do with any other man in the country — sent for 
 you to ask you whether you will accept the appointment of Secretary 
 of the Treasury, without, however, being exactly prepared to offer it 
 to you." The difficulty with Cameron explained in part, but only in 
 part, this unflattering invitation to a cabinet post. Still back in Lincoln's 
 mind lay the troublous question of Seward. The New Yorker had defi- 
 nitely accepted, but at the same time his friends were conducting a 
 campaign against Chase. With Chase in the Treasury would Seward 
 remain faithful to his promise? Would he serve in any cabinet that in- 
 cluded this rival? That Lincoln's misgivings on this subject were amply 
 justified subsequent events disclosed, and the way in which he put the 
 question would indicate that, in this particular stage of cabinetmaking, 
 he might have sacrificed Chase rather than have lost "the recognized 
 leader of the Republican party." Chase replied that he desired no ap- 
 pointment, "certainly not a subordinate one," and that Mr. Lincoln's 
 question had placed him in an "unpleasant position." However, the two 
 men talked long and agreeably, Chase making no direct reply to the 
 conditional offer, and Lincoln insisting on no commitment of a definite 
 kind. "I replied," said Chase afterward in a written memorandum, "that 
 I did not wish and was not prepared to accept that place if offered. A 
 good deal of conversation followed in reference to other possible mem- 
 bers of the cabinet but everything was left open when we parted and I 
 returned to Columbus." 8 And the question remained in this uncertain 
 state until the fifth of March. 
 
 In spite of this unpromising beginning to their relation, Chase's visit 
 to Springfield left no bitterness in his mind. "Mr. Lincoln conversed 
 frankly and fully," he wrote a friend on January 9, immediately after 
 returning to Columbus. u He is a man to be depended on. [Italics Chase's 
 own.] He may, as all men may, make mistakes; but the cause will be 
 want of sufficient information, not of unsoundness of judgment or of 
 devotion to principle." This was a somewhat higher estimate of Lincoln 
 than Chase expressed after nearly four years' association in his cabinet. 
 
 8 Warden, Robert Bruce, An Account of the Private Life and Public Services of 
 Salmon Portland Chase. Wilstoch, Baldwin & Co., 1874. P. 365. 
 
Th 
 
 HOUGH BY THE time Lincoln reached Washington for the in- 
 auguration only two men, Bates and Seward, had definitely received 
 and accepted cabinet appointments, the likelihood is that most of the re- 
 maining posts had been assigned. Lincoln, however, was holding them 
 in petto after the fashion of the Pope of Rome, who sometimes keeps 
 hidden in his own breast the cardinals whom he expects to name at some 
 future consistory. And probably Lincoln's choices were about as secret 
 as those of the Supreme Pontiff in similar circumstances. The per- 
 sistent Seward-Weed attempts to exclude Chase from the Treasury 
 Department had not deflected the President-elect from his determina- 
 tion on that point. Cameron had probably been settled on for the War 
 Department as an unsatisfactory compromise in the Pennsylvania im- 
 passe. Similarly the "all- Whig" campaign against Gideon Welles had 
 not changed Lincoln's prepossessions in favor of that gentleman. In 
 fact, a few days after reaching Washington a message was sent to the 
 Hartford journalist enjoining him to repair to the National Capital 
 — a command which Welles not illogically regarded as confirming cur- 
 rent reports as to his selection. Caleb B. Smith for the Interior was an- 
 other compromise Lincoln was obliged to make with his conscience; 
 the man was unworthy of any appointment, but the simple fact re- 
 mained that Davis had guaranteed anricky and vapid politician this 
 place in exchange for Indiana's forty-eight (?) votes in the Chicago 
 Convention, and that Lincoln, although he had warned his agents against 
 making such unholy bargains, felt under party duress to redeem the 
 promise. Two other candidates, Norman B. Judd of Illinois and Schuy- 
 ler Colfax of Indiana, were still negotiating for this place; Lincoln re- 
 imbursed Judd by sending him as minister to Prussia and made a life- 
 long enemy of Colfax by ignoring his solicitations. The third member 
 of the trio who had aroused the unrestrained opposition of Weed and 
 Seward, Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, was also practically assured 
 of an appointment. The alternative candidate from this Border state, 
 Henry Winter Davis, had from the first met little favor at Lincoln's 
 
114 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 hands. Had the Seward proposal for some Southern statesman — say 
 Gilmer of North Carolina, Botts of Maryland, Etheridge of Tennessee 
 — proved feasible, probably Blair would have been dropped in the in- 
 terest of this attempt at conciliation. An exchange of letters between 
 Gilmer and Lincoln, however, had showed the futility of the plan. 
 States on the verge of secession could hardly be represented in a cabi- 
 net pledged, first of all, to preserving the Union, and Gilmer's subse- 
 quent election to the Confederate Congress showed where his final 
 sympathies lay. 
 
 The nine-day interval between the President-elect's arrival in Wash- 
 ington and the inauguration witnessed a renewal of the cabinet in- 
 trigues that had driven Lincoln almost to distraction for three months 
 in Springfield. The pro-Seward forces, headed by the burr-like David 
 Davis, had clung closely to Lincoln since his departure from Spring- 
 field. Another recruit, Orville H. Browning, whom Lincoln held in 
 much higher regard than Davis, had joined the calvalcade at Indianapo- 
 lis. When Lincoln made his unhappy entrance into Washington early 
 in the morning of February 22, Seward appeared as a reception com- 
 mittee of one and took Lincoln in tow. He did not disassociate himself 
 from his destined chief for the next few days. He entertained him at 
 breakfast in the morning and at dinner in the evening of that first Sat- 
 urday, escorted him to church the next day, called with him for a cour- 
 tesy visit on President Buchanan, who received his elected successor 
 most graciously and introduced him to his cabinet. 
 
 Hannibal Hamlin and Lyman Trumbull, both anti-Seward and pro- 
 Chase, had attempted to secure a favored position in Lincoln's en- 
 tourage, but had been outwitted. To protect the next President from 
 too much contamination by the enemy they had secured interim head- 
 quarters for Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and their two sons in a private house 
 on a quiet Washington street. Here their charges could pass the nine 
 days before inauguration undisturbed by the armies of suppliants al- 
 ready congregated in the Capital and be accessible only to those Illinois 
 friends who had been Lincoln's companions and co-workers for years. 
 Thurlow Weed had successfully protested against this domicile. The 
 ever-faithful David Davis rallied to his side. "It will never do," Weed 
 wrote Davis, "to allow him to go to a private house. He is now public 
 property and ought to be where he can be reached until he is inaugu- 
 rated." In a brief period Davis had persuaded William E. Dodge, the 
 millionaire, to vacate temporarily the finest suite in Willard's Hotel, 
 Parlor No. 6, and place it at Lincoln's disposal. David Davis himself 
 took up quarters only a few doors away from the presidential apart- 
 ment. Salmon Portland Chase also established himself on the same sec- 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 115 
 
 ond floor, and soon a kind of theatrical queue, of the great and small, had 
 joined the procession to the new seat of power. One of the earliest 
 callers was old man Blair from Silver Spring, who had many chats with 
 the President-elect in the course of the next week, in which it may be 
 assumed that the elevation of his son Montgomery was not forgotten. 
 Lincoln received as many men of less importance as time allowed, lis- 
 tened to as many pleas for foreign missions, postmasterships, collector- 
 ships, and the like as was humanly possible — making, however, few 
 commitments — and shook hands with thousands of self-invited greeters, 
 men and women, with all the good nature and patience that were to be 
 manifest during the coming four years. Everyone who met the Presi- 
 dent-elect remarked upon his worried, melancholy appearance. "He is 
 not a great man, certainly," observed one of his visitors at this time, 
 "and, but for something almost woman-like in the look of his eyes, I 
 should say the most ill-favored son of Adam that I ever saw." "He 
 owned to me that he was more troubled by the outlook than he thought 
 it discreet to show. . . . Half an hour with Mr. Lincoln confirmed my 
 worst fears. I should say he is at his wit's end if he did not seem to me 
 to be so thoroughly aware of the fact that some other people are in 
 that condition." "I was struck and pained by the haggard, worn look 
 of his face, which scarcely left it during the whole time of our visit." * 
 
 The most vivid view of Washington for those nine tumultuous days 
 is derived from that Diary of a Public Man from which these quotations, 
 describing Lincoln's melancholic state of mind, are taken. This is one 
 of the most valuable and most mysterious documents in Lincoln's liter- 
 ature. Ever since the North American Review, in 1879, published ex- 
 tracts from this Diary, the identity of the author has baffled all stu- 
 dents of the Lincoln era. Extensive searches for the complete Diary 
 have failed; if found, this would be an inestimable treasure, for it is 
 written with forceful literary grace, and in its abundance of detail and 
 its pictures of personalities it rivals even Gideon Welles himself. This 
 fact has led certain scholars to regard the memoirs as unauthentic. In 
 despair at their failure to discover the rest of the record or of finding 
 any person on whom to fix the authorship suspicions have arisen that 
 the whole thing is a superb forgery. Internal evidence rather refutes 
 this conclusion. The writer reveals such an intimate knowledge of 
 the Washington panorama as it was unfolding before his eyes, his de- 
 scriptions of persons and incidents are so detailed, familiar, and life- 
 like — in a word, the whole story conveys such a complete impression 
 of firsthand knowledge that the Diary, if a literary concoction, must 
 be, as F. Lauriston Bullard says in his introduction to the recently 
 
 1 Diary of a Public Man, 44. 
 
116 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 published edition, "the perfect crime." In fact it bears the evidence 
 of reality in every line. In the opinion of Frank Maloy Anderson, for 
 many years Professor of American History at Dartmouth College, the 
 scholar who has investigated the problem most exhaustively, the "highly 
 probable" author was Amos Kendall. 2 This famous member of An- 
 drew Jackson's kitchen cabinet, having made a comfortable fortune 
 with Samuel F. B. Morse in exploiting the telegraph, was then spend- 
 ing his last years in Washington, and was probably in closer touch than 
 any man, except old man Blair, with the leaders of that era. This would 
 explain not only the energy of the literary style, and the intimate infor- 
 mation revealed, but also the disappearance of the complete Diary itself, 
 for most of Kendall's papers were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 
 Washington. 
 
 If Kendall wrote this Diary, he had certainly outgrown one of the 
 enthusiasms of his youth. It was this versatile journalist and statesman 
 and young Francis Blair who had edited jointly the Argus of Frank- 
 fort, Kentucky, and it was Kendall who had brought his companion, 
 in 1830, to Washington to edit the Jacksonian Globe. But "Public 
 Man," in 1861, regarded Blair as a dangerous influence and resented 
 the almost certain prospect of Montgomery in the Lincoln cabinet. 
 The elder Blair's frequent appearances in the Willard Hotel during 
 that fateful winter aroused Public Man's worst fears. He quotes with 
 apparent approval Stephen A. Douglas's characterization of the Blairs 
 as "those born conspirators and makers of mischief." "I do not like 
 the Blairs," wrote the author of this Diary, "and indeed I know nobody 
 who does. But of them all I like Montgomery least; and I can imagine 
 nothing less to be desired than his entrance into the cabinet, which 
 Senator Douglas regards as inevitable. He goes further than I do in his 
 views as to the policy which he thinks the Blairs are bent on cajoling 
 or compelling Mr. Lincoln to adopt. They are co-operating now, for the 
 moment, he thinks, with the extreme anti-Seward men both here and in 
 New York. 'What they really want,' said Senator Douglas, 'is a civil 
 war. They are determined, first, on seeing slavery abolished by force, 
 and then on expelling the whole negro race from the continent. That 
 was old Blair's doctrine, sir.' " It was the elder Blair's attitude on the 
 great pending problem — what to do about Fort Sumter — that particu- 
 larly aroused this Public Man, as it did Douglas, for the Blairs believed 
 that the Federal government should hold and reinforce that bastion, 
 whereas Douglas and Kendall — if it was Kendall — believed with Sew- 
 
 2 See Professor Anderson's article on Amos Kendall in the Dictionary of Ameri- 
 can Biography, X, 325-327. Since writing this article, Professor Anderson is said 
 not to be so sure of the conclusion expressed in it. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 117 
 
 ard that the place should be abandoned to South Carolina, as the best 
 means of averting civil war. 
 
 Public Man's view of Lincoln was that of most intellectuals of the 
 day; he was as startled as Charles Francis Adams himself at the Presi- 
 dent's ungainly appearance, his ill-fitting clothes, his lack of Bos- 
 tonian manners, and his apparent failure to realize the enormity of the 
 crisis. Though in fleeting moments the diarist catches glimpses of an- 
 other Lincoln concealed within this strange exterior, he is appalled 
 by the prospect of entrusting the nation's destinies to his care. That 
 Lincoln could never direct his own administration, and that the real 
 power must be delegated to a stronger, abler brain — the prevailing 
 opinion appears vividly in this memoir. Who then is the real ruler of 
 the nation to be? Seward is evidently the indicated man, yet this likeli- 
 hood is not entirely reassuring. Public Man distrusts the man's sin- 
 cerity. Relating an anecdote that reveals the New Yorker's cynicism, 
 he comments: "It is a serious misfortune at such a time as this that such 
 stories are told and believed of the man who apparently is to control 
 the first Republican administration in the face of the greatest difficul- 
 ties any American administration has ever been called upon to en- 
 counter." Yet he sees no one except Seward who can possibly take up 
 the reins of state. "From what Mr. Seward tells me, it is plain that he has 
 more weight with Mr. Lincoln than any other public man, or than all 
 public men put together, and I confess that I grow hourly more anxious 
 as to the use that will be made of it." Presently, however, the writer's 
 judgment is more qualified. Several interviews with Lincoln himself, 
 though they did not change Public Man's dislike of the President-elect's 
 log-cabin demeanor and at times apparently carefree view of things, 
 called forth a new note. After his first talk with Lincoln, "I gathered 
 for myself that he is not so much in the hands of Mr. Seward as I had 
 been led to think and I incline to believe that Mr. Barney [Hiram 
 Barney, anti-Sewardite of New York] is nearer the truth than I like 
 to think." That Lincoln may not virtually abdicate to the New Yorker 
 Public Man evidently looks upon as an impending danger. "There can 
 be no doubt about it any longer. This man from Illinois is not in the 
 hands of Mr. Seward. Heaven grant that he may not be in other hands 
 — not to be thought of without patience!" — probably another hit at 
 "the Blairs." That Lincoln must be in someone's "hands" and, indeed, 
 ought to be is clearly assumed. "I can not feel even sure now that Mr. 
 Seward will be nominated at all on Tuesday; and certainly he neither 
 is nor after this can be the real head of the administration, even if his 
 name is on the list of the cabinet." 
 
 This entry accurately conveys the uncertain atmosphere that 
 
118 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 shrouded cabinetmaking on the date it was made — March 2. The pre- 
 ceding week had been one of tension and strain. The fact is that Sew- 
 ard, the most important of the cabinet possibilities, had not for a 
 moment abandoned the Albany plan. He and Weed — and Davis — 
 were working hard for the fulfillment of the Saratoga pact, which 
 meant the exclusion of Chase, Blair, and Welles from the presidential 
 council. Hardly had Lincoln been deposited in Willard's Hotel when 
 the intrigue started afresh. The anxiety of the New Yorkers had prob- 
 ably been heightened by a sharp letter dispatched by Lincoln to Weed 
 before the departure of the train from Springfield. Disturbed by cur- 
 rent reports of the dominant part the new Albany regency expected to 
 play in the new dispensation, the President-elect administered a rebuff 
 to Weed which must have been as unwelcome as it was unprecedented 
 in that dominant gentleman's career. "As to the matter of dispensing 
 patronage," Lincoln had written Weed, "it perhaps will surprise you to 
 learn that I have information that you claim to have my authority to ar- 
 range that matter in New York. I do not believe that you have so 
 claimed; but still so some men say. On that subject you know all I 
 have said to you is 'Justice to all,' and I have said nothing more par- 
 ticular to any one. I say this to reassure you that I have not changed 
 my position." 
 
 Public Man's comments on Seward's declining position as boss of the 
 Lincoln administration were made on the day that marked a crisis in 
 the relations of the two men. Of certain details Public Man apparently 
 knew nothing; on one of the most important he is almost our only 
 authority. This diarist did not know, for example, that Seward the 
 day before had called upon Lincoln and filed a complaint that he was 
 not being consulted in cabinetmaking. Lincoln had indeed yielded, 
 with sour face, in the matter of Cameron and Smith, but evidently that 
 had not been concession enough. That Cameron was to become Secre- 
 tary of War, not of the Treasury, did not accord strictly with the 
 Saratoga demand, and this was resented especially because it left sec- 
 ond post open to the detested Chase. The man who was selected for 
 "Premier" was usually consulted about the other members; Seward 
 now insisted on this personal talk with Lincoln. He was grieved that 
 Lincoln had ignored this precedent. The large Democratic representa- 
 tion — especially Blair, Chase, and Welles — was unfair to the old Whigs 
 who made up the great majority of the new party. Seward quoted 
 President Jackson, who insisted that a cabinet should be a "unit"; cer- 
 tainly the one that Lincoln had put together would possess little unity. 
 Welles and Blair were bad enough, but the main point of contention 
 was Chase. Seward flatly told Lincoln that Chase must be excluded, if 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 119 
 
 he himself were to remain. He and the Ohio Puritan could never sit at 
 ease at the same table. "Mr. Lincoln expressed his surprise that after all 
 that had taken place and with the great trouble on his hands, he should 
 be met with such a demand at this late day. He requested Mr. S. to fur- 
 ther consider the subject." Gideon Welles, who provides this account 
 of what must have been an embarrassing interview, 3 does not quote a 
 remark made at this time, reported by Nicolay and Hay. Late one 
 night Norman B. Judd gained access to Lincoln, and asked in some ex- 
 citement whether he intended to drop Montgomery Blair and award 
 the Postmaster Generalship to Henry Winter Davis. "Judd," said Lin- 
 coln, "when that slate breaks again, it will break at the top." 4 If this 
 remark reached Seward's ears — and, in the gossip wildly flying around 
 Washington at the time, it most likely did — it could hardly have as- 
 suaged that statesman's resentment at the turn matters were taking. 
 
 The next day, March 2, two days before inauguration, the situation 
 moved to a real crisis. For some time a group of New Yorkers, headed 
 by Simeon Draper, a rich and politically influential merchant, long one 
 of Seward's most valiant champions in New York, subsequently by 
 Seward's favor Collector of the Port, had been waiting on the out- 
 skirts, seeking an interview with the President-elect. All these gentle- 
 men were Sewardites, particularly interested in eliminating Salmon P. 
 Chase from the Lincoln council table. Their hostility reflected not 
 only loyalty to Seward, but apprehension about the tariff views of the 
 Ohio Senator. What would become of the United States, if a free 
 trader, as Chase was accused of being, should be placed at the head of 
 the Treasury Department? The day following Seward's protesting talk 
 with Lincoln, the promised audience was granted. Lincoln received the 
 delegates in his usual friendly way and listened patiently as, one after 
 another, they set forth their belief that Chase in the administration 
 would be a prime mistake. He was an abolitionist, they urged, a man 
 who sympathized with the Garrisonian view that a Union with slave 
 states was an abomination, and that a northern republic, perhaps in- 
 cluding Canada, would be an ideal way out of the present impasse; let 
 the South, with its slaves and its State rights, go to the devil — so loyal 
 Garrisonians held — in any way it pleased. Lincoln watched each 
 speaker carefully, and, after all had had their say, asked them just what 
 they wanted him to do, or to forbear to do. "Do not name Chase for the 
 Cabinet!" the opposition chorused. "He cannot sit around the same table 
 with Seward. He wouldn't wish it, and his following and his state 
 would not tolerate it — couldn't tolerate it — it must not be." Lincoln 
 
 3 Welles, op. cit., p. 391. 
 
 4 Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln. Century Company, 1917. Ill, 370. 
 
120 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 seemed much depressed, and sat — as he usually did in such awkward 
 moments — for a considerable time, saying nothing. Then, speaking 
 in a low voice, he said that it was very hard to reconcile conflicting 
 claims and interests; the only hope was to form an administration that 
 would inspire general confidence; he had the deepest respect for Mr. 
 Seward, but Chase had great claims, too, which could not be disre- 
 garded. Lincoln granted that Chase's pretensions did not equal Seward's; 
 still he ranked second to the New Yorker as a national leader. Then 
 Lincoln opened a table drawer, took out a piece of paper, and contem- 
 plated it for a time. "I had written out my choice of secretaries in 
 the cabinet after a great deal of pains and trouble; and now you tell me 
 that I must break the slate and begin all over." 
 
 Something in the President-elect's unaggressive manner made the 
 delegation think that they were gaining their desire, and when 
 Lincoln went on to say that he had at times thought he might have to 
 revise his cabinet, the visitors really thought that victory was at hand. 
 The fact was, continued Lincoln, that he had drawn up an alternative 
 list, should that need become imperative. He did not like this second 
 cabinet nearly so well as the old one, which had Mr. Seward as Secre- 
 tary of State and Mr. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, "but he 
 could not expect to have things exactly as he liked them; and much 
 more to the same effect, which set the listeners quite agog with sup- 
 pressed expectations of carrying their point. "This being the case, 
 gentlemen," Lincoln continued, "how would it be for us to agree upon 
 a change like this? How would it be to ask Mr. Chase to take the 
 Treasury and to offer the State Department to Mr. William L. Day- 
 ton? " Mr. Dayton was from New Jersey, which "is next door to New 
 York." He was an old-line Whig, like Seward and himself. He had been 
 candidate for Vice-President on the Fremont ticket, and was "a most 
 conservative, able, and sensible man." Mr. Seward could go as minister 
 to Great Britain, where he was well known and would find abundant 
 scope for his talents in keeping Europeans from mixing in American 
 troubles. 
 
 At this suggestion the New York delegation was literally speech- 
 less. Here was a sad outcome of their warfare on Chase; the net result 
 of their reconnaissance in force was likely to be the exclusion of Seward 
 altogether and his exile to London. One of Lincoln's visitors finally 
 found voice enough to thank their host for his kindness in receiving 
 them, and then all noiselessly withdrew. "Whether this prefigures an 
 exclusion of Mr. Seward from the cabinet, who can tell?" writes Pub- 
 lic Man, after describing the scene in the above terms. "Nor does that 
 possibility alone make it alarming. It does not prefigure — it proves that 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 121 
 
 the new administration will be piloted on a dangerous and not a safe 
 key. It makes what was dark enough before, midnight black. What is 
 to come of it all?" 
 
 Lincoln, of course, understood that this last-minute attempt to keep 
 Chase out of his administration had been instigated by Seward and 
 Weed — certainly acquiesced in. The reply that he had made to the 
 New York delegation had really been addressed to Seward. He had car- 
 ried out the threat confided to Judd the night before — that, if the cab- 
 inet slate broke again, it would "break at the top." The "top" was 
 Seward, and Lincoln's remarks to the protestants merely informed 
 Seward, without any beating about the bush, that if he desired to come 
 into the cabinet on the President's terms he would be gladly received, 
 but if he persisted in saying who should be his associates, then his serv- 
 ices would be dispensed with. Of course the New Yorkers at once 
 reported the result of their mission to their chief. Seward was angry 
 and bitter. He at once seized his pen and addressed the following curt 
 note to the President-elect, two days before the inauguration: "My 
 dear Sir: Circumstances which have occurred since I expressed to you 
 in December last my willingness to accept the office of Secretary of 
 State seem to me to render it my duty to ask leave to withdraw that 
 consent. Tendering you my best wishes for the success of your ad- 
 ministration, with my sincere and grateful acknowledgment of all your 
 acts of confidence and kindness towards me, I remain, very respect- 
 fully and sincerely, your obedient servant, William H. Seward." 
 
 And so it came about that when the inaugural procession, on March 
 4, started up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Edward Bates was the 
 one man definitely agreed upon for the cabinet. Lincoln pondered the 
 situation all day Saturday and Sunday. He knew he could still have 
 Seward if he would accept Seward's terms. In view of events of the 
 preceding twenty-four hours — Seward's visit to Lincoln, the Draper 
 delegation at Willard's — the letter was simply an ultimatum. If Lin- 
 coln would exclude Chase — and probably Blair and Welles — he would 
 head the cabinet; otherwise, the Lincoln administration must get along 
 without "the leader of the Republican party" at the council board. 
 Seward and other cabinet ministers, in the course of the next four 
 years, were to learn of Lincoln's most positive trait — an iron will and 
 determination when his mind, after reflection and apparent yielding 
 and even doubting, had fixed upon a course of action. Seward was to 
 become aware of this characteristic now. Lincoln thought that the 
 best time to fix the issue definitely of who was to head the government 
 was at the beginning of his term. To have yielded to Seward would 
 have been almost to abdicate the Presidency, and make Seward virtually 
 
122 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 chief of state. Not to yield might be to lose the man then generally 
 regarded as the ablest in matters of state in the nation, and probably 
 convert him and his large following into enemies working at cross- 
 purposes with the White House. Lincoln, so far as is known, said noth- 
 ing to anyone about this letter — except to his secretaries — but thought 
 out the problem, as was his custom, then and afterward, alone. Mon- 
 day morning, while the inaugural procession was forming in the 
 streets, he wrote his reply, handing it to his secretary to copy, re- 
 marking — a remark that summed up in real Lincolnian language the 
 great principle at stake — "I can't afford to let Seward take the first 
 trick." 5 Lincoln dated the letter "Executive Mansion, March 4, 1861" 
 — though it was actually written in his apartment at the Willard. "My 
 dear sir: Your note of the 2nd instant, asking to withdraw your ac- 
 ceptance of my invitation to take charge of the State Department, was 
 duly received. It is the subject of the most painful solicitude with me; 
 and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the with- 
 drawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and 
 my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction. Please 
 consider and answer by nine o'clock a.m. tomorrow. Your obedient 
 servant, A. Lincoln." 
 
 And so the President-elect did not yield a jot. His letter in turn was 
 an ultimatum — and an ultimatum with a date limitation. Seward was 
 given until nine o'clock, March the fifth, to say whether he would 
 accept a cabinet post on Lincoln's own terms. Lincoln put the argu- 
 ment on high grounds: the interest of the nation required Seward's 
 presence in the cabinet; he also added to his previous statement that 
 this was his personal wish. But he made none of the concessions that 
 Seward had been insisting on. If Seward had not rescinded his letter 
 then William L. Dayton would have been Secretary of State during 
 the Civil War. But Seward made a complete capitulation — at least to 
 outward view. After the inaugural he called on Lincoln at the White 
 House and the two had a long and amiable talk, as a result of which 
 Seward withdrew his withdrawal. "The President," Seward wrote his 
 wife, "is determined to have a compound cabinet and that it shall be 
 peaceful, and even permanent. I was at one time on the point of refus- 
 ing — nay, I did refuse for a time, to hazard mvself in the experiment. 
 But a distracted country appeared before me, and I withdrew from that 
 position. I believe I can endure as much as anvone; and maybe I can 
 endure enough to make the experiment successful. At all events, I did 
 not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance." 
 And "leave the country to chance"! Here again Seward assumes that 
 
 5 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. Ill, 371. 
 
A MINISTRY OF ALL THE TALENTS 123 
 
 the fate of the nation rested on him, not on the President-elect. It is 
 doubtful if he ever really outgrew this conviction. 
 
 Lincoln, however, completely understood. That evening, at the in- 
 augural ball, the correspondent of the New York Herald approached 
 the President, and asked if he had any message for his editor, James 
 Gordon Bennett. "Yes," replied Lincoln, "you may tell him that Thur- 
 low Weed has discovered that Seward was not nominated at Chicago." 
 If there was a certain note of exultation and anger in this retort, the 
 tension of the hour, and the way in which Seward, by his demands 
 and intransigence, had added to them, were sufficient excuse. 
 
 The next day, March 5, Lincoln sent to the Senate his cabinet and 
 it was immediately confirmed: — 
 
 For Secretary of State: William H. Seward, of New York. 
 For Secretary of the Treasury: Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio. 
 For Secretary of War: Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania. 
 For Secretary of the Navy: Gideon Welles, of Connecticut. 
 For Secretary of the Interior: Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana. 
 For Attorney General: Edward Bates, of Missouri. 
 For Postmaster General: Montgomery Blair, of Maryland. 
 
 And so, after many tribulations, Lincoln obtained the cabinet — 
 with one or two exceptions — that he had fixed upon, with the help of 
 no advisers, the day following his election. 
 
BOOK TWO 
 
 C William Henry Seward: 3 
 | "Prime Minister" 1 
 
A 
 
 .T NIGHT. President Lincoln's first cabinet meeting," Edward 
 Bates noted in his Diary for March 6, "Intended, I suppose, to be 
 formal and introductory only. In fact, uninteresting." Inevitably this 
 group of ill-assorted statesmen must have felt some awkwardness at 
 their first assembling. They were far from being a mutual-admiration 
 society. Three of them, Chase, Blair, and Welles, were confronting 
 a "Premier" who, for the preceding four months, had used all his re- 
 sources of intrigue, and even of intimidation, to keep them out of the 
 intimate White House circle. And of his maneuverings all three were 
 well aware. But even Chase, Blair, and Welles, although they had a 
 common bond of accord in hostility to the Secretary of State, were 
 not entirely companionable themselves. Welles and Blair, it is true, 
 could rub elbows on congenial terms; Welles's friendship with the 
 Blair family, beginning in the Jacksonian era, and cemented after- 
 ward by cordial association at Silver Spring, had laid the basis of a co- 
 operation that survived the Lincoln administration. They were almost 
 the only friendly couple in the cabinet. Both men, however, had little 
 regard for Chase. All three had another aversion in common — the 
 lanky Pennsylvanian who had finally succeeded, with the help of 
 Seward and David Davis, in slithering into the Secretaryship of War. 
 To Edward Bates, who found that first evening's proceedings so "un- 
 interesting," not one of his associates embodied his ideal of a states- 
 man. Welles was probably the only one for whom he felt any personal 
 attraction. Cameron himself did not find a single friend at Lincoln's 
 board unless his marriage of convenience with Seward — soon to be 
 dissolved — put the Secretary of State in that class. Caleb B. Smith was 
 isolated, both by his own unimportance and by the methods he had 
 used to obtain his seat. Seward, from the first, refused to take any of 
 his fellow members seriously. Not one of them, in his view, was to play 
 any figure in the general conduct of affairs. His failure to dominate 
 Lincoln in cabinetmaking had taught him nothing. Perhaps Thurlow 
 Weed had learned, in Lincoln's phrase, that Seward had not been 
 
128 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 nominated at Chicago, but that statesman's behavior, in the very first 
 business that faced the administration, showed that Seward had not 
 taken the lesson deeply to heart. 
 
 This first question awaiting decision was critical indeed. Immedi- 
 ately after inauguration a telegram from Major Anderson, command- 
 ing Fort Sumter, had been handed the new President. The little garri- 
 son of less than a hundred men could hold out for only a brief time 
 unless resupplied and reinforced. The matter that had kept the United 
 States in a turmoil for three months — whether to attempt to retain 
 the bastion by force, or to evacuate it in the face of superior numbers 
 and dwindling supplies — could not much longer be postponed. 
 
 Seldom has the nation passed through such a period of anxiety and 
 disquiet as the quarter year that preceded Lincoln's accession. The 
 Buchanan administration, though repudiated at the polls, still held pos- 
 'session of the government. Not until March 4 would the new regime 
 ibe installed in office. The aging President himself, irresolute, inert, 
 without courage or initiative, extremely partisan and hidebound to the 
 South, did nothing when confronted with national dissolution. While 
 state after state had been leaving the Union, each appropriating to it- 
 self such Federal property as could be seized within its limits, Bu- 
 chanan spent his days and nights weeping, praying, and proclaiming 
 his inability to cope with disaster. Though he was feebly loyal himself, 
 his cabinet, until reorganized in late December, contained at least three 
 members — Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury, Floyd of Vir- 
 ginia, Secretary of War, and Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of 
 the Interior — who were arch secessionists and who were suspected, 
 how justly is still a moot question, of using their Federal positions to 
 strengthen the seceding states. With the Federal army of only sixteen 
 thousand men scattered in distant posts on the western frontier, from 
 which it could not be reassembled for months, and with the fighting 
 ships of the navy lying in foreign ports, the central government had 
 scant means of defending itself against the threat of attack that every 
 day grew more formidable. The state of affairs in Washington led the 
 young Henry Adams to compare the National Capital to ancient Rome 
 in the days of Cataline. Expressions of sympathy for the Southern cause 
 were daily events. Jefferson Davis and his associates were holding 
 secession meetings in the Capitol building itself, rumors of oath-bound 
 organizations said to be sworn to prevent Lincoln's inauguration filled 
 every street and home, and fears of an attempt to seize the city and 
 government in the interest of the Confederacy distracted the patriotic 
 mind. 
 
 If conditions did indeed recall to a classic-minded Bostonian the 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 129 
 
 time of Cataline, who was there in all this welter to perform the part of 
 Cicero? Though Seward was much more mild-mannered and less 
 vituperative than his ancient exemplar, he was a man of comparable 
 vanity and assurance, and clearly regarded himself as the one states- 
 man who could save a dissolving nation from its domestic foes. The 
 vacillating statesman in the White House was clearly not the man for 
 the occasion. The rustic President-elect in Springfield was untried in 
 large concerns, and was still a private citizen. 
 
 In his letters to Lincoln, Seward had shown little modesty. Even 
 toward the leader most concerned, he did not hesitate to assume a 
 superior attitude. "I, my dear sir," he wrote Lincoln on February 24, 
 "have devoted myself singly to the study of the case here with ad- 
 vantage of access and free communication with all parties of all sec- 
 tions. I have a common responsibility and interest with you and I shall 
 adhere to you faithfully in every case." Only a few days before, in 
 suggesting changes in the inaugural address, Seward had expressed 
 similar ideas to his nominal chief. "Only the soothing words which 
 I have spoken have saved us and carried us along thus far. Every loyal 
 man and indeed, every disloyal man in the South, will tell you this." 
 To others, Seward's letters were written in the same strain. Those to 
 Mrs. Seward portray himself as the one man pursuing a steady, definite 
 purpose amid the accumulating ruins. "All parties, north and south, cast 
 themselves upon me." "My future responsibilities have already begun." 
 "I have assumed a sort of dictatorship for defense, and am laboring 
 night and day." "It seems to me that, if I am absent only three days, 
 this administration" — the letter was written in January 1861, so the 
 reference is to the Buchanan regime — "the Congress and the District 
 would fall into consternation and despair. I am the only hopeful, calm, 
 conciliating person here." "Mad men North and mad men South are 
 working together to produce a dissolution of the Union by civil war. 
 The present [Buchanan] administration and the incoming [Lincoln] 
 are united in devolving on me the responsibility of diverting these 
 disasters." 
 
 If Lincoln felt chagrin at Seward's statement that he had an equal 
 responsibility with him in "saving" the Union, and that his course dur- 
 ing the interim from election to inauguration had succeeded in turn- 
 ing over to the new President a government still secure, there is no 
 record to indicate the fact. But that he seriously differed with Seward 
 in his proposals for counteracting secession there is abundant evidence. 
 The gulf between their fundamental conceptions of duty in the crisis 
 had been widening for a considerable period. The best index to their 
 conflicting views can be obtained from the speeches each delivered in 
 
130 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 February 1860, about three months before the Chicago Convention. 
 Lincoln's address was the one made in Cooper Union February 27, and 
 Seward's was spoken in the Senate two days afterward. Both men prob- 
 ably had in view the forthcoming Chicago Convention, and intended 
 their respective orations to be regarded more or less as personal plat- 
 forms in rivalry for the nomination. The important fact about Lin- 
 coln's statement of the case was that it differed hardly at all from the 
 judgments he had expressed in the debates with Douglas two years 
 before. Slavery in the states in which it already existed he had no 
 disposition to disturb; that the Constitution recognized and protected 
 it was granted; thus the Federal government had no right to interfere. 
 But to the creation of new slave territories and ultimately new slave 
 states in the national domain west of the Mississippi River Lincoln de- 
 clared himself inexorably opposed. That had been his stand from the 
 time he began to study and discuss the question and that continued to 
 be his position during the campaign of 1860 and afterward. 
 
 Seward's Senate speech of February 29, 1860, however, had com- 
 pletely reversed his previous attitude. Where before he had been un- 
 yielding towards the Southern claim, he now displayed a more acquies- 
 cent mood. Where in earlier speeches Seward had declared that slavery 
 and free labor could not exist permanently side by side in the same 
 nation, he now saw a harmonious fraternal relationship between the 
 two sections, irrespective of their different labor systems. Even ob- 
 noxious words were avoided; instead of "slave states," the Southern 
 commonwealths were described in this speech as "capital states." The 
 North had no desire "to force or even intrude" its labor system upon 
 the Southern brethren. The Republicans, said Seward, were now plan- 
 ning to play a national role, thus virtually admitting the claim of the 
 South that they had formed a sectional party. By mentioning only 
 incidentally slavery in the territories, and by talking much of the home- 
 stead laws and Pacific railroads, Seward almost echoed the plea of 
 Edward Bates for a moratorium on the "agitation." It was the duty of 
 the hour to get down to "practical" issues, and "leave metaphysical 
 speculation to those whose duty it is to cultivate the ennobling science 
 of political philosophy." 1 This thrust may have drawn a laugh from 
 his Southern associates, but it could not have pleased those at whom the 
 satire was aimed — the crusading antislavery men who had formerly 
 regarded Seward as their intrepid champion. 
 
 Of course in this speech Seward was again playing politics — the 
 Republican National Convention was only ten weeks in the future — 
 and this conciliatory attitude he continued to express in the next few 
 
 Reward, William Henry, Works. Redfield, 1853-1884. Vol. IV, 619-643. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER'' 131 
 
 months. He did not desert it even after Lincoln's nomination and elec- 
 tion. That this policy satisfied a considerable section of the Whig 
 Party, especially that element representing business and finance, soon 
 became evident. Seward and Weed had always been spokesmen of 
 what today would be called "Big Business." In Wall Street and in the 
 industrial sections of New England and Pennsylvania, support was 
 found in plenty for the pressure which these two leaders now began 
 to exert on Lincoln. Northern manufacturers did an extensive trade 
 with the South and had large outstanding accounts; and this talk of 
 secession and war was "bad for business." Politicians of the victorious 
 party, eager for temporary advantage, more interested in spoils than 
 in saving the Union, similarly gave Seward their acclaim. His plan for 
 "soothing" the South and in this way averting war found many fol- 
 lowers among those less affected by personal interests. They soon 
 began to besiege the President-elect. That avalanche of letters which 
 inundated Lincoln's humble home and that procession of visitors which 
 converged on the same point did not consist exclusively of office seek- 
 ers. A good-sized proportion came to beg the President-elect to issue 
 a "statement of his views." They asked for something which would 
 mollify the South and check its determination to secede. Only such a 
 "proclamation," as some of the visitors called it, could quiet the tur- 
 moil and save the Union. Many of the nation's leading citizens, espe- 
 cially in business and financial circles, took part in this bombardment. 
 August Belmont, A. T. Stewart, William B. Astor, Jay Gould, William 
 H. Aspinwall, Moses H. Grinnell, Abbott Lawrence, and other money 
 kings joined in the demand. But these appeals for a "statement" were not 
 precisely what they purported to be. Lincoln's views on the Southern 
 question had been set forth frequently and in detail; they had been ex- 
 pressed many times in the preceding two years, in most public fashion. 
 They existed in printed form, readily accessible to anyone really in- 
 terested in ascertaining his attitude. In reply to personal and written 
 requests, Lincoln appropriately called attention to these discussions, 
 and declared that they still continued to be his opinions on current 
 problems. In doing this, he frequently made direct citations, giving 
 dates and pages of his published speeches. There were, for example, 
 his debates with Douglas in the senatorial contest of 1858; on page so 
 and so the questioner would find a specific answer to his specific ques- 
 tion. There was the Cooper Union speech of February 27, 1860 — his 
 position, Lincoln would write, had not changed from the one expressed 
 in that utterance. Above all, there was the Chicago platform on which 
 he had been elected; the sections in that document concerning slavery 
 in the territories accurately defined the program he still upheld. But 
 
132 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 such rejoinders, apt as they might be, did not satisfy those besieging 
 the Springfield statesman. It was, indeed, precisely because Lincoln's 
 ideas had been so widely disseminated and were so well known that a 
 new "statement" was demanded. What the politicians and business 
 leaders really desired was not a "proclamation" of Lincoln's well- 
 known articles of faith, but an entirely new creed. They demanded 
 that Lincoln abandon his long-cherished convictions and adopt their 
 own. They insisted that he violate the pledges on which he had been 
 nominated and elected and make a complete surrender to the South. 
 The word that had already played so calamitous a role in the slavery 
 dispute was again pressed upon the forthcoming Chief Magistrate. 
 The quarrel had been "compromised" in 1820 and 1850; why should 
 Lincoln not assume the role of Henry Clay and compromise it again? 
 
 The demand took definite form about three weeks after the elec- 
 tion, under the leadership of a powerful wing of the Republican 
 Party. On November 24, 1860, an editorial on the state of the Union 
 appeared in the Albany Evening Journal. Ordinarily, an article in a 
 small-town partisan newspaper would not have attracted national at- 
 tention. But Thurlow Weed, editor of this organ, was Republican 
 Boss of New York State and an aspirant for an extension of his power 
 throughout the nation. Any discussion of his on such a vital subject 
 would therefore arouse wide interest. In this pronouncement Weed, 
 after picturing in melancholy colors the condition of public affairs, 
 made a definite proposal, which, in his view, would settle all pending 
 troubles. Only one concession, he suggested, would keep the cotton 
 states in the Union. This was the proposal advanced in the recent de- 
 bate in the Georgia Legislature by Robert Toombs and Alexander H. 
 Stephens, who had said that the enactment of Federal laws that would 
 protect slavery in the territories would keep Georgia from seceding. 
 There, Weed proclaimed in the Journal article, is "something to go 
 upon." In two sentences, he propounded his solution: "Why not re- 
 store the Missouri Compromise line? That secured to the South all the 
 territory adapted by soil and climate to its peculiar institution." 
 
 For thirty years Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward had been 
 the closest personal friends and political co-workers. So intimate was 
 this relationship that the popular mind had long bracketed the two 
 almost as a single person. Seward openly proclaimed this close partner- 
 ship and seemed almost to glory in it. "Seward is Weed and Weed is 
 Seward," he once informed his colleagues in the Lincoln cabinet. 
 "What I do Weed approves. What he says, I endorse. We are one." 2 
 In an association now extending over thirty years they had never 
 
 3 Welles, Gideon, Lincoln and Seward. Shelden & Co., 1874. P. 25. 
 
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WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER 133 
 
 taken opposite stands on any public policy or party program; their 
 association represented probably the closest co-operation that had ever 
 existed in American politics. Moreover, Weed's assistant editor on the 
 Albany journal was Frederick W. Seward, son of the future Secretary 
 of State. It was this lifelong companionship that gave such importance 
 to Weed's editorial. The public at once assumed, in the words of 
 Charles A. Dana, then Greeley's chief co-worker on the Tribune, that 
 "the voice was the voice of Seward, though the hand was the hand of 
 Weed"; an impression that was strengthened when, a few days after- 
 ward, the New York Times, then under the editorship of Henry J. 
 Raymond, another confidential associate of Seward, endorsed the 
 Albany journal's plan. When the New York Courier and Enquirer, 
 edited by James Watson Webb, another member of the Seward- Weed 
 group, added its voice of approval, this impression became a fixed con- 
 viction. Seward's denials — or semi-denials — the public refused to ac- 
 cept at face value. Evidently the general belief that he had inspired 
 Weed's outgiving caused him some uneasiness. "Mr. Weed's articles 
 have brought perplexities about me," Seward wrote his wife, "which 
 he, with all his astuteness, did not foresee. But you need not expect, or 
 rather fear, that I will act unwisely or wrong." In one or two newspa- 
 per publications he repudiated Weed as his mouthpiece, though in 
 none of them did he express disagreement with his proposals. Not 
 even in his letter to his wife did he reject his friend's main thesis — an 
 assurance that Mrs. Seward, not always a follower of her husband in 
 slavery questions, would have been glad to receive. The nationwide 
 commotion produced by this sensational suggestion, however, com- 
 pelled both Weed and Seward to issue disclaimers. Six days after the 
 original publication Weed, replying to its unfavorable reception, re- 
 marked, "We think and speak only for ourself." On December 5, the 
 New York Tribune contained a brief paragraph that bore signs of 
 having been officially inspired. "Mr. Seward will make no speech imme- 
 diately and will submit no proposition. . . . He is in no manner or 
 form responsible for the various suggestions recently put forward 
 in certain newspapers, which have been supposed to reflect his views, 
 and was not consulted concerning, or in any way privy to their publi- 
 cation. His policy is to watch the development of events and to direct 
 them wisely at the proper time for peace and the preservation of the 
 Union." This last sentence, again emphasizing Seward's conviction that 
 in him rested the salvation of the Union, gives the cue to his behavior, 
 at this critical moment. The same idea had been expressed in a recent 
 letter to Weed; in the present picture of affairs, Seward wrote, he in- 
 tended to be "silent but not sullen." In maintaining this extreme caution 
 
134 
 
 he had two persons, or groups of persons, in view. To have championed 
 publicly Compromise on the Weed pattern would have brought about 
 his ears the slavery radicals — men like Sumner, John P. Hale, Ben 
 Wade, Wendell Phillips, long his enemies in public life and destined 
 to make his career miserable in the next four years: the hullabaloo 
 from this source would have made any attempt at conciliation, however 
 moderate, out of the question. Seward perhaps felt even more con- 
 cerned about the response that might come from a thoughtful and 
 patient man then watching his every move from his home in Spring- 
 field, Illinois. Seward, despite his somewhat offish attitude at the 
 time, clearly yearned to occupy the chief cabinet post in the new ad- 
 ministration. To take publicly a position on slavery opposed to that of 
 his prospective chief would make impossible his appointment. One 
 pointed sentence in Lincoln's letter offering Seward the State Depart- 
 ment may be repeated. The new President had delayed so long in 
 filling the post, he wrote, "in deference to what appeared to me a 
 proper caution in the case." Why was such "caution" necessary? Not 
 improbably Seward's conciliatory speeches, his remark that he "would 
 make any sacrifice to save the Union," had aroused doubts in Lincoln's 
 mind. The Weed editorial, published at the time Lincoln was deeply 
 concerned with his Seward problem, must have inspired misgivings. 
 It is not too much to assume that Seward's repudiation, published in the 
 Tribune on December 5, was intended, above all, to quiet any appre- 
 hensions Lincoln may have felt. Significantly, Lincoln did not write 
 his letters, offering Seward the Secretaryship of State, until three days 
 after that statesman's rejection of Thurlow Weed as his spokesman 
 had been published. 
 
 The fact of course is that Weed's demarche was merely a feeler — 
 an instance of that most familiar device of the practical statesman, a 
 trial balloon. Its purpose was to test public sentiment, to discover how 
 press and public would regard the plan for quieting the national excite- 
 ment on which Seward had set his heart. If this had been the Seward- 
 Weed purpose, the answer they received removed all doubts. A tornado 
 of disapproval fell on Weed, and also on Seward, for the public refused 
 to accept his denial of co-authorship. So strong was this in Republican 
 circles, even in New York itself, where Weed was supposed to be 
 supreme, that a movement started to deprive him of that contract for 
 state printing which he had profitably enjoyed for many years. No 
 single person had been shocked more than the President-elect. Lincoln 
 had just fought successfully a presidential campaign on an issue which 
 Weed now proposed that he surrender to the South. The Republican 
 platform had denounced, as a "dangerous heresy," the doctrine that 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 135 
 
 "the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any and all the 
 territories of the United States"; and had denied "the authority of Con- 
 gress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individual to give legal 
 assistance to slavery in" any part of the unsettled domain. It was for 
 the maintenance of this principle that the Republican Party had come 
 into existence. On this declaration of intention it had won the election. 
 To repudiate the Chicago platform was to reverse the result of the 
 election and give victory to the South. Such a change would mean the 
 abandonment of everything that Lincoln had stood for since he had 
 joined the ranks in 1856. It would have made meaningless his political 
 career for it was a career which had been based on opposition to slavery 
 in the territories. Lincoln, in a letter to Seward, written some time 
 after these events, explained his position on this question with his usual 
 clarity. "I say now, as I have all the while said," he wrote, "that on the 
 territorial question — that is, the question of extending slavery under 
 the national auspices, — I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which 
 assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the 
 nation. And any trick by which it is to acquire territory, and then 
 allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as 
 any other. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us 
 again in the high road to a slave empire, is the object of all these pro- 
 posed compromises. I am against it." 
 
 This Weed-Seward definite suggestion of extending the Missouri 
 line, Lincoln insisted, was another attempt to build up a "new slave 
 empire." Such was the scarcely concealed purpose of the so-called 
 Crittenden Compromise then enjoying the distracted attention of Con- 
 gress — a compromise which, as its main item, embraced the suggestion 
 Weed had put forth. This drew an imaginary line of latitude 36° 30', 
 extending from the southern boundary of Missouri to California, north 
 of which slavery was to be forever excluded, but south of which — 
 territory now including Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona — it was to 
 be permitted. The phraseology of the proposed constitutional amend- 
 ment — for this principle, as well as other concessions favorable to the 
 slave interest, was to be imbedded in the fundamental law — comprised 
 more than this. Slavery was to become legal not only in all territories 
 "now held" by the United States south of this line, but in all "hereafter 
 acquired" south of the same parallel. It was that "hereafter acquired" 
 that made Lincoln, and most other orthodox Republicans, look upon 
 the Crittenden Compromise as a plan to create a "new slave empire." 
 Southerners of the Davis and Yancey school had never concealed 
 their plan to secure territory in Mexico, Central America, and the 
 Caribbean and create new slave states in this region. In this ambi- 
 
136 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 tion, the Buchanan administration had been a sympathetic co-worker. 
 Buchanan's pet idea was the annexation by purchase, or force of arms, 
 of Cuba — a fruitful island out of which more than one slave state 
 could be created. Filibustering expeditions into Central America, for 
 the purpose of seizing territory that could be incorporated into the 
 Union and ultimately become slave states, had been a feature of Ameri- 
 can history for the preceding ten years. So, as Lincoln saw it, this 
 compromise would merely start the old slave cycle to a new evolution. 
 The very word "compromise" aroused sad memories. The question 
 had been already several times "compromised" and "settled" — but to 
 what effect. In 1820, 1850, 1854 — the story was now an old and familiar 
 one, and the repeated violations of the several compromises gave little 
 ground for hope that another one would lead to any other result. The 
 politicians, North and South, on the outlook for temporary advantage, 
 had proved false to all the compromises that had previously been 
 entered into, and could be depended on to do so again. 
 
 The Weed publication was not necessary to show in what direction 
 Weed and Seward were working in 1860. The story of Weed's visit 
 to Lincoln in December has been told in preceding pages. Cabinet ap- 
 pointments — the plan to secure an all- Whig and all-Seward cabinet — 
 perhaps formed the main quest of that pilgrimage, but the policy of 
 the coming administration on the great issue was not disregarded. Had 
 Seward and Weed succeeded in obtaining an all- Whig cabinet they 
 would also have succeeded in bringing Lincoln to their compromise 
 plans, for the strength of this territorial plan consisted chiefly in its 
 old-time Whig supporters, especially in the propertied class. All those 
 Southern Whigs whom Seward had pressed for places in the cabinet — 
 John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, John M. Botts of Virginia, Emerson 
 Etheridge of Tennessee, James Barbour of Virginia, Randall Hunt of 
 Louisiana — were compromisers in 1860, while the former Democrats 
 to whom he had been so hostile, Gideon Welles, Montgomery Blair, 
 and Salmon P. Chase, were against making terms with the South that 
 would have reversed the result of the election in its favor. 
 
 Just before Weed's visit to Lincoln, his Albany Journal, in the face 
 of the hostility its earlier article had stirred up, came out with another 
 advocating the same proposal. That Seward had not been consulted on 
 this renewal of the demand is too much to believe. In fact he had spent 
 several days in Albany with Weed preceding the publication and was 
 present in that town the day it appeared. That it was written largely 
 with the President-elect in view may also be assumed. In forewarning 
 Lincoln of his friend's arrival, Seward wrote that he "would remain 
 at home until his return, and then, in further conference with him 
 [Weed] would have the advantage of a knowledge of the effect of 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 137 
 
 public events." Thus, he virtually notified Lincoln that Weed went to 
 Springfield as his ambassador, and the implication seemed to be that 
 Seward's acceptance of a cabinet post would depend upon the outcome 
 of the interview. Weed's latest journalistic effort appeared in Spring- 
 field almost simultaneously with his own arrival. Lincoln read it but 
 did not appear to be greatly moved. "This is a heavy broadside," he 
 remarked to Weed. "You have opened your fire at a critical moment. 
 It will do some good or much mischief." 3 Then he changed the subject 
 and took up the cabinet. Weed returned East, met Seward on the train 
 at Syracuse, and the two men spent two hours discussing the unsatis- 
 factory interview. Lincoln had given Weed a written memorandum 
 suggesting certain concessions he was prepared to make and requesting 
 that Seward present them to the Crittenden Committee. The extension 
 of the Missouri Compromise line was not among them. Seward ac- 
 cepted his defeat in his usual philosophic spirit and wrote Lincoln, 
 accepting the offer of the Secretaryship of State. 
 
 Having agreed to go into the cabinet, Seward could hardly vote for 
 the Crittenden Compromise. Had he done so, the likelihood is that he 
 would have received a letter from Lincoln, similar to the one sent 
 Simon Cameron, withdrawing the cabinet tender. Lincoln would 
 hardly have tolerated, as "Premier," a man who publicly endorsed a 
 policy diametrically opposed to his own. When the amendments came 
 up in the sessions of the Crittenden Committee, Seward seemed to 
 Southern members to be the most difficult and unbending of all. 
 Robert Toombs, the Georgia representative, subsequently paid tribute 
 to Seward as the irreconcilable foe of adjustment in the Senate. "At 
 length I saw that the compromise measures must fail," Toombs re- 
 corded years after the war. "With a persistent obstinacy that I have 
 never yet seen surpassed, Seward and his backers refused every over- 
 ture. I then telegraphed to Atlanta: 'All is at an end. North determined. 
 Seward will not budge an inch. Am in favor of Secession.' " 
 
 Toombs did not understand, what now seems apparent enough, that 
 Seward's opposition to the compromise was not genuine. Through 
 Weed he had aired that proposal in the public prints, with little suc- 
 cess, so far as popular opinion was concerned; he had sent Weed to 
 Springfield to exert pressure on the President-elect and had almost 
 seemed to make his entrance into the cabinet depend upon the accept- 
 ance of his peace program. Failing in all these efforts, he vigorously 
 opposed the compromise in committee and was given chief credit by 
 the Southern leaders for its defeat. Yet the fact is that, despite this out- 
 ward show of hostility, he was as much of a compromiser as ever, and 
 he did not cease his efforts to make this an administration issue. 
 
 3 Weed, op. cit. I, 604. 
 
J 
 
 UST WHAT proposals for meeting the crisis were forming in 
 Lincoln's mind from December 20, 1860, when South Carolina seceded, 
 to March 4, 1861, when he assumed the presidential office? On this 
 point historians apparently find little but confusion. A picture has been 
 drawn of the President-elect, wavering from day to day, with no defi- 
 nite plan of operation — inscrutable, silent, aimless, melancholy. Prob- 
 ably Lincoln's complete self-reliance — seldom seeking advice, keeping 
 his inmost thoughts to himself, listening willingly enough to all comers 
 but taking none into his confidence, and making his own decisions — 
 explains the lack of an adequate written record of his mind in the 
 pre-inauguration period. "He was the most secretive, reticent, shut- 
 mouthed man that ever lived," wrote William H. Herndon, his daily 
 companion for twenty years. Judge David Davis uses almost the same 
 words in describing his former companion and roommate on the 
 Eighth Circuit. 
 
 The fact that Lincoln did not boldly proclaim from the housetops 
 the plans he was contemplating for dealing with the South does not 
 mean that his mind was a blank on this subject. As to the main questions 
 involved, the preservation of the Union, the constitutional aspects of 
 Secession, reclaiming, even "retaking" by force the arsenals, navy 
 yards, customhouses, forts, and "places" which had been seized, the 
 futility of compromise as a method of assuring the future — Lincoln 
 left neither his friends, nor the public, in any doubt. In this interim, he 
 wrote several letters, and in his progress from Springfield to Washing- 
 ton from February 11 to the twenty-third made several speeches, 
 which clearly set forth his views on all these matters. Lincoln's much 
 admired first inaugural, as originally written — before, on the plea of 
 Seward and Orville H. Browning, certain crucial revisions were intro- 
 duced — gives a fairly clear view of his mind at this crisis. According 
 to Herndon, the President-elect started writing on this paper "late in 
 January"; it was finished and secretly printed by February 11, the day 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD*. "PRIME MINISTER ' 139 
 
 Lincoln left Springfield for Washington. This document, as it origi- 
 nally came from Lincoln's hands, together with certain important 
 letters, written with great care and scrupulous phrasing, gives at least 
 in outline the new President's plans for immediate action. 
 
 Not only the inaugural itself, but the circumstances of its writing, 
 show what was going on in Lincoln's mind. Herndon tells how the 
 lonely statesman, seeking asylum from visitors and office seekers who 
 made concentration impossible in that governor's room of the state 
 capitol which had served as headquarters since election, retired to a 
 dingy room over a store in a near-by building and here began work on 
 one of the most famous state papers of all time. No ghost writers and 
 "research assistants" helped in the incubation; four pieces of literature 
 only served as Lincoln's companions. Nothing could more eloquently 
 portray his mental state than the classics to which the President-elect 
 now went for inspiration. The Constitution of the United States, 
 Andrew Jackson's Proclamation of 1832 against Nullification, Web- 
 ster's Reply to Hayne, and Henry Clay's speech on the Compromise 
 measures of 1850 — in these four political testaments Lincoln looked 
 not only for the principles that should guide his administration, but in 
 some instances for the policies that should carry them into effect. By 
 the time Lincoln settled down to this literary task, seven states had 
 gone through the form of separating from the Union; no more appro- 
 priate aids to composition could be imagined than those with which 
 Lincoln now went into a kind of monastic seclusion. The note all these 
 prophets most confidently sounded was union, one and indivisible. In 
 the next few months the words of the Constitution were constantly on 
 Lincoln's lips — this fundamental instrument that knew no such thing 
 as secession or the right of the state to overrule the Federal legislature, 
 whose very reason for existence, as recorded in the preamble, was "to 
 form a more perfect Union." Lincoln took this admonition closely to 
 heart, and insisted on it, then and in the next few years, as his pre-emi- 
 nent duty. To keep that Union intact, as set forth in this Constitution, 
 against all subversive onslaughts, to maintain the integrity of the Fed- 
 eral domain against all attempts to split it into sections — here was the 
 cardinal task confronting the new regime. "My opinion,", Lincoln had 
 written to Thurlow Weed a month previously, "is that no state can 
 in any way lawfully get out of the Union without the consent of the 
 others; and that it is the duty of the President and other government 
 functionaries to run the machine as it is." This latter phrase became a 
 favorite of Lincoln's, sometimes varied by an even more homely ex- 
 pression of the same idea — "to keep house" — and the kindred duty 
 laid on the President in the inaugural oath, to "take care that the laws 
 
140 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 be faithfully executed," was another injunction he regarded with 
 solemnity. 
 
 The Union must be preserved, even at the cost of armed conflict — 
 such was the lesson of the documents that supplied the "source mate- 
 rials" for the first inaugural. The Seward- Weed approaches were 
 rejected, not only because Lincoln knew that they would be as ineffec- 
 tual in the future as they had been in the past, but because they would 
 not provide even a temporary solution. This important fact Seward 
 did not perceive, or, if he did, proceeded, with his splendid faculty for 
 self-deception, to ignore. Lincoln's clearer mind understood it from 
 the first. Both men, in shaping their divergent policies, had in view the 
 same object. The great prizes for which all devotees of the Union 
 struggled in 1861 were the upper Southern and the Border states. 
 With them, both Lincoln and Seward maintained, the Union could be 
 salvaged; without them, or at least some of them, the task would be 
 almost insurmountable. In Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Ten- 
 nessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas, the Union feeling up to 
 Sumter was strong; the masses of the people, and many of the leading 
 men, had little sympathy with the Cotton Confederacy. Certain 
 Senators and Representatives, like Mason and Hunter in Virginia, 
 Clingman in North Carolina, approached, in hatred of the Union, the 
 worst of the fire-eaters of the Gulf; but they did not embody the real 
 public sentiment of their region. With both the moderate and the 
 irreconcilable elements Seward remained on friendly terms. 
 
 Virginia and Maryland became the chief objects of his attention. 
 With these commonwealths, Seward believed, the fate of the Union 
 chiefly rested. Virginia, though by no means the commanding figure 
 it had been in earlier days, still, in historic prestige, led the South; its 
 decision on whether to join the new Confederacy or to remain faithful 
 to the Union would greatly influence all the Border states, especially 
 North Carolina and Tennessee, as yet undecided between two loyalties. 
 That Maryland would follow Virginia's leadership was a fair assump- 
 tion, though it proved to be unjustified. The possibility that these two 
 states would cross the Rubicon and march south appalled Seward, as 
 it did Lincoln. Such a departure would leave Washington within the 
 limits of the new Confederacy — and make its retention as the Federal 
 capital difficult, if not impossible. Seward opposed Montgomery Blair 
 for the cabinet in part because he believed, as Thurlow Weed had 
 explained to Lincoln, that he had "no following in his own State," and 
 therefore could do little in keeping Maryland in the Union; Henry 
 Winter Davis, whom he had urged instead, was the dapper, aristocratic 
 boss of the Baltimore "plug-uglies," as the Tammanyites of that city 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 141 
 
 were styled; because of his patrician birth and his skill in practical poli- 
 tics, he was believed to wield great power, which he proclaimed his 
 desire to use for the benefit of the Union. In Virginia Seward's chief 
 reliances were James Barbour and John Minor Botts — both of whom 
 had been included among the "White Crows" whom he had suggested 
 for the cabinet. That Botts was a white crow events made clear, for he 
 remained loyal to the Union after Virginia's secession, but Mr. Barbour 
 was a Unionist of less pronounced type though Seward called him the 
 "master spirit of the Union cause" in Virginia. 
 
 In early February, Virginia, after a spirited campaign, elected dele- 
 gates to a- state convention — a convention which was called to settle 
 the question of secession. At this assize, non-seceders won a smashing 
 victory. The returns disclosed that the people, by a vote of six to one, 
 had turned their backs on Jefferson Davis and stretched out the friend- 
 liest hand to Abraham Lincoln. Seward and others hailed the event as 
 almost settling the great question, on a national scale. When North 
 Carolina and Tennessee soon afterward followed, with similar result, 
 the Union cause indeed seemed to be triumphant. Yet the outcome in 
 these Border states did not settle the matter at all. The election returns 
 did not portray the real state of the public mind. The respective fates 
 at the polls of James Barbour and John M. Botts in Virginia tell the 
 story. Mr. Barbour was elected a delegate, while Mr. Botts was de- 
 feated. The reason for these different fates was that the Barbour loyalty 
 to the Union was conditional, while that of Mr. Botts was uncondi- 
 tional. Mr. Barbour would keep Virginia faithful to the Union, pro- 
 vided certain "guarantees" were granted, while Mr. Botts was a 
 Unionist through thick and thin. And what were the Barbour condi- 
 tions? The Crittenden Compromise again! A letter written by James 
 Barbour to William H. Seward, just after the convention election, 
 warns the prospective Secretary of State not to take this victory too 
 seriously. The election merely meant that Virginia was for the Union, 
 provided "guarantees for slavery" were given; otherwise it would go 
 with the lower South. Not only would Virginia insist on the new 
 Missouri line and other concessions, but Mr. Barbour thought she was 
 right in doing so. But the unconditional Union men — those candidates 
 who would hold fast to the Federal government even without these 
 Crittenden amendments — like John M. Botts — failed to obtain seats 
 in the approaching convention. This was not all that the conditional 
 Unionists in Virginia and the other Border states demanded as the price 
 of their allegiance to the Union. That there should be no "coercion" 
 of the Cotton Confederacy — no attempt to relieve Fort Sumter and 
 Fort Pickens, or to "retake" the "places" which Jefferson Davis and 
 
142 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 his companions had seized from the Federal government, and no use of 
 force to bring the seceded communities back under the Federal flag — 
 was the second item in these demands. Such "coercion" would be the 
 signal for immediate secession of the states now wavering between 
 the two sections. Thus the once compact United States, in the spring 
 of 1861, really consisted of three almost independent units. The free 
 Northern and Western states comprised one part; the Border and 
 upper Southern states — Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Caro- 
 lina, Tennessee, Arkansas — formed another entity attached to the 
 Union by a tenuous thread; and the seven states already joined in a 
 so-called Confederate Republic constituted the third. Seward planned 
 to retain the Middle Kingdom in the Union by making almost any 
 concession necessary to that end. Not only was he prepared to give 
 Virginia and her sister states the "guarantees for slavery" which they 
 insisted on, but to meet the other demands — to evacuate Fort Sumter, 
 and to refrain from military action to regain Federal property which 
 the states already had seized. In accomplishing this latter result, the 
 Border states, he believed, would serve as intermediaries. Once the 
 Border states were definitely secured, and the excitement had died 
 down — after the passing of a few months or a few years — they would 
 act as good angels, and persuade their "erring sisters" further south to 
 rejoin the great Republic of the Fathers. 
 
 In the essential devotion of this difficult cotton country to the Union 
 Seward constantly expressed his belief. At a dinner of the New England 
 Society in the Astor House, New York, on December 24, 1860, he had 
 phrased this conviction in words that shocked the nation by their 
 levity — so lighthearted were they, indeed, that Seward, in the version 
 of the speech afterward published in his Works, omitted certain pas- 
 sages. South Carolina had passed its ordinance four days previously. 
 "They do not humbug me," he said, "with their secession. I do not 
 believe they will humbug you and I do not believe that if they do 
 not humbug you or me, they will succeed very long in humbugging 
 themselves." Let no one doubt the loyalty of South Carolina to their 
 beloved Union! That state would rise as one man if New York were 
 attacked by a foreign foe; if South Carolina were similarly assailed, 
 every state in the North would simultaneously spring to its defense. 
 This latter sentiment, though thrown off extempore the same evening 
 to his cheering and laughing auditors, afterward took such complete 
 possession of Seward that, as will appear, it became the central point 
 in the policy he in time submitted to Lincoln as the one way of re- 
 uniting the severed Union. 
 
 Lincoln did not share Seward's optimism. He did not believe in the 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 143 
 
 innate loyalty of the seceded states. He believed — and there are few 
 historians today who do not agree with him — that the Confederate 
 States, organized at Montgomery in early February, 1861, represented 
 a determined and long-planned scheme for independence. In his opin- 
 ion, no concessions made to the Border states, not even the new 
 Missouri Compromise line, would persuade South Carolina and the 
 others to return to Federal allegiance. The Seward concessions would 
 be interpreted by •the Cotton South merely as a sign of weakness and 
 fear and lead to further demands that would inevitably culminate in 
 armed conflict. Civil war or submission — such was the issue of 1861, 
 reduced to its simplest terms. The alternative was not a new one in 
 human history; the American nation had faced it before, and would be 
 called upon to face it again, especially in 1917 and 1941. Just when 
 Lincoln accepted this stark conclusion cannot be said, for, as always, 
 he kept his own counsel, but it probably antedated his election to the 
 Presidency. Should the North agree to a dissolution of the Union, 
 recognize the theory of secession, or resort to war? Thus the funda- 
 mental difference between Lincoln and Seward as statesmen was that 
 the "prairie lawyer" saw these alternatives and made no effort to de- 
 ceive himself and evade the truth, while the accomplished Senator from 
 New York would not accept the situation and make his choice. Eighty 
 years afterward, John Morley, English historian and biographer, as 
 well as perhaps the most outspoken pacifist of his time, said the final 
 word on this subject. The American Civil War was "the only war in 
 modern times as to which we can be sure, first, that no skill or patience 
 of diplomacy would have avoided it; and second, that preservation of 
 the American Union and abolition of negro slavery were two vast tri- 
 umphs by which even the inferno of war was justified." 1 
 
 And so while Lincoln, in his dingy sanctum over a store in Spring- 
 field, was working at the inaugural which recognized the logic of cir- 
 cumstances, Seward, in his Auburn home and in Washington, was 
 writing letters and making speeches intended to accomplish what, in 
 Morley's words, was impossible — avert war by diplomacy. The most 
 impressive effort of this kind was an address delivered in the Senate on 
 January 12, 1861. The news that Seward was to speak drew great 
 crowds to the Capitol. For anything resembling the eagerness with 
 which his words were awaited one must go back thirty years, when 
 Daniel Webster rose to make his reply to the South Carolinian Hayne. 
 That Seward was to head the cabinet had now become public property, 
 and he was naturally looked upon as the spokesman of the new admin- 
 istration. Men and women poured into the Senate Chamber, and filled 
 
 1 Morley, John, Viscount, Recollections. Macmilhn, 1917. I, 20. 
 
144 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 all corridors and halls. By this time four states had seceded, but several 
 of the figures that had been familiar sights in the days of the great 
 slavery arguments still held their seats. Toombs had uttered his angry 
 harangue and departed for Georgia, but Jefferson Davis, Seward's per- 
 sonal friend but political foe, was an attentive listener; Mason and 
 Slidell, who in a few months were to confront Seward with his 
 most dangerous diplomatic impasse, Judah P. Benjamin, destined to 
 become Seward's opposite member in. the Confederacy, were still 
 Senators and gave a respectful hearing to his proposals. Crittenden, 
 author of the Compromise — a Kentuckian who stayed loyal to the 
 Union despite the failure of his attempted conciliation — sat directly in 
 front of Seward, and wept during a considerable part of the discourse. 
 For nearly two hours Seward pleaded for peace and union; an oration 
 that was restrained but deeply moving, even impassioned, recalling the 
 splendid past of a united nation, its greatness, the lofty position it had 
 obtained in the respect of mankind, and the happiness it had brought 
 to millions. How could this Union be saved? The speaker repelled the 
 suggestion of armed force. "I dread, in my innermost soul, I abhor, 
 civil war. I do not know what the Union would be worth, if saved by 
 the use of the sword." To prevent such a calamity Seward could 
 "afford to meet prejudice with conciliation, exaction with concession 
 that surrenders no principle, and violence with the right hand of 
 peace." As to slavery as an institution, the speech of January 12 departs 
 a long distance from Seward's "irrepressible conflict" dogma of two 
 years before. According to that famous declaration, the two conflicting 
 systems, slave labor and free labor, could not exist indefinitely side by 
 side. The conviction which had made Seward's name so odious in the 
 South and so celebrated in the North he now cast aside. The different 
 forms of labor, he now asserted, "if slavery were not perverted to 
 purposes of political ambition need not constitute an element of strife." 
 Few practical or definite proposals for resolving the issue were sug- 
 gested. A constitutional amendment guaranteeing perpetual slavery in 
 the states where it existed; the division of the remaining national domain 
 into two states, one to remain free and the other slave — provided this 
 could be done constitutionally — summed up the main recommenda- 
 tions now put forth. Seward proposed also that a new national conven- 
 tion be assembled, two or three years hence, "when calmness once more 
 shall have resumed its accustomed sway over the public mind," for the 
 revision of the Constitution and the final settlement of pending dis- 
 putes. Two Pacific railroads, one with its terminus in the South and 
 one in the North, would assist in cementing the Union. 
 
S: 
 
 EWARD READ this speech to Charles Sumner four days before 
 its delivery. "I protested," Sumner wrote Samuel G. Howe, "with my 
 whole soul, for the sake of our cause, our country and his own good 
 name, and I supplicated him to say no such thing." x Whittier sent 
 Seward a poem, praising him for extending the olive branch to the 
 South, but qualifying the eulogy by hinting that too much subserviency 
 had been shown the slave power. Sumner and Whittier, of course, 
 stood for the Abolitionist standpoint — a tribe for which Seward had 
 little respect, but the response forthcoming from his fellow Republi- 
 cans proved hardly more consoling. Lincoln indeed did write Seward 
 that the speech "is well received here, and, I think, is doing good all 
 over the country," but this faint praise to a prospective colleague did 
 not include any approval of the sentiments expressed, and Lincoln, 
 two weeks afterward, penned his letter to Seward expressing his ex- 
 plicit opinion of the slavery question, saying, "I am for no compromise 
 which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned 
 by the nation," and, about the same time, sat down to the composition 
 of his inaugural, the tone of which hardly echoed that of Seward's 
 oration. 
 
 Chase, a future colleague, paid the speech a characteristically doubt- 
 ful compliment: it was "not so wrong as I feared . . . not so good as 
 I hoped." The Republican members of Congress almost unanimously 
 condemned the Seward program, and were barely restrained from 
 calling a caucus and passing resolutions repudiating its proposals, while 
 elections presently held in New England and Ohio showed decreased 
 Republican majorities — a loss generally attributed to a belief that the 
 leaders of the party were surrendering to the South. Perhaps James 
 Buchanan, in the apology for a misspent Presidency which he began 
 writing on retirement, expresse3 as well as anybody the essential qual- 
 ity of Seward's forensics, on this and other occasions: "Without strong 
 
 1 Pierce, Edward L., Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner. Roberts Bros., 1877- 
 1893. IV, 9. 
 
146 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 convictions he understood the art of preparing in his closet and uttering 
 before the public antithetical sentences well calculated to influence the 
 ardor of his anti-slavery friends and to exasperate his pro-slavery 
 opponents." But criticism fell upon Seward from a source that prob- 
 ably cut deeper than that of these political friends and foes. His wife 
 did not like his speech and wrote more than once telling him so. Mrs. 
 Seward, as ever profoundly moved by slavery, watched the progress 
 of affairs with concern and emotion. Weed's editorials proposing a 
 new Missouri Compromise had already disturbed her, and Seward's 
 assurances that "you need not expect, or rather fear, that I will act 
 unwisely or wrong" did not carry conviction. "I am not surprised you 
 do not like the 'concessions' of my speech," Seward wrote his wife, 
 January 18. "You will soon enough come to see that they are not com- 
 promises, but explanations." One of the "concessions" Mrs. Seward 
 did not like was the proposal, soon framed in a definite bill, to admit 
 New Mexico — which territory then included Arizona — as a slave 
 state. "Three thousand square miles of God's earth," Mrs. Seward pro- 
 tested to her "Henry," "is a high price for the questionable advantage 
 of a Union with the slave states." Seward kept insisting that he was no 
 compromiser, that he could not "compromise a principle," but the 
 person who knew him most intimately remained unpersuaded and 
 disconsolate. 
 
 Seward himself, however, regarded this speech as having historic 
 importance; it was a powerful influence, he thought, in tranquilizing 
 public excitement and "saving the Union," in that dangerous interim 
 extending from late December until inauguration. His son Frederick 
 relates that, in all his father's letters and conversation during this period, 
 the same expression constantly recurred: "The Government can be 
 saved, if not betrayed before the Fourth of March." 2 At other times 
 Seward described himself as a bridge builder, engaged in guiding public 
 affairs so that the gulf stretching between these two fateful dates could 
 be safely spanned. Certain historians have estimated highly his services 
 in this interval. Henry and Charles Francis Adams, sons of Seward's 
 minister to Great Britain, always insisted that their favorite statesman 
 saved the nation from dissolution in these three months, and gave him 
 credit for handing to Lincoln, on his assumption of power, a country 
 still at peace. Perhaps the most graphic view, if not the most accurate 
 one, of Washington in the last days of Buchanan can be obtained from 
 the writings of Henry Adams — the Letters, the Education, and espe- 
 cially a brochure, The Secession Winter, 1861-62, written at the time, 
 
 2 Seward's Seward. II, 501. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 147 
 
 but not published until 1910. 3 Certainly no one has given a more lively 
 picture of Seward the man than Adams, in his Education: "A slouching, 
 slender figure; a head like a wise macaw's; a beaked nose; shaggy eye- 
 brows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free 
 talk and perpetual cigar — offered a new type — of western New York 
 — to fathom; a type in one way simple because it was only double — 
 political and personal; but complex because the political had become 
 nature, and no one could tell which was the mask and which the fea- 
 tures. At table, among friends, Mr. Seward threw off restraint, or 
 seemed to throw it off in reality, while in the world he threw it off 
 like a politician for effect. In both cases he chose to appear as a free 
 talker, who loathed pomposity and enjoyed a joke; but how much was 
 nature and how much was mask, he was himself too simple a nature to 
 know. Underneath the surface he was conventional after the conven- 
 tions of western New York and Albany. Politicians thought it uncon- 
 ventionality. Bostonians thought it provincial. Henry Adams thought 
 it charming." 4 
 
 Seward, a constant diner at the Adams board, indeed almost a mem- 
 ber of the family, appears in his several guises in the Adams letters of 
 the period. "Seward is great, a perfect giant in his howling"; the "wily 
 old scarecrow" insinuates his advice, "talks slowly and watches one 
 so hard, under those grey eyebrows of his"; he "sprawls about and 
 snorts and belches and does all sorts of outrageous things" — such as 
 removing his boots in the parlor, to dry his feet before the fire, unde- 
 terred by the presence of his hostess; or consuming the Adams super- 
 fine cigars in vast aureoles of smoke, and stuffing his pockets with them 
 as he leaves the house; or patting the grandiose Mrs. Charles Francis 
 Adams on the head, like a little girl — "from any other man this would 
 make our dear mother furious, but he is so hopelessly lawless that she 
 submits and feels rather flattered." It is an unforgettable picture capped 
 by the young man's conclusion that "I have excited immense delight 
 among some young ladies here by a very brilliant proposition which I 
 made, to dye the old sinner's hair bright crimson, paint his face the 
 most brilliant green, his nose yellow and then to make an exhibition of 
 him as the sage parrot; a bird he wonderfully resembles in manner and 
 profile." 5 But the chief impression gained from these glimpses of what 
 
 3 In Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. XLIII, 655. 
 
 4 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918. 
 P. 104. The selections from this book are used by permission of the publishers, 
 Houghton Mifflin Company. 
 
 5 Adams, Henry, Letters of Henry Adams, 1858-1891. Ed. Worthington Chaun- 
 cey Ford. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930. Ch. 11. 
 
148 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 many regarded as the leading statesman of his time is that of lighthead- 
 edness and gaiety. Though most contemporaries stressed the tragic 
 aspects of the hour, young Henry Adams portrayed a man undis- 
 turbed, almost unconcerned, by the national danger, completely sat- 
 isfied with the state of affairs and apparently troubled by no doubts 
 concerning the outcome. At one of Seward's own dinner parties — ap- 
 parently in early December, 1860, on the eve of the Charleston seces- 
 sion — the host presented a picture far from despair. Reinforced by a 
 superior champagne, he "was chipper as a lark and swore by yea and 
 nay that everything was going on admirably." Senator Anthony of 
 Rhode Island remarked, "Things look pretty bad, Governor, don't you 
 think so?" "No," growled Seward, "I don't see why they look bad." 
 Seward at whist; Seward playing with the children; Seward sipping the 
 Moselle of Baron Gerolt, the Russian Minister, "and we managed to be 
 pretty jolly"; Seward entertaining everybody with a discourse on good 
 clothes, especially amusing because his own were always so ill-fitting 
 and unkempt; Seward convulsing the whole table with his stories, and 
 then entrancing all present with his conversation — "I sat and watched 
 the old fellow with his big nose and his wire hair and grizzly eyebrows 
 and miserable dress, and listened to him rolling out his grand, broad 
 ideas that would inspire a crow with statesmanship if she understood 
 our language" — the picture is not that of a man overburdened by a 
 chaotic, dissolving nation. Perhaps this was the "mask" that Seward 
 assumed, or perhaps he was not confiding his inmost secrets to a young 
 man of twenty-three, recently out of Harvard. Not improbably, Sew- 
 ard looked upon this attitude of optimism and nonchalance as the 
 proper one to assume; it was part of the essential stage business of a 
 prospective Secretary of State whose duty it would be to harmonize 
 the contending sections. Seward showed the same outward aspect on 
 other occasions. His toast at a dinner given this winter by Stephen A. 
 Douglas to the French Minister — "Away with all parties, all platforms 
 of previous committals and whatever else will stand in the way of a 
 restoration of the American Union" — would have shocked Lincoln, 
 had it been reported to him. 
 
 Yet that Seward was the "ruler" of the nation in the three months 
 preceding inauguration not only young Adams, but his more experi- 
 enced father, believed. The younger man wrote of Seward's "reign" 
 of two months and of the "triumph of his dictatorship." Both these 
 appraisals lacked specific details, and certain historians accepting them 
 have similarly failed to make out a clear, consecutive story. No period 
 in our history, indeed, seems more confused than that from the seces- 
 sion of South Carolina to the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. There 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 149 
 
 will be no attempt in the present instance to explore the long, involved 
 situation again. So far as Seward's policy was concerned — of offering 
 concessions, even extreme ones, to the Border states, and in that way 
 keeping them in the Union, and using them as agents for persuading 
 the lower South to see its mistake, and ultimately come back under the 
 old flag — nothing, it is now understood, could have been more falla- 
 cious. If any good came from these efforts, it is that they may have 
 caused hesitation and delay in such regions as Virginia and North 
 Carolina, and thus tended to postpone hostilities before the Lincolnian 
 advent. Had war broken out when Buchanan was in the White House 
 — and this might have taken place, except for the hopes held out to the 
 Border states of a satisfactory compromise — the result might have been 
 deplorable. So far as Seward's speeches and acts in these two months 
 helped to delay the crisis, and thus insured the setting up of a new 
 regime, they served a genuine public end. 
 
 The famous Peace Convention of Virginia, for example, seems to 
 have been called on Seward's prompting. Most of the states still in the 
 Union sent delegates, but none of the states already in the Confederacy 
 were represented; it met in Washington early in February and remained 
 intermittently in session for three weeks. It offered no practical plan 
 for reuniting the severed Union; all it could do was to propose again 
 the Crittenden Compromise, with its extension of the Missouri line. 
 But the convention may have served a valuable purpose in preventing 
 the secession of Virginia and certain sister Border states until Lincoln 
 had been solidly seated in power. In mature life, Charles Francis Adams, 
 Jr., in a more accurate summary of Seward's services than the con- 
 temporary estimate of his father, and his brother Henry, said Seward 
 "had formulated a policy based on the careful avoidance of collision 
 and bloodshed until there had been ample time allowed for reflection 
 and the saving second thought. The course of subsequent events 
 showed that he was wholly wrong in basing any hopes on this miscon- 
 ception of the real attitude and feelings of the South; but, on the other 
 hand, they also showed that the day of compromise was over, and that 
 the attitude of conciliation, while it might gain valuable time, endan- 
 gered nothing." 6 Seward, said the younger Charles Francis, was dwell- 
 ing in his " 'Southern-Unionist' dreamland" - an experience that pro- 
 duced little of value in settling the question, but did have considerable 
 value in keeping the government intact until the fourth of March. 
 That Sunday, February 24, the day following Lincoln's arrival in 
 
 6 Adams, Charles Francis, Autobiography. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916. P 74 
 Miffon C tl0nS fr ° m ^^ b °° k arC USCd by P ermission of the P ublisher s, Houghton 
 
150 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Washington, proved to be an engrossing one for the prospective 
 Secretary of State. Lincoln had given Seward a copy of his inaugural 
 soon after reaching the Capital. Secluded in his library for the greater 
 part of the day, Seward went over the document line by line and word 
 for word, jotting memoranda in the margin, here and there excising a 
 phrase and substituting one of his own, finally writing a long letter to 
 his future chief proposing many changes, and giving reasons for each 
 suggestion. That Seward approached this task with trepidation was 
 not surprising. Lincoln, he knew, differed diametrically from him on 
 vital questions. In impromptu speeches on his long progress to Wash- 
 ington, the new leader had uttered certain sentences, even paragraphs, 
 that offered little encouragement to that policy of extreme appeasement 
 on which Seward had set his heart. For certain passages in the inaugural, 
 therefore, the Secretary-to-be was well prepared, but the document as 
 a whole lifted a great weight from his mind. A week afterwards, on 
 another Sunday, March 3, the day before inauguration, Charles Francis 
 Adams, the younger, dined at Seward's house in company with a num- 
 ber of Auburn friends. "He was comparatively quiet, and seemed less 
 exuberant than usual; but almost the only thing he did say caused with 
 me a long breath of relief. Referring to the coming inaugural, he re- 
 marked that he had been reading it, and that while it would satisfy the 
 whole country, it more than covered all of his heresies." 7 Apparently 
 Seward did not confide to his guests the chief reason for contentment. 
 He had proposed many changes, most of them trivial, one or two of 
 considerable importance, and Lincoln, in a friendly spirit of co-opera- 
 tion, had adopted a good many of his emendations. 
 
 Most of them, as he wrote Lincoln that evening of February 24, had 
 "little importance severally," but were intended "in their general effect 
 to soothe the public mind." Sometimes he offered a gentler word in 
 place of Lincoln's more downright one, occasionally he gave a little 
 easier variation to one of the President's more direct statements. Thus 
 at the beginning Lincoln had referred to his fifteen distinguished prede- 
 cessors in the Presidency who had conducted the government "on the 
 whole, with great success." Seward's innocuous proposal that "gener- 
 ally" be substituted for "on the whole" Lincoln cheerfully accepted. 
 "A disruption of the Federal government," the original address read, 
 "is menaced, and, so far as it can be on paper, is already effected," but 
 this plain statement of a most evident fact was changed to Seward's 
 softer — but not so accurate — phrase: "A disruption of the Federal 
 Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted." If 
 the states, one by one, could destroy the Federal Union, wrote Lincoln 
 
 7 Adams, Charies Francis, op. cit. P. 95. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 151 
 
 in his original draft, "the Union is less perfect than before, which con- 
 tradicts the Constitution and therefore is absurd." That "absurd" rather 
 startled the cautious Auburn statesman, and Lincoln, in deference to 
 his protest, struck out the offending syllables. One clause of that Federal 
 Constitution which Lincoln had kept close at hand while penning his 
 address, and which he took with the utmost seriousness, was that the 
 President "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." He 
 incorporated this familiar quotation in his inaugural, thus plainly inti- 
 mating an intention of living up to the obligation. Seward desired that 
 the new President should point out that that duty was "expressly en- 
 joined upon me" by the Constitution, and so it stands in the famous 
 document today. When Lincoln declared that "there are persons who 
 seek to destroy the Union," Seward asked him to add, "I am sure they 
 must be few in number and of little influence when their pernicious 
 principles are understood," but Lincoln refused to add a clause which 
 was utterly at variance with the facts. "My countrymen, take time and 
 think well on this subject," the original inaugural admonished the 
 American people, facing a great disaster; "think calmly and think well," 
 Seward amended: and Lincoln compromised on "think calmly and 
 well." 
 
 Revised readings like these, of which there were many, signified 
 little, but one passage fairly brought Seward to his feet. "All the power 
 at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places 
 which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess these and all other 
 property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the 
 duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these ob- 
 jects, there will be no invasion of any state." Up to this time seven 
 states, in seceding from the Union, had seized all the customhouses, 
 mints, arsenals, and forts within their boundaries; only Fort Sumter, 
 in Charleston Harbor, Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Fort Taylor at Key 
 West, and Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas remained in the hands of 
 the Federal government. These "places" could not be "reclaimed" 
 except by force of arms; and such action meant war. This paragraph, 
 Seward perceived, immediately destroyed his policy; it was little less 
 than a presidential proclamation in an inaugural address, that he in- 
 tended to resort to military pressure and bloodshed to bring the South 
 to terms. Seward ran his pen through the alarming paragraph, and 
 wrote one of his own — long, rambling in thought, almost meaningless 
 in its qualifications — which he asked Lincoln to substitute. As a piece 
 of English and as a piece of shuffling sophistry, it was Seward at his 
 worst and Lincoln did not accept the two-faced disquisition. 
 
 Lincoln had shown the address to a friend of many years' standing, 
 
152 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Judge Orville H. Browning, for whose judicial discretion he probably 
 entertained a higher regard than for Seward's. Judge Browning had also 
 thought the passage little less than dynamite. The policy itself Brown- 
 ing approved, but this bold announcement in an inaugural struck him 
 as unnecessary and unwise. All efforts were then being made to keep 
 Virginia and the other Middle and Border states in the Union; and 
 would not this "threat or menace," as Browning characterized it, be 
 inexpedient in view of that attempt? He suggested that the sentence 
 be changed to read: "All the power at my disposal will be used to hold, 
 occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the govern- 
 ment and to collect the duties and imposts, etc." The suggested change 
 was a radical one. Instead of informing the South that the new President 
 intended to move an army into the Confederacy to "retake" Federal 
 property already seized, Judge Browning's revision merely announced 
 the intention to "hold" or "occupy" the forts that were still flying the 
 Stars and Stripes — Forts Sumter, Taylor, Jefferson, and Pickens. Of 
 course Lincoln, although he acquiesced in the Browning phraseology, 
 did not intend to change his real purpose; but, not wishing to put any 
 obstacles in the way of those still laboring for a peaceful settlement, he 
 temporarily refrained from issuing what was little less than defiance. 
 
 From the same motive Lincoln adopted a vital request of his concili- 
 atory Secretary of State. At the beginning of the original inaugural 
 Lincoln had said that he would follow the declaration of the Chicago 
 platform, upon which he had been elected. "By no other course could 
 I meet the reasonable expectations of this country." For several months 
 an influential section of the party, led by Weed and by Seward himself, 
 had been urging Lincoln to abandon the Chicago platform and cham- 
 pion a program directly opposed to it. The Chicago platform — it may 
 be repeated — had declared in effect that there should be no further 
 encroachment of slavery in the territories — that is, that no more slave 
 states should be added to the Union. Lincoln, on March 4, as well as 
 on the day of his nomination, was "inflexible" on this point. As Seward 
 read this reiteration in the inaugural, all his hopes of compromise 
 seemed to have been pulled from under him. "I declare to you my con- 
 viction," he now wrote Lincoln, "that the second and third paragraphs, 
 even if modified as I propose in my amendments, will give such advan- 
 tage to the Disunionists that Virginia and Maryland will secede, and 
 we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty days, be obliged to fight 
 the South for this capital, with a divided North for our reliance, and 
 we shall not have one loyal magistrate or ministerial officer South of the 
 Potomac. In that case, the dismemberment of the Republic would date 
 from the inauguration of a Republican administration. I therefore most 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 153 
 
 respectfully counsel the omission of these paragraphs." Again Lincoln 
 excised the passage. But not for a moment had he abandoned his deter- 
 mination to shape his presidential course on the Chicago platform. 
 
 In the change Seward proposed for concluding the inaugural, he 
 proved supremely happy. Lincoln's final paragraph has been quoted 
 on a preceding page — the one in which he informed his "dissatisfied 
 friends" that, come what might, he intended to enforce the Constitution 
 and defend the Union, and that with the Secessionists lay the choice 
 of "peace or the sword." To Seward the words sounded too much like 
 a gauntlet thrown down to the South. The inaugural, he believed, 
 should end on a note of fraternal affection, not of defiance. "The argu- 
 ment is strong and conclusive," he wrote Lincoln, "and ought not to 
 be in any way abridged or modified. But something besides or in addi- 
 tion to argument is needful — to meet and remove prejudice and passion 
 in the South and despondency and fear in the East. Some words of 
 affection — some of calm and cheerful confidence." He submitted two 
 paragraphs as containing at least a suggestion of what he had in mind. 
 One was platitudinous and badly expressed, but the other had a finer 
 quality. Why not conclude the inaugural somewhat in this fashion? 
 "I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow 
 countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of 
 affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. 
 The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and 
 so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in 
 this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient 
 music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation." 
 Lincoln's quick literary sense leaped upon this paragraph, but also per- 
 ceived that it could be improved. When it had passed through his 
 more sensitive mind, it emerged as follows: "I am loath to close. We 
 are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion 
 may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mys- 
 tic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot 
 grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, 
 will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they 
 surely will be, by the better angels of our nature." 
 i Though the Lincolnian touch gave the lines a gentle dignity that 
 Seward's version lacked, it must be granted that the New Yorker was 
 more than half the author of one of the most admired passages in 
 Lincoln literature. If the collaboration of President and "Premier" 
 could produce such brilliant and harmonious results as this, the outcome 
 for the future looked bright indeed. 
 
M. 
 
 .AJOR ANDERSON'S message to General Scott was not the 
 only pressing business forced on the administration at this time. On 
 February 28, Jefferson Davis appointed a commission of three men, 
 Martin J. Crawford of Georgia, John Forsyth of South Carolina, and 
 Andre B. Roman, ex-governor of Louisiana, to come to Washington 
 as "ambassadors" and settle questions arising out of the division of the 
 one-time Federal Union into two parts. Mr. Crawford, the head of 
 this delegation, reached the Capital on March 3, and, not waiting for 
 the arrival of his associates — who, however, in due course appeared — 
 applied to the new Secretary of State for an official reception, at which 
 he could present his "credentials" and enter upon the business of the 
 embassy. This business, the State Department was informed, com- 
 prised "the speedy adjustment of all the questions growing out of 
 separation, as the respective interests, geographical contiguity and 
 future welfare of the two nations may render necessary." Naturally 
 the part in this letter that made Seward pause was the reference to "two 
 nations." The Confederate States, assuming that they comprised a 
 sovereignty as independent as Great Britain or France, had sent a com- 
 mission to that foreign power, the United States of America, to set up 
 the relations that commonly existed between civilized countries. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson Davis's appointees were instructed to demand from 
 Washington recognition to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce, 
 and to determine certain pressing questions. The mere fact that the two 
 republics had spent the preceding seventy years as one government 
 now presented the "two nations" with many knotty problems to dis- 
 entangle. Together they had accumulated a national debt; how was 
 that to be apportioned? Together they had acquired a vast territorial 
 domain; inevitably the Confederacy would assert a right to a good- 
 sized portion of this. Just how was this rich country west of the Mis- 
 sissippi to be divided? The cotton states, in secession, had seized great 
 quantities of property belonging to the Federal Union; Washington 
 still held certain "places" which were now included within the limits 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER 155 
 
 of the Confederate States; clearly — such was the Confederate view — 
 the adjustment of final ownership called for negotiation. That the 
 solution of the many questions proposed would be difficult — assuming 
 that Lincoln and Seward would consent to treat with the Confederate 
 "ambassadors" — appeared on the surface. Almost every one of the 
 points in dispute — and many more that would arise — involved the pos- 
 sibility of war. Indeed, had the envoys been accredited and discussion 
 begun, the impossibility of severing the ligament that bound these dis- 
 harmonious Siamese twins would in itself have presented an un- 
 answerable argument for Union. 
 
 The complacent pretension, in the letter to Mr. Seward, that North 
 and South constituted "two nations" aroused popular wrath. With one 
 bland parenthetical movement of the pen, the all-important point in 
 the pending argument was thus swept aside. The North had steadily 
 denied that the Constitution was a loose compact from which any state 
 could withdraw at will, and rested its whole case upon the assertion 
 that it formed "an indissoluble Union of indissoluble states" — that is, 
 that secession was unconstitutional. If that principle were justified, the 
 Confederacy did not form a separate "nation"; and if not, then its 
 claim to independent sovereignty must be allowed and diplomatic 
 relations established with the North. If, however, this thesis were 
 granted, all the excitement of the preceding months was mere sound 
 and fury. Should the Lincoln administration receive these "ambas- 
 sadors," it would abandon the constitutional ground on which its 
 whole policy depended. In the eyes of the Federal government, the 
 recent gathering at Montgomery, resulting in the formation of the 
 so-called Confederate States, merely represented the proceedings of 
 disorderly private persons engaged in "rebellion"; and to those who 
 held this view the appearance of certain emissaries in Washington, in- 
 sisting on negotiations with their lawful sovereign, amounted to mon- 
 strous impudence. Imagine, it was urged, that, after the signing of the 
 Declaration of Independence, a trio of gentlemen from Philadelphia 
 had arrived in London, representing a new "nation" overseas, and had 
 demanded an audience of King George to obtain recognition and nego- 
 tiate treaties; what would have been their fate? They would have been 
 thrown into the Tower, and there kept in durance awaiting trial on a 
 charge of treason. Many fiery spirits north of the Potomac demanded 
 that Mr. Crawford and his companions should be treated in this fashion. 
 On March 16 another pseudo-diplomatic mission from the Confed- 
 eracy, consisting of Yancey, Rost, and Mann, had been dispatched to 
 London on essentially the same errand entrusted to the Confederate 
 commissioners in Washington. Seward had written the American Min- 
 
156 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ister instructing him to sever diplomatic relations with the Queen if 
 this Confederate embassy were officially received. Could it be expected 
 that the same Secretary who was to take this attitude on the matter of 
 Confederate "ambassadors" at a foreign court could consistently have 
 dealings with a commission engaged in an identical enterprise in his 
 own country? 
 
 The flexibility of Seward's methods — his native tendency to oppor- 
 tunism in meeting drastic situations — is illustrated again in his treat- 
 ment of the Crawford mission. The Secretary of State never received 
 these deputies, even unofficially, never extended to them anything sug- 
 gesting recognition, yet he did enter into negotiations with them 
 through third parties and did seek to use them in furtherance of his 
 conciliatory policy. Nor was this the first time that he had shown a 
 negotiating spirit towards Southern commissioners sent to Washington. 
 A previous delegation from South Carolina, headed by John L. Orr, 
 arrived in the Federal Capital in late December, 1860, to settle certain 
 questions rising out of the recent secession of that state. The great 
 problem, then, as it remained for several months afterward, was the 
 retention in Federal hands of the forts of Charleston Harbor, especially 
 Moultrie and Sumter. On Christmas evening, Major Robert Anderson, 
 in command of Federal forces at Charleston, feeling insecure in his po- 
 sition in Fort Moultrie, secretly moved his forces into the far stronger 
 Fort Sumter, an act that instantaneously made him a hero in the North- 
 ern states. The rejoicing that followed in the North, the great acclaim 
 his farsightedness and bravery brought to Major Anderson, is a long 
 familiar story. There was one citizen, however, who did not take part 
 in this patriotic outburst. Seward, not yet Secretary of State, though 
 already designated for that post, was appalled at a daring step which 
 seemed to him to destroy his whole policy. Naturally the South Caro- 
 lina commissioners took the same stand, and brought pressure to bear 
 upon President Buchanan to undo that act of Major Anderson which 
 had made his name resound all over the country. If the Diary of a 
 Public Man can be credited — and corroborative evidence from other 
 sources exists — Seward sympathized with this effort. Mr. Orr dis- 
 cussed the matter with Seward on December 28; the Senator agreed 
 with the South Carolinian that Major Anderson's movement had been 
 "most unfortunate" and discussed a plan according to which that hardy 
 cavalier might be ordered to return to Fort Moultrie. This plan was the 
 occupation of Fort Sumter by forces neither of South Carolina nor of 
 the Federal government, and its segregation as a kind of no-man's land 
 until differences between the two sections should be placed on a more 
 satisfactory basis. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 157 
 
 Perhaps these discussions with the South Carolina diplomat in late 
 December and early January involved no impropriety, for the Bu- 
 chanan administration still had charge of public affairs, and Seward, 
 of course, had no official responsibility. Such importance as he held 
 in the eyes of the South Carolinian was derived from his position as a 
 distinguished Republican Senator, and as "Premier" in the approaching 
 administration. In March, however, Seward's status was very different. 
 He was now Secretary of State; any dealings he might have with "rebel 
 emissaries" therefore would commit the Lincoln government. Clearly 
 he could not receive the Crawford Commission, or negotiate with it 
 directly or indirectly; even an "unofficial" reception — such as the one 
 interview which Lord John Russell in England had given Yancey and 
 Mann — would not accord with the dignity of the United States. 
 Though outwardly Seward observed the proprieties, the evidence is 
 clear enough that he personally yearned to make use of these Southern 
 envoys. So scrupulous was the Secretary in observing an official 
 restraint that Mr. Crawford's letter, asking for an appointment at the 
 State Department, was not even acknowledged; to enter into cor- 
 respondence with these self-styled ministers, even to the extent of 
 refusing an audience, would, in Seward's punctilious eyes, have had a 
 taint of recognition. 
 
 Yet the facts disclose that this careful attention to the proprieties did 
 not represent the Secretary's personal attitude. This was evident in a 
 conversation with Senator R. M. T. Hunter, on March 11. Hunter, for 
 years Senator from Virginia, afterward Secretary of State for the Con- 
 federacy, and as strong a secessionist in this March of 1861 as James M. 
 Mason himself, had called in an effort to persuade the government to 
 communicate in some way with Mr. Crawford. Seward, as Hunter 
 afterward said, seemed unhappy and embarrassed; he gave his erstwhile 
 senatorial colleague no definite reply, saying that he could do nothing 
 without consulting the President. Whether this was merely Seward's 
 method of avoiding a direct commitment, or whether he entertained 
 some hope that Lincoln might give his assent, cannot be said; if the 
 latter were the case, the Secretary received a decided veto from the 
 White House. Next day he informed Hunter — in most courteous terms 
 — that the request for an interview could not be granted. When, a 
 few days afterward, Judge John A. Campbell of Alabama, then a 
 member of the United States Supreme Court, made the same plea for 
 a reception, Seward said flatly: "I wish I could do it. See Montgomery 
 Blair, see Mr. Bates, see Mr. Lincoln himself! I wish you would; they 
 are all Southern men; convince them! No, there is not a member of 
 the cabinet who would consent to it." 
 
158 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 An even more positive evidence of Seward's real desire appears in 
 the account of a meeting with the Russian Minister, Baron Stoeckl, 
 as reported by A. B. Roman, in his official dispatch to Robert Toombs, 
 Confederate Secretary of State. In this conversation Seward evidently 
 laid bare his deepest soul. The Russian Minister was one of Seward's 
 closest friends in Washington; he was also personally devoted to the 
 Federal cause, so that the Secretary of State evidently felt free to un- 
 burden himself. No coercion, Seward told Baron Stoeckl, would be 
 resorted to against the Confederate States. Lincoln, in his inaugural, 
 had discussed the question of collecting Federal customs dues at South- 
 ern seceded ports; though the President announced his determination 
 to make such collections, Seward, in this informal talk with a foreign 
 envoy, said that the seceded states would be permitted to collect the 
 dues themselves. Seward, Baron Stoeckl reported to Mr. Roman, hoped 
 and believed that the cotton states, if treated with consideration, would 
 ultimately return to their old allegiance; if not, they would not be 
 forced, but permitted to depart in peace. In his struggle for accom- 
 modation, Seward said he had to fight the "ultra-Republicans" — mean- 
 ing, by that term, those who still stood by the Chicago platform — but 
 he was gaining ground and his policy would prevail. And then came 
 the somewhat wearied and discouraged Secretary's astonishing pro- 
 posal: could not the Russian Minister arrange a meeting between him- 
 self and Mr. Roman at the Russian Legation? Two evenings later he 
 might casually drop in for a cup of tea; perhaps the Confederate com- 
 missioner would do the same, and, if they should thus meet acciden- 
 tally, opportunity would be offered for a friendly chat. Naturally, 
 Roman wrote Toombs, he gladly fell in with this suggestion. But next 
 day Seward sent his regrets. After all, the consultation would involve 
 dangers; the newspapers might learn that the Secretary of State and the 
 "rebel" commissioner had met and the scandal would injure the cause. 
 The fact that Horace Greeley, Seward's inveterate enemy, had just 
 arrived in Washington perhaps had something to do with this abrupt 
 change of plan. Such a confabulation would certainly have made star- 
 tling news in the New York Tribune, and the excitement aroused in 
 the "ultra-Republican" camp could only be faintly imagined. 
 
 Another reason for breaking the appointment was that no need for 
 a private discussion between Seward and one of the Confederate am- 
 bassadors existed even at a surreptitious tea party, for the Secretary, 
 at this very moment, was negotiating with all three through other men. 
 The one point on which that commission showed irreconcilable per- 
 sistence was the situation in Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter had by 
 this time assumed a symbolic importance far more significant than its 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 159 
 
 value for strategic purposes. Standing as it did at the entrance to 
 Charleston Harbor, occupied by a tiny and already hungry army of 
 Federal troops, the South regarded it as little less than an insult. So 
 long as Lincoln held this battlement, situated in the heart of the Con- 
 federacy, its claims to being an independent "nation" seemed absurd. 
 Its possession was essential to complete the work of the Montgomery 
 Convocation. In the same sense it was a symbol to the North; to hold 
 this fort was notification to the "rebels" that they were engaged, not 
 in nation-building, but in insurrection. Other "places," still in Federal 
 hands, embodied the same issue. But Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tor- 
 tugas, and Fort Taylor, at Key West, were not practically so impor- 
 tant; the Washington government retained these firmly, and there was 
 no possibility of the Confederacy securing them, for they could be 
 captured only by a naval force, which the Montgomery forces did 
 not possess. Fort Pickens, on Santa Rosa Island, off Pensacola, Florida, 
 the Southerners placed in the same class as Sumter. This stronghold was 
 easier to defend than Sumter, and for that reason perhaps did not figure 
 so largely in the discussions, but the Confederacy was just as deter- 
 mined to get Pickens as Sumter. 
 
 From the day of South Carolina's secession, Seward's attitude on 
 the Sumter question had not been concealed. Its evacuation by Federal 
 troops he thought necessary in the interest of conciliation. A kind of 
 truce had existed between the South and the Buchanan administration 
 on this point. Buchanan agreed, at least tacitly, not to reinforce or 
 resupply the forts and the South agreed not to attack them. It was 
 probably because Major Anderson's spectacular transference of his 
 forces from Moultrie to Sumter, on Christmas, seemed to be a viola- 
 tion of this "truce" that Seward believed that his coup should be un- 
 done. In this Sumter and Pickens business the new President did not 
 agree with his Secretary. Though Lincoln, in the pre-inauguration 
 period, had not responded to the clamorous demand for a "statement" 
 on general issues, he was willing to take a public position on the new 
 issue created by the secession of South Carolina. In a letter to Lyman 
 Trumbull, four days after that event, he wrote: "Despatches have come 
 here two days in succession, that the Forts in South Carolina will be 
 surrendered by the order, or consent at least, of the President [Bu- 
 chanan]. I can scarcely believe this; but if it prove true, I will, if 
 our friends at Washington concur, announce publicly at once that 
 these are to be retaken after the inauguration." 1 At about the same time 
 
 1 Tracy, Gilbert A., Ed., Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln. Houghton 
 Mifflin Co., 1917. P. 173. The selections from this book are used by permission of 
 the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company. 
 
160 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 he wrote to David Hunter: "If the forts fall my judgment is that they 
 should be retaken." That this determination was not a temporary one, 
 caused by the prevailing excitement, is evident from Lincoln's an- 
 nounced intention to "reclaim the public property and places which 
 have fallen." In making the evacuation of Sumter — and probably of 
 Pickens also, though the evidence on this latter point is not so clear — 
 the cardinal point of his conciliatory program, Seward was thus taking 
 a stand directly opposed to that of his chief. 
 
 Nor did Seward stand alone. The entire cabinet, on March 15, with 
 the exception of Montgomery Blair and possibly Chase, opposed any 
 attempt to reinforce, or even to resupply, the ominous "Gibraltar" at 
 the entrance to Charleston Harbor. At that time it was known that 
 Major Anderson could hold out only two weeks longer; his food 
 was running low, and starvation itself would soon compel a surrender. 
 On March 15, therefore, Lincoln submitted the following question to 
 his cabinet: "Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sum- 
 ter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it? Please give me 
 your opinion in writing on this question." Seward's reply, sent to the 
 President on March 16, was the longest and most detailed of the seven 
 submitted. The answer was an emphatic negative. The Secretary of 
 State declared himself in favor of evacuating Sumter, and surrendering 
 it to the Confederate authorities, at the earliest possible moment. "If it 
 were possible to peacefully provision Fort Sumter," Seward wrote, 
 "I should answer that it would be both unwise and inhuman not to 
 attempt it." That is, if food boats could be quietly moved to the docks, 
 and supplies unloaded for a garrison that was nearing starvation, with- 
 out any interference from the Confederate armies that were now be- 
 leaguring the fortress, the Secretary was willing that the provisioning 
 take place. Everybody knew, however, that such orderly relief would 
 be impossible. Any expedition to Sumter, even one attempting merely 
 to land food supplies, would be regarded by the South as a hostile act. 
 Armed forces, both military and naval, would be needed to effect a 
 landing. A clash of arms and the shedding of fraternal blood would 
 follow, and this would be the first blow in a long and terrible civil war. 
 Seward rehearsed again all his arguments for appeasement. The seces- 
 sion of seven states and the organization of a Confederate government 
 were brushed aside as a "temporary" excitement, a disturbance that had 
 arisen merely "out of a simple and harmless disappointment in a Presi- 
 dential election." Again Seward expressed his confidence in an un- 
 quenchable loyalty to the Union in the Southern states. Even in South 
 Carolina itself "devotion to the Union is a profound and permanent 
 national sentiment." Again the influence of the Border states, in bring- 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: 
 
 ing their sister communities back to their national fealty, received its 
 by now time-honored emphasis. If the Federal government should show 
 patience in face of the appalling crisis "we should have the spirit of the 
 country and the approval of mankind upon our side. In the other, we 
 should imperil peace and union, because we had not the courage to 
 practice prudence and moderation at the cost of temporary misappre- 
 hension. If this counsel seems to be impassive and even unpatriotic, I 
 console myself by the reflection that it is such as Chatham gave to his 
 country under circumstances not widely different." 2 
 
 Four other cabinet members — Cameron, Welles, Bates, and Smith — 
 cast their votes on Seward's side, though not all for the same reasons. 
 Chase and Blair were in favor of making the attempt. Chase's written 
 opinion illustrated again the man's tendency to hedge. "If the attempt 
 will so inflame civil war as to involve an immediate necessity for the 
 enlistment of armies and the expenditure of millions" he would not 
 favor it; but as such an outcome was "highly improbable" he was in 
 favor of dispatching food supplies to the hungry soldiers. The only 
 straightforward and unconditional statement in favor of an immediate 
 expedition came from Montgomery Blair. In several ways Blair had a 
 better right to speak with authority on this subject than any of his 
 colleagues. He was himself of a Southern family and had a clearer in- 
 sight into Southern ambitions and the Southern temperament than any 
 man surrounding Lincoln. He himself had started life under the tutelage 
 of Andrew Jackson, historic foe of such subversive movements as this 
 Southern Confederacy. His father — old man Blair — still alive and an 
 absorbed watcher of events from his retreat at Silver Spring — had 
 stood at Jackson's elbow in 1832 when this same South Carolina had 
 made its first attempt to lead the slave states in rebellion. If there were 
 any principles for which the Blair family stood they were anti- 
 Nullification and anti-Secession. Moreover, the family in this very 
 March of 1861 was rendering services to the Union cause that in them- 
 selves justified Lincoln's determination to include one of the Blairs in 
 his cabinet. 
 
 In Missouri, Frank Blair, Montgomery's brother, was showing that 
 at least one Border state could stand firmly for the Union — and show- 
 ing it not by argument or appeasement diplomacy, but by sledge- 
 hammer action. Few slave states were more important to the Union 
 cause than Missouri. Its loss would not only exert strong influence upon 
 the Border commonwealths, such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ar- 
 kansas, but would have weakened the North in a military sense, for it 
 commanded a long stretch of the Mississippi River and furnished the 
 
 2 For opinions of the cabinet members see Lincoln, op. cit. VI, 192-220. 
 
162 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 main gateway to the Northwest — a vast reservoir of supplies. Despite 
 the fact that the state had been settled largely from the South, events 
 soon disclosed that the people of Missouri were overwhelmingly 
 Unionist in sympathy. But the politicians controlling the Democratic 
 legislature, headed by a recently elected governor, Claiborne Jackson, 
 were determined to carry Missouri into the Confederacy. Even after a 
 convention, called to determine Missouri's course, had overwhelmingly 
 voted against secession, the Southern sympathizers persisted in their 
 secession campaign. In this tense situation Frank Blair became the 
 leader of the Union forces. His judgment on the nature of the impend- 
 ing conflict differed greatly from the hesitations that clouded many 
 minds. "It is useless," he said, "to talk further about Compromise. It is 
 useless to expect anything from the Border slave states, the Peace Con- 
 vention, or the Crittenden Compromise. I think I know the sentiments 
 and intentions of the pro-slavery leaders. The condition means war, and 
 nothing but war, fierce and desperate war. We might all just as well 
 understand it and prepare accordingly; our safety is to organize and 
 drill our people as soldiers, and the sooner we go about it the better." 
 He suited his act to the word. The "Wide-Awakes" whom he had or- 
 ganized and directed in the Lincoln campaign were now called forth 
 again and transformed into so-called Union clubs. On the surface 
 merely patriotic organizations created to arouse enthusiasm for the 
 Federal government, they were really military companies, regularly 
 drilled and equipped with arms. Their business was to resist by force 
 any efforts which the governor and his sympathizers might make to 
 carry the state into the Confederacy — a duty which, under the skillful 
 leadership of Frank Blair, they afterward brilliantly performed. All 
 this preparation had preceded Lincoln's inauguration; but young Blair 
 kept in close touch with the President-elect, who encouraged the far- 
 sighted labors which, in April and May of '61, enabled Frank Blair to 
 save Missouri for the Union. 
 
 Frank's brother Montgomery, in Lincoln's cabinet, entertained the 
 same views as to the inevitable war, and from the first meeting of that 
 body stiffened in opposition to Seward's peaceful plans. The choice of 
 Blair, wrote the youthful Henry Adams, "was decisive of the policy of 
 the government and the death blow to the policy of Mr. Seward." 
 What a chasm of opinion separated the two men appeared in Mont- 
 gomery's reply to the President's question on Fort Sumter. There was 
 nothing ambiguous or halfhearted in this document; to the casuistry 
 of Seward, the expediency of Cameron, and the hesitating assent of 
 Chase, it stood out in brilliant contrast. Like his brother Frank in St. 
 Louis, Montgomery immediately went to the heart of the discussion. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER 163 
 
 The Cotton South had decided on separation, even at the cost of civil 
 war; the administration could commit no greater mistake than to dis- 
 play anything resembling a white feather in the face of this intention. 
 This Southerner found the real seat of the trouble in the Southern char- 
 acter, and in its misapprehension of the quality of the Yankee. "The 
 rebels," as he invariably called the secessionists, "for the most part 
 believe that the northern men are deficient in the courage necessary to 
 maintain the government. It is this prevalent opinion in the South which 
 induces so large a portion of the people there to suspect the good faith 
 of the people of the North and enable the demagogues so successfully 
 to inculcate the notion that the object of the northern people is to 
 abolish slavery and make the negroes the equal of the whites. Doubting 
 the manhood of northern men, they discredit their disclaimers of this 
 purpose to humiliate and injure them." This conviction, an abiding one 
 with Blair, he had expressed even more strongly in a recent letter to 
 his brother-in-law, Gustavus Vasa Fox. "The real cause of our trouble 
 arises from the notion generally entertained at the South that the men 
 of the North are inferiors and the rebellion springs altogether from 
 pride which revolts from submission to supposed inferiors. You hear 
 these blusterers say everywhere that one southern man is equal to half 
 a dozen Yankees. They will not submit, they say, to mere numbers, 
 made up of the mudsills, the factory people and shop keepers of the 
 North. . . . And I really fear that nothing short of the lesson we had 
 to give Mexico to teach the don better manners will ever satisfy the 
 southern gascons that the people of the north are their equals even 
 upon the field upon which they had now chosen to test the question." 
 The inaction of President Buchanan, Blair told Lincoln in this formal 
 paper, had done much to substantiate this illusion. "To the connivance 
 of the late administration it is due alone that this rebellion has been en- 
 abled to gain its present proportions." South Carolina had started a 
 similar rebellion in 1833 and how had that been checked? It was ended 
 by the promptitude of President Jackson "in taking measures which 
 made it manifest that it could not be attempted with impunity. The 
 action of the President in 1833 inspired respect, whilst in 1860 the 
 rebels were encouraged by the contempt they felt for the incumbent 
 of the presidency." To surrender Fort Sumter, wrote Blair, would be 
 the surest way to provoke civil war. Such a surrender would "convince 
 the rebels that the administration lacks firmness, and will, therefore, 
 tend more than any event that has happened to embolden them; and 
 so far from tending to prevent collision, will ensure it unless all other 
 forts are evacuated and all attempts are given up to maintain the au- 
 thority of the Union." If the expedition to provision Fort Sumter 
 
164 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 should succeed — and he thought this likely — that "would completely 
 demoralize the rebellion"; if it should fail, "it will in any event vindicate 
 the hardy courage of the North and the determination of the people 
 and their President to maintain the authority of the government; and 
 this is all that is wanting, in my opinion, to restore it." 
 
 That five of the seven cabinet members advised the evacuation of 
 Fort Sumter — and that a sixth, Chase, stood on equivocal ground — 
 naturally distressed Blair. After the cabinet meeting, he went for ad- 
 vice to the source of all wisdom, his father, Francis Preston, Sr. The 
 veteran Kentuckian, at the moment sojourning in the Blair House on 
 Pennsylvania Avenue, immediately crossed the street to the White 
 House and found a somewhat wistful President sitting alone in the 
 council room. His official advisers had left only a short time before, 
 and Lincoln was still holding in his hands their written recommenda- 
 tions on the controverted question. Old man Blair and Lincoln had 
 been excellent friends for years, and the elder statesman of the Jackson 
 regime did not hesitate to express his views with the utmost candor. 
 Had it been decided, he asked, to withdraw Major Anderson and his 
 little force from Fort Sumter and thus surrender completely to the 
 rebels? For Lincoln's reply to this pointed question there is only one 
 authority, Samuel W. Crawford, the historian of Fort Sumter, who 
 testified that he recorded it on the authority of Mr. Blair himself. 3 
 "The President said the matter had not yet been fully determined, but 
 that the cabinet was almost a unit in favor of it, all except your son," 
 and "that he thought this would be the result." The elder Blair insisted 
 that the American people would not endorse such action, that it would 
 destroy the Republican Party, and that impeachment would probably 
 follow. This was rather high talking, and naturally this account of the 
 interview, especially as it discloses Lincoln in a far from heroic mood, 
 has not been accepted unquestioningly by all historians. As already 
 intimated, no one can tell precisely what was the state of Lincoln's 
 mind from March 5 when Major Anderson's telegram presented this 
 issue in critical form, to the latter part of the same month when Lincoln 
 definitely decided to disregard his cabinet, and make an attempt to 
 relieve the fort. That at moments he showed outward signs of in- 
 decision may be true — something not strange, for on the word of one 
 lonely man rested the most terrible decision, that of civil war, ever 
 offered to an American statesman. The strongest man would have had 
 periods of doubt when brought face to face with such a responsibility, 
 and perhaps the elder Blair found Lincoln, with his cabinet almost 
 
 3 Crawford, Samuel W., The Genesis of the Civil War. C. L. Webster and 
 Company, 1887. P. 363. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 165 
 
 unanimously in favor of what, in the eyes of posterity, seems a craven 
 course, at one of these moments of hesitation. But it is not likely that 
 an informal remark — even if the Crawford report is accurate — ad- 
 dressed in one of the tensest moments of his life to an excited caller, 
 represented a matured presidential program. Even if Lincoln hesitated 
 for a moment, the momentary emotion quickly passed, to give place 
 to action of a decisive kind. 
 
WO OF THE most distinguished members of the United States 
 Supreme Court at this time were Samuel Nelson of New York and 
 John A. Campbell of Alabama. Though citizens of widely separated 
 states, these two men had much in common. Both were strong Union 
 men and both were opposed to secession. That Nelson, a Northern 
 man, should entertain such convictions was natural enough, but Camp- 
 bell suffered much odium in his native Alabama and indeed throughout 
 the whole South for his loyalty — until the final break — to the Federal 
 cause. Certain of Nelson's opinions made him a sympathetic co-worker 
 with his Southern colleague. He believed that Lincoln's plan of col- 
 lecting customs dues by force in Southern ports was unlawful and 
 coercion of any kind against the Confederate States he disapproved. 
 Not unfittingly, therefore, these two venerable members of the high- 
 est court in the land now became involved in one of the strangest 
 diplomatic negotiations in American history. 
 
 Up to the present time, all efforts to obtain a reception for the Con- 
 federate commissioners, even an unofficial one, had failed. On March 15, 
 the very day that Lincoln demanded written opinions from his cabinet 
 members on Fort Sumter, these two Justices appeared in Seward's 
 office, and made another plea for such a reception. That Seward per- 
 sonally was inclined to grant the request has already been made plain. 
 That Lincoln and most of the cabinet would have opposed such a pro- 
 ceeding, the facts disclose. All that Seward could say to the Justices, 
 therefore, was to explain his situation and repeat his refusal. The con- 
 versation would have ended at this point had not the Secretary, in the 
 most offhand manner — whether accidentally or by design is a mys- 
 tery — let fall a remark that completely changed the issue. Up to this 
 meeting the only question that had been discussed was that of recep- 
 tion for the "ambassadors." Seward now dismissed this problem and 
 raised another. 
 
 "If Jefferson Davis had known the state of things here," he said, "he 
 would not have sent those commissioners. The evacuation of Sumter 
 is as much as the Administration can bear," 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 167 
 
 Justice Campbell fairly jumped at this statement. Here was a clear- 
 cut announcement, from the head man in Lincoln's cabinet, that Fort 
 Sumter was to be evacuated. No official intimation to this effect had 
 previously been forthcoming. That Seward would volunteer such a 
 piece of news without authority from his chief naturally did not occur 
 to this judicially minded man. Yet what basis the Secretary possessed 
 for his disclosure has puzzled historians. Not a shred of evidence has 
 ever been produced showing that Lincoln had communicated such a 
 purpose to Seward; the facts, of course, are all of a contrary kind. It 
 was not until the sixteenth of March, the day following this interview, 
 that the cabinet opinions, five for evacuation, two against, were sub- 
 mitted to the President; this secret plebiscite, therefore, could not jus- 
 tify Seward's startling declaration. Moreover, Seward understood the 
 Constitution well enough to know that such opinions were purely ad- 
 visory and that the final act rested in the discretion of one man — the 
 President. Naturally Justice Campbell seized with avidity Seward's 
 remark. For two weeks the Southern commissioners, and those who had 
 interfered in their behalf, had been snubbed by the Secretary of State. 
 The evacuation of Fort Sumter had been one of the demands they had 
 been directed to press. Toombs's official instruction had emphasized this 
 capitulation as a sine qua non of any settlement with the North. And 
 now the head of the State Department had informed Justice Campbell 
 that this great decision had been made in favor of the Confederacy. 
 Naturally, in view of this concession, other demands — such as the 
 recognition of the Confederate government, the drawing up of treaties 
 of amity and trade — could for the moment be suspended. The South- 
 erners regarded the surrender of Sumter as in itself a recognition of 
 Southern independence, as in reality, if not technically, it would have 
 been. 
 
 Justice Campbell remarked that he was about to write a letter to 
 Jefferson Davis. 
 
 "And what shall I say to him upon the subject of Fort Sumter?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "You may say to him," replied Seward, "that before that letter 
 reaches him — how far is it to Montgomery?" 
 
 "Three days." 
 
 "You may say to him that before that letter reaches him, the tele- 
 graph will have informed him that Sumter will have been evacuated." 
 
 "And what shall I say to him as to the forts in the Gulf of Mexico?" 
 
 Seward avoided this issue. "We contemplate no action," he replied, 
 "as to these; we are satisfied as to the position of things there." 
 
 Though Seward and his defenders afterward maintained that this 
 statement did not constitute a definite commitment, the documents in 
 
168 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the case do not support this disclaimer. There is no need to rehearse 
 again, in all its detail, the facts in a long familiar episode. Practically all 
 historians who have done this agree with the conclusion of James Ford 
 Rhodes that "the assurances to Campbell were simply those of an 
 officious Secretary of State whose vanity had grown by what it fed 
 on until now he deluded himself with the idea that he and not another 
 was the executive of the nation." * 
 
 In all the discussions pro and con one fact stands out clearly: Justice 
 Campbell transmitted to Crawford, head of the Southern commission, 
 Seward's promise that Sumter would be given up in five days and that 
 "no measure changing the existing status of things prejudicially to the 
 Confederate states is at present contemplated by the administration' ' — 
 an inclusive pledge that comprehended Pickens as well as Sumter. On 
 March 15, the day the pledge was given, Justice Campbell wrote Sew- 
 ard informing him that he had sent this memorandum to Crawford, 
 thus making Seward a party to the agreement. Seward gave this iden- 
 tical commitment not only once, but at least three times, for, after 
 the five-day interval had expired and Major Anderson still continued 
 to retain the rampart, Campbell visited Seward again and again was 
 assured that the promise would be fulfilled. He did so a third time, on 
 March 22, and a third time was assured that there had been no change 
 in the Federal program of evacuation. Justice Campbell made a written 
 record of this third conversation, and submitted this paper also to Sew- 
 ard before sending it to the Confederate authorities. Justice Nelson was 
 present at these three interviews with Seward, was shown his associate's 
 written accounts before they were passed on to Montgomery, and ap- 
 proved them as accurate. Not only do historians and biographers agree 
 as to the definite character of Seward's pledge, but they are also a unit 
 in the conviction that Lincoln was not consulted in the matter, and 
 knew nothing of his Secretary's forwardness. Not until April 1 did 
 the President obtain any inkling of Seward's negotiation. On that day 
 Campbell made another call on the Secretary of State — Justice Nelson 
 had by this time withdrawn from the situation and left Washington — 
 and protested in urgent terms against the nonfulfillment of the pledge. 
 Seward excused himself and withdrew to the White House, for a con- 
 sultation with the President. On his return, he handed Campbell a 
 paper on which he had written: "I am satisfied the Government will 
 not undertake to supply Fort Sumter without giving notice to Gov- 
 ernor Pickens" — Pickens, that is, the governor of South Carolina. This 
 undertaking, evidently agreed to by Lincoln, was naturally something 
 entirely different from the flat promise to evacuate to which Seward 
 
 1 Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States. Macmillan. Ill, 339. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER 169 
 
 had committed himself several times, and Campbell could only exclaim 
 against what he regarded - and not unwarrantably - as a breach of 
 faith. 
 
 Certain important events had taken place in the final days of March 
 which had put an end to Seward's personal handling of the problem. 
 Lincoln had never accepted Seward's belief that the South, even South 
 Carolina, was fundamentally loyal to the Union cause. But he decided 
 to put this question to a practical test — to discover by personal investi- 
 gation whether the Palmetto State, if gently dealt with, would rescind 
 its secession. He had sent his friend, S. A. Hurlburt, to Charleston, 
 to examine the matter on the ground. Mr. Hurlburt was himself a 
 Charlestonian by origin, and close friend of James L. Petigru, in some 
 ways South Carolina's most distinguished citizen and an ardent cham- 
 pion of the Federal cause. Ward H. Lamon, another Lincoln intimate, 
 and Gustavus Vasa Fox, afterward Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 
 had gone to Charleston at about the same time on a similar mission. 
 All three envoys had returned by March 29. Gustavus Fox reported 
 that Major Anderson, with his present supplies of bread, beans, hard- 
 tack, and salt pork, could hold out not longer than two weeks. Mr. 
 Hurlburt had had a long conference with James L. Petigru, in which 
 that noble Roman declared that South Carolina, irrespective of any 
 compromises or concessions, was determined on separation from the 
 Federal government. "I am the only Unionist in the state," Mr. Petigru 
 had declared over and over again. Ward Lamon gave identically the 
 same report. Evidently Seward's belief that South Carolina and its sym- 
 pathizing "wayward sisters" were ready, at the first sign, to return to 
 the paternal roof had no basis. The political situation, as Petigru ex- 
 plained it to Lincoln's representative, was simplicity itself; his diagno- 
 sis agreed completely with that of the President and the Blairs. Only 
 two choices were left to the Federal authorities: peaceable secession or 
 war. Either Lincoln must agree to the permanent withdrawal of the 
 South from the Union, or he must suppress the Confederacy by force. 
 
 On March 29, President and Mrs. Lincoln gave their first state din- 
 ner, attended by all members of the cabinet and their wives, as well as 
 most members of the diplomatic corps. Readers of William Howard 
 Russell's Diary North and South are familiar with this sumptuous event. 
 The tart Englishman's not overefTusive references to Mrs. Lincoln; his 
 honest admiration for the impressive personality of Secretary Chase — 
 to say nothing of his "very agreeable, attractive and sprightly" daughter 
 Kate; his lack of admiration for the great white beard and spectacles of 
 Secretary of the Navy Welles, "who does not know the stem from the 
 stern of a ship" and who had never seen the sea in his life - a strange 
 
170 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 remark to make of the son of a New England shipbuilder; his com- 
 ments on the "long, lean, shambling" President, whose clothes reminded 
 him of an "undertaker's uniform at a funeral" — all these and other de- 
 tails which make the chapter a journalistic classic are familiar enough 
 to readers of Civil War literature. With all his ability as a reporter, 
 however, Mr. Russell did not learn of the most important incident of 
 this evening. He tried to draw Mr. Seward on the then pressing ques- 
 tion of forts in Southern waters, but all the Secretary would confide 
 was that the Sumter policy had been indicated in the President's in- 
 augural and would be adhered to as there set down. 
 
 Naturally the representative of the London Times was not informed 
 that the President had requested all members of the cabinet to remain 
 after the others had departed and meet him in the council room. 
 The presidential advisers found their usually self-possessed and good- 
 natured chief in a state of considerable excitement. Lincoln held in 
 his hands a paper the contents of which he read to his dinner com- 
 panions. It was a communication from General Winfield Scott, General- 
 in-Chief of the Army of the United States, in which that officer an- 
 nounced that the time had come to surrender both Fort Sumter and 
 Fort Pickens. This advice was astonishing enough in itself; even more 
 surprising were the reasons General Scott gave for his conclusion. The 
 martial gentleman, going outside his province, rested his argument 
 chiefly on political grounds. "It is doubtful whether the voluntary 
 evacuation of Fort Sumter," he wrote, "alone would have a decisive 
 effect upon the states now wavering between adherence to the Union 
 and Secession. It is known, indeed, that it would be charged to neces- 
 sity and the holding of Fort Pickens would be induced in support of 
 that view. Our southern friends, however, are clear that the evacuation 
 of both the Forts would instantly soothe and give confidence to the 
 eight remaining slaveholding states and render their cordial adherence 
 to the Union perpetual." 
 
 The words may have been the words of Scott, though even that is 
 doubtful for he was notoriously unready with the pen; but the argu- 
 ment — now well worn — was certainly that of Seward. That word 
 "soothe" had been the one constantly on Seward's lips all through the 
 winter and spring. For the last three months the rheumatic and bulky 
 figure of this ancient commander had lumbered in and out of the 
 Washington crisis, always in neighborly association with William H. 
 Seward. The two men had been cronies since 1852, when Scott, by 
 one of those strange escapades of fate which not infrequently happen in 
 American politics, had been nominated for President by the Whig 
 Party, plunging that aggregation into an abyss from which it never 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER ' 171 
 
 lifted its head. Seward not only wrote Scott's speech of acceptance for 
 him on that occasion, but remained his constant adviser throughout the 
 campaign. For Scott's military talents and for his character as patriot — 
 despite the fact that he was a Virginian he remained steadfastly loyal 
 to the Union — the nation had respect; but for the General's pretensions 
 to statesmanship — to which he was constantly giving expression — it 
 entertained only ridicule. In the present impasse, Scott's military ad- 
 vice, as head of the American Army, was of course in order, but his 
 insistence on basing this upon political considerations was not patiently 
 endured. His views invariably echoed those of Seward and naturally he 
 was looked upon as the Secretary's cat's paw. This proposal of evacuat- 
 ing both Sumter and Pickens sounded the lowest note in national hu- 
 miliation that had been heard up to that time. To throw Sumter to the 
 wolves would not be enough. That the South expected as a matter of 
 course — its surrender would be no concession at all. A further pledge 
 of Federal amity and noncombativeness would be needed to win Con- 
 federate affection. Therefore Pickens, which the Federal government 
 strongly held and which could not be subdued by the tactics subse- 
 quently used against Sumter, must be added to the sacrificial altar. 
 
 It was to discuss this recommendation that Lincoln had summoned 
 the banqueters from the state dining room. However bland Seward 
 might appear on this critical evening, there were probably few of his 
 colleagues who doubted that Scott's views on Sumter and Pickens had 
 been inspired by the Secretary of State. Montgomery Blair, in the mid- 
 night cabinet meeting, could not restrain his indignation. He burst 
 out in a violent tirade against Scott, accusing him of deserting his proper 
 field. "Mr. President," said Blair on this occasion, "you can now see 
 that General Scott, in advising the surrender of Fort Sumter, is play- 
 ing the part of a politician, not of a general. No one pretends that there 
 is any military necessity for the surrender of Fort Pickens, which he 
 now says it is equally necessary to surrender. He is governed by po- 
 litical considerations in both recommendations." 2 In making these 
 remarks on the general's motives, Blair kept his eyes fixed on Seward. 
 He might as well have named "Seward" instead of Scott in his de- 
 nunciation. All his colleagues — including Seward himself — knew who 
 was the object of his wrath. Blair never concealed, then or afterward, 
 his conviction that, in presenting this humiliating document to Lincoln, 
 Scott was carrying out Seward's instructions. 
 
 The President requested his cabinet to assemble on the following day, 
 March 29. At that council he held his second session on Sumter. This 
 disclosed a striking change of opinion from the one that had been ex- 
 
 2 Crawford, op. cit., p. 363. 
 
172 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 pressed just two weeks before. Every member, except Seward and 
 Caleb Smith, now advised immediate relief. Probably the President's 
 own attitude largely explains this change. It was apparent to all that 
 the President's determination was fixed. Irrespective of anything his 
 cabinet might say, Fort Sumter was to be relieved. The sole constitu- 
 tional responsibility rested on the President, and he was ready to as- 
 sume it. Seward, in his second written statement of his position, did not 
 again rehearse the lengthy arguments of the earlier paper, but took the 
 same ground. "The despatch of an expedition to supply or reinforce 
 Fort Sumter would provoke an attack and so involve a war at that 
 point. ... I do not think it wise to provoke a civil war beginning at 
 Charleston, and in rescue of an untenable position. Therefore I advise 
 against an expedition in every view. ... I would instruct Major An- 
 derson to retire from Fort Sumter forthwith." Seward, however, did 
 not adopt General Scott's recommendation as to Fort Pickens. "I would 
 at once, and at every cost, prepare for a war at Pensacola and Texas, 
 to be taken, however, only as a consequence of maintaining the pos- 
 session and authority of the United States." That is, Seward would 
 abandon Fort Sumter as a friendly gesture to the South, but would re- 
 tain Pickens as a symbol of national sovereignty. 
 
 Secretary Chase now forgot his hesitation of a fortnight previously. 
 "I am clearly in favor of maintaining Fort Pickens," he flatly wrote the 
 President, "and just as clearly in favor of provisioning Fort Sumter. . 
 If that attempt be resisted by military force, Fort Sumter should, in 
 my judgment, be reinforced." "I concur in the proposition to send an 
 armed force off Charleston with supplies of provisions and reinforce- 
 ments for the garrison of Fort Sumter," proclaimed Welles, reversing 
 his first attitude. Just what position Cameron took will never be known, ! 
 for he submitted no opinion in written form. Montgomery Blair waxed 
 more emphatic than before. "As regards General Scott, I have no con- 
 fldence in his judgment on the questions of the day. His political views 
 control his judgment and his course as remarked on by the President 
 shows that whilst no one will question his patriotism, the results are the 
 same as if he was in fact traitorous." Not only did Blair demand vig- 
 orously the reinforcement of Sumter, but he had already wTitten out 
 his resignation from the Lincoln cabinet, which he intended to submit 
 in case an attempt to resupply and reinforce this vital spot were not 
 made. 
 
 On that same March 29, Lincoln sent orders to Secretary of War 
 Cameron to prepare a relief expedition to Sumter ready to sail if neces- 
 sary as early as April 6. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 173 
 
 Whatever defense can be made for Seward's plan must rest upon the 
 assumption that the South, even the Cotton South, was not so deter- 
 mined on separation as its acts indicated, and that the Border states, 
 pacified by the surrender of Fort Sumter and other concessions, 
 would remain loyal to the Union, and serve as intermediaries for re- 
 uniting the severed sections. It was exclusively on this conviction that 
 Seward justified his dealings with "ambassadors" whom he had refused 
 to receive officially and whom his more fervid countrymen insisted on 
 stigmatizing as "rebels" and "traitors." What did the so-called com- 
 missioners and their superior, Robert Toombs, Confederate Secretary 
 of State, think of Seward's program? The correspondence between the 
 commissioners and Robert Toombs, preserved in the Library of Con- 
 gress, answers this question. If his talks with Justice Campbell, Seward 
 believed, accomplished nothing else, they would gain time; that was 
 precisely what the Confederate agents regarded as an advantage to 
 themselves. While the meetings were taking place, work was pushed 
 night and day on the fortifications and batteries encompassing Fort 
 Sumter. "We think the policy of 'masterly inactivity,' " Crawford 
 wrote Toombs, "was wise in every particular." For Seward's high de- 
 signs the commissioners expressed contempt. "His reasons and my own 
 are as wide apart as the poles," he wrote to Toombs; "he is fully per- 
 suaded that peace will bring about a reconstruction of the Union, while 
 I feel confident that it will build up and cement our Confederacy and 
 put us beyond the reach either of his aims or of his diplomacy." "It is 
 well that he should indulge in dreams which we know are not to be 
 realized." Toombs agreed with this sentiment. "It is a matter of no 
 importance to us," he wrote his commissioner on April 2, "what 
 motives may induce the adoption of Mr. Seward's policy by his govern- 
 ment. We are satisfied that it will redound to our advantage, and there- 
 fore, care little for Mr. Seward's calculations as to its future effect upon 
 the Confederate states." The same correspondence disposes of another 
 illusion. At times — though on this subject, as on others, Seward's mind 
 fluctuated — he believed that the question of Fort Pickens could be han- 
 dled in a way different from Sumter. But the Confederate correspond- 
 ence makes it clear that the evacuation of Sumter would have been fol- 
 lowed by a demand for the evacuation of Pickens. It might take a little 
 longer, but "invest the latter as Sumter was and it soon becomes a 
 necessity." Above all, Crawford wrote Toombs, the abandonment of 
 Sumter would give the Confederacy character, power, and influence 
 abroad. 
 

 E 
 
 IVIDENTLY the situation was becoming tense for the Secretary 
 of State. All of Seward's cabinet colleagues, except Caleb B. Smith and 
 possibly Cameron, had abandoned his cause; and Lincoln, by ordering 
 the preparation of the expedition, had brought the discussion to a sud- 
 den end. Seward's commitment made to the Confederate Commission, 
 through Judge Campbell, evidently could not be fulfilled and as the 
 first of April approached, his embarrassment became portentous. In 
 response to another urgent demand from Justice Campbell that the 
 Fort Sumter promise be redeemed, Seward had informed the insistent 
 person that a reply would be made on April 1 . As the ships that were to 
 sail with relief were already fitting for sea in New York, the Secretary 
 knew that he could not make good his undertaking. What was to be 
 done? Was there still no way of stopping this expedition? One ir- 
 removable obstacle made impossible the fulfillment of the promise, and 
 apparently forestalled the whole plan to which Seward was by this time 
 fanatically committed for preventing war. The inexperienced states- 
 man in the White House, who was giving signs of determination and 
 will that had hitherto been unsuspected, stood blocking Seward's path. 
 So long as the President held supreme executive power, the Secretary 
 was helpless. Obviously there was no legitimate way of removing Lin- 
 coln from office. But Seward still regarded himself as head of the Re- 
 publican Party and was still resentful that the accident of politics had 
 awarded to an ignorant backwoodsman a technical leadership that on 
 all rightful grounds belonged to an abler statesman. Only one way re- 
 mained, he was honestly convinced, by which the promises made to the 
 South could be made good and the United States of America be pre- 
 served from civil war. The nominal President must — in effect if not in 
 form — abdicate his office and transfer its responsibilities to himself. 
 This change in power must be made on this very day — this April 1 
 when Seward must speak the word to the Confederate commissioners 
 that would mean peace or war. And so, on the morning of that day, 
 Lincoln found upon his desk the most astounding communication ever 
 addressed to a President of the United States. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 175 
 
 Some thoughts for the President's consideration, April 1, 1861. 
 
 First. We are at the end of a month's administration, and T7 et 
 without a policy, domestic or foreign. 
 
 Second. This, however, is not culpable, and it has even been un- 
 avoidable. The presence of the Senate, with the need to meet ap- 
 plications for patronage, have prevented attention to other and 
 more grave matters. 
 
 Third. But further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for 
 both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal 
 upon the administration, but danger upon the country. 
 
 Fourth. To do this we must dismiss the applicants for office. 
 But how? I suggest that we make the local appointments forthwith, 
 leaving foreign or general ones for ulterior and occasional action. 
 
 Fifth. The policy at home. I am aware that my views are singular 
 and perhaps not sufficiently explained. My system is built upon this 
 idea, namely, that we must 
 
 CHANGE THE QUESTION FROM ONE UPON SLAV- 
 ERY, OR ABOUT SLAVERY, FOR A QUESTION UPON 
 UNION OR DISUNION. 1 
 
 In other words from what would be regarded as a party ques- 
 tion, to one of Patriotism or Union. 
 
 The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in 
 fact a slavery or a party question, is so regarded. Witness the tem- 
 per manifested by the Republicans in the free states, and even by 
 the Union men in the South. 
 
 I would therefore terminate it as a safe measure for changing the 
 issue. I deem it fortunate that the last administration created the 
 necessity. 
 
 For the rest I would simultaneously defend and reinforce all the 
 forts in the Gulf, and have the navy recalled from foreign nations 
 to be prepared for a blockade. Put the island of Key West under 
 martial law. 
 
 This will raise distinctly the question of Union or Disunion. 
 I would maintain every fort and possession in the South. 
 
 For Foreign Nations 
 
 I would demand explanations from Spain and France, cate- 
 gorically, at once. 
 
 I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and 
 send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a 
 vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent 
 against European intervention. 
 
 And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain 
 and France, 
 
 Would convene Congress and declare war against them. 
 
 *AI1 the italics and capitals in this paper are Seward's own. 
 
176 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 But whatever policy we adopt there must be an energetic prose- 
 cution of it. 
 
 For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pursue it and 
 direct it incessantly. 
 
 Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while 
 active in it, or 
 
 Devolve it on some member of the cabinet. Once adopted, de- 
 bates on it must end, and all agree and abide. 
 
 It is not my especial province. 
 
 But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility. 
 
 In this paper Seward thus definitely proposed that Lincoln not only 
 eliminate himself from the conduct of affairs, but the cabinet as well. 
 The demand that supreme power be "devolved" upon some member, 
 and that u once adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and 
 abide" could have no other meaning. He evidently desired no more 
 discussions such as had recently taken place on Fort Sumter; one man — 
 that is, Seward himself — was to settle all such problems and enforce his 
 decisions with no interference from any other source. What Seward 
 in fact demanded was that he be made dictator and that the adminis- 
 tration elected the previous November be abrogated. Perhaps even 
 more astonishing was the use the Secretary intended to make of his 
 extraconstitutional power. He would evacuate Fort Sumter, but retain 
 Fort Pickens, and the other strongholds in the Gulf. He would scrap 
 Lincoln's decision to support the Federal sovereignty and substitute 
 for it his own policy of surrender. He would insist on legislation 
 along the lines of the Crittenden Compromise, give the South guar- 
 antees for the "protection" of slavery in the territories, and in this way, 
 as he thought, keep Virginia and the other Border states in the Union 
 and lay the basis for the return at a later date of those already seceded. 
 The Secretary's proposal for shelving the slavery question and sub- 
 stituting that of union or disunion puzzled Lincoln at the time as 
 it has all students of the question since, for how slavery and the ques- 
 tion of union could be separated was past thinking. 
 
 In his scheme for reuniting the country Seward betrayed again the 
 illusion that had haunted him ever since the sectional troubles began. 
 In the impromptu remarks at the Astor House, on December 20, 1860, 
 quoted on a preceding page, Seward had declared that the North, at 
 the slightest danger to the South, would rush all its men and arms to its 
 defense, and similarly his conviction that even South Carolina, should 
 any Northern state be attacked by a foreign power, would come to 
 its assistance. This conception laid the basis for the plan, now unfolded 
 to the astonished Lincoln, for silencing the slavery issue and bringing 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 177 
 
 all sections of a disharmonious nation into unity and co-operation. 
 Seward would precipitate a war with Spain and France, and, if neces- 
 sary, with Great Britain and Russia. Spain had just raised the Spanish 
 flag in San Domingo, thus clearly flouting the Monroe Doctrine; France 
 and Great Britain were preparing to send a debt-collecting naval force 
 to Mexico — the first step in what developed into the Maximilian enter- 
 prise; Russia's offense was less definite, but there were rumors — utterly 
 unfounded — that the Czar was surreptitiously negotiating with Jef- 
 ferson Davis as a preliminary to recognition. Seward believed, or af- 
 fected to believe, that such a great conflict with the most powerful 
 nations would compel North and South to forget their differences and 
 embrace each other again in common defense. We know now that the 
 outcome would have been exactly the reverse. A declaration of war 
 against Britain, France, Russia, or all combined would have played 
 directly into the Confederacy's hands. The republic of Jefferson Davis 
 had only one chance of survival — that was the assistance and co- 
 operation of Europe, especially of Great Britain and France. Far from 
 springing to the defense of the Union, the Confederate cabinet would 
 have hailed such a conflagration with joy, for it would have meant the 
 success of their attempt to found a new nation, with cotton as its 
 "king" and slavery, in the words of Alexander H. Stephens, as its 
 "cornerstone." 
 
 Lincoln replied to this letter the same day on which it was received. 
 In ordinary circumstances such a communication would have meant 
 its author's retirement from the cabinet. The reasons that had per- 
 suaded Lincoln to appoint Seward to the State Department now im- 
 pelled him to overlook what was really violent insubordination and 
 retain him among his councilors. The acute state of national affairs 
 made the disruption of the administration something not to be thought 
 of. Seward's dismissal would have split in two the Republican Party 
 at the very time when harmony and teamwork were most demanded, 
 with a result upon the fate of the nation that can hardly be imagined. 
 Lincoln therefore replied to Seward's statement of his case with a quiet 
 dignity that in itself amounted to a severe rebuke. All the points worth 
 an argument were replied to with a logical restraint that should have 
 made Seward wince. The insulting criticism that the President had been 
 too busy distributing the offices to pay attention to matters of state 
 was properly ignored. The charge that Lincoln had no domestic policy 
 was met by quoting from his inaugural address: "The power confided 
 to me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places 
 belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts." 
 "This had your distinct approval at the time," Lincoln reminded his 
 
178 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Secretary, "and taken in connection with the order I immediately gave 
 General Scott, directing him to employ every means in his power to 
 strengthen and hold the forts, comprises the exact domestic policy you 
 now urge, with the single exception that it does not propose to abandon 
 Fort Sumter." "Again I do not understand how the re-enforcement of 
 Fort Sumter would be done on a slavery or party issue while that of 
 Fort Pickens would be on a more national and patriotic one." As to the 
 carrying out of administration policy, domestic and foreign, and 
 Seward's demand that this be placed in his untrammeled hands, Lin- 
 coln remarked that "if this must be done, I must do it. When a gen- 
 eral line of policy is adopted, I apprehend there is no danger of its being 
 changed without good reason, or continuing to be a subject of un- 
 necessary debate; still upon points arising in its progress I wish, and I 
 suppose I am entitled to have, the advice of all the cabinet." 
 
 One might think that this response would have persuaded Seward 
 that Lincoln intended to exercise the constitutional functions entrusted 
 to him by the people, and would in no case set up a virtual dictatorship, 
 with his Secretary in supreme power. Montgomery Blair liked to com- 
 pare his colleague to Polonius, who sought "by indirection [to] find 
 direction out," and the fact is that, even after receiving Lincoln's 
 pointed rejoinder, Seward kept up his underground campaign in favor 
 of conciliation. Even after April 1, he did not cease interfering with 
 the President's plans. To the Fort Sumter expedition Seward was still 
 unreconciled, and he now resorted to strange maneuvers which in some 
 ways constitute the most inexplicable chapter in his career. 
 
 Only three warships were at hand in early April as naval escort to 
 the ships which were to carry supplies and reinforcements to Fort Sum- 
 ter. The Powhatan, the most important of these, a steam frigate pow- 
 erfully armed, was the only vessel that could be depended upon to 
 protect the boats and tugs that were expected to run the Confederate 
 batteries and deposit their supplies on the Sumter landing wharf. With 
 the broadsides of the Powhatan the operation might have succeeded, 
 without them it was certainly sure to fail. The Powhatan, the flagship 
 of the naval force, was itself loaded with munitions sadly needed by 
 Major Anderson, and also with launches, boats and sailors indispensable 
 to the operations. On April 5, Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, 
 issued orders to Captain Samuel Mercer, putting him in command of 
 the Powhatan, and directing him to depart at once for sea, and take his 
 stand at a point ten miles east of Charleston light. On the evening of 
 April 6, just as Captain Mercer was about to leave the Brooklyn Navy 
 Yard on his fateful mission, Lieutenant David Dixon Porter — his infe- 
 rior in rank — stepped aboard the Powhatan and demanded that the 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 179 
 
 ship be placed at his disposal. Lieutenant Porter handed the dissenting 
 Mercer an order, issued on April 1 and signed "Lincoln," with an ad- 
 dendum that was something new in naval procedure — "Recommended. 
 Wm. H. Seward." Instructions bearing the same date also came to the 
 Commandant of the Navy Yard: "You will fit out the Powhatan with- 
 out delay. Lieutenant Porter will relieve Captain Mercer in command 
 of her. She is bound on secret service and under no circumstances com- 
 municate to the Navy Department the fact that she is fitting out. Abra- 
 ham Lincoln." When Lieutenant Porter insisted that orders from the 
 President, his commander-in-chief, superseded orders from the Secre- 
 tary of the Navy, there was of course nothing to be said. The humili- 
 ated Mercer retired from the quarter-deck, Lieutenant Porter took 
 command, and the Powhatan put out to sea. However, the sturdy, re- 
 cently re-equipped frigate did not bend her course in the direction of 
 Fort Sumter. On that same busy April 1 other instructions, also signed 
 "Abraham Lincoln," had been issued to Lieutenant Porter, directing 
 him "to proceed to Pensacola harbor at the extreme western end of 
 Florida," and "at any cost or risk prevent any expedition from the main- 
 land reaching Fort Pickens or Santa Rosa." 2 
 
 Two features involved in these instructions deserve particular at- 
 tention. The orders to Lieutenant Porter enjoined him "under no cir- 
 cumstances [to] communicate to the Navy Department the fact that 
 she [the Powhatan] is fitting out." That is, the department which had 
 jurisdiction over the naval forces of the United States, and which at 
 the time was in charge of one of the most critical operations in its 
 history, was to be kept ignorant of the fact that the ship that was es- 
 sential to success had been detached and sent on an entirely different 
 mission. The second fact was that the destination itself, Fort Pickens, 
 which protected Pensacola and its Navy Yard, presented a very dif- 
 ferent problem from that of Fort Sumter. Its safety caused no par- 
 ticular anxiety to the army or navy. An adequate naval force had al- 
 ready been assembled in the region, to protect Fort Pickens from any 
 possible attack. Neither were the munitions and other supplies loaded 
 on the Powhatan for Sumter needed at the Florida stronghold. A force 
 of men for reinforcement had been landed at this point before the 
 Powhatan came in sight of the island — a force with which the Federal 
 government held the position all through the Civil War. In fact, the 
 Powhatan, after, with some interruptions, it had reached Pickens, found 
 nothing to do. The commandant would not permit Lieutenant Porter 
 to make the brilliant entrance which that gallant and impetuous officer 
 
 2 For these instructions see Official Records of the Rebellion, Series I, I, 244; 
 and Series II, IV, 108. 
 
180 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 had planned; after remaining for a considerable time offshore, in the 
 Gulf of Mexico, the crestfallen Porter — whose first performance in the 
 Civil War gave little intimation of the laurels he was to win before 
 its end — pulled up anchor and returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 
 His voyage had accomplished nothing — for there was nothing to be ac- 
 complished. What had taken place at Fort Sumter meanwhile the world 
 knows only too well. 
 
 How had it happened that the sagacious Abraham Lincoln, com- 
 mander-in-chief of the United States Navy, interested above all else at 
 this time in the success of the Sumter expedition, had issued orders that 
 superseded those of his Secretary of the Navy, and did so in such com- 
 plete secrecy that even Mr. Welles was kept in the dark? A midnight 
 scene in the White House on April 6 — the day Mercer gave up his 
 ship to Porter — for which Welles himself supplies the details, explains 
 the mystery. Five men participated in this meeting — the President, 
 Seward, his son Frederick, Welles, and Commodore Stringham, head of 
 the navy's Bureau of Detail. Both Seward and Welles had received 
 information from New York of the unexpected detachment of the 
 Powhatan. A rather excited scene had taken place between the two 
 statesmen in consequence. Why had the President countermanded the 
 orders of the Secretary of the Navy and kept him in ignorance of the 
 change? What right had Seward, the Secretary of State, to interfere 
 with the operations of the Navy Department? 
 
 Only one man could settle this dispute and so Welles and Seward, 
 despite the lateness of the hour, proceeded side by side to the White 
 House. Welles started the proceedings by reading his order to Captain 
 Amercer to assume command as flag officer of the Powhatan, reminded 
 the President that he had submitted this message to him before putting 
 it into force, and had received his approval — a circumstance which 
 Lincoln acknowledged that he remembered clearly. How he had come 
 to sign the contradictory orders to Porter Lincoln did not at the mo- 
 ment explain, but the facts came out in time. For the larger part of that 
 April 1, the day when Lincoln definitely ordered the Sumter expedition, 
 Seward and Porter had been at work in an office adjoining the Presi- 
 dent's, preparing a mass of papers dealing with that and other matters, 
 which in due course Seward presented for the President's signature. For 
 a President to sign a vast number of papers daily without reading them 
 was nothing unprecedented then nor is it now. The duties of the office 
 could not be performed on any other basis. Merely to read this daily 
 accumulating mass of papers was, and is, a physical impossibility. The 
 President is obliged to trust his subordinates and accept their advice 
 that everything is right and proper. That the April 1 in question was 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 181 
 
 an extremely arduous one with Lincoln the preceding pages have made 
 clear; on this day he had received Seward's "thoughts," asking to be 
 made de facto President, had fixed his plans for relieving Sumter, and 
 doubtless had had to give some attention to the hordes of office seekers 
 crowding the antechambers. If a President could not trust his cabinet 
 officers, Lincoln afterward remarked to Welles, relating to him the 
 details of this disorderly proceeding, whom could he trust? Welles has 
 recorded his admiration for the President's frankness and honesty at this 
 midnight gathering. It was all a mistake, Lincoln said; it was his fault, 
 "he ought to have been more careful and attentive." 3 Then turning 
 squarely to Seward he said that the Powhatan must be restored to Mer- 
 cer; "on no account must the Sumter expedition fail or be interfered 
 with." Seward protested, but Lincoln, with that imperiousness which 
 he could assert when the occasion demanded it, cut him short. He 
 ordered Seward to telegraph at once to Porter to turn the Powhatan 
 over to its designated commander and flag officer of the Sumter flotilla, 
 Captain Mercer. 
 
 And now came the most puzzling episode of the whole proceeding 
 — the one that has given Seward's biographers the greatest difficulty in 
 explaining. The new message sent to Porter, at the President's com- 
 mand, can be read today in the official records of the War of the Re- 
 bellion. 4 "April 6, 1861. Give the Powhatan up to Captain Mercer. 
 Seward." At first glance that looks like literal obedience to the Presi- 
 dent's instructions, yet closer examination reveals a detail that Mont- 
 gomery Blair and Welles always believed to be one of those deft strokes 
 of iniquity at which they regarded Seward as a master, but which his 
 defenders attribute to the excitement, almost hysteria, of a momentous 
 day and evening. Undoubtedly Lincoln, in directing Seward to send 
 this telegram, intended to have the President's name appended to the 
 order. But the Secretary of State, in affixing his own instead, made the 
 message a nullity. No naval officer in his right mind would pay attention 
 to instructions signed by the Secretary of State, any more than an am- 
 bassador in London would treat with respect a dispatch signed by the 
 Secretary of the Navy. Lieutenant Porter held command of the Pow- 
 hatan by virtue of a paper signed by Abraham Lincoln, and only an- 
 other from that same high authority could countermand it. Of this fact 
 Seward had just been made aware. Porter had compelled Mercer to 
 hand the frigate over to him, because Mercer's orders bore the name of 
 Welles, while his own bore that of the President. Was it probable that 
 he would now give up the ship by virtue of a -message simply signed 
 
 8 Welles, Diary. I, 25. 
 
 4 Official Records of the Rebellion, Series I, IV, 112. 
 
182 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 "Seward"? Porter himself presently answered that question. He had 
 already started for Pensacola, but a fast tug was sent to overtake him, 
 and the new instructions reached the Powhatan off Staten Island. As 
 he held the vessel by presidential flat, he could not accept the orders 
 of the Secretary of State without making himself liable to court-martial 
 and dismissal from the navy. He therefore proceeded to Pensacola. 
 
 Was this all a carefully thought out design on the part of the adroit 
 Secretary of State? Who can ever answer that question? The most un- 
 biased student of the ethical problem involved is Frederic Bancroft, 
 who wrote his substantial and impartial biography of Seward with the 
 sympathy of the Seward family, who gave him complete access to all 
 the Seward documents. Making full allowance for the distractions of 
 April 1 and the fact that the Pickens expedition was Seward's own 
 from the first, Mr. Bancroft reaches this conclusion: "After what has 
 been learned of Seward's methods, it would hardly be warrantable to 
 express confidence that his despatch to Porter was not the result of 
 subtle calculation." 5 Others express the same doubt in more explosive 
 terms. Montgomery Blair, Seward's cabinet colleague — with whom, 
 even at this early stage of the administration, he was hardly on speaking 
 terms — maintained, to his dying day, that had the Powhatan not been 
 taken away from the Sumter fleet, the expedition would have suc- 
 ceeded, and Fort Sumter saved to the Union with incalculable effect 
 upon history. Both Blair and Welles believed that Seward, after trying 
 in many other ways to make good to the Crawford Commission his 
 pledge to evacuate the fort, finally resorted to this underhanded method 
 of making Lincoln's effort at resupply a failure. If Fort Sumter had 
 been reinforced, insisted Blair, it would have been made impregnable. 
 After the Confederates captured the battlement, the North, though 
 holding undisputed command of the sea, was unable to retake it in four 
 years of war. Lincoln, in a letter to Gustavus Fox, the originator of the 
 plan to relieve Sumter and in charge of the whole expedition, wrote, 
 "The practicability of your plan was not, in fact, brought to a test. By 
 reason of a gale, well known in advance to be possible and not improb- 
 able, the tugs, an essential part of the plan, never reached the ground; 
 while, by an accident for which you were in no way responsible, and 
 possibly I to some extent was, you were deprived of a war vessel, with 
 her men, which you deemed of great importance to the enterprise." 
 Gideon Welles records scraps of a conversation with Seward on the 
 way to the President on the evening of April 6. "Mr. Seward remarked 
 that, old as he was, he had learned a lesson from this affair and that was, 
 he had better attend to his own business and confine his labors to his 
 
 5 Bancroft, op. ciu II, 144. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER'' 183 
 
 own department. To this I cordially assented." 6 Yet Welles was not so 
 certain as Blair that the desired flagship would have saved the situation. 
 "Had the frigate remained under Captain Mercer," he wrote, "the at- 
 tempt to relieve Major Anderson probably would not have succeeded, 
 for the rebels of Charleston were strangely prepared and warned of the 
 intended expedition and there were other movements which precipi- 
 tated Rebel action." 7 
 
 This latter sentence refers to another incident of the Sumter pro- 
 ceeding even harder to explain than the diversion of the Powhatan. This 
 has always been known as the "Harvey incident." After Lincoln's de- 
 sire to resupply the fort had been made known, an employee of the 
 Washington telegraph office, a Connecticut friend of Gideon Welles, 
 brought the Secretary two telegrams that had been recently sent from 
 the Federal Capital to Charleston. These telegrams are also preserved 
 in the Official Records of the Rebellion. 8 One of the messages, sent to a 
 leading Confederate in Charleston, read: "Positively determined not 
 to withdraw Anderson. Supplies go immediately, supported by naval 
 force under Stringham if their landing be resisted. A Friend." This 
 "friend," it presently appeared, was James E. Harvey, a native Charles- 
 tonian, a well-known newspaper correspondent in Washington, and a 
 man who had free access to the Secretary of State. That Seward had 
 given the vital news in the telegrams, subsequent events clearly dis- 
 closed. At that moment, no matter was quite so confidential as the 
 President's plan for relieving Sumter. Seward himself, in explaining 
 why the orders transferring the Powhatan from Mercer to Porter had 
 been kept from the knowledge of Welles and Cameron, the two mem- 
 bers of the cabinet officially responsible for the success of all pro- 
 ceedings of the kind, had declared that absolute secrecy was essential 
 to success. Yet this even more critical news concerning Sumter he had 
 himself confided to a newspaper reporter of Southern sympathies who 
 at once transmitted it to the Confederate authorities. 
 
 A few days before Harvey had been detected sending this informa- 
 tion to Charleston, Seward caused him to be made United States Minis- 
 ter to Portugal. In spite of the great scandal caused when this appoint- 
 ment became known, the Secretary of State refused to rescind it. The 
 only explanation of these strange — perhaps even worse than strange — 
 transactions that has been forthcoming up to the present time is a 
 memorandum made by John G. Nicolay and published in the Nicolay 
 and Hay Abraham Lincoln, "Being a correspondent and believed to be 
 
 6 Welles, Diary, I, 24. 
 
 7 Ibid., I, 33. 
 
 8 Official Records of the Rebellion, Series I, I, 187. 
 
184 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 trusty, the secret was imprudently imparted to him [Harvey]. . . . 
 The affair was a gross error of judgment, and a breach of confidence, 
 but not an act of treachery. Seward obtained knowledge of the tele- 
 gram the same afternoon it was sent, and in his first indignation advised 
 the President to revoke Harvey's commission [as Minister to Portugal]. 
 'But thinking it over coolly,' said Seward, 'I thought it wrong to punish 
 a man for his stupid folly, when really he had committed no crime.' " 9 
 
 9 Nicolay & Hay, op. cit. IV, 32. 
 
VI 
 
 Wr 
 
 ITH MOST heads of state, insubordination of this kind, to use 
 the mildest word, would have produced a cabinet crisis. Lincoln and 
 Seward, however, continued to maintain agreeable relations. Both per- 
 sonal considerations, and reasons of state and politics, kept the two men 
 in close harmonious and effective co-operation for the succeeding four 
 years. 
 
 The support of the largest wing of the new party probably seemed 
 to Lincoln more indispensable to national success in April and May, 
 1861, than in December of the preceding year. The calamity that 
 had then been only a threat had now become a reality. The weak- 
 ness of the Union party remained the same, only in larger degree. The 
 North was by no means of one mind on the coercion of the South. The 
 firing on Fort Sumter had indeed roused the nation to action, but the 
 following three years were to show that nothing like unanimity pre- 
 vailed on this and plenty of other issues growing out of the war. It is 
 hard to see how the stand Lincoln had taken for war in preference to 
 national dissolution could have won wide support, as it did, if the fact 
 had become popularly known that his own administration was not 
 unanimous on this decision. That Lincoln felt the personal affront in- 
 volved in Seward's tortuous proceedings may be taken for granted. 
 But in the next four years it was to be his fate to submit to many more 
 indignities in consideration of the public good. At base, Lincoln was 
 conscious of his own power, completely assured of his ability to keep 
 his hand on events and prevent such manifestations as Seward's from 
 bringing harm to the common cause. It was all a part of that mixed 
 humility and dominance so conspicuous in his complex character. When 
 one of his friends remarked on the Secretary of State's presumption and 
 advised Lincoln to drop him from the cabinet, the President quietly 
 said, "Seward knows that I am his master." He was just as sure of this 
 at the time of the Sumter maneuvers as some time afterward when the 
 remark was made. The statement really summed up the situation; mean- 
 while Seward was an extremely useful man, both as party leader and as 
 
186 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Secretary of State, and Lincoln gladly availed himself of the strength 
 he brought to the administration, overlooking, as was always his cus- 
 tom, any incidental trouble the man's egotism and headstrong willful- 
 ness might cause him. 
 
 From the first, Lincoln had taken a personal liking to his presumptu- 
 ous underling. The administration had not been under way many weeks 
 before the friendly relationship between the two men made other 
 members of the cabinet grieve and writhe. Seward acquired a new 
 home on Fifteenth Street, on the east side of Lafayette Square — the 
 present site of the Belasco Theater — only a few steps removed from 
 the White House. This soon became a cherished haven for a distracted 
 President. Lincoln's habit of leaving his official headquarters and drop- 
 ping in unexpectedly on his intimates formed another count against 
 an unconventional and "undignified" ruler; but the reason was plain 
 enough. The executive offices, corridors, and even private living quar- 
 ters of the White House were so constantly swarming with an office- 
 seeking and advice-giving rabble that the only chance for relaxation 
 was an occasional half-surreptitious visit to friends. Seward's house in 
 particular offered charming respite of this kind. Lincoln liked to stretch 
 his long legs before Seward's log fire and discuss a thousand subjects — 
 not all of them concerned with the problems of the day. The Secre- 
 tary's conversational gifts made him one of the delights of Washing- 
 ton; he could tell stories as amusing as Lincoln's own; he had a vast 
 experience out of which to draw reminiscence and anecdote; he liked 
 to laugh, to poke fun at his contemporaries, and to detect the ludicrous 
 aspects of even the most serious questions. Seward himself would have 
 been a popular figure at those tavern symposia of the Eighth Circuit in 
 Illinois, and Lincoln found in him some compensation for the loss of 
 this part of his life. Against the agonies of the real world outside the 
 companionable Secretary was thus a stimulating contrast. No other 
 cabinet associate could offer consolation of this kind. The righteous 
 Puritanic Welles, the self-satisfied, half-contemptuous Chase, the slow- 
 moving, legalistic Bates, the nervous, ill-tempered Blair, cut a poor 
 figure when compared to Seward as a human being. His nature, though 
 not lacking in cynicism, had no taint of hypocrisy; Lincoln found in 
 this politico-statesman a relief somewhat akin to that which he drew 
 from the pages of Petroleum V. Nasby. On Seward's first day in office 
 he began a diary; the volume is still preserved among his papers; it 
 consists, however, of only a single page, for the writer never got be- 
 yond the first day. Had Seward continued the record, the accounts 
 of his day-by-day talks with Lincoln would have given posterity its 
 most scintillating portrait of the man. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 187 
 
 Seward was, however, much more than a court jester; he was a man 
 of imagination — an imagination that far outdistanced that of his more 
 matter-of-fact colleagues — and he had a suppleness of mind that en- 
 abled him to view pressing questions in all their phases. Naturally, Lin- 
 coln would like to discuss matters of state with this agile mentality, 
 undisturbed by the presence of the rest of the cabinet. At any rate, 
 these personal meetings grew to be a habit. Their congeniality grew 
 closer as events proceeded, especially when, in the cleavage between 
 the Union forces on the great civil problem presented by the war — 
 the conditions under which the seceded states were to be readmitted 
 to the Union — Lincoln and Seward found themselves in agreement. 
 
 But this Lincoln-Seward companionship, especially in the early days, 
 alarmed and enraged the administration's friends and foes. In the house 
 of Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner railed so fiercely that he lost 
 the friendship of that family. Lincoln — this was the charge — was in 
 Seward's hands. The Secretary was leading the President on the most 
 dangerous courses; at first merely the mutterings of cloak-room and 
 drawing-room gossip, this presently grew to such a storm that it nearly 
 disrupted the administration. Even at his own domestic hearth Lincoln's 
 "subserviency" to Seward caused frequent ructions. Mrs. Lincoln hated 
 the man she described as "a dirty abolitionist sneak" so intensely that, 
 in her drives about Washington, she would order the coachman to 
 avoid the street on which Seward lived. "He draws you around his 
 little finger like a skein of thread," she would tell her husband. George 
 Bancroft, shocked, among other things, by Seward's frequent use of 
 the words "hell" and "damn," said that his respect for the President's 
 wife was increased by her dislike of the Secretary of State, while 
 Greeley's hostility to Lincoln was believed to be inspired in large de- 
 gree by the President's friendship for his "Premier." 
 
 The comments of cabinet members were no more appreciative. 
 "Strange, strange," said Montgomery Blair, "that the President, who 
 has sterling ability, should give himself over so completely to Stanton 
 and Seward." * Blair sometimes spoke more emphatically. Edward 
 Bates, in his Diary, quotes the Postmaster General as describing the 
 Secretary of State as an "unprincipled liar — the truth is not in him." 2 
 He regarded Seward as "the least of a statesman and knows less of pub- 
 lic law and of administration than any man who ever held a seat in the 
 cabinet." Bates, almost the only one of Lincoln's original cabinet 
 choices whom Weed and Seward had approved, did not reciprocate 
 
 1 The remark was made somewhat later, after Stanton had displaced Cameron 
 as Secretary of War. 
 2 Bates, op. cit., p. 291. 
 
188 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 their friendly disposition. If the "Premier" really thought that the 
 canny Missourian would ever become part of a pro-Seward coterie, he 
 was quickly undeceived. In his first meeting with Lincoln in Spring- 
 field, Bates had shown his distrust of his fellow Whig and the closer 
 view obtained under Lincoln's official roof only increased it. Bates's first 
 meeting with Seward — at Washington, at the time of the inauguration 
 — aroused his suspicions. He found his new colleague agreeable enough, 
 but he objected to "the urgency with which he invited me to take up 
 my quarters at his house, as his guest, until I can make permanent ar- 
 rangements." Bates had no intention, then or afterward, of becoming 
 part of a Seward cabal. It was not only that Bates distrusted Seward's 
 methods, he had no high regard for his statecraft. This able jurist re- 
 garded the Secretary of State as ignorant of the law, blundering in his 
 methods, overbearing to his colleagues, disrespectful to the President, 
 "extremely loose in practical politics," "studiously dark," and generally 
 a man in whom he had "no confidence." He found many of Seward's 
 papers "strange documents" and, at least in one case, could not "well 
 determine whether its errors and ambiguities result from careless haste 
 or cautious casuistry." Again, Seward "always shuffles around a knotty 
 point by some trick." 
 
 That Salmon P. Chase would look with disapproving eye on Seward's 
 constant approach to the throne was natural — especially as, in the early 
 days, he had attempted himself, without success, to acquire precedence 
 in Lincoln's favor. Even Simon Cameron, who had entered the cabi- 
 net as a protege of Seward, presently turned against him. That trait, 
 conspicuous in a career of thirty years, of forsaking the men whose as- 
 sistance he had used in advancing to power played true to form in his 
 relations with Seward. The man was enraged when he learned of his 
 friend's performance in the Sumter expedition, and filled the corridors 
 of his office with profane denunciations. Cameron did not take too 
 pompously his prestige as a war minister, but the realization that the 
 Secretary of State had usurped his functions, issued orders to the army 
 of which he knew nothing, and had, indeed, taken pains to see that he 
 was kept in ignorance, proved too much for Cameron's not ordinarily 
 sensitive nature. The agreeable understanding on which the two men 
 had entered the cabinet presently collapsed. 
 
 But the man whose acid comments have become most famous was 
 Gideon Welles. "Father Neptune," as Lincoln called his Secretary of 
 the Navy, not only despised Seward and his whole Albany crowd, but 
 had — what the others lacked — literary skill in setting forth his senti- 
 ments. To reproduce all Welles's unappreciative comments would 
 mean reprinting a considerable part of the Diary. Personal animus does 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 189 
 
 not, in itself, explain this attitude, though this animus existed in plenty. 
 Welles was fundamentally a just and honest man who could see the 
 good points of contemporaries whom he did not like, and in his ob- 
 jections to Seward some public interest was usually involved. Mr. Sew- 
 ard "has talent and genius but he has not the profound knowledge nor 
 the solid sense, correct views and unswerving right intentions of the 
 President." He had "very little devotion to principle which he always 
 subordinated to his ambition." He was a "man more of expedients than 
 principles," "assuming," "presuming," "meddling," "not particularly 
 scrupulous in accomplishing his ends," "a schemer," "not always truth- 
 ful," and was hand-in-glove with Thurlow Weed, who, according to 
 Welles, was "of vastly more vigor of mind, is reckless and direct, per- 
 sistent and tortuous, avaricious of power and always corrupt." Seward's 
 easygoing treatment of Lincoln, even in cabinet meetings, exasperated 
 the navy head. The man's failure to realize Lincoln's superior intellec- 
 tual ability rankled. "The President he treats with a familiarity that 
 sometimes borders on disrespect." "With temperaments so constituted 
 and unlike it is not surprising that the obsequious affability and ready 
 assumption of the subordinate presumed on and to an extent influenced 
 the really superior intellect of the President and made him in a degree 
 the centralizing personage." 
 
 The grievances of Welles and his associates against the "Premier" 
 were founded on more than personal antagonism. Seward not only 
 treated each individually as a nonentity, but attempted to sweep them 
 aside as a collective body. His plan of ruling the Republic as Prime 
 Minister, and relegating Lincoln to a position purely ceremonial, made 
 necessary the reduction of the other Secretaries to what, perhaps, con- 
 sidered constitutionally, they really were — mere heads of the executive 
 departments. In Seward's "Thoughts" of April 1, he had admonished 
 the President that, after appointing one of his cabinet heads virtual 
 chief of state, "debates must end" and "all agree and abide." Not one 
 of Seward's colleagues ever knew anything of Seward's memorandum 
 — it did not see the light until nearly a quarter of a century after the 
 Civil War; if they had, it would have explained certain maneuvers of 
 the Secretary of State at the time which had aroused their resentment. 
 For Seward, in his attitude toward his colleagues, was acting as though 
 his recommendation to the President had been accepted. That is, he 
 was treating the cabinet as though it did not exist. As a presidential 
 council, he regarded it as having ceased to be a part of the American 
 system. Since Washington's day, cabinet meetings, usually on stated 
 days, had been part of the executive routine. Washington's precedent 
 of consultation on general governmental matters had transformed the 
 
190 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 body into a presidential council, and all his successors had continued 
 the custom. Cabinet meetings, usually twice a week or oftener if spe- 
 cial occasions arose, were an immutable feature of Washington life. 
 Readers of the diaries of John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk will 
 recall the seriousness with which those Presidents regarded "cabinet 
 day" and the exhaustiveness with which matters affecting the adminis- 
 tration were laid before their assembled advisers. But Seward evidently 
 intended to end this time-honored institution. He early decided that 
 there should be no cabinet meetings, or at least no regular meetings 
 on fixed days. Occasionally, of course, the cabinet, or parts of it, did 
 come together, usually in response to invitations issued by the Secre- 
 tary of State. The proceedings were not impressive in dignity or con- 
 tent. The informality seemed to be almost studied; no regular seats were 
 assigned, though the Secretary of State was always careful to place 
 himself at the President's right. "It seemed inadvisable," wrote Welles, 
 "to the Premier — as he liked to be called and considered — that the 
 members should meet often and they did not. Consequently there was 
 very little concerted action. At the earlier meetings there was little or 
 no formality; the cabinet meetings were a sort of privy council or 
 gathering of equals, much like a senatorial caucus, where there was no 
 recognized leader and the Secretary of State put himself in advance of 
 the President. The Secretary of State . . . from his former position 
 as the chief executive of the largest state in the Union, as well as from 
 his recent place as a senator, and from his admitted experience and 
 familiarity with affairs, assumed, and was allowed, as was proper, to 
 take the lead in consultations and also to give tone and direction to the 
 manner and mode of proceedings. The President, if he did not actually 
 wish, readily acquiesced in this." 
 
 Instead of holding cabinet meetings, Seward spent a considerable part 
 of every day with the President. The two were frequently in close con- 
 sultation in his private office; they took walks and drives and lunched 
 together. It was an intimacy which the other Secretaries regarded with 
 a suspicious eye. Not one of them enjoyed such a familiarity with Lin- 
 coln; each was confined, for the most part, to his own department, and 
 thus obtained little knowledge of the government as a whole. That 
 Seward showed the utmost interest in the affairs of his colleagues, but 
 managed to keep secret about his own, aggravated this grievance. The 
 President, naturally, knew of the important transactions of all the de- 
 partments, and was believed to discuss them freely with Seward, who 
 in this way kept in close touch with all branches of the government. 
 But his colleagues, having few opportunities to see Lincoln at close 
 range, could not, in the same way, learn of the doings of the State 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 191 
 
 Department. Seward usually arrived in advance of his colleagues, and 
 frequently remained, in confidential discussion with the President, 
 after they had left. Lincoln would let Seward apparently dominate the 
 meeting, listen attentively to what all his Secretaries said, and then, after 
 a most unsystematic discussion, himself sum up the pros and cons and 
 announce his decision. Welles admitted, however, that the President's 
 conclusions frequently ran counter to those of his chief adviser. 
 
 Seward's colleagues grew more and more restive under this humilia- 
 tion. Chase was the first to break out into open protest. At an early 
 meeting he raised the question of regular "cabinets." Had it not al- 
 ways been the custom for the President's associates to assemble on 
 stated days and act as a general council in the direction of affairs? 
 Would not this sanctified practice make for better administration? All 
 Chase's colleagues supported his protest with the exception of Seward, 
 who could see no value in these periodical gatherings. Lincoln ap- 
 proved the suggestion, and directed that the time-honored "cabinet 
 days" be restored. However, the improvement lasted for only a brief 
 time; because, as the other Secretaries believed, of Seward's persistent 
 opposition, things presently relapsed into the former easygoing state. 
 Seward's meddling in the affairs of other departments, especially the 
 Navy, the Army, and the Attorney General's office, caused a renewal 
 of the demand. Bates, not easily moved to anger, was outraged when 
 he learned that Seward was sending instructions — without the Attor- 
 ney General's knowledge — to district attorneys' and marshals' offices 
 which were exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Department of 
 Justice. He brought up the whole question of "cabinet unity" and a 
 more regular procedure in full cabinet meeting. He protested to the 
 President against the lack of method, and even of dignity, in the pre- 
 vailing conduct of public business. From the beginning Bates, as his 
 Diary discloses, entertained an exalted notion of the function of the 
 cabinet in the guidance of the nation. He always refers to it as "the 
 Council," and the spectacle which it had presented in real life, an un- 
 orderly assembling of individuals, only one of whom seemed to be in the 
 President's confidence, and most of whom learned of vital govern- 
 ment decisions from the newspapers, shocked him. The administra- 
 tion, he declared, was not a unit; it was departmentalized, each Secre- 
 tary keeping monastic-like in his own office, knowing little of what was 
 going on in the others, not participating in the general concerns of the 
 nation. Why, he now asked Lincoln, could not the cabinet come to- 
 gether on stated days, and on such special occasions as the national 
 emergency might make desirable? All of Bates' associates echoed his 
 demand — again excepting Seward. "The Secretary of State," records 
 
192 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Welles, "alone dissented, hesitated, doubted, objected, thought it in- 
 expedient, said all had so much to do that we could not spare the 
 time." 3 Again Lincoln overruled the Secretary of State, and ordered 
 that regular meetings in future be held on Tuesdays and Fridays. The 
 Secretary of the Navy intimates that Lincoln probably instigated Bates 
 in bringing the matter up in this definite fashion; at least it was evident 
 enough that he strongly favored the plan. This time the new scheme 
 of things became established, and Tuesdays and Fridays, for the rest 
 of the administration, were regular "cabinet days." However, many of 
 the old evils continued. Ultimately, as will appear, the lack of "unity" 
 grew to be a public grievance and, manipulated as an issue by Seward's 
 enemies in the Senate, resulted almost in breaking up the cabinet. 
 
 Great as was Seward's influence over Lincoln, that statesman was 
 far from exercising the despotic control his colleagues suspected. In the 
 great early issues of the conflict, it was the will of Lincoln, not that of 
 Seward, which prevailed. He had utterly disregarded Seward's policy 
 of avoiding the conflict by compromising with the South. The deci- 
 sion to preserve the Union, even at the cost of civil war, was Lincoln's, 
 not Seward's. He overruled Seward's policy on the relief of Sumter. 
 He had also disregarded Seward's pet solution of domestic difficulties 
 — war with Great Britain, France, or some other formidable enemy — 
 though no one, least of all his cabinet councilors, knew of it at the 
 time. The obstinacy with which Seward clung to this favorite panacea 
 was astonishing. A letter written to his wife on May 2 shows that even 
 then he had not recovered from his delusion. Though two months had 
 passed since Lincoln had told him, as flatly as words could express the 
 idea, that he proposed to run his own administration and that he in- 
 tended to have no trumped-up wars with Europe, the fact had appar- 
 ently not deeply penetrated the man's consciousness. "I received your 
 letter last evening, on my birthday. 4 It seemed to me a matter of regret 
 that I had lived to reach it, under circumstances so trying and painful. 
 A country so largely relying on my poor efforts to save it had refused 
 me the full measure of its confidence, needful to that end. I am a chief 
 reduced to a subordinate position, and surrounded with a guard, to 
 see that I do not do too much for my country, lest some advantage may 
 revert indirectly to my own fame. . . . The tide, on this side of the 
 Atlantic, begins to turn in our favor. They have misunderstood things 
 fearfully in Europe. Great Britain is in great danger of sympathizing 
 so much with the South, for the sake of peace and cotton, as to drive 
 us to make war against her, as the ally of the traitor. If that comes it 
 
 3 Welles, Diary. I, 138. 
 
 4 Seward was now sixty. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 193 
 
 will be a strife of the younger branch of the British stock — for free- 
 dom, against the other, for slavery. It will be dreadful, but the end will 
 be sure and swift. My last despatches from Great Britain and France 
 have showed that they were almost ready, on some pretext, to try and 
 save cotton, at the expense of the Union. I am trying to get a bold re- 
 monstrance through the cabinet, before it is too late." 
 
 The reference to the cabinet is obscure, for in the "bold remon- 
 strance" in which Seward was engaged on this twentieth of May, the 
 cabinet certainly had not been consulted. But this same "bold remon- 
 strance" furnishes a brilliant illustration of the extent to which Lincoln 
 was controlling his own administration, all the more impressive from the 
 fact that it concerned a matter of supreme importance in Seward's 
 own department. While Lincoln was contented, in routine details, to 
 leave Seward in control of his office, on critical occasions the rail splitter 
 could be his own Secretary of State. The paper to which Seward re- 
 ferred is known in the annals of Civil War diplomacy as "Despatch 
 No. 10." The age of Seward represents one of those primitive times in 
 American history when secretaries of state, secluded from the world, 
 wrote their own state papers in their own hand, and this letter to Mr. 
 Adams, the new American Minister in London, bears in every sentence 
 evidence of Seward's literary style. Had Gideon Welles and Edward 
 Bates ever read the message, it would have substantiated their views of 
 the lawlessness that prevailed in early cabinet days. One might indeed 
 have supposed that a document which was little less than a declaration 
 of war upon Great Britain would have been submitted to the presi- 
 dential council before being committed to the mail pouch, but the 
 truth is that only Seward, Lincoln, and perhaps Charles Sumner, chair- 
 man of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had any knowl- 
 edge of its existence. In the diplomatic correspondence of 1861, pub- 
 lished in connection with Lincoln's message of that year, Despatch 
 No. 10 indeed saw the light, but the version then given to the public 
 differed in vital details from the original composition. Not until April 
 1886, a quarter century after, did the American people first learn of 
 the defiance of John Bull which Seward had prepared in the early 
 days of the Civil War. In that month the North American Review 
 published Despatch No. 10 in facsimile form, 3 the manuscript disfig- 
 ured by certain elisions, interlineations, marginal comments, all in a 
 script which is easily recognized as that of Abraham Lincoln. The 
 President, as Lord Lyons had confided to Lord John Russell, may have 
 been "ignorant of foreign countries and foreign affairs," but a cursory 
 glance at the instructions Seward had transmitted in this document to 
 
 5 North American Review, Vol. 142, pp. 402-410. 
 
194 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Mr. Adams convinced the inexperienced diplomat that certain revi- 
 sions would be necessary if his country was not to be plunged into 
 ruin. 
 
 For the anger which certain transatlantic events had aroused in 
 American hearts appeared in every line of Seward's paper. Certain 
 letters from George M. Dallas, Buchanan's minister to Great Britain, 
 who remained at his post until Mr. Adams's arrival on the thirteenth 
 of May, had caused Seward much misgiving. On May 2 — the letter 
 must have reached Washington in the middle of the month — Mr. Dal- 
 las reported an interview with Lord John Russell. The commissioners 
 sent by the Confederate government to solicit British recognition were 
 then, his lordship informed the American Ambassador, in London, 
 and he was prepared to receive them "unofficially." Even more por- 
 tentous was the news that Britain and France had concluded something 
 in the nature of an alliance, or at least an entente, to act as a unit on 
 the "American question." A matter under consideration of these joint 
 powers was the recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent — 
 which, among other things, meant a recognition of their rights to com- 
 mission privateers for the purpose of preying upon Federal commerce, 
 despite the fact that Uncle Sam had already proclaimed that such evil 
 emissaries would be regarded as pirates, and subjected to the punish- 
 ment usually meted out to free rovers of the sea. Mr. Dallas had sug- 
 gested that this last item in what Seward and most Americans regarded 
 as an unfriendly program might properly be reserved for consideration 
 until the arrival of his successor, Mr. Adams. Though Lord John had 
 seemed to acquiesce in this suggestion, the Queen's Proclamation rec- 
 ognizing Southern belligerency had in fact been issued several days 
 before the new minister appeared in London. In England Seward was 
 regarded — and with considerable reason — as extremely hostile to that 
 country! Lord Lyons's letters of the time contain passages in plenty 
 emphasizing this dislike, extending through a long political career. 
 That Seward was meditating plans for the annexation of Canada added 
 to this distrust. Thus public sentiment in both countries, at the out- 
 break of the Civil War, was suspicious and hostile, and these emotions 
 found expression in every line of the famous dispatch. 
 
 Lord Russell's willingness to receive "unofficially" Yancey, Rost, and 
 Mann, Confederate "Commissioners," had aroused the Secretary's 
 wrath. In case such receptions should take place, he now informed 
 Adams, "you will in any event desist from all intercourse whatever, un- 
 official as well as official, with the British government, so long as it 
 shall continue intercourse of either kind with the domestic enemies 
 of this country" — an instruction which, while it may not necessarily 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER ' 195 
 
 have meant the permanent severance of diplomatic relations, suggested 
 a status dangerously approaching such an impasse. As to what Seward 
 called "the alliance" of France and Great Britain against the United 
 States — an alliance into which, he intimated, these countries were 
 attempting to draw the other nations of Europe — Seward remarked 
 that this country had a right to expect a more independent if not a more 
 friendly course. "Recognition of the Confederacy, either as a nation or 
 as a belligerent," Seward wrote, will "not be borne unquestioned by the 
 United States." The British cabinet was to be notified that recognition 
 of Southern independence — and recognition of belligerency Seward 
 evidently regarded as merely the first step in that direction — would 
 mean war with the United States. "When this act of intervention is 
 distinctly performed we from that hour shall cease to be friends and 
 become once more, as we have twice before been forced to be, enemies 
 of Great Britain. ... As to southern privateers, should Great Britain 
 choose to recognize them as lawful belligerents and give them shelter 
 from our pursuit and punishment, the laws of nations afford proper 
 remedy and we shall avail ourselves of it" — by which cryptic state- 
 ment Seward perhaps meant that American warships would follow 
 and seize the "privateer" in British harbors. As to the war into which 
 the American reprisals would likely engage the United States, Seward 
 looked upon the inevitable result without anxiety. "The dispute will be 
 between the European and the American branches of the British race. 
 ... A war not unlike it between the same parties occurred at the close 
 of the last century. Europe atoned by forty years of suffering for the 
 error that Great Britain committed in provoking that contest. If that 
 nation shall now repeat the same great error the social convulsions 
 which will follow may not be so long but they will be more general. 
 When they shall have ceased, it will, we think, be seen, whatever may 
 have been the fortune of other nations, that it is not the United States 
 that will have come out of them with its precious Constitution altered 
 or its honestly obtained dominion in any degree abridged." Thus Sew- 
 ard was threatening Great Britain not only with overwhelming defeat 
 on land and sea, but with a struggle which would end in the over- 
 throwing of its monarchical constitution and reorganization of its gov- 
 ernment on democratic, republican lines. The final words evidently 
 suggested that one result would be the acquisition of Canada by the 
 United States, a project which had long been dear to Seward's heart. 
 That the ruling aristocracy of Great Britain had given the United 
 States grounds for resentment cannot be denied, yet the situation had 
 practical aspects which Seward ignored, but which Lincoln instantly 
 perceived. His country, Lincoln believed, in summoning all its re- 
 
196 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 sources for the suppression of rebellion on so vast a scale, had assumed 
 a task sufficiently large to enlist all its energies. The accession of Great 
 Britain, France, and other European allies to the side of the Confed- 
 eracy could, at the most favorable view, seriously complicate the prob- 
 lem. To throw down a challenge to the British fleet, to say nothing of 
 the British and French armies, would play directly into the hands of 
 Jefferson Davis and enable him to attain the great objective which was 
 indispensable to Southern success. By one simple but fundamental 
 change, Lincoln completely transformed the character of Seward's 
 paper. In its original version Despatch No. 10, though in form instruc- 
 tions to Charles Francis Adams, Minister at the Court of St. James's, 
 was in reality a declaration addressed to Her Majesty's government. 
 Seward had directed Mr. Adams to take the message to the Foreign 
 Office, read it to Lord John, and leave a copy. Such procedure seemed 
 to Lincoln dangerously provocative. He therefore excised the direc- 
 tion to Adams as to reading the defiance to the British Foreign Secre- 
 tary, and substituted the following paragraph: "This paper is not to 
 be read or shown to the British Secretary of State, nor are any of its 
 positions to be prematurely, unnecessarily, or indiscreetly made 
 known. But its spirit will be your guide." Thus Lincoln sanctioned the 
 policies and views on international law which Seward had set forth, 
 and, in case Britain recognized the Confederate envoys as ambassadors 
 of an independent state, was ready to°go to the limit that Seward had 
 presented. However, he saw no need of presenting the British with a 
 blustering threat in advance of such action. 
 
 Even when he had thus adroitly changed Despatch No. 10 from 
 what was virtually a threat, to be officially presented to England, 
 to a secret paper for Adams's personal information, the President made 
 other substantial changes in Seward's text that smoothed over many a 
 rough passage. "Leave out," "drop all from this line to the end" — such 
 emendations, appearing in Lincoln's handwriting on the margins of 
 Seward's manuscript, took the sting out of many a phrase. In one place, 
 Seward had written that intercourse of any kind with the Confederate 
 mission in London would be "wrongful" to the United States, but 
 Lincoln deleted this word and substituted "hurtful." Seward had 
 asserted that recognition of the Confederacy, or acts that amounted 
 to the same thing, would not be "borne by the United States." "No one 
 of these proceedings" — so Lincoln softened the phrase — "will pass 
 unquestioned by the United States." Lincoln ran his pen through the 
 passage threatening reprisals in case Southern cruisers found refuge 
 in British harbors and wrote in the margin, "omit." "If that nation 
 shall now repeat the same great crime," Seward said, referring to 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 197 
 
 Britain's war against the infant United States, but Lincoln thought 
 the word "error" an improvement. Instead of the "social calamities" 
 which Seward prophesied for England, in the event of another war, 
 Lincoln suggested "social convulsions"; thereby pointing out to Sew- 
 ard a certain confusion of thought in this passage, for the altera- 
 tions in the British constitutional structure which the Secretary had 
 foreseen — a democratic franchise, perhaps a Republican form of gov- 
 ernment — Seward himself, on reflection, would not have regarded as 
 "calamities." Lincoln must have chuckled when he made that substi- 
 tution. 
 
 But Despatch No. 10, even in its emasculated form and in its com- 
 pletely changed character, startled Mr. Adams when it landed on the 
 ministerial desk. What, he asked himself, had happened to Mr. Seward? 
 The New Yorker he greatly admired; Adams and Seward had worked 
 together in the congressional session of 1860-1861 for a plan of con- 
 ciliation with the South. On the other hand, this New Englander had 
 never recovered from the shock of his first interview with Lincoln 
 when that statesman, clad in shabby slippers and unpressed trousers, 
 abruptly replied to Adams's conventional thanks for the appointment 
 to London — "Don't thank me, thank Seward," for the selection 
 had been made at Seward's insistence. Lincoln's own choice for the 
 London mission, as Adams doubtless knew, had been William L. Day- 
 ton—the same New Jersey man whom he had intended to make 
 Secretary of State, in case Seward persisted in his eleventh-hour 
 refusal to enter the cabinet. The remembrance of things like this per- 
 haps explains Adams's comment when the immortal No. 10 reached the 
 legation. "The government," Charles Francis wrote in his Diary, "seems 
 almost ready to declare war with all the powers of Europe, and almost 
 instructs me to withdraw from communication with ministers here in 
 a certain contingency. ... I scarcely know how to understand Mr. 
 Seward. The rest of the government may be demented for all I know; 
 but he surely is calm and wise. My duty here is, in so far as I can do it 
 honestly, to prevent the irritation from coming to a downright quarrel. 
 It seems to me like throwing the game into the hands of the enemy." 
 One can only imagine what would have been Mr. Adams's emotions 
 had Seward's original message been transmitted to London. 
 
 This Lincoln version, leaving everything to the discretion of Mr. 
 Adams himself, had a fortunate outcome. Adams was a man of great 
 good sense and honest diplomatic skill. His mere presence in London 
 accomplished much, for Russell early formed a high regard for his 
 character and methods. When the time came to protest against the 
 Confederate commissioners in London, and their unofficial reception 
 
198 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 at the Foreign Office, he did it in an urbane, yet decided manner that 
 completely disarmed the Foreign Secretary. To receive envoys of 
 revolution unofficially, Lord John explained, was not recognition or a 
 preliminary to recognition — it was merely one way of obtaining 
 desired information; he had, on other occasions, received representa- 
 tives of revolutionary movements in Poland, Austria, Italy, but no 
 objection had been made by the legitimate governments with which 
 they were at war. Had not President Pierce, he might have added, 
 received Louis Kossuth at the White House, when that ardent spirit 
 was leading a rebellion for the liberation of Hungary from Habsburg 
 rule? His Lordship, had he known the facts, might have struck even 
 closer home, and reminded the American Minister that Mr. Seward 
 had been recently conducting negotiations through third parties with 
 delegates from the same Confederate government whose emissaries 
 were then in London, and had been stopped from discussing matters 
 with them face to face only by the orders of President Lincoln. As for 
 Yancey, Rost, and Mann, Lord John told Adams, he had seen them 
 informally twice but had no intention of seeing them "any more." So 
 the interview which Adams had apprehended as one of the most diffi- 
 cult of his career really proved to be a triumph. 
 
 This proceeding had one other result of importance. Lincoln's 
 shrewd modification of No. 10, and the determination he had displayed, 
 gave his Secretary of State a new conception of his chief. That Lincoln 
 was indeed President, and intended to remain President, now appar- 
 ently dawned for the first time upon Seward's slowly perceiving mind. 
 From late May, the time of this little drama, to the end, relations be- 
 tween Lincoln and Seward remained on a more satisfactory basis. The 
 plan of regaining prestige and saving the Union by plunging into uni- 
 versal war no longer haunted Seward's dreams. On June 5, he wrote 
 his wife in terms very different from those expressed in the petulant, 
 complaining letter of May 26, quoted above. "Executive skill and 
 vigor," he said, "are rare qualities. The President is the best of us, but 
 he needs constant and assiduous co-operation." How completely the 
 man's belligerent mood had changed, and how earnestly Seward was 
 now prepared to work with Lincoln — or, to use his now far from 
 presumptuous word "co-operate" — for a sane foreign policy appeared 
 in the new crisis, more serious than that of the Confederate commis- 
 sioners in London, which presently brought England and the United 
 States to the very brink of war. 
 
VIII 
 
 I 
 
 T SEEMS almost as though a sardonic fate had created the Trent 
 crisis for the express purpose, in poker language, of calling Seward's 
 bluff. In late November, 1861, the golden opportunity for a war with 
 England arrived, without any artificial stimulation from the White 
 House or State Department. When the bumptious Captain Wilkes, in 
 command of the sloop of war San Jacinto, stopped the British packet 
 Trent in the Bahama Straits, forcibly removed from her deck four 
 insurgent Americans and lodged them as prisoners of war in Fortress 
 Monroe, Virginia, he presented Seward with that European war which 
 several months before had been the chief item in his statesmanship. 
 The mercurial gentleman, abruptly confronted with the fact, hesitated 
 to seize this gift from heaven. It is the most picturesque contradiction 
 in Seward's career that, in the Trent disturbance, he was almost the 
 only member of the cabinet who kept his head. All of the seven, ex- 
 cepting Montgomery Blair and Seward, seemed ready to go to war 
 with England rather than back down and surrender the prisoners. 
 Even Lincoln, the most deliberate influence in the administration, in- 
 clined to the prevailing view that Captain Wilkes must not be dis- 
 avowed. 
 
 All ingredients essential to a conflagration were aroused by his high- 
 handed act: an infuriated English populace, demanding reparation for 
 the "insult" to the British flag; an American public, similarly excited, 
 insisting on supporting Captain Wilkes and retaining in American 
 custody the Confederate envoys. In its essentials, the Trent affair in- 
 volved no diplomatic problem. Captain Wilkes, a troublesome officer 
 whose insubordination had already involved him in one court-martial 
 and was to involve him in another, had acted on his own responsibility, 
 without the slightest suggestion of instructions from his government. 
 In doing so, he had violated certain principles of international law of 
 which the United States had been the champion for sixty years, and 
 had acted in accordance with certain British practices against which 
 this country had always protested. It was for doing precisely what 
 
200 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Captain Wilkes had done in the Trent that the American government 
 had declared war on England in 1812. Had the administration promptly- 
 disavowed Wilkes's act and restored the captives to the British guard- 
 ianship from which they had been ravished, it not only would have 
 acted in a way befitting the nation's dignity, but would have scored a 
 diplomatic triumph. Mr. Seward would have upheld American prin- 
 ciples, and would have compelled Great Britain to recognize interpre- 
 tations of maritime law which it had been disregarding for centuries. 
 
 Not improbably Seward perceived this great opportunity, but cer- 
 tain demonstrations, both in England and in America, made such a 
 course almost impossible. At no time in history, even in 1776 and 1812, 
 had England been so unpopular in the United States. That English 
 statesmen were deliberately planning to use American domestic trou- 
 bles as an excuse for disrupting the Union, destroying its trade and 
 merchant marine, and ending the Republic as a threat to the supremacy 
 of the British Empire, was the conviction of most Americans. It was 
 also shared by many distinguished Englishmen. "Three fourths of the 
 House of Commons," wrote Richard Cobden, a strong friend of 
 America in four years of war, "will be glad to find an excuse for voting 
 for the dismemberment of the great Republic." In a speech at Rochdale, 
 John Bright, another unswerving English friend of the Union, declared 
 that the attitude of the upper strata of British society was that "the 
 republic is too great and powerful and that it is better for us — not by 
 us meaning you, but the governing classes and the governing policy of 
 England — that it should be broken up." The Queen's precipitate 
 proclamation of neutrality and the recognition of the seceded states as 
 belligerents added fuel to American hostility. Certain comments of 
 Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister, on Northern military reverses and 
 the vituperative editorials of the London Times had not softened the 
 American temper. 
 
 It is not strange therefore that the news of the capture of Mason and 
 Slidell, two envoys sent by the Confederacy to England and France, 
 to secure, among other things, recognition of Southern independence, 
 was received with a frenzy of approbation. Captain Wilkes found him- 
 self the hero of the hour. The press, the pulpit, and public men of all 
 parties showered him with adulation. Congress hurriedly passed a reso- 
 lution thanking him for his brave, adroit, and patriotic conduct in the 
 arrest of the traitors James M. Mason and John Slidell; international 
 lawyers of great repute defended the legality of the performance; even 
 men of the standing of Edward Everett, ex-President of Harvard, 
 Richard Henry Dana, and Caleb Cushing joined in the universal 
 chorus. In England the seizure of Mason and Slidell still further enrage^ 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 201 
 
 the enemies of the United States and dismayed its friends. Though the 
 Times and other anti-American papers had seemed to have exhausted 
 already their resources in lampooning their transatlantic kindred, they 
 now burst out with a new fury of execration. Naturally the name of 
 Seward loomed large in all this excitement. That Captain Wilkes had 
 acted under his instructions, and that Seward's purpose was to start 
 the war with England which he had long planned, seemed as clear as 
 daylight. Seward's steady course of hostility to England in thirty years 
 of public life, and the many unpleasant comments he had made on the 
 British Empire and British "rapacity," were now brought forth as part 
 explanation of the Mason-Slidell "outrage." Of all the unflattering 
 things the Secretary had said on this subject, one in particular rankled 
 in the English mind. In a meeting with the Duke of Newcastle in 
 Albany in 1860, on the occasion of the Prince of Wales's visit, Seward 
 had remarked, referring to his forthcoming Secretaryship of State, that 
 he would soon be in a position where it would be his duty to insult 
 Great Britain and that he should proceed to do so. The noble lord, 
 perhaps suffering from the traditional British lack of appreciation of 
 American humor, took the remark in all seriousness and spread it broad- 
 cast throughout the British Empire. It now reappeared in a thousand 
 newspaper articles and reverberating platforms; if any British heart 
 had wondered at the meaning of the words, the Trent affair had now 
 supplied the answer. All over England rose an almost unanimous de- 
 mand for war. The sentiment was general that only the most abject 
 apology could save Uncle Sam from a trouncing at the hand of the 
 British fleet. War preparations began in every British shipyard on a 
 scale not known since the days of Napoleon. An army of twelve thou- 
 sand men was assembled for immediate transport to Canada, and forti- 
 fications were thrown up in strategic places on the long undefended 
 Canadian frontier. Under these circumstances — the roars of approval 
 from the American population, the threat of annihilation from what 
 was then regarded as America's most determined enemy — the likelihood 
 that the question of the Trent could be settled on the basis of justice 
 and the principles of law seemed slight. 
 
 The attitude of the seven cabinet members on the Trent issue thus 
 figured large in the public mind. In some cases individual opinions 
 were expressed with an emphasis that subsequently proved embar- 
 rassing. That roving pictorial historian Benson J. Lossing happened to 
 be in the War Department on the morning when the news of the Trent 
 "broke" in Washington. He has left a lively picture of Simon Cameron, 
 Secretary of War, leading a large crowd of associates in three cheers 
 for Captain Wilkes, one of the most enthusiastic of the group being 
 
202 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. The usually placid and judicial 
 Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, indulged in extravagant praise 
 that cost him in future years a vast amount of casuistry to explain away. 
 "I congratulate you on your safe arrival," he wrote Wilkes — a man 
 whom he cordially detested and afterward removed from an important 
 command — "and especially do I congratulate you on the great public 
 service you have rendered in the capture of the rebel emissaries. Messrs. 
 Mason and Slidell have been conspicuous in the conspiracy to dissolve 
 the Union and it is well known that when seized by you they were on 
 a mission hostile to the government and the country. Your conduct in 
 seizing these public enemies was marked by intelligence, ability, de- 
 cision and firmness and has the emphatic approval of this department." 
 Chase, though, as always somewhat nebulous in his use of words, 
 believed "that the circumstances under which the act of Captain Wilkes 
 was done, not only repelled the imputation of aggressive or unfriendly 
 intent, but entitled him to commendation for the motives by which 
 his conduct was governed, and reduced the seizure and removal from 
 the 'Trent' of the rebel commissioners to a mere technical violation of 
 the neutral rights of England. . . . The capture was, of course, war- 
 ranted, and Captain Wilkes, in making it, performed only his plain 
 duty to his government." The ablest lawyer in the Lincoln cabinet, 
 and the most unimpassioned judge of administrative questions, was 
 Edward Bates, Attorney General. From him, above all others, an 
 earnest, impartial opinion on Wilkes might have been expected, yet we 
 find the even-tempered Bates, in his Diary, joining in the universal 
 acclaim. "While the fact gives great and general satisfaction, some timid 
 persons are alarmed, lest Great Britain should take offense at the viola- 
 tion of her flag. There is no danger on that score. The law of nations 
 is clear upon that point, and I have no doubt that, with a little time for 
 examination, I will find it so settled by English authorities. . . . Not 
 only was it legal to seize the men, but, I think, the ship itself was sub- 
 ject to confiscation." l 
 
 Only one member of the cabinet evidently believed, and so expressed 
 himself, that the whole business was a mistake. Immediately on hearing 
 the news Montgomery Blair declared that Wilkes had acted in violation 
 of international law and that Mason and Slidell would have to be 
 handed over to British custody. The proper course, he said, would be 
 for Wilkes to take Mason and Slidell on the Iroquois, sail to England, 
 and deliver them to the British government. Otherwise, resulting com- 
 plications would fatally interfere with the attempt to put down rebel- 
 
 1 Bates, op. cit., p. 202. The entry is dated November 16, but no news had come 
 of the excitement in England. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 203 
 
 lion. The elder Blair, at Silver Spring, fulminated against Seward, 
 whom he mistakenly regarded as responsible for the crisis. Not only 
 should Mason and Slidell be restored to England, said old man Blair, 
 but he suggested that "Billy Bowlegs" — he was now accustomed to 
 refer to the Secretary of State in this unseemly fashion — should be 
 added as a sacrificial offering on the altar of British revenge. 
 
 What was the real attitude of Seward and, an even more important 
 matter, of his chief in the White House? According to Gideon Welles 
 — the statement was made several years after the event — "no man was 
 more elated or jubilant over the capture of the emissaries than Mr. 
 Seward." This may have been true as a momentary impulse, but second 
 sober thoughts soon gained control in Seward's mind, especially as he 
 faced the practical issue involved — either to surrender the captives or 
 to engage in war with England. Certainly his conduct in the six weeks 
 of the Trent crisis — from November 8 to December 26 — show the 
 man at his best. Unlike several of his cabinet colleagues, he gave no 
 public expression of his views. Those jaunty remarks which he was too 
 inclined to throw out at dinner tables did not confuse matters in the 
 Trent dispute. Lord Lyons, the British Minister, who distrusted Seward 
 and regarded him as England's inveterate foe, a man who wished war 
 in order to carry out his plan of Canadian annexation, was at first 
 disposed to hold him responsible for the Trent performance. But the 
 change that soon came over the Secretary amazed the British diplomat. 
 Instead of the suspicions and detractions of Seward he had been writ- 
 ing Lord John Russell, he now began to speak of the Secretary in 
 glowing terms. The dignity and courtesy with which the Secretary 
 handled the whole matter came in for warm commendation. "I am told 
 confidentially," he had written Lord John Russell on November 19, 
 "that orders were given at Washington which led to the capture of the 
 Trent and that they were signed by Mr. Seward without the knowl- 
 edge of the President." 2 Lord John's plan for solving the difficulty had 
 the merit of simplicity. "The best thing would be if Seward could be 
 turned out and a rational man put in his place." But presently a new 
 note of appreciation appears in Lyons's letters to his chief. Mr. Seward, 
 strangely enough, was not proving an obstacle to a harmonious settle- 
 ment. "Mr. Seward," Lord Lyons writes on December 19, "is now on 
 the peace side of the cabinet." 
 
 The Secretary of State was displaying once more that talent which 
 had proved his salvation in other crises — the ability to shift his former 
 position and adapt his principles to a new set of circumstances. It had 
 
 2 Newton, Thomas Wodehouse E. Legh, Second Baron, Lord Lyons, A Record 
 of British Diplomacy. London, E. Arnold, 1913. I, 55. 
 
204 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 been his lifetime habit to view problems in their practical, not their 
 legalistic or idealistic, aspect, and the theories advanced by many re- 
 spectable sources as to the rights and wrongs of Captain Wilkes's per- 
 formance interested him far less than what was likely to be the definite 
 outcome. His once cherished plan for a European war as a means of 
 bringing North and South together no longer represented his ideal of 
 statesmanship. "You will perhaps be surprised," wrote Lord Lyons to 
 Lord John on December 23, while the negotiation was still pending, 
 "to find Mr. Seward on the side of peace. He does not like the look of 
 the spirit he has called up. Ten months in office have dispelled many of 
 his illusions. I presume that he no longer believes in the existence of a 
 Union party in the South; in the return of the South to the arms of the 
 North in case of a foreign war; in his power to frighten the nations of 
 Europe by great words; in the ease with which the U. S. could crush 
 rebellion with one hand and chastise Europe with the other; with the 
 notion that the relations with England in particular are safe playthings 
 to be used for the amusement of the American people. He sees himself 
 in a very painful dilemma. But he knows his countrymen well enough 
 to believe that if he can convince them that there is a real danger of 
 war, they may forgive him for the humiliation of yielding to England, 
 while it would be fatal to him to be the author of a disastrous foreign 
 war. How he will act eventually I cannot say. 8 ... I cannot say that 
 my general opinion of Mr. Seward had undergone any change," his 
 Lordship added later, "but without enquiry into his motives I must 
 allow him the merit of having worked very hard and exposed his popu- 
 larity to great danger. . . . Mr. Seward told me he had been through 
 the fires of Tophet in order to get the prisoners surrendered." 4 
 
 Lincoln's position is more obscure. The conventional version shows 
 the President as the dominant mind in the Trent excitement, as the cool 
 statesman who at once perceived the realities of the situation and who 
 compelled Seward to modify his attitude and find good reasons for 
 giving up the captives. The known facts do not substantiate this view. 
 Several witnesses, it is true, have recorded glimpses of Lincoln in the 
 crisis that lend color to the legend. One of them, Benson J. Lossing, 
 tells of meeting Lincoln on the day when the Trent news reached the 
 Capital, and he portrays the President as the one man who seemed to 
 be keeping his poise when the rest of the government had fallen victim 
 to the prevailing madness. "I fear," he quotes Lincoln as saying, "the 
 traitors will prove to be white elephants. We must stick to American 
 principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain 
 
 *lbid., I, 69-70. 
 *IHdr 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: PRIME MINISTER 205 
 
 for insisting, by theory and practice, on the right to do precisely what 
 Wilkes has done. If Great Britain shall now protest against the act, and 
 demand their release, we must give them up, apologize for the act as a 
 violation of our doctrines and thus forever bind her over to keep the 
 peace in relation to neutrals and so acknowledge that she has been 
 wrong for sixty years." Gideon Welles quotes Lincoln as using this 
 same phrase, "white elephants," in reference to the Southern gentle- 
 men then languishing in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor (to which they 
 had been removed), and Nicolay and Hay insist that he saw the issue 
 correctly from the first. There are indications, however, that the idea 
 of backing down before British threats rankled in Lincoln's breast, and 
 that he was anxious to find some other solution. Charles Sumner proved 
 to be a wholesome influence at this time. As chairman of the Senate 
 Committee on Foreign Relations, Sumner had considerable claims to 
 Lincoln's confidence, and spent a part of nearly every day with him 
 discussing the Trent question. Sumner saw clearly the issues involved. 
 From the first he was for a peaceful settlement, not only because Eng- 
 land had justice on its side, but because he knew that a military con- 
 flict would sink his country in disaster. No American of the time 
 understood so well Englishmen and the English character. British lead- 
 ers like Cob den, John Bright, William E. Foster, the Duke of Argyle, 
 the Duchess of Sutherland, all devoted to the Northern cause, were 
 Sumner's close friends, and the letters interchanged through four years 
 of war form an indispensable part of the story of British-American 
 relations in that time. 
 
 In his almost daily talks with Lincoln, Sumner would read letters 
 from these correspondents. All pleaded with Sumner to use his influ- 
 ence to induce Lincoln to surrender the captives and thus ensure a 
 peaceful solution. The British aristocracy and governing classes — they 
 were practically identical — secretly desired war, they urged, and for 
 the United States to maintain an irreconcilable attitude would simply 
 play into their hands. Though Lincoln gladly listened to Sumner, he 
 was, as always, moving slowly, taking advice from all worth-while 
 sources, but not committing himself. In his message, sent to Congress 
 on December 1, the Trent affair was not even mentioned, greatly to 
 the disgust of British statesmen. Sumner, like Lincoln, was seeking a 
 way out that would not mean abject surrender, and the two men gave 
 much consideration to arbitration. Sumner was willing to go to any 
 extreme to avert war, but the President at first hesitated at complete 
 acquiescence in the British viewpoint. That influences other than Sew- 
 ard and Blair and Sumner were working to smooth the way to Ameri- 
 can acceptance of British terms was not known then, but is known 
 
206 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 today. When Seward obtained his first view of Lord John's note, de- 
 manding the surrender of Mason and Slidell, the agreeable tone in 
 which the message was framed gave him a pleasant surprise. Seward 
 "told me that he was pleased to find that the despatch was courteous 
 and friendly and not dictatorial or menacing," Lord Lyons wrote the 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs. Had Russell's original paper been handed 
 to the Secretary of State his satisfaction would not have been so pro- 
 nounced. That the Queen and the Prince Consort had edited this curt 
 ultimatum — for in its original form it was little less — cutting out the 
 harsh phrases and writing in more polite ones, leaving the general im- 
 plications the same yet transforming it into something that a proud 
 nation could accept without humiliation, did not become known until 
 long after the Trent had become part of history. 
 
 When the cabinet came together on Christmas Day, 1861, only Sew- 
 ard and Blair had taken a stand in favor of the British contention. It 
 required the better part of two days' discussion to obtain that una- 
 nimity of decision desirable in the solution of such a momentous prob- 
 lem. Not improbably this session was the most fateful held in the course 
 of the Civil War. The real issue hanging in the balance was the future 
 of the United States. A stark alternative confronted the council: re- 
 fusal to accept the British demand meant that, in addition to subduing 
 the South, American army and naval forces would be compelled to add 
 the British Empire to its foes. In all probability the French Empire 
 would have joined England in hostilities, as well, for Napoleon III had 
 from the beginning supported the British and it was no secret that the 
 dismemberment and paralyzing of American power was regarded in 
 the Tuileries as essential to the success of French imperial schemes in 
 Mexico. Edward Bates, whose Diary gives the best account, 5 sketchy 
 as it is, of this cabinet session, indicates that all seven members clearly 
 estimated the gravity of the occasion. "All of us were impressed with 
 the magnitude of the subject," wrote Bates, "and believed that upon 
 our decision depended the dearest interest, probably the existence of 
 the nation." Charles Sumner attended on Lincoln's invitation, armed 
 with the letters of Cobden and Bright which he read with due solem- 
 nity, and letters of Thurlow Weed, who was then in England as a kind 
 of Civil War Colonel House, also urging compliance, were laid before 
 the gathering. 
 
 Lord John Russell's letter to Seward, polite as was the phraseology, 
 admitted of nothing but a "yes" or "no" answer. It demanded the re- 
 turn of Mason and Slidell to British custody and an apology for the 
 insult to the British flag. In private instructions to Lord Lyons, Russell 
 
 5 Bates, op. cit., pp. 213-217. 
 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 207 
 
 had said that Britain would probably be "easy" about the apology, in 
 consideration of American sensitiveness. Seward's statement that Cap- 
 tain Wilkes had acted without instructions naturally made such an 
 apology superfluous; no nation could be reasonably expected to apolo- 
 gize for an offense it had not committed. After reading Russell's note, 
 Seward laid before his colleagues the reply which, shut up all alone 
 in his office, he had spent two days in preparing. It was a clever political 
 paper, and one of the most characteristic ones that ever came from 
 Seward's pen; it was written not primarily for the attention of Her 
 Majesty's law lords but for the ears of the American public. It was not 
 intended to be a document that would stand the closest analysis from 
 the standpoint of international law, but one that would show the man 
 in the street that he was not kowtowing to the British lion when he 
 gave up his unpopular guests. Seward's main contention was that en- 
 voys on a neutral ship, carrying dispatches, were contraband of war 
 and subject to seizure. Captain Wilkes therefore had been within his 
 rights in firing a shot across the bow of the Trent, boarding that vessel, 
 demanding her papers, and searching for forbidden materiel and per- 
 sonnel of war. Seward granted, however, that Wilkes had exceeded his 
 right when he forcibly removed the suspected envoys to an American 
 ship. He should have seized not only the "contraband" but the ship 
 itself, taken it into the nearest American port, and handed it over to a 
 prize court. That had always been the American practice, and Wilkes, in 
 disregarding it, and in adopting instead the British custom of violently 
 removing passengers from merchant vessels, had followed a procedure 
 which his government could not support. That is, in surrendering the 
 Southern envoys, the United States was observing principles for which 
 it had been contending for the best part of a century. "These principles 
 were laid down for us in 1804, by James Madison, when Secretary of 
 State in the administration of Thomas Jefferson, in instructions given 
 to James Monroe, our Minister to England." How could America re- 
 main true to its own doctrines and sustain Wilkes when he had violated 
 them? "The four persons," 6 concluded Seward, "in question are now 
 held in military custody at Fort Warren in the State of Massachusetts. 
 They will be cheerfully liberated. Your lordship will please indicate a 
 time and place for receiving them." 
 
 Adroit as Seward had shown himself to be in finding a way out of 
 this deadlock, his colleagues were slow to be convinced. To give way 
 to detested Albion, even when a pistol was pointed at Uncle Sam's 
 head, came hard. "There was a reluctance on the part of some of the 
 members of the cabinet — and even the President himself," notes Bates, 
 
 6 In addition to Mason and Slidell, their secretaries had been seized. 
 
208 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 "to acknowledge these obvious truths." An anecdote years afterward 
 related by Frederick W. Seward, son of the Secretary and his assistant 
 in the State Department, describes Lincoln's hesitation in more detail. 7 
 Though the cabinet discussed the matter from ten o'clock in the morn- 
 ing till two in the afternoon, no conclusion had been reached. It was 
 therefore decided to adjourn and meet the following morning. After 
 all the others had left the cabinet room, Lincoln and Seward found 
 themselves alone. "You will go on, of course," Lincoln said to Seward, 
 "preparing your answer, which, as I understand it, will state the reasons 
 why they ought to be given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at 
 stating the reasons why they ought not to be given up. We will com- 
 pare the points on each side." Lincoln did formulate such an argument 
 and it is now preserved among his papers. In it he approached the plan 
 of arbitration — in this doubtless showing the influence of Charles Sum- 
 ner, who had been at his elbow for several weeks pressing this solution. 
 When the cabinet reconvened the next morning, however, Lincoln did 
 not present his thesis. All seven men now accepted Seward's answer. 
 After the cabinet broke up, Lincoln and Seward again held a private 
 session. Seward referred to their talk of the day before. "You thought 
 you might frame an argument for the other side?" Lincoln smiled and 
 shook his head. "I found that I could not make an argument that would 
 satisfy my own mind," he said. "That proved to me that your ground 
 was the right one." 
 
 7 Seward's Seward, III, 25-26. 
 
Th 
 
 HE TRENT EPISODE made clear that Seward had other re- 
 sources of diplomacy than menacing threats against the most powerful 
 nations of Europe. Perhaps his skillful behavior when confronted with 
 the contingency he had apparently so long hoped for sheds a new light 
 upon the motives which had inspired these explosive moments. Sew- 
 ard's great responsibility, as Secretary of State, was to prevent the 
 recognition of the Confederacy by Great Britain and France. Such 
 recognition, he believed — and most students of the period agree with 
 him — would have resulted in a Confederate triumph. There is little 
 question that Great Britain would have extended this friendly welcome 
 to Jefferson Davis, except for one thing. That was fear of war with the 
 United States. To fight such a war successfully, England would have 
 had to dispatch practically her entire fleet to American waters, and in 
 the tense situation prevailing at that time in Europe, this was too dan- 
 gerous a hazard to risk. Seward perceived this last from the outset, and 
 his genius as a diplomat consists in the ability with which he utilized it 
 as the one possible way of forestalling British intervention. From this 
 point of view his denunciation of England at private dinner parties in 
 the secession winter of 1860-1861, and his declaration of war in case the 
 Palmerston government meddled in American concerns, assume a new 
 importance. 
 
 If we seek the real secret of Seward's diplomacy, we may safely 
 ignore the many learned studies of which it has been the subject and 
 turn to the estimate of one who was certainly no friend — his facile 
 antagonist, Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State in the Confederate 
 cabinet. "The most surprising infatuation of modern times," wrote 
 Benjamin to John Slidell, the Confederate commissioner who had spent 
 nearly two years at the Court of Napoleon III, attempting to entice 
 that monarch into the recognition of the seceded states, "is the thor- 
 ough conviction entertained by the British ministry that the United 
 States are ready to declare war against England, and it is impossible 
 not to admire the sagacity with which Mr. Seward penetrated into the 
 
210 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 secret feelings of the British cabinet and the success of his policy of 
 intimidation, which the world at large supposed would be met with 
 prompt resentment, but which he, with deeper insight into the real 
 policy of that cabinet, foresaw would be followed by submissive 
 acquiescence in his demands." Here is a complete explanation both of 
 Seward's methods in foreign relations and of his accomplishments. He 
 succeeded in preventing the recognition of the South by the great 
 European powers, not because he was a master of international law — 
 a field in which Seward was deficient — but because he was a master of 
 human nature. It was his lively imagination, his insight into the minds 
 of his fellows, his artist's skill in playing upon their weaknesses and 
 their apprehensions, his knowledge of the precise moments when to 
 threaten and when to conciliate, that enabled him for four years to 
 keep his country safe from European aggression. Seward could do this 
 because, to him, diplomacy was fundamentally not a matter of proto- 
 cols, precedents, and treaties, but the underlying motives and purposes 
 of men. Of the former he knew little, but the latter had been a lifetime 
 study. This gift, in the hurly-burly of American practical politics, had 
 lifted the Secretary from the obscurity of a small New York village 
 almost to the White House, and he found it equally useful in dealing 
 with the foremost statesmen of Europe. 
 
 The bad reputation which Seward enjoyed in Europe in itself proved 
 to be an invaluable asset. In England no American, possibly excepting 
 Charles Sumner, was so well known. Any American who wins fame 
 as an enemy of the British Empire is more likely to acquire notoriety 
 in England than one who achieves high place in literature, science, art, 
 or even statesmanship. And Seward meant to British statesmen the 
 pre-eminent American jingo. American destiny, in the conviction to 
 which he frequently gave expression, was to become mistress of the 
 entire North American Continent, from the Arctic to Panama. The 
 existence of Canada, as a dependency of the British Empire, he looked 
 upon as little better than a standing insult. His opinions of the several 
 sovereignties of Europe had had free circulation in the countries most 
 concerned. "The monarchs of Europe are to have no rest while they 
 have a colony remaining on this continent," he declared as far back as 
 1846. He described Napoleon III as "the sickly successor of the Ro- 
 mans"; the French Empire was "a hateful usurpation"; and he de- 
 nounced the "treachery by which Louis Napoleon rose to a throne on 
 the ruins of the Republic." The United States, he said, "is, and forever 
 must be, a living offense to Russia and to Austria, and all despotic gov- 
 ernments. You will never, by whatever humiliations, gain one friend 
 or secure one ally in Europe or America that wears a crown." The 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 211 
 
 man's choicest bits of malediction, however, were reserved for Great 
 Britain. The British Empire, in his view, was "the greatest, the most 
 grasping and the most rapacious in the world." "Without a war on our 
 part, Great Britain will wisely withdraw and disappear from this hemi- 
 sphere within a century — at least within a half-century." 
 
 This kind of talk may not have been admirable or statesmanlike, but 
 it profoundly affected Civil War diplomacy. The correspondence of 
 Lord Lyons, British Minister at Washington, indicates the apprehen- 
 sion which Seward's advent as Secretary of State caused in England. 
 He could not help fearing, Lyons wrote Russell, that "Mr. Seward will 
 be a dangerous Foreign Minister," and his anxiety was confirmed when, 
 at a formal dinner party at the British Legation on March 25, the new 
 Secretary began to lay down the law to all the foreign representatives 
 present — not only the British Minister, but the French, Russian, and 
 other distinguished emissaries. "Mr. Seward," Lord Lyons wrote his 
 chief, "went off into a defiance of foreign nations, in a style of bragga- 
 docio which was formerly not uncommon with him, but which I had 
 not heard from him since he had been in office." At times the Secretary 
 of State used more subtle methods of threat. Thus on April 8, 1861, he 
 sent for William H. Russell, correspondent of the London Times, and 
 amid huge clouds of tobacco smoke entertained his guest by confiden- 
 tially reading a dispatch which he was about to send to Charles Francis 
 Adams, recently arrived American Minister in London. Russell ex- 
 pressed his misgivings at the menacing attitude towards Great Britain 
 which Mr. Adams was instructed to adopt. Naturally, Russell dutifully 
 reported the details to the British Minister, as Seward knew he would; 
 that was the reason he had taken him into his confidence. He could not 
 directly lay his dispatch to Mr. Adams before the British envoy, but 
 this roundabout method served the purpose just as effectively. 
 
 Mad as all this seems, there was method in it; the one idea which 
 Seward was determined to implant in the minds of British and French 
 statesmen was that the recognition of the Confederacy would spell war 
 with the United States. He did not insinuate this as the certain outcome, 
 but framed it in the most outspoken language. Mercier, the French 
 Minister in Washington, who was an unabashed champion of the South 
 and an advocate of recognition, in a long talk with the Secretary of 
 State in October 1861 expressed his well-known views that separation 
 of North and South was inevitable, and rather impudently added that 
 he had advised Thouvenel, Napoleon's Foreign Secretary, to recognize 
 Southern independence. The United States, Seward snapped back, 
 would declare war on any power that took this step. It was possible 
 that, in such a conflict, the United States might suffer defeat, "but 
 
212 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 France," he said, "will know that there has been a war." Over and over 
 again he instructed Adams to inform Russell that, if Great Britain rec- 
 ognized the Confederacy, she should at once make plans to become its 
 ally, for the Queen would find herself at war. In August 1862, there 
 were signs in plenty that Earl Russell, goaded by Gladstone, was con- 
 templating this fatal step. McClellan's reverses in the Peninsula had 
 persuaded that statesman of the utter hopelessness of the Union cause. 
 Minister Adams was instructed, on August 16, that if Britain took any 
 step that indicated an intention "to dictate, or to mediate, or even to 
 solicit or persuade, you will answer that you are forbidden to debate, 
 to hear, or in any way receive, entertain, or transmit, any communica- 
 tion of the kind." If the South were "acknowledged" Adams was 
 "immediately to suspend his function." "You will perceive," Seward 
 concluded, "that we have approached the contemplation of that crisis 
 with the caution which great reluctance has inspired. But I trust that 
 you will also have perceived that the crisis has not appalled us." 
 
 Whatever may have been the shortcomings of Seward as a diplomat, 
 he had one virtue, whose value in that evasive profession has been rec- 
 ognized only in modern times. He spoke in the plainest of terms; his 
 correspondence was, indeed, "shirt sleeves" diplomacy at its best. Mr. 
 Judah P. Benjamin, in words quoted above, gives Seward praise for 
 "penetrating into the secret feelings of the British cabinet" and fore- 
 seeing that this "policy of intimidation" would be successful. For the 
 historic fact is that, though Lord Lyons and Lord John Russell were 
 accustomed to refer to these challenges as "bluster" — the word "bluff" 
 had not acquired diplomatic standing — they were really disturbed. 
 They believed in their hearts that Seward desired a European war as a 
 way out of the nation's domestic difficulties. Lyons warned that such 
 a war would be a serious matter for Great Britain. England would have 
 to send the "largest possible naval force and bring the war to an end 
 before the United States could prepare." Otherwise, "the spirit, the 
 energy and the resources of this people would be difficult to overcome." 
 In identical dispatches to Adams in London and Dayton in Paris, dated 
 July 28, 1862, Seward set forth the reasons why war was the last thing 
 Britain desired. The United States, he wrote, relied "upon the practice 
 of justice and respect for our sovereignty for foreign nations"; but "it 
 is not necessary for me to say that if this reliance fails, this civil war 
 will, without our fault, become a war of continents — a war of the 
 world." The calamity that finally afflicted the world in 1914 would, 
 according to Seward's reading of world politics, have descended upon 
 it during the American Civil War. This was the contingency that 
 British statesmen foresaw and feared, in case they meddled in American 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 213 
 
 affairs. That such a European conflict might have incalculable, perhaps 
 fatal consequences for the British Empire needs no demonstration. 
 
 If this was a bluff it was a magnificent one, and it was justified by 
 success. Palmerston himself succinctly, if colloquially, summed up Brit- 
 ish policy when a delegation of British clergymen, noblemen, Members 
 of Parliament, and other distinguished gentlemen called upon him, in 
 July 1864, to urge mediation. "They who in quarrels interpose, Will 
 often wipe a bloody nose," he reminded his visitors — "a quotation 
 which," commented the Index, the pro-Confederate weekly published 
 in London, "in the mouth of the Prime Minister of the British Empire, 
 and on such an occasion, must be admitted as not unworthy of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln himself." 
 
 Of all Seward's threats, his masterpiece was delivered in 1863, when 
 the so-called "rams," under construction by the Lairds of Liverpool as 
 Confederate raiders, were nearing completion. The Alabama, secretly 
 built by the same firm a year before, was wreaking vast destruction at 
 that time on American merchant shipping. These new ships were much 
 more powerful, and should they be permitted to "escape" from the 
 Liverpool docks, in the manner of the Alabama, the American flag 
 would have vanished from the seas. Charles Francis Adams, under in- 
 structions from Seward, had been bringing pressure for months on 
 Lord John Russell, presenting unmistakable evidence that the ships 
 were Confederate property and demanding their detention by the 
 British government. Mr. Adams, in September 1862, presented his pro- 
 test, concluding an eloquent state paper with the famous words that if 
 the rams became part of the Confederate navy, "it would be superfluous 
 in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." This declaration, 
 and the apparent British backdown in face of it, have become one of 
 the legends of the Civil War. The fact is that Russell, five days before 
 this menacing note was received, had ordered the seizure of the ships, 
 had stationed British war vessels in Liverpool Harbor to prevent their 
 escape - with orders to sink them, if the attempt were made - and, 
 soon after, purchased them and made them part of the British Navy. 
 It was not Adams's threat, but the more subtle maneuvering of Seward 
 that had persuaded the British government to change its policy. 
 
 In July 1862, a bill was introduced in Congress authorizing the 
 President to issue letters of marque and reprisal — that is, to commission 
 "privateers" — as a kind of "militia of the sea" to prey upon enemy 
 commerce, just as Confederate "corsairs" were attacking Federal ships. 
 There was only one defect in this otherwise desirable measure: the 
 South had no merchant marine, and therefore there were no Southern 
 ships to attack. Because of this absurdity, the bill was pigeonholed by 
 
214 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 both House and Senate, and lay unnoticed and unacted upon in com- 
 mittee until February 1863. Then Congress, prompted by Seward, took 
 up the measure and quickly passed it, with little debate. When Charles 
 Sumner, in the Senate, objected to the bill as senseless, since the South 
 had no mercantile marine, Senator Grimes, who had the measure in 
 charge, replied that that was true, but added that the administration 
 desired the legislation to use "if need arose" and hinted that privateers 
 might be useful against British ships that had "turned Confederate." 
 While there was much puzzlement in the United States, and while 
 Seward, in his statements to Lord Lyons and his instructions to Adams, 
 was rather vague, in one quarter no doubt prevailed as to the value of 
 the measure at this critical moment. British shipping interests quickly 
 grasped its meaning. So did Palmerston and Russell. Both these states- 
 men had been in public life in 1815; Palmerston, indeed, had then held 
 a minor post in the Liverpool government; and both had vivid memo- 
 ries of the terrible devastation American privateers had visited on the 
 British mercantile marine at that time. They wanted no repetition of 
 that experience. A vast array of British merchant ships, during the Civil 
 War, plied between home ports and the Confederacy, bringing muni- 
 tions and other necessaries to the struggling South and transporting 
 back most marketable cargoes of cotton, tobacco, and other Southern 
 products. They had to take the chance of seizure, of course, but block- 
 ade running, despite many captures, proved to be a most profitable risk. 
 A cordon of privateers placed out at sea, so numerous that few vessels 
 could escape, would be a different matter. According to American law 
 — for the United States was not a party to the Declaration of London, 
 outlawing such procedures — enemy property in neutral ships was 
 legally subject to attack and confiscation. That such a "flood of pri- 
 vateers" operating against British ships would incite war was evident. 
 In a word, the privateering bill was Seward's reply to the construction 
 of Confederate commerce destroyers in British shipyards. It is the opin- 
 ion of Ephraim D. Adams, the classic authority on British-American 
 relations in the Civil War, that Seward's insinuating use of this recourse 
 was the argument that induced the British government to seize the 
 Laird rams and to end, for good and all, the use of British shipyards to 
 do what the Confederacy was unable to do by itself — construct a 
 navy. 1 
 
 In addition to knowing when to threaten, when to bluster, when to 
 prod, to hint, to instill suspicions and fears, Seward had another gift 
 equally serviceable in diplomacy. He knew when to conciliate and 
 
 x For a complete and interesting account of the whole matter, see Adams, 
 Ephraim D., op. cit. II. Ch. XIII. 
 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD: "PRIME MINISTER" 215 
 
 when, without any loss in dignity, to yield. He made use of this talent 
 most effectively, perhaps, in the case of the Trent. But he displayed 
 it with equal patience and skill in his treatment of France. Napoleon 
 III had taken advantage of the domestic difficulties in the United States 
 to extend his imperialistic system to Mexico. He had dispatched a 
 French army overseas, invaded the southern republic, seized its capital, 
 overturned its government, and on its ruins set up a puppet regime, 
 installing Maximilian of Austria as emperor. A more complete defiance 
 of the Monroe Doctrine could not be imagined. One would hardly 
 have supposed that a jingo American like Seward, the well-advertised 
 enemy of European monarchism, would hesitate long in applying the 
 appropriate remedy. Yet this "blustering" diplomat filed no formal 
 protest, for a protest, if disregarded, would almost necessarily mean 
 war. Instead, with the use of those pointed, yet unprovocative phrases 
 of which he was such a master, he conveyed to Napoleon his disap- 
 proval of this aggression, and informed him that, when home affairs 
 had quieted down, Mexico would receive the undivided attention of 
 the United States. Most Americans at the time regarded his Mexican 
 diplomacy as disgraceful and pusillanimous. The House of Representa- 
 tives passed a resolution denouncing it, unanimously declaring the 
 establishment of a monarchy by a European power in this continent as 
 contravening American policy. Seward's "cowardice" in the face of 
 Napoleon's encroachment was a leading item in the attacks made upon 
 him all through the war. The newspapers flamed with angry editorials; 
 the Democratic platforms bristled with unflattering adjectives when 
 they touched on the Mexican question. Many intelligent and undemon- 
 strative Americans held similar views. Even John Bigelow, in Paris, 
 who succeeded Dayton as minister in 1864, wrote Seward that a more 
 positive attitude would accomplish results. "I think," Seward answered 
 Bigelow in an unofficial letter, "with deference to your opinion, which 
 I always hold in great respect, that, with our land and naval forces in 
 Louisiana retreating before the rebels instead of marching toward 
 Mexico, this is not the most suitable time we could choose for offering 
 idle menaces to the emperor of France. We have compromised nothing, 
 surrendered nothing, and I do not propose to surrender anything. But 
 why should we gasconade about Mexico when we are in a struggle 
 for our own life?" 
 
 Soon after Lee's surrender, however, Seward's warnings took on a 
 definite tone. The Maximilian enterprise, he now informed the French 
 Foreign Office, fundamentally antagonized American policy on this 
 continent; the United States had never recognized the new Mexican 
 Empire, and had no intention of ever recognizing it. In December he 
 
216 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 instructed Bigelow to inform the French Emperor that his behavior in 
 overthrowing the Mexican Republic and setting up a puppet regime 
 endangered the friendship that had so long prevailed between France 
 and the United States. Gently as this was expressed, it amounted to 
 a threat. It gave France the choice of withdrawing its forces from 
 Mexico, or crossing swords with the large and well-trained American 
 Army which General Grant had stationed along the Mexican border, 
 and which was now free to concentrate its undivided efforts upon a 
 new problem. In April 1866, France officially announced its plans for 
 withdrawing from Mexico — plans which, after a little delay, it carried 
 out, leaving Maximilian to his tragic fate at the hands of a Mexican 
 firing squad. The nation can never be too grateful to Seward for not 
 plunging the country into war with the greatest military power of 
 Europe at a time when all its strength was needed in the domestic 
 struggle, and for preventing this without sacrifice of principle or honor. 
 Seward would have fought France at once if it had recognized the 
 Confederacy, for in that event immediate action would be demanded; 
 the invasion of Mexico, however, presented an issue which could be 
 postponed to a more favorable time. 
 
 Thus, mistaken as was Seward's policy frequently in domestic mat- 
 ters, he was a great foreign secretary — many believe the greatest who 
 had ever headed the Department of State. 
 
BOOK THREE 
 
 jj Exit Cameron; Enter Stanton | 
 
I 
 
 D, 
 
 OMESTIC as well as foreign complications were disturbing the 
 Lincoln cabinet in this critical December of 1861. Lord Palmerston, 
 "Johnny" Russell, and Mason and Slidell were not the only public 
 characters who were making that an arduous Christmas season for the 
 President. Another disturber of the peace, much nearer home, was 
 consuming that part of Lincoln's time which was not devoted to foreign 
 problems. The selection of Simon Cameron for Secretary of War rep- 
 resented one of the compromises the President was frequently com- 
 pelled to make in his effort to weld together a solid, compact party 
 organization for fighting the war. That the result would be disastrous 
 had been the popular expectation and in this foreboding Lincoln him- 
 self had joined. Events quickly justified the worst apprehensions. 
 Probably the ablest, most conscientious conduct of the department 
 would not have satisfied the American public in the first hysterical 
 months of war. With practically no regular army, with a militia system 
 unprepared and largely in the hands of politicians, with virtually no 
 arms or war supplies and only the most rudimentary facilities for pro- 
 ducing them, with a public ignorant of the proportions of the task it 
 had assumed, yet loudly clamoring for immediate results, the greatest 
 war minister in history would have proved inadequate. But the charges 
 that soon began accumulating against Cameron concerned other things 
 than failure to measure up intellectually to his post. That, under Cam- 
 eron, the War Department would degenerate into a political machine, 
 abounding in graft and corruption, had been generally predicted, and 
 this gloomy forecast Cameron, almost with malice prepense, immedi- 
 ately proceeded to vindicate. 
 
 Alexander K. McClure, Philadelphia editor and politician, relates 
 one anecdote in his recollections of Cameron that gives the perfect key 
 to the man's character. As to his purely strategic candidacy for the 
 presidential nomination of 1860, "Cameron himself believed, in after 
 years, that he could have been nominated and elected if he had been 
 heartily pressed by Pennsylvania. He many times chided me for refus- 
 
220 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ing to give him earnest support, saying that he could have been made 
 a successful candidate, and then, to use his own expressive language, 
 'We could have had everything we wanted.' " 1 Though the War De- 
 partment, in normal times, was not exactly a spoilsman's paradise, the 
 sudden turn of history in 1861 transformed it into a sumptuous field. 
 The duty of organizing soldiers by the hundreds of thousands, pur- 
 chasing their food, their transportation, their supplies, their tents, 
 clothing, blankets, horses, their arms, opened up a dazzling prospect. 
 The selection of officers became as much a matter of political patronage 
 as the expenditure of millions in money. Cameron's associates in the 
 cabinet suffered no illusions as to the spirit in which he would approach 
 this problem. "When the Chicago nomination was made," wrote 
 Gideon Welles, 2 "the question with him was, how and in what way 
 was Cameron to be benefitted?" The Pennsylvanians who protested his 
 selection insisted that the office would be used to build up an impreg- 
 nable political machine. This is precisely what the Secretary pro- 
 ceeded to do. His chief henchmen in Pennsylvania were Alexander 
 Cummings and John Sanderson. In the Chicago Convention these 
 were the agents who traded the Pennsylvania delegation — which they 
 did not control — to Lincoln, on the promise of David Davis of a seat 
 for Cameron in the cabinet. Cameron, on assuming the War Depart- 
 ment, immediately gave to Sanderson his most important office — that 
 of chief clerk, which, as there was no Assistant Secretary at the time, 
 made him second man in the department. The other lieutenant, Cum- 
 mings, was made purchasing agent of army supplies at New York. 
 When Cameron began his labors, the War Office contained only five 
 appointees from Pennsylvania; in short order, by the decapitation of 
 existing incumbents, the proportion had increased to twenty-seven — 
 all selected from political motives. 
 
 Other favors granted to Pennsylvania Republicans of the Cameron 
 school occasioned widespread criticism. Simon Stevens, a Cameronian 
 in high standing, early figured in the celebrated saga of the Hall car- 
 bines, arms which the War Department first sold as almost worthless 
 at two dollars each and then, in April and May, purchased back for 
 twenty-two dollars. No one questioned the abilities of Thomas A. 
 Scott, another Pennsylvanian, whom Cameron appointed Assistant 
 Secretary of War in August 1861, after Congress had passed a law 
 creating the position, but the fact that he continued his post as vice- 
 president of the Pennsylvania Railroad — without salary, it is true — 
 
 1 McClure, op. cit., p. 153. 
 
 2 Welles, Gideon, Narrative of Events. Published in the Magazine of History, 
 1925. Extra number 105, Vol. XXVII. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 221 
 
 a corporation with which he was constantly making contracts for trans- 
 porting troops and supplies, caused much criticism. The charges exacted 
 for moving soldiers — two cents a mile in boxcars - seemed excessive. 
 The awarding of contracts to middlemen, the greater number of whom 
 derived from Pennsylvania, was looked upon as another Cameronian 
 method of rewarding friends, paying political debts, and reinforcing 
 the machine. The number of commissions awarded to Pennsylvania 
 politicians became a matter of current jest. "No wonder Pennsylvania 
 has so few privates in the army," a scornful Congressman declared, 
 "since she furnishes so many officers." John Tucker, still another Penn- 
 sylvanian, was placed by Cameron in charge of water transportation, 
 although he had never operated a vessel in his life; the excessive prices 
 paid for water craft for this purpose made entertaining newspaper 
 copy. In view of the political partnership between himself and Thur- 
 low Weed - a partnership to which Cameron in large degree owed his 
 cabinet appointment - the appearance of that politician's name in the 
 government's reports on frauds caused no surprise. Weed early par- 
 ticipated as middleman in the purchase of vessels for Cameron's depart- 
 ment. The case of the Cataline loomed large in these investigations. 
 Weed himself was one of the four men who purchased - with notes - 
 this wheezy veteran of the deep for $18,000, then chartered it to Uncle 
 Sam for three months at $10,000 a month, with a guarantee of $50,000 
 in case it should sink. One of the cargoes of "supplies" loaded on the 
 Cataline — purchased by a clerk recommended by Weed — proved as 
 picturesque as the ship itself: it consisted of straw hats, linen panta- 
 loons, pickles, and other articles not found in any army ration list. 
 That Weed had also succeeded in collecting a 5 per cent commission 
 on powder sold to the War Department was asserted by a congressional 
 committee. 
 
 There is no intention of rehearsing in this place the long story of 
 jobbery and corruption in the War Department under the regime of 
 Simon Cameron. Material on the subject is certainly not lacking. All 
 substantial American libraries have reposing on their shelves today the 
 bulky volume containing about three thousand pages of testimony 
 which Congress published in 1862. It offers an abundant storehouse to 
 which researchers into the seamy aspects of democratic government, 
 especially in wartime, have frequently gone for enlightenment. In 
 December of 1861 and the early months of 1862, Congress rang with 
 fiery speeches picturing the excesses of Cameron's department. There 
 was "indubitable evidence," said Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, 
 "that somebody has plundered the public treasury in a single year as 
 much as the entire yearly expenses of the government, which the peo- 
 
222 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 pie hurled from power because of its corruption" — meaning the Bu- 
 chanan administration. The army had its regular officers, stationed at 
 all important points, for the purchase of supplies; despite this, Cam- 
 eron appointed favored gentlemen from civil life to do the work. Such 
 appointees, of course, were politicians and speculators, who obtained 
 contracts without public bidding, invariably in lines of business in 
 which they had no experience. These contracts, in turn, they would 
 sell — pocketing fat profit in every case — to dealers who actually pro- 
 vided the goods. Of such transactions, the ones that most shocked the 
 public were those for the purchase of horses. Horse breeders and 
 traders did not get the original contracts; these were awarded to po- 
 litical middlemen, who sublet them to professional traders. The specu- 
 lators made handsome profits, but the army frequently got very poor 
 horses. Out of a thousand animals purchased for a cavalry regiment 
 in Louisville, 485 were discarded as diseased and worthless — blind, 
 spavined, ringboned, afflicted with heaves and glanders. These unhappy 
 creatures cost Mr. Cameron's department $58,200, and $10,000 for 
 transportation, and they were fit only for the boneyard. "Many of 
 the horses that were sent back," said Mr. Dawes, "have been tied to 
 posts and to trees within the District of Columbia and left there to 
 starve to death. A guide can take you around the District of Columbia 
 today to hundreds of carcasses of horses chained to trees where they 
 have pined away, living on bark till they starve and die." Horse con- 
 tracts became so plentiful in the District of Columbia that they cir- 
 culated as a kind of currency, and were used to pay political debts and 
 heal political feuds. 
 
 In the distribution of such contracts, Cameron again displayed his 
 fondness for Pennsylvanians. One thousand horses were purchased at 
 extravagant prices at Huntingdon, in that state, one third of which 
 proved to be such sad representatives of a noble beast that the people 
 in the town protested against the transaction. Kentucky, no mean 
 judge of horseflesh and a considerable producer, expressed justifiable 
 rage when several of its cavalry regiments were equipped with an in- 
 ferior breed transported at great expense from the Keystone State. In 
 late October, more than eight thousand horses were eating vast quan- 
 tities of forage and rendering no military service, for there were no 
 men to mount them. Similar details could be given — and were given in 
 the government report mentioned above — of the purchase of guns, 
 pistols, ammunition, uniforms, and the thousands of things needed to 
 equip an army. Cameron favored Pennsylvania, and interfered with the 
 war in another way. All through his career as Senator, as noted in a 
 preceding chapter, he had shown interest in only one public question — 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 223 
 
 the protective tariff. In the early days of the war, he steadfastly refused 
 to enter the European market for the purchase of arms and ammunition. 
 He opposed patronizing any but home industries. That his "home in- 
 dustries" were not yet equipped to turn out munitions in the quantity 
 needed, and would not be for a considerable time, did not matter. Had 
 he at once sent agents to England and France to acquire these essential 
 materials, two ends would have been served: the Federal army would 
 have been properly furnished, and the guns would not have been ac- 
 quired, as they were, by the Confederates. When Cameron finally 
 woke up and began scouring the European field, prices, because of 
 these Southern purchases, had reached a high figure, and in many cases 
 arms could not be acquired at any price, for the agents of Jefferson 
 Davis had cornered the supply. 
 
 If one were seeking the way a war department should not be run, 
 especially in a time of national crisis, no better model could be found 
 than the work of Simon Cameron in the first six months of the Civil 
 War. The sad military history of those early months did not enhance 
 his standing with an outraged American public. An angry press un- 
 doubtedly exaggerated his misdeeds when it held his loose and corrupt 
 administration responsible for Bull Run and Ball's Bluff. Cameron, 
 however, early perceived that Lincoln would not long tolerate his 
 presence in an administration to which he was daily bringing discredit. 
 By early summer it became apparent, especially to Cameron's ob- 
 servant eye, that his departure from Washington was inevitable. He 
 had no intention of surrendering his post without a struggle. The ener- 
 getic and ruthless reformation of his department might have saved his 
 head. Had Cameron thrown out all the politicians and installed a new 
 and effective regime the public would probably have overlooked these 
 early excesses as the mistakes and the inevitable consequences of sud- 
 denly transferring a peaceful nation to a state of war. Such a simple 
 solution of his problem, however, did not accord with Cameron's 
 genius. He began to look for succor in the crisis, every day growing 
 more intense, between himself and Lincoln. He found powerful support 
 in the most unexpected quarters. In the early days of the cabinet, Cam- 
 eron worked in close sympathy with Seward. The New Yorker, as al- 
 ready made clear, had promoted Cameron's appointment as essential to 
 his plans, formed immediately after Lincoln's election for control of the 
 administration. In April and May of '61, Cameron had fulfilled Sew- 
 ard's fondest expectations. In the Sumter business he had acted as Sew- 
 ard's close ally. He undoubtedly used his position to bring General 
 Scott under Seward's wing. With Scott's — and Seward's — proposal to 
 surrender not only Fort Sumter, but Fort Pickens, to the Confederates, 
 
224 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Cameron was in cordial agreement. The Secretary of War, though 
 his department was the one most intimately concerned, did not attend 
 the cabinet meeting called to consider that monstrous proposal. The 
 probability is that he was absent by design; he did not wish to go on 
 record as favoring this surrender, for that would have displeased Lin- 
 coln, who had already manifested his anger with Scott's recommenda- 
 tion; on the other hand, he did not wish to oppose it, for that would 
 have been an unfriendly act toward Seward, in all likelihood the pro- 
 ponent of the plan, and working hard at least for the abandonment of 
 Sumter. So, true to his political instinct, Cameron refrained from at- 
 tending the session and made no response to Lincoln's request for his 
 written opinion — in itself an act of insubordination. 
 
 Up to this time, therefore, and for a period afterward, Cameron ful- 
 filled Seward's expectation, and stood loyally at his side. Cameron's 
 nature, however, did not entirely lack pride, and his fiery Scotch spirit 
 soon began to resent his colleague's increasing encroachment on his de- 
 partment. Seward's assumption that he was Secretary of War as well 
 as Secretary of State was so unconcealed that it became a joking mat- 
 ter in the cabinet itself. The question of dispatching General Butler 
 to the Virginia front came up in a meeting of Chase, Cameron, and 
 Seward. Chase, ordinarily not given to banter, said, "Well, let's leave 
 Seward to order him off at once." 3 Cameron joined in the laughter at 
 the sally, but it depicted a state of affairs in his office that was no longer 
 to his taste. Seward's letters disclose his belief that he was the real head 
 of the army — and, in fact, of the navy as well. "I am consulting with 
 the cabinet one hour," he wrote Mrs. Seward, "with the army officers 
 the next, and with the navy next, and I visit all troops as fast as they 
 come." Cameron did not participate in counsels on military plans and 
 the disposition of the forces, but Seward was invariably at the center 
 of things. Seward, wrote Gideon Welles in his "Narrative of Events," 
 now in the Library of Congress, 4 "seemed to consider the war depart- 
 ment a mere appendage to that of the State and freely issued orders, 
 projected and sent out expeditions and did some extraordinary things, 
 which, if to be done at all, should have been by the administration and 
 properly belonged to the secretary of war." Cameron resented in vio- 
 lent language the Fort Pickens undertaking, organized by Seward and 
 kept secret even from the War Department, and threatened to have 
 Colonel Meigs, whom Seward had put in charge, court-martialed for 
 absence without leave and misappropriation of government funds. In 
 the early days Seward continued to keep control of the War Depart- 
 
 3 Warden, op. cit., p. 401. 
 
 4 It was published in the American Historical Review, XXXI, 492. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 225 
 
 ment through General Scott, now so senile and weakened by dropsy 
 that he could not walk and had to be carried by orderlies from his car- 
 riage to his office. Scott's unhappy advice on the surrender of Fort 
 Pickens had ended his influence with Lincoln, and the battle of Bull 
 Run had made him most unpopular — perhaps unjustly — with the 
 public. 
 
 Seward, with that versatility in switching allegiances for which he 
 was famous, now turned to the rising sun and attached himself to the 
 "young Napoleon," the brilliant, handsome McClellan whom Lincoln 
 had brought from the West and put at the head of the Army of the 
 Potomac. McClellan, like Scott and most other leaders of that early 
 day, regarded Seward, and not Lincoln, as head of administration, and 
 for a time the Secretary of State and the commanding general were 
 almost inseparable. The situation came to a crisis in a meeting in Gen- 
 eral Scott's office in early October, 1861. An important matter came 
 up: How many troops were then stationed near Washington? Cam- 
 eron was unable to answer the question. General McClellan gave no 
 information. General Scott said that no reports had been made to him. 
 The President, who was present, seemed vexed and disturbed at this 
 lack of essential knowledge in responsible quarters, but Seward came 
 to the rescue. Drawing from his pocket a slip of paper, he read off 
 figures showing the size of the army at that moment, and gave details 
 of the regiments that had reported in the last few days. McClellan, ap- 
 pealed to, said that Seward's information was correct. General Scott 
 turned to the President in disgust and anger. "This," he said, "is a re- 
 markable state of things. I am in command of the armies of the United 
 States, but have been wholly unable to get any reports, any statement 
 of the actual forces; but here is the Secretary of State, a civilian for 
 whom I have great respect, but who is not a military man nor con- 
 versant with military affairs, though his abilities are great, but this 
 civilian is possessed of facts which are withheld from me. Military re- 
 ports are made, not to these headquarters, but to the state department. 
 Am I, Mr. President, to apply to the Secretary of State for the neces- 
 sary military information to discharge my duties?" Seward explained 
 that he had pieced together these statistics by keeping track of the 
 regiments as they arrived, but Scott and the others believed that 
 McClellan was his real source of knowledge. "Your labors are very 
 arduous," Scott said to Seward, "but I did not before know the whole 
 of them. If you in that way can get accurate information, the Rebels 
 can also, though I cannot." Then the old veteran turned to McClellan 
 in restrained but magnificent fury. "You were called here," he said, 
 "by my advice. The times require vigilance and activity. I am not 
 
226 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 active and never shall be again. When I proposed that you should come 
 here to aid, not supersede me, you had my friendship and confidence. 
 You still have my confidence." 5 
 
 That Cameron should resent this state of affairs was inevitable. His 
 anger assumed a guise that was especially offensive to Seward. Cam- 
 eron gradually transferred his somewhat doubtful affections to Sew- 
 ard's chief rival in the cabinet, Salmon Portland Chase. On personal 
 grounds such an alliance was incompatible; in making the austere, 
 self-righteous head of the Treasury his cabinet confidant, however, 
 the shrewd Cameron acted on other than personal grounds. He had 
 been looking for an issue that would divert public attention from the 
 scandals in the War Department, and seeking friends who would be 
 useful in thwarting Lincoln's well-known intention to drop him over- 
 board. Certain early developments of the Civil War had not escaped 
 Cameron's observation. Hostilities had hardly begun when the Re- 
 publicans split into two camps on the slavery question. On one side 
 stood the "radicals," headed by such leaders as Charles Sumner, Zach- 
 ariah Chandler, William P. Fessenden, and Benjamin Wade, proclaim- 
 ing as the chief purpose of the war the extirpation of slavery. On the 
 other hand were the moderates, of whom, of course, Lincoln was chief, 
 who insisted on the preservation of the Union as the main objective. 
 The contention between these two groups, which was to split the party 
 in two for the next ten years and reach an explosive state in the ad- 
 ministration of Andrew Johnson, began as soon as the Confederate guns 
 had silenced Fort Sumter. Certain happenings in the early military op- 
 erations brought the question to notice in a practical way. When 
 Northern armies began to advance into slave states — especially in Vir- 
 ginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri — considerable num- 
 bers of slaves would flee their ancient bondage and enter the Federal 
 lines. 
 
 What disposition was to be made of these black refugees? Should 
 they be retained in the Northern armies and set to work in ways in 
 which they could most usefully promote their success? Should they be 
 employed in building fortifications, throwing up entrenchments, serv- 
 ing as cooks and in other capacities which would relieve white soldiers 
 for fighting in the ranks? Should they be returned to their masters, in 
 accordance with the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law? Should they 
 be given their freedom, and, as free men, be permitted to enlist in 
 the Federal forces? Had the question concerned only the slaves of states 
 in the Confederacy the decision would not have been so difficult, for 
 these states, engaged in rebellion, might be regarded as having lost, for 
 
 5 Welles, Dicrry. I, 241-242. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 227 
 
 the time being at least, their rights under the Constitution. But in most 
 cases the trouble involved states, or parts of states, that were still loyal 
 to the Union, whose citizens, in considerable numbers, were enlisting in 
 the Federal armies. To deprive citizens of South Carolina or Louisiana 
 of their slaves would not have shocked the Northern conscience, but 
 how about those of Maryland, western Virginia, Kentucky, and Mis- 
 souri, slave states which had not seceded? In these states the Constitu- 
 tion still ran, and that document, and the laws made under its pro- 
 visions, guaranteed the citizens their "property" in black men. Lincoln, 
 in his inaugural, had solemnly assured these states that the Federal gov- 
 ernment would not disturb their favorite institution but would protect 
 them in their most cherished rights. Moreover, even after Sumter, the 
 Border states that still remained faithful to the Union continued to be 
 one of Lincoln's constant anxieties. To lose Maryland, Kentucky, and 
 Missouri would be, he still believed, to lose the war; and in all these 
 states the secessionists were sleeplessly at work, attempting to force 
 them into the Confederacy. To encroach on their slave property, even 
 in moderation, would play into the hands of the anti-Federal forces, 
 and very probably result in secession. 
 
I 
 
 N THE perspective of history Lincoln's position seems unassailable; 
 he disliked slavery as much as the radicals themselves, but believed that 
 prudence, in the delicate situation that prevailed in the first year and a 
 half of war, demanded that no drastic steps be taken. Extremists, how- 
 ever, insisted on immediate emancipation. Slavery had brought on the 
 war; to end that vicious institution was its sublime purpose; day by 
 day these exhorters made the halls of Congress ring for action. In 
 the cabinet the radicals at first had only one champion. They looked 
 upon Salmon Portland Chase as their representative, and relied upon 
 their favorite antislavery champion to bring a reluctant President to 
 terms. Certain politically minded generals, particularly the raffish Ben 
 Butler in Virginia and the still ambitious Fremont in Missouri, were 
 quick to seize the issue. That Ben Butler should suddenly become the 
 hero of Charles Sumner and William P. Fessenden is only one of the 
 many humorous developments of a confusing time. The fertile genius 
 achieved this paradox, however, when he made one of the most enter- 
 taining constitutional discoveries of the day. Taking the Virginian con- 
 stitutionalists at their word, he declared slaves to be property; in that 
 case, like all other property, they were subject to seizure and con- 
 fiscation. They had precisely the same standing as cows, horses, crops, 
 and other useful articles which armies, in their progress in enemy coun- 
 try, have immemorially laid hands on and converted to military use. 
 The many slaves who "crossed" into his lines at Fortress Monroe Butler 
 confiscated as "contraband of war," and set them to labor constructing 
 military works. Fremont, in Missouri, went further. As his armies ad- 
 vanced in that state, this general issued proclamations declaring all 
 slaves in the occupied region to be free. Other fervid military leaders 
 in other sections took similar action, greatly to the chagrin of the 
 harassed statesman in the White House, who issued orders nullifying 
 their acts, and, in the case of Fremont and Hunter, removed them from 
 command for insubordination and general military unfitness. 
 
 Lincoln's embarrassment was great, because the radicals, with Chase 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 229 
 
 as their cabinet leader, applauded the proclamations and made public 
 heroes of the disobedient generals who had issued them. A consid- 
 erable part of the population in the Northern states endorsed their at- 
 titude. The favor with which Butler and Fremont were regarded by 
 a large faction of the Republican Party and the unpopularity visited 
 upon Lincoln for thwarting their plans were not lost upon the po- 
 litically minded. One sure road to popularity was evidently to take an 
 anti-Lincoln stand on this question. Cameron was one of the earliest 
 of the politico-statesmen to act upon this hint. No American, in the 
 latter half of 1861, stood so emphatically in need of a little public favor. 
 The most available way, he reasoned, of removing from the public 
 nostril the stench of war contracts would be to champion the rights 
 of the black man. And so Cameron, well understanding Lincoln's pre- 
 dicament, swung his comradeship from Seward to Chase, and openly 
 took a stand on the side of Fremont, Butler, Sumner, Ben Wade, and 
 other champions of early emancipation. Chase gratefully accepted his 
 strange disciple. Like Seward, the Treasury head had his eye on the 
 nomination in 1864, and the accession of so powerful a politician as 
 Cameron was not to be put aside. "While he was Secretary of War," 
 wrote Chase in 1864, in one of his autobiographical letters to John T. 
 Trowbridge, "General Cameron conferred much with me. I never 
 undertook to do anything in his department, except when asked to 
 give my help, and then I gave it willingly. In addition to certain Bor- 
 der state matters, the principal subjects of conference between General 
 Cameron and myself were slavery and the employment of colored 
 troops. We agreed very early that the necessity of arming them was 
 inevitable; but we were alone in that opinion. At least no other mem- 
 ber of the administration gave open support, while the President and 
 Mr. Blair, at least, were decidedly averse to it." * 
 
 Lincoln had indicated to Cameron, in most pointed fashion, his op- 
 position to action at this early day, while the Border states were still 
 hanging in the balance. Cameron, with the co-operation of Chase, had 
 ignored the President's admonition. The letters which Cameron sent 
 to Butler and others giving directions at variance with the President's 
 desires were, in the main, written by Chase. When the expedition 
 against the coast of South Carolina was planned in October, Cameron 
 issued instructions to the commanding general, Thomas W. Sherman, 
 which seemed to authorize the seizure and arming of slaves. There are 
 reasons to believe that Chase had a hand in drafting this document 
 also — a step that went beyond the Butler and Fremont measures, for 
 
 1 Schuckers, Jacob W., Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase. 
 D. Appleton and Co., 1874. P. 420. 
 
230 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 neither of those officers had made any attempt to arm fugitive slaves 
 and enroll them in the fighting army. At any rate, a copy of the letter 
 reposes at present in the Chase papers in the Library of Congress. In its 
 original form it never reached its destination, for Lincoln made changes 
 in it that eliminated the authority to enroll a slave auxiliary to the 
 Union Army. Despite these unmistakable evidences of Lincoln's policy 
 — which was to keep clear of the slavery question until the fortunes of 
 the Union, especially in the Border states, had become more assured — 
 Cameron proceeded on his course of insolent insubordination. In No- 
 vember, John Cochrane, a Tammany Hall politician with a varied 
 career, made a speech-making tour, with Cameron as his fellow trav- 
 eler, which embraced the cities of New York, Springfield, Massachu- 
 setts, and Washington. Cochrane's harangues were devoted chiefly to 
 advocating the arming of slaves. Cameron sat on the platform on all 
 occasions, thus lending his support to this anti-Lincoln campaign. After 
 a particularly fervid address on this subject before certain troops in 
 Washington, Cameron, after Cochrane sat down, stepped forward and 
 said: "I will say I heartily approve every sentiment uttered by your 
 noble speaker. They are my sentiments — sentiments that will not only 
 lead us to victory, but will in the end reconstruct this our glorious 
 constitution." 
 
 Thus Lincoln's own Secretary of War, in face of repeated admoni- 
 tions, was openly defying the administration on the most delicate prob- 
 lem of the hour. The one way of saving his official head, as Cameron 
 diagnosed the situation, was to make himself so acceptable to Sumner, 
 Ben Wade, Chandler, and others — for the most part, the Chase fol- 
 lowing — that they would insist on his retention in the cabinet. In ac- 
 cordance with this strategy, Cameron, in the latter part of the year, 
 played his final card. His report for the year 1861, to be submitted to 
 Congress on December 1, contained a passage recommending again 
 that creation of a slave army to which Lincoln, at this stage of proceed- 
 ings, had shown himself so inexorably opposed. "If it shall be found that 
 the men who have been held by the rebels as slaves are capable of bear- 
 ing arms," read part of his famous passage, "and performing efficient 
 military service, it is the right, and may become the duty of the govern- 
 ment to arm and equip them, and employ their services against the 
 rebels under proper military regulation, discipline and command." 
 Without consulting the President, or submitting his report, Cameron 
 had the document printed, and sent to the postmasters of all the lead- 
 ing cities, with instructions to issue it to the press as soon as Lincoln's 
 message had been delivered to Congress. The report of the Secretary 
 of War had all the sanctity of an official document; and this pronounce- 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 231 
 
 ment made the arming of slaves an administration policy, for no one 
 would imagine that a cabinet officer would advocate such a revolution- 
 ary proposal in so public a manner without the approval of the head 
 of the government. What Cameron was attempting to do by this sly 
 procedure was to force Lincoln's hand and compel him to accept, at the 
 dictation of the Secretary of War, a program which he was known to 
 disfavor; the outcome would be great glory to Cameron in the eyes 
 of the antislavery extremists and a hold on the country so great that 
 he could not be retired from the War Department. The fact that all this 
 involved an impropriety so great as printing his report, and distributing 
 it to the newspapers, before the President had seen a line of it, did not 
 embarrass the agile Secretary. 
 
 Lincoln discovered this state of affairs when he began assembling the 
 reports of his departmental heads and other official papers for trans- 
 mission to Congress with his annual message. According to the artist 
 Carpenter, who evidently received his information from Lincoln him- 
 self while painting his portrait, the government printer was the first 
 to call the President's attention to Cameron's irregular proceeding. 2 
 That conscientious official called at the White House, bringing a copy 
 for presidential inspection, and informed Lincoln that a considerable 
 number had already been sent to several sections of the Union. The 
 printer thought the President "ought to look it over and see if it was 
 satisfactory." Lincoln's quick eye, roving over the pages, soon hit upon 
 the questionable passage. The presidential wrath was not concealed. 
 "This will never do!" he exclaimed. "General Cameron must take no 
 such responsibility. That is a question that belongs exclusively to me." 
 At the next cabinet meeting the Cameron report was brought up for 
 discussion. Lincoln, in quiet but effective terms, called Cameron to 
 account, not only for the views expressed, but for his presumption in 
 attempting to announce a vital administration policy, which, if pro- 
 claimed at all, should be proclaimed only by the President. Cameron 
 made a feeble defense, but Lincoln brushed his arguments aside. In the 
 discussion that followed, Seward conspicuously failed to rally to the 
 side of his onetime companion. Only one member out of the seven 
 came to Cameron's support. "In the discussion that took place Cam- 
 eron found a friend and supporter in the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury . . . Mr. Chase apologized for Cameron, befriended and defended 
 him." 3 His arguments had no influence with the President. Lincoln 
 ordered that the obnoxious paragraph be excised, a new innocuous one 
 
 2 Carpenter, F. B., Six Months in the White House, Hurd and Houghton, 1866. 
 Pp. 135-138. 
 
 3 Welles, Narrative of Events. 
 
232 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 substituted for it, and that the entire edition be destroyed. Cameron 
 was directed to telegraph all the favored postmasters to return their 
 copies, and in no event to facilitate publication in the daily press. The 
 fact that a few papers, especially the widely circulated New York 
 Tribune, had obtained the unexpurgated report and published the ob- 
 noxious sections did not improve relations between Cameron and the 
 President. When malicious critics began comparing the unrevised para- 
 graph with the one that had been hastily inserted to replace it, the fact 
 that something resembling a schism had taken place in the cabinet could 
 not be concealed. 
 
 Though Lincoln took no precipitate steps at the moment, Cameron 
 knew that his days as Secretary of War were approaching an end. His 
 high-handed act only gave Lincoln one culminating reason for dis- 
 pensing with a man who had been a humiliation from the first. For the 
 next three or four weeks he indeed treated Cameron courteously, and 
 this caused that statesman's cabinet colleagues to think that the long- 
 suffering President had decided again to forget and forgive. But reasons 
 existed in plenty for Lincoln's delay. His position, as always with 
 Cameron, was a difficult one. To throw the man out angrily and sud- 
 denly might have fatal results. It might lose for the administration the 
 support of the organization in Pennsylvania, and without that support, 
 Lincoln was persuaded, the whole party structure might go to pieces. 
 In thirty years of political life Cameron had savagely turned against 
 every President with whom he had been associated — Jackson, Van 
 Buren, Polk, Buchanan — and Cameron enrage, working with a su- 
 preme talent for intrigue against his most recent executive chief, would 
 be capable of unlimited mischief. Again, while the electorate as a whole 
 had not been impressed by Cameron's sudden transformation into a 
 champion of the Negro, certain of the antislavery enthusiasts, led by 
 Sumner, Chandler, Wade, and others, were hailing the old spoilsman 
 as the most enlightened statesman in the cabinet. While Lincoln was 
 fumbling and bungling, completely misunderstanding the war and its 
 causes, here was at least one man who saw clearly the issues involved 
 and who had the courage to defy his superior in bringing them to the 
 front. 
 
 Since a large faction in the Republican Party took this view of the 
 Lincoln-Cameron trouble, the President's problem was to eject Cam- 
 eron from the cabinet in a way that would not make that man and his 
 following disrupting enemies of the administration. About five weeks 
 after the episode of the report, a kind Providence indicated the way. 
 In Lincoln's first distribution of diplomatic rewards the post of min- 
 ister to Russia had fallen to the eminent Kentuckian, Cassius M. Clay. 
 

 Simon Cameron (11 9 9-1 8 89) 
 Secretary of War from March 5, 1861, to January 13, 1862 
 
Edwin McMasters Stanton (1814-1869) 
 Secretary of War 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 233 
 
 A six months' sojourn in this hyperborean climate had completely 
 satisfied Clay's ambition for residence at the court of the Czar. He 
 wished to come home, receive a commission in the Federal Army, and 
 fight for the antislavery cause. Here was one way of getting rid of the 
 Secretary of War. On Sunday, January 11, 1862, about six weeks after 
 the unfortunate incident of the "slave-arming" report, Simon Cam- 
 eron received the following letter from the "Executive Mansion": 
 "My dear Sir: As you have more than once expressed a desire for a 
 change in position, I can now gratify you consistently with my view 
 of the public interest. I therefore propose nominating you to the 
 Senate next Monday as minister to Russia. Very sincerely your friend, 
 A. Lincoln." Accompanying this formal note was another one of those 
 "private" letters which Lincoln was so inclined to write, expressing his 
 "high personal regard for you and my confidence in your ability, pa- 
 triotism and fidelity to public trust." In view of Cameron's record, 
 the politeness of this final clause is a little difficult even for Lincoln's 
 admirers to swallow; it must be accepted as only another of those com- 
 promises which Lincoln never hesitated to make in his efforts to hold 
 together the disharmonious wings of that party whose unity was essen- 
 tial to Federal triumph. 
 
 So far as it appears from the public record, that is the history of Cam- 
 eron's exit from Lincoln's cabinet and his supercession by Edwin M. 
 Stanton. But these official documents, now published in Lincoln's 
 works, 4 do not tell the complete story. Other annalists, particularly 
 Alexander K. McClure, the greatest authority on the Pennsylvania 
 politics of the day, Gideon Welles, and Salmon P. Chase, have pro- 
 vided details of the backstage scenes that culminated in this easeful 
 cabinet death. McClure goes so far as to say that Lincoln's letter, as 
 printed above, was not the one originally sent to the exiled Secretary 
 of War. On the evening of that January 11, McClure has recorded, he 
 was dining with Thomas A. Scott, and enjoying an after-dinner cigar 
 when the distracted figure of Simon Cameron burst upon their seclu- 
 sion. "Read that!" he exclaimed to both men, tossing upon the table a 
 letter which he said had reached him that evening from the White 
 House. The document has not been preserved, but it was so brief 
 that McClure said he had no difficulty in remembering the precise 
 words. "I have this day nominated the Hon. Edwin M. Stanton to be 
 Secretary of War and you to be minister plenipotentiary to Russia." 
 That was all — no sugared compliments conveying the President's high 
 appreciation of Cameron's services and grief for the separation. That 
 letter, Cameron said — and the justice of his comment could not be 
 
 4 Lincoln, op. ck. VII, 79-80. 
 
234 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 gainsaid — was a personal affront from the President. It meant his po- 
 litical destruction, it was an "irretrievable wrong" and other things. 
 Cameron burst into tears, and turning to McClure begged him, political 
 foes though they were, to intercede in his behalf. "This is not a po- 
 litical affair; it means personal degradation; we do not agree po- 
 litically, but you know I would gladly aid you personally if it were 
 in my power." 
 
 This was the second interview Cameron had sought that Sunday 
 evening on this same subject. The man to whom he had first turned for 
 help, naturally enough, was his only friend in the cabinet, Salmon P. 
 Chase. Three times that day Cameron and Chase had been in consul- 
 tation — once after church, again after dinner, and again later in the 
 evening at Seward's house, into which Cameron burst with Lincoln's 
 letter in his hand. "He was quite offended," writes Chase in his diary, 
 "supposing the letter intended as a dismissal, and therefore discour- 
 teous." Both Seward and Chase tried to soothe him, making much of 
 Lincoln's choice of Stanton as his successor; this was a compliment, 
 they said, for Stanton, like Cameron himself, was a Pennsylvanian, and 
 was known to be Cameron's own choice, if a successor should be neces- 
 sary. 5 Colonel McClure quieted Cameron in a more effective way. The 
 following day he saw Lincoln, persuaded him to permit Cameron to 
 write and antedate a letter of resignation, to withdraw his curt notice 
 of ejectment and substitute the more urbane literary effort that now 
 appears in his collected works. Thus for the second time did Lincoln 
 suppress a sharp notification to Cameron, and substitute a more in- 
 gratiating one; the correspondence of the preceding January, in con- 
 nection with the original cabinet offer, will be recalled. 
 
 Gideon Welles knew nothing of these proceedings at the time; in 
 fact, only two members of the cabinet, Seward and Chase, were in at 
 the Cameron demise. "I was first informed of it," wrote Welles, "by 
 Mr. Blair, whom I met on the street. He had just been advised of the 
 fact by President Lincoln, who had sent, or was about to send, the 
 nomination of Mr. Stanton to the Senate." 6 Blair had been urging the 
 President for some time to get rid of Cameron but evidently he was 
 not taken into Lincoln's confidence when the critical moment arrived. 
 "Strange," mused Edward Bates in his Diary entry of January 13, 
 "not a hint of all of this was heard last Friday, at Cabinet Council, 
 and stranger still, I have not been sent for by the President, nor spoken 
 to by any member. The thing, I hear, was much considered, Saturday 
 and Sunday. Hay told the ladies at Eames that the cabinet had been 
 
 5 Warden, op. cit., pp. 400-401. 
 
 6 Welles, Narrative of Events. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 235 
 
 sitting en permanence and Eames himself informed me that Mr. Sew- 
 ard had been with the President the whole of Sunday afternoon." 7 
 Both Blair and Welles believed that Seward had intrigued for Cam- 
 eron's deposition; and it is significant that when the Pennsylvanian was 
 fighting for his life, he appealed to Chase, not to Seward, to intercede 
 with the President. Cameron himself suspected that Seward had en- 
 gineered his retirement. "I know, and know from his own lips," wrote 
 Welles, "that he left the cabinet with reluctance, and that he believed 
 if Mr. Seward had been so disposed, he could have remained." 8 
 
 There is not much in Seward's correspondence to justify these sus- 
 picions or disprove them. "General Cameron has resigned his place, 
 and is going to Russia," he wrote Mrs. Seward January 15, in a cryptic 
 passage which may, or may not, hint at the part he played in the trans- 
 lation. "Not only was the press completely taken by surprise, but, with 
 all its fertility of conjecture, not one newspaper has conceived the real 
 cause. So you see public men must labor, either not understood, or mis- 
 understood by their countrymen and mankind." Had Seward really 
 played an influential part in Cameron's displacement, that fact would 
 doubtless have raised him in public esteem at the time, for few of Lin- 
 coln's acts were greeted with more wholehearted applause. There was 
 universal agreement with the editorial view of the New York Herald 
 that Cameron's resignation was as good as a major military victory for 
 the Federal cause. When his name was sent to the Senate for the Rus- 
 sian mission, opposition developed to confirmation; one of the gro- 
 tesque anomalies of a demoralized era was that Charles Sumner, com- 
 pletely beguiled by Cameron's sudden conversion to the abolitionist 
 ranks, undertook his defense, and finally succeeded, after a four days' 
 struggle, in persuading a reluctant Senate to support the nomination. 
 The House of Representatives expressed its opinion by passing a vote 
 of censure on Cameron for employing his political henchman, Alex- 
 ander Cummings, as purchasing agent of war supplies, declaring that act 
 proved "highly injurious to the public service." Lincoln, again acting 
 from his desire to keep Cameron and his followers loyal to the adminis- 
 tration, sent a message to the House, declaring that the transactions in 
 question were not exclusively Cameron's but were approved by him- 
 self and the cabinet. 
 
 7 John Hay, Secretary to Lincoln: Charles Eames, international lawyer, editor, 
 diplomat, at this time counsel for the Navy Department. 
 
 8 Welles, Narrative of Events. 
 
T 
 
 A HAT Edwin McMasters Stanton should have succeeded to the 
 cabinet post of Simon Cameron presents one of the most ironic epi- 
 sodes in Lincoln's career. The ejected Minister of War had signed his 
 death warrant when he surreptitiously inserted in his annual report a 
 recommendation for arming slaves which directly contravened Lin- 
 coln's policy at the time. Lincoln was unaware that Stanton had 
 endorsed this act; that, as there is some reason to suppose, he had even 
 instigated the whole transaction. Several years subsequently Cameron 
 revealed the details. His report had been submitted, Cameron said, to 
 several political friends, chiefly Pennsylvanians, all of whom had con- 
 demned the disloyal passage and urged its elimination. Forced to seek 
 comfort from a Democratic leader, he had then taken the document 
 to a "man of broad views, great courage and tremendous earnestness." 
 This was Edward M. Stanton, at that time legal adviser to the War 
 Department. Stanton, after making certain changes "so that the lawyers 
 would not carp at it," gave the slavery paragraph his cordial bene- 
 diction. According to his most recent biographer, Stanton himself 
 wrote the sentences that aroused Lincoln's resentment. "Those who 
 make war against the government justly forfeit all rights of property, i 
 privilege or security derived from the Constitution and laws against, 
 which they are in armed rebellion; and as labor and service of their 
 slaves constitute the chief property of the rebels, such property should : 
 share the common fate of war, to which they have devoted the prop- 
 erty of loyal citizens. . . . It is as clearly the right of the government 
 to arm slaves, when it may become necessary, as it is to use gunpowder 
 taken from the enemy." Thus the fateful words that caused Cameron's 
 dismissal were penned by the confidential friend and adviser who suc- 
 ceeded to his position in the cabinet. 
 
 Knowing what we know of Stanton's oblique and sinuous character, 
 his impetuous ambition and unscrupulous methods in attaining ends, 
 the suspicion naturally rises that, in encouraging Cameron to pursue 
 a course which would end his cabinet career, Stanton was not inspired 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 237 
 
 exclusively by public motives. Few men in American history have pre- 
 sented such divergencies of behavior. Any attempt to estimate the man 
 is inevitably colored by his career subsequent to Lincoln's death — his 
 disloyalty to Johnson, his alliance with Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin 
 Wade, and other extreme radicals for the infliction of the heaviest 
 punitive policy on the South, and his part in the impeachment of the 
 President. The rehabilitation of Andrew Johnson has injured no public 
 reputation quite so severely as Stanton's. Yet even his relations with 
 Abraham Lincoln have elicited a variety of opinions. They range all 
 the distance from the judgment of Nicolay and Hay that Stanton was 
 an unselfish patriot, unfailing in devotion to Lincoln and "the greatest 
 war minister the government had ever had," to that of Gideon Welles, 
 who hardly ever mentions his colleague's name without expressing con- 
 tempt for his character and distrust for his every action. A recent 
 volume of grotesque depreciation even suggests — without making the 
 deliberate charge — that Stanton may have had a hand in the plot 
 which ultimately culminated in Lincoln's assassination. 1 To Massachu- 
 setts abolitionists like Henry Wilson and Charles Sumner, Stanton at 
 least shared the credit with Lincoln of ending slavery and saving the 
 Union. To Democratic leaders like Jeremiah Black, he was an "apos- 
 tate," a "renegade," a "betrayer of his country," a "dastard," and a 
 "crawling sycophant." 2 
 
 A man who could arouse such different emotions in so many re- 
 spectable bosoms must have been at least an energetic person, and it 
 is not surprising to discover that, from childhood days to the last 
 stormy experience in Johnson's cabinet, the positive qualities chiefly 
 associated with Stanton's name were fierce determination, instantaneous 
 decision and execution, remorseless concentration, and a savage capac- 
 ity for labor that despite perpetual ill-health made him, in the opinion 
 of the same Jeremiah Black whose uncomplimentary adjectives are 
 listed above, the greatest lawyer of his time, and in the view of history 
 the most dynamic, if not the most admirable, member of Lincoln's 
 cabinet. But nothing in Stanton's heredity or early influences would 
 explain so passionate a character. On his father's side he came of New 
 England Quakers, on his mother's, of a long line of easygoing Virginia 
 planters. Both father and mother were plodding, earnest, worthy mem- 
 bers of society. Only one decisive moment marked the life of David 
 Stanton: when he proclaimed his intention to his Quaker brethren of 
 marrying out of meeting, those guardians of orthodoxy raised such a 
 
 1 Eisenschiml, Otto, Why Was Lincoln Murdered? Little, Brown & Co., 1937. 
 
 2 All these elegant expletives — and many more — appear in an article contrib- 
 uted by Mr. Black to the Galaxy Magazine, vol. II, 257. 
 
238 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 protest that he abandoned the faith of his ancestors and joined the 
 Methodist Church of his affianced bride. Stanton's father was a mod- 
 erately successful country doctor in Steubenville, Ohio, and in a hum- 
 ble but comfortable home in this thriving village the oldest child, Ed- 
 win, was born in 1814. Two circumstances in Edwin's boyhood and 
 youth had much to do in directing his career. Steubenville, situated on 
 the Ohio River, overlooking the northern notch of Virginia, gave an 
 educational view of the problem that was to figure so conspicuously 
 in Stanton's mature life. Like the youthful Salmon P. Chase in Cincin- 
 nati, the boy Stanton glimpsed the black men toiling for the profit of 
 others in the open fields. More important, perhaps, the town served as 
 a prolific station in the underground route for fugitive slaves. Stan- 
 ton's father, true to his Quaker blood, was a fervent abolitionist, and 
 discoursed extensively on the great wrong to his son, whom he used 
 to take as a companion on the buggy drives to visit his patients on the 
 environing farms. An anecdote which Stanton, always alive to the 
 dramatic possibilities of his own career, liked to relate suggests Plu- 
 tarch's story of Hannibal, whose father, in the great warrior's tender 
 years, made him take an oath of undying hatred and annihilation to 
 Rome. Similarly the elder Stanton compelled his son, as a child, to 
 swear everlasting warfare on the South's peculiar institution. 
 
 An obscure saddler living in Wheeling, about ten miles south of 
 Steubenville, also subsequently played a leading role in Stanton's rec- I 
 ollections of his childhood. This was Benjamin Lundy, as deserving 
 perhaps as any man of the credit of starting the abolition movement. 
 Lundy frequently visited the Stanton home, and early enlisted the head 
 of the family in establishing a journal devoted to the abolition cause. 
 In the founding of this paper, which bore the formidable title of the 
 Genius of Universal Emancipation, the elder Stanton helped with 
 money and became the selling agent in his district. The gentle Quaker j 
 — this was another of Stanton's favorite stories — spent many a night 
 in the Stanton home, and seemed to detect possibilities for the cause in j 
 the black-eyed and black-haired little boy whom he would frequently 
 take upon his knee, endowing the infant mind with one of those "fixa- 
 tions" — so dear to the modern psychologist — against the barbarous 
 system. The other fact of Stanton's childhood has a less spiritual im- 
 port, but perhaps exercised an even more important effect upon his out- 
 look. It may, to a considerable degree, explain those explosive, ugly 
 traits that afterward made him an object of terror and hatred. The 
 asthma that became a settled part of his physical life made its first at- 
 tacks in childhood. From that time until his death in 1869, Stanton was 
 never free from the disease. Seizures of paroxysmal breathing would 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 239 
 
 periodically attack the man, frequently at critical times — an impend- 
 ing appearance in court, an important journey or social engagement; 
 the experience would last for a few minutes, a few hours, or a few 
 days, the sufferer always undergoing great exhaustion and agony. Per- 
 haps it is not strange that a lifetime victim of such torment should 
 not have developed an angelic nature. Not improbably Stanton's fre- 
 quently brutal manners, crazy outbursts of rage, and tyrannous treat- 
 ment of subordinates may be explained in part by the fact that with 
 him the mere act of breathing, which to most mortals is a matter of 
 unconscious routine, was always difficult and frequently plain torture. 
 
 The boy and man had a strange mentality, not lacking in morbid 
 tendencies. He was devoted to study and much given to reading but, 
 for the usual sports of youth — hunting, fishing, outdoor or indoor 
 games — he cared nothing. When his abolitionist father died, Stanton, 
 aged eleven, to help in family expenses secured a job in Turnbull's 
 bookstore at four dollars a month. The work proved more profitable 
 to Stanton than to his employers. He was far more interested in books 
 than in customers, and spent a considerable part of each day reading his 
 favorite authors. In spare moments, by self-study, he found compen- 
 sation for his interrupted school work. He had already determined on 
 an education, and in a brief time, by hard evening work, had acquired 
 enough preparation for entrance to the freshman class of Kenyon 
 College at Gambier, Ohio. His mother, who had spent her early life as 
 a schoolteacher, sympathized with this ambition, as she did with an- 
 other of her son's plans. He had decided not to adopt his father's pro- 
 fession of medicine, but to study law. At Kenyon, he made one 
 of those sudden changes in allegiance for which his career was sub- 
 sequently marked: influenced perhaps by Bishop Philander Chase, then 
 the active head of Kenyon, he gave up his membership in the Metho- 
 dist Church and became an Episcopalian. Religion with Stanton, then 
 and afterward, was an important matter; the name of God, as was the 
 case with most Civil War leaders, was frequently on his lips, though 
 the self-immolating piety of Chase never disturbed his waking hours. 
 At Kenyon Stanton acquired also the one lifelong conviction whose 
 earnestness and sincerity even his worst detractors seldom questioned. 
 He stayed at the college only little more than a year, but the period 
 1831-1832 was a vital one in his country's history. 
 
 In those fateful two years, South Carolina started that onslaught 
 on Federal authority which came to full strength in 1860. At that time 
 the slavery question had not attained a prime importance and South 
 Carolina precipitated the great issue of State versus Federal power 
 by declaring null and void and unenforceable within its limits a tariff 
 
240 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 law which Congress had passed against its protests. Behind it lay the 
 threat of secession, if hostile moves were taken against this veto. At 
 Kenyon two camps came into being, one supporting the Nullification 
 doctrine of Calhoun, the other sustaining Andrew Jackson, in oppo- 
 sition to this attack on the Union. Young Stanton, already distinguished 
 for mental vigor, powerful will, and forceful energy, "went over to 
 Jackson," in the phrase of the time, and led the Union phalanx in the 
 undergraduate body. It was a loyalty which never left him, a convic- 
 tion that fixed his political course for the next thirty years. At Ken- 
 yon itself, however, his days were brief. Financial troubles again called 
 him to his mother's aid; Stanton left college, took a place again in a 
 bookstore, again devoted his spare hours, day and night, to study, this 
 time to the law, with the result that in 1836, at the age of twenty-one, 
 he was admitted to the bar and began practice in the little town of 
 Cadiz, Ohio. Success greeted his efforts from the first day; the rest 
 of the story is that of one of the most famous and prosperous lawyers 
 of the time; Stanton advanced, by rapid stages, from Cadiz to Steuben- 
 ville to Pittsburgh — each time called to a more fruitful field by a stead- 
 ily enlarging practice. In 1856 this practice, more and more requiring 
 his appearance before the United States Supreme Court, caused Stan- 
 ton to settle definitely in Washington. He had married twice; his first 
 wife was Mary Lawson, a girl of unpretentious origin like himself, 
 whom he loved with all the passion of his nature, and of whom he re- 
 mained the widower for twelve years. His second, Ellen M. Hutchison, 
 was the daughter of one of the richest men of Pittsburgh. 
 
 Anecdotes told of Stanton's early manhood show strange, almost 
 macabre qualities of character and temperament. His portrait, taken 
 at this early period, while it justifies the local legend that he was the 
 most striking, even handsome young man in that region of Ohio, sug- 
 gests also the equivocal traits that made Stanton the great puzzle of his 
 time. In this, more than in the representations of mature life, is ap- 
 parent the "little black terrier" that Montgomery Blair called him. A 
 smooth, oval countenance, surmounted by a thin layer of black, silken 
 hair, underlaid by a delicate beard, not yet lying, patriarch-like, on an 
 expansive breast but closely cropped a la Horace Greeley, with shaven 
 chin and upper lip; small beady eyes, peering out suspiciously; large, 
 finely shaped, generous nose; ears so closely pressed against the skull 
 as to be scarcely visible; thin, slightly smiling lips — the general effect 
 is one of intellect and power, and at the same time detached, scrutiniz- 
 ing, possibly a little sinister. In stature he lacked the majesty of Chase 
 or the angular picturesqueness of Seward; Carpenter's group painting 
 of the cabinet discloses Stanton as one of the shortest of the seven, nor 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 241 
 
 did his quick, jerky walk, his inability to stay long in one position, add 
 to his personal impressiveness. Here is a man who did not instinctively 
 draw to his fellows, or inspire great sympathy or trust in them. Stan- 
 ton's behavior on certain occasions in early life indicates his uncanny 
 side. When his emotions were deeply stirred he could act almost like 
 a madman. At certain crises, indeed, doubts of his sanity were wide- 
 spread. When news came of his brother's suicide — he opened his veins 
 like a Roman patrician — Stanton, in a disheveled state, rushed into the 
 woods, wandering for hours until finally carried forcibly home by a 
 searching party. His friends set two strong guards to watch him for 
 several days, apprehending a second suicide. This fear was enhanced 
 by the strange habit the young man had of carrying a dagger in a 
 beautiful sheath under his waistcoat; why, no one knew, for his way of 
 life involved no dangers, and he was not given to brawls. 
 
 A semi-romantic attachment existed in his early days at Columbus 
 between Stanton and Anna Howard, daughter of his landlady. One 
 day they partook together of the midday meal; that same evening Stan- 
 ton, returning for dinner, was informed that Anna had died in the 
 afternoon from cholera, then epidemic in the region, and that she 
 had already been buried — in those days victims of this contagion were 
 precipitately hurried to their final resting place. Stanton, transfixed 
 with horror, refused to believe it. The insane notion seized his mind 
 that Anna was not dead, but had been buried alive. In a frenzy he 
 rushed to the graveyard, exhumed the unfortunate girl, and convinced 
 himself, by a personal inspection, that the incredible story was true. 
 Similar outbursts took place in subsequent years. The death of his first 
 child, a baby girl, so affected Stanton that, after she had been buried 
 a considerable time, he had the little body disinterred, enclosed in a 
 metal casket, and placed on the mantelpiece in his bedroom, where 
 it was kept for several years. When Mary Lawson died, in 1844, Stan- 
 ton's morbidity again aroused fears for his sanity. This was the wife 
 with whom he had spent his early days of struggle; that the end should 
 have come when prosperity had arrived, when Stanton had just 
 crowned his success by taking for his home the finest house in Steuben- 
 ville, seemed to make the tragedy complete. The bereaved husband 
 sent for a dressmaker and ordered her to produce a perfect duplicate 
 of Mary's wedding gown. "She is my bride," he moaned, "and shall 
 be dressed and buried like a bride." The Supreme Court had to sus- 
 pend sessions for a month, for Stanton, whose name appeared on every 
 calendar, would not leave his dead wife's grave. Every night he would 
 put her nightcap and gown on her bed, and sit beside them weeping 
 for hours. These and other signs of an unstable nervous temperament 
 
242 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 call to mind the excitement and morbid fears that so frequently pos- 
 sessed Stanton in Lincoln's cabinet. Gideon Welles contemptuously 
 described his overwrought colleague when news of the Merrimack 
 depredations reached Washington — his rushings from room to room, 
 his jumpings up and down, his predictions of the immediate bombard- 
 ment and destruction of Washington, New York, Boston, and all 
 other coast cities, his refusals to be pacified by the assurances of the 
 sober Puritan that this Confederate terror could never leave Norfolk 
 Harbor, because of its deep draught, were all a part of the same morose 
 sensibility that showed itself in such strange ways in the earlier time. 
 
 All this seems foreign to the judicial weighing of evidence, the schol- 
 arly exactness in formulating briefs, the profound searchings into 
 precedents, the orderly presentation of facts, that soon made Stanton 
 the most successful lawyer of his section. His undivided absorption in 
 his work largely explains his progress. Compared to the law, all other 
 occupations, in Stanton's view, were insignificant. Presidents, Senators, 
 cabinet officers, were not the nation's great men. The lawyers held the 
 destiny of America in their hands. To reach the top of his profession, 
 a seat on the United States Supreme Court, was Stanton's ambition 
 from the earliest days — a goal that was ultimately accomplished; but 
 here again the fate that seemed to mock Stanton's career made the prize 
 illusory. Appointed by President Grant in 1869, Stanton died four days 
 after confirmation by the Senate. 
 
 No man of Stanton's prominence could escape a certain part in 
 politics, but public office, in the early days, did not figure in his as- 
 pirations. All his energies and time were concentrated on his work at 
 the bar. "Law, law, law was his God, his mistress, and these he never 
 ceased to worship" — in these words a contemporary described his 
 laborious days and nights. Not that Stanton fills a particularly lofty 
 place in legal annals. As an interpreter of fundamental American law 
 he was no Webster or Marshall. One great case indeed — that of Penn- 
 sylvania v. Wheeling, establishing the power of Congress to control 
 navigable rivers and harbors — brings his name into all histories of the 
 Constitution; and other famous litigations such as the almost endless 
 suits involving the McCormick reaper, and the brilliant exposures of 
 land frauds in California, made his name one of the most resounding of 
 the time. When contemporaries eulogized his legal eminence, they were 
 thinking not of any original contribution to jurisprudence, but of the 
 stalwart, almost ferocious pleader, the man who could marshal his facts 
 with persuasive artistry, wring the truth and expose the prevarications 
 of witnesses, sway juries, and, in more sober appearances before the 
 Supreme Court, analyze cases and set forth with supreme logic and 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 243 
 
 eloquence technicalities and principles. His versatility was as celebrated 
 as his industry. He was equally at home in the criminal court and in the 
 supreme tribunal in Washington. He could defend a man accused of 
 murder with the same zeal and thoroughness that was bestowed on a 
 complicated constitutional issue. His fame rested both on his reaper and 
 bridge cases and on his sensational arguments for Daniel E. Sickles, who 
 shot in broad daylight, on a Washington street, a man who had stolen 
 the marital fidelity of his wife. This proceeding held the city spell- 
 bound for days; the plea Stanton invented to fit the case — one that has 
 done heroic service in countless similar trials since — that of temporary 
 insanity, succeeded so well that Sickles went scot-free, subsequently 
 lost a leg in the battle of Gettysburg, became minister to Spain, and 
 had a long and varied career in New York politics. 
 
 In his court appearances Stanton displayed the infirmities of temper 
 and the same strength of personality that distinguished all his activities. 
 He was frequently called to account for rudeness to judges — on several 
 occasions barely escaping arraignment for contempt — was most over- 
 bearing to witnesses and frequently insulting to opposing counsel. "Stop 
 your whining," he once shouted at a learned brother representing the 
 other side. Stanton's voice itself was rough and guttural, and in refer- 
 ence to this defect opposing counsel remarked, "It's no worse to whine 
 than to bark." "Yes, it is," said Stanton, "dogs bark but puppies whine." 
 In the ensuing hubbub, in which the offended gentleman was prevented 
 by attendants from rushing at Stanton's throat, the judge found it neces- 
 sary to suspend the session. Stanton's easygoing legal ethics would pos- 
 sibly shock a generation more squeamish on this subject than the one 
 that preceded the Civil War. Whether a lawyer should defend a man 
 obviously guilty is a favorite subject of dispute, but on this point 
 Stanton had no qualms. One dubious client of this kind, whom Stanton 
 had aided in avoiding a penalty he richly deserved, was shocked at the 
 size of his bill. A thousand dollars was a great fee for the period, but 
 Stanton demanded it. "Do you think," he said, "that I would argue the 
 wrong side for less?" A murderer whose neck he had saved from the 
 hangman, having no money to pay a lawyer, had made over to Stan- 
 ton, before he would undertake the case, his solitary piece of property 
 — a small house and lot. When Stanton exacted fulfillment of this bond, 
 his client pleaded for mercy. "You are taking everything I've got, and 
 leaving me to starve." "You deserve to starve," replied Stanton, "for you 
 were guilty." He promptly sold the house for five hundred dollars and 
 pocketed the money. 
 
 Men may reasonably argue the moral aspects of these proceedings, 
 but another of Stanton's methods, related by a friendly biographer, 
 
244 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 brings up a really serious question. His sister was suing her husband for 
 divorce, and Stanton appeared as witness in the case. The opposing 
 lawyer was quick at making objections — a trait Stanton craftily turned 
 to account. Before taking the stand, he instructed the examining legal 
 light to ask him if his sister had lost four front teeth, and if he knew 
 how she had lost them. "Yes," said Stanton, in reply to the first planted 
 question, and to the second, he began, "She once told me how she had 
 lost them" — but by this time the agile counsel for the defense jumped 
 to his feet, shouting objections, which the court sustained. Stanton 
 knew that counsel would object to these improper questions, and that 
 the judge would not permit him to go on with his answer. But he also 
 knew that the belief would be implanted in the mind of the jury, which 
 nothing subsequently said or done would eradicate, that the defendant 
 husband had played some part in her misfortune. Yet the truth was that 
 Stanton's sister had lost the four teeth in the course of nature, with no 
 assistance from her spouse. Probably most reputable lawyers, of that 
 time or in the present, would regard this method of inquiry as sharp 
 practice. 
 
 Stanton's political activities in the thirty years preceding 1860 dis- 
 played the same qualities, great and small, that marked him as a lawyer. 
 A passion for reform was combined with personal ambition, devotion 
 to a cause was frequently laid aside in pursuit of temporary advantage, 
 and loyalty to persons and causes was now and then tainted by that 
 double-dealing which his enemies insisted was Stanton's controlling 
 characteristic. He started life, as already indicated, with two solid, 
 idealistic convictions. He hated slavery and he worshiped the Federal 
 Union. On occasions, these principles seemed to fix his political attach- 
 ments; at other times more worldly considerations dictated his courses. 
 In 1840 Stanton attended the Democratic Convention in Baltimore as 
 a delegate and gave himself heartily to the cause of Van Buren. In 1844 
 he worked hard for a Van Buren delegation from Ohio and fiercely 
 opposed that two-thirds rule the enemy invented to bring about his 
 hero's downfall. He resented the "insolent" dominance of Southerners 
 in the Democratic Party and the proslavery uses they made of their 
 ascendancy. For the policy of annexing Texas he had no friendly word. 
 Yet in 1846 he supported the man, James K. Polk, who was the chief 
 exponent of this Southern pretension, and regretted that ill-health pre- 
 vented his shouldering a musket and fighting in the Mexican War. In 
 1847, he again transferred his allegiance, indorsing the Wilmot Proviso, 
 which was intended to prevent the introduction of slavery into any 
 territory acquired as booty in that conflict. In 1848, Stanton finally 
 abandoned the Democrats and became a Free-Soiler. Two motives may 
 
 
ENTER STANTON 245 
 
 be offered for this departure into idealism, a genuine zeal for antislavery 
 principles, and anger at the Democrats for their treatment of Van 
 Buren. Stanton's subsequent behavior rather inclines the balance in 
 favor of the latter diagnosis, for, after the disappearance of the Free- 
 Soil Party, only one sanctuary was left for those to whom its antislavery 
 principles comprised the one question of the day. This was the new 
 Republican amalgamation, organized in 1856. In this all the great Free- 
 Soil leaders of 1848, Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Gideon Welles, 
 John P. Hale, Samuel Fessenden, Charles Francis Adams, and others 
 found a satisfactory haven. Stanton, however, did not follow their ex- 
 ample; instead, this onetime abolitionist joined the most extreme pro- 
 slavery wing of the Democratic Party, that led by James Buchanan. 
 
 It was in 1856, the year of Buchanan's election, that Stanton moved 
 to Washington, and perhaps the Buchanan ascendancy had something 
 to do with this choice of a new home. Stanton built a stately house on 
 Franklin Square, and in this he and his new, handsome, and rich wife 
 soon became the center of an influential social circle. A close friendship 
 had been formed with Jeremiah S. Black, the Buchanan leader in Penn- 
 sylvania, who, it is believed, had induced Stanton to align himself with 
 the Buchanan forces, not improbably holding forth the prospect of po- 
 litical favor. Stanton was now in the prime of his powers, only forty- 
 two years old, in the front rank of his profession, financially and socially 
 strong; in other words, a point had been attained when honorable serv- 
 ice to the statfe would gratify ambition. That Black would be an im- 
 portant figure in the administration, in case of Buchanan's election, was 
 well known; and when that event followed, it caused no surprise that 
 he entered the cabinet as Attorney General. Brilliant, cantankerous, 
 rabid in belief and expression, Black hated one type of citizens above all 
 others. For the Garrisonian abolitionist his usually resourceful vocabu- 
 lary could find no denunciation sufficiently acrid. That he should se- 
 lect Stanton as his favorite among rising administration Democrats testi- 
 fies again to the flexibility of that consummate artist in being all things 
 to all men. Stanton, from his first arrival in Washington, began quietly 
 consorting with the antislavery leaders. He was a frequent evening visi- 
 tor to the house of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, proprietor of the National Era, 
 the uncompromising abolitionist organ, in which Mrs. Stowe's Uncle 
 Tom had recently been serialized. At Dr. Bailey's home, an abolition 
 headquarters, Stanton frequently delighted the guests by recollections 
 of his early days in Steubenville, in which the vignettes of himself as a 
 child sitting on Benjamin Lundy's knee did emotional service. Salmon 
 P. Chase, one of Dr. Bailey's close friends, afterward testified to Stan- 
 ton's soundness on the antislavery question, and Charles Sumner, an- 
 
246 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 other, afterward bore testimony to Stanton as "one of us." Yet the man's 
 outward proceedings in this prewar period were entirely satisfactory 
 to Black and Buchanan. He supported all Buchanan's policies. In the 
 Kansas disputation, he stood on Buchanan's side, even eulogizing 
 the Lecompton Constitution — a measure which, had it passed, would 
 have made Kansas a slave state. No Buchanan follower more loyally 
 accepted the Dred Scott decision, which opened all the territories to 
 slavery, as forever settling that crucial question. In 1860, he did not 
 follow Douglas, the candidate of the more moderate Democrats, but 
 Breckinridge, whose platform demanded the complete surrender of the 
 North to the South. It was when, some years afterward, Jeremiah Black 
 learned, among other things, of Stanton's two-faced position — consort- 
 ing at the same time with the abolitionists and the Buchanan slavery 
 extensionists — that he applied to his former companion the epithets 
 enumerated on a preceding page. 
 
 
 
if 
 
 C. A 
 
 s 
 
 TANTON'S COURTING of the Buchananites - or, as the irrev- 
 erent enemy usually called them, the Buchaneers — made possible his 
 political advancement. The war with Mexico had left many land 
 entanglements in California. By the treaty of Guadalupe Uncle Sam 
 recognized all land grants which had been made by Mexico before 
 California passed into his hands. Such a situation naturally gave oppor- 
 tunities in plenty for fraud. A multitude of claimants appeared, holding 
 titles to great tracts which, they asserted, had been assigned them by the 
 Mexican Republic. Many of these were open to suspicion. One pre- 
 tender especially, Jose Limantour, a Frenchman, produced so-called 
 deeds to all of San Francisco and a considerable area of adjacent terri- 
 tory. In early 1858, Black sent his friend Stanton to California to look 
 into this and other claims and to take such proceedings as circumstances 
 might warrant. The compensation agreed upon, $25,000 and expenses, 
 made the public gasp, for such a fee for legal services was unprece- 
 dented at the time, but the outlay proved an excellent investment, for 
 Stanton's labors in San Francisco saved the United States a sum esti- 
 mated at $150,000,000. His year's experience in this frontier country 
 probably provides the best illustration we have of Stanton's legal tal- 
 ents, his exhaustive industry, his pantherlike pursuit of the evildoer, 
 and his skill in constructing an impregnable case. Though the land 
 records of the former Mexican regime had been scattered to the four 
 winds, Stanton, with incredible labor and patience, succeeded in re- 
 claiming the most important — a monumental work comprising four 
 hundred neatly bound volumes. Limantour, it appeared, was a rascal 
 of incredible proportions: all his so-called claims rested upon forged 
 documents; and only his precipitate flight from the country saved him 
 from a long term in prison. Naturally both Buchanan and Black re- 
 joiced at this performance; it gave the Buchanan administration a lift 
 in popular esteem. 
 
 It also paved the way for the appointment of Stanton to Buchanan's 
 cabinet — something to which he had aspired for some time. Stanton 
 
248 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 returned from California in season to take part in the epochal campaign 
 of 1860, and his championship on the stump of the most extreme pro- 
 slavery candidates put him in line for Democratic favor. Apparently 
 Buchanan consulted Stanton in framing his message of December 3, 
 1860, in which he annunciated the strange doctrine that secession was 
 unconstitutional, but that the Federal government had no right to keep 
 a state by force in the Union. Stanton afterwards said — though his 
 recollection has not gone uncontradicted — that he advised the Presi- 
 dent against such an interpretation; that, as a result of his persuasion, 
 Buchanan deleted the passage, but subsequently, on the insistence of 
 Jefferson Davis and other Southern Senators, restored it in the docu- 
 ment presented to Congress. This message and other events, especially 
 Buchanan's refusal to strengthen Federal forces in Charleston Harbor, 
 caused a split in Buchanan's cabinet. Lewis Cass, the venerable Secretary 
 of State, resigned in disgust at the President's policy, and Jeremiah 
 Black was transferred from the Attorney General's office to the State 
 Department. Black consented to the change only on condition that 
 Stanton should succeed to the cabinet post left vacant. And so, on De- 
 cember 20, Edwin M. Stanton became Attorney General of the United 
 States. On that same day South Carolina passed its ordinance of se- 
 cession. 
 
 He attended his first cabinet meeting on December 27. That session 
 was enlivened by one of the several "crises" that were to make the next 
 few months so momentous. That morning news reached the administra- 
 tion of Major Anderson's historic maneuver — the transfer of his tiny 
 force from the indefensible Fort Moultrie to the far stronger Fort Sum- 
 ter. At that time at least three members of Buchanan's cabinet were gen- 
 erally referred to in the Northern press as "traitors" — John B. Floyd 
 of Virginia, Secretary of War; Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, Secre- 
 tary of the Interior; and Isaac Toucey of Connecticut, Secretary of the 
 Navy. Howell Cobb, Secretary of the Treasury, had already departed 
 for his native Georgia, to be succeeded by Philip F. Thomas of Mary- 
 land, a man not regarded kindly by supporters of the Union. Buchanan 
 had already demanded Floyd's resignation — not, however, for sus- 
 pected disloyalty. He had become involved in the theft — "purloining" 
 was the President's own word — of $870,000 worth of bonds held in 
 trust by the Interior Department for the Indian wards of the nation. 
 Thompson, head of the Interior Department, was concerned in the 
 same transaction, and his dismissal from the cabinet also was only a 
 matter of time. Toucey had been an old Jacksonian Democrat, an ex- 
 governor of Connecticut, Attorney General in Polk's cabinet, and a 
 consistent supporter of the Southern point of view in the tumultuous 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 249 
 
 fifties; his action in dispersing the Federal fleet to foreign ports, leav- 
 ing less than half a dozen ships in home waters to meet the crisis of 
 Civil War, so outraged the people of his own extremely loyal state 
 that his portrait as governor was removed from its niche of honor in 
 the capitol at Hartford. 1 
 
 Whether Floyd, Thompson, and Toucey comprised a triumvirate of 
 "traitors" is a question on which lively controversy has raged; it is 
 not necessary to enter into the long and tedious discussion in this place. 
 What is evident, however, is that, in the situation precipitated by Major 
 Anderson on December 27, the three men championed the Southern 
 side. That the trembling President Buchanan accepted their viewpoint 
 is also a matter of history. Whether a definite "truce" had been con- 
 cluded between Buchanan and South Carolina guaranteeing the "neu- 
 trality" of the forts in Charleston Harbor is another matter over which 
 the historians have wrangled for eighty years. One cannot read the 
 documents, however, without concluding that, if a precise "pledge" 
 had not been given, at least something in the nature of an entente had 
 been agreed upon. This tacit understanding provided that the South- 
 ern "rebels" would make no attack on the forts so long as the Federal 
 government should make no attempt to change their existing status. 
 Floyd, Thompson, and Toucey maintained that Anderson's coup had 
 radically changed this status. Floyd comported himself at this cabinet 
 meeting in noisy, insulting fashion. As his resignation had been de- 
 manded, he showed considerable presumption in attending the con- 
 clave; the suspicion at the time was that he intentionally stirred up a 
 rumpus, so that he could resign on the issue of Fort Sumter, instead of 
 submitting to dismissal on the pending charge of dishonesty. Merely 
 to order Major Anderson back to Fort Sumter, Floyd loudly pro- 
 claimed, would not satisfy an insulted South; the offending general 
 and all his forces must clear out of Charleston harbor altogether. "The 
 great contest for the Union commenced a few minutes after I parted 
 from you here," Stanton wrote his brother-in-law, Christopher P. 
 Wolcott, describing the historic "scene." "On reaching my office I 
 found a summons to a cabinet council. On entering the chamber, I 
 found treason with bold and brazen front demanding the surrender of 
 Fort Sumter. The contest continued until dark, when dispute ran so 
 high that we adjourned until eight o'clock in the evening." 
 
 If subsequent accounts of this "scene" put in writing by Stanton 
 himself — not the most dependable authority when his vanity was at 
 stake — and Joseph Holt, at that time Postmaster General and Floyd's 
 
 *It was subsequently restored, when, after the war, a kinder judgment of his 
 work as Secretary of the Navy prevailed. 
 
250 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 destined successor as Secretary of War, can be depended on, this 
 picture to his brother-in-law is a mild description. According to 
 Holt, "the emotions of Floyd were absolutely uncontrollable, — emo- 
 tions of mingled mortification and anguish and rage and panic. His 
 fury seemed that of some baffled fiend." 2 Stanton's own relation is 
 enshrined in a letter written October 8, 1863, and now preserved among 
 his papers. 3 The apparent intention of the President to accept the 
 Southern argument, to regard the brilliant movement of Anderson — 
 with whose praises the unanimous North was then resounding — as a 
 violation of his tacit understanding with the rebels, and to order the 
 undoing of his act, stirred Stanton to the depths. In the presence of 
 Floyd and the Secretaries held in part responsible for the recent de- 
 falcation of government trust funds, he told Buchanan that a reversal 
 of Major Anderson's act "ought certainly to be regarded as most 
 liberal towards erring brethren, but while one member of your cabi- 
 net has fraudulent acceptances for millions of dollars afloat and while 
 the confidential clerk of another — himself in South Carolina teaching 
 rebellion — has just stolen $900,000 from the Indian trust fund, the 
 experiment of ordering Major Anderson back to Fort Moultrie would 
 be dangerous. But if you intend to try it, before it is done I beg that 
 you will accept my resignation." This challenge is quoted from an 
 article by Thurlow Weed in the London Observer for the ninth of 
 February, 1862, which Stanton, in his account written for posterity, 
 said was "substantially true." Joseph Holt, supporting the accuracy 
 of the whole narrative, added even more lurid details. To give up Fort 
 Sumter, Stanton told Buchanan, "would be a crime equal to the crime 
 of Arnold and that all who participated in it ought to be hung like 
 Andre," and the intrepid Secretary added "that a President of the 
 United States who would make such an order would be guilty of 
 treason." "At this point," continued Secretary Holt, "and I remember 
 the scene as clearly as though it happened yesterday — Mr. Buchanan 
 raised his hand deprecatingly and said, as if wounded by the intensity 
 of Mr. Stanton's language and manner, 'Oh, no! Not so bad as that, 
 my friend! —not so bad as that!' " 
 
 George Ticknor Curtis, whose life of James Buchanan includes sev- 
 eral labored chapters extenuating that President's behavior in these 
 fateful December days, entered a general denial of the truth of Stan- 
 ton's statements, and Jeremiah Black, in a frenzy of vituperation against 
 
 2 Atlantic Monthly, XXVI, 471. 
 
 3 Gorham, George C, Life and Public Services of Edwin McMasters Stanton. 
 Houghton Mifflin Co., 1899. Pp. 151-159. The letter was not published in Stanton's 
 lifetime. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 251 
 
 his onetime protege, pronounced the whole story of criticism and de- 
 fiance pure "fiction." Both these defenders of Buchanan, only one of 
 whom possessed any value as a firsthand witness, wrote several years 
 before Stanton's recital and the corroborative indorsement of Joseph 
 Holt were given to the world. Therefore, so far as this particular 
 "crisis" is concerned, we are forced to waver as to the credibility to be 
 given four persons who were present and who have gone upon record. 
 Stanton and Holt have testified explicitly in the affirmative, while 
 Black and Buchanan have entered an uncompromising denial. As to 
 another "crisis" that immediately supervened, however, there is no 
 conflict in the evidence. This second drama, while not so explosive as 
 the preceding "scene," involved essentially the same points of dispute. 
 Something has already been said of the "ambassadors" sent by the 
 "Republic of South Carolina" in late December, 1860, to that foreign 
 nation, the United States of America. Among the demands this dele- 
 gation, under the headship of James L. Orr, presented to the Buchanan 
 government was one insisting on Major Anderson's return from Sum- 
 ter to Moultrie. That precipitated action, the South Carolinians main- 
 tained, nullified the "truce" tacitly agreed upon by the insurgent 
 state and the Buchanan regime by which the status quo was to be re- 
 spected by both parties. Before these South Carolinians would deign 
 to enter into negotiations with the United States that soldier, with all 
 his forces, must be ordered not only out of Sumter, but out of Charles- 
 ton Harbor itself. This demand caused another crisis in the Buchanan 
 cabinet, and another threatened flood of resignations. For the Presi- 
 dent was disposed to yield to the insistent Southerners. At a moment 
 when most Northern newspapers were demanding that the South Caro- 
 linians be imprisoned for high treason, Buchanan, in the quiet of 
 his study, composed a respectful communication addressed to these 
 emissaries. 
 
 On December 29, the President read this letter to an uncomfortable 
 and unappreciative cabinet. Not even a copy of this missive has ever 
 been discovered. Its contents can be reconstructed, however, from a 
 memorandum opposing the views expressed in it, drawn up by Black 
 with Stanton's co-operation. This would indicate that Buchanan's 
 letter to the "ambassadors" practically recognized the right of South 
 Carolina to be represented diplomatically "near" the Federal govern- 
 ment. It implied a willingness to negotiate with South Carolina the 
 possession of the forts in Charleston Harbor — forts that had always 
 been the undisputed property of the United States. It apparently re- 
 hearsed Buchanan's famous doctrine that the Federal government had 
 no right to compel a state by force to remain in the Union. It admitted 
 
252 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 that Major Anderson had done wrong in leaving Fort Moultrie and re- 
 moving his little garrison to Sumter. Conciliatory as Buchanan and 
 his advisers were to the Southern insurrectionists, these sentiments an- 
 gered every member of his official family, except Toucey, who gave 
 his approval. In particular Buchanan's closest confidant, Jeremiah S. 
 Black, was deeply grieved. On the Sunday following the reading, Black 
 called upon Isaac Toucey, requesting the Connecticut statesman to 
 inform the President that if the letter in question were sent to the 
 South Carolina delegation, he would resign his seat in the cabinet. Black 
 next notified Stanton of his intention. "I shall go out with you," said 
 the Attorney General. Joseph Holt, now Secretary of War — for 
 Floyd had been deposed — took the same stand. In response to a hur- 
 ried call from Buchanan, Black went to the White House and found 
 the venerable President on the verge of tears. "Do you too talk of leav- 
 ing me?" asked their agonized modern Caesar of his Brutus. 4 
 
 A second dislocation of his cabinet within a month was more than 
 Buchanan could bear. His surrender was complete. Black, he declared, 
 could write his own response to the South Carolina gentlemen; he 
 would leave the matter entirely to his discretion. Black and Stanton 
 spent the rest of that Sabbath composing the letter which Buchanan 
 signed. This document, while according to modern ideas hardly satis- 
 factory, omitted the weak concessions of the presidential draft. It 
 greatly angered the South Carolinian "ambassadors," who answered in 
 a diatribe so violent that Buchanan returned it, with the endorsement 
 that it was not "one which the President of the United States could 
 receive." The correspondence marked a new day in Buchanan's attitude 
 towards the rebellious South. The cabinet, now reconstructed by the 
 elimination of Floyd, Thompson, Cobb, and Thomas, contained men 
 who were heart and soul — with the possible exception of Toucey, who 
 lingered on until March 4 — devoted to the Union cause. Black, the 
 new Secretary of State, much as he detested Republicans and aboli- 
 tionists, loved the Union; John A. Dix, the new Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, soon gained immortality by his terse instructions to a Treasury 
 official at New Orleans, ordering him to take possession of a revenue 
 cutter there — "If anyone attempts to haul down the American flag, 
 shoot him on the spot"; Joseph Holt, Secretary of War, was one of 
 those Kentuckians who remained superloyal to the central govern- 
 ment; and Horatio King, the new Postmaster General, was a New 
 Yorker of the same patriotic school as Dix. As for Stanton, he displayed 
 
 4 Black, Jeremiah S., Essays and Speeches. New York, 1885. P. 14. Gorham, 
 op. ch. y I, 146-147. Curtis, George Ticknor, Life of James Buchanan Fifteenth 
 President of the United States. Harper & Brothers, 1883. II, 383-395. 
 
 
253 
 
 his eagerness for the Union cause in ways that enraged Buchanan and 
 his followers when they learned of his activities — which they did not 
 for several years — and made him the great hero of the time in the 
 eyes of Sumner, Henry Wilson, and the whole tribe of "radicals." 
 
 The word is an unpleasant one, but no other completely fits the situ- 
 ation. Stanton became a spy on the Buchanan administration in the in- 
 terests of the approaching Lincoln regime. According to Nicolay and 
 Hay, Stanton was so struck with "horror" by what he discovered in 
 the Buchanan government — before it was reformed, and when it was 
 virtually being controlled by Jefferson Davis — that he had only one 
 recourse. The highly ethical New England radicals found no difficulty 
 in justifying his conduct on the loftiest moral grounds. Stanton had 
 taken oath to support and defend the Constitution; he immediately 
 discovered that secessionists in the cabinet were working to annihilate 
 that instrument, to destroy the government and erect their own impro- 
 vised Confederacy in its place. Washington, in December and early 
 January, 1860-1861, was, so Stanton averred, full of Confederate agents 
 who were secretly organizing military units, with which, before Lin- 
 coln could be inaugurated, they had planned to seize the Federal city, 
 with all its buildings and archives, and transform it into the capital of 
 their new Confederacy. That Lincoln entertained some such appre- 
 hension his anxieties, before inauguration, clearly show. Seward's fever- 
 ish fears have already been set forth. The Washington situation in that 
 winter might easily have disturbed the sleep of a nation overwrought 
 and unprotected. The city was generally Southern in population and 
 feeling. For nearly ten years Southern Democrats had controlled all 
 three branches of government, and filled important offices and military 
 and naval commands with men thoroughly in sympathy with the pro- 
 slavery ideal. No army or military forces were at hand to safeguard the 
 Capital from a sudden onslaught, and almost the weakest and most 
 vacillating of American Presidents — himself for years a timeserver to 
 Southern aspirations — reigned in the White House. 
 
 Stanton's activities at this moment suggest not so much a matter-of- 
 fact American as a conspirator in Ruritania or Graustark. One midnight 
 he met Charles Sumner by prearrangement in Sumner's lodgings; in 
 the vivid words of Jeremiah S. Black he sat "squat like a toad" at the 
 Senator's ear, stealthily giving him full details of the new gunpowder 
 plot. Ten years afterward Sumner related the incident in a letter to 
 Henry Wilson, published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1870. 
 "He came at one o'clock that night, and was alone with me for an hour. 
 During this time he described to me the determination of the southern 
 leaders and developed particularly their plan to obtain possession of the 
 
254 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 national capital and the national archives, so that they might substi- 
 tute themselves for the existing government." Sumner, however, was 
 not Stanton's most intimate confidant. "The plot is forming to seize the 
 capital and usurp the government," Seward wrote Thurlow Weed on 
 December 29, 1860, "and it has abettors near the President. I am writ- 
 ing you not from rumors but knowledge." "Treason is at work in the 
 states," he wrote his daughter the same day, "and even in the cabinet 
 and Senate, to overthrow the country." And to his wife: "Treason is 
 around and amongst us; and plots to seize the capital and usurp the 
 government." "At length I have gotten a position," he wrote Lin- 
 coln on this same exciting December 29, "in which I can see what is 
 going on in the councils of the President. It pains me to learn that things 
 there are even worse than we understood. The President is debating 
 day and night on the question whether he shall not recall Major An- 
 derson and surrender Fort Sumter and go on arming the South. A plot 
 is forming to seize the capital on or before the 4th of March, and this, 
 too, has its accomplices in the public councils. I could tell you more 
 particularly than I dare write, but you must not imagine that I am giv- 
 ing you suspicion and rumors. Believe me I know what I write." The 
 date of this letter is significant. It was the day before that Buchanan had 
 startled his cabinet by reading his letter to the South Carolina am- 
 bassadors, in which he had practically acceded to all their demands. 
 Seward's intelligence, relayed to Lincoln, shows that he had been ac- 
 curately informed of this proceeding. Another letter, written to Lin- 
 coln the next day, proves that he knew of the position Black, Stanton, 
 and others had taken, and of the result. "The President," he wrote 
 Springfield, "has decided to stand on his loyalty. Floyd resigned and 
 the other seceder members will. But we are trembling today, lest he 
 may be overborne by seceding influences and recall all. The White 
 House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink and sleep with 
 him." 5 
 
 The man who had worked Seward up to this state of apprehension 
 was Edwin M. Stanton. Seward wrote confidently to Lincoln of events 
 taking place in the Buchanan cabinet because the newest addition to 
 that company had established personal relations with the forthcoming 
 Secretary of State, and was giving him day-by-day bulletins of its 
 most secret transactions. He could assure Lincoln "I know what I 
 write," because Stanton was giving him daily reports. A certain Mr. 
 Watson, as Seward's son has related, was making frequent visits to the 
 Seward home, ostensibly conferring with his father in the basement on 
 an important patent case. This Mr. Watson was a real person, a close 
 
 5 Seward's Seward, II, 487-488. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 255 
 
 friend of both Seward and Stanton, and was afterward Assistant Secre- 
 tary of War in the Lincoln administration. "Immediately after Mr. 
 Stanton took office," Seward himself wrote on June 6, 1870, to Henry 
 Wilson, "he put himself into indirect communication with me, at my 
 house, employing Mr. Watson for that purpose. Every day thereafter, 
 until the inauguration had passed, I conferred either in the morning 
 or the evening or both with Mr. Stanton through this same agency, 
 and the question of what either of us could or ought to do at the time 
 for the public welfare was discussed and settled. Mr. Watson often 
 brought with him suggestions in writing from Mr. Stanton and re- 
 turned to Mr. Stanton with mine." 6 
 
 On January 9 Seward wrote Lincoln that "the alarms about the 
 capital have passed over"; significantly on this same day Jacob Thomp- 
 son, the most treacherous of the secessionists in the Buchanan regime, 
 had retired from the cabinet. Floyd, who, in addition to his part in the 
 defalcations in Thompson's department, had been caught red-handed, in 
 late December, in an attempt to transfer heavy artillery from the 
 arsenal in Pittsburgh to uncompleted forts in Texas, then preparing for 
 secession, had disappeared from Washington into the Confederate 
 Army in early January. 
 
 It is not likely that Stanton had much influence in this cleansing of 
 the Buchanan cabinet. He seems, however, to have been the chief in- 
 stigator of the committee of the House appointed on January 26 to 
 investigate subterranean plots believed to be hatching for attacks on 
 Washington. According to the chairman, William Howard of Michi- 
 gan, Stanton himself unquestionably drew up the resolution creating 
 this group of inquisitors. "It would be easier," Mr. Howard said after- 
 ward, "to persuade me that Mr. Jefferson did not write the Declaration 
 of Independence than that Mr. Stanton did not write those resolu- 
 tions." 7 According to Henry L. Dawes, a Massachusetts member of 
 the committee, Stanton kept in constant touch with its members. Dawes 
 gave theatrical details. Papers, some of them written in a bold hand- 
 writing "that became familiar enough after Stanton was made Secretary 
 of War," were left in secret places, where they were recovered by 
 members of the committee, and after being "read by the light of the 
 street lamp at night" were "returned to the place of deposit." Informa- 
 tion derived from these memoranda, said Mr. Dawes, frequently gave 
 the lead for the next day's cross-examination. One of Stanton's notes 
 warned against the suspected Toucey. "There is a northern traitor in 
 the Cabinet. Arrest him tonight. Pensacola has been given up. Stop 
 
 6 Atlantic Monthly, XXVI, 465. 
 
 7 Ibid.. XXVI, 467. 
 
256 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 him before it is too late." 8 Despite this constant stream of information 
 from a source so near the throne, the work of the House committee 
 proved almost barren of results. After holding sessions for something 
 more than a week, the committee reported that no evidence had been 
 disclosed of an organized attempt to seize the Capital and prevent Lin- 
 coln's inauguration. It did unearth one Democratic "marching club" 
 that was drilling secretly, but the revelation that its stealth was in- 
 spired by a determination to avoid creditors proved too much for the 
 national sense of humor. Afterward Galusha Grow, a member of the 
 committee, said that the real reason for the appointment of this com- 
 mittee was to let the disloyal know that Congress was on the alert — 
 and possibly its mere existence did accomplish something in discourag- 
 ing the large army of Confederate sympathizers in Washington. 
 
 Gideon Welles, who could never see a worthy motive in any of 
 Stanton's acts, had his own explanation for his strange activities in this 
 difficult winter. He knew that Seward was to be Secretary of State 
 and chief man in the Lincoln administration; he had early formed his 
 plans for preferment under the new regime, and he deliberately "be- 
 trayed" — Welles uses this word — Buchanan for the purpose of in- 
 gratiating himself with the most powerful man in the Republican 
 Party. There seems to be little doubt that the Seward-Stanton proceed- 
 ings in January and February of 1861 laid the ground for the Ohioan's 
 entrance into Lincoln's cabinet almost precisely a year afterward. This 
 fact, therefore, substantiates to a degree Mr. Welles's unfriendly, but 
 as always shrewd, explanation. The intrigues in which Stanton engaged 
 for the succession to Simon Cameron add force to the theory. On the 
 other hand, if Stanton, in January 1861, was preparing the way for 
 admission into Lincoln's administration, his behavior seems to have been 
 a strange way of accomplishing his designs. His attitude for the rest of 
 this year portrays the man in his most unpleasant light. He was one of 
 Washington's most outspoken and loquacious enemies of Lincoln, on 
 both personal and public grounds. He had snubbed the prairie lawyer 
 from the day that he reached Washington. Most public men of Stan- 
 ton's prominence, on the arrival of the new President, either called or 
 at least did him the courtesy of leaving their cards. From the begin- 
 ning, Stanton avoided Lincoln and all members of the cabinet; the only 
 one with whom he had any personal dealings was Seward. 
 
 Moreover he was vulgarly insulting in his free-and-easy comments 
 on the new incumbent. General George B. McClellan, whom Stanton 
 — at this time — most sedulously cultivated, has recorded one of the 
 choicest of -these remarks. "He never spoke of the President in any 
 
 8 Ibid., LXXII, 163. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 257 
 
 other way than as 'the original gorilla' and often said that Du Chaillu 
 was a fool to wander all the way to Africa in search of what he could 
 so easily have found in Springfield, Illinois." 9 The Diary of a Public 
 Man contains allusions similarly impolite. On February 25, two days 
 after Lincoln's surreptitious arrival in Washington, this diarist met 
 Stanton as he was crossing Fourteenth Street. He "stopped me to ask 
 if I had seen the President-elect since he 'crept into Washington.' It is 
 impossible to be more bitter and malignant than he is; every word was 
 a suppressed or an ill-suppressed sneer, and it cost me something to keep 
 my temper with him even for a few moments. When he found that I 
 had met Mr. Lincoln only once, to my recollection, he launched out 
 into a downright tirade about him, saying that 'he had met him at the 
 bar and found him a low, cunning clown.' I could not resist telling him 
 as we parted, that I hoped the President would take an official and not 
 a personal view of his successor in any relations he might have with 
 him. I think he felt the thrust, for he bowed more civilly than he is apt 
 to, when he left me." 10 Stanton's reference to his one meeting with 
 Lincoln "at the bar" recalls the celebrated incident that, had Lincoln 
 been of more vindictive character, would forever have excluded the 
 Steubenville lawyer from his society. The two men were associated, 
 in 1855, as counsel for the Manny interests in the famous McCormick 
 reaper infringement suit. Several versions of the episode have been pub- 
 lished, but all agree on the rudeness of Stanton's behavior — how he 
 elbowed Lincoln out of the case, prevented him from making his argu- 
 ment, and browbeat him, personally and professionally, in the accus- 
 tomed Stanton fashion. "Where did that long-armed creature come 
 from, and what can he expect to do in this case?" was a remark which, 
 according to Herndon, Lincoln through a half-opened door, overheard 
 the distinguished Pittsburgh lawyer make concerning himself. Yet it 
 was said that Lincoln, though disappointed and bruised in spirit, was 
 so entranced by the intellectual power Stanton displayed in his argu- 
 ment that the experience, rough as it was, exercised a good deal of 
 influence when Lincoln decided, six years afterward, to put him in the 
 cabinet. 
 
 Not only in conversation, with "Public Man" and others, was Stan- 
 ton contemptuous towards the new tenant of the White House. He has 
 left an imperishable written record of his mental operations for the 
 few months following the inauguration. When James Buchanan left 
 Washington, he asked Stanton to write him occasionally, giving his 
 impressions of the new regime and generally keeping the ex-President 
 
 9 McClellan, George B., McClellarts Own Story. C. L. Webster, 1887. P. 152. 
 10 North American Review, Vol. 129, p. 262. 
 
258 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 abreast of the times. Stanton scrupulously complied with this request. 
 The portrait he draws of himself in this correspondence differs surpris- 
 ingly from the one he painted in the memorandum of cabinet scenes 
 written for the benefit of posterity and preserved among his papers. 
 The heroic paladin, storming into the Buchanan cabinet and denounc- 
 ing Floyd and Thompson, and even President Buchanan himself, as 
 "traitors," about to deliver their country over to the South, is no longer 
 in evidence. Instead we have a Stanton who is subdued, complimentary, 
 even oily, comparing the new administration with the old in terms to 
 the advantage of the latter. Reading these letters, indeed, calls to mind 
 certain adjectives, such as "sycophantic," "hypocritical," "double-deal- 
 ing," which contemporaries were inclined to apply to the Secretary. 
 Stanton writes as a loyal Buchanan Democrat reporting all the good 
 things said in Washington of the Buchanan administration and all the 
 unpleasant things gossiped concerning the succeeding one. "Black Re- 
 publicans," he wrote were obtaining most military commissions, and 
 the war was being fought for party ends. Corruption and ineffi- 
 ciency were rapidly producing chaos. One would almost think, in 
 reading these letters, that patriotic Americans were yearning for a 
 return of the good old Buchanan days. "I do not think," writes Stanton 
 in April, "there will be any serious effort to assail your administration 
 in respect to Fort Sumter." "The first month of the [Lincoln] adminis- 
 tration has furnished an ample vindication of your policy and has ren- 
 dered all occasion of other defense unnecessary." 
 
 The regime was without public respect; indeed, little confidence 
 prevailed that it would last long. "Every day," Stanton wrote on March 
 16, "affords the proof of the absence of any settled policy or harmoni- 
 ous concert of action. Seward, Bates and Cameron form one wing. 
 Chase, Miller, 11 Blair the opposite wing. Smith is on both sides and 
 Lincoln sometimes on one, sometimes on the other." And on April 1 1 : 
 "The feeling of loyalty to the government has greatly diminished in 
 this city. Many persons who would have supported the government 
 under your administration refused to be enrolled. Many who were en- 
 rolled have withdrawn and refuse to take the oath. The administration 
 has not acquired the confidence or respect of the people here. Not one 
 of the cabinet or principal officers has taken a house or brought his 
 family here. Seward rented a house 'while he should continue in the 
 cabinet' but he has not opened it nor has his family come. They all act 
 as though they meant to be ready 'to cut and run at a minute's notice' — 
 their tenure is like that of a Bedouin on the sands of the desert. And 
 
 11 So it appears in Works of James Buchanan. Ed. by John Bassett-Moore. 
 J. P. Lippincott, 1908-1911. P. 170. Evidently a printer's error for "Welles." 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 259 
 
 besides a strong feeling of distrust in the candor and sincerity of Lin- 
 coln personally, has sprung up. . . . No one speaks of Lincoln or any 
 member of his cabinet with respect or regard." "The imbecility of this 
 administration," Stanton wrote Buchanan on July 26, after Bull Run, 
 "culminated in that catastrophe — an irretrievable misfortune and na- 
 tional disgrace, never to be forgotten, are to be added to the ruin of all 
 peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy as a result of Lincoln's 'run- 
 ning the machine' for five months. ... It is not unlikely that some 
 change in the war and navy departments may take place, but none 
 beyond those two departments until Jeff Davis turns out the whole 
 concern." 
 
 It seems strange that Stanton should have aspired to become a mem- 
 ber of an administration which he so despised, but there are signs in 
 plenty that, in the summer and fall of 1861, he was maneuvering to that 
 end. The unpopularity of Cameron and the indications that his career 
 as War Minister was reaching a crisis naturally did not escape Stanton's 
 notice. Moreover, events had made this department the most important 
 of all; any man who desired to serve his country — and this unselfish 
 motive should not be disregarded in considering the complexities of 
 Stanton's character — would naturally turn his thoughts in that direc- 
 tion. Possibly the rebuff which Stanton received in his first attempt to 
 serve the new regime explains, in part, the venom with which he 
 assailed it. Soon after inauguration Lincoln was called upon to ap- 
 point the District Attorney for the District of Columbia. For this im- 
 portant office two candidates were presented, Edwin M. Stanton and 
 Edward C. Carrington. Seward and Chase strongly endorsed Stanton, 
 while Attorney General Bates favored Carrington. The question came 
 up in an early cabinet meeting. Lincoln announced that he had no 
 personal regard for Stanton — the President was still evidently smarting 
 under the insulting treatment received at his hands in the McCormick 
 case; still Stanton was an able man and a Democrat, and, Lincoln added, 
 at that critical moment he would like to bring as many influential 
 Democrats as possible to the side of the Union. Seward spoke strongly 
 for Stanton, emphasizing the great services he had rendered to his 
 country while in Buchanan's cabinet. Chase also, seldom found, even 
 at that early date, on the same side as Seward, warmly supported Stan- 
 ton. Bates admitted Stanton's ability, but did not trust the man. Lincoln 
 then appealed to Blair, who, in his appearances before the Supreme 
 Court, had had opportunities to gauge the candidate. Blair, in his ex- 
 plosive manner, threw a bombshell into the discussion. No one ques- 
 tioned, he said, that Stanton, as a lawyer, was far abler than Carrington, 
 but, he complained, Stanton was not an honest man; he had taken 
 
260 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 bribes, and Blair said he knew of at least one case in which the evidence 
 was complete. The charge astonishes the present generation, for Stan- 
 ton, as head of the War Department, was especially distinguished for 
 honesty and for the ferocity with which he pursued corrupt contrac- 
 tors; it likewise, writes Gideon Welles, "astonished the President and 
 disconcerted both Seward and Chase, each of whom questioned whether 
 there might not be some mistake in this matter, but Blair said there 
 could be none, and farther that he (Stanton) was a protege of Black, 
 and in feeling with him." Lincoln cut the whole discussion short by say- 
 ing that the matter chiefly concerned the Attorney General and that he 
 would therefore let Mr. Bates decide between the two men. Bates at 
 once chose Carrington. 
 
 The fact that Stanton could enlist on his behalf the two great rivals 
 of the cabinet, Seward and Chase, again attests his versatile talent for 
 simultaneously winning the favor of men of the most divergent views. 
 At that time the great issue that was to raise such havoc in Lincoln's 
 official family — the problem of the Negro — had already been definitely 
 drawn. Seward and Chase represented the opposite poles of this ques- 
 tion, and both men believed that Stanton belonged to their school. 
 That he was a strong Unionist and conservative was Seward's convic- 
 tion. On the other hand Chase, the leader in the administration of an 
 extreme pro-Negro policy, regarded Stanton as one of his own party. 
 Stanton had given both men grounds to regard him as a follower. 
 Unfriendly critics insist that he, like Cameron, had observed the grow- 
 ing power of the antislavery group, and had therefore cultivated a 
 resurgence of the abolitionist allegiances with which he had started 
 life. "Wily Edwin M. Stanton," is the way a recent analyst puts it, 
 "who was snuggling up to the radicals in the hope of securing Cam- 
 eron's job with their aid while at the same time holding hands with his 
 Democratic friends." 12 Whatever the method, or whatever the motive, 
 all the great radical leaders — Chase, Sumner, Chandler, Wade, Fessen- 
 den, Julian — became Stanton's friends and joyfully acclaimed him as 
 one of themselves. 
 
 At the same time an influence even more powerful at the moment 
 than any of these was tenderly cultivated. Probably no man, in the 
 latter part of 1861, could become Secretary of War without the support 
 of the young Napoleon of the Army of the Potomac, George B. Mc- 
 Clellan. One of the first friends that commander made after his arrival 
 in Washington, the day following Bull Run, was the famous lawyer. 
 Stanton became his legal adviser, his friend, and his refuge. In politics 
 
 12 Williams, T. Harry, Lincoln and the Radicals. University of Wisconsin Press, 
 1941. P. 84. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 261 
 
 McClellan represented a different type from either Seward or Chase. 
 He was a Democrat of the Breckinridge-Buchanan school. Slavery, in 
 his view, was exclusively a Southern question, and the North should 
 let it severely alone. If remarks said to have been dropped by McClellan 
 in Washington can be accepted as authentic, he was not an overzealous 
 Unionist. Gideon Welles quotes with horror the McClellan statement 
 that Massachusetts and South Carolina were equally to blame for the 
 war, and that he would just as willingly fight one as the other. Such 
 opinions did not prevent Stanton and the little general from becoming 
 intimate. McClellan's Own Story contains a tart record of that friend- 
 ship. McClellan portrays himself as an unsuspecting fly who had been 
 beguiled into the Stanton web. All Stanton's pretensions of friendship 
 and support were merely plottings for the succession to Cameron. 
 "Not many weeks after arriving I was introduced to him as a safe 
 adviser on legal points. From that moment he did his best to ingratiate 
 himself with me, and professed the warmest friendship and devotion. 
 . . . His purpose was to endeavor to climb upon my shoulder and then 
 throw me down." The sequel disclosed that, whether or not Stanton's 
 blandishments were deliberately designed to such an end, that was 
 certainly the outcome. 
 
 McClellan makes charges that seem pretty wild. When Cameron 
 made "quite an abolition speech," Stanton urged McClellan to arrest 
 him — Cameron was then Secretary of War — "for inciting to insubor- 
 dination. He often advocated the propriety of my seizing the govern- 
 ment and taking affairs into my own hands." In the early time 
 McClellan became so close to Stanton that, seeking a peaceful retreat — 
 even from Lincoln — he took up his headquarters at Stanton's house. 
 Here only, McClellan wrote his wife, could he be secured from "prowl- 
 ing Presidents." On one critical occasion Stanton rendered McClellan 
 a friendly service. A meeting of the radicals was being held one Sunday 
 in the White House, to decide McClellan's fate — for his long period 
 of preparation, or failure to take a vigorous offensive, seemed to call 
 for action. Stanton came to McClellan, who was just recovering from 
 a serious illness, and revealed the plot against him. "They are counting 
 on your death," Stanton said, "and are already dividing among them- 
 selves your military goods and chattels." As a result of this warning 
 McClellan himself, generally supposed to be lying at the point of 
 death with typhoid fever, appeared at the solemn Sanhedrin, "where 
 my unexpected appearance," he afterward wrote, "caused very much 
 the effect of a shell in a powder magazine." As a result, the campaign 
 of the radicals for McClellan's military head was frustrated. Chase, 
 McClellan believed, working in the interest of the radical party, was 
 
262 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the instigator of the scheme against him. Thus Stanton, by quietly 
 informing McClellan of the "plot," had, as Gideon Welles and 
 Jeremiah Black would have put it, "betrayed" Chase's confidence. But 
 at this very moment Chase regarded Stanton as one of the finest char- 
 acters in Washington and was working hard to make him Secretary 
 of War. 
 
 Just through whose instrumentality Stanton did attain his goal is 
 something that, historians are generally agreed, will never be known. 
 Three conspicuous candidates for this honor figure in all discussions 
 of the subject: Simon Cameron, Salmon P. Chase, and William H. 
 Seward. That these were the only members of the cabinet who knew 
 of the appointment before it was sent to the Senate was true. In his 
 lifetime Cameron always pointed to himself as the creator of the new 
 Secretary of War. He has left a record of his call on Lincoln, in which 
 he expressed a wish to retire from the War Department, and declared 
 his willingness to do so provided Stanton were selected as his succes- 
 sor. 13 This is all a part of the legend which the Cameronians diligently 
 spread that Cameron's retirement was voluntary, and may therefore be 
 disregarded. As always, we are forced to fall back again upon that 
 unfailing fountain of information, who gave full credit to William H. 
 Seward. Lincoln's first choice for the post, according to Gideon Welles, 
 was Montgomery Blair. From the professional standpoint such an ap- 
 pointment would have been an excellent one. Of all the cabinet mem- 
 bers, Blair was the only one who knew anything at first hand of military 
 affairs. He was a graduate of West Point and had served for a time in 
 the regular army. His knowledge of the existing army situation and 
 the soundness of his views on military plans had impressed both Lincoln 
 and Welles in cabinet councils. The ability with which Blair managed 
 the Post Office Department showed that he possessed administrative 
 capacity of a high order. But from a political standpoint the promotion 
 would have been a mistake. No man was quite so odious to both Seward 
 and Chase as this forthright, peppery Marylander, and the Republican 
 Party as a whole would have resented the heightened influence of "the 
 Blairs" that such an elevation would have made inevitable. But such 
 spadework as Seward may have performed in excluding Blair and pro- 
 moting the influence of Stanton has left no trace. So far as the record 
 shows, he had nothing to do with the cabinet change. As he was Lin- 
 coln's closest intimate, and as he spent the larger part of the Saturday 
 and Sunday preceding the appointment in Lincoln's company, it may 
 be assumed that Seward's assistance was not disregarded in this crisis. 
 Always the politician, Seward was looking not only for a capable 
 
 13 Atlantic Monthly, XXVI, 473. 
 
EXIT CAMERON; ENTER STANTON 263 
 
 Secretary of War, but for a personal partisan. In advocating Cameron, 
 he had been deluded into the belief that, in a sense, he was packing the 
 cabinet with a man of his own. This plan having failed, he now labored 
 to oust Cameron and install a dependable Seward man in his place. One 
 sentence in Welles's narrative concerning this cabinet change sheds 
 more light upon the transaction than all the contradictory accounts of 
 which it has been made the subject. Seward himself told Welles, so the 
 latter has recorded, that Stanton had promised, in case of attaining the 
 War Department, that "he should maintain his [Seward's] policy, vote 
 with him and remain with him in the cabinet, and leave whenever he 
 did." 14 
 
 This single sentence lifts the curtain. It discloses Stanton angling for 
 the post, and prepared to make — or at least to promise — most humiliat- 
 ing commitments to obtain it. It similarly discloses Seward contriving a 
 hard-and-fast bargain as the price of his influence. After this, Chase's 
 own elaborate story of how he first proposed Stanton for the coveted 
 place, acted as go-between in the negotiations, and persuaded both Lin- 
 coln and Seward of the appropriateness of the appointment, need not be 
 taken too seriously. It is interesting to observe how Welles, preparing 
 his memorandum in the late seventies, anticipates and explains this pas- 
 sage in Chase's Diary, none of which had then been published. That 
 Seward himself should lie low, and let Chase imagine himself the active 
 manipulator in Stanton's appointment, was all a part of the Seward 
 technique. That Stanton had insulted Lincoln to his face, that he had 
 abused and ridiculed the administration, Seward well knew; human 
 nature being what it is, it would seem almost too much to expect even 
 the most tolerant of men to take the reviler to his bosom. Seward there- 
 fore needed Chase's assistance, and the best way of obtaining it was to 
 appeal to the man's vanity and permit him to think that he was the 
 mainspring of the transaction. There had been nothing in Stanton's 
 career, in the campaign of 1856 — when he supported Buchanan — or 
 in 1860 — when he took the stump for Breckinridge — or in his activities 
 in Buchanan's cabinet to give Chase ground for foreseeing what came 
 to pass, that Stanton would join the Chase radical party in opposing 
 Lincoln's reconstruction policy. On his merits one would think that 
 almost any other man would have been preferred by Chase as Cam- 
 eron's successor. 
 
 Perhaps, therefore, Welles was right in thinking that Seward, by 
 tickling Chase's vanity, manipulated him into coming to his support in 
 urging the Stanton appointment on Lincoln. Welles also describes, as 
 well as it has ever been described, Lincoln's reason for overlooking the 
 
 14 Welles, Narrative of Events. 
 
264 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Stanton past. The President "was not the man to permit his personal 
 likes and dislikes to govern his action in cases of public necessity." 
 
 The outcome was not a happy one for Lincoln personally. Stanton 
 was insulting at times and, even worse, he was disloyal, an intriguer 
 against his chief. For Seward's plans, Stanton was the worst selection 
 he could have made. Perhaps Montgomery Blair summed up the matter 
 most neatly in his comment to Welles, a few weeks after Stanton's 
 advent. He declared that Seward had brought Stanton into the cabinet 
 for his own purposes "after Chase had stolen Cameron and that Chase 
 is now stealing Stanton." The flippant phrase described accurately a 
 transition in allegiance that proved to be one of the vexations of Lin- 
 coln's life. 
 
BOOK FOUR 
 
 C The Cabinet and McClellan | 
 
I 
 
 A 
 
 .S AN ADMINISTRATOR of the War Department, Stanton 
 aided powerfully in the conduct of the war. He quickly put to flight 
 the corrupt contractors who had reaped a profitable harvest under 
 Cameron, introduced order and honesty into every branch of the serv- 
 ice, and won the gratitude of his generals, such as Grant and Sherman, 
 for the efficiency with which he enrolled and transported troops and 
 provided munitions and supplies. But on matters of general administra- 
 tion policy, he proved to be only another thorn in Lincoln's side. By the 
 time of his accession, the lines that were to split the Republican Party 
 in two — a schism that was to continue into the explosive days of recon- 
 struction — had been definitely drawn. What was the immediate ob- 
 jective of the war, the preservation of the Union or the extinction of 
 slavery? What was to be the future of the Negro? If set free, would 
 he become a citizen, with all civic rights, on equal grounds in political, 
 economic, and social prerogatives, with the white man? On what terms 
 were the seceded states to be readmitted into the Federal Union? From 
 the first Lincoln had proclaimed the reconstitution of the central gov- 
 ernment as the great aim of the conflict. He was determined to keep 
 all other questions subordinate. In this program he had had the support 
 of all members of his cabinet except Chase and Cameron. But with the 
 coming of Stanton, Chase secured a powerful and resourceful as well 
 as unscrupulous, intriguing ally. Seward, Welles, Blair, Bates, stood 
 strongly at Lincoln's side in his struggle for Union and for a concilia- 
 tory policy toward the South, while Chase and Stanton represented a 
 small, but effective and persistent bloc which insisted on the future of 
 the Negro as the great question at issue and advocated harsh treatment 
 for the states in rebellion. 
 
 The leaders in the policy of Thorough are generally known today 
 as "radicals"; a name under which they became even more notorious 
 in the era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Those who 
 advocated more conciliatory methods were called, then and afterward, 
 conservatives. But the colloquial parlance of the day had coined a new 
 
268 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 appellation for the extremists. Edward Bates, in his Diary, always refers 
 to this faction of the Republican Party as the Jacobins, and John Hay's 
 favorite nickname for the most aggressive group was "the Jacobin 
 Club." The title, of course, harked back to the French Revolution and 
 to the firebrands who held their meetings at the monastery of the 
 Jacobins in Paris, and there plotted the schemes which ultimately led 
 to the Reign of Terror. In character and manners, the two foremost 
 leaders, "Bluff Ben" Wade and the frequently bibulous "Zack" Chan- 
 dler, mildly suggested a Marat or a Robespierre. Wade's features, as they 
 have been handed down in the crude photographs of the time, with his 
 mastiff -like jaw and lips, his determined eyes, thin, skeleton-like face, 
 protruding chin and lofty cheekbones, high forehead and unruly hair, 
 form a fitting setting for the doctrines and performances associated 
 with his name. The last qualities the exterior man presented were the 
 ancient culture and education of New England. Yet Wade directly 
 derived from several of the most distinguished families of Massachu- 
 setts. Among his formidable list of grandfathers, great-grandfathers, 
 and the like appear the names of Dudley, Upham, Bradstreet, and Wig- 
 glesworth. Anne Bradstreet, that "tenth muse" of early Puritan litera- 
 ture, was an ancestor, and Michael Wigglesworth, author of the Day 
 of Doom — a poem compared to which Dante's Inferno is a work of 
 boisterous humor — was his great-grandfather. Wade had this lugu- 
 brious masterpiece at tongue's end, and frequently entertained his 
 friends by repeating its choicest passages, especially the stanza which 
 promised babies born in a state of nonelection "the easiest room in hell." 
 The obvious analyst might see in this dark family background the re- 
 lentless, bloodhound qualities which Wade displayed in the pursuit of 
 his favorite form of evil; but the man was not a religious enthusiast, 
 still less a theological one, and his interest in ancestral literature did not 
 spring from awe for its gloomy precepts, but rather expressed the 
 backwoodsman type of humor for which Wade was celebrated. 
 
 Indeed, no man ever departed further from the family norm. Most 
 of Wade's ancestors had been educated at Harvard, but a few winter 
 months at a red brick schoolhouse represented the height of his intel- 
 lectual equipment. The ministry and schoolmastering, or substantial 
 farming, had given sustenance to most of his predecessors; but Wade 
 at the age of twenty, with seven dollars in his pocket, and all his mun- 
 dane possessions crammed into a bag and thrown over his shoulder, 
 abandoned the "wild Agawam hills" of western Massachusetts, plunged 
 into the wilderness, and walked all the way to the Western Reserve of 
 Ohio. Here he cleared a tract, built a log cabin, and settled down to the 
 life of a pioneer. In the next few years he followed a variety of occu- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 269 
 
 pations. He taught school — an academic degree not being a requisite 
 for this profession on the primitive shores of Lake Erie — drove herds 
 of cattle over the Alleghanies into Pennsylvania, hired out as wood- 
 cutter at fifty cents a cord, and worked with pick and shovel on the 
 proudest engineering enterprise of the day, the Erie Canal. The West- 
 ern Reserve — part of the empire which Connecticut claimed by royal 
 charter, lying within certain degrees of latitude extending from the 
 Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean — was really a piece of New England 
 transplanted to a new frontier. Practically all its settlers came from 
 Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire and not unnaturally 
 had transplanted the institutions and the mode of life that had made 
 them what they were at home. This may explain the new ambitions 
 which soon diverted Wade from the jack-of-all-trades existence he had 
 pursued in the earlier years. For a brief time he studied medicine, but 
 abandoned that profession for the law. A few months of reading in a 
 law office at Ashtabula qualified him, in 1827, for admission to the bar. 
 By a lucky chance Joshua Giddings offered the promising young man 
 a partnership. This not only guaranteed Wade a modest living, but 
 enlarged what may possibly be called his spiritual or humanitarian out- 
 look. This Giddings was the same man who thirty years afterward 
 impressively walked out of the Chicago Wigwam when the convention 
 refused — a refusal afterward rescinded — to include the "created equal" 
 phrases of the Declaration of Independence in the party platform. 
 Giddings thus represented that extreme type of abolitionist whom only 
 the Western Reserve of Ohio could engender. Logically enough, there- 
 fore, his rough-and-ready protege soon blossomed forth into an un- 
 abashed and uncompromising advocate of the black man. 
 
 Wade quickly advanced from the routine business of law into the 
 State Senate of Ohio. Here he fought the Negro's cause so vehemently 
 that his denunciations displeased even that antislavery district, which 
 angrily refused to return him for a second term. The usual antislavery 
 battle cries of the day did not suffice for Wade. Opposition to fugitive- 
 slave laws, to the extension of slavery, to slavery in the old South, to 
 Texas annexation, to the Mexican War, provided the main items in the 
 abolitionist creed, but Wade went in for more sweeping denunciations. 
 He proposed to transform the Negro, at least on the political and civic 
 side, into a white man. In Ohio State lived a considerable population 
 of free colored men, who, except for the fact that they were not 
 slaves, enjoyed few more civic rights than their brethren of the planta- 
 tions. Wade demanded the removal of all legal distinction between 
 them and their Caucasian fellow citizens. The right to vote, to hold 
 office, to sit on juries — indeed, all the privileges which, in Wade's 
 
270 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 mature days in the United States Senate, became the watchwords of 
 Reconstruction, he proposed to give Negroes in the Ohio of the 
 eighteen-thirties. He urged the proposal in a raucous oratory which, 
 if it accomplished nothing else — for the program of civic equality 
 failed in the legislature — did advertise the speaker as a bold, rough- 
 hewn reformer, of unquestioned mental power and formidable strength 
 in debate. When his tall, straight, broad-shouldered but supple figure 
 arose, black locks shaking and little black eyes full of sparks, only the 
 most courageous of his enemies cared to oppose him. Those speaking 
 habits that afterward made Wade so familiar a figure in the Federal 
 Senate — rising and sinking on his toes in the heat of argument, now 
 thrusting his right hand, Napoleon-like, into his coat, again shooting 
 it out like a rocket to rivet an argument or scornfully indicate an oppo- 
 nent, for Wade never hesitated at personalities — marked his early 
 efforts in Ohio. That Wade possessed many of the qualities of a leader 
 of men — personal courage, lightning-like repartee, strong convictions, 
 a quick and dominating mind — soon became evident. That he lacked 
 the humane graces which make the popular favorite was also clear. He 
 cared little for comradely association with his kind, almost never ap- 
 peared at social gatherings, and as a young man cared nothing for the 
 companionship of women. Wade did not marry until he had passed his 
 fortieth year. 
 
 Here was an incongruous colleague, one might think, for Salmon P. 
 Chase, and Wade, when elected to the Senate in 1851, for a time kept 
 aloof from his stately, intellectual companion. Wade did not entirely 
 trust Chase on the abolition issue, and looked doubtfully at the queer 
 compromises which had made possible Chase's election. Nor did he 
 like him personally; the popular impression of his senior was well re- 
 flected in his remark that "Chase is all right, only his theology is 
 wrong; he thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity!" In fact Chase 
 and Wade never affiliated; as time went on, they became positively hos- 
 tile, Chase regarding Wade, in 1860, as the man chiefly responsible for 
 his failure to obtain Ohio's unanimous support at the Chicago Conven- 
 tion. In 1851, the Senate as a whole, which had become a little weary 
 of Chase's superior manners and Latin quotations, found it something 
 of a relief when Wade appeared. In the fifties feeling between Northern 
 and Southern Senators raged at white heat. Students of Reconstruction 
 are startled by the passions that ultimately swayed the two parties — 
 the Thad Stevens who wished to transform the Southern states into a 
 "desert," the Southern cavaliers who regarded bowie knives and shot- 
 guns as the most persuasive of arguments. Undoubtedly a good deal 
 of this fire was kindled when Northern and Southern lawmakers fought 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 271 
 
 face to face, and sometimes literally fist to fist, in the days of the repeal 
 of the Missouri Compromise and of bleeding Kansas. It was the time 
 of primeval passions, and as such the Senate formed an ideal bull pen 
 for a hard hitter like Ben Wade. Northern a dough-faces" and Southern 
 "fire-eaters" he despised with identical fervor. Certain rustics from 
 the middle states and New England who regarded physical brawls and 
 duelings as unchristian sometimes took too meekly the insults and chal- 
 lenges hurled at them by the gentlemen of the South. Wade decided 
 on a different course. Any brother Senator who assailed him or his 
 state, he almost officially proclaimed, would have to answer for his 
 rashness. Immediately a brave spirit from Virginia rose in the Senate 
 and said that Ohio was a state of "Negro thieves." "You're a liar!" 
 Wade, as good as his word, retorted. Presently the outraged Southern- 
 er's representatives called on the Ohioan. A retraction, even a faint 
 apology, would satisfy their principal; otherwise Mr. Wade understood 
 what the word "liar," applied to a son of the Old Dominion, neces- 
 sarily entailed. "I take this opportunity," replied Wade, "to say what 
 I then thought, and you will, if you please, repeat it. Your friend is a 
 foul-mouthed old blackguard." Next day in the Senate he walked up 
 to his seat, drew from beneath his coat two huge pistols and, in full 
 view of his associates, placed them on his desk. Strange to say, no chal- 
 lenge was ever received. Wade's defiance of the redoubtable Robert 
 Toombs gave the Ohioan high standing among sports-loving Ameri- 
 cans. Toombs was one of the Senators who, when Bully Brooks 
 clubbed Charles Sumner into insensibility at his Senate desk, delivered 
 a speech applauding the assault. Wade rose in fury, "his voice thunder- 
 ing and his eyes shooting fire," one chronicle records. "If the principle 
 now announced," he roared, murderously looking at Toombs, "is to 
 prevail, let us come armed for the combat, and although you are four 
 to one, I am here to meet you." When Wade was asked to name the 
 weapons in the expected duel, he specified "squirrel rifles at twenty 
 paces" and demanded that both antagonists wear pieces of white paper 
 over their hearts. Each man was to shoot at the signal, and if the bullets 
 miscarried was to advance, for the next volley, a yard closer to his foe; 
 if they both misfired again, another yard, and so on, until, if the affair 
 lasted that long, they would stand practically face to face. A few days 
 after this specification of the terms, both Wade and Toombs, who sat 
 near each other in the Senate, resumed their seats. Toombs bent over 
 and put his hand on the enemy's shoulder. "Wade," he said, "what's 
 the use of two men making damned fools of themselves?" "None at 
 all," Wade retorted, "but it is the misfortune of some men that they 
 can't help it." From that day he and Toombs remained excellent friends. 
 
272 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Not unnaturally the Southern fire-eaters, much as they abhorred 
 Wade's principles, admired him as a man. His often happy retorts in 
 debate added to his popularity and his growing national fame. In the 
 discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill Senator Badger, of North Caro- 
 lina, plaintively asked: "You mean that when I go to settle in Nebraska, 
 I can't take my old black mammy with me?" "We haven't the slightest 
 objection to your taking your old black mammy to Nebraska," Wade 
 shot back. "What we object to is selling her when you get her there." 
 Here were clearly the makings of one of those Jacobins who were 
 to prove as troublesome to Lincoln and his cabinet as they had proved 
 to the Southern comrades in the Senate of the eighteen-fifties. Similar 
 qualities embellished Zachariah Chandler, Wade's closest associate on 
 both fields of battle. Like Wade, Chandler was uneducated and per- 
 sonally unpolished. His letters, while they do not lack a certain vigor, 
 are misspelled and jumbled in construction; an amusing fact is that 
 Chandler never mastered the orthography of the man whom he detested 
 above all others, that young Napoleon who frequently figures in his 
 correspondence as "that damned McLelland." Like Wade's — and in- 
 deed, like most of the Jacobins' — Chandler's origin went back to New 
 England; he was born in the Merrimac Valley of New Hampshire, in 
 1814, of Puritan stock. The elder Chandler, when Zack reached his 
 eighteenth year, offered him the choice of college education his broth- 
 ers had received, or a capital gift of one thousand dollars. Chandler 
 took the cash and let the culture go. He, too, sought fame and fortune 
 — especially fortune — in the dawning West, landing in the frontier 
 settlement of Detroit in 1833. In more recent times this energetic 
 Yankee would have found himself at home in that state of steel and 
 automobiles; in this earlier territorial period, however, Chandler opened 
 a general store. The man evidently possessed mercantile genius. Chan- 
 dler, in the experimental period, acted as his own manager, salesman, and 
 porter; after standing at the counter all day, he would deliver the pur- 
 chases, and then, returning to his emporium, would sleep on his counter 
 with a bale of goods for pillow. He cannily invested his earnings in real 
 estate in an expanding community. Twenty years after this beginning 
 the "Chandler block," an architectural masterpiece — so proud Detroit- 
 ers of that day regarded it — was the most imposing building in town, 
 housing the great retail and wholesale drygoods business that had made 
 Zack a rich man, and consequently, when he deigned to take up politics 
 as a side issue, a power in Republican circles. On July 6, 1854, a large 
 host of Free-Soilers, ex- Whigs, and antislavery Democrats met in the 
 open, under the elms in Jackson, Michigan, the men in stovepipe hats 
 and the women in coal-scuttle bonnets, and issued the call to all anti- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 273 
 
 slavery forces for a new party, and, as Michiganders have always 
 insisted, for the first time adopted the designation "Republican." On 
 this occasion Chandler was the loudest, if not the most Ciceronian, of 
 the orators. He had already attained the boss-ship of the new party in 
 his state, largely owing this distinction, his detractors proclaimed, to 
 the lavish use of money and hard liquor. When Chandler first appeared 
 in Washington, as Senator from Michigan, he proved to be the fore- 
 runner of a senatorial type that in due course exerted vast authority. 
 At that time the United States Senate was not a rich man's club; 
 Chandler, however, had already reached millionairedom — an attain- 
 ment he made obvious in several ways. Abolitionists for the most part 
 were a poor, scrawny lot; but Chandler occupied one of the most pre- 
 tentious houses in the Capital, entertained on a sumptuous scale, and 
 made nothing of dropping checks of $10,000 and more into the yawn- 
 ing party deficit. Had Chandler been an ordinary man, manifestations 
 like this would have made him a conspicuous light; but in addition to 
 his wealth he was vigorously able, a master politician, and a dangerous 
 parliamentarian, not overscrupulous in accomplishing his ends, even 
 though the ends were, in his own opinion and that of many worthy 
 men and women, about the most idealistic that had ever fired the 
 American conscience. 
 
 A strange mixture of practical sense and philanthropic impulse was 
 this Zack Chandler. Edward Bates, describing what he calls "a disgrace- 
 ful scene at Willard's," gives one view of the man. "Senator Chandler 
 of Michigan was in the lobby, drunk (a bad habit that has lately grown 
 upon him) and abused General McClellan roundly, finally calling him 
 a liar and a coward." * Bates, on political grounds, despised Chandler as 
 cordially as he hated Wade, who, in his eyes, was a "frosty dema- 
 gogue." 2 Michigan, however, so excessively admired "old Zack" that 
 his statue stands today in the Capitol in Washington, as one of the two 
 native sons whom it chiefly delights to honor. This, of course, is in- 
 tended as a tribute to what Michigan regards as Chandler's unselfish 
 labor for the black man. And in truth the picture suggested by the 
 censorious Bates shows only one side of the man. Not that Chandler 
 was ever a figure of dignity. His long, horselike face, high forehead, 
 glaring eyes, large and close together, long, aggressive nose, thin lips, 
 the lower one protruding above the upper, the two shaggy clusters of 
 dark hair, one rising almost vertically from his head, the other depend- 
 ing from the chin, his powerful frame, awkward, gaunt, and sinewy, 
 his manners, blunt, at times good-natured, at other times overbearing — 
 
 1 Bates, op. cit., p. 260. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 273. 
 
274 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 such an exterior hardly made him a fitting companion of the debonair 
 Sumner and the pompous Chase. At least they portray one advantage 
 that helped Chandler in his early political days. He possessed the 
 strength of a giant and sometimes used it as a giant. In the early 
 fifties Detroit's richest and most elegantly dressed merchant would 
 leave his counting room and descend into the voting places, where the 
 roughs of the opposite party were using the strong-armed methods of 
 the time. With his brawny shoulders Zack would plow through these 
 Democratic cohorts, as handy with his fists as the less prosperous mem- 
 bers of the proletariat. 
 
 This same personal aggressiveness was displayed from the first day 
 in the Senate. Southern fire-eaters frightened him no more than they 
 did Bluff Ben. In fact, Chandler and Wade drew up a written compact, 
 to which they solemnly put their signatures, pledging themselves to 
 resist Southern verbal offensives in the one way that gentlemen of the 
 South were supposed to approve. So seriously did Chandler regard the 
 agreement that, several months before going to Washington, he daily 
 practiced marksmanship, and engaged in regular muscular exercises so 
 as to keep his already powerful body in the pink of condition. No 
 record indicates, however, that Chandler came so close as did Wade to 
 upholding this agreement by deed. However, his rough-and-ready 
 speeches on the Negro, on Kansas, on John Brown and other disquiet- 
 ing themes, often roused Mason, Toombs, Davis, and the rest to verbal 
 fury. The Michigan millionaire proved to be one of the most pestifer- 
 ous declaimers for Negro rights — the same Negro rights which Wade, 
 Garrison, and other abolitionists were demanding. On the occasion of 
 Preston Brooks's attack on Sumner, Chandler exclaimed in face of his 
 enraged Southern brethren: "Had I been on the floor of the Senate 
 when that assault occurred, so help me God that ruffian's blood would 
 have flowed!" Like Wade and the others, Chandler at this time acquired 
 that intense hatred of Southern statesmen which inspired his every act 
 and word during the next thirty years — for his political life was a long 
 one, culminating as Secretary of the Interior in the cabinet of President 
 Grant. When the catastrophic year 1861 arrived, Chandler faced the 
 situation boldly. He turned his face against all compromise. The issue, 
 he loudly declared, was the break-up of the Union or war. He was for 
 war. In a Senate speech on the Crittenden Compromise, which Chandler 
 opposed, he quoted Jefferson's letter of November 13, 1787, that the 
 "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of 
 patriots and tyrants." "Some of the manufacturing states," said Chand- 
 ler, "think a fight would be awful. Without a little blood-letting this 
 Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush." 
 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 275 
 
 Other members of the Jacobin camp were less robustious in word 
 and deed. Charles Sumner accepted most of the Jacobin tenets and 
 usually spoke and voted with that faction in the Senate; but he hardly 
 had access to the inner shrine; he served as a kind of window dressing 
 to the movement, giving it respectability and elegance. Lyman Trum- 
 bull, a member of one of Connecticut's most distinguished families, 
 and now Senator from Illinois, also gave the Jacobin cause a dignity 
 which at times it conspicuously needed. Perhaps the most idealistic 
 devotee, however, and the most intellectual, was George Washington 
 Julian, of Indiana. This star-set noncompromiser had a personal history 
 that placed him apart from the others. Wade, Chandler, Sumner, Trum- 
 bull, all traced their origins to Puritan New England. Julian's paternal 
 forebears - they spelled the name Julien - had fled France after the 
 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, while his mother's ancestors were 
 almost exclusively German. The French Huguenot and the New Eng- 
 land Calvinist had much in common, and certainly Julian's unselfish 
 zeal in the cause of the Negro would have satisfied the most unbending 
 New Englander. The name of Joshua R. Giddings recurs again and 
 again in the annals of the Jacobins; it seems fitting enough, therefore, 
 that Julian should have married Giddings's daughter, the lady's only 
 dowry being the fires of that abolitionism which her father had been 
 spreading for so many years in the Western Reserve. The motives of 
 other leaders in the Jacobin ranks - especially Wade and Chandler - 
 may occasionally abide our question, but Julian's fiercest opponent 
 never doubted his selfless pursuit of an ideal, his readiness to sacrifice 
 fame, fortune, and if necessary life itself, to achieve freedom and the 
 rights of man for the Negro. In early days his own brother had dis- 
 solved a law partnership with George Julian, because his unrestrained 
 advocacy of abolition was driving clients from the firm. His interest in 
 other cranky causes, such as Maine temperance laws, woman suffrage, 
 magnetic healing, and spiritualism added little to his standing with more 
 conventional brethren. Julian was similarly a man of the most monastic 
 habits; bread and milk were his favorite food, water his exclusive bev- 
 erage, while tobacco in any form never polluted his lips. An intellectual 
 and bookish man, he supported the poverty-stricken old age to which 
 the championship of unpopular causes had doomed him chiefly by 
 fugitive magazine writing, the Atlantic Monthly and the North Ameri- 
 can Review being favorite receptacles for his essays. His speeches in 
 Congress, to which he was elected in 1848, still occupy a place among 
 the classics of the abolition cause. 
 
 Someone once asked Charles Sumner if he had ever looked at the 
 other side of the slavery question; the reply was immediately flashed 
 
276 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 back, "There is no other side." That completely set forth Julian's atti- 
 tude. In early life he had taken a vow never to vote for any candidate 
 who was even slightly tainted with the great evil. He even balked at 
 Lincoln's nomination in 1860. Had not the rail splitter taken the stump 
 for Taylor in 1848 — Taylor, the owner of two hundred slaves? In the 
 winter of '61, Julian made an exploratory visit to Springfield to discuss 
 the slavery issue with the President-elect and also to protest against 
 Simon Cameron and Caleb B. Smith in the cabinet. He was completely 
 won by Lincoln's personal charm, but the suspicion that the new man 
 was not entirely sound on the Negro still troubled his conscience. 
 Lincoln's inaugural, assuring the South that no warfare was planned on 
 its favorite institution, added to this anxiety. When the President boldly 
 proclaimed that the purpose of the conflict was not to destroy slavery, 
 but to save the Union, Julian went over fervently to the Jacobin camp, 
 becoming its most eloquent representative in the lower chamber, as 
 Wade and Chandler were in the Senate. 
 
 This trio — Wade, Chandler, and Julian — represented the most volu- 
 ble and persistent foes of the Lincoln cabinet in Congress; their hostility 
 scarcely paused from the day the Civil War began. They gave the ' 
 Jacobin cause a spectacular leadership, and, in fine, gathered about them 
 a good-sized majority in both legislative chambers. They demanded im- 
 mediate emancipation, both in the deep South and in the Border states, : 
 the enlistment of Negroes in the Northern armies, the confiscation of I 
 all rebel property — this property in the main, of course, consisted of 
 slaves — civil and political equality for the Negro, including the right 
 to vote and to hold office. The very day after Bull Run, Chandler and 
 Sumner called formally upon Lincoln, demanding that he immediately ; 
 proclaim emancipation and announce, as the supreme object of the , 
 war, the end of slavery. That Lincoln quietly rejected the proposal 
 probably did not surprise them. From the beginning the radicals had , 
 expected little support from Lincoln and his cabinet. For the whole 
 administration the Wade and Chandler group entertained no feeling 
 but distrust and contempt. The plan on which the new President had 
 organized his official family seemed to the Jacobins almost a betrayal 
 of the cause. A cabinet that brought into one coalition all the several 
 elements comprising the Republican Party to them spelled the doom 
 of the Republic. Gather around the same table onetime Whigs who had 
 supported the Taylor regime, old-line Democrats whose hostility to 
 slavery was limited merely to its extension, others whose sympathy 
 with the South was hardly concealed? In the mind of the Jacobin 
 school there was only one type of Republican worthy of a seat at the 
 presidential table. That was the type which, fair weather and foul, and 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 277 
 
 without the slightest qualification, had vowed themselves to the de- 
 struction of what Sumner had called, in a Senate speech, "the harlot 
 slavery." 
 
 We have seen that Seward was aggrieved because Lincoln had not 
 assembled an "all-Whig," even an all-Seward, cabinet. The Jacobins 
 were disgusted because he had not formed an all-abolition administra- 
 tion. Nor, in the months following election, had they been backward 
 in recommending names. Lyman Trumbull had proposed to Lincoln 
 "bluff Ben Wade" and "old Zack Chandler," but the suggestions had 
 been silently pigeonholed. A cabinet that would have satisfied these 
 extremists can be easily outlined. Charles Sumner, Secretary of State; 
 Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury; Zachariah Chandler, Sec- 
 retary of War; Benjamin F. Wade, Secretary of the Navy; George W. 
 Julian, Attorney General; William P. Fessenden, Postmaster General; 
 John P. Hale, Secretary of the Interior — here we have the kind of 
 administration that the Jacobins would have deemed worthy of the 
 work in hand. Instead, Lincoln had selected a ministry which, in the 
 words of Wade, was a disgraceful surrender to the South. "A sorry, 
 rotten cabinet, blundering, cowardly and inefficient," is only the mild- 
 est of the brickbats leveled at the new White House regime. One 
 Jacobin editor advocated the adoption of the parliamentary system, 
 giving cabinet heads seats in Congress. This, he urged, would "drag 
 them out of those corrupt rat holes, their departments, where they 
 can slink away and defy public opinion for an entire four years." Only 
 one member, Salmon Portland Chase, measured up to the Jacobin 
 standard; even Simon Cameron's momentary lapse into virtue did not 
 win their confidence, though they made as much of the doubtful 
 convert as the facts justified. Seward the Jacobins hated as the early 
 Christians did the Emperor Julian; he was an apostate, with his plans 
 for appeasing the South, for guaranteeing slavery in the states, for 
 secretly negotiating with rebel commissioners, for wishing to put 
 Southerners in the cabinet. Chandler described Seward as an "out and 
 out traitor" who must be destroyed. Welles was no abolitionist; he was 
 a onetime Jacksonian Democrat of only mild "anti-slavery" views. 
 Bates was a relic of other days, still holding largely to the Virginia 
 prejudices on the Negro to which he had been born. Smith they re- 
 garded as a corrupt Indiana politician ready to adopt any opinions 
 that would advance him politically. 
 
 Against the President himself the Jacobins waxed similarly ferocious 
 and abusive. They railed at Lincoln's tenderness towards the Border 
 states, though this policy had saved for the Union cause Delaware, 
 Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and nearly one third of Virginia. Even 
 
278 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the philosophic Julian had no better word for Lincoln's forbearance 
 than "this sickly policy of an inoffensive war." Wade, commenting on 
 this and other aspects of the administration, lost all sense of decency. 
 "Only a man sprung from poor white trash," he declared, would have 
 disavowed Fremont's proclamation freeing the slaves of Missouri. The 
 rail splitter, he added, "lacked backbone" and "not even a galvanic 
 battery could inspire any action in the cabinet." The courtly gentleman 
 railed at Mrs. Lincoln as though she had been a feminine Robert 
 Toombs. Her fondness for airing her French especially riled him. 
 Invited, as a Senator, to a White House function, Wade replied: "Are 
 the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If 
 they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to 
 participate in feasting and dancing." This hostility the Jacobins never 
 outgrew. A first glimpse of Lincoln shocked many party leaders and 
 aroused doubts as to his wisdom, even his serious intentions; in the 
 vast majority of cases, however, a closer knowledge caused this skepti- 
 cism to change to affection and admiration. This was not the case with 
 Wade, Chandler, and most of the Jacobin tribe. They worked hard to 
 defeat Lincoln for renomination in 1864 and, when their efforts failed, 
 supported him most ungraciously. "To save the nation," wrote Wade 
 at the time, "I am doing all for him [Lincoln] that I possibly could do 
 for a better man." Even the tragedy at Ford's Theater did not stir these 
 irreconcilables as it did the rest of the world. After the assassination 
 Wade called on the new President. "Johnson," he said, "we have faith 
 in you. By the gods there will be no trouble now in running the gov- 
 ernment." 3 Even the milder Julian, according to Nicolay and Hay, 
 believed that "the accession of Johnson would prove a god-send to the 
 country." 4 The usually boisterous Chandler became solemn and pious. 
 He "intoned that God had kept Lincoln in office as long as he was 
 useful and then had put another and better man in his place." 5 Ulti- 
 mately, of course, these same Jacobins turned against Johnson, and for 
 the same reason that they had fought Lincoln. The new President, 
 after veering toward radicalism in the early days, finally adopted Lin- 
 coln's plans for dealing with the South. Had that impeachment suc- 
 ceeded, Ben Wade would have become President of the United States. 
 He was president pro tern of the Senate in 1868, and would have suc- 
 ceeded to the White House in case of a vacancy. It should also be 
 recorded to the everlasting honor of Lyman Trumbull that, although 
 
 8 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. X, 316. 
 *Ibid. X, 316. 
 
 5 Williams, T. Harry, op. cit. Abstraction of a letter written by Chandler to his 
 wife, April 22, 1865. P. 374. 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 279 
 
 a radical on the slavery question, and a harsh critic of President John- 
 son's Reconstruction policy, he was too honest a man to submit to the 
 final outrage and voted in favor of the badgered President's acquittal. 
 As that President's official life was saved by one vote, Trumbull has 
 some claim to the distinction of having preserved the nation from an 
 eternal disgrace. 
 
s 
 
 INCE LINCOLN and his cabinet were apparently inadequate to 
 the task in hand, upon whom should the duty devolve? On that point 
 the Jacobins never entertained the slightest question. The management 
 of the war should be the prerogative of Congress — in other words, of 
 the Jacobins themselves. The struggle that ensued between the radicals 
 and Lincoln, and afterward Johnson, over the powers of Congress and 
 the Executive in Reconstruction started as early as 1861, taking the 
 form of a struggle for the control of military operations. The constitu- 
 tional clause making the President commander in chief his enemies 
 brushed aside. In the Jacobin view the commander in chief did not 
 reside in the White House; the only proper headquarters of preparation 
 and strategy was Capitol Hill. Though the Jacobins were fierce for : 
 war, and hailed the enlistment of an army, they looked askance at 
 Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers after Fort Sumter. The men were 
 needed, of course; but was it the business of the President to enroll 
 them? Should not Congress itself have issued the call? Even so learned 
 a constitutionalist as Lyman Trumbull upheld this contention. "Our 
 power is omnipotent over this army," he declared. 
 
 The word "faction," as frequently applied to the Wade-Chandler- j 
 Julian group, needs qualification. The Radicals were the most vocif- 
 erous element in the party majority and the most powerful. Their, 
 power was displayed when, in December 1861, Congress created a com- j 
 mittee on the conduct of the war. The proposal passed the Senate by a 
 handsome vote and was adopted by the House without debate. One or 
 two conservative Senators did object on the ground that such a commit- j 
 tee would interfere unwarrantably with the Executive, but William P. 
 Fessenden sternly rebuked the timid souls. The proposed committee, 
 he said, would "keep an anxious watchful eye over all the executive 
 agents who are carrying on the war at the direction of the people. . . . 
 We are not under the command of the military of this country. They 
 are under ours as a Congress." The main duty of the committee, that 
 is, was military; it was to see that the right officers were appointed, 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 281 
 
 that their campaigns were soundly planned and executed, and that due 
 punishments and rewards were parceled out where deserved. That this 
 meant a constant interference with President, cabinet, and officers in 
 the field did not disturb the committee; to them this seemed to be the 
 strongest argument in its favor. Wade became chairman and remained 
 in that position for four years of war; Chandler was a member, and the 
 chief representative from the House was Julian. One of the tenets of 
 Jacobinism insisted that military operations were not necessarily the 
 province of men educated for that trade. In their eyes West Point was 
 the most odious of American seats of learning. To the leadership of 
 West Pointers the Jacobins attributed all the early failures; the detail 
 that West Point graduates also commanded the too frequently vic- 
 torious Confederate troops was quietly ignored. Wade and his group 
 regarded West Point not only as the headquarters of military inepti- 
 tude — as a place where ridiculous stress was laid on such technicalities 
 as strategy, exhaustive preparations, lines of supply — but as a school 
 for proslaveryism and therefore for treason. Unless a great civilian 
 army should be put under the control of patriotic — for patriotic read 
 "Jacobin" — officers drawn from civil life, the rebellion could never 
 be crushed. 
 
 The energies of the committee, under Wade and Chandler, were thus 
 directed largely to the selection of the men who were to lead this armed 
 citizenry. They regarded it as their right actually to appoint officers in 
 the army. In view of that clause in the Constitution which gave the 
 President this power, the pretension proved difficult to maintain. The 
 committee therefore contented itself with making suggestions, con- 
 stantly interfering with generals in the performance of their duties, 
 summoning them like ill-behaved schoolboys to its presence, catechiz- 
 ing them about their plans, demanding explanations for failure, and 
 insisting on being taken into the army's confidence in all matters. And 
 political considerations governed everything. Military leaders were dis- 
 credited who did not wholeheartedly sympathize with Jacobin aims. 
 Army chiefs, in Jacobin eyes, fell into two classifications: those who 
 were "great generals" and those who were "fool and traitor generals." 
 The standards by which military genius and military stupidity were 
 gauged astonishes a generation that has learned the value of professional 
 soldiers. A "great general" in the mind of the average citizen today is 
 the able organizer of victory, the planner and director of successful 
 campaigns and battles. The Jacobins set up a different standard. First 
 and foremost a great commander should be a Republican, and not a 
 Republican of Lincolnian breed, but of the Wade-Chandler type. Un- 
 less his "heart was in the right place" — unless, that is, a general stood 
 
282 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 for immediate emancipation of the slaves and their speedy accession to 
 the rights of citizenship — all the genius of a Caesar would avail him 
 nothing. 
 
 Lincoln's persistence in appointing Democrats to important com- 
 mands — because, in his view, many of them were best qualified for 
 it — enraged his congressional opponents. Henry Wilson, abolitionist 
 from Massachusetts, made an intensive study of the one hundred and 
 ten generals in the army of 1861, and announced in the Senate that 
 eighty of them were Democrats. How could victories be won under 
 such leadership? Another fellow Jacobin bewailed that the higher com- 
 mand did not include "more than one sincere abolitionist and emancipa- 
 tionist." The fact that the one exception was evidently John C. Fremont 
 tells the story. For a considerable time the former Pathfinder was the 
 military darling of the Jacobin group. He was esteemed a great com- 
 mander not because he had displayed genius in the field, which he cer- 
 tainly had not, but because he had issued a proclamation freeing the 
 slaves in his department. Another general sacrosanct in Jacobin eyes 
 was Ben Butler; even after his grotesque display of incompetence at 
 Fort Fisher their allegiance remained unshaken. Bull Run did not shat- 
 ter their belief that McDowell was a great, born leader of men; 
 McDowell had lost that engagement, it was true, but he was sound 
 on the slavery issue. The blunders of Rosecrans might have had dis- ! 
 astrous results at Chickamauga, but he was right on the Negro, and the 
 Jacobins at one time talked of running him for President. At first the ; 
 committee disapproved Burnside's appointment to command of the 
 Army of the Potomac, not on military grounds, as they well might 
 have done, but on the ground that he was a close friend of McClellan 
 and wrote him letters addressed to "dear Mac" and signed "Burn." 
 After the terrible debacle at Fredericksburg, however, they took Burn- , 
 side to their bosom and defended him against his "proslavery" critics, j 
 The reason is that the politically minded general, after the battle, had 
 gone over to the radical side. After Chancellorsville, the committee has- 
 tened to the defense of Hooker, for that mercurial gentleman, like other 
 wire-pulling officers, had adopted abolitionist opinions. 
 
 The hero-worshiping which the Jacobins lavished upon military fail- 
 ures who held correct views on the Negro was exceeded only by the 
 abuse heaped upon certain triumphant captains whose attitude was 
 more Lincolnian. Grant was beyond the pale; was he not a Democrat 
 and a product of "that abominable and aristocratic hole, West Point?" 
 William Tecumseh Sherman might march his army up Peachtree 
 Street, Atlanta, and thus make Lee's surrender inevitable, but he did not 
 win the favor of the Wade committee, for he was "disloyal" — that is, 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 283 
 
 he was not an enthusiast on emancipation. Meade might win the Battle 
 of Gettysburg, but he, too, was a moderate on the same question; 
 therefore the committee under Wade's chairmanship went to great 
 pains to prove his military stupidity, and to attribute the real credit 
 for stopping Lee to certain of his subordinates - all of whom, it ap- 
 peared, belonged to the radical school of politics. 
 
 But the man above all others on whom the hostility of the Jacobins 
 centered was the "young Napoleon" of the Army of the Potomac, 
 George Brinton McClellan. On the day following the battle of Bull 
 Run, Lincoln had summoned to Washington this leader of the army of 
 western Virginia, and placed in his youthful hands — McClellan was 
 only thirty-five years old — the disorganized mob then known as the 
 "Division of the Potomac." The choice was an inevitable one. While 
 the unprepared nation was groaning under ineptitude on every hand, 
 electrifying news had flashed from the mountains of that part of the 
 Old Dominion bordering the Ohio River. A young major general re- 
 cently called from civil life, at the head of an army of less than ten 
 thousand men, had met larger Confederate forces, defeated them at 
 every conflict, and, at the battle of Rich Mountain, had completely 
 cleared this section of secessionists. The political result of McClellan's 
 exploits proved more important than the military, for he was credited 
 with saving for the Union nearly one third of the most venerated 
 Southern state and made possible its ultimate incorporation in the 
 Union as the new state of West Virginia — but it was the feat of arms 
 that drove the North fairly to frenzy with joy. 
 
 McClellan's whole career, in both military and civil life, indicated 
 him as the one man fitted to the command to which Lincoln, amid 
 universal applause, had called him. Born in 1826 in Philadelphia, of 
 good Massachusetts and Connecticut stock, McClellan had been grad- 
 uated from West Point at the age of twenty, second in a class of fifty- 
 one, had served creditably in the war with Mexico — his name fre- 
 quently appears in the official dispatches of that conflict -and had 
 been sent by Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War in the cabinet of Frank- 
 lin Pierce, as military observer in the Crimean War, writing a report 
 of that conflict and the lesson it held for the American Army that is 
 still a model of its kind. Resigning his commission in 1859, McClellan 
 engaged in business life with a success that proved executive talents of 
 high order. Entering the employ of the Illinois Railroad as an engineer, 
 within a year he was elected president of the Ohio and Mississippi 
 Railroad at a salary of $10,000 — a tremendous income in those days. 
 As soon as Fort Sumter fell, he made preparations to drop railroading 
 and return to his old profession. Several states, including Ohio, sought 
 
284 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 to enlist McClellan's services as general in their militia; and in April he 
 was offered, and accepted, a Federal commission as major general com- 
 manding the Department of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The success 
 that ensued turned not only his country's head, but apparently his own. 
 In the stormy eighteen months that followed, nothing delighted 
 McClellan so much as the public acclaim he received and especially the 
 love and admiration he inspired in the common soldier. Whether "Lit- 
 tle Mac" was a great general or not makes probably the fiercest con- 
 troversy in the history of the American Army. The battle between 
 those, in this and other lands, who regard him as the genius of the Civil 
 War, and those who look upon him as the man who delayed Federal 
 success for at least two years, still rages. Robert E. Lee said that McClel- 
 lan was the ablest of Northern soldiers. He has always been extolled 
 by Southern writers — so excessively, indeed, that the question rises 
 whether McClellan's well-known friendly attitude to the South and his 
 considerable sympathy with Southern views on slavery and Recon- 
 struction may not partially explain this admiration. That McClellan 
 possessed one of the most valuable assets of a military chieftain is gen- 
 erally agreed. No other leader, not even that Napoleon with whom 
 McClellan liked to be compared, ever so completely possessed the af- 
 fection of his men. At the mere sight of McClellan, dressed in the most 
 brilliant regalia — for he loved uniforms, epaulettes, and military sashes 
 — astride his faithful "Kentuck" — and McClellan was a superb horse- 
 man — the whole army would break into roars, and dash into almost 
 certain death with all the eclat of conquest. 
 
 McClellan's letters — and he wrote them daily, usually to his wife — 
 never tire of describing the almost insane loyalty of his men. In the 
 early months of his command he inspired the same emotions in the 
 breast of civilians. Even the Jacobins at first joined in the general ac- 
 claim. How all this affected the young man his letters reveal. The 
 sight of the President, cabinet ministers, Senators, generals, welcoming 
 him as another Washington, destined to save his country from ruin, 
 overwhelmed him. "It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but 
 I believe I can accomplish it. When I went into the Senate today and 
 found those old men flocking around me; when I afterwards stood in 
 the Library looking over the capitol of our great nation and saw the 
 crowd gathering around to stare at me, I began to feel how great was 
 the task committed to me. Oh how sincerely I pray to God that I may 
 be endowed with the wisdom and courage necessary to accomplish the 
 work. Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should 
 so soon be called upon to save my country." x Thus in a short time 
 
 1 McClellan, op. cit., p. 83. 
 
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Reprinted from Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man by Roy Meredith, Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 War (top) and Navy Department Buildings in IS 61 
 From original wet plates by Matthew B. Brady 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 285 
 
 one fixed belief took possession of McClellan's mind. On his shoulders 
 alone rested the salvation of his country. If the Union were to be saved, 
 he alone would save it. A kind of religious mysticism possessed him. 
 How did it happen that he, a man only thirty-five years old, had been 
 suddenly lifted from the mass of his fellow men, passed over the heads 
 of all the older experienced men in the army, and entrusted with this 
 supreme duty? The call, McClellan devoutly believed, had come not 
 from Abraham Lincoln or the American people, but directly from 
 God. "I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to 
 preserve this great nation. ... I feel that God has placed a great work 
 in my hands — I have not sought it — I know how weak I am — but I 
 know that I mean to do right and I believe that God will help me and 
 give me the wisdom I do not possess." 
 
 In a sense this may have proved a source of strength, but it explains 
 also, in large part, the misunderstandings and accidents that beset "Lit- 
 tle Mac's" career. The belief in himself as the personally selected instru- 
 ment of the Almighty was an expression of that vanity which was the 
 young man's overweening characteristic. It gave support to the charges 
 which the Jacobins hurled against him in Congress and it even sowed 
 distrust in Lincoln's mind. On personal and political grounds the 
 Chandler-Wade group instinctively disliked McClellan. He was pre- 
 cisely the type of man, in birth, breeding, and political and professional 
 association, most displeasing to them. McClellan stood far removed 
 from the fierce antislavery leaders in social characteristics and military 
 convictions. All of McClellan's biographers, especially the latest, Wil- 
 liam Starr Myers, 2 have much to say — probably too much — of his 
 standing as a "gentleman" and an "aristocrat." He came of good, but 
 not illustrious stock. Whether highly commendable antecedents lift 
 a simple American citizen above his fellows may be questioned, but 
 they exerted at times a baneful effect upon McClellan himself. From 
 youth to old age, his bearing expressed a consciousness of superiority. 
 The words "vulgar" and "low-bred" came easily to his lips in com- 
 ments on his fellow man. At West Point McClellan's favorite compan- 
 ions had been Southerners; the plantation "aristocrat" seemed to exer- 
 cise a strong hold upon his admiration. "Somehow or other," he wrote 
 when a plebe at West Point, "I take to the southerners. I am sorry 
 to say the manners, feelings, and opinions of the southerners are far, 
 far preferable to those of the majority of the northerners at this place. 
 I may be mistaken, but I like them better." An insistence on command, 
 an impulsive temper, a tendency to despise rustics and to feel restless 
 
 2 Myers, William Starr, Study in Personality: George Brinton McClellan. 
 Appleton-Century, 1934. 
 
286 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 and quarrelsome in the presence of superiors, were generally esteemed 
 Southern traits, and the young McClellan would inevitably have a fel- 
 low feeling with such manners, for these were his characteristics as 
 boy and man. His fine personal appearance gave some basis for these 
 pretensions. Though under average height, with his erect, slender 
 frame, broad shoulders, bright, intelligent face, and always graceful 
 carriage, McClellan certainly looked the soldier. He was also a highly 
 cultivated man, perhaps the best educated scholar in the army of his 
 time. He read deeply, especially in military science, and his acquire- 
 ments as a linguist set him apart from most of his brother officers. Ac- 
 cording to his official biographer he could converse freely in German, 
 French, Italian, and Spanish, and required no interpreter in Russian, 
 Turkish, and several North American Indian dialects. Association with 
 persons of birth seemed indispensable to his happiness. This sometimes, 
 even at the high tide of war, brought reproaches on his head. The pres- 
 ence of French royalty on his staff — the Comte de Paris, who, except 
 for usurping Bonapartes, would have been King of France, and his 
 brother, the Due de Chartres — and the pleasure the American took in 
 this close companionship, added little to his popularity with the most 
 rigid type of Yankee Republican. 
 
 Similarly characteristics that might charm the gentlemanly Bourbons 
 would hardly recommend McClellan to the rough-and-tumble forces 
 then dominant in Congress. And "Little Mac" was unsympathetic to 
 the majority not only in temperament and personality, but in opinion 
 and in action. His views on slavery, his war aims, and his attitude to- 
 wards the South and the Rebellion, seemed to men like Wade, Chan- 
 dler, Julian, and Sumner little less than a betrayal of his country. No 
 word was in more widespread use in those intolerant days than 
 "traitor," an epithet that McClellan did not escape. In radical estimation 
 the head of the Army of the Potomac did not fulfill the first require- 
 ment of a commander in the field. He was not a radical Republican. He 
 was not even an antislavery Democrat. His sympathies, before and dur- 
 ing 1860 — so the enemy argued — had lain with those Southern poli- 
 ticians whose excesses had resulted in civil war. In the Lincoln-Douglas 
 debates of 1858, McClellan had championed the Douglas side, and as 
 vice-president of the Illinois Central Railroad had shown favors to the 
 "Little Giant" which had been denied the rail splitter. In 1860 he had 
 voted for Douglas, and had spoken of Lincoln with disdain. Of all 
 human cattle, there was no breed that McClellan so despised as the abo- 
 litionist. On this subject he had been most vigorously outspoken, and 
 confirmed his well-known opinions by his acts. McClellan's proclama- 
 tion, on his invasion of western Virginia, had caused almost as much 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 287 
 
 excitement as had Fremont's on the brink of his campaign in Missouri, 
 but for contrary reasons. He had not come, McClellan declared in this 
 pronunciamento, to interfere with the property of Virginians, espe- 
 cially with their property in slaves. Anyone who insisted that the gov- 
 ernment was planning to disturb this institution was a "traitor." Let 
 Virginians have no fear of slave insurrections! Should the black men 
 rise against their masters, his army would suppress them "with an iron 
 hand." Runaways, who found such friendly haven in the camps of Ben 
 Butler, Hunter, and other Northern generals, met harsh treatment at 
 McClellan's quarters; he invariably returned them to their owners, thus 
 becoming, in the eyes of the Jacobins, that most odious of mortals, a 
 "slave-catching general." The "Hutchinson Singers" of the early Civil 
 War provided the same kind of soldiers' diversion that Hollywood en- 
 tertainers have given in modern times. One evening these innocent 
 young warblers sang before the Army of the Potomac "an abolition 
 song" composed by John Greenleaf Whittier. McClellan exiled them 
 from the Army for the "duration." His indiscreet comments on the 
 Negro and emancipation proved to be a more serious matter. To 
 Charles Sumner's face he ridiculed the idea that freedom for the Negro 
 should be one of the aims of the war. Edward Bates notes in his Diary 
 a remark of McClellan's that "the South was right and he would never 
 fight against it, that the southern Democracy had always governed the 
 country and ought to govern it." 3 McClellan's choice of friends added 
 point to these accusations. His closest associate in civilian life was the 
 celebrated New York lawyer, Samuel M. L. Barlow, whom Welles 
 stigmatizes as a "Copperhead leader." 4 A radical Congressman once 
 sought an interview and was denied because McClellan was colloquing 
 with Sunset Cox and Clement L. Vallandigham, both regarded as allies 
 of the South. 
 
 It is not strange, when Washington and the newspapers were flooded 
 with such anecdotes, that McClellan's behavior in the winter and spring 
 of 1861-1862 should have given rise to the darkest suspicions. The 
 present generation, having passed through two great world wars, 
 understands much better than that of 1861 the need of exhaustive 
 preparation. That McClellan, from Bull Run to December 1861, had 
 performed a marvelous feat in organizing the Army of the Potomac, 
 everybody granted. The unarmed, undisciplined rabble of July had 
 become, by November, one of the most powerful, best-equipped, and 
 best-organized armies the world had ever seen. This was McClellan's 
 work, and everyone was praising him in extravagant terms for the 
 
 3 Bates, Diary, p. 253. 
 
 4 Welles, Diary. II, 28. 
 
288 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 achievement. But why did McClellan not make some use of this new 
 engine of warfare? A Confederate army, which we now know to have 
 been less than half as large as the Federal — though McClellan insisted 
 that it was much larger — stood at Manassas impudently defying him 
 and blocking the road to Richmond. Why, everyone was asking, did 
 not McClellan attack this force, wipe it out, and end the war in a single 
 battle? Why, after this army succeeded in breaking camp and taking 
 up a stronger position further south, did McClellan, against the vig- 
 orous protests of Lincoln and the cabinet, suddenly change his plans 
 and decide to approach Richmond by way of the Peninsula between 
 the York and the James River? There is no need of going into the 
 merits of this dispute, one of the most famous in military annals. 
 Though the ablest professional soldiers of the last eighty years have not 
 answered the question to their own satisfaction, the politicians who, 
 in 1862, detested McClellan for his political views and his personal ar- 
 rogance had no difficulty in solving the problem. The man's heart was 
 not in the war; he did not want the North to win, or at least not to win 
 quickly. Horace Greeley thundered in the New York Tribune that 
 the ambitious general was determined to prolong the strife in order to 
 be elected President. His real design, according to this Jacobin editor, 
 was to restore the Southern dynasty that had ruled the nation before 
 1860, and to re-establish on an impregnable basis its system of slave 
 labor. Not many critics of McClellan today accept this explanation, but 
 there were plenty who, in 1862, believed it implicitly. 
 
 McClellan's uncompromising attitude towards both the Congres- 
 sional leaders and the Lincoln cabinet did not help his case. He re- 
 garded them as a lot of hopeless ignoramuses and treated them with 
 open contempt. When Wade's committee on the Conduct of the War 
 summoned him to the presence and began to ask questions concerning 
 his plans, McClellan flatly refused to take the lawmakers into his con- 
 fidence. What was the use of talking with men who knew absolutely 
 nothing of the art of war? Even when the cabinet called him into con- 
 sultation he again refused to discuss the forthcoming campaign. He 
 could not talk about such confidential matters, he brusquely explained, 
 to so large a group; anything he said would be sure to leak out, and 
 be in the possession of the Confederates in a few hours. He would, of 
 course, tell all his plans to the President or Secretary of War, if either 
 asked for the information, but not the cabinet and their advisers in mass 
 meeting assembled. The mere fact that McClellan was right in this at- 
 titude — though he might have been more tactful in expression — did 
 not lessen the anger of the august statesmen. Had the political leaders 
 seen the letters that McClellan was daily sending his wife their fury 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 289 
 
 would not have been at all assuaged. Washington he described as a 
 "sink of iniquity." "The hounds are after me again" was one of the 
 gentlest references to inquisitive Jacobins. "I am daily becoming more 
 disgusted with this administration — perfectly sick of it." "How weary 
 I am of all this business! Care after care, blunder after blunder, trick 
 upon trick." "I am thwarted and deceived by these incapables at every 
 turn." "History will present a sad record of these traitors who are will- 
 ing to sacrifice the country and the army for personal spite and per- 
 sonal aims." "Alas! poor country that it should have such rulers! 
 I tremble for my country when I think of these things; but still 
 can trust that God in his infinite wisdom will not punish us as we 
 deserve." 
 
 Again and again he expresses contempt for "the dolts," "the rascals," 
 "the scoundrels," "the fools" who make up the Lincoln administration. 
 Even in the days when things were going well and when the young 
 general's praises were on every lip, McClellan writes of the cabinet in 
 scurrilous terms. "When I returned yesterday," he records on October 
 10, 1862, "after a long ride, I was obliged to attend a meeting of the 
 cabinet at 8 p.m. and was bored and annoyed. There are some of the 
 greatest geese in the cabinet I have ever seen — enough to tax the pa- 
 tience of Job." Again on November 17, when his popularity was still 
 unimpaired: "It is sickening in the extreme and makes me feel heavy 
 at heart, when I see the weakness and unfitness of the poor beings who 
 control the destiny of this great country." "I feel that the fate of the 
 nation depends on me and I feel that I have not one single friend at the 
 seat of government." "They have done all that cowardice and folly 
 can do to ruin our poor country and the blind people seem not to see it. 
 It makes my blood boil when I think of it." As early as October 1861, 
 McClellan descends to particulars. "I can't tell you how disgusted I am 
 becoming with these wretched politicians — they are a most despicable 
 set of men. I think Seward is the meanest of them all — he has done 
 more than any other one man to bring all this misery upon the coun- 
 try and is one of the least competent to get us out of the scrape. The 
 President is nothing more than a well meaning baboon. Welles is the 
 most garrulous old woman you were ever annoyed by. Bates is a good, 
 inoffensive old man," he writes his wife. "I went to the White House 
 directly after tea where I found 'the original Gorilla' about as intel- 
 ligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now! 
 ... I went to Seward's where I found the Gorilla again, and was of 
 course edified by his anecdotes un-apropos and even unworthy of one 
 holding his high position. I spent some time there and almost organized 
 a little quarrel with Seward. It is a terrible dispensation of Providence 
 
290 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 that so weak and cowardly a thing as that should now conduct our 
 foreign relations. Unhappily the President is not much better, except 
 that he is honest and means well. I suppose our country has richly mer- 
 ited some great punishment, else we should not now have such wretched 
 triflers at the head of affairs." 
 
 McClellan's venom against Seward is puzzling, for the Secretary of 
 State, at the time this letter was written, was supporting him most 
 loyally — and McClellan knew it. The resort to Darwinian primates for 
 purposes of comparison with Lincoln is also surprising, for in his 
 Memoirs McClellan tells of his shocked disgust with Stanton for using 
 such metaphors in referring to the head of state. The views that McClel- 
 lan entertained of Lincoln at this early stage remained with him to the 
 end. In 1861, McClellan regarded Lincoln as a "vulgar" person, utterly 
 unfit for his great office, and there are no signs that he ever changed 
 his mind. His Memoirs, published in 1887, two years after his death, 
 enshrine the opinion and epithets quoted above, but not a line suggest- 
 ing that he had perceived in the man any evidence of greatness. In the 
 first four or five months of his command Lincoln not only gave the 
 young general his full confidence and co-operation, but attempted to 
 treat him as a friend. The President's habit of leaving his office, drop- 
 ping in on cabinet men and government departments, brought him a 
 good deal of criticism. Surely the sovereign should summon to his pres- 
 ence those whom he would honor by seeking them in consultation! 
 McClellan, who lived at the corner of H Street and Fifteenth, only a 
 block from the White House, was the occasional recipient of such pres- 
 idential visits. But he did not always receive them graciously. John Hay, 
 in his Diary, records the incident which, perhaps more than any other, 
 has prejudiced McClellan's character in the eyes of posterity. "I wish 
 here to record," the President's secretary wrote November 13, 1861, 
 "what I consider a portent of evil to come. The President, Governor 
 Seward, and I went over to McClellan's house tonight. The servant at 
 the door said that the general was at the wedding of Colonel Wheaton 
 at General Buell's and would soon return. We went in, and after we had 
 waited about an hour McC. came in, and, without paying any par- 
 ticular attention to the porter, who told him the President was waiting 
 to see him, went upstairs, passing the door of the room where the 
 President and Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half 
 an hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the general they were 
 there and the answer coolly came that the general had gone to bed. 
 I merely record this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes without com- 
 ment. It is the first indication I have yet seen of the threatened su- 
 premacy of the military authorities. Coming home I spoke to the Presi- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 291 
 
 dent about the matter, but he seemed not to have noticed it specially, 
 saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette 
 and personal dignity." 5 
 
 Soon afterward Hay noted with considerable satisfaction that the 
 President, whenever he wished to consult the commanding general, no 
 longer dropped in for an informal visit. He summoned McClellan to 
 the White House. 
 
 5 Hay, John, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, 
 selected and with an introduction by Tyler Dennett. Dodd, Mead & Co., 1939. 
 Pp. 34-35. Reprinted by permission of Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. 
 
IIM 
 
 i 
 
 T WAS THIS situation — the warfare of the irreconcilable anti- 
 slavery men on McClellan — that brought the Lincoln cabinet, in the 
 summer of 1862, to the brink of dissolution. Up to the time of Stanton's 
 appointment on January 16, the Wade and Chandler group, though 
 constantly sniping against the young Napoleon, found little popular or 
 official support. Chase, it is true, had early embraced their side, but 
 Chase was not an effective party intriguer and enjoyed little personal 
 influence or prestige in the White House. He was already laying plans 
 for the presidential succession and undoubtedly his alliance with the 
 Jacobin leaders and his antagonism to AicClellan — of whom at first he 
 had been a warm defender — were explained, in large part, by this am- 
 bition. In Stanton, however, the radicals discovered a far more adroit 
 and useful ally. Their exultation at his elevation knew no bounds. "He 
 is just the man we want!" exclaimed Senator Fessenden. "We agree on 
 every point; the duties of the Secretary of War, the conduct of the war, 
 the negro question and everything else." "He agreed with us fully," 
 said Julian, after a personal cross-examination of the new incumbent, 
 "in our estimate of General McClellan, and as to the estimate of an early 
 forward movement. We are delighted with him." Sumner, Lyman 
 Trumbull, and other more sedate radical statesmen applauded Stanton's 
 selection and expedited confirmation by the Senate. The radical press, 
 led by Greeley's Tribune, hailed Stanton's promotion to the cabinet 
 as the beginning of a new day. "There is a very general agreement," 
 wrote Greeley, "that the appointment of the new secretary means busi- 
 ness. . . . No man ever entered upon the discharge of the most momen- 
 tous public duties under more favorable auspices, so far as public con- 
 fidence and support can create such auspices. Here is the man who would 
 know how to deal with the greatest danger then facing the country — 
 treason in Washington, treason in the army itself, especially the treason 
 which wears the garb of Unionism." 
 
 One man read these tributes from extreme radical sources with sur- 
 prise. Up to this time, McClellan had regarded the new Secretary as his 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 293 
 
 cordial friend and co-worker. His optimism and confidence seemed to 
 rest on solid grounds. In his Memoirs McClellan declares that he knew 
 nothing of Stanton's impending appointment until the day it was made. 
 On the evening of January 13, Stanton himself dropped in at McClel- 
 lan's house and informed him. The new Secretary, whose nomination 
 had gone to the Senate that afternoon, asserted that, for personal 
 reasons, his selection was unwelcome. Only the opportunity of working 
 in close co-operation with McClellan for the salvation of the Union 
 could persuade him to undergo the sacrifice involved. He would accept 
 only if General McClellan expressed his approval. "If I wished him to 
 accept he would do so, but only on my account; that he had come to 
 know my wishes and determine accordingly. I told him that I hoped 
 he would accept the position." 1 Stanton, McClellan always insisted, 
 gave other indications of a friendly spirit. He sent messages by com- 
 mon friends expressing his confidence in the much criticized com- 
 mander, and his desire to serve his interests. 
 
 Probably Stanton's reason for this appeal for McClellan's approval 
 was his desire to obtain his support with influential Senators, when his 
 name came up for confirmation. At least, that is the only plausible ex- 
 planation, but even this is doubtful, for Stanton met little opposition in 
 the upper chamber, the name being approved two days after his nomi- 
 nation. That the new Secretary's friendly overtures to McClellan were 
 insincere events quickly disclosed. He hardly let pass a decent interval 
 before assuming an almost open hostility to the man with whom, six 
 months before, he had been on daily companionable terms. The two 
 men had held frequent consultations before the day of Stanton's ap- 
 pointment. On practically all points, McClellan said, they had agreed. 
 After January 15, the day of Stanton's confirmation by the Senate, 
 the close association came suddenly to an end. The general of the 
 Potomac army found himself practically denied access to his chief. 
 Stanton's association with the Republican leaders who were bent on 
 McClellan's destruction soon became common gossip in Washington. 
 Wade and Chandler were almost officially members of the War Depart- 
 ment. Stanton, in his absorption with his new duties, kept himself aloof 
 from the public. He was the most inaccessible member of the adminis- 
 tration. Only on certain days were callers admitted to his private of- 
 fice. Yet all members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War had 
 pass cards giving them entree at any time. They came and went freely 
 while McClellan and other military leaders were excluded. Stanton 
 frequently visited the Capitol and held sessions with the committee on 
 the progress of the war. In these star-chamber sessions the "treason" 
 
 1 McClellan, op. cit., p. 153. 
 
294 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 and the unfitness of McClellan, and the desirability of a new com- 
 mander, were the leading topics. In fact, the Wade-Chandler-Julian 
 committee really existed for one purpose in the period that inter- 
 vened between Stanton's appointment and the Peninsular campaign; 
 that was to "break" McClellan and secure a new general, preferably 
 McDowell or Fremont, or — and this proved finally to be the choice 
 — John Pope. 
 
 That Stanton began at once his campaign against the young Napo- 
 leon the record convincingly shows. On the very evening following his 
 appointment Simon Cameron gave a dinner party, at which Stanton 
 himself was the guest of honor. This quickly resolved itself into an 
 indignation meeting against the unpopular chief. Colonel John Coch- 
 rane, who was present at this banquet, relates that both Stanton and 
 Chandler were "harmonious in censure of General McClellan's dila- 
 tory conduct of the war." The day preceding this symposium, accord- 
 ing to McClellan, Stanton had told the general he would accept the 
 War Department only with his approval. A week afterward, in a let- 
 ter to Charles A. Dana, Stanton picturesquely described his dissatis- 
 faction with his one-time favorite. "This army has got to fight or run 
 away; and while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne 
 and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped." As one of the popular 
 grievances against the fashionable McClellan were his almost daily 
 elaborate dinner parties — to which Republicans and administration 
 champions were seldom invited — the shaft was unmistakable. In Stan- 
 ton's meetings with Wade's committee similar sentiments were ex- 
 pressed. He never went to bed nights, the Secretary once declared to 
 this inner group, "without his cheek burning with shame upon this 
 disgrace upon the nation" — the disgrace in question being McClellan's 
 failure to clear the virtual blockade of the Potomac River. That subtlety 
 which was one of Stanton's greatest gifts appeared to advantage in his 
 praise of General Grant for his brilliant achievements in Kentucky. 
 With artistic skill, this eulogy praised Grant for the very qualities in 
 which McClellan seemed most deficient. "The purpose of this war," he 
 wrote in an order of January 22, 1862, "is to attack, pursue and destroy 
 a rebellious enemy and to deliver the country from danger menaced 
 by traitors. Alacrity, daring, courageous spirit and patriotic zeal on all 
 occasions, and under every circumstance, are expected from the army 
 of the United States." At that moment the nation was ringing with 
 criticism of McClellan for the lack of those very qualities of leader- 
 ship. When Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, at the time 
 that the McClellan question had reached a new height of frenzy, the 
 American public did not fail to grasp the real meaning of the words in 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 295 
 
 which Stanton hailed that great performance. Greeley had written, in 
 a fulsome editorial, that it was to "Edwin M. Stanton, more than to 
 any other individual, that these auspicious events are now due." The 
 Secretary, with an excess of modesty hardly in keeping with his gen- 
 eral character, at once addressed the Tribune, declining to accept such 
 commendation. "Much has been said," the letter protested, "recently 
 of military combinations and 'organizing victory.' I hear such phrases 
 with apprehension. They commenced in infidel France with the Italian 
 campaign, and resulted in Waterloo. Who can organize victory? We 
 owe our recent victories to the spirit of the Lord, that moved our sol- 
 diers to rush into battle and filled the hearts of our enemies with terror 
 and dismay. . . . We may well rejoice at the recent victories, for they 
 teach that battles are to be won now, and by us, in the same and only 
 manner that they were ever won by any people, since the days of Joshua 
 — by boldly pursuing and striking the foe. What, under the blessing 
 of Providence, I conceive to be the true organization of victory and 
 military combination to win this war was declared in a few words by 
 General Grant's message to General Buckner — 'I propose to move 
 immediately upon your works.' " All this, of course, was not primarily 
 a tribute to Grant but a Stantonian back thrust at McClellan. The Sec- 
 retary frequently vented his criticism of McClellan in less exalted and 
 less insinuating words. One of General Rosecrans's favorite stories was 
 of his visit in April 1862 to the Secretary of War. "I was received with 
 profuse expressions of cordiality and sent upon a mission. I was told 
 by the same War Secretary, 'I wish you and McDowell could get to 
 Richmond before that damned little cuss McClellan.' " 
 
 As the "damned little cuss" became aware of what he always re- 
 garded as Stanton's duplicity — swearing eternal friendship and devo- 
 tion to his face, and behind his back constantly urging Lincoln to re- 
 move him from command — his loathing for his official chief knew no 
 restraint. One or two extracts from his letters to his wife will suffice. 
 "Stanton is without exception the vilest man I ever knew or heard of," 
 he confided to his beloved Nellie on A4ay 18. Afterward, in a splendid 
 outburst, the whole thing was summed up. "So you want to know how 
 I feel about Stanton and what I think of him now? I will tell you with 
 the most perfect frankness. I think he is the most unmitigated scoundrel 
 I ever knew, heard, or read of; I think that (I do not wish to be irrev- 
 erent) had he lived in the time of the Savior, Judas Iscariot would have 
 remained a respected member of the fraternity of apostles, and that 
 the magnificent treachery and rascality of E. M. Stanton would have 
 caused Judas to have raised his hands in holy horror and unaffected 
 wonder — he would certainly have claimed and exercised the right to 
 
296 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 have been the betrayer of his Lord and Master, by virtue of the same 
 merit that raised Satan to his bad eminence. ... I remember what you 
 thought of Stanton when you first saw him. I thought you were wrong. 
 I now know you were right. Enough of the creature — it makes me 
 sick to think of him. Faugh!" 2 
 
 In the cabinet itself McClellan found little more comfort than in Stan- 
 ton. Only two members for a time supported him, Seward and Mont- 
 gomery Blair. As Blair was himself a West Point graduate and the cabi- 
 net member whose opinions on military matters counted most with 
 Lincoln, his endorsement of McClellan's policy — especially as he re- 
 mained steadfast to the end — was important. Blair endorsed the Penin- 
 sular approach to Richmond as strategically correct. "If you can reach 
 your object of reaching Richmond by a slower process than storming 
 redoubts and batteries in earthworks, the country will applaud the 
 achievement which gives success to its arms with greatest parsimony 
 of the blood of its children," wrote old man Blair to McClellan on 
 April 12, 1862, and this sentiment Montgomery upheld to the end. But 
 the Blairs could not view any question without taking thought of its 
 political consequences and one reason they advanced to Lincoln against 
 deposing McClellan was that this would make him a martyr and 
 strengthen him as a presidential candidate in 1864. 
 
 Chase's admiration for other generals than McClellan was based ex- 
 clusively on political grounds. McClellan did not accept the Jacobin 
 view on the Negro; and that seemed to be sufficient reason to condemn 
 him as a military strategist. Chase admired McDowell and wished to 
 see him enter Richmond. His reasons for this preference were set forth 
 in a letter to an unknown correspondent. "He never drinks, or smokes, 
 or chews, or indulges in any kind of licence. He is serious and earnest. 
 He resorts to no acts of popularity. He has no political aims and per- 
 haps not any very pronounced political opinions, except the conviction 
 that this war sprung from the influences of slavery and that whenever 
 slavery stands in the way of successful prosecution, slavery must get 
 out of the way." 3 A long passage contains practically nothing about 
 McDowell's ability in the field, except the general appraisement that 
 he "has been unfortunate, but is a loyal, brave, truthful, capable offi- 
 cer." Though of military science, of course, Chase knew nothing, that 
 did not prevent him from analyzing McClellan's strategical plans and 
 pronouncing them unsound. He "made himself as busy in the manage- 
 ment of the army as the Treasury," notes Gideon Welles, who gives 
 an unforgettable picture of his colleague bending, with the President, 
 
 2 Myers, op. cit. y p. 395. 
 
 3 Warden, op. cit., p. 461. 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 297 
 
 over a map of the Peninsular campaign, pointing out McClellan's mis- 
 takes and indicating the correct plan of procedure. 
 
 Welles himself and Edward Bates entertained the same unfavorable 
 opinion of McClellan as most of their colleagues. They appreciated and 
 acknowledged the general's strong points, but had no high regard for 
 his qualities as a leader of assault. In this they came nearest of all their 
 associates, except Lincoln himself, to the modern view. That talent for 
 "organizing victory" which Stanton ridiculed in his Greeley letter 
 they believed McClellan possessed in great measure. "McClellan is an 
 intelligent engineer and officer, but not a commander to head a great 
 army in the field. To attack or advance with energy and power is not 
 in him; to fight is not his forte. ... He has military acquirements and 
 capacity, dash, but has not audacity, lacks decision, delays, hesitates, 
 vacillates; will, I fear, persist in delays or inaction and do nothing af- 
 firmative." Perhaps Bates put his finger definitely on McClellan's weak- 
 est quality — his egoism and allegiance to his own convictions, simply 
 because they were his own. "I believe the general has such a morbid 
 ambition of originality that he will adopt no plan of action suggested 
 by another. He must himself invent, as well as execute, every scheme 
 of operation." Neither Welles nor Bates, who, of all cabinet members, 
 were most inclined to discuss problems on their merits, placing aside 
 personal prejudice and political views, accepted the Stanton-Chase 
 judgment that the man was a Democratic "traitor," and a presidential 
 aspirant who in his heart favored the Southern cause. Bates maintained 
 the fantastic notion that no general in chief should be selected, but that 
 Lincoln should exercise his constitutional prerogative as commander 
 in chief and assume personal direction of military operations. Though 
 a good many critics think that Lincoln, despite his incongruous ap- 
 pearance on horseback, with stovepipe hat and long trailing coat skirts, 
 was an able strategist, the President himself labored under no such 
 delusion, and was content to leave movements in the field in the hands 
 of trained officers, always insisting, however, on certain fundamental 
 dispositions. 
 
 A good deal of criticism has been visited on Lincoln for his toler- 
 ance of McClellan in these early days, and his seemingly vacillating 
 treatment of the commanding general. Perhaps it is not strange that he 
 hesitated and more than once changed his mind. For the last eighty 
 years military authorities, on both sides of the Atlantic, have argued 
 over McClellan's strategy, and, up to the present moment, have not 
 reached an agreement. Lincoln may be forgiven therefore, if, in all the 
 nervousness and excitement of the McClellan era, and the pulling and 
 hauling from a hundred directions, he spent sleepless nights trying, not 
 
298 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 with perfect success, to reach the right conclusion. On one point his 
 admiration for the "organizer of victory" had no limits. On weighing 
 McClellan's capacities, Lincoln always had before his mind those two 
 contrasting scenes — the dirty, undisciplined, and even rebellious rab- 
 ble that poured into Washington after First Bull Run, and the beauti- 
 fully articulated, completely equipped, perfectly behaved, and vigilant 
 host that replaced it six months afterward. Only a genius of military or- 
 ganization, the President believed, could have accomplished that mira- 
 cle. And McClellan was the man who had done it. Lincoln did not es- 
 teem this talent as lightly as did Stanton — indeed he did not see how 
 the war could succeed without it. Very likely McClellan was not the 
 captain ordained to lead in battle the magnificent army he had created, 
 but he was at least the man who had produced this superb machine. Lin- 
 coln would have endorsed McClellan's own appraisal of his work, in a 
 letter to his wife: "I know of no man except myself who could have 
 built up this army." For this reason Lincoln stood steadfast — until the 
 debacle at Harrison's Landing — against all the anti-McClellan wiles 
 of Stanton and all the sledgehammer imprecations of the Jacobins in 
 Congress. Even McClellan's at times insulting conduct towards him- 
 self did not cause Lincoln to forget this great service to the nation. "I 
 would hold McClellan's horse for him if that would help to win the 
 war," the patient President once remarked, and on occasions he came 
 close to doing just that. 
 
 Gratified as the President was by McClellan's success as an organ- 
 izer, his work as a leader in offense afforded lean satisfaction. About 
 November 1, 1861, Lincoln believed that the time had arrived for an- 
 other attempt on the enemy works near Manassas. Conditions in 
 the late fall of 1861 seemed favorable for an attack. The weather 
 was fine, the roads in splendid condition, the army rank and file eager 
 to avenge Bull Run, and the forces at McClellan's disposal were at least 
 twice those that the Confederates could bring against them. But the 
 general delayed, setting forth the argument that, by constant repeti- 
 tion, fairly drove the Jacobins mad — that his preparations were not 
 complete, that the Confederate army was at least twice in numbers 
 that of the Federal, and that their entrenchment and armament were too 
 formidable to make feasible a frontal approach. When, at the height 
 of the argument, the enemy suddenly decamped from the lines McClel- 
 lan had declared impregnable, and it was disclosed that only compara- 
 tively light forces had ever held the position, that the so-called forti- 
 fications were really flimsy and indefensible, and that the guns which 
 had menaced the Federals for so many months were not guns at all, 
 but painted counterfeits of wood, inevitably McClellan, as a field com- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 299 
 
 mander, did not rise in Lincoln's estimation. The South roared with 
 laughter and the North gritted its teeth in rage. But more serious hap- 
 penings presently increased Lincoln's dissatisfaction. 
 
 The Peninsular campaign is a subject that belongs to the military his- 
 torian; a lay writer would not have the temerity to discuss a complex 
 series of operations on which the experts have not yet reached agree- 
 ment — and probably never will. But this great episode did have politi- 
 cal complications which profoundly concerned the Lincoln cabinet. 
 In his Diary of February 3, 1862, Edward Bates, recording Washing- 
 ton gossip of the likely retirement of Seward, Welles, and Smith, con- 
 cluded, "All this is very idle talk and only shows that there is a feel- 
 ing of discontent. That feeling will continue until the army takes 
 measures active, aggressive and successful. If we fail to do something 
 effectual in the next twenty days, the administration will be shaken to 
 pieces — the cabinet will be remodeled and several of its members must 
 retire." 4 McClellan and his plans — or lack of plans — were causing 
 this commotion, both in the cabinet itself and in the public mind. Stan- 
 ton was constantly at Lincoln's elbow, declaring that the general's 
 course inevitably spelled the ruin of the nation. Wade, Chandler, and 
 their congressional followers were not only making the Senate resound 
 with their denunciations, but were almost daily besieging the White 
 House, accusing McClellan both of military incapacity and of stark 
 treason. The general's hopes of the presidential succession formed the 
 burden of the complaint. "He is more interested in reconstructing the 
 Democratic party than the Army of the Potomac" — Stanton's argu- 
 ment constantly revolved on this point. The radicals asserted that the 
 very plans for the conquest of Richmond showed that the man was 
 working in the interest of the South. On no question was the Presi- 
 dent so sensitive as the safety of Washington. Many a sleepless night 
 was spent agonizing over the possibility that the National Capital 
 would fall into the hands of the Confederates. 
 
 Such a calamity, Lincoln believed, would mean the triumph of the 
 Davis government. Both Great Britain and France had their eager eyes 
 fixed on the military situation, hoping to find in that plausible reasons 
 for recognizing the Confederacy. Whatever might be the state of popu- 
 lar feeling in both countries, there is not the slightest question that 
 the British government of Lord Palmerston, and the autocracy of Louis 
 Napoleon, fervently desired the success of the Rebellion. Should Wash- 
 ington fall into its hands, recognition from these two unfriendly powers 
 would automatically follow; this in turn would mean war with the 
 United States, and Lincoln did not share Seward's optimism that the 
 
 4 Bates, op. cit., pp. 227-228. 
 
300 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Federal forces could successfully confront the whole European conti- 
 nent. When Stanton and his senatorial associates began playing assidu- 
 ously and almost diabolically upon this fear, they touched Lincoln in 
 his most apprehensive spot. McClellan's strategy, they insisted, would 
 expose Washington to capture by Jackson's and Johnston's armies. In- 
 deed that was its very purpose. McClellan, Southern in sympathy and 
 politics, desired the Federal cause to fail. Here was the real explana- 
 tion for his plan — to take the Union forces from their stations before 
 Washington, put them into transports, make a sea voyage to southern 
 Virginia, and move them from the Yorktown peninsula westward into 
 the mud and swamps of the country around Richmond. Such a disposi- 
 tion, they maintained, would leave Washington unprotected, and per- 
 mit Jackson's army in the Shenandoah to sweep down and seize the 
 National Capital. In Stanton's view, the only safe way to march on 
 Richmond was directly south from the Potomac. By this plan, the bulk 
 of the army, as it advanced on Richmond, would always stand between 
 the Confederate Army and Washington and thus accomplish two ends 
 at the same time — protect the Federal Capital and conquer the Re- 
 bellion. 
 
 Lincoln did not believe that McClellan had conceived his plan for 
 the traitorous purpose of delivering Washington to Jefferson Davis, 
 but he did think that that was likely to be the practical outcome. From 
 the first he had opposed the McClellan roundabout strategy and favored 
 the direct line of approach. One morning early in March, McClellan 
 received a summons to the White House. "An ugly story," the Presi- 
 dent informed him, was broadcast in Washington. He did not himself 
 believe the accusation, but, as a matter of frankness, McClellan should 
 knew about the prevailing suspicion. Then the President laid bare the 
 charges — that the Peninsular scheme had been deliberately planned to 
 uncover Washington to the forces of disunion. McClellan indignantly 
 asserted that he had no intention of moving his forces to the Peninsula 
 without leaving an army of sufficient size in northern Virginia to pro- 
 tect the Capital. Lincoln agreed to put the disputed question to the 
 twelve brigadier and major generals of the Potomac army, and abide 
 by their decision. Eight of these approved McClellan's plan as stra- 
 tegically correct. Four opposed it as unwise in itself and as jeopardizing 
 the Capital. This referendum had evidently decided the argument in 
 favor of McClellan. Stanton might protest that the majority who 
 favored the Peninsular route were all McClellan's appointees and all 
 members of the McClellan clique; Lincoln still believed he could not 
 justifiably disregard the advice of his highest military authorities and 
 reluctantly acceded to the Peninsular campaign. He stipulated, how- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 301 
 
 ever, that a force large enough be left in the camps about Washing- 
 ton to make that city absolutely secure from capture. 
 
 Hardly had McClellan resumed his preparations when Stanton and 
 the Jacobins, furious at their failure, again laid siege to the harassed 
 President. McClellan, they urged, was not obeying the President's 
 orders. He was moving practically all of the army to the York River, 
 and leaving utterly inadequate forces for the safety of Washington. 
 Again charges of "treason" filled the air. Lincoln was genuinely alarmed 
 at the figures presented to prove McClellan's disregard of his instruc- 
 tions. Without consulting the general, in three successive orders the 
 President transferred 30,000 men from the Army of the Potomac, and 
 placed them under McDowell in northern Virginia. Lincoln's action in 
 this crisis has given rise to the most hard-fought controversy of the 
 Civil War. According to the anti-McClellanites, even after this weak- 
 ening of his command, the Federal army greatly outnumbered the Con- 
 federates. Had McClellan, they urged, conducted a vigorous offensive 
 campaign, instead of digging trenches and engaging in prolonged sieges, 
 he could have reached his goal in July 1862, and ended the war. That 
 McClellan did greatly overestimate the size of Johnston's army is a 
 matter of record. His habit of exaggerating the size of the armies op- 
 posed to him, and underestimating his own, was his greatest fault as a 
 soldier. We now know that Johnston, in early June, had not many 
 more than 40,000, and that Lee, after McClellan's delay of a month in 
 the siege of Yorktown had given time for gathering reinforcements, 
 commanded about 98,000. There was never a time when McClellan 
 had fewer than 100,000. This was true even after Lincoln had detached 
 30,000 for the defense of Washington. McClellan and his apologists al- 
 ways maintained that this act of Lincoln's explained all the disappoint- 
 ments that followed. A failure the campaign certainly proved to be. 
 After wallowing in the fever-ridden swamps of Virginia for nearly 
 three months and fighting many battles, in some of which the Fed- 
 erals administered severe punishment to the rebels, the public was 
 stunned one morning by the news that McClellan had retreated with 
 his whole command to Harrison's Landing on the James, determined not 
 to resume the conflict until large reinforcements — which Lincoln did 
 not have available — were sent him. The result was his disgrace and a 
 Stanton triumph. The McClellan army was moved from the region of 
 Richmond and transported overseas again to northern Virginia. The 
 reigning favorite of Stanton and the Jacobins, John Pope, was placed in 
 command and "Little Mac," with his staff, was sequestrated at Alex- 
 andria. 
 
 Had Lincoln by this time not lost faith in McClellan's motives, as 
 
302 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 well as in his strategy, he would probably not have deprived that gen- 
 eral of his forces and entrusted them to such an incompetent com- 
 mander as Pope. Against charges impugning McClellan's loyalty — his 
 desire to end the war and save slavery by forming some kind of com- 
 bination with the South — Lincoln was adamant. The other suspicion — 
 that the young man was politically ambitious and laying plans for the 
 presidential succession — could not be so easily dismissed. Certain hap- 
 penings of this disastrous July gave force to the impeachment. The 
 question which is more or less solemnly debated today — was McClel- 
 lan really fixing his eyes on the White House? — seems a little absurd. 
 The fact is that, in 1864, he did accept the Democratic nomination 
 for the Presidency against Lincoln, and accepted it from a Copperhead 
 convention which adopted a platform declaring the war to be a failure 
 and demanding its immediate cessation. Just as we cannot properly ap- 
 praise Stanton without keeping in mind his subsequent behavior as a 
 member of Andrew Johnson's cabinet, so we cannot truly understand 
 the McClellan of 1862 without taking into consideration his presiden- 
 tial aspirations in 1864. That this dangerous seed was early sown in 
 McClellan's mind his always revealing letters to his wife disclose. The 
 deference and applause showered upon the "young general" on his 
 first arrival in Washington might easily have implanted political 
 thoughts in a mind less egoistical than McClellan's. "I find myself in a 
 new and strange position here: Cabinet, General Scott and all deferring 
 to me. By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the 
 power in the land." Almost on the day of his appointment, McClellan's 
 presidential boom began. What could have been more natural? The 
 military heroes of the Revolution, of the second war with England, 
 and of the war with Mexico, had become President, and fate itself indi- 
 cated the conqueror of the South as destined to follow in the footsteps 
 of Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Zachary Taylor. Democratic 
 leaders of the Buchanan allegiance, who subsequently adopted McClel- 
 lan as their presidential candidate, began whispering in his ear at an 
 early day. McClellan's intimate friends were men like S. M. L. Barlow, 
 George Ticknor Curtis, August Belmont — all Democrats lukewarm in 
 support of the war. His chief journalistic supporters were the New 
 York World and the New York Herald — papers whose anti-Lin- 
 colnian policy frequently aroused patriotic wrath that resulted in 
 broken windows and on one occasion at least left their premises com- 
 pletely wrecked. The World, edited by Manton Marble, Copperhead 
 of Copperheads, was once suppressed by the government for three days 
 and put in charge of a military guard. Though McClellan had refused 
 to discuss his plans with the cabinet on the ground that its discretion 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 303 
 
 could not be trusted, he did take into his confidence on these extremely 
 secret matters Malcolm Ives, Washington correspondent of the Herald 
 and his chief journalistic supporter. As early as August 1861, McClellan 
 deprecatingly refers to the political ideas these supporters were instilling 
 in his reluctant mind. "I receive letter after letter, have conversation 
 after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding to the 
 Presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united to you 
 [his wife] forever in heaven, I have no such aspirations. I would cheer- 
 fully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the 
 country is saved." This talk of dictatorship need not be taken too omi- 
 nously, but McClellan's avoidance of conservative Republicans — 
 leaders who held men like Stanton, Wade, Chandler, and the other 
 Jacobins in as great abhorrence as did McClellan himself, and who 
 would have gladly protected him from their attacks — did betray a 
 lack of common sense. The fact is that the Democratic chieftains early 
 concentrated on McClellan as a rallying point for their opposition to 
 the Lincoln administration, with an eye to 1864, and that he made the 
 serious mistake of listening to their beguilings. 
 
 For a time Lincoln remained undisturbed over McClellan's presi- 
 dential prospects. Not until McClellan himself, in his communications, 
 began to mix war and politics, did Lincoln's attitude change. The fate- 
 ful moment came in early July 1862. McClellan had retreated to Har- 
 rison's Landing on the James, with Lee undefeated and Richmond un- 
 captured; the Peninsular campaign, into which all the national effort 
 for a year had been concentrated, had been the ghastliest of failures. 
 The time seemed an inopportune one for McClellan to show interest 
 in political questions. Yet on July 7, on the occasion of Lincoln's visit 
 to the Union camp, McClellan handed him a letter setting forth his 
 views on the great political controversies of the day. In a telegram he 
 had asked Lincoln's permission to write him on certain matters per- 
 taining to the conduct of the war. Lincoln had answered affirmatively, 
 provided McClellan could find time from his pressing duties to do so 
 — a rather plain intimation that the President thought Lee's army quite 
 enough to absorb the energies of his general. On July 7, in the course 
 of Lincoln's visit to Harrison's Landing, McClellan personally handed 
 him the promised communication. Lincoln read it in McClellan's pres- 
 ence, said "All right," thrust it into his pocket, and never mentioned 
 it to McClellan again. He regarded the paper as little less than a politi- 
 cal manifesto. It seemed to justify the prevailing criticism that McClel- 
 lan was as much concerned with politics as with the conduct of the 
 army. The latter had little to say of the military situation, which was 
 McClellan's only legitimate province, but dealt with pending problems 
 
304 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 affecting the Negro and emancipation. Seward's presentation to Lin- 
 coln of his "Thoughts" and his criticism of Lincoln for lack of a defi- 
 nite policy have properly shocked posterity as presumptuous, even 
 insolent; but Seward, after all, was a mature public man of great skill 
 and experience, at the time regarded as the leader of the Republican 
 Party and the occupant of the most important office in the Lincoln 
 cabinet. McClellan had no such basis for intruding his unasked-for 
 thoughts upon the harassed head of the nation. He was only thirty- 
 six years old, had had no career in public affairs, belonged to the politi- 
 cal party opposed to the administration, and had no concern in any- 
 thing except military matters. 
 
 Yet he began this letter with precisely the same complaint that Sew- 
 ard had uttered a year before. "The time has come," McClellan admon- 
 ished the Chief Executive, "when the government must determine 
 upon a civil and military policy covering the whole ground of our 
 national trouble. . . . The responsibility determining and supporting 
 such civil and military policy . . . must now be assumed and exercised 
 by you, or our cause will be lost. The Constitution gives you power 
 sufficient even for the present terrible emergency." Thus was the vet- 
 eran President, a lifelong student of the Constitution, lectured on his 
 civic duties by his youthful commander. And the only possible "pol- 
 icy," continued the writer, was a "conservative" one. The war should 
 not be one "looking to the subjugation of the people of any state in 
 any event. It should not be a war upon population, but against armed 
 forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, 
 political execution of persons, territorial organization of states, or forci- 
 ble abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment." As Lin- 
 coln had already settled his mind on the question of emancipation, and 
 had, figuratively speaking, his famous proclamation in his pocket at this 
 very moment, McClellan's declaration against that measure could 
 hardly have sat lightly upon him. But McClellan proceeded to criticize 
 the administration's methods of summary dealing with public disturb- 
 ers of the peace and active workers in the interest of the Confederacy 
 — Vallandigham was the shining example — and demanded that they 
 be stopped. "Military arrests should not be tolerated, except in places 
 where active hostilities exist, and oaths, not required by enactments 
 constitutionally made, should be neither demanded nor received. Mili- 
 tary government should be confined to the preservation of public 
 order and the protection of political rights." One sentence comprised 
 what might be regarded as a threat. "Unless the principles guarding the 
 future conduct of our struggle shall be made known and approved 
 the effort to obtain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declara- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 305 
 
 tion of radical views, especially on slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our 
 present armies." Lincoln might well have been startled by this pro- 
 nouncement of the commanding general, almost saying that an emanci- 
 pation proclamation would cause his soldiers to lay down their arms 
 and disband. McClellan's final suggestion that a commander in chief, 
 having control of all the forces of the United States on all fronts, be 
 appointed, and his indirect proposal that he was the man for the place, 
 similarly fell on barren ground. "I am willing to serve in such position 
 as you may assign me" reminds one of Seward's offer to the President 
 a year before, of himself as de facto President. "This is not my especial 
 province; but I neither seek to waive nor assume responsibility." 
 
 Lincoln and the few intimates to whom he showed this letter agreed 
 as to its purpose. It was addressed to the President, but was really in- 
 tended for the American electorate. It was a statement of the platform 
 on which McClellan intended to run for the Presidency — and indeed 
 he did run for that office on a platform which, in spirit, was much the 
 same. It was to be enshrined in McClellan's record, to be given free 
 circulation at the proper time. That also is what happened. McClellan 
 included his letter of July 7, 1862, in his report of the Peninsular opera- 
 tions, which was submitted to the President in August 1863, and given 
 to the world soon afterward. The date fitted nicely into McClellan's 
 presidential plans. On October 12, 1863, he wrote a letter endorsing 
 George W. Woodward, the Democratic candidate for governor of 
 Pennsylvania, who was conducting his campaign on what was prac- 
 tically a Copperhead platform. This letter was generally considered — 
 as it proved to be — McClellan's bid for the presidential nomination. 
 His greatest admirers today regard it as the most deplorable mistake of 
 his career. 
 
M 
 
 IV IcCLELLAN'S PROPOSAL of himself as commander of all the 
 Federal armies proved to be ill-timed. In July his status as commander 
 of only one of these armies, that of the Potomac, was in question. Stan- 
 ton and Chase in the cabinet, and their allies, the Republican radicals 
 in Congress, now advanced in a direct attack on the general. In doing 
 so, they took a stand that was little less than rebellion against the Presi- 
 dent. To accomplish McClellan's retirement to obscurity they were 
 even prepared to risk the disruption of the cabinet. 
 
 On July 31, Lincoln, no longer expecting results from the army 
 penned up at Harrison's Landing, peremptorily ordered McClellan to 
 abandon that position, move his troops to Aquia Creek, on the Rappa- 
 hannock River, and deliver them to the Army of Virginia, then under 
 the command of General Pope. The transportation of these forces did 
 not begin until August 14, two weeks after the order had been re- 
 ceived. Lee seized the opening thus presented, and attacked Pope's 
 army before a junction could be formed, with the hundred thousand 
 men moving up from the Peninsula. The outcome was the most disas- 
 trous defeat inflicted on the Federals in four years of war. The fact 
 that the scene of the battle was that same field of Bull Run on which 
 the Confederates had scored their first triumph fourteen months before 
 did not lessen the humiliation of the North. 
 
 Stanton and Chase, and their congressional cohorts, attributed the 
 full blame to McClellan. His fortnight's delay in beginning the north- 
 ward movement of his army, his failure, once this army had landed 
 on the Potomac, to rush them to Pope's hard-pressed contingents — 
 here, they cried (and the criticisms to which the proceedings gave 
 rise have not yet died down), was the explanation for the Federal rout. 
 Here was more of that proslavery "treason" which had paralyzed the 
 Union armies for the preceding ten months. McClellan, of course, had 
 his defenders then, as he has today. He had changed his base from 
 southern to northern Virginia, he declared, with all possible dispatch. 
 In fact, his skill in withdrawing from the James, in face of a hostile 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 307 
 
 army, his admirers have always hailed as one of those maneuvers at 
 which he was so great a master. To get his men to the scene of active 
 operations in the time allotted, they declare, was beyond human power. 
 Had McClellan been guilty of the crime of which he was accused — 
 that of deliberately withholding his troops and thus insuring Federal 
 defeat — only a firing squad could have meted out the appropriate pen- 
 alty. That mild-mannered Christian gentleman, Salmon P. Chase, ad- 
 vocated this as the one desirable solution of the McClellan problem. 
 "Chase," notes Gideon Welles, said that "he deliberately believed 
 McClellan ought to be shot, and should, were he President, be brought 
 to summary punishment." x 
 
 This conviction made Chase a willing partner in the plan which 
 Stanton set in motion for McClellan's destruction. That the program 
 also endangered the existence of the cabinet did not deter either man. 
 All through August, Stanton and Chase had been bringing pressure to 
 bear on Lincoln to this end. They did not seek merely to reduce McClel- 
 lan's command. Only utter disgrace — his retirement to civil life — 
 would be deemed adequate punishment for his crime. Stanton had 
 gone as far as his authority warranted, to accomplish this result. Prob- 
 ably no military man of high rank ever received a more cutting reply 
 than when McClellan in late August telegraphed Stanton, asking what 
 his status was. At that time his army had been taken from him and trans- 
 ferred to Pope. Just what then, he asked of the Secretary, did he com- 
 mand? "General McClellan," came the answer, "commands that por- 
 tion of the Army of the Potomac that has not been sent forward to 
 General Pope's command." As only one hundred men, many of whom 
 were ill, remained with McClellan at the time, this official announce- 
 ment may be regarded as one of those studied insults for which Stanton 
 had so brilliant a gift. Writing to Thaddeus Stevens, expressing his satis- 
 faction with Stanton's reply, Chase remarked, "This is late, but well, 
 though not well enough." 2 A more fitting disposition of McClellan 
 Stanton and Chase had been cogitating for some time. It came to a 
 head on Saturday, August 30. News had just arrived from Pope, tell- 
 ing of a great Federal victory; he had defeated and was pursuing Stone- 
 wall Jackson to his destruction. Pope's message was utterly untruthful, 
 though possibly he believed it himself; in fact, the wily Confederate 
 leader was luring Pope into an ambush, where in due course he en- 
 trapped and destroyed him. 
 
 Chase had heard only Pope's version, when on the afternoon of that 
 day he came into the office of Gideon Welles and handed him a paper, 
 
 1 Welles, Diary. I, 102. 
 
 2 Warden, op. cit. } p. 457. 
 
308 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 which he asked the Navy head to sign. The document was written in 
 Stanton's familiar backhand scrawl and to it the names of Stanton and 
 Chase, with their official titles, had been appended. Both Mr. Bates, 
 Attorney General, and Mr. Smith, Secretary of the Interior, Chase 
 informed Welles, had signified their willingness to add theirs. The 
 paper was addressed to the President of the United States. "The under- 
 signed," it read, "feel compelled by a profound sense of duty to the 
 government and the people of the United States, and to yourself as 
 your constitutional advisers, respectfully to recommend the immediate 
 removal of George B. McClellan from any command in the armies of 
 the United States. We are constrained to urge this by the conviction 
 that after a sad and humiliating trial of twelve months and by the 
 frightful and useless sacrifice of the lives of many thousand brave men 
 and the waste of many millions of national means, he has proved to be 
 incompetent for any important military command, and also because by 
 recent disobedience of superior orders and inactivity, he has twice im- 
 perilled the fate of the army commanded by General Pope and while 
 he continues in comrrfand will daily hazard the fate of our armies, ex- 
 hibiting no sign of a disposition or capacity to restore by courage and 
 diligence the national honor that has been so deeply tarnished in the 
 eyes of the world by his military failures. We are unwilling to be ac- 
 cessory to the destruction of our armies, the protraction of the war, 
 the waste of our national resources, and the overthrow of the govern- 
 ment, which we believe must be the inevitable consequence of George 
 B. McClellan being continued in command, and seek, therefore, by his 
 prompt removal to afford an opportunity to capable officers under 
 God's providence to preserve our national existence." 
 
 Probably American history offers no parallel to this document. In 
 the first place, it was most undignified in substance and manner. It was 
 not an official paper, though signed by two cabinet members and ad- 
 dressed to the President, but a stump speech. In the most approved 
 Stantonian style, it assumed as true all the charges then in open and 
 whispered circulation in Washington — that McClellan was responsible 
 for Pope's defeat, that he had deliberately withheld forces that would 
 have ensured his victory, that he was plotting the overthrow of the 
 government. The unasked-for advice was also an insult to Lincoln. 
 It informed the President, in so many words, that, if he did not at once 
 dismiss McClellan from "any command" in the Federal army, the sign- 
 ers — and Stanton and Chase believed they could count on at least five 
 of the seven cabinet members — would resign their portfolios and dis- 
 rupt the administration. The declaration that they would be "unwilling 
 to be accessory" to the national calamities that would follow McClel- 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN , 309 
 
 lan's retention in any command could have no other meaning. Indeed, 
 Chase, in discussing the subject with Gideon Welles in this and sub- 
 sequent interviews, avowed such to be the purpose. Chase, writes 
 Welles, said that the letter "was designed to tell the President that the 
 administration must be broken up or McClellan dismissed. The method 
 was an unusual one, but the case itself was unusual." 3 "Why not take 
 the matter up in face to face conversation with Mr. Lincoln," Welles 
 asked, "instead of putting the matter so uncompromisingly in writing?" 
 Nothing could be gained, Chase replied, by discussing matters of such 
 consequence personally with the President. "Argument was useless. 
 It was like throwing water on a duck's back. A more decisive expres- 
 sion must be made and that in writing." 4 Both Stanton and Chase had 
 in fact already used verbal persuasion without result; this letter, which 
 was virtually an ultimatum, had therefore been prepared. 
 
 Chase insisted that "the time had arrived when the cabinet must act 
 with energy and promptitude, for either the government or McClellan 
 must go down." 5 In a letter written to William Cullen Bryant, another 
 fierce anti-McClellanite, on September 1, Chase took the same stand. 
 "I do not see how I can reconcile my duty to the country with sharing 
 the responsibilities of the administration, if it continues to allow its 
 military actions to be guided in any considerable degree by his [Mc- 
 Clellan's] counsels or control." The evening of the thirtieth, Welles 
 discussed the matter with Stanton in the War Department. Stanton, as 
 was his custom in tense moments, hitched his chair close to Welles and 
 began to speak in whispers. He did not particularly disagree, Welles 
 told Stanton, with his opinion of McClellan as a commanding officer, 
 but suggested that this abrupt manner of approach showed little con- 
 sideration for the President. That comment excited Stanton. "I know 
 of no particular obligation I am under to the President," the War Sec- 
 retary replied. "He called me to a difficult position and imposed on me 
 labors and responsibilities which no man could carry." Lincoln had 
 fastened upon him a commander who was constantly striving to em- 
 barrass him. "I cannot and I will not submit to a continuance of this 
 state of things." Stanton instanced one of his latest grievances against 
 the hated general. General Pope had telegraphed to McClellan for 
 sorely needed supplies; McClellan had replied that supplies were lying 
 at Alexandria and that Pope could have them if he would send an escort 
 to insure their safe delivery. "A general fighting and on the field of 
 battle to send to a general in the rear and in repose and ask for an 
 
 3 Welles, Diary. I, 102. 
 
 *Ibid. 
 
 5 Ibid., 1,94. . 
 
310 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 escort!" 6 That personal feeling entered deeply into Stanton's fury 
 was evident. "Stanton is mad and determined to destroy McClellan," 
 Welles wrote, and that always fair-minded critic added, "perhaps with 
 reason." 7 Doubtless Welles had in mind that telegram which McClellan 
 had sent his chief after his collapse on the Peninsula — a remonstrance 
 so insubordinate and insulting both to the Secretary of War and to the 
 President that McClellan's wife, always his worshiping admirer, re- 
 buked him for sending it. "If I save this army now," so read the cele- 
 brated dispatch, "I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to 
 any other person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice 
 this army." Stanton was probably not unmindful of this communication 
 when he launched this determined effort, three weeks afterward, to end 
 McClellan's career in disgrace. 
 
 Had the ultimatum succeeded, Lincoln's whole plan of a coalition 
 cabinet would have gone adrift. The scramble that would have taken 
 place for the control of the administration would have endangered the 
 whole Union cause. This revolution would have triumphed — that is, 
 the Lincoln cabinet of August 1862 would have fallen in ruins — except 
 for one man. The old-fashioned but shrewd gentleman then filling the 
 post of Secretary of the Navy saw the meaning of the step at a glance 
 and stiffened his puritanical back against it. Stanton and Chase clearly 
 understood that Welles's accession was indispensable. Though Stanton 
 had enrolled four members of the cabinet in his palace revolution — a 
 majority — the demonstration was not quite so impressive as it appeared 
 on the surface. His only really strong ally was Chase. The other two, 
 Caleb B. Smith and Bates, exercised little influence in the administra- 
 tion. Smith was practically a cipher; neither by character nor by ability 
 did he enjoy the respect of his associates or the public; his career was 
 approaching its end, and, in fact, he retired from the cabinet four 
 months after signing the Stanton-Chase manifesto. Edward Bates was 
 a more important convert, though he, a man without a political party, 
 and filling a minor cabinet place, did not add great strength to the up- 
 rising. One wonders why Bates, who was a wise, honest man, with a 
 strong sense of official propriety, permitted himself to be drawn into 
 the intrigue. He despised both Chase and Stanton and always bracketed 
 them as unfaithful to the President and as selfish pursuers of their own 
 ambitions. It is also true that Bates was not overemphatic in his admira- 
 tion of Lincoln. "The President," he notes on December 31, 1861 — and 
 this remained his view to the end — "is an excellent man, and in the 
 main wise, but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear, has not 
 the power to command? 8 He thought designing men took advantage 
 
 6 Welles, Diary. I, 98. 7 Ibid., I, 100. 8 Bates, op. cit., p. 220. 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 311 
 
 of Lincoln's "amiable weakness," that "he lacked nerve to apply the 
 remedy," that "if he had more vim" he would have dismissed Stanton 
 from the cabinet. 9 In the matter of McClellan, Bates in particular re- 
 garded Lincoln as inept and vacillating. Yet Chase was wrong in telling 
 Welles that Bates would sign the paper. He was too judicially minded 
 to endorse Stanton's wild charges, though, as presently became evident, 
 he was willing to sign an appeal couched in more appropriate language. 
 
 The Stanton-Chase proposal, if it was to have any force, would need 
 more powerful supporters than Bates or Smith. The cabinet members 
 who, besides the two original promoters, really mattered were Blair, 
 Seward, and Welles. There was no hope of winning Blair. The Mary- 
 lander despised Pope as heartily as the rest — all the Popes, the breezy 
 gentleman once told Lincoln, were "flatterers, deceivers, liars and 
 tricksters" 10 — and he still, even after August 1862, believed in McClel- 
 lan's military capacity. Chase, well knowing Blair's devotion to Lincoln 
 and his confidence in McClellan, was almost morbidly fearful that he 
 should learn of the pending plot. While Chase and Welles were discus- 
 sing the matter, in their first interview on the subject, Blair casually 
 dropped into the Secretary's room. "Chase was alarmed," recorded 
 Welles, "for the paper was in my hand and he evidently feared I should 
 address Blair on the subject." In deference to Chase's agitation, Welles 
 refrained, but after the Postmaster General had left Welles asked if 
 Blair should not be called back and taken into their confidence. "No; 
 not now," replied the head of the Treasury. "It was best he should for 
 the present know nothing of it." So nervous was Chase about Blair's 
 being let into the secret that, after he had himself left the room, he 
 returned for a final injunction to Welles; he begged his colleague to 
 say nothing about the proposal to Blair or anyone else. 11 
 
 As to Seward, his position in this moment of crisis will probably 
 never be known. Up to Second Bull Run, Seward had espoused Mc- 
 Clellan's cause; but there is reason to believe that after this defeat his 
 loyalty paled, and that in his heart he endorsed the Stanton-Chase 
 declaration. An open decision, however, would have proved embar- 
 rassing. A year before Seward had attempted with his "Thoughts" to 
 get control of the administration. He understood the President's deter- 
 mined spirit, and the lofty respect which Lincoln, despite his informali- 
 ties and his frequently jocose behavior, entertained for the dignity of 
 his office. Perhaps the agile Secretary of State was disinclined to invite 
 another rebuff. He had come to have a personal regard for Lincoln, and 
 was averse to being identified with what he knew was a hostile, disloyal 
 act and one which, if carried into effect, might cause his own retire- 
 
 9 Ibid., p. 343. ,0 Welles, Diary, I, 126. ll Ibid., I, 95. 
 
312 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ment. On the other hand, Seward was always the trimmer and did not 
 care to oppose the two most powerful members after himself of Lin- 
 coln's official family. So he boarded a train and left for a brief vacation 
 at his home in Auburn, New York. An energetic campaign for three 
 hundred thousand more recruits for "father Abraham" was under way 
 in the North and Seward believed — or so he said — that his presence 
 and speeches in that region would stimulate enlistment. So, from late 
 August to September 4, the period of the McClellan cabinet upheaval, 
 Seward remained absent from the presidential councils. Gideon Welles 
 records his conviction that Seward's sudden departure was "purpose- 
 ful." 
 
 Blair and Seward evidently being unavailable as signers, the leaders 
 in their search for influential supporters had fallen back on Welles. He 
 was indispensable to their cause, not only as head of one of the greatest 
 departments, but for his personal standing and influence with Lincoln. 
 With Welles the junto would have numbered five members of the 
 cabinet out of a possible seven, and such a majority — including three 
 of the most powerful: Stanton, Chase, and Welles — would have been 
 impressive. But Welles, in almost belligerent fashion, refused to have 
 anything to do with the movement. In bluntly telling Chase that he 
 disapproved Stanton's importunities, he dropped into a Yankee phrase 
 subsequently made celebrated by Calvin Coolidge. After the first read- 
 ing of the paper, in Chase's presence, he looked up, turned his white- 
 whiskered Santa Claus countenance to his smooth-faced visitor, and 
 said, "I do not choose to denounce McClellan for incapacity, or to 
 pronounce him a traitor, as declared in this paper, but I will say, and 
 perhaps it is my duty to say, that I believe his removal from command 
 is demanded by public sentiment and the best interests of the country." 
 The President, Welles continued, understood his opinion of McClellan, 
 for in many conversations on this subject he had expressed himself 
 frankly. The general's dilatory course had long since caused Welles 
 to lose confidence in him and this conviction was much aggravated by 
 what he had recently learned at the War Department. If, in cabinet 
 council, the President should request his views on the subject, they 
 would be given freely, and would not differ greatly from those set 
 forth in the Stanton-Chase indictment. But this method of approaching 
 the problem Welles regarded as irregular, improper, and disrespectful 
 to Mr. Lincoln. He flatly refused to join any "combination" whose 
 purpose it was to seize "control" of the administration. Of all the 
 seven cabinet members, Welles was practically the only one who, up to 
 this time, had accurately gauged Lincoln's character and abilities. He 
 entertained the highest opinion of both. On moral and intellectual 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 313 
 
 grounds he estimated him far above Stanton, Chase, Seward, or any 
 other public man of his time. This attempt to wrest "control" — 
 Welles's word, repeated several times in his narrative of the uprising 
 — of the administration by a threat of disruption in case the unasked- 
 for advice should not be accepted aroused Welles's anger and contempt. 
 In the next few days Chase brought pressure several times. All he re- 
 ceived from the Navy head were a few apparently much-needed les- 
 sons in constitutional law. 
 
 Two days after his first rebuff from Welles, Chase returned with 
 another document. This was in the trembling but clear handwriting of 
 Attorney General Bates. That conscientious lawyer had refused to put 
 his name to Stanton's bludgeoning paragraphs, but he agreed with the 
 fundamental idea, and was willing to sign one expressed in more cor- 
 rect terms. He had been therefore asked to rephrase the protest. The 
 Bates version omitted the traitorous charges against McClellan and, 
 more significantly, blue-penciled the prospect of wholesale resignations, 
 if he were retained in command. It was merely an expression of opinion, 
 not a threat, that, if rejected, would throw the government into chaos. 
 "The undersigned," it read, "who have been honored with your selec- 
 tion, as a part of your confidential advisers, deeply impressed with our 
 great responsibility in the present crisis, do but perform a painful duty 
 in declaring to you our deliberate opinion that, at this time, it is not 
 safe to entrust to Major General McClellan the command of any army 
 of the United States. And we hold ourselves ready, any time, to explain 
 to you in detail, the reasons upon which this opinion is founded." 
 Appended to this redaction were the names of Edwin M. Stanton, S. P. 
 Chase, Caleb B. Smith, and Edward Bates. A white space was left be- 
 tween Smith and Bates for the hoped-for signature of Gideon Welles. 
 
 This document displays the difference between the constitutional 
 lawyer, Edward Bates, and the impulsive politician, Edwin M. Stanton. 
 Stanton's paper had embodied a gross misstatement in constitutional in- 
 terpretation. It had referred to the members of the President's cabinet 
 as his "constitutional advisers." Bates knew better and changed the 
 words to "confidential advisers" — and admitted that they were only 
 "part of his confidential advisers" at that. The cabinet, as Stanton ought 
 to have known and undoubtedly did know, has no standing under the 
 Constitution. That fundamental law makes no provision for such an 
 agency of government. All so-called "cabinet" members are the special 
 creatures of acts of Congress. Not one of them had any existence at the 
 time the Constitution went into operation. In successive pieces of leg- 
 islation Congress had established the administrative departments — 
 State, Treasury, War, and the rest of the present ten — providing for 
 
314 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 a secretary to act as executive head of each. Nothing identical with a 
 cabinet in the real meaning of the term has ever been known in the 
 United States. The secretaries are mere underlings of the President, 
 appointed by him and removable at his pleasure. They become "ad- 
 visers" only when the President deigns to ask their advice, and then he 
 adopts or rejects it as his judgment approves. The Constitution did take 
 for granted executive departments and provided that the President 
 could demand in writing the opinion "of the principal officer in each 
 of the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties 
 of their respective offices." Thus, under the Constitution, cabinet mem- 
 bers — or rather "department heads" — are not expected to offer unso- 
 licited admonitions to the President. Had Lincoln asked their opinions 
 on McClellan — as he did on Fort Sumter — then each member would 
 have been obliged to render an opinion in writing. Seward once ex- 
 pressed tersely the relative powers of President and cabinet. "There is 
 only one vote in the cabinet," he said, "and that is cast by the Presi- 
 dent." Legend relates how Lincoln once called for a cabinet vote on a 
 pending question. All seven voted "no"; Lincoln voted "aye." The 
 "ayes have it," the President declared. The anecdote, true or not, cor- 
 rectly epitomizes the authority and responsibility of the Chief Execu- 
 tive, as compared to that of his "department heads." To frame a round 
 robin and place it in menacing fashion under the President's nose was 
 a proceeding not justified in law or morals. 
 
 Bates's revised declaration was a great improvement on Stanton's, 
 but even his went too far, and it is surprising that so excellent a 
 jurist and so fair-minded a man should have been beguiled by Stanton 
 and Chase into writing and signing it. The Attorney General's modifi- 
 cations did not remove Welles's objections. He was opposed not only 
 to the form of the demand, but to the demand itself. He complimented 
 Chase on the improvement over Stanton's epistolary manners, but even 
 the more correct form he regarded as irregular and disrespectful to 
 Mr. Lincoln. "I told Chase I did not like and could not unite in the 
 movement; that in a conference with the President, I should have no 
 hesitation in saying or agreeing to what was there expressed. . . . Re- 
 flection had more fully satisfied me that this method of conspiring to 
 influence or control the President was repugnant to my feelings and 
 was not right; it was unusual, would be disrespectful, and would justly 
 be deemed offensive; that the President had called us around him as 
 friends and advisers, with whom he might counsel and consult on all 
 matters affecting the public welfare, not to enter into combinations to 
 control him. Nothing of this kind has hitherto taken place in our 
 intercourse." 12 
 
 12 Bates, op. cit., pp. 101-102. 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 315 
 
 Chase attempted to argue the case, but Welles proved inflexible. As 
 a result, the whole matter was dropped. "My refusal," Welles after- 
 ward wrote, "and perhaps my remarks prevented the matter from pro- 
 ceeding further. The President never knew of this paper." 1S 
 
 That Lincoln would have flatly rejected the cabinet proposal, even 
 at the cost of a cabinet resignation en masse, events made clear. Perhaps 
 the tensest of all cabinet meetings in the Civil War assembled on the 
 morning of September 2 — the day after Chase's first unsuccessful ap- 
 peal to Welles for co-operation in the warfare on McClellan. All were 
 present except Seward — and, as the pertinacious Welles again notes, 
 "I think there was design in his absence." Washington had reached a 
 state of hysteria. Authentic news had then arrived at the Capital of 
 Pope's calamitous proceedings at Bull Run. If any emphasis were 
 needed to give point to his defeat, the thousands of stragglers from his 
 army, rushing almost in rout to the Washington entrenchments, would 
 have supplied it. The city was hourly expecting the arrival of Lee's 
 army and a battle in front of the Capital that would decide the fate of 
 the nation. Lincoln's "department heads" assembled before his arrival 
 and were excitedly discussing the situation. Most of them were hurling 
 imprecations impartially at McClellan and Pope. Montgomery Blair, in 
 references to the latter commander, was free with his usual expletives: 
 Pope, he declared again, was a "braggart and a liar" — the latter word 
 now had a particular application, for Pope's first message, reporting a 
 smashing victory, had lifted Northerners everywhere in exultation, 
 only to have their hopes dashed to a new depth when the real truth 
 arrived. 
 
 Of all the assembled statesmen, Stanton showed the greatest emotion. 
 As Welles records, the Secretary of War was "trembling with excite- 
 ment." He was big with news, which he announced "in a suppressed 
 voice." McClellan, he' informed his colleagues, had been restored to 
 command of the Army of the Potomac! Consternation and amazement 
 followed the declaration. At the height of the discussion, the tall, 
 gaunt figure of the President entered, calm and controlled, yet evi- 
 dently laboring under a great strain. All the perturbed cabinet faces 
 turned in his direction. Was it true that McClellan had been replaced 
 in his old position? Yes, Lincoln quietly answered, it was true. His 
 delay in reaching the cabinet meeting had been caused by his absence 
 in consultation with that military chieftain. He and General Halleck 
 had called at McClellan's house, routed him out before breakfast, and 
 ordered him to take command of the Federal armies stationed about 
 Washington. In response to the anxious expressions on every face — 
 which, in the case of Stanton and Chase, amounted to surly glares 
 
 13 Welles, Lincoln and Seward. Pp. 193-194. 
 
316 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 — Lincoln said that he had done what seemed best under all the circum- 
 stances. 
 
 "No order to that effect," said Stanton, "has been issued from the 
 War Department." 
 
 Lincoln turned on his insolent subordinate with that cold finality 
 he could use at times most effectively. "The order is mine," he replied, 
 "and I will be responsible for it to the country." He acknowledged all 
 McClellan's shortcomings. The general had "the slows" and was not 
 to be depended on for aggressive fighting. But he was a good engineer, 
 a splendid organizer of armed forces; he knew, better than any man, 
 conditions that then surrounded Washington, and no man in the nation 
 was so competent for the immediately pressing task — that of reconsti- 
 tuting the demoralized hordes then pouring into the Washington forts, 
 and whipping them expeditiously into a fighting force. 
 
 So far as his counselors gave their opinions, Lincoln received more 
 blame than praise. Most of them accepted the information in respectful 
 silence, though Montgomery Blair expressed approval. The attitude of 
 Chase and Stanton approached pretty close to insulting disrespect. The 
 Secretary of the Treasury insisted that the President's changes of com- 
 manding general would prove to be a "national calamity." When Lin- 
 coln said that McClellan was the best man to put the forts in order, 
 Chase retorted that the engineer who had constructed them could do 
 the job just as well. He recalled his whole attitude towards McClellan; 
 said that he had welcomed him to Washington and had given him 
 support as long as he could do so without proving faithless to the 
 national cause. Even after Chase had felt compelled to withdraw that 
 confidence, he had, in deference to the President's disinclination to 
 appoint another commander, supported him in every possible way. He 
 had no personal animosity against the man and devoutly wished him to 
 succeed. But what had been the outcome? McClellan's campaigns had 
 been a series of failures. He had shown no alacrity in forwarding assist- 
 ance to Pope. His delay in hastening troops to the scene of action on 
 the preceding Friday and Saturday had evinced a spirit which rendered 
 him unworthy of trust. "I cannot but feel," Chase declared, "that giv- 
 ing the command to McClellan is equivalent to giving Washington to 
 the rebels." "This and more I said," Chase wrote rather proudly in his 
 Diary. Lincoln replied that he was distressed exceedingly to find him- 
 self differing in so important a matter from the Secretary of the 
 Treasury and the Secretary of War. He saw no one who could do the 
 work that was immediately at hand so well as McClellan. Whom would 
 Chase suggest? The Secretary proposed Hooker, or Sumner, or Burn- 
 side. "Either of them would do the work better." Lincoln did not agree, 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 317 
 
 and the long discussion finally ended, the President still determined in 
 his plan, though most of his cabinet took stand against him. 
 
 One curious misstatement in connection with this meeting has crept 
 into the most respectable histories, which does a great injustice to 
 Lincoln. He has been pictured as so driven by despair that he informed 
 his cabinet, on this occasion, that he would "gladly resign his place." 
 "The President retained his dignity and maintained at first a calm atti- 
 tude" — so reads the account of this cabinet meeting in McClelland 
 Own Story. 1 * "He had been accustomed for months to the nagging 
 policy of the Secretaries; but it now became so personal and bitter that 
 he was at last driven to the exclamation that he would gladly resign his 
 high office." To prove that Abraham Lincoln had reached such a low 
 state of mind, a passage from Chase's Diary, as extracted and published 
 by his biographer, Robert Warden, is reproduced. In this work Lin- 
 coln is indeed quoted as saying to Chase "that he would gladly resign 
 his place." Even so careful a historian as James Ford Rhodes repeats 
 the supposed cry of anguish as indicating the state of demoralization 
 prevailing in Washington at that time, and other writers have dutifully 
 copied the sentence. Seldom has a misprint done a statesman such in- 
 justice. In 1903, the American Historical Association published Chase's 
 Diary. From this it appears that Lincoln did not inform that gentleman 
 that he would "gladly resign his place," but that he would "gladly 
 resign his plan." 15 It was a frequent remark of Lincoln in laying his 
 proposals before his advisers that he would be happy to give up his 
 plan if they could suggest something better, and it was in response 
 to this question that Chase had indicated as "something better" any one 
 of the three generals — Hooker, Sumner, or Burnside — all three of 
 whom were favorites with the congressional Jacobins, all three having 
 accepted the radical view on the Negro question. 
 
 The next day, Chase, meeting Welles on the White House lawn, 
 upbraided him for not giving his support to his anti-McClellan demon- 
 stration. He could now see to what straits his failure to sign the pro- 
 nunciamento had brought the nation. McClellan would never have been 
 restored to a place where he would be able to accomplish unutterable 
 mischief if that written defiance had been placed on the President's 
 desk. But Welles knew better than that. In a private conversation Lin- 
 coln had gone further into detail with Welles on this matter. He was 
 willing to admit that most of the criticisms lavished on his difficult 
 general had a genuine basis. He was even prepared to believe, in a 
 
 14 McClellan, op. cit., p. 544. 
 
 15 Page 65. The Diary formed part of the Annual Report of the American His- 
 torical Association for 1902, Vol. II. 
 
318 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 measure, that "Little Mac" had been derelict in forwarding reinforce- 
 ments to the fiercely pressed Pope. "He acted badly towards Pope, he 
 wanted him to fail," Nicolay and Hay report the President as having 
 remarked to them, and Welles records similar confidential criticisms 
 made to him. Most of the recent troubles, Lincoln declared, were 
 caused by "the quarrels of the generals"; their jealousies and personal 
 ambitions provided the real explanation for the state to which the 
 country had been reduced. Welles thought the same, but neither he 
 nor Lincoln accepted the easy belief that the man was a traitor, that 
 he deliberately planned to deliver Washington to Lee; the thing was 
 subtler than that. It stemmed from the paralyzing effect produced on a 
 man's actions by his conviction that he had been wronged, and that, 
 through spite, a soldier whose character and abilities he despised had 
 been given the work which he himself was the only one competent to 
 do. All that, Lincoln said, should be overlooked in face of the fact that 
 the one man in the army best fitted to stop the demoralization every- 
 where becoming worse and to make over the forces for the defense of 
 the capital was the recalcitrant McClellan. The mere fact that he was 
 recalled from obscurity to repair the injury inflicted on the nation by 
 the hated Pope would put him on his mettle. "It was humiliating" — 
 Welles quotes the President to this effect — "after what had transpired 
 and all we knew, to reward McClellan and those who failed to do 
 their whole duty in the hour of trial, but so it was. Personal considera- 
 tions must be sacrificed for the public good. He had kept aloof from the 
 discussions that prevailed and intended to, but, said he, 'I must have 
 McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos.' " 16 The 
 task which McClellan must do now was almost ^identically the same 
 that he had so brilliantly performed after First Bull Run. He had cre- 
 ated a splendid fighting force out of all that confusion and he could do 
 so again. The nation must use the best talent available to its hand for 
 the work that immediately needed to be done. That Lincoln was right 
 the events proved. In less than two weeks, the restored general had 
 repeated his former brilliant performance, and out of the scattered 
 fragments of Pope's hordes had created the host that brought Lee to 
 defeat at South Mountain and Antietam. 
 
 The affair increased the already profound admiration which Welles 
 entertained for his chief. His handling of the McClellan crisis in Sep- 
 tember 1862 Welles regarded as one of the greatest moments in Lin- 
 coln's life. He expressed this view at the time, and again long after 
 Lincoln's death. "From what I have seen and heard within the last few 
 days," he wrote on September 7, 1862, "the more highly do I appre- 
 
 16 Welles, Lincoln and Seward. P. 197. 
 
THE CABINET AND McCLELLAN 319 
 
 ciate the President's judgment and sagacity in the stand he made." 
 Probably the fact that Welles had himself done yeoman work in sup- 
 porting his chief — all unknown to the man concerned — heightened 
 his satisfaction. The President was "never unreasonably obstinate or 
 wilful," he wrote in a brochure published in 1874, 17 "even when his 
 intentions were defeated. ... In the generosity of his nature, he was 
 tolerant of acts where a more arbitrary and imperious mind would 
 have been implacable and unforgiving. There were occasions, however, 
 when, relying on his own convictions, and the exigencies being great, 
 he exercised the executive will — the one-man power — with intelligent 
 determination and effect. His promptness and energy in an emergency 
 were displayed on one memorable occasion, when danger was immi- 
 nent and immediate decision necessary. It may be mentioned as illus- 
 trative of his executive ability, promptness, and self-reliance. Gloom 
 and national disaster were upon the country, but the President met the 
 crisis with firmness, rose with the exigency, and independent of his 
 cabinet and against the general sentiments of the people, and by a sac- 
 rifice of personal feeling, adopted a course which results justified and 
 proved his ability as a chief." It was Lincoln's action in the McClellan 
 crisis that called forth this eulogy from the most penetrating and just 
 member of his cabinet. 
 
 Some days after this critical cabinet meeting, Welles, walking on a 
 Sunday evening on Pennsylvania Avenue, sighted what he at first 
 thought was a squadron of cavalry men, about thirty in number. It 
 proved to be McClellan and his staff, caparisoned in all their old-time 
 splendor. Welles raised his hand in salute as the dashing young general 
 approached. McClellan, recognizing the Secretary, stopped, leaned 
 down, and shook the old man's hand in his most friendly, charming 
 manner. This handclasp, he said, was intended as a farewell. "Then," 
 inquired Welles, "you go up the River?" Yes, he had started to take 
 charge of the army for the operations above — where Lee's forces were 
 known to be gathering. "Well," said the Secretary of the Navy, "on- 
 ward, General, is now the word; the country will expect you to go 
 forward." "That," replied McClellan, "is my intention." "Success to 
 you, General, with all my heart!" and the men waved hands in fare- 
 well. In a few days the Army of the Potomac, in four columns, was 
 marching along the north side of the Potomac towards the battlefield 
 of Antietam. 
 
 17 Ibid., p. 189. 
 
BOOK FIVE 
 
 & Senate versus Cabinet I 
 
T« 
 
 HE NEXT FEW weeks proved to be a period of mingled triumph 
 and disaster. In that time McClellan justified both the favorable and 
 the unfavorable opinions Lincoln held of his character. He had been 
 specifically summoned to reorganize the shattered Potomac forces and 
 re-establish them as a fighting army and the task had been accomplished 
 with McClellan's customary speed and completeness. The army that 
 advanced in late September to meet Lee in western Maryland was the 
 finest, in equipment, courage, and fighting power, that this continent 
 had known up to that time. These qualities were displayed when it 
 came face to face with the Confederate forces, who, overconfident 
 from their recent campaigns, now boldly attempted an invasion of the 
 North. Lee had expected that all Maryland, including Washington and 
 Baltimore, would quickly fall into his hands, and that this would lead 
 to the capture of Philadelphia and Harrisburg and even of New York. 
 But McClellan, at Antietam Creek, in one of the bloodiest battles of 
 the war, stopped Lee's forces, threw them back, and sent them in re- 
 treat to their Virginia strongholds. 
 
 This failure taught the South that it was about as difficult to invade 
 the North as similar misadventures had taught the Federals that it was 
 to invade the South. After achieving this success, however, McClellan's 
 familiar qualities of doubt and procrastination again came to the sur- 
 face. Lincoln believed that Antietam had delivered the Army of North- 
 ern Virginia into McClellan's hands and that, had the success been 
 vigorously pursued, Lee's forces would have been captured or de- 
 stroyed and the back of the Rebellion broken. Day after day the dis- 
 tracted leader in the White House sent peremptory orders to McClellan 
 to follow up his advantage and not let the Southerners cross the Poto- 
 mac into Virginia. Instead of obeying these instructions, McClellan 
 again set up his usual demands for reinforcements, and made his usual 
 complaints of the lack of supplies and of the Potomac mud. His patience 
 exhausted, Lincoln formed a resolve, not communicated to anyone 
 until long afterward. If McClellan permitted Lee to cross the Blue 
 
324 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Ridge Mountains and place himself between Richmond and the Army 
 of the Potomac, he would remove him from command. 1 On November 
 5 news reached Washington that Lee and Longstreet had arrived safely 
 at Culpepper Court House; Lincoln at once sent a message to McClel- 
 lan, directing him to turn over command of the Army of the Poto- 
 mac to General Ambrose E. Burnside and retire to Trenton, New 
 Jersey, and there await further orders. The days of George Brinton 
 McClellan as a commanding officer in the United States Army had defi- 
 nitely come to an end. 
 
 Whatever may be thought of McClellan's dismissal — and on this, 
 as on all episodes in his career, controversy is still raging — the selection 
 of Burnside was one of Lincoln's greatest mistakes. This incapable 
 officer led the Federal forces to another disaster at Fredericksburg on 
 December 13, and in so doing, brought the cabinet to the verge of ruin. 
 The threatened breakup of the regime in August had been a palace 
 revolution, an uprising of an inner group of the cabinet itself, led by 
 Stanton and Chase, who were bent on seizing control of affairs and 
 conducting the war in accordance with their own military and political 
 doctrines. The revolt that assailed it in December 1862 had a more 
 dangerous origin. The cabinet crisis of August came from within the 
 breastworks, that of December from without. It presented a spectacle 
 practically unprecedented in American history. Quarrels between Con- 
 gress and President have been common enough, but a fairly ferocious 
 attempt of the legislature to seize the executive power, to dictate cabi- 
 net removals and appointments, was something new. Yet the senatorial 
 onslaught on Lincoln in December of this year virtually amounted to 
 this. It was an attempt to transfer the seat of executive power from the 
 White House to the Capitol. Had the attempt succeeded the Jacobins 
 would not only have usurped control of the war, they would have 
 revolutionized the American system of constitutional government. Yet 
 in the December attack on the Lincoln administration, the leading 
 spirits were the same as those who led the cabinet's abortive uprising. 
 In August, Stanton and Chase had incited their colleagues to reorganize 
 and control the Executive. In the December crisis, their hands did not 
 appear so conspicuously, yet neither can escape a good share of the 
 responsibility for one of the most harassing experiences in Lincoln's 
 official life. 
 
 It was not only the tragedy of Fredericksburg that gave the anti- 
 administration leaders in the cabinet and in Congress their opportunity. 
 The long, patient tolerance with which McClellan had been treated 
 infuriated the Jacobins, and Lincoln's steadfast refusal to regard the 
 
 1 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. VI, 188. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 325 
 
 extinction of slavery as the object of the war, his persistence in main- 
 taining the salvation of the Union as the great end in view, added fuel 
 to the flame. The elections of November 1862 were hailed as indicating 
 popular sympathy with the Jacobin cause and a lowered esteem for the 
 Executive. In several important states — Ohio, Indiana, New York, 
 Pennsylvania, Illinois, and others — the Democrats had emerged either 
 victorious or with a greatly increased vote. While it was not unusual 
 in those days, as in modern times, for midterm elections to go against 
 the party in power, public dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war 
 had considerably affected the result. Again, in the latter part of 1862 
 the publication of Seward's first volume of diplomatic correspondence 
 caused great excitement in antislavery quarters. This unhappy opus not 
 only explained the criticisms that for some time had been hurled at the 
 cabinet, but gave Congress a shining figure upon whom to center its 
 hostility. Certain passages in Seward's letters to Minister Adams in Lon- 
 don were cynical and reckless, even for Seward. They were certainly 
 improper things to have written in the first place, and fairly outrageous 
 when given to the world in an official document. The fact that Seward 
 had printed them with apparent malice prepense increased the popular 
 uproar. The volume in which they appeared was liberally sprinkled 
 with asterisks, indicating the omission of doubtful paragraphs. Such 
 editorial precautions could easily have been applied to the offending 
 sentences, yet the Secretary had permitted his views on secession, 
 emancipation, and other similarly delicate matters to stand in all their 
 nakedness. A letter of April 10, 1861 —on the verge of Sumter — that 
 clearly committed the administration to the Buchanan theory of seces- 
 sion gave particular umbrage. In this, Seward declared that the Presi- 
 dent was not disposed to "reject a cardinal dogma" of the South, "that 
 the Federal government could not reduce the seceding States to obedi- 
 ence, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But 
 in fact the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or 
 despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected or insur- 
 rectionary members of the state." 2 
 
 Astonishing as were these sentiments, expressed by the first member 
 of the cabinet, the word of Seward, boldly proclaiming these obnoxious 
 Buchanan opinions as Lincoln's, caused widespread amazement. Of 
 course Seward's exposition of these views as Lincoln's was false. Lin- 
 coln had never held them, and certainly not when he had started a 
 great war based on an interpretation of the Constitution directly at 
 variance with the one Seward presumptuously set forth. Lincoln flatly 
 denied the right of secession and maintained the duty of the Federal 
 
 2 Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861. U. S. Government. P. 74. 
 
326 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 government to use force to keep a seceded state in the Union. On any 
 other reading of the Constitution the war on which the nation had 
 embarked would have been as wicked as Southern spokesmen con- 
 tended. Another passage in the correspondence enraged the Jacobins 
 even more. On July 5, 1861, Seward had written Adams — and had pub- 
 lished the passage in December 1862 — as follows: "It seems as if ex- 
 treme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents 
 were acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war — the for- 
 mer by making the most desperate attempts to overthrow the federal 
 union, the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation as a 
 lawful and necessary, if not, as they say, the only legitimate way of 
 saving the Union." 3 There was probably no man whom these expres- 
 sions shocked more than the diplomat — a man of Boston antislavery 
 antecedents — to whom they had been addressed. In these few casual 
 lines Seward accused the secessionists of the South and the radicals of 
 the North of joining hands to cause an uprising of slaves. Incidentally 
 he had cast a slur upon the Proclamation of Emancipation which, at the 
 time this letter was published, the President had given to the world. 
 
 Seward had already taken his place, in the estimate of the Jacobins, 
 as "the evil genius" of the cause and the "bane of the administration," 
 a bad eminence which these indiscretions lifted to an even more odious 
 height. Charles Sumner, a copy of the book in hand, rushed to the 
 White House and showed the passages to Lincoln. The President was 
 as greatly shocked as the Boston abolitionist. He informed Sumner that 
 this was the first time he had ever seen the paragraphs. The presidential 
 remark, quickly circulated in the Senate lobby by Sumner, gave a new 
 turn to the rising indignation. Evidently, it was said, the Secretary of 
 State was accustomed to send dispatches of vital importance to the 
 diplomatic corps without submitting them to the responsible Chief of 
 State. Procedure like this was unknown in any well-conducted govern- 
 ment. For a year criticism had been in circulation that Seward regarded 
 himself as the real head of the nation and ignored the President in the 
 most important decisions. Here, the radicals insisted, was clear proof 
 that this gossip was true. Seward's letter to Adams outlining Lincoln's 
 attitude on the right of secession and the wickedness of force in sup- 
 pressing it, which, Seward well knew, was directly opposed to the 
 views Lincoln held and was acting upon, indicated the really con- 
 temptuous opinion he held of the President and his conviction that the 
 "Premier" was in fact his superior. 
 
 Could one ask — inquired the Jacobins — a more adequate explanation 
 of the failures and humiliations of the preceding eighteen months? The 
 
 3 Diplomatic Correspondence, 1862. P. 124. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 327 
 
 power that really controlled the nation did not believe in the war! 
 The head man felt no sympathy with its object, and had been intri- 
 guing, before and after it began, for a peace that would leave its 
 problems unsolved and the South the virtual victor. That Seward had 
 supported McClellan almost to the day of his deposition was common 
 knowledge. He had opposed emancipation, and even now was attempt- 
 ing to dissuade Lincoln from that policy; here was another charge that 
 his blatantly published dispatches to Mr. Adams seemed to substantiate. 
 That he had once been hailed as a great antislavery leader was true; 
 and thus to his other vices as a public man Seward had added those of 
 an apostate. One need look no further, it was said, for the influence 
 that had persuaded Lincoln, every time a patriotic general — like Fre- 
 mont and Hunter — issued a proclamation freeing the slaves in his mili- 
 tary district, to issue orders revoking the decree. The Jacobin press, 
 led by Horace Greeley's Tribune, teemed with denunciations. The 
 time had come to get rid of this incubus, once for all. A writer in the 
 Tribune denounced the Secretary of State for his "shallow smartness" 
 and for the "coldness, alienation, and almost open hostility which the 
 incompetent cunning of our Secretary has exerted in our regard in 
 almost every quarter." Others described Seward as "the unseen hand," 
 "the mesmerist" who had reduced the President to hypnotic ineptitude. 
 Joseph Medill, of the Chicago Tribune, expressed this latter criticism 
 with a picturesqueness all his own. "McClellan in the field," he wrote 
 Schuyler Colfax, "and Seward in the cabinet have brought our grand 
 cause to the very brink of death. Seward must be got out of the cabi- 
 net. He is Lincoln's evil genius. He has been President de facto and has 
 kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe's nose all the 
 while, except for one or two brief spells." The eccentric Pole, Adam 
 Gurowski, who held a minor job in the State Department, echoed the 
 same general view. "Lincoln," he noted in his diary, dropping into that 
 English which made him one of the jokes of Washington, "is under the 
 tumb of Seward, to a degree allmost ridiculous. Seward brings him out 
 to take airing as he were Lincoln's nurse." Early in September a com- 
 mittee of New York Republicans waited on Lincoln, demanding 
 Seward's dismissal. The presumption, even discourtesy, of this self- 
 appointed board of censors irritated the calmest of Presidents. "There 
 is not one of you," he told them flatly, "who would not see the country 
 ruined if you could turn out Seward." 
 
 Soon, however, the anti-Seward campaign assumed more ambitious 
 proportions. It was urged that not only Seward, but all the rest of the 
 cabinet, with the exception of Chase and Stanton, would have to go. 
 "Common sense, if not common honesty, has fled from the cabinet," 
 
328 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 William Pitt Fessenden wrote his family on December 7, 1862, "and 
 the country has little to hope, I fear, from Mr. Lincoln or his advisers. 
 I very much fear that there will be an outbreak in Congress." 4 An 
 insurrection was indeed stirring in the upper chamber and Fessenden 
 became the most aggressive leader. One of the ablest statesmen of his 
 day, a scholar of economics and finance, a man of courage and integ- 
 rity, an eloquent, if somewhat acrid speaker, Fessenden, since his 
 entrance into the Senate in 1855, had been an uncompromising oppo- 
 nent of slavery, and was now an unremitting advocate of making its 
 extirpation the cardinal issue of the Civil War. In character a higher 
 type than Wade or Chandler — for his sincerity and his unselfish devo- 
 tion to the cause were never questioned — Fessenden's accession to the 
 radical cause, like that of Sumner, gave it a dignity not conspicuous 
 in all its champions. His unbending manners, his frequently sharp, harsh 
 comments on men and things, his general unsociability, reminded his 
 admirers of the rock-bound coast of the Maine from which he hailed. 
 It was perhaps characteristic of Fessenden's philosophic mind that the 
 discussion of the weaknesses in Lincoln's cabinet, which stirred up a 
 tempest in the last week of December, 1862, should have taken a consti- 
 tutional turn. The remedy he proposed was revolutionary. In short, 
 what Fessenden and his companions aimed at was to supplant the presi- 
 dential system — as Walter Bagehot called it — by the parliamentary 
 form. In Britain the House of Commons votes cabinets in and out of 
 office. From time to time voices have been heard in the United States 
 suggesting the adoption of the British system. They became quite 
 audible during the Civil War. One feature of the Constitution recently 
 adopted by the Confederate States of America was regarded by many 
 as an improvement over that of the Federal Union. This gave cabinet 
 members seats in Congress, and thus subjected them to the inquisition 
 of the legislature. The Jacobins could have put such a device to profit- 
 able use in the Civil War had the fathers embodied it in the Constitu- 
 tion. One can imagine how Wade, Chandler, Sumner, and Julian would 
 have rejoiced to hail their dearest foe, William Henry Seward, before 
 either house, in full sight of the nation, and submit him to one of 
 those questionings that are a part of the British system. 
 
 Whether Fessenden had definitely committed himself to such a pro- 
 cedure is not clear, but he did insist that the upper branch of Congress, 
 the Senate, should exercise authority in executive concerns. At least 
 his opinion in the new crisis, as reported by himself, amounted practi- 
 cally to such a startling pretension. That senatorial meddling in execu- 
 tive affairs would be extraconstitutional he granted, but he declared 
 
 4 Fessenden, Francis, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden. Hough- 
 ton Mifflin Company, 1907. I, 265. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 329 
 
 that the Senate should "no longer be content with its constitutional 
 duties." The national situation was so serious that the upper chamber 
 would be justified in taking general control. It was the more august 
 half of the legislative body and, as such, could properly step outside 
 the specific duties assigned it by the fundamental law and assert su- 
 preme power in the state. Fessenden's own word for the assumption 
 by the Senate of a kind of universal providence was to "interpose." 5 
 By December 1862, he was prepared to "interpose" to the extent of 
 seizing control of the cabinet. At another time he asserted a similar 
 right of the Senate to direct military matters. "We are not under the 
 command of the military of this country," he said in a Senate speech. 
 "They are under ours, as a Congress, and I stand here to maintain it." 
 This overlordship Fessenden would have carried into all branches of 
 the government. He had been disgruntled with Lincoln's cabinet from 
 the first. He disliked the manner in which it had been selected as well 
 as its personnel. Lincoln, he insisted, should not have chosen his official 
 family until arriving in Washington, and then he should have done so 
 in consultation with the Senators representing the party that had placed 
 him in power. With the President's conception of a coalition cabinet, 
 taken from the leaders of the several elements making up the new 
 Republican Party, Fessenden completely disagreed. The cabinet, he 
 never tired of saying — and it was an orthodox item in the Jacobin 
 creed — should be a unit. It should include only those men who had 
 taken the lead in fighting slavery. Instead of this what kind of adminis- 
 tration had Lincoln created? "The simple truth," declared Fessenden, 
 "is, there was never such a shambling half-and-half set of incapables 
 collected in one government since the world began." The cabinet should 
 work on equal terms with the Chief Executive in all matters. For Fes- 
 senden echoed the now familiar grievance that Lincoln never regarded 
 his department heads as "constitutional advisers." Most vital courses 
 he decided himself, frequently without consulting his council. Each 
 department chieftain was secluded in a hermetically sealed compart- 
 ment, transacting routine business; the cabinet as a whole seldom met 
 in solemn assembly, settling critical matters, as Fessenden seemed to 
 think they should be decided, by a majority vote. Instead of this coun- 
 cil, the President leaned almost exclusively for direction on one man, 
 and that the one who was regarded by the radicals as little better than 
 a "traitor." 
 
 The sources from which Fessenden and his group had learned of this 
 lack of cabinet "unity" were no secret. No men had given this criticism 
 quite so extensive advertisement as Chase and Stanton. Since 1855, 
 when Fessenden first came into the Senate, his closest political intimate 
 
 5 Ibid., II, 234. 
 
330 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 had been the Ohio Senator. This intimacy had been maintained after 
 Chase's accession to the Treasury. Fessenden's duties as chairman of 
 the Senate Finance Committee — which he ably performed — brought 
 him into almost daily association with the Treasury head. Together 
 they had worked over financial legislation and decided the fiscal policy 
 of the nation. On methods of waging the war, of re-establishing the 
 nation and uplifting the Negro, they were at one — and their policies 
 usually ran counter to Lincoln's. Both supported the several attempts 
 that had been made by generals like Ben Butler, Fremont, and Hunter 
 to emancipate in advance of presidential action the slaves in their mili- 
 tary departments. In the most recent case — that of Hunter, in May 
 1862 — the Jacobins, under the leadership of Chase and Stanton, had 
 rushed to Lincoln imploring him not to revoke the proclamation. Chase 
 wrote the President a personal letter making the same plea. The reply 
 received from Lincoln indicated that the President, with all his other 
 talents, could effectively snub. "No commanding general" — his note 
 to Chase consisted of this single sentence — "shall do such a thing, upon 
 my responsibility, without consulting me." Emancipation, when it 
 should be granted, would not be extended piecemeal by generals, but 
 by the one officer who could legally exercise that prerogative — the 
 President. 
 
 Stanton, when first appointed, did not enjoy Fessenden's confidence. 
 His service as Buchanan's Attorney General did not inspire complete 
 faith in his soundness on the Negro question. Fessenden therefore se- 
 cured postponement by the Senate of Stanton's nomination as Secretary 
 of War until he could look into his record. Chase brought Fessenden 
 and Stanton together for a personal comparison of views, and after this 
 meeting the Senator declared his admiration for the new appointee and 
 obtained quick action on confirmation. "With Stanton," Fessenden 
 said, "we shall soon see a new face on affairs and God knows we need 
 it." From that day, this trio — Fessenden, Chase, and Stanton — had 
 worked in the utmost harmony, and in Lincoln's cabinet Chase and 
 Stanton were the only two members who met Fessenden's approval. 
 These two would serve as a nucleus about which a genuine cabinet 
 could be constructed; one that would be a "unit" and devoted to the 
 radical cause. His brother Senators had selected Fessenden himself as 
 Seward's successor, but the gentleman from Maine, with more delicacy 
 than his compatriots, rejected the proposal; he could hardly step into 
 the shoes of a man whom he had been instrumental in expelling from 
 public life. Yet the time was to come, a year afterward, when Fessenden 
 would enter the cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury in succession to 
 his friend Chase. 
 
o 
 
 N TUESDAY afternoon, December 16, 1862, three days after 
 the Battle of Fredricksburg, the Republican Senators met in secret 
 caucus on Capitol Hill. The proceedings began with a motion to the 
 effect that "the chairman be instructed to offer in open Senate a reso- 
 lution expressing a want of confidence in William H. Seward, Secre- 
 tary of State," words that recall those frequently used in the British 
 House of Commons when the opposition seeks to throw out the minis- 
 try. Perhaps the form, as well as the substance, struck the more sober 
 Senators as incongruous. At least several raised objections and this 
 particular resolution was dropped. However, this new mood indicated 
 no kindly attitude toward the White House; as soon as the caucus got 
 under way, it resolved itself into an indignation meeting, directed at 
 the "Premier" of the cabinet. No improvement in the state of the 
 nation, military or civil — such seemed to be the unanimous opinion — 
 would be possible so long as this obnoxious person held sway in the 
 State Department. All the charges that had been circulating against 
 Seward for a year and a half received another eloquent airing. He had 
 never believed in the war. He was constantly seeking to bring it to an 
 end. He was determined to surrender to the South. He had no desire 
 to see the Negro obtain his freedom. Senator Fessenden, the chief 
 speaker, said that the meeting had been called to learn whether the Re- 
 publicans in the Senate could reach unanimity on this subject. There 
 was no use in pursuing the Seward crisis or anything else, unless all 
 Republicans could agree. "It had been said that there was a secret influ- 
 ence that controlled the President. He had been told by a member of 
 the cabinet" — Fessenden did not give the name, but everyone knew that 
 Chase was meant — "that there was a backstairs influence which often 
 controlled the apparent conclusions of the cabinet itself." 
 
 "Is the name of that backstairs influence," asked Howard of Michi- 
 gan, "William H. Seward?" 
 
 "No name was given," replied Fessenden, "but Senators may draw 
 their own conclusions." Both Fessenden and Wade clearly made mani- 
 
 
332 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 fest the real grievance rankling in the Jacobin heart. "Measures should 
 be taken," said the Maine Senator, "to make the cabinet a unity and to 
 remove from it anyone who does not coincide heartily with our views 
 in relation to the war." Wade censured Lincoln "for placing our armies 
 under the command of officers who did not believe in the policy of 
 the government and had no sympathy with its purposes." By "our 
 views," of course, Fessenden meant the negrophile policies he and his 
 associates had been preaching since the war began and Wade's criticism 
 meant that too many Democrats had been made generals. All high offi- 
 cers, Wade insisted, should be Republicans and Republicans of his own 
 stripe. 
 
 On the issue of flatly demanding Seward's removal a certain number 
 of Senators balked at this first meeting. They believed the question 
 should be framed in less offensive words. Thus the unanimity that Fes- 
 senden had declared to be essential could not be obtained — though a 
 good-sized majority was voted in its favor. At an adjourned meeting 
 held the next day, all the thirty-two Republican Senators, except one, 
 did agree upon the same demand when it was set forth in more general 
 terms. The size of this vote indicated the proportions to which the 
 Jacobin cause had grown since its attack on the administration began. 
 It disclosed also the really formidable proportions of the hostility di- 
 rected from the legislative chamber against Lincoln. Senator Preston 
 King of New York, who had been Seward's colleague for several 
 years, and was a loyal friend and supporter, declined to vote; he was 
 thus the only Republican Senator who did not join in the attack. 
 Seward's successor in the Senate, Mr. Harris, presented the resolution 
 that met general approbation. It ran as follows: "Resolved, that in the 
 judgment of the Republican members of the Senate, the public confi- 
 dence in the present administration would be increased by a reconstruc- 
 tion of the cabinet." John Sherman, brother of the general, who was 
 then beginning a public life that was to last thirty years, called at- 
 tention to one misconception that might arise from this sweeping 
 proposal. It might be taken as the opinion of the Republican majority 
 that all members of the cabinet should "go out." He presumed that this 
 was not desired. "No one wished Mr. Chase to leave the Treasury, 
 which he had managed so ably." Mr. Sherman further said that he 
 doubted whether changing the cabinet would remedy the evil. The 
 difficulty was with the President himself. "He had neither dignity, 
 order, nor firmness. His [Mr. Sherman's] course would be to go di- 
 rectly to the President and tell him his defects. It was doubtful if even 
 that would do any good." 
 
 The particular fault which Senator Sherman found in the phrase- 
 
Montgomery Blair (1813-1883) 
 Postmaster General 
 
Zachariah Chandler 
 
 (1813-1879) 
 Senator from Michigan 
 
 Benjamin Franklin Wade 
 
 (1800-1818) 
 
 Senator from Ohio 
 
 William Pitt Fessenden 
 
 (1806-1869) 
 
 Senator from Maine; successor 
 
 to Chase as Secretary of the 
 
 Treasury 
 
 Charles Sumner 
 
 (1811-1814) 
 
 Senator N from Massachusetts 
 
 headers of the Senatorial Opposition to the Cabinet 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 333 
 
 ology was quickly remedied. The resolution finally called, not for the 
 elimination of everybody around Lincoln's council table, but for "a 
 change in and partial reconstruction of the cabinet." A committee was 
 appointed, of which the seventy-one-year-old Senator from Vermont, 
 Jacob Collamer, was made chairman, to wait solemnly upon the Presi- 
 dent, and present this resolution. The other members were Wade, 
 Trumbull, Sumner, Grimes, Fessenden, Harris, Pomeroy, and Howard. 
 Good judgment had been displayed in selecting Collamer as spokes- 
 man. No member of the Senate was held in greater respect. Collamer 
 was not a Jacobin, and was probably designated for that reason, for 
 naturally a protest presented by one of the conservative Senators 
 would carry greater weight than one proffered by a well-known 
 firebrand. Senator Harris, the New Yorker who had presented the 
 resolution — probably to forestall a more destructive one which he 
 feared — was also a conservative. But all the other members belonged 
 to the radical wing. 1 
 
 While this vote was being taken, another scene was being enacted at 
 the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Senator Preston King's name 
 appears in the record as "not voting" — the only name, in fact, that was 
 not cast in favor of the resolution. The fact is that Mr. King had hastily 
 left the caucus room before his name had been called and betaken him- 
 self to Seward's home. Several Senators had insisted in their speeches 
 that all the proceedings should be kept secret, but King angrily de- 
 clared that he declined to observe any such injunction. Soon this cor- 
 pulent and visibly very much disturbed statesman burst into the library 
 of the Secretary of State, who was sitting nonchalantly, in his usual 
 informal dress, before a cheery fire, immersed in a favorite volume 
 and enjoying his customary after-dinner cigar. Seward's peace of mind 
 was apparently not greatly upset after King had given a complete ac- 
 count of the senatorial proceedings of the two preceding days. The 
 Republican Senators, he said, were "thirsty for a victim" in view of 
 recent misfortunes, and, among others, had selected as sacrifice Mr. Lin- 
 coln's chief lieutenant. "Seeing how things were going," said Mr. King, 
 "I did not stay for the last vote, but just slipped out of the chamber, to 
 tell you, for I thought you ought to know. They were pledging each 
 other to keep the proceedings secret, but I told them I was not going 
 to be bound." Seward acted quickly on receipt of the news. "They 
 may do as they please about me," he said, "but they shall not put the 
 President in a false position on my account." He took a sheet of paper 
 
 1 Senator Fessenden made at the time a long memorandum of the caucus pro- 
 ceedings, which forms the chief authority for the present narrative. See Fessenden, 
 op. cit. I, 231-252. 
 
334 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 and wrote the following, addressed to the President: "Sir, I hereby 
 resign the office of Secretary of State, and beg that my resignation may 
 be accepted immediately." He called in his son Frederick, who was 
 assistant Secretary of State, and instructed him to write his resignation 
 also. Then, at Seward's direction, King and the younger Seward took 
 the resignations, crossed over to the White House, and placed them in 
 President Lincoln's hands. 
 
 "What does this mean?" said the puzzled President, and then Senator 
 King repeated the story he had just told Seward. Lincoln at once took 
 his hat and crossed the White House lawn to his Secretary's house. 
 When the President expressed regret at Seward's drastic action, the 
 latter replied that it would be a relief to be freed from official cares. 
 Lincoln answered: "Ah yes, Governor, that will do very well for you, 
 but I am like the starling in Sterne's story. 'I can't get out.' " 
 
 And so, when the august senatorial committee advanced on the 
 White House the next morning, the President was well prepared for 
 their interview. Their main purpose — for Seward's overthrow, despite 
 the form their formal protest had assumed, was the great objective — 
 had apparently already been achieved. That is, Seward had freed Lin- 
 coln from all embarrassment, had the President really desired his re- 
 tirement. But should Lincoln decline to accept the resignation, Sew- 
 ard's triumph over his enemies would be fairly overwhelming. He had 
 practically given the President the choice between himself and the 
 Jacobins who had been seeking, for some time, to get control of the 
 administration. 
 
 Probably the White House had never been the scene of more tense 
 proceedings than those that took place in the next three days. Lincoln 
 had never before displayed his several talents — conciliation, diplomacy, 
 manipulation of individuals, ability to center on the main point and 
 gently turn persons and incidents to the important issue — so con- 
 spicuously as in his handling of this crisis. If he detected also in the 
 quickly passing event materials for humor he gave no indication of 
 the fact — unless, perhaps, when things had been finally adjusted. He 
 quickly understood that a situation of great danger had suddenly taken 
 form, and one that might endanger the successful outcome of the war. 
 To hand over the government to the Wades, the Chandlers, the Julians, 
 the Fessendens, and the Sumners of Congress would spell disaster to the 
 nation. Yet when thirty-one out of thirty-two Republican Senators 
 had taken a position that amounted practically to such a demand, an 
 opposition of really portentous size had developed against the ad- 
 ministration. A less tactful and farseeing man might have spoiled his 
 case at the start. Gideon Welles did not quite approve the presidential 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 335 
 
 acquiescence in the request of the Collamer committee for the presen- 
 tation of the resolution — virtually a declaration of war. The Senate 
 was clearly going outside its province, he said, in its attempt to dictate 
 to the President about his cabinet, and an Executive with a more ar- 
 rogant sense of the dignity of his office than Lincoln would have re- 
 fused to parley with its representatives. Men like Jackson or Cleveland 
 might likely enough have shown the intruding gentlemen the door. 
 But Lincoln, as always, laying aside prerogatives and personal pride, 
 took a practical view of the matter. A terrible civil war was raging; 
 these Senators, if treated as their insolence properly deserved, could 
 become implacable foes, capable of doing the cause infinite harm. When 
 Senator Collamer therefore asked for an opportunity of placing their 
 grievances before the Executive, Lincoln fixed seven in the evening 
 of Thursday, December 18, for their reception. 
 
 The paper which this seventy-one-year-old chairman read to the 
 President set forth, in fairly moderate terms, what he regarded as the 
 conclusions which the Republican majority had reached in its long de- 
 liberations. The document, with some decency, refrained from men- 
 tioning Seward's name, though its phrasing pointed clearly enough to 
 him as the chief villain of the piece. The first section, for example, 
 emphasized the need for a vigorous and successful prosecution of the 
 war; and the third insisted that "the cabinet should be exclusively com- 
 posed of statesmen who are the cordial, resolute, unwavering supporters 
 of the principles and purposes first above stated." Put these two dec- 
 larations together and they summed up to a demand for Seward's offi- 
 cial head. Another extract from Senator Collamer's precis — now read 
 to the President — declared that "it is unwise and unsafe to commit 
 the direction, conduct or execution of any important military opera- 
 tion or separate general command or enterprise in this war to anyone 
 who is not a cordial believer and supporter of the same principles and 
 purposes first above stated." Thus Lincoln was instructed to get rid 
 of Democratic generals and put the armies exclusively under the com- 
 mand of those who adhered to the Jacobin creed. 
 
 Several speeches that followed Senator Collamer's presentation of 
 the chapter of grievances made both these points clear. Wade, who 
 spoke in his most raucous style, asserted that "the conduct of the war 
 lay in the hands of men who had no sympathy with it or its cause." 
 He rubbed in the recent elections, "imputing the defeat of the Repub- 
 licans to the fact that the President had placed the direction of our 
 military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats." Fes- 
 senden indorsed this general indictment. The war, he told Lincoln, 
 "was not sufficiently in the hands of its friends. Perhaps at the outset 
 
 
336 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 this was unavoidable, as the officers of the regular army had little 
 sympathy with the Republican party. They were largely pro-slavery 
 men and sympathized strongly with the southern feeling. It was sig- 
 nally unfortunate that almost every officer known as an anti-slavery 
 man had been disgraced. He instanced General Fremont, Hunter, 
 Mitchell, and others. It was time to change this condition of affairs. 
 The war should be conducted by its friends. The administration should 
 protect itself. It was evident that it had nothing to expect from the 
 Democrats. General McClellan had been used for party purposes and 
 was now busy in making an attack upon the government." All this was 
 intended, among other things, as a criticism of Seward: the Secretary 
 of State was looked upon as McClellan's chief supporter in the cabinet. 
 Fessenden recalled the common belief "that the Secretary of State 
 was not in accord with the majority of the cabinet and exerted an 
 injurious influence upon the conduct of the war." 2 
 
 The second part of Collamer's bill of complaints was the most revo- 
 lutionary of all. It set forth that new theory of the cabinet to which 
 Lincoln could not assent and which probably no student of the Con- 
 stitution, in that day or this, could endorse. Collamer was a learned stu- 
 dent of that document, as was Lincoln himself, and it seems incon- 
 ceivable that he could have accepted as good law the principle which 
 was now enunciated. "The theory of our government" — read this re- 
 markable paragraph — "and the early and uniform construction thereof, 
 is, that the President should be aided by a cabinet council, agreeing 
 with him in political theories and general policy, and that all important 
 public measures and appointments should be the result of their com- 
 bined wisdom and deliberation. This most obviously necessary con- 
 dition of things, without which no administration can succeed, we and 
 the public believe does not now exist and therefore such selections and 
 changes in its members should be made as will secure to the country 
 unity of purpose and action, in all material and essential respects, more 
 especially in the present crisis of public affairs." The suggestion was 
 made that the President should make appointments only after submit- 
 ting names to the cabinet and obtaining its approval. That the Presi- 
 dent and his cabinet should hold the same views on policy was another 
 thrust at Lincoln's program of coalition government. 
 
 Lincoln said little in the course of the three hours' discussion to 
 which this paper gave rise, though he treated the visitors with the ut- 
 most candor and courtesy, letting them expand on his errors at will. 
 He had already fixed in his mind his method for meeting the situation. 
 
 2 Fessenden, op. tit. I, 240-242. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 337 
 
 He knew precisely where these criticisms, especially that one of ignor- 
 ing his official counselors, had originated. He knew the amount of 
 extracurricular talking on this dereliction that Chase and Stanton had 
 indulged in, and, less openly, Bates. He also knew that to a considerable 
 degree, this was jealousy; Lincoln's preference for Seward as his most 
 companionable intimate had offended Chase from the first, and Stan- 
 ton, great as were his obligations to Seward for his cabinet post, had 
 been disappointed at not having secured a closer access to the presi- 
 dential ear. Why not therefore, Lincoln concluded, bring these two 
 opposing forces face to face? Why not let the Senate committee and 
 the cabinet confront one another and debate their differences to their 
 heart's content? Hence the day after this interview the Senate received 
 word from the White House that the President would like to have 
 another session with the committee that evening at seven and a half 
 o'clock. That same morning, at a special cabinet meeting, Lincoln had 
 informed his counselors of the senatorial demands and of Mr. Seward's 
 resignation. The evening had been passed "in a pretty free and animated 
 conversation"; some "not very friendly feelings" had been expressed 
 in regard to other department heads, though no specific resignations 
 had been demanded except that of the Secretary of State. The President 
 had invited the committee to meet him again that evening, and he 
 wished all members of the cabinet — except, of course, Mr. Seward — 
 to join in the discussion. 
 
 Only two of the Secretaries objected to this plan. Chase could see no 
 point in facing the cabinet with their senatorial accusers. "Bates knew 
 of no good that could come of an interview." Both these statesmen, as 
 explained above, had good reasons for opposing the President's pro- 
 posal. Other cabinet members, perhaps with a little malice — for Chase 
 was not popular with his colleagues — warmly seconded Lincoln's 
 plan. Welles, who always liked to score on the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, eagerly approved. Blair thought the plan an excellent one, and 
 "finally all acquiesced." Blair and Welles understood Chase's pre- 
 dicament and were awaiting with equanimity his forthcoming expe- 
 rience on the gridiron. 
 
 Outwardly, when he met the insurgent Senators that evening, Lin- 
 coln was composed and genial, yet there are indications that inwardly 
 he was in one of his melancholic moods. Senator Orville Browning, 
 one of his most intimate friends, had had a few moments' talk with the 
 President just before the session began. 
 
 "What do these men want?" Lincoln asked. 
 
 "I hardly know, Mr. President, but they are exceedingly violent 
 
338 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 towards the administration, and what we did yesterday" — he was 
 referring to the Senate caucus — "was the gentlest thing that could be 
 done. We had to do that or worse." 
 
 "They wish to get rid of me," Lincoln replied, "and I am sometimes 
 half disposed to gratify them." 
 
 Browning protested against this despairing remark. 
 
 "We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln replied. "It ap- 
 pears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of 
 hope." 
 
 Again Browning protested the pessimism. "You ought to have 
 crushed the ultra-impracticable men last summer. You could then have 
 done it and escaped these troubles. . . . Mr. Seward appears now to be 
 the special object of hostility. Still I believe he has managed our for- 
 eign affairs as well as anyone could have done. Yet they are very bitter 
 against him, and some of them very bitter upon you." 
 
 "Why should men believe a lie," Lincoln replied — referring to the 
 charges that Seward dominated the President — "an absurd lie, that 
 could not impose on a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance 
 of all evidences to the contrary?" 
 
 "The committee is to be up to see me at seven o'clock," Lincoln 
 concluded. "Since I heard last night of the proceedings of the caucus, 
 I have been more distressed than by any event of my life." 3 
 
 In the evening, the senatorial critics arrived at the appointed time. 
 The President informed them that he had summoned his cabinet — 
 except Seward — for a general all-around debate. The six gentlemen 
 then marched solemnly in. This was the first intimation the statesmen 
 from Capitol Hill had received that they were to meet face to face the 
 body that, with one or two exceptions, had fallen under their con- 
 demnation. They were surprised and, as the subsequent proceedings 
 disclosed, irritated. Had their frequently expressed preference for the 
 parliamentary system been sincere, however, they should have wel- 
 comed this confrontation. Lincoln's informal gathering was, indeed, 
 not precisely the same thing as "question time" in the House of Com- 
 mons, yet it probably achieved as complete a reproduction of that 
 phenomenon as was possible under the more rigid American system. 
 Often in congressional speeches certain of the Jacobins had expressed 
 a wish that cabinet members could have seats in the national legisla- 
 ture, where they could be submitted to "interpellation." Now, to a 
 degree, their wishes had been gratified. "Here are the statesmen of 
 whom you so disapprove" — Lincoln did not use these precise words, 
 but they represented his attitude — "so let's talk things over face to 
 
 8 Browning, Orville H., Diary. Illinois State Historical Library. I, 600-601. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 339 
 
 face, as friends and equals, and see if we can reach some settlement of 
 our differences." 
 
 The Senators, and perhaps a few members of the cabinet, may have 
 been embarrassed, but Lincoln showed no signs of discomfort. Three 
 of the gentlemen present have left accounts of the proceedings — 
 Welles, Fessenden, and Bates; 4 in all, Lincoln appears as master of the 
 situation, conciliatory but firm, patiently listening to all complaints, but 
 leaving no one in doubt that he regarded the cabinet as his own affair, 
 and was not in the least disposed to submit to dictation by the Senate. 
 As always, Welles was the most admiring. "The President managed his 
 own case, and showed great tact, shrewdness, and ability." Those ac- 
 customed to sneer at Lincoln's manners would have been ashamed 
 could they have witnessed the restrained courtesy with which he re- 
 ceived these belligerent guests and sought to put them at their ease. He 
 began proceedings by reading the memorandum of grievances which 
 Senator Collamer had put in his hands two evenings previously. He 
 then discussed it at length, defending the Secretary of State. Special 
 attention was paid to the charge that the cabinet was not a unit and 
 was not sufficiently consulted. That it was not called together on all 
 questions Lincoln granted. He instanced decisions that he had made 
 on his sole responsibility. McClellan's reinstatement after Second Bull 
 Run, the appointment of Halleck as commander in chief, were among 
 the important steps Lincoln granted had been taken without consult- 
 ing his official advisers. But in the main, Lincoln insisted, the cabinet 
 was a unit. Naturally seven men, all of them of independent thinking 
 and positive character, did not agree on every policy. But there was 
 general acquiescence in measures, once they were decided on. The 
 President could have cited — though none of the records specifically 
 say that he did so — such questions as the Fort Sumter expedition and 
 the Trent affair, as matters of supreme importance on which cabinet 
 meetings had been held. That Mr. Seward was in the habit of making 
 vital decisions without presidential approval was denied. Seward sub- 
 mitted to the President practically all his dispatches before sending 
 them to foreign parts. On mere matters of routine Lincoln admitted 
 he was not usually advised and he saw no reason why he should be. 
 
 On the question of cabinet consultations a little sprightly debate fol- 
 lowed between Fessenden and Blair. The Maine Senator, according to 
 Welles, who evidently enjoyed the altercation, "was skillful, but a 
 little tart; felt, it would seem, more than he cared to say," and harked 
 back to John Quincy Adams. Mr. Adams, as President, apparently did 
 
 4 Welles, Diary, I, 197-199. Fessenden, op. ch. I, 243-248. Bates, op. cit. y pp. 268- 
 270. 
 
340 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 submit important measures to cabinet vote, and accepted the judgment 
 of the majority. Blair, who, Welles felt, "spoke earnestly and well," 
 but in Fessenden's estimation "in a long and rambling" manner, dis- 
 sented from this conception of a "plural executive"; there was only one 
 head of the state: the President might ask opinions of his cabinet mem- 
 bers — of one, or of as many as he pleased — but he alone was ac- 
 countable to the people and all decisions rested with him alone. Blair 
 was so offended by this senatorial interference that he even came to 
 the support of Seward. He and the Secretary of State had differed on 
 many questions, but he "thought him as earnest as anyone in the war" 
 and it would be injurious to the public service to permit him to resign. 
 Blair flatly told the Senate committee that they "had better not meddle 
 in matters of that kind." Bates, who really admired Seward as little as 
 Blair, defended him valiantly, and for the same reason — the Senators 
 were mingling in something that was none of their concern. 5 In a long 
 disquisition on constitutional interpretation, Bates supported Blair's 
 views but in more learned phraseology. Fessenden, in his abstract of the 
 debate, remarks that "Mr. Bates spoke of himself as 'a garrulous old 
 man' and I think there was a general acquiescence in the correctness of 
 the description." 
 
 But these discourses on the Constitution did not form the chief ob- 
 ject of interest in this little assembly. As always, the personal drama 
 concerned the observers far more than the old-time cabinet practices of 
 John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson. And in this concentration of 
 interest it was not Fessenden, or Bates, or Blair, or Sumner, or even 
 Lincoln himself, who commanded universal attention. The man in 
 whose plight all present displayed the liveliest curiosity was the Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. That he was chiefly responsible 
 for this gathering of statesmen everybody knew. The accusations gen- 
 erally hurled against Seward as the "bane" and "evil genius" of Lin- 
 coln — the man, as Lincoln himself said, generally regarded as the one 
 who, whenever the President had a decent impulse, "managed to suck 
 it out of him" — had originated, in large part, with Chase. There was 
 probably not a Senator in Lincoln's sanctum on this momentous eve- 
 ning who had not heard many times, from Chase's own lips, the com- 
 mentaries on Lincoln, Seward, and his other cabinet colleagues which 
 formed the basis of the indictment. No one understood that fact more 
 completely than Lincoln himself. His main motive in bringing together 
 the statesmen from the Capitol and his Secretaries was to force Chase 
 into the open, to put Chase "on the spot." In modern parlance what 
 the President aimed at was a "showdown." After finishing his remarks, 
 
 5 Welles, Diary. I, 197-198. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 341 
 
 insisting on the unity of the cabinet, Lincoln therefore asked for ex- 
 pressions of opinion on that point from the several cabinet members 
 present. The views he particularly wished to obtain were those of the 
 Secretary of the Treasury. That this put Chase in an awkward dilemma 
 was true, and that was probably Lincoln's intention. Should Chase sus- 
 tain the President's argument, he would stand disgraced in the eyes of 
 the Senators, who had many times heard him express contrary views. 
 Should he agree with the Senators, he would portray himself as dis- 
 loyal to his chief and as promoter of the present uprising; such a dis- 
 closure would necessitate his withdrawal from the cabinet. Perhaps 
 Lincoln was a little merciless in forcing his Secretary into this position, 
 but he had a reason for doing it. 
 
 When the President put this vital question to the cabinet, therefore, 
 Chase was greatly embarrassed. Not only embarrassed, but angry. He 
 would not have come to the session, he replied, if he had known that 
 he was "to be arraigned." According to Bates, he "seemed offended"; 
 and his reply to Lincoln's question was halting and indefinite. His evi- 
 dence in the case, so far as it has been preserved, was somewhat con- 
 fused, but on the whole Chase did about the only possible thing in the 
 circumstances. He certainly did not sustain the senatorial accusations, 
 and in general supported his chief. Matters of first importance, Chase 
 said, had usually come before the cabinet, though perhaps "not so fully 
 as might be desired. There had been no want of unity in the cabinet, 
 but a general acquiescence in public measures." Still "he regretted that 
 there was not a more full and thorough consideration and canvass of 
 every important measure in open cabinet." Though Chase's approval 
 of Lincoln's cabinet policy was hedged about by qualifications, his 
 concessions did not please the Senators. Fessenden, in no equable frame 
 of mind, told Chase that he was not being "arraigned." This joint 
 session of cabinet and Senators "had not been arranged by the Senate 
 committee." It "was no movement of ours, nor did we suspect or come 
 here for that purpose." That the President, under the Constitution, need 
 not be bound by the cabinet's advice, Fessenden admitted; he still be- 
 lieved, however, that all important questions should be discussed in 
 full cabinet council. The Senators had no desire to dictate to the Presi- 
 dent, or in any way to interfere with his prerogatives. The statesman 
 from Maine did come to Chase's relief when Lincoln began to poll the 
 Senators on their views. After this long discussion of Seward's merits, 
 did they still think that his resignation should be accepted? "I do not 
 think it proper to discuss the merits or demerits of a member of the 
 cabinet in the presence of his associates," said Fessenden, ignoring the 
 fact that that is precisely what had been going on for a considerable 
 
342 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 time, with himself as one of the most voluble disputants. Chase heartily 
 seconded this opinion. "I think members of the cabinet should with- 
 draw," Chase said, and in solemn procession they filed out of the room. 
 
 It had been a most unpleasant experience for the Treasury head, and 
 he lost prestige with his brother radicals from that time forward. They 
 regarded him as something of a renegade — as having deserted them at 
 a critical time. He had incited, directly or indirectly, this frontal attack 
 on the cabinet, which was also, of course, an attack on Lincoln, yet had 
 backed down when the President called upon him to make his position 
 known. Nicolay and Hay have recorded Lyman Trumbull's displeasure 
 at the Secretary's conduct. "As the Senators were retiring, Mr. Trum- 
 bull paused for a moment at the door, then turning, walked directly 
 back to the President and said to him privately, but with great vehe- 
 mence, that the Secretary of the Treasury had held a very different 
 tone the last time he had spoken with him." 6 "It struck me," Fes- 
 senden wrote in his memorandum, "that Mr. Chase seemed to have very 
 much modified his opinions, often previously expressed to me, as to 
 Mr. Seward's influence on the mind of the President, and the want of 
 unity in the cabinet." In a letter to his family, the Maine statesman 
 waxed more emphatic. "The story of the last few days will make a 
 new point in history, for it has witnessed a new proceeding — one prob- 
 ably unknown to the government of the country. Had all men on 
 whom we had a right to rely proved brave and true, and forgotten 
 themselves in their love of country, I think it would have been pro- 
 ductive of great good. As it is the result will be to unmask some selfish 
 cowards and perhaps frighten them into good behavior." At least two 
 of Chase's cabinet colleagues expressed disgust with his double attitude. 
 Smith told Fessenden that he had been tempted to contradict Mr. 
 Chase on the spot, but, as he expected to leave the cabinet very soon, 
 concluded to be silent. 
 
 Stanton referred to his favorite cabinet ally in unfraternal language. 
 At the joint session the wily Secretary of War had kept silent, neither 
 repeating in the Senators' presence the violent criticisms of Lincoln and 
 his associates which he had many times made to them personally, nor 
 accepting Lincoln's invitation to confirm the President's analysis of the 
 situation. The next day, however, in a private talk with Fessenden, he 
 unbosomed himself freely. "He remarked," wrote the Senator, "that 
 the interview the evening before was the most impressive scene he 
 had ever witnessed, and that he was particularly struck by the dignity 
 and propriety exhibited by the senators and disgusted with the cabinet; 
 that what the senators had said about the manner of doing business in 
 
 6 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. VI, 267. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 343 
 
 the cabinet was true, and he did not mean to lie about it; that he was 
 ashamed of Chase, for he knew better." Senator Collamer was even 
 more explicit than Stanton in his disgust at Chase. The Diary of Orville 
 H. Browning contains a succinct passage setting forth Collamer's 
 judgment on the Secretary of the Treasury. Browning, relating the 
 proceedings at the senatorial caucus to Lincoln, had unhesitatingly put 
 his finger on the instigator. "The attack in the Senate caucus upon 
 Mr. Seward," he told the President, was by the partisans of Mr. Chase 
 and he had reason to believe "that he had set them on." Their game was 
 to drive all the cabinet out — then force upon him Mr. Chase as Premier, 
 and form a cabinet of ultra men around him. Lincoln said that he was 
 master and that they should not do that. Why had Chase, after inspir- 
 ing the revolt, weakly forsaken his senatorial allies and taken refuge 
 on the side of the President? That was the question Browning had put 
 forth to Senator Collamer. "I asked Judge Collamer how Mr. Chase 
 could make such a statement" — that is, that the cabinet was a harmo- 
 nious body — "in the presence of senators to whom he had said that 
 Seward exercised a back-stairs and malign influence upon the Presi- 
 dent and thwarted all measures of the cabinet. He answered: 'He 
 lied.'" 7 
 
 Stanton went to extremes in his attempt to keep the news of Sew- 
 ard's resignation out of the public prints. Though Washington, as 
 Bates noted, was "all a-buzz" with stories, true and false, about the 
 disturbance — some said that all the cabinet had resigned, others that 
 the President had abdicated — and speculation as to a cabinet about to 
 be formed was prevalent in all quarters, Stanton clamped down the 
 censorship and prohibited the telegraph from sending the news broad- 
 cast. When, three days after the excitement had subsided and the New 
 York papers finally published an account of the affair, Chase came in 
 for a severe grilling. The New York Herald denounced him as the 
 "Mephistopheles" of the cabinet. He "had been the prime mover in all 
 the radical schemes and an active co-worker with his confederates in 
 the Senate against Mr. Seward." 
 
 Despite his backwoods manner, there was an element of subtlety 
 in Lincoln, and not improbably his real motive in unmasking Chase did 
 not appear upon the surface. The one thing he desired to obtain, above 
 all, was Chase's resignation. Not that Lincoln wished to separate the 
 Secretary from the cabinet at that time. But Chase's resignation would 
 be of the utmost value in solving the issue in a satisfactory way. To 
 have Chase and Seward on an equality, so far as their relation to the 
 cabinet was concerned, would greatly facilitate the negotiations. To 
 
 7 Browning, op. cit. I, 603. 
 
344 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 have the resignations of the two chief men safely in Lincoln's hand 
 would make him master of the crisis. In that event, he could not 
 accept one without accepting the other. Seward represented the con- 
 servatives in the Republican Party, Chase the radicals; to accept the 
 resignation of Seward would be to hand the government over to the 
 Jacobins; to accept that of Chase would be to take a stand exclusively 
 on the side of the conservatives. But Lincoln had no wish for a de- 
 cision that would make him adopt one wing of the party and desert the 
 other. Internal conflicts over the conduct of the war and its aims, now 
 extending over nearly two years, had reached a more demoralizing 
 climax than ever. Profoundly as the radicals were displeased with the 
 way Chase had deserted them at this evening session, they would have 
 been outraged had the episode ended in his elimination from the cabinet 
 and the retention of Seward. Such an outcome would have been a 
 melancholy conclusion of all their contrivings. They would have lost 
 the one man in Lincoln's inner circle who represented their point of 
 view and their whole uprising would merely have rebounded against 
 themselves. Stanton would still have remained, it is true, but, much 
 as the Jacobins valued his adhesion to their cause, they distrusted him, 
 as did everybody else, and regarded him as a rather slippery reliance. 
 
 Not improbably Lincoln, with that shrewdness which Welles so 
 admired, had deliberately maneuvered Chase into a position where his 
 resignation became inevitable. At any rate that was the result. The 
 Secretary of the Treasury, smarting from the undignified role he had 
 played before the Senators, went home and wrote his resignation. The 
 next morning he entered Lincoln's office with the paper concealed in 
 his pocket. Gideon Welles has described the scene that ensued. 8 The 
 head of the Navy had spent a sleepless night, turning over the rights 
 and wrongs of the two parties to the dispute. He admired Seward no 
 more than did Blair, but no more than Blair did he believe that a sena- 
 torial cabal should force his retirement from the administration. "A 
 senatorial combination to dictate to the President in regard to his po- 
 litical family in the height of a civil war which threatens the existence 
 of the Republic cannot be permitted to succeed, even if the person 
 to whom they object were as obnoxious as they represent; but Sew- 
 ard's foibles are not serious failings." The next morning Welles re- 
 paired to the White House as soon as he thought that the President had 
 breakfasted. Lincoln, he advised, should not accept Seward's resigna- 
 tion. To yield to a party in the Senate on what was exclusively an 
 executive function "would be an evil example and fraught with in- 
 calculable injury to the government and the country." Lincoln, much 
 
 8 Welles, Diary. I, 199. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 345 
 
 gratified, said that such was his view. If he let the Senators have their 
 way, "the whole government must cave in; it could not stand, could 
 not hold water; the bottom would be out." 
 
 Later that same morning Welles returned to the President's office, 
 where he found Chase and Stanton. Lincoln presently came in. The 
 four men grouped themselves around the fire, Chase and Stanton facing 
 it, Lincoln at one side, while Welles sat on a sofa near the east window. 
 Chase began complaining of his harrowing experience the preceding 
 evening. It had been a total surprise to him — so he said — and had af- 
 fected him most painfully. In fact, he had prepared his resignation as 
 Secretary of the Treasury. If Chase had expected this announcement 
 to startle the President, he was quickly undeceived. Lincoln's face 
 lighted up with eagerness. 
 
 "Where is it?" he asked. 
 
 "I brought it with me," Chase answered, taking a paper from his 
 pocket. 
 
 "Let me have it," said Lincoln, reaching his long arm and bony fin- 
 gers in Chase's direction. 
 
 Chase half drew the paper back. Lincoln rose, and almost ripped the 
 document from Chase's reluctant hand. Lincoln tore the envelope 
 hastily and read: "Sir: I resign the office of Secretary of the Treasury 
 which I have had the honor to hold under your appointment. What- 
 ever service my successor may desire of me in making him acquainted 
 with the conditions and operations of the department will be most 
 cheerfully rendered. Yours truly, S. P. Chase." 
 
 Lincoln could not conceal his delight. He glanced towards Welles 
 with what the latter described as "a triumphal laugh." "This cuts the 
 Gordian knot. I can dispose of this subject now without difficulty. I see 
 my way clear." Then Stanton spoke up in his most solemn manner. 
 "Mr. President, I informed you day before yesterday that I was ready 
 to tender you my resignation. I wish you, sir, to consider my resignation 
 at this time in your possession." But Lincoln waved him gaily aside. 
 "You may go to your department," he said. "I don't want yours. 
 This" — and he held out Chase's letter — "is all I want; this relieves 
 me; the case is clear, the trouble is ended. I will detain neither of you 
 longer." Lincoln used several other characteristic expressions — inher- 
 itance of his pioneer days in Illinois — to express his delight at the suc- 
 cess of his maneuver. "Now I have the biggest half of the hog," he 
 told one friend, and to others he summed up the situation in one of 
 the most apt metaphors of his career. "Now I can ride; I have got a 
 pumpkin in each end of my bag." The illustration calls up one of the 
 familiar sights of pioneer days in the West: the farmer riding horse- 
 
 
346 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 back to market, with a bag containing pumpkins; obviously, if he 
 had one in each end of the receptacle, the balance would be complete. 
 A year afterward, recalling the transaction, Lincoln declared: "I do 
 not see how it could have been done better. I am sure it was right. 
 If I had yielded to that storm and dismissed Seward the thing would 
 have all slumped over one way, and we should have been left with a 
 scant handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw 
 that the game was in my hands and I put it through." 9 
 
 With these two resignations in hand the problem was quickly ad- 
 justed. Lincoln emphasized his impartiality by writing a note, jointly 
 addressed to the two Secretaries, declining to permit them to leave the 
 cabinet, and insisting that the services of both were needed for the 
 successful prosecution of the war. The President sincerely believed 
 this. Despite their temperamental differences, and the annoyances they 
 caused the administration, Lincoln admired the way Seward and Chase 
 were conducting the State Department and the Treasury. One of the 
 main advantages of this amicable settlement — for both accepted Lin- 
 coln's solution and returned to the WTiite House council table — was 
 that it retained in the Federal service two men of great ability in their 
 respective offices whom it would have been difficult at that time to 
 replace. Other permanent benefits accrued. The attack that was to 
 destroy the administration resulted in knitting it in closer harmony 
 than it had previously known. From now forward, if the administra- 
 tion did not become a unit in the sense the Jacobins desired, it did be- 
 come one in the Lincolnian sense. The effort to substitute an all- 
 radical cabinet in place of the coalition had failed, and failed definitely. 
 Though the Jacobin element did not cease its onslaughts on Lincoln 
 for his conciliatory attitude towards the South, its failure in Decem- 
 ber 1862 proved to be a discouraging setback. If Lincoln did not re- 
 main complete master of his party, he certainly did remain the un- 
 disputed ruler of the executive department. 
 
 The incident similarly brought Seward and Chase closer together. 
 Up to this time they had regarded themselves more or less as rivals for 
 the presidential succession. On this ambition Seward's hopes were not 
 so fondly set as Chase's, but the disappointment of 1860 had not been 
 finally assuaged, and if Lincoln, as was perhaps the general belief at 
 that time, could not survive more than one term, Seward could think 
 of no one so entitled to the succession as himself. But any expectation 
 Seward may have cherished up to this time was dashed when all the 
 Republican Senators except Preston King turned against him. The 
 discouraging lesson Seward now took to heart was that he no longer 
 
 9 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. VI, 271. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 347 
 
 had any political following in the Republican Party. His only possible 
 future was as second man to Lincoln. His loyalty to Lincoln acquired 
 a new zeal, and single-minded devotion to his official duties, rather than 
 conciliatory gestures towards the South, became his one interest. Chase 
 did not abandon his ambitions, it is true, but the episode had greatly 
 weakened his chances of success. He had lost caste with the radical 
 forces who had been his main reliance. 
 
 As for Lincoln, he emerged with greatly enhanced prestige. This 
 "prairie lawyer" had proved to be a handler-of-men of previously un- 
 suspected power. He had confronted the rebels in his own cabinet and 
 all the Republicans in the Senate and had defeated the machinations of 
 both. The eulogy of his admiring secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, close 
 inspectors of the whole proceeding, was not undeserved. "The un- 
 trained diplomatist of Illinois had thus met and conjured away, with 
 unsurpassed courage and skill, one of the severest crises that ever 
 threatened the integrity of his administration. He had to meet it abso- 
 lutely unaided; from the nature of the case he could take no advice 
 from those who were nearest him in the government. By his bold and 
 original expedient of confronting the senators with the cabinet, and 
 having them discuss their mutual understandings under his own eye, 
 he cleared up many dangerous misconceptions, and, as usually happens 
 when both parties are men of intelligence and good will, brought about 
 a friendlier and more considerate feeling between his government and 
 the Republican leaders than had ever before existed. By placing Mr. 
 Chase in such an attitude that his resignation became necessary to his 
 own sense of dignity, he made himself absolute master of the situation; 
 by treating the resignations and the return to the cabinet of both min- 
 isters as one and the same transaction he saved for the nation the in- 
 valuable services of both, and preserved his own position of entire im- 
 partiality between the two wings of the party." 10 
 
 One change in the cabinet did take place at this time, though it was 
 unrelated to the general crisis. Caleb Blood Smith, who had obtained 
 the Interior Department as the result of a bargain made by David Davis 
 and Leonard Swett, had for some time been bored by his inconspicuous 
 duties and perhaps the unimportant part he was playing in public af- 
 fairs. Lincoln solved this problem in characteristic fashion. In Decem- 
 ber 1862, he appointed Smith judge of the United States District Court 
 of Indiana, a position for which he was well fitted, being an excellent 
 lawyer. Smith enjoyed his new duties for only a little more than a 
 year, dying in January 1864. Lincoln promoted to the vacant cabinet 
 
 10 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. VI, 270-271. 
 
348 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 post John Palmer Usher, who for some time had been Assistant Secre- 
 tary of the Interior. Usher was an Indiana lawyer who had once rid- 
 den the eighth circuit with Lincoln. He had been an earnest Repub- 
 lican from the founding of the party, but up to his appointment to the 
 cabinet had filled no important legislative or executive office. 
 
Ill 
 
 o 
 
 N SUNDAY, the 13th of July, 1862," wrote Gideon Welles, 
 "President Lincoln invited me to accompany him in his carriage to the 
 funeral of an infant child of Mr. Stanton. Secretary Seward and Mrs. 
 Frederick Seward were also in the carriage. ... It was on this occa- 
 sion and on this ride that he first mentioned to Mr. Seward and myself 
 the subject of emancipating the slaves by proclamation in case the 
 Rebels did not cease to persist in their war on the government and the 
 Union, of which he saw no evidence. He dwelt earnestly on the grav- 
 ity, importance, and delicacy of the movement, said he had given it 
 much thought and had about come to the conclusion that it was a 
 military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, 
 that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. This was, he 
 said, the first occasion when he had mentioned the subject to any one, 
 and wished us to frankly state how the proposition struck us. Mr. Sew- 
 ard said that the subject involved consequences so vast and momentous 
 that he should wish to bestow on it mature reflection before giving a 
 decisive answer, but his present opinion inclined to the measure as jus- 
 tifiable, and perhaps he might say, expedient and necessary. These were 
 also my views. Two or three times on that ride the subject, which was 
 of course an absorbing one for each and all, was reverted to, and before 
 separating the President desired us to give the question special and 
 deliberate attention, for he was earnest in the conviction that some- 
 thing must be done. It was a new departure for the President, for until 
 this time, in all our previous interviews whenever the question of the 
 emancipation or mitigation of slavery had been in any way alluded to, 
 he had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by 
 the general government with the subject. This, I think, was the sen- 
 timent of every member of the cabinet." * 
 
 And so the question which for a year and a half had split the Repub- 
 lican Party in two had at last come to a decision. Behind all the fero- 
 cious assaults of the radicals — the warfare on McClellan, the senatorial 
 
 1 Welles, Diary. I, 70-71. 
 
350 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 uprising of December, the wranglings over the army command, the an- 
 gry debates in Congress, and the dissensions within the cabinet itself — 
 had stalked the shadowy but still distinct figure of the black man. The 
 war had found this disturbing character a slave; how was it to leave 
 him? The patient, plaintive laborer had been the cause of the conflict; 
 what effect would it have upon his fortunes? Lincoln settled this ques- 
 tion, at least in part, when on July 22, amid all the gloom of military dis- 
 asters, he called his cabinet, took from his pocket a carefully guarded 
 paper, and read its fateful contents. What the startled gentlemen lis- 
 tened to was a document which, though it comprised less than five 
 hundred words, was probably the most momentous state paper that 
 had seen the light since the adoption of the Federal Constitution. The 
 gist of it was brief and to the point: on the first day of January 1863, 
 he, Abraham Lincoln, acting solely on his responsibility as President 
 of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, 
 would issue a proclamation, declaring that "all persons held as slaves," 
 within any states at that time in rebellion against the Federal govern- 
 ment, "shall then, thenceforward, and forever be free." On Septem- 
 ber 22, five days after the battle of Antietam, Lincoln made public this 
 edict, or one that substantially resembled it, and on January 1 it duly 
 became the law of the land. Up to the time of that first reading, on 
 July 22, only two members of the cabinet — William H. Seward and 
 Gideon Welles — had known anything of the President's intention. All 
 during the contentions described in preceding pages, the Proclamation, 
 in one form or another, had lain on Lincoln's desk, awaiting the mo- 
 ment when it could most effectively be given to the world. 
 
 In his masterly letter to Horace Greeley of August 22, written at a 
 time when his course had been already decided, Lincoln reiterated that 
 he was waging war not to destroy slavery, but to save the Union. 
 Whatever steps he might or might not take on that question, he de- 
 clared, would be taken exclusively with this great purpose in mind. His 
 proclamation indicated no departure from that assertion. If he could 
 save the Union by freeing all the slaves, Lincoln had said, he would 
 do that; if he could save it by freeing none, he would adopt that pro- 
 gram; if he could save it by freeing some and leaving the rest in bond- 
 age, he would follow this middle course. It was the third alternative 
 that seemed the wisest in July and September. Lincoln's preliminary 
 and final proclamation set "forever free" the slaves of the regions still 
 in rebellion but did not free those of the Border states. There were 
 two excellent reasons for this discrimination. In the first place, Lin- 
 coln had no constitutional power over the property of states not at 
 war with the Union. Under the Constitution, slavery was exclusively a 
 
Copyright by Harris & Ewing 
 
 Reading of the First Emancipation Yroclamation, July 22, 1862 
 
 Painting by Francis B. Carpenter, now hanging in the old Supreme 
 Court Chamber, the Capitol, Washington. This, the artist's final 
 revision, differs in several important details from the engravings 
 
 in general circulation 
 Left to right: Stanton, Chase, Lincoln, Welles, Smith, Seward, 
 
 Blair, Bates 
 
Edward Bates (1793-1869) 
 Attorney General 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 351 
 
 state prerogative over which the Federal government had no jurisdic- 
 tion. Only, the military power could be invoked, and that only against 
 the states in rebellion; it could not be used against the loyal slave states, 
 since they were not engaged in war against the Federal government. 
 Thus, had Lincoln desired to do so, he could not have extended eman- 
 cipation over Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, western Virginia, and 
 Missouri; in fact he had no such desire. Such an act would have con- 
 travened his steadfast policy of conciliating these states and strengthen- 
 ing their loyalty to the Union. The Federal government, under mili- 
 tary necessity, could seize the human property of citizens engaged in 
 treason, just as it could seize their horses, cattle, pigs, and materials of 
 war. Once having seized these chattels, it could dispose of them in the 
 way most useful in the prosecution of the war — and it chose to trans- 
 form them into freemen. Properly considered, Lincoln's historic edict 
 was thus first an act of confiscation, and secondly of manumission. 
 
 Both the proclamations — that of July 22 and that of September 22, 
 for the document issued on January 1, 1863, was merely an addendum 
 to the latter — embodied Lincoln's solution for the difficult problem 
 of slavery. They offered the areas that were in arms against the Fed- 
 eral government two alternatives. If they returned to their old al- 
 legiance by January 1, they would be permitted to retain their 
 favorite domestic institution, the ultimate destiny of which was to be 
 left to the civilizing processes of time. If they should resume "their 
 constitutional relations" to the central power at Washington and simul- 
 taneously abolish slavery, they would be compensated for their sur- 
 rendered property, presumably at the rate of $400 a head. If they de- 
 clined either of these alternatives, then their 4,000,000 Negroes were 
 to be "forever free." The cabinet meetings at which these papers were 
 proposed and discussed have been frequently described. The surprise 
 of the department heads at the presentation of the preliminary paper; 
 Seward's proposal that it be postponed until a military success had 
 crowned the Federal army; Lincoln's acceptance of the suggestion; 
 the President's introducing the second debate on the subject by read- 
 ing a chapter from Artemus Ward; Stanton's indignation and Chase's 
 pained surprise at the apparent levity; Chase's amendment that some 
 recognition of the favor of God should be incorporated in the Proc- 
 lamation, an amendment that Lincoln accepted — all this is a long- 
 familiar story. The cabinet had really little to do with the conception 
 or formulation of this measure. It was, except for a few minor sug- 
 gestions, exclusively Lincoln's work. None of his acts so completely 
 embodied his conception of presidential responsibility. 
 
 The President's critics in the Senate who had complained that Lin- 
 
352 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 coin made important decisions without consulting his cabinet — and 
 that, indeed, he declined to regard that aggregation as an executive 
 council, with authority almost equal to his own — could have found 
 their most impressive illustration in this instance. For more than a 
 year, the subject of emancipation had been revolving in Lincoln's 
 mind; he had discussed it with intimates, inside the cabinet and out. 
 He had been closely following the argument in Congress and the press 
 and had been attentively listening to visiting delegations, urging action 
 one way or another. But none of these several exponents of public 
 opinion had obtained any inkling as to his decision. Before reading the 
 momentous paper to the cabinet, Lincoln emphasized the fact that the 
 act was his own. He had settled the question, he declared, in his own 
 conscience and did not wish their advice as to its propriety and wisdom. 
 
 "The President states," records Gideon Welles, "that the question 
 was finally decided, the act and the consequences were his, but that 
 he felt it due to us to make us acquainted with the fact, and to invite 
 criticism on the paper which he had prepared. There were, he had 
 found, not unexpectedly, some differences in the cabinet, but he had, 
 after ascertaining in his own way, the views of each and all, individually 
 and collectively, formed his own conclusions and made his own de- 
 cisions." 2 "I have got you together to hear what I have written down," 
 writes Chase, quoting the President's very words in his account, which 
 for once is much more graphic and complete than that of his fellow 
 diarist of the Navy Department. "I do not wish your advice about the 
 main matter — for that I have determined for myself. This I say with- 
 out intending anything but respect for any of you. But I already know 
 the views of each upon this question. They have been heretofore ex- 
 pressed and I have considered them as thoroughly as I can. What I 
 have written is that which my reflections have determined me to say. 
 If there is anything in the expressions I use, or in any other minor 
 matter, which any one of you think had best be changed, I shall be glad 
 to receive the suggestions. ... I am here. I must do the best I can, and 
 bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to 
 take." 3 
 
 The precise moment when Lincoln's decision to issue the Proclama- 
 tion had been made is something, of course, that cannot be determined. 
 On the general conviction that the time must come when the slave 
 should be liberated he had from the first completely agreed with the 
 most ardent radical. In a theoretical sense, he knew when the moment 
 
 2 Welles, Diary. I, 143 
 
 3 American Historical Association. Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. 
 Chase. Annual Report, 1902. II, 88- 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 353 
 
 for action would arrive. That would be the time when such an ex- 
 treme measure would most effectively promote the cause to which, 
 above all, Lincoln had dedicated himself — the preservation of the 
 Union. He had resisted all the exhortations of radicals and humani- 
 tarians for a year and more, knowing that the action they proposed 
 was premature and premature emancipation, Lincoln had always in- 
 sisted, would have defeated the purpose at which he aimed. Had the 
 Proclamation been issued six months before it was actually given to 
 the world, Lincoln told the artist Carpenter, it would have worked 
 great injury to the cause. In early July 1862, however, the President 
 concluded that the moment had come to deprive the South of its most 
 powerful instrument of warfare. The McClellan disasters in the Penin- 
 sula had much to do with this decision. "It had got to be midsummer, 
 1862" — so Carpenter quotes Lincoln. "Things had gone on from bad 
 to worse, until I had felt that we had reached the end of our rope on 
 the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had played our 
 last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game. I now deter- 
 mined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and, without 
 consultation with, or knowledge of the cabinet, I prepared the original 
 draft, and, after much anxious thought, called a cabinet meeting on the 
 subject." 4 
 
 However, the President's casual remarks to an artist engaged in paint- 
 ing his picture did not tell the whole story. While the military situation 
 in Virginia might be desperate, in other parts of the embattled region 
 things were fairly prosperous. In the pivotal Border states, for exam- 
 ple, conditions had vastly improved. The Federal troops, by completely 
 defeating the pro-Confederacy forces in Missouri, had removed that 
 region from the list of states of doubtful loyalty. Missouri was now 
 securely anchored to the Union, beyond the power of the secession 
 elements to dislodge it. Grant's victories in Kentucky and on the Ten- 
 nessee and Cumberland Rivers had sealed the Federal triumph in that 
 strategic region. How definitely Maryland had taken its place on the 
 side of the Union was shown two months afterward, when Lee 
 attempted unsuccessfully to invade it. He came, the Confederate com- 
 mander told Marylanders in a proclamation, to free them from the "op- 
 pressor," and he invited them to rise, flock to his arms, and join the con- 
 federacy. Fewer than one hundred men had accepted the invitation; the 
 great mass of the people seemed perfectly content in their "subjection" 
 to Federal rule. Thus by July 1862, and even more emphatically in 
 September, the Border states were strongly allied to the Union cause 
 and no fear existed that emancipation would alienate them — especially 
 
 4 Carpenter, op. cit. y p. 20. 
 
354 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 as the measure affected only the regions in rebellion, and left the insti- 
 tution of slavery in the loyal states precisely where it had been before. 
 
 The foreign situation, in the summer and fall of 1862, had reached a 
 critical stage. Confederate recognition by Great Britain and France was 
 assuming more ominous proportions every day. Lincoln's declaration 
 to Horace Greeley that he was waging war not to end slavery, but to 
 save the Union, gave the English supporters of the South a powerful 
 argument. The masses in both Britain and France had sympathized 
 with the North chiefly because they hated slavery. But, Confederate 
 apologists in England and France urged, Lincoln, according to his own 
 declaration, was fighting not for freedom of the black but for power — 
 not to end an abominable social evil, but to secure the dominance of the 
 North. Gladstone advocated, practically openly, the admission of the 
 "nation" that Jefferson Davis had made to fellowship with Great Brit- 
 ain; Russell, the Foreign Secretary, as his correspondence with Palm- 
 erston shows, had settled his mind on recognition. Emancipation, Lin- 
 coln knew, would end this agitation at once and forever make its 
 renewal impossible. Political considerations at home also had their influ- 
 ence. The question of the black man was threatening the integrity of 
 the Republican Party. In both House and Senate the champions of the 
 slave, and of his immediate freedom, had an overwhelming majority. 
 Lincoln, the supreme politician and party manager, realized that he 
 could not much longer preserve Republican solidarity, indispensable to 
 success in war, without taking this forward step. The statement is some- 
 times made that the Jacobins had at last forced the President's hand, and 
 to an extent this is true, but the political situation on Capitol Hill was 
 only one of the reasons, and not the most important, that persuaded 
 Lincoln to take decisive action. 
 
 Yet when the President, on July 22, read his first preliminary procla- 
 mation to his cabinet, only two of his advisers gave it their wholehearted 
 assent. The septuagenarian Edward Bates, the most conservative and 
 "fossilized" of them all, the Virginia-born jurist who for a lifetime had 
 held, for the most part, the opinions of his native state on the Negro, 
 expressed approval. He particularly liked Lincoln's recommendation for 
 deportation of the ex-slaves. "He dreaded any step which should be 
 taken to bring about social equality between the two races. The effect, 
 he said, would be to degrade the whites without elevating the blacks. 
 Demoralization, vice and misery would follow." 5 Stanton was the other 
 cabinet member who showed no hesitation. From the beginning the 
 Secretary of War had promoted the radical interest, of which emanci- 
 pation was the leading item; besides, Stanton, as head of military af- 
 
 5 Welles, Diary. I, 158. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 355 
 
 fairs, understood its importance better than his colleagues. From Stan- 
 ton's first day in the War Department, the strength which the Con- 
 federacy derived from its slave population had impressed and appalled 
 him. Probably no nation had ever possessed such a powerful prop to 
 military operations. The slaves for the larger part remained at home, 
 cultivating the farms, raising food and caring for the wives and children 
 left behind. This placed the entire white male population at the dis- 
 position of the recruiting officer. Slavery thus gave the Confederacy 
 an immense advantage over the North, where a large proportion of the 
 men must be left at home to provide for the domestic and military econ- 
 omy. In the Northern armies again able-bodied soldiers by the tens of 
 thousands were necessarily set aside for nonmilitary duties such as dig- 
 ging entrenchments, building fortifications, acting as teamsters, cooks, 
 and the like. In the Southern forces these essential services were per- 
 formed by slaves, and all the white men could be used as combatants. 
 If these slaves, or a considerable part of them, could be appropriated 
 for the Northern armies, the South, to the extent of the appropriation, 
 would be weakened in military power, and the North correspondingly 
 strengthened. How could such a shift in resources be brought to pass? 
 Whenever the Northern armies approached the region of serfdom, the 
 black folk had already shown an eagerness to abandon their allegiances, 
 leave home, and enter territories under Federal control. To stimulate 
 this migration, emancipation would offer the two inducements that ap- 
 peal most eloquently to human nature. Such emigres would be assured 
 of their freedom and be paid wages for their labor. As the Northern 
 armies advanced into rebel territory, the newly conquered domain 
 would become in fact, as it was under the proclamation in theory, free. 
 Vast human resources would be lost to the Confederates and trans- 
 ferred to the Federals. 
 
 In his report for 1862, Stanton had given a graphic illustration of the 
 anticipated benefits. The sea cotton islands lying off the coast of South 
 Carolina, then in control of the Federal armies, could supply forage 
 enough for the whole department of the South — South Carolina, Geor- 
 gia, and Florida. Under prevailing conditions the Federal armies had 
 to draw these supplies from Northern ports, entailing a serious prob- 
 lem of transportation. But it was very difficult to get the Negroes on 
 the islands to supply the labor. Give these Negroes their freedom, how- 
 ever, and the protection of Northern troops, and the problem of labor 
 and supplies would be solved. "By striking down this system of com- 
 pulsory labor," said Stanton, "which enables the leaders of the rebellion 
 to control the resources of the people, the rebellion would die of itself." 
 
 That Stanton would immediately assent to the new measure, which 
 
356 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 aimed to accomplish the very destruction of the labor system he had 
 demanded, could therefore be taken for granted. Stanton himself hastily 
 made notes of the proceedings at that first discussion of July 22 — a 
 valuable document that still exists in his hurried backhanded scrawl 
 among his voluminous papers. "The Attorney-General and Stanton are 
 for its immediate promulgation," this paper says, referring to the first 
 session on the Proclamation of July 22, but no such definite commit- 
 ments are recorded for Stanton's colleagues. Welles apparently re- 
 ceived the proposal in silence though subsequently he gave it loyal 
 support. Blair — this fact, however, Stanton's memorandum does not 
 record — opposed it on political grounds. Blair was not present when 
 the session began, but came in before it was finished. He was an eman- 
 cipationist from principle, he announced, but he thought the time badly 
 taken; it would give the Democrats a club with which to beat the ad- 
 ministration at the polls. Smith vigorously argued against the docu- 
 ment on the same practical grounds. His Assistant Secretary, soon to 
 be his successor, John P. Usher, quotes him as saying that if Lincoln is- 
 sued such a rescript, "I will resign and go home and attack the admin- 
 istration." 6 
 
 While the objections of Blair and Smith were not based on the high- 
 est grounds, they proved to be good prophets, for emancipation doubt- 
 less did exercise an important influence on the misfortunes that over- 
 whelmed the Lincolnian party in November. 
 
 The strangest feature of this first session was the lack of enthusiasm 
 displayed by Chase. Of all men close to Lincoln, the Secretary of the 
 Treasury, for the last two years, had been the most outspoken apostle of 
 freedom and enfranchisement for the African. But, according to one 
 part of Stanton's memorandum, Chase was "silent," and in another page 
 it says that "Chase thinks it a measure of great danger and would lead 
 to universal emancipation. The measure goes beyond anything I [Chase] 
 have recommended." Chase had always endorsed the proclamations of 
 his favorite generals, but this sweeping ukase from the one man who 
 had the authority to take such action evidently left him cold. The con- 
 clusion seems justified that Chase, although he desired emancipation, 
 did not desire it by act of Abraham Lincoln. He wished it to be done 
 piecemeal by military commanders in the respective districts. The 
 precedents set by Fremont and Ben Butler this great champion of the 
 Negro still believed to be the ideal way of approaching a momentous 
 national problem. That the Secretary of the Treasury was already lay- 
 ing plans for the presidential nomination in 1864 necessarily arouses 
 suspicion of his motives. Was Chase relying upon freedom for the Ne- 
 
 6 Usher, John P., President Lincoln's Cabinet. Nelson H. Loomis, 1925. P. 17. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 357 
 
 groes as the issue on which he hoped to win, and did this aspiration 
 explain his unzealous reception of the document? The insinuation may 
 seem unworthy but it is set forth in plainer terms by that merciless 
 analyst of his colleagues' character, Gideon Welles. "The subject should 
 not become mixed with party issues," old Neptune notes in his Diary 
 for August 22, 1863, "but yet it can scarcely be avoided. Chase gathers 
 it into the coming presidential election; feels that the measure of eman- 
 cipation, which was decided without first consulting him, has placed 
 the President in advance of him in a path which was his specialty." 
 
IV 
 
 JLERHAPS OTHER grounds would explain the hesitation of Chase. 
 The Proclamation in its two separate forms — that of July 22 and of 
 September 22 — contemplated indemnity for slaves to all states adopt- 
 ing emancipation, including such states then in rebellion as should re- 
 turn to their Federal allegiance. Chase was opposed to compensated 
 emancipation; he agreed with the abolitionist view that this was giving 
 malefactors payment for the restoration of stolen goods. Colonization, 
 which Lincoln had been advocating for a long time, the Secretary also 
 disapproved. His treatment for the Negro insisted on his elevation, so 
 far as civil rights and citizenship were concerned, to an equality with 
 the whites. "How much better," he said, "would be a manly protest 
 against prejudice against color! And a wise effort to give freemen homes 
 in America! A military officer, emancipating at least the slaves of South 
 Carolina, Georgia, and the Gulf States" — the reference, of course, is to 
 General Hunter, who had attempted that very thing — "would do more 
 to terminate the war and ensure an early restoration of solid peace and 
 prosperity than anything else that can be devised." Chase confided this 
 view to his Diary 1 on August 15 — about a month after Lincoln had 
 informed his cabinet of his intention; any proper scheme of emancipa- 
 tion, he said, should lay the basis for "ultimate enfranchisement," and 
 he was stronger than ever for enlisting Negroes in the armies. For such 
 extreme measure Lincoln's proclamation made no provision, nor did the 
 President conceal his opposition to giving the Negro the vote at this 
 time. Still, lukewarm as Chase may have been towards the decree, he 
 still accepted it as better than nothing. After setting forth his views in 
 a cabinet meeting on August 3, 2 he concluded that he "regarded this 
 as so much better than inaction on the subject that I should give it my 
 entire support," and by January, when the final document received the 
 seal of the United States, he surveyed the completed work with satis- 
 faction. His attitude somewhat resembled that of William Lloyd Garri- 
 
 1 Chase, Diary, p. 59, 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 54. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 359 
 
 son, who looked kindly on the Proclamation as a "step in the right direc- 
 tion" and perhaps even approximated the opinion expressed by Wendell 
 Phillips when told of Garrison's faint praise. "A step!" retorted this 
 extremist. "It's a stride!" 
 
 Gideon Welles, at first hesitant, came around slowly to cordial appro- 
 bation. The edict had troubled him from the first on constitutional 
 grounds. To him it seemed "an arbitrary and despotic measure in the 
 cause of freedom." This doubt explained this Yankee's reluctance to 
 give an opinion when Lincoln, at the Stanton funeral, sounded him on 
 the subject and also the silence with which he had received the first 
 reading in July. The Constitution gave the Executive no such autocratic 
 power, Welles believed, the act resting solely upon Lincoln's author- 
 ity as commander in chief; in other words, the Proclamation was not an 
 executive but a military prerogative; and these considerations would 
 naturally give pause to a thinker who, throughout his whole life as 
 journalist and public man, had strongly supported the doctrines of 
 State rights and strict construction. However, with Welles, this proved 
 to be only a passing phase. At the September cabinet meeting, Stanton, 
 after speaking in favor of immediate emancipation, with all the fervent 
 eagerness of his nature, turned with some irritation towards Chase and 
 Welles. Two members of the cabinet, he said, had not spoken. Then 
 the Secretary of the Navy explained briefly the constitutional reasons 
 for his hesitation. But, he concluded, "the Rebels themselves had in- 
 voked war on the subject of slavery, had appealed to arms and they 
 must abide the consequences. It was an extreme exercise of war powers, 
 and under the circumstances and in view of the condition of the coun- 
 try and the magnitude of the contest I was willing to resort to extreme 
 measures and avail ourselves of military necessity, always harsh and 
 questionable." From this attitude of moderation, as years went on, 
 Welles went to the most heartfelt appreciation. The time came when 
 he estimated the Proclamation as the supreme achievement of Lincoln's 
 career, and as one of the greatest acts in modern history. In 1874, twelve 
 years after the signing, when Welles, long after retirement from the 
 cabinet, was spending a meditative old age in Hartford, Connecticut, 
 pondering the great episodes of which he had been a part and com- 
 mitting his recollections to paper, he set forth his mature convictions 
 on this subject. "The distinctive measure of Mr. Lincoln's administra- 
 tion, beyond all others, that makes it an era in our national history, is 
 the decree of emancipation. Results have proved that there was in the 
 measure thought, statesmanship, courage and far-seeing sagacity — 
 consummate executive and administrative ability which was after some 
 reverses crowned with success. The nation, emerging from gloom and 
 
360 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 disaster, and the whole civilized world, united in awarding honor and 
 gratitude to the illustrious man who had the mind to conceive and the 
 firmness to decree the emancipation of a race." 8 
 
 But the most important member of the cabinet held no such exalted 
 view of Lincoln's act. For Seward's position we are indebted again to 
 that industrious compiler of Lincoln memoranda, the artist Francis B. 
 Carpenter. In the course of his work on the emancipation picture, Car- 
 penter came frequently into association with the Secretary of State. 
 "I told the President the other day," Seward remarked at one of these 
 meetings, "that you were painting your picture upon a false assump- 
 tion." The bewildered artist asked for an explanation. "You appear to 
 think," Seward explained, "in common with many other foolish people, 
 that the great business of this administration is the destruction of slav- 
 ery. Now allow me to say that you are "much mistaken. . . . Had you 
 consulted me on a subject to paint, I should not have given you the 
 Cabinet Council on Emancipation, but the meeting which took place 
 when the news came of the attack upon Sumter, when the first measures 
 were organized for the restoration of the national authority. That was 
 the crisis in the history of this administration — not the issue of the 
 Emancipation Proclamation." 4 Seward's behavior at the time accords 
 with this opinion. Again that distinguishing trait of his character comes 
 to the surface — the tendency to hesitate, to take both sides of a ques- 
 tion, to compromise. One would have thought that Seward, having the 
 control of foreign affairs in his hands, would have promptly hailed the 
 proposal. One of Lincoln's purposes was to ease the foreign situation 
 and make impossible that recognition of the Confederacy which was 
 imminent in the summer and fall of 1862. 
 
 Seward did indeed show interest from the standpoint of foreign rela- 
 tions, but in a way precisely opposed to Lincoln's intention. The Secre- 
 tary of State at first deprecated emancipation on the strange ground 
 that it would injure our standing in Europe. The universal dislike of 
 slavery that prevailed on the Continent he disregarded. Seward believed 
 that the one and only interest Britain and France had in the contest was 
 a material one. In their eyes — so he insisted — the United States was 
 important only as a source of cotton; for these nations there were no 
 principles involved; anything that increased the supply of this essential 
 material would receive their approval and anything that diminished it 
 would arouse their hostility. Emancipation, in Lincoln's view, would 
 destroy the Southern labor system, and thus would be an excellent 
 
 8 Welles, Lincoln and Seward. Pp. 204-207. 
 
 4 Gideon Welles also gives an account of this conversation, which took place at 
 his house but not in his hearing. See Diary, I, 549. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 361 
 
 thing; Seward agreed that it would handicap Southern agriculture, and 
 for that very reason he looked upon it unfavorably. The British gov- 
 erning classes and their commercial and financial allies hated the North, 
 above all, because the war, by depriving their spindles of cotton, had 
 created vast unemployment and put millions of people on public relief; 
 the Proclamation would make conditions worse, and still further stimu- 
 late the demand for recognition. Two days after Lincoln had submitted 
 his original paper, Seward wrote John Lothrop Motley, minister to 
 Austria, inquiring: "Are you sure that today, under the seductions and 
 pressures that could be applied to some European powers, they would 
 not rise up and resist an attempt to bestow freedom upon the laborers 
 whose capacity to supply cotton and open a market for European 
 fabrics depends, or is thought to depend, upon their continuance in 
 bondage?" Motley's almost thunderous negation, "A thousand times 
 No!" was evidently not exactly the response which Seward had hoped 
 to elicit. 
 
 Stanton's hurried memorandum of that first discussion again makes 
 clear Seward's scarcely concealed hostility to Lincoln's edict. "Seward 
 argues," Stanton jotted down, "that foreign nations will intervene to 
 prevent abolition of slavery for the sake of cotton. Argues in a long 
 speech against its immediate promulgation. Wants to wait for troops. 
 Wants drum and fife and public spirit. Wants Halleck here. We break 
 up our relations with foreign nations and the production of cotton for 
 sixty years." Did Seward sincerely believe that foreigners would op- 
 pose emancipation for the sake of cotton, or was he using this argu- 
 ment to defeat a measure to which he was naturally hostile? The ques- 
 tion is a difficult one. Not improbably Seward was still adhering to his 
 policy of settling the war by propitiation. Lincoln's bold move would 
 certainly forever put an end to this dream. The promise to leave their 
 sacred institution intact had formed the basis of all the conciliatory ap- 
 proaches Seward had made to the Secessionists; and he was still nour- 
 ishing hopes that, by this and other guarantees, the erring sisters could 
 be brought back into the Union. At times, indeed, Seward spoke ap- 
 provingly of the Proclamation, particularly in the cabinet sessions called 
 to discuss it; yet a different spirit is manifest in his private letters, writ- 
 ten while it was under consideration. These occasionally display, if not 
 an unfriendly disposition towards it, certainly a doubtful and cynical 
 one. "Proclamations are papers" he wrote Mrs. Seward on July 29, 
 one week after Lincoln had presented his first version to the cabinet. 
 "It is mournful to see a great nation shrink from a war it has accepted, 
 and insist on adopting proclamations, when it is asked for force. The 
 Chinese do so without success." "The President's proclamation," he 
 
362 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 wrote his daughter soon after it had been given to the public press, "so 
 long and importunately clamored for by a portion of our people, is 
 out at last. It is now evident that the Proclamation has not been delayed 
 too long. In a short time we shall know whether it has come too soon. 
 I hope that this may not prove to be the case. I was fearful of prema- 
 turely giving to the people, prone to divide, occasion for organizing 
 parties, in a crisis which demands union and harmony, in order to save 
 the country from destruction." 
 
 At the same time Seward's bantering reference to "proclamations" 
 frequently annoyed more serious colleagues. Thus when Lee was on 
 the brink of invading Pennsylvania, Chase quotes in his Diary Sewards' 
 remark that "some one had proposed that the President should issue a 
 Proclamation . . . freeing all the apprentices of that state." "I thought 
 the jest ill-timed," solemnly comments Chase. Orville H. Browning's 
 Diary notes several talks with Seward, in which the Secretary's opposi- 
 tion to die Proclamation is recorded. Browning, who himself regarded 
 emancipation as a mistake, asked Seward one evening "why the cabinet 
 had done so monstrous a thing as to issue the proclamations." Seward, 
 Lincoln-like, answered with a story. A revolutionary patriot in his sec- 
 tion could not rest content, after the establishment of American inde- 
 pendence, until he had raised a liberty pole. "What is liberty," he asked, 
 "without a pole?" And so, Seward remarked, between puffs on his 
 cigar, "What is war without a proclamation?" 5 Yet Seward did have 
 his less flippant moods, as is shown in his letter to Charles Francis 
 Adams, written after the final step had been taken. Will Britain and 
 France, he asks, "interfere to strike down the arm that so reluctantly, 
 but so effectively, is raised at last to break the fetters of the slave and 
 seek to rivet anew the chains which he has sundered? Will they recog- 
 nize the insurgents now and thus seek to commit themselves to main- 
 tain slavery among a people when slaves and masters alike agree that 
 it shall no longer exist? Is this to be the climax to the world's progress 
 in the nineteenth century?" 
 
 Seward's early caution sheds light upon that famous episode of the 
 first reading — for details of which we are again under obligation to 
 portrait painter Carpenter. Stanton's notes and Seward's own com- 
 ments show that the Proclamation at this session impressed him unfavor- 
 ably, and not impossibly his suggestion for postponement was only his 
 way of accomplishing its demise. Seward, Lincoln told Carpenter, said, 
 at the first discussion, that he approved the measure, but that he thought 
 the time inopportune for issuing it. "The depression of the public mind, 
 consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect 
 
 5 Browning, op. cit. I, 609. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 363 
 
 of so important a step. It may be viewed as the last measure of an ex- 
 hausted government, a cry for help; the government stretching forth 
 its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands 
 to the government." The President explained Seward's meaning in a 
 pithy phrase of his own. "His idea was that it would be considered 
 our last shriek on the retreat." Seward therefore recommended that its 
 publication be put off until the North should obtain a military victory. 
 Lincoln said that this objection had never occurred to him; he was 
 much struck by its force, however, and he so told the artist. "I put the 
 draft of the Proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, 
 waiting for a victory." It seems a fair assumption, in view of Seward's 
 evident hostility to emancipation, that he was seeking delay, hoping 
 perhaps that time and events would cause the President to rescind his 
 unhappy mistake. 
 
 Yet the history of Carpenter's painting illustrates again certain traits 
 in Seward's mercurial character. In its original form that work of art 
 set forth graphically the Seward assumption which he evidently wished 
 to see ingrained in history, that he, not Lincoln, was the ruler of the 
 United States during the Civil War. In the shape in which the picture 
 left the White House for exhibition all over the United States, it greatly 
 irritated Lincoln's admirers. Even Chase denounced it as a misrepre- 
 sentation of history. "The Chief Justice," notes John Hay in his Diary 
 for February 11, 1867, "showed me Carpenter's engraving of the Read- 
 ing of the Proclamation. He objects to the whole picture being made 
 subsidiary to Seward who is talking while everyone else listens or stares 
 into vacancy." 6 Carpenter has himself described the principles on which 
 he grouped his characters. The two elements in the cabinet, radical and 
 conservative, were separated, with the figure of Lincoln between, acting 
 as a kind of dividing wall, Stanton sitting and Chase standing at his 
 right, the other five sitting or standing about the council table, on his 
 left. "To the Secretary of State," writes Carpenter, "as the great ex- 
 pounder of the principles of the Republican party, the profound and 
 sagacious statesman, would the attention of all at such a time be given. 
 Entitled to precedence in discussion by his position, he would neces- 
 sarily form one of the central figures in the group." Acting under this 
 awesome belief the artist made Seward the dominating figure, even to 
 the exclusion of Lincoln himself. The Secretary of State sat in profile in 
 the foreground, a mass of papers resting on the table before him, ink- 
 well and goose-quill pen convenient to his hand, as though to empha- 
 size the remarks he is clearly directing at the President. Lincoln, with a 
 paper in his left hand, which he has apparently just finished reading, is 
 
 6 Hay, op. cit., p. 272. 
 
 
364 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 listening with a deferential regard, while the other members of the cab- 
 inet, so far as they are gazing at anything except empty space, have their 
 eyes upon their colleague, absorbing his every word. 
 
 Engravings of the painting were widely distributed, and in a few 
 years were hanging in thousands of American homes. But it afforded 
 little pleasure to Lincoln's sincerest friends. The papers of Gideon 
 Welles in the New York Public Library contain letters from Hiram 
 Barney, Lincoln's appointee as Collector of the Port of New York, 
 which echo this indignation. "The engraving," Mr. Barney wrote to 
 Welles, December 4, 1873, "taken, I think, from Carpenter's painting 
 of the Proclamation of Emancipation, represents Mr. Seward, with pen 
 in hand, as if he had written that paper and had then submitted it to 
 Mr. Lincoln and the cabinet. It is very probable that Mr. Seward chose 
 for himself this attitude in the group, so as to produce the impression 
 that he was the author of that great measure and of the instrument by 
 which it was declared to the world. It was his fortune to appear to the 
 world in a great many meritorious transactions as the moving, leading 
 or controlling power, when in fact he often did not participate in the 
 business or did oppose what was done during its performance. The foun- 
 dation and early movements of the Republican party is an illustration 
 of this statement. His attitude towards the party up to the time of Mr. 
 Lincoln's inauguration was such that no proof could be found of his 
 membership. It was a favorite saying of his during all that period: 'In 
 religion I am an Episcopalian, in politics a Whig.' He was ready to ad- 
 vise that party and to accept its favors, but he was not a member and 
 kept his record clear of responsibility for its measures and even for its 
 existence." 7 
 
 The Carpenter picture evidently preyed upon Mr. Barney's mind; 
 the fact that Seward, contrary to the impression conveyed by Carpen- 
 ter's work, was really opposed to the Proclamation was a particular 
 reason for irritation. He returned to the matter in another letter to 
 Welles, on September 27, 1877. "You were right in thinking that my 
 interview with Mr. Lincoln after we left you was on the subject of 
 the proclamation which was drafted in his own handwriting and in 
 his pocket when we were together. When we reached what he thought 
 was a place secure against interruption he read and showed it to me, and 
 then, at my request, read it a second time for my suggestions. I made 
 one which he adopted and advised him about the time and circum- 
 stances in which it should be issued. But we were interrupted three 
 times by Mr. Seward, who came through closed doors and two empty 
 
 7 This letter and the one that follows are in the Gideon Welles manuscripts in 
 the New York Public Library. 
 
SENATE VERSUS CABINET 365 
 
 rooms to find us and tried to hush up our conference, though he could 
 have had no more than a suspicion, if he had that, of the subject of our 
 conversation. Mr. Lincoln requested me not to talk about it, 'for,' said 
 he, 'no human being has seen this or knows anything about it.' I think 
 he wanted a witness to the fact that it was all his own work. Carpen- 
 ter's picture groups the figures so that it would appear that Seward has 
 just finished his draft and Mr. Lincoln was reading it for the first time. 
 But the fact is Seward was not very well pleased with the measure." 
 When Carpenter's painting was hung in the Capitol — first on the 
 landing stair wall of the House of Representatives, recently transferred 
 to the old Supreme Court room — significant changes had been made. 
 In 1878 Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson purchased the stodgy masterpiece 
 from the artist for $25,000 and presented it to the United States Govern- 
 ment. It was unveiled before the joint assemblage of the House and 
 Senate with impressive ceremonies, James A. Garfield, subsequently 
 the murdered twentieth President, and Alexander H. Stephens, Vice- 
 President of the defunct Confederacy, providing the oratory. When 
 the veil was drawn aside, it appeared that the criticisms which Lin- 
 coln's friends had lavished on what they regarded as a caricature of 
 history had not been without effect. In the scene which thousands of 
 visitors to the Capitol now look upon every year, Lincoln is indubitably 
 the central figure. The quill pen which for several years had rested 
 close to Seward's fingers had been transferred to Lincoln's right hand. 
 The mass of papers lying on the table, which, to Mr. Barney and others, 
 seemed intended to picture Seward as the author of the Proclamation, 
 are clutched firmly by the President. Lincoln is no longer bending at- 
 tentively towards Seward, as his first Secretary apparently explains the 
 document, but is gazing straight ahead, while the other faces do not 
 seem especially interested in the "Premier" of the cabinet, except per- 
 haps Gideon Welles, who casts upon him a benevolent and slightly dis- 
 approving countenance. Many other alterations of less importance 
 have been added to the first phase of the picture, which Lincoln had 
 looked upon and, utterly oblivious of the undue importance placed 
 upon his favorite adviser, had pronounced "as good as it could be 
 made." It is the engraving of the original version, however, which still 
 hangs in a multitude of old-fashioned American homes and still has 
 the annoying habit of appearing in books devoted to the Emancipator. 8 
 
 8 The unrevised version even appears in so comprehensive a work as Sandburg's 
 Lincoln-The War Years. Ill, 498. 
 

BOOK SIX 
 
 C CA<25^ #7&i r TA£ Blair s" jj 
 
I 
 
 T 
 
 J_HE YEAR 1864 proved to be a critical one in the history of the 
 Lincoln cabinet. Before its end the reorganization which had been 
 threatened so many times had become an accomplished fact. The 
 change, however, represented no triumph for the Sumners, the Wades, 
 the Chandlers, and the Greeleys who had struggled and intrigued so 
 fiercely for a whole presidential term to gain control of affairs. The 
 reconstruction was the work not of attacks from without, but of dis- 
 sensions within. By December 1864, only two of the seven whom 
 Lincoln had appointed on March 5, 1861, remained around his coun- 
 cil table. William H. Seward and Gideon Welles still occupied their 
 familiar, if somewhat uneasy, seats. But Salmon Portland Chase and 
 Montgomery Blair had succumbed to the political complications of 
 Lincoln's second presidential campaign, and Edward Bates, in his 
 seventy-second year, had retired to a comfortable old age in St. Louis. 
 The mere fact that Chase's was the most spectacular resignation indi- 
 cates the extent to which the radical attempts to reorganize the cab- 
 inet to their advantage had miscarried. 
 
 That the cabinet disintegrated in 1864 was not surprising; the really 
 astonishing thing was that it had held together so long. No such un- 
 congenial or contentious group had ever assembled beneath the White 
 House roof. Lincoln's conception of a coalition was politically sound, 
 but on the personal side it inevitably led to trouble. For the most part 
 Lincoln's councilors were forceful men, with their own programs, 
 their own ambitions, their own vanities, jealousies, obstinacies, and de- 
 fects of temper. Each had his set of ideas and his personal following, 
 and on few matters had any two agreed. The criticism constantly made 
 that the cabinet was not a "unit," that each of its members went his 
 own way and lived by himself in a watertight compartment, was 
 largely justified. An inner bloc — Blair, Welles, and Bates — did re- 
 main on approving personal terms, but that was the only element of 
 harmony. Perhaps a qualification to this statement should be made in 
 
370 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the case of Blair and Bates, who had little personal regard for each 
 other, and who at times sharply disagreed in matters of politics and 
 the conduct of the war. Still, these two positive characters generally 
 held the same views on important questions — such, for example, as 
 Reconstruction and the future of the Negro — belonged to the same 
 wing of the party, and so may be linked with Welles as forming an 
 anti-Chase, anti-Seward, and anti-Stanton entente. From the Diaries 
 of Chase and Welles, and from the memoranda of Blair, could be culled 
 an entertaining anthology of elegant extracts in which their fellow 
 statesmen are described, over and over again, as deceitful, scheming, 
 avaricious of power, and disloyal to the President. Both Welles and 
 Bates esteemed Chase an ignoramus in matters of finance — a judgment 
 that posterity does not accept; while Blair did not hesitate to denounce 
 the Secretary of the Treasury as a "traitor" to Abraham Lincoln. The 
 feelings all three entertained for Stanton were unutterable. The elder 
 Blair's conviction that Stanton would "betray any man, no matter what 
 his obligations to him, if he stood in the way of his selfish and ambitious 
 schemes" was likewise that of his son. In the last year of their official as- 
 sociation, Blair and Stanton were not on speaking terms. They would 
 enter the cabinet room, take their seats without the usual greetings, and 
 sit throughout the session oblivious of each other's presence. Relations 
 between Blair and Seward were scarcely more cordial. The stories of 
 wild altercations in cabinet that now and then reached the newspapers 
 were usually exaggerated, but material in plenty existed for the repor- 
 torial talent to build upon. Maunsell B. Field once complained to Sew- 
 ard that he was keeping no diary, thereby depriving posterity of a most 
 illuminating record. It would contain little, Seward replied, except a 
 squalid account of quarrels within the cabinet, and would disgrace the 
 nation if ever exposed to public view. Real patriotism demanded 
 silence. 
 
 Long before the convention of 1864 Seward had become one of the 
 strongest of Lincoln's supporters for re-election. "As they sat together 
 by the fireside," relates Frederick W. Seward, "or in the carriage, the 
 conversation between them, however it began, always drifted back to 
 the same channel — the progress of the great national struggle. Both 
 loved humor, and however trite the theme, Lincoln always found some 
 quaint illustration from his frontier life, and Seward some case in point 
 in his long public career, that gave it new light." Seward was probably 
 not unacquainted with a talk that had recently taken place between 
 Lincoln and Thurlow Weed. "Is there any man in the Democratic 
 party," Lincoln had solemnly asked this New York politician, "who 
 can push this war one day faster and one day further than I can?" 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 371 
 
 "Why? " "Because if there is such a man I want him to take my place." 
 Lincoln was so serious that Weed took up the matter with the Demo- 
 cratic leaders and found that the "war Democrats" were prepared to 
 support Lincoln in the approaching campaign, and that the other ele- 
 ment in the opposing ranks, which desired a "negotiated peace" with 
 the "South," was in such a state of confusion that it need not be 
 regarded. 
 
 The same authority pictures a charming scene between President and 
 Secretary of State in which the question of the succession was dis- 
 cussed. The conversation took place at one of those evening talks that 
 had apparently become essential to the contentment of both men. Lin- 
 coln confided that he had hoped to see Seward his successor — thus 
 compensating the Secretary and his friends for the disappointment of 
 1860. "No," Seward answered, "that is all past and settled. The logic 
 of events requires you to be your own successor. You were elected in 
 1860 but the southern states refused to submit. They thought the deci- 
 sion made at the polls could be reversed in the field. They are still in 
 arms and their hope now is that you and your party will be voted down 
 at the next election. When that election is held and they find the people 
 reaffirming their decision to have you President, I think the Rebellion 
 will collapse." x 
 
 Another member of the cabinet, however, did not view his prospects 
 with such philosophy. Chase had entered Lincoln's administration with 
 the fixed determination of becoming his successor. Events had not dis- 
 couraged, but rather incited this ambition. Not only had three years 
 demonstrated, to Chase's satisfaction, Lincoln's utter inadequacy; they 
 had provided a compelling issue on which he believed he could win. 
 Chase had two distinct sides to his nature — he was a genuine idealist 
 where the cause of the Negro was involved, but a practical aspirant 
 where his political fortunes were at stake. His attitude on this question 
 illustrates both phases of his character. Championship of the Negro, a 
 noble cause in itself, offered a promising issue on which to ride into 
 the Presidency. Chase's hesitation when Lincoln first read his decree 
 giving freedom to 4,000,000 Negroes has already been noted; in a way 
 he resented that document; it seemed a kind of impertinence, an en- 
 croachment on territory sacred to himself, an attempt to rob him of his 
 presidential issue. The Negro and his future were Chase's property — 
 let no man, not even the President, trespass upon that sacred soil! The 
 extent to which extremists in the political, journalistic, and religious 
 worlds reverenced Chase as the apostle of the black man inevitably made 
 this conviction sink deeper in his mind. The man's vanity did the rest. 
 
 Reward's Seward, III, 196, 197. 
 
372 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 With him it was a matter of religious conviction. He devoutly believed 
 that God had appointed him His chosen agent in this exalted mission. 
 Now and then, in references to his chief, Chase would patronizingly 
 approve his amiable nature, natural kindness, and "good intentions," 
 but that the man was vastly superior to himself, in intellect and char- 
 acter, never crossed his mind. "I do not wonder," he wrote John 
 Young, October 27, 1862, "that dissatisfaction prevails. The President, 
 from the purest motives, committed the management of the war almost 
 exclusively to his political opponents." As late as February 1, 1864, 
 Chase was writing in the same key. "If to his kindness of spirit and 
 good sense he joined strong will and energetic action there would be 
 little left to wish for him. As it is, I think he is likely to close his first 
 term with more honor than he will his second, should he be re-elected." 
 Welles described Chase as complimenting the President "for honesty ' 
 of intentions, good common-sense, more sagacity than he has credit 
 for," but thought him "greatly wanting in will and decision, in compre- 
 hensiveness, in self-reliance, and clear, well-defined purpose." 2 
 
 Perhaps the most annoying instance of this condescension — praise 
 of Lincoln's minor qualities at a time when Chase was moving heaven 
 and earth to undermine him — appears in a letter to the same corre- 
 spondent of November 26, 1863: "I can never permit myself to be 
 driven into any hostile or unfriendly position as to Mr. Lincoln. His 
 course towards me has always been so fair and kind; his progress 
 towards entire agreement with me as to the great question of slavery 
 has been so constant, though rather slower than I wished for, and his 
 general character is so marked by traits which command respect and 
 affection that I can never consent to anything which he himself could 
 or would consider incompatible with perfect honor and good faith, if 
 I were capable — which I hope I am not — of a departure from either, 
 even where an enemy might be concerned." 3 Here Chase draws his 
 self-portrait as the man who was really the soul and the brains of the 
 administration, and Lincoln as a good-natured underling whose increas- 
 ing merit was measured by the extent to which "his progress" showed 
 "entire agreement" with his Secretary of the Treasury. Perhaps Chase's 
 attitude toward Lincoln and his estimate of his qualities come out best 
 in a diary entry for October 11, 1862. He asked a certain Major Hal- 
 pin, a dinner guest, his estimate of the President. The mere fact that the 
 Secretary should have put such a question to a minor officer, and have 
 seen no impropriety in recording the fact, indicates his lack of respect 
 for the commander in chief. "A man irresolute," he quotes the Major's 
 
 2 Welles, Diary. I, 413. 
 
 3 Schuckers, op. cit., p. 495. 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 373 
 
 answer, "but of honest intentions — born a poor white in a slave state, 
 and, of course, among aristocrats — kind in spirit and not envious, but 
 anxious for approval, especially of those to whom he has been accus- 
 tomed to look up — hence solicitous of the support of slave holders in 
 the border states and unwilling to offend them — without the large 
 mind necessary to grasp great questions — uncertain of himself and in 
 many things ready to lean too much on others." This was the kind of 
 appraisement that tickled Chase's ears. "I found him well read and 
 extremely intelligent" is his comment on this insolent understrapper. 4 
 While Chase, with Christian forbearance, evidently strove to take 
 as charitable a view as possible of Lincoln himself, he had nothing but 
 contempt for the administration. His favorite criticism, set forth con- 
 stantly in the letters that issued in a steady stream day after day from 
 his pen, was that there was no administration. "I feel myself," he wrote 
 William E. Dodge, March 31, 1864, "like one without a chart among 
 forces of wind and currents which he cannot measure or manage. I can 
 only do my best, and trusting Him with whom are the issues of all 
 events." 5 In January 1864 Chase wrote Judge Dickinson of Ohio, 
 sounding him on Ohio's preference for the candidate at the approach- 
 ing Republican convention. The judge returned a frank but apparently 
 most unsatisfactory opinion; the sentiment of Ohio strongly inclined to 
 Lincoln. That is "most certainly erroneous," Chase replied; "the ad- 
 ministration cannot be continued as it is, for properly speaking there is 
 in fact no administration. There are departments and there is a Presi- 
 dent. The latter leaves administration substantially to the heads of the 
 former, deciding himself comparatively few questions." 6 This was, of 
 course, the familiar criticism — the one which had produced the crisis 
 of late 1862, and almost accomplished the disruption of the cabinet. 
 "Had there been an administration in the true sense of the word," 
 Chase wrote the Reverend J. Leavitt, one of the editors of the Inde- 
 pendent, a paper which, under Theodore Tilton, had been assailing 
 Lincoln for a long time and proclaiming the virtues of Chase as a de- 
 sirable successor, "a President conferring with his cabinet and taking 
 their united judgments and with their aid enforcing activity, economy 
 and energy in all departments of public service, we could have spoken 
 boldly and defied the world." 7 The time came when Chase ceased to 
 speak of the cabinet as a cabinet. "I am now going," he once informed 
 Thurlow Weed, "to a meeting of the department heads." Dissatisfied 
 
 4 Chase, Diary, p. 105. 
 
 6 Schuckers, op. ch. y p. 400. 
 
 6 Warden, op. cit., p. 564. 
 
 7 Ibid., p. 562. 
 
374 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 as he was with the cabinet as a working force, and with its members 
 as individuals — except Stanton — the man's confidence in himself never 
 weakened. "So far, I think I have made few mistakes. Indeed, in look- 
 ing back over the whole ground, with an earnest desire to detect error 
 and correct it, I am not able to see where, if I had to do my work all 
 over again, I could in any matter do materially otherwise than I 
 have." 8 
 
 It is perhaps not strange that a statesman who entertained these ideas 
 of his chief, and at the same time regarded so favorably his own quali- 
 fications, should have turned to himself as the most desirable candidate 
 for the succession. The influence of aspiration for high office in warp- 
 ing the character of public men is one of the most fruitful lessons to be 
 learned from American history. Probably none of the great men so 
 disastrously affected by this ambition — such as Calhoun, Clay, or 
 Webster — presented so melancholy a spectacle as Chase. In no instance 
 has this desperate search for the unattainable attained such morbid 
 proportions. "I shall ever strive to be first wherever I may be," he 
 wrote in 1830, at the age of twenty-two, "let what success shall attend 
 the effort," and from his earliest appearance in public life, the Presi- 
 dency not only became his goal, in his belief it was his heaven-predes- 
 tined right; any man who interfered with his quest, in his mind, was 
 little less than sacrilegious. That support in this infatuation which 
 Chase could not arouse in the outside world he found in his domestic 
 circle. His long pursuit of the Presidency — for it did not end in 1864, 
 but was resumed in 1868 and 1872 — introduced a new phenomenon 
 into American politics. Up to this time, women had played little or no 
 part in directing the course of parties. One or two had occasionally 
 risen above the not too imposing state to which the standards of the 
 time had assigned them. Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolly 
 Madison, Harriet Lane, Adele Cutts Douglas, Jessie Benton Fremont, 
 were women who stood conspicuous in the American world of their 
 day by virtue of character, social charm, and, at least in the case of Mrs. 
 Adams and Mrs. Fremont, an apprehensive mind; but not one of them 
 could be regarded as exercising a definite influence on history. One 
 woman indeed, Peggy O'Neill, had caused the disruption of Jackson's 
 cabinet and helped elect Van Buren President, but in this she was the 
 victim, rather than the commander of events. 
 
 8 Letter to J. W. Hartwell, February 2, 1864. Warden, op. cit. } p. 570. 
 
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 .ATE CHASE had many of the qualities needed for activity of 
 this kind. She was young, she was beautiful, she had an assertive, ag- 
 gressive character, and, if a mind not well stocked with knowledge 
 and culture, a quick wit, intelligent conversation, and a political sense 
 which, in the judgment of most of her contemporaries, exceeded that of 
 her father. In the spring of 1860, Carl Schurz, then thirty-one years 
 old, passing through Columbus, Ohio, was invited to be a guest at the 
 Chase home. Chase was then governor; the Chicago Convention, at 
 which he hoped to be nominated, was only a few weeks ahead; natu- 
 rally Schurz, leader of the Germans in Wisconsin, was a person worth 
 cultivating at that particular time. Chase and his daughter impressed 
 this keen observer as a remarkable pair. "More than anyone else Chase 
 looked the great man. . . . His dignity of deportment never left him 
 even in his unbending moods, for it was perfectly natural and uncon- 
 scious. It really belonged to him like the majestic figure that nature 
 had given him." Presently Kate entered the breakfast room. She "sa- 
 luted me very kindly and then let herself down upon her chair with 
 the graceful lightness of a bird that, folding its wings, perches upon 
 the branch of a tree. She was then about eighteen years old, tall and 
 slender and exceedingly well formed. Her features were not at all 
 regularly beautiful according to the classic rule. Her little nose, some- 
 what audaciously tipped up, would perhaps not have passed muster 
 with a severe critic, but it fitted pleasingly into her face with its large, 
 languid, but at the same time vivacious hazel eyes, shaded by long 
 dark lashes and arched over by proud eyebrows. The fine forehead 
 was framed in waving, gold-brown hair. She had something imperial 
 in the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an exquisite 
 natural charm. No wonder that she came to be admired as a great 
 beauty and broke many hearts. After the usual polite commonplaces, 
 the conversation at the breakfast table, in which Miss Kate took a 
 lively and remarkably intelligent part, soon turned upon politics" * — 
 1 Schurz, Carl, Reminiscences. McClure and Company, 1907-1908. II, 169-170. 
 
376 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 and the imminent national convention, Chase making no secret of his 
 anxiety for the support of Schurz and his German following. 
 
 A few years later, another young man, James A. Garfield, was a 
 guest at the Chase home — this time in Washington, at E and Sixth 
 Streets. Garfield passed many pleasant hours with Kate, playing chess, 
 escorting her to army camps, occasionally taking a gallop in the coun- 
 try surrounding Washington — "she is a splendid rider," he notes. 
 "Kate is quite a belle here from what I learn. They have a fine residence 
 and live in splendid style. . . . She is a woman of good sense and pretty 
 good culture — has a good form but not a pretty face, its beauty being 
 marred by a nose slightly inclined to pug. She has probably more social 
 influence and makes a better impression generally than any other 
 cabinet lady." 2 Most observers did not use qualifications when de- 
 scribing Kate's beauty. The petulant nose that impressed these two 
 romantic young men as a blemish seemed to others only to enhance the 
 girl's provoking charm. "Kate Chase spent Tuesday night with us," 
 Jay Cooke wrote his brother Henry, June 13, 1861. "She is a glorious 
 girl." Her appearance at her first White House reception almost imme- 
 diately lifted Kate to the social leadership of the new administration. 
 Certainly the stately father and the brilliant, animated daughter made 
 a handsome pair on entering the East Room. As Mrs. Seward, wife of 
 the "Premier," was an invalid and seldom appeared in Washington, 
 this left Kate, as hostess of the cabinet officer second in rank, virtually 
 first lady of the cabinet and chief assistant to Mrs. Lincoln at state 
 functions. But the post of second-in-command by no means satisfied 
 her ambitions. At this first reception the girl of twenty-one, dressed 
 in white silk with sprays of jasmine, made rather a pale figure of Mary 
 Todd, in white satin and black lace, forty-three, mother of four chil- 
 dren, who, if by no means the dowd that malicious gossip pictured her, 
 could hardly compete with the tall, exquisitely framed figure — the 
 brown eyes melting into blue, searching, demanding; the rust-gold 
 hair; the small but willful mouth; the little, perfectly formed chin; the 
 lively laughter and spirited talk of her youthful rival. For rival to the 
 President's wife Kate became from the day she entered Washington. 
 Just as Chase regarded himself as the man morally entitled to rule 
 the administration, so his daughter believed that the position fate had 
 intended for her was to be eventually mistress of the White House. 
 That she sought to make herself the center of White House functions, 
 generally with success — drawing to her circle the most distinguished, 
 such as the French princes, with whom, thanks to a daily association 
 
 3 Smith, T. C, Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield. Yale University Press, 
 1925. I, 238, 242. 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 377 
 
 for nine years with Mademoiselle Janon at Miss Haines's School in 
 New York, she could easily converse in their own language — was 
 perhaps natural enough, and it was also to be expected that Mrs. Lin- 
 coln would resent her pretensions and regard her soon as a presumptu- 
 ous enemy. The fact that Lincoln, like all men, liked to bend over the 
 lovely creature and bask in her entertaining talk did not improve 
 Mary's fondness for the girl. 
 
 Yet Kate Chase, radiant as she seemed, had had a rather unhappy 
 childhood and youth. Chase's entry in his Diary on the day of Kate's 
 birth gives some indication of the time to come. A good part of the 
 hours of the mother's travail Chase spent upon his knees praying "God 
 to support and comfort my dear wife, to preserve the life of the child 
 and to save both from sin. . . . The child is pronounced pretty," he 
 subsequently notes. "I think otherwise. May God give the child a good 
 understanding that she may keep His commandments." When the little 
 girl first evinced positive traits — she was really a personality at three, 
 self-centered, impatient of control, always exacting admiration and 
 seeking to make the world revolve around herself — it was by religious 
 admonition that the patient father strove to reform her ways. An out- 
 burst of temper was reproved by a repetition of the 119th Psalm; after 
 a particularly outrageous escapade — such as misbehaving at morning 
 prayers — Chase would read the tiny impenitent an extract from the 
 Book of Job. "Was obliged to correct my dear little Katie — prayed 
 with her" — Chase's Diary abounds with notations of this kind. It was 
 not only the child's charm and imperiousness that brought adoring 
 circles wherever she went; she had a quick, bright mind, and at five 
 could read and write. "Heard little Katie read Bible as usual," was 
 Chase's entry at the end of a most satisfactory day. The mother's in- 
 validism — she, like so many women of that day, was a consumptive — 
 and consequent movings from place to place in search of health, height- 
 ened the melancholy of Katie's early surroundings. She was only five 
 when her mother died; fourteen months afterward Chase married again 
 — for the third time; and Katie's domestic happiness, such as it had 
 been, came to an end. She resented, with all her fiery little soul, this 
 strange woman whom she was instructed to call "mother" and obey; 
 by this time also what was unquestionably the most impelling emotion 
 of her life, her worship of her father — beside whom, in her estimation, 
 all other humans were dross — had taken deep root; she disliked this 
 intruder intensely and was exceedingly jealous also of a little half-sister, 
 Janette, who presently began to divide her father's attention. 
 
 At the age of seven, therefore, Chase carried the unhappy rebel to 
 New York, and installed her in the fashionable school conducted by 
 
378 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Miss Henrietta Haines. Here she remained until her sixteenth year. 
 That is to say, for most of Kate's childhood she was motherless and 
 homeless. The Haines establishment ranked high socially; all the arts 
 becoming a young lady of station were religiously cultivated; the in- 
 struction was of a more solid character than was usual in such places, 
 for Miss Haines was a cultivated lady — tall, handsome, full of dignity 
 and poise — and believed in something more than embroidery and a 
 smattering of French as desirable for girls on the threshold of life. 
 There was plenty, too, that appealed to Kate's vainer side. She was the 
 belle of school cotillions, the most striking figure in the daily walks 
 up Fifth Avenue, the most prominent performer at school exhibitions; 
 and, in the horseback rides in the north part of Adanhattan Island she 
 easily outdistanced all her companions. But her life was still a solitary 
 one. She did not go home for Christmas and Easter — traveling was too 
 difficult in those primitive days; her father practically never came to 
 New York; and, except for an occasional visit from Charles Sumner, 
 who formed an attachment for "this very intelligent child," as he called 
 her, that was to last a lifetime, school was unrelieved by domestic 
 affections and influences. When Kate, at the age of sixteen, returned 
 to Ohio to become the mistress of her father's household — for the 
 third wife had died several years before — she had grown to be a stun- 
 ning girl, vigorous in body and mind, better educated than most, but 
 dominant in spirit and rather contemptuous of the local population, 
 especially the masculine contingent — those who knew anything of 
 Shakespeare began to refer to her as "Kate the Shrew," though their 
 attempts at taming grotesquely failed — and defiant of convention. By 
 this time, her father was a national figure; he had served in the Senate, 
 was a powerful antislavery leader, had become governor of Ohio and, 
 in the estimation of friends, was a likely presidential candidate. Barren 
 as Kate found life in these rustic surroundings, one development in the 
 governor's existence entranced her. From all over the nation shoals of 
 letters came to Chase extolling his fitness for the presidential succession. 
 Kate found these the most interesting literature she had ever read. She 
 would pore over them days on end, and discuss them with her father 
 at the dinner table and on buggy rides — for she used dutifully to drive 
 the governor to and from his office morning and evening. Distinguished 
 visitors gathered at the Chase board; slavery, the growth of the Repub- 
 lican Party, the critical presidential year of 1860, were the subjects of 
 discussion; Carl Schurz, in the passage quoted above, says that Kate 
 Chase entered into political discussion with "remarkable intelligence" 
 and there is plenty of testimony from others to the same effect. This 
 correspondence and these visitors only confirmed the belief already 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 379 
 
 lodged in Kate's mind that her father was the greatest living American 
 and stimulated an increasing contempt for all who presumed to dispute 
 with him that eminence. Especially was the lanky backwoodsman from 
 Illinois who had snatched the prize from its rightful heir at the Chicago 
 Convention of 1860 an object of dislike. In Washington, the pleasure 
 Lincoln displayed in her society naturally appealed to the girl's vanity, 
 but at heart she never ceased to regard him as an enemy, the man who 
 was standing between her idol and his destined goal. 
 
 Attempts to portray Kate Chase as an intellectual would not be war- 
 ranted; she was a woman of strong mind and strong will, and in force 
 of character superior to her father. Certain positive qualities derived 
 from Scottish ancestors that had not been implanted in Salmon Portland 
 had, by a strange but not unprecedented quirk of heredity, found 
 lodgment in a fascinating girl. The softer feminine qualities, however, 
 had passed her by. Love and tenderness were not Kate's dominating 
 traits. She later did develop a maternal feeling for her little sister Nettie, 
 whose arrival at first had aroused jealousy; but no man — except per- 
 haps Roscoe Conkling, the dashing, handsome New York Senator, 
 with whom Kate's name was afterward associated — ever held much 
 sway over her emotions. For her there was only one man in the world 
 and that was her father. Any attempt to encroach on her exclusive pos- 
 session of this godlike figure aroused resentment. Today Salmon P. 
 Chase and his daughter Kate are buried side by side in Spring Grove 
 Cemetery in Cincinnati, with a grandiose monument erected in the 
 statesman's honor; that would have seemed to her the appropriate rest- 
 ing place. Though Chase gave the child the name of his first wife, 
 Catherine Garniss, there are anecdotes indicating that the grown 
 woman was as jealous of this first of Chase's loves as of the stepmother 
 who succeeded her own. Robert B. Warden, Chase's chosen biographer, 
 charged that Kate had withheld essential documents because they 
 would have revealed her father's great affection for this wife. In Wash- 
 ington the vigilant protection Kate maintained over her father, where 
 aspiring women were concerned, had its humorous aspects. The Secre- 
 tary was only fifty-six when he joined Lincoln's cabinet; his handsome 
 exterior inevitably made him an appealing prospect to women; more- 
 over he himself, scrupulously correct as was his life, had a strong liking 
 for their society. He enjoyed nothing better, after a hard day in the 
 office, than to drop in late for a cup of tea with the beautiful Adele 
 Cutts, widow of Stephen A. Douglas; he would even take her driving 
 in Rock Creek Park; and with at least two women, Mrs. Carlotta East- 
 man of Beverly, Massachusetts, and Miss Susan Walker of Cincinnati, 
 he carried on a half-sentimental, half-platonic correspondence. That 
 
380 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Chase stood in awe of his daughter, indeed was afraid of her, is evident 
 from the fact that this correspondence, so far as Kate was concerned, 
 was clandestine. The ladies were instructed to send their letters to the 
 Treasury office, not to the Chase home. It is not unlikely that Chase 
 would have married Mrs. Eastman, but recoiled before the fear of his 
 daughter's hostility. He did invite her to visit the home in E Street, 
 but the coolness of Kate's reception caused the lady to cut the visit 
 short. When Chase became President, as Kate unflinchingly believed 
 he would, she intended to be the mistress of the White House. Thus 
 ambition was the controlling incentive of her life. That she had many 
 suitors was inevitable; she enjoyed their admiration, but marriage ap- 
 parently did not enter her scheme of things. One of the men gossips 
 reported her as having rebuffed was Lord Lyons, the bachelor minister 
 from Great Britain. She was said to have remarked that she would 
 never marry, but intended to devote all her interest to her father and 
 his career. In a way her marriage to Senator William Sprague of Rhode 
 Island did not violate this resolution. That her devotion to the Secretary 
 of the Treasury had much to do with her acceptance of this cavalier, 
 after keeping him dangling in uncertainty for more than two years, 
 was the harsh judgment of the time. 
 
 For Sprague had the one thing needed to make the Chase existence 
 complete — money. The lack of this essential had been a lifelong em- 
 barrassment to Chase and his daughter. He had never practiced law 
 long enough to lay aside a nest egg; the legal services that had brought 
 him fame, as "lawyer for runaway slaves," he had rendered without 
 fee; the fifteen years before 1860 he had lived on the meager stipends 
 paid governors and Senators in a parsimonious age. In ordinary times 
 this had been hardship enough; but it took on fairly tragic proportions 
 with Kate's attainment of womanhood. She had a passion for fine 
 clothes and expensive living, and her extravagance, even as a child in 
 Miss Haines's School, had given her father many anxious days. One 
 morning Chase received a bill forwarded by Kate, then fifteen, for a 
 summer outfit, consisting of a hundred separate items, "all for personal 
 adornment," endorsed in this businesslike fashion: "I have examined 
 this bill and find everything correct. C. G. Chase." The total sum, $305, 
 would perhaps not seem so startling today, but for a poor Ohio gover- 
 nor, with a salary of $1800 a year — and not a very large income from 
 other sources — it was staggering. 
 
 Chase's position as Secretary of the Treasury, with a brilliant daugh- 
 ter who soon became the rage of Washington, demanded at least a 
 dignified background. His salary of $8000 could not supply it. Daily 
 piling up debts for household expenses and a bank account that was 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 381 
 
 frequently overdrawn hardly comported with that personal dignity 
 which was Chase's most conspicuous asset. The stringency forced this 
 most righteous of men to steps that approached impropriety. He bor- 
 rowed money, for example, from Hiram Barney, to whom he had 
 allotted the most powerful office in the Treasury Department, that of 
 Collector of the Port of New York; he solicited loans, if not for him- 
 self, for relatives and friends, from Jay Cooke, the Philadelphia banker 
 who was the fiscal agent of the Treasury Department. Whatever quali- 
 ties young Sprague may have lacked, this hiatus in the Chase economy 
 he could certainly bridge. He was a calico printer from Providence, 
 Rhode Island, and was said to be the richest man in New England, the 
 newspapers estimating and exaggerating his fortune at $25,000,000. All 
 this and the business that produced it Sprague had inherited; that he 
 lacked business ability the future showed — for his money slipped 
 through Sprague's hands in the seventies, he himself dying unnoticed in 
 Paris as recently as 1915. In 1861 in Washington, however, Sprague 
 was the catch of the season, though it cannot be said that he had any 
 other recommendation. In appearance, with slight frame and sallow 
 face, he was not prepossessing. He had left school at fifteen with little 
 education. He was a hard drinker — a failing that eventually became a 
 vice, causing unseemly spectacles at social gatherings and on the Senate 
 floor. Personal scandals, one involving an illegitimate child, had caused 
 his exclusion from the best circles of Providence. He became governor 
 of Rhode Island at the age of twenty-nine and Senator in 1862, by the 
 corrupt use of money. His governorship alone was said to have cost 
 him $100,000. John Hay, in his Diary, 3 curtly disposes of Sprague with 
 the remark that he was "a small, insignificant youth who bought his 
 place." It seems a little strange that a man so rigidly moral as Salmon P. 
 Chase should have manifested, if not a cordial, at least an acquiescent 
 attitude towards such a son-in-law. Perhaps could he have foreseen the 
 day when Sprague would drag his wife's name in the mire, starting 
 divorce proceedings against her on the most scandalous charges, and 
 when the newspapers would be filled day after day with stories of 
 their quarrels, he would have attempted to dissuade Kate from her 
 dangerous experiment. 
 
 But the wedding took place in October 1863, in the presence of 
 Lincoln — Mrs. Lincoln did not attend — the cabinet, and fashionable 
 and political Washington, including a liberal representation of the 
 diplomatic corps. The newspapers declared it to be the most preten- 
 tious function of the kind Washington had ever known, and Kate, in 
 white velvet gown and long train, the most magnificent of Washington 
 
 8 Hay, op. cit., p. 12. April 26, 1861. 
 
382 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 brides. For months afterward the doings of the Spragues — their parties, 
 Kate's jewels and wardrobe, the $1,000,000 house, Canonchet, which 
 she built near Point Judith, Narragansett Bay, the elaborate entertain- 
 ments given there — occupied the newspaper reading public. The press 
 treated the birth of her first baby almost like a royal event; the sad 
 fate that pursued the marriage acted true to form in the matter of this 
 boy, who, twenty-five years afterward, committed suicide. Public 
 judgment on the alliance and the motives that had inspired it were 
 accurately set forth by Henry Villard in his Memoirs. Sprague, he 
 wrote, "had very limited mental capacity but had reached political 
 distinction at an early age through the influence of real or reputed 
 great wealth. It was at his headquarters that he became acquainted with 
 Kate, the beautiful and gifted daughter of Secretary Chase. The ac- 
 quaintance ripened into an engagement that was the social sensation 
 of the day. She was far superior to him in every way and married him 
 for the enjoyment and power of his money. It turned out one of the 
 unhappiest marriages ever known in American society, ending in moral 
 and material wretchedness for both parties." 4 
 
 In marrying Sprague, Kate did not give up her father. The young 
 millionaire purchased the fine mansion the Secretary had had such 
 difficulty in maintaining, and Chase continued to live, as a paying 
 guest, under his son-in-law's roof. With her husband's vast income at 
 her disposal, Kate converted this handsome establishment into a head- 
 quarters for the promotion of the Chase presidential campaign. The 
 more sordid pursuit of supporters, the angling for delegates, could be 
 safely left to the politicians enlisted in the cause. Kate's activities were 
 of a more subtle kind, the making of friends by the adroit exercise of 
 social flattery. Her receptions and dinners were the great events of 
 Washington; an invitation to the home the most desired. In that critical 
 winter of 1863-1864, Mrs. Sprague distributed her favors mainly with 
 one end in view. Any politician from the provinces, irrespective of his 
 standing at home or his personal graces, became the object of her 
 attention — provided he was likely to control delegates to the June 
 convention. Her smaller dinner and supper parties were occasions for 
 the discussions, plans, and even plots that formed the necessary prelude 
 to the open contest. Even so strait-laced a Puritan as Lyman Trumbull, 
 after having been admitted to Kate's inner circle on E Street, began 
 to see value in her father as a presidential candidate. 
 
 4 Villard, Henry, Memoirs. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904. 1, 175. The selec- 
 tions from this book are used by permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin 
 Company. 
 
Ill 
 
 I 
 
 N ONE RESPECT the Chase aspiration was perhaps the most pa- 
 thetic episode in American politics, for in the whole extent of the 
 nation only two persons unreservedly and sincerely embraced the 
 cause. These were Chase himself and his daughter Kate. Even after 
 Gettysburg and Vicksburg, great hostility prevailed in many quarters 
 against the Lincoln administration and loud cries were raised for a 
 more competent conduct of the war. That Lincoln could not be re- 
 elected for a second term was the conviction of many competent 
 observers — including, at times, Lincoln himself. In few cases, however, 
 did the opponents of Lincoln turn with genuine eagerness to Chase. 
 There were several groups to which the Secretary might have naturally 
 looked for support. For two decades the professional abolitionists had 
 regarded him as their political reliance. Yet not many of these, in 1863 
 and 1864, hailed him as their chosen candidate. Henry Wilson, Charles 
 Sumner, Joshua Giddings, and Thaddeus Stevens were almost the only 
 influential men in this company that seemed to favor — at times rather 
 faintly — his nomination. Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Gar- 
 rison showed little interest in the proposal; indeed, in the earlier stages 
 of the canvass, both these seasoned exhorters announced their prefer- 
 ence for Lincoln. Certain antislavery editors and preachers — such as 
 Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana, Joseph Medill of the Chicago Trib- 
 une, Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Tilton of the Independent, 
 Whitelaw Reid of the Cincinnati Gazette — wrote approvingly of Chase 
 though some changed their attitude as the discussion proceeded. Per- 
 haps the Secretary's most devoted boomer was William Wales, editor 
 of the Baltimore American, who frequently sent his editorials to Chase 
 for emendation in advance of publication. An article in the North 
 American Review, January 1864, by James Russell Lowell, one of the 
 leaders of the Boston intellectual world and a strong antislavery man, 
 eulogizing Lincoln's administration and eloquently advocating a second 
 term, grieved Chase as a disheartening blow directly from the house 
 of his friends. 
 
384 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 The one heroic band which, above all the rest, might be depended 
 upon to rush to his support was that radical group in Congress, the 
 Jacobins, who for three years had found in him their main support in 
 the cabinet, and whose views on Reconstruction and the future of the 
 Negro were identical with his own. Yet little encouragement came to 
 the Treasury head from this source. These leaders, for the most part, 
 abhorred Lincoln as President, and would have gone to almost any 
 extreme to dispossess him of the White House. Yet the alternative of 
 Chase in Lincoln's seat did not appeal to them as a satisfactory solution 
 of the problem. Thaddeus Stevens spoke a few approving words and 
 John Covode offered the Secretary the support of Pennsylvania, pro- 
 vided his faction could secure immediate disposal of the Treasury 
 patronage in the Keystone State — but these were the most friendly 
 responses Chase received from his cherished allies in Congress. William 
 Pitt Fessenden, his close associate in financing the war, and strident 
 critic of Abraham Lincoln, made no favorable sign. Ben Wade, chair- 
 man of the Jacobin Committee on the Conduct of the War, maintained 
 a flintlike silence. Zack Chandler kept belching forth his anathemas on 
 "Honest Old Abe," but spoke no word of commendation for Chase as 
 heir apparent. George W. Julian, the most idealistic of the extreme 
 radicals, never lifted up his eloquent voice in Chase's favor. James A. 
 Garfield, one of the younger of the firebrands and an unrestrained 
 critic of Lincoln — even after Emancipation he described him as a "sec- 
 ond rate Illinois lawyer" — regarded Chase's presidential hopes as a great 
 mistake and tried to persuade the deluded man to drop them. 
 
 What was the explanation for this lukewarm attitude? Mere politics 
 had much to do with it. Newspaper editors and other more or less 
 detached makers of public opinion were not so restricted in their ac- 
 tivities and utterances as Representatives and Senators. These latter 
 patriots, eager, as legislators always have been, for re-election, could 
 not too defiantly oppose public opinion in their districts, and, as 1863 
 drew to a close, no fact stood out more conspicuously than that the 
 voting rank and file of the Republican Party, the war Democrats, and 
 the soldiers in the field were demanding Father Abraham's renomina- 
 tion. The radicals might curse Lincoln under their breath — and even 
 in the cloakrooms of Congress — and pray for another candidate, but 
 they were not heroic enough to risk their political necks by doing 
 so publicly. Nor had the Jacobins forgotten how Chase, in Decem- 
 ber 1862, had egged them on in their revolutionary attempt to destroy 
 the cabinet, and then, at the critical moment, had turned against them. 
 Their favorite candidate was Fremont, though Grant to many seemed 
 the ideal man. 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 385 
 
 In the cabinet itself, in 1863 and 1864, Stanton alone encouraged 
 the Chase aspirations. The Seward- Weed machine in New York 
 opened all its batteries against them — and even Hiram Barney, Col- 
 lector at New York and one of the leaders of the anti-Seward contin- 
 gent, proved ^independable where Chase's presidential claims were 
 concerned. "Granny Bates," Attorney General, regarded Chase, be- 
 cause of his Negro policies, as one of the most evil influences in the 
 nation. To Welles, whose great hero was Lincoln, Chase seemed little 
 better than a renegade. But the man who above all, in cabinet and out, 
 proved most vitriolic against this attempt to undermine his chief was 
 Montgomery Blair. 
 
 The Soldiers' Home figures prominently in all accounts of Lincoln's 
 days in Washington — that retreat on the outskirts of Washington to 
 which a harassed President commonly sought sanctuary in the darkest 
 times of the war. But another refuge provided even more comfortable 
 relief from the torments of the National Capital. Silver Spring, a few 
 miles across the Maryland border, in addition to pastoral quiet, gave 
 human association of the most stimulating kind. The couple that pre- 
 sided over this suburban home, the elder Francis Preston Blair and his 
 wife, Violet Gist, could offer all that personal charm, that sympathy, 
 that understanding, that ever-ready advice and admonition so welcome 
 to a man called every day to meet a hundred problems and beset on 
 every hand by selfish intriguers. The very presence of these two experi- 
 enced political and social leaders was a balm. Both had now passed their 
 seventieth year and were basking in a life filled with beauty, culture, 
 troops of friends, and all the other essentials of a contented old age. 
 The sight of old man Blair, gray-headed, wrinkled, and stoop-shoul- 
 dered, moving among his shrubberies, sipping his Madeira in the Acorn 
 summerhouse, bending over his flower beds, lounging in his library 
 with a favorite volume, or surrounded by a few companions at tea, 
 formed perhaps the most soothing diversion in Lincoln's anxious days. 
 Unforgettable was the remembrance of the old man, clad in silk 
 dressing gown, in his beloved rose garden; he had the habit of picking 
 his blooms by running his fingers up the stalks, a procedure that left 
 nothing in his hands except the stemless flowers; he would thrust these 
 into his large pocket, arranging them, after returning to the house, in 
 a specially contrived silver dish. 
 
 This little ritual fairly symbolized the peace and delight of the Silver 
 Spring estate. And there were more robust forms of pleasure. Both 
 Blair and his wife were expert riders, and frequent gallopings about the 
 Maryland countryside and even into Washington did their part in 
 keeping them young and strong. Mrs. Blair never needed help in 
 
386 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 mounting or dismounting; a few mornings before her death, at the 
 age of eighty-six, she had her favorite round of exercise, getting on and 
 of! the horse without assistance. Lincoln entered wholeheartedly into 
 this existence. He especially liked the Blair grandchildren — there were 
 always several at hand — and used to join in their games. The appari- 
 tion of the long and lean President playing one o' cat with the younger 
 Blair generation — running to first base, with arms outstretched and 
 coattails billowing in the wind — was a sight not easily forgotten. There 
 were more serious moments. Lincoln enjoyed not only the sylvan, but 
 the intellectual aspects of the place. He was drawn to old man Blair 
 for the same reason that he was attracted to Seward. He loved his com- 
 ments on men and events, especially his reminiscences of a long politi- 
 cal experience. Moreover, the present concerned Blair as much as the 
 past; and, at least for the first two years of Lincoln's administration, 
 he remained the President's closest adviser in times of crisis. "Between 
 Francis P. Blair and Mr. Lincoln," wrote Ward Lamon in his Recollec- 
 tions of Abraham Lincoln, "there existed from first to last a confidential 
 relationship as close as that maintained by Mr. Lincoln with any other 
 man. To Mr. Blair he almost habitually revealed himself upon delicate 
 and grave subjects more freely than to any other. When he had con- 
 ceived an important but difficult plan, he was almost certain, before 
 giving it practical form, to try it by the touchstone of Mr. Blair's 
 fertile and acute mind." 
 
 But there was more to old man Blair than that gentleman himself; 
 he was the head of a kind of dynasty, a family group that had long 
 been in the center of public affairs. His son Montgomery was Postmas- 
 ter General in Lincoln's cabinet; another son, Francis, Jr. — usually 
 called Frank Blair to distinguish him from his sire — probably the most 
 brilliant of the lot, was Lincoln's unfailing bulwark in Missouri and in 
 Congress. His daughter Betty, herself a leading political hostess, had 
 married Samuel Phillips Lee; this Lee was an admiral in the Federal 
 navy when the war broke out, and unlike his cousin, Robert E. Lee, 
 declined to go over to the Confederacy. He commanded the fleet that 
 blockaded his own Virginia and North Carolina. Gustavus Vasa Fox, 
 the able Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Welles's chief reliance, had 
 married Virginia Woodbury, daughter of Levi Woodbury, governor 
 of New Hampshire, United State Senator, and, in his latter years, 
 Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, an alliance that 
 brought him within the Blair family circle, for Montgomery had mar- 
 ried another daughter of the same distinguished New Englander; the 
 two brothers-in-law were, moreover, close intimates. Of this family 
 corporation it was the three Blairs that played the strongest role as 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 387 
 
 Lincoln's supporters. Their ideas on the future of the slave marched 
 side by side with Lincoln's. They favored, as did Lincoln, gradual 
 emancipation. They believed, as did Lincoln also, in compensation to 
 masters for slaves set free — at the rate of $300 and $400 a head. They 
 endorsed immediate emancipation — with payment — in the District of 
 Columbia and the territories; Frank Blair, as a member of Congress, 
 had voted for both these bills when they were passed in the early days 
 of the war. 
 
 It was commonly remarked that one could hardly enter Lincoln's 
 sanctum without finding him cheek by jowl with one of this fraternal 
 and paternal triumvirate. Montgomery's habit of lingering after ad- 
 journment of cabinet meetings for a private talk with Lincoln exas- 
 perated his cabinet colleagues — all except Welles, who, in a way, 
 formed part of the Blair sodality. "On important questions Blair," noted 
 the Secretary of the Navy, "is as potent with the President as either 
 [Chase or Seward] and sometimes I think equal to both. With some 
 egotism Blair has great good sense, a better knowledge and estimate of 
 military men than either or both the others and, I think, is possessed 
 of more solid, reliable administrative ability." x Welles's comparison 
 of Chase and the Blairs might rank with one of Plutarch's parallels. 
 "The Blairs are pugnacious, but their general views, especially those of 
 Montgomery Blair, have seemed to me sound and judicious in the 
 main. . . . Chase is deficient in magnanimity and generosity. The 
 Blairs have both, but they have strong resentments. Warfare with them 
 is open, bold and unsparing. With Chase it is silent, persistent, but regu- 
 lated with discretion. Blairs make no false pretensions. Chase avows no 
 enmities." Naturally all these evidences of intimacy with the head of 
 the nation — Lincoln's frequent trips to Silver Spring, the access of 
 the Blairs to his private rooms, the President's crossings of Pennsyl- 
 vania Avenue for chats with Montgomery at the Blair "mansion," the 
 sight of Montgomery's children playing on the White House lawn 
 with the Lincoln boys — aroused to fury the anti-Blair element, the 
 Abolitionists and radicals. Horace Greeley railed against them as "a 
 dangerous family" that had got Lincoln completely under their thumb 
 while the Chase following denounced them as "a family of Maryland 
 serpents." 
 
 "When the Blairs go in for a fight," Montgomery used to say, "they 
 go in for a funeral," and this war-to-the-death spirit was exemplified, 
 above all, in the youngest of the trio. Frank, forty years old when war 
 began, was the darling of his father's eye; the radicals were right when 
 they accused the family of aiming at the Presidency, for both old man 
 
 1 Welles, Diary. I, 205. 
 
388 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Blair and Montgomery confidently expected some day to see their 
 favorite succeed to Lincoln's chair. If dash, magnetic control over men, 
 supreme courage, both in the battlefield and in public life, a handsome 
 person, immense capacity for work, and a fanatical love of country 
 qualify a man for this post, Frank Blair would have made an ideal head 
 of the nation. All these traits he possessed and more; if not a bookish 
 man like Montgomery and his father, Frank was an extensive student 
 of affairs and a speaker whose words were all fire and conviction. Since 
 he was absolutely honest, the many efforts of the Jacobins to picture 
 him as a grafter disastrously failed, as did practically all the other 
 calumnies which, in an angry time, they hurled against him. That Frank 
 was a hard drinker could not be denied; his tent during the war was too 
 often the scene of conviviality; but he carried his liquor far more suc- 
 cessfully than other martial gentlemen of his day. His wartime speeches 
 were usually full of fighting arguments and soul-stirring epithets; those 
 who disagreed with Frank were too likely to find themselves figuring 
 in them as "cowards" and "traitors" and "damned whelps." His ener- 
 getic temperament added force to these characterizations. In appearance 
 Frank underwent some changes in the field, chiefly in the addition of a 
 large reddish beard; but the wiry frame, thin and six feet high, the 
 finely poised head, with large, rectangular brow, the sparkling gray 
 eyes, aggressive nose, elongated horselike face, seemed to take on addi- 
 tional vitality from the stress of the times. 
 
 Frank came to Washington as Representative from Missouri in the 
 first war Congress meeting on July 4, 1861, with enhanced prestige 
 for his work in "saving Missouri for the Union" in the early part of 
 the year, and from that time to nearly the end of hostilities he filled a 
 dual role — that of legislator in the Capitol and of soldier in the field. 
 The Copperheads, under Vallandigham, and the Abolitionists, led by 
 Thad Stevens, might shout that this double life was unconstitutional 
 and demand Blair's expulsion from the House; with Lincoln's encour- 
 agement and perhaps even with his connivance Frank kept the two 
 dignities and rendered valuable service in both. In that disastrous sum- 
 mer of 1861, Blair, as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, 
 piloted through the chamber the many bills needed to create an army, 
 and also established his position as champion of Lincoln that was to 
 make him a pre-eminent influence for the next three years. Even in 
 1861 the difficulties that were to burden Lincoln's existence scored 
 their first innings. Frank Blair assumed the lead in expounding Lincoln's 
 views and defending them. That his speeches on the Negro and Emanci- 
 pation were read and revised by his father and brother Montgomery 
 before delivery was the general belief. They aroused such animosity 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 389 
 
 in the Chase, Stevens, and Sumner circles, and brought such fierce re- 
 criminations on the floor that perhaps Frank was relieved when the 
 session came to an end and he was free to return to Missouri, organize 
 seven regiments, and, as brigadier general, march off to join General 
 Sherman. In this phase Frank succeeded so well that when the victori- 
 ous Union Army paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of 
 the war, he received, next to Grant and Sherman, the greatest popular 
 acclaim. Both Grant and Sherman had great contempt for civilian 
 officers, but both forgot their favorite abomination in the case of 
 Frank Blair. His behavior at Vicksburg and Lookout Mountain won 
 their hearts. They regarded him as the ablest of all the non-West Point 
 generals, and it was on the recommendation of Sherman that Frank 
 Blair was appointed to the command of an army corps. 
 
 But Sherman, greatly as he admired Frank Blair's fighting qualities, 
 understood the other side of the family character. "Blair was a man of 
 great courage," he said, "and talent, but was a politician by nature and 
 experience. I regarded him as a volunteer that looked to personal fame 
 and glory as an auxiliary, and secondary to his political ambition and 
 not as a professional soldier." This same was true of old man Blair 
 and Montgomery. In every question that arose they all saw, first of 
 all, its political tendencies. The personal fortunes of the Blair family 
 always claimed consideration. No one understood this failing so clearly 
 as Lincoln himself. The assertion of the radical group that the Blairs 
 controlled the President had no foundation in fact. Lincoln used the 
 Blairs, as he used other men, where they could be most serviceable in 
 the supreme purpose of preserving the Union. A typical exchange be- 
 tween Lincoln on one side and Halleck and Stanton on the other 
 emphasized his attitude towards all who were seeking to dominate his 
 administration. In July of 1864, Jubal Early, in his aborted raid on 
 Washington, overran Silver Spring and burned Montgomery Blair's 
 summer home. "Nothing better could be expected," commented the 
 peppery Monty, "while poltroons and cowards run the War Depart- 
 ment." This remark, reported to Stanton and Halleck, threw those 
 gentlemen into a rage. They demanded Blair's dismissal from the cabi- 
 net. "Truth is generally the best vindication against slander," Lincoln 
 wrote his angry subordinates. "I propose continuing to be myself the 
 judge as to when a member of the cabinet shall be dismissed." 2 That 
 represented his attitude towards Stanton and towards the Blairs them- 
 selves. 
 
 It was probably the Blair tendency to capitalize their importance for 
 personal advancement, and, in a degree, their attempts to "control" 
 
 3 Lincoln, op. cit. X, 157. 
 
390 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Lincoln, that led to an appreciable loss of influence. In December 1862, 
 Lincoln and the Blairs had flatly disagreed on two important issues. 
 The first concerned the formation of the new state of West Virginia. 
 The question of its admission into the Union caused a cleavage in the 
 cabinet. Chase and Stanton favored this radical move; Blair, Bates, and 
 Welles opposed it. Montgomery Blair prepared, at Lincoln's request, 
 a detailed constitutional argument against separating this western pro- 
 Union part of the state from its parent — a learned paper which the 
 President pigeonholed and ignored. The second serious disagreement 
 involved General McClellan. Had the Blairs opposed that soldier's dis- 
 missal on military grounds their objections might have received more 
 respectful consideration. Characteristically the matter seemed to them 
 chiefly a political problem. Was not McClellan a presidential candi- 
 date? To cashier him summarily would be politically unwise, for it 
 would make him a martyr and increase his popularity. The elder Blair 
 spent the evening before McClellan's dismissal with Lincoln, beseech- 
 ing him to give the man another chance, basing his argument on politi- 
 cal expediency. The result proved to be a commentary on the Jacobin 
 insistence that Lincoln was completely "run" by the Blairs. The Presi- 
 dent listened to the specious pleas, stretched his long legs, and ended 
 the interview. "I said I would remove him if he let Lee's army get 
 away from him and I must do so. He has got the slows, Mr. Blair." 
 And then he added the familiar Lincolnian touch: "I have tried long 
 enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold." The President's 
 knowledge that part of Francis Blair's plan was to elevate his son, the 
 valiant Frank, to the post of McClellan's chief of staff, and in this way 
 make him liaison officer between the army and the administration, 
 probably did not increase Lincoln's respect for this advice. 
 
 As the year 1863 wore on, the relations became merely friendly and 
 anecdotal; the signs that old man Blair's position as closest adviser 
 to the President were less important began to prey upon the veteran's 
 mind. Up to June 1860, there had been at least three attempts to obtain 
 control of the Lincoln administration and to supplant that leader in 
 the post to which he had been constitutionally elected. Seward's 
 "Thoughts" of April 1, 1861; the insurrection of Chase and Stanton in 
 August 1862; and, most formidable of all, the attempt of the Republi- 
 can Senators, in December 1862, to dismiss the cabinet and appoint its 
 successors, have already been described. Another more subtle effort in 
 the same direction was evidently planned in June 1863 by Montgomery 
 and the elder Blair. It is true that this demarche never became an up- 
 rising. The Blair proceeding, so far as the scanty records disclose, was 
 an aspiration rather than a concerted movement. For details we are 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 391 
 
 dependent upon that crusty chronicler, Edward Bates. One of Bates's 
 most intimate confidants, and chief purveyor of inside Lincoln informa- 
 tion, was a gentleman who bore the illustrious name of Isaac Newton. 
 This hard-working Quaker and skilled horticulturist had one distinc- 
 tion, aside from his personal intimacy with Lincoln — he was the first 
 head of the great Agricultural Department, though in that experimental 
 period the office did not carry cabinet rank. Newton flits in and out 
 of the crabbed pages of Bates's Diary, usually as the bearer of secret 
 news — of plots and counterplots of the active gentlemen who were 
 then pulling the strings of national politics. The fact that he held 
 almost a cabinet post — Newton really laid the foundations of the pres- 
 ent Department of Agriculture — and was known to be on friendly 
 terms with the President, gave value to his revelations. 
 
 The most ambitious of these stratagems Bates discloses in his Diary 
 entry of May 10, 1863. Montgomery Blair, Newton related, had set 
 forth, in a long interview which he had sought, a plan which amounted 
 to nothing less than the elevation of his venerable father to the post of 
 exclusive private councilor — "dictator" is the word Bates used — to 
 Abraham Lincoln. Montgomery bewailed the fact that his father's in- 
 fluence on Lincoln seemed to be nearing the vanishing point. "His 
 father had not, of late, been admitted, as much as he desired, to private 
 conferences with the President." Couldn't Newton, in some way, 
 remedy this situation? Couldn't he "use his influence with the President 
 to bring about more intimate relations?" Montgomery eulogized his 
 father at length and extolled the services he could render Lincoln and 
 the nation if placed quietly at the head of affairs. He said "that the old 
 man was, beyond all question, the ablest and best informed politician 
 in America — and was known to be such! That under his advice, the 
 President would be saved a world of trouble and the nation far better 
 served, than in any other way." (Upon this Bates comments: "I have 
 abundant other proof that he is full in the faith that Wisdom will die 
 with his father and him!") The first fruit of this Lincoln-Blair com- 
 bination, Montgomery informed Newton, would be a complete reor- 
 ganization of the cabinet. The only man worthy of being retained in 
 his existing position was Gideon Welles. Bates himself was marked for 
 decapitation. Seward and Stanton would be retired to private life. 
 Chase might possibly be moved up to the Secretaryship of State, or 
 perhaps Charles Sumner would succeed to that place. Joseph Holt 
 would be a good man for Stanton's seat — he had been Secretary of 
 War in the last two months of Buchanan's administration, after the 
 departure of the "traitor" Floyd; Benjamin F. Butler and Nathaniel P. 
 Banks also were worthy of consideration for the same office. Preston 
 
392 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 King, Senator from New York, would make an excellent Secretary of 
 the Treasury. Montgomery had expressed himself in the freest terms 
 on certain of his colleagues in the cabinet. Stanton was a "great scoun- 
 drel — making all sorts of fraudulent contracts, to put money into his 
 own pocket — that, in that way, 'Cameron was a fool to him.' " 3 
 
 "I knew before," Bates says, evidently somewhat irked at the fact 
 that, in Blair's new assize, he was himself marked for slaughter, "his 
 very bad opinion of Seward and Stanton, and his jealousy of Chase. 
 And as to me, I knew he was disappointed and dissatisfied because I 
 declined from the start to be an agent of 'the Blairs.' In fact, that clique 
 has mistaken cunning for w T isdom and they believe fully in trick and 
 connivance. They believe me a mere marplot — and that, as Cardinal 
 Wouley said of Bishop Gardener, 'He was a fool, for he would needs 
 be virtuous. I'll have none such near his Highness.' 4 True, I have no 
 confidence in Seward and very little in Stanton; but that does not make 
 me confide in tricky politicians, who have not the first conception of 
 statesmanship." 
 
 3 It is due to Stanton to repeat that no serious student of Stanton today believes 
 this charge. 
 
 4 Bates, as almost always, misspells and misquotes. "Cardinal Wouley" is evidently 
 Cardinal Wolsey and "Bishop Gardener" should be Bishop Gardiner. For what 
 Shakespeare really wrote, see Henry Vlll, Act II, Scene 2. 
 
IV 
 
 IINCOLN'S MESSAGE of December 8, 1863, and accompanying 
 proclamation, came to Chase and his adherents almost like a declaration 
 of war. These great state papers announced a scheme for readmitting 
 the Southern states to the Union, which the radicals regarded as a 
 betrayal of the cause and a surrender to the South. There was not a 
 vestige of punishment or vengeance in the President's proposals. To 
 forgive and forget, to gather together the shattered fragments and 
 begin life anew on the basis of good will and fraternity — such was the 
 general idea underlying Lincoln's plan for a regenerated Union. Full 
 pardon was offered, with a few exceptions in the higher ranks, to all 
 who had fought in the Southern armies, on condition that they take 
 the oath of allegiance to the Federal government and agree to accept 
 and support the presidential proclamations and Congressional acts on 
 slavery. Whenever 10 per cent of the citizens of a Southern state, 
 according to the census of 1860, had formed a government and applied 
 for readmission to the Union, it would become once more one of the 
 United States. In this Lincoln plan there was no provision for reprisals 
 — no wholesale hanging of "traitors," no transformation of the South 
 into a "desert," no rule by military governors sent from the North. It 
 was a proposal for genuine reconciliation and permanent peace, not 
 of retribution. It was a foreshadowing of the second inaugural: "With 
 malice toward none; with charity for all." 
 
 The radicals, after preliminary murmurs of apparent approval, 
 pounced upon this proposal as a negation of the high purpose of the 
 war. The Blairs, in Congress and the hustings, came just as vigorously 
 to Lincoln's support. They had their own explanation for the war, 
 which was entitled to special consideration because of their Southern 
 origin. Secession, they insisted, had never obtained wide popularity in 
 the South. The masses, even in states like South Carolina and Georgia, 
 still remained loyal to the Union. They were speaking, of course, of 
 those known as the "people" — the middle and poorer elements who 
 owned no slaves, or practically none, and who despised slavery, chiefly 
 
394 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 as an economic wrong to themselves. The independent farmers of the 
 North and West, who worked their own fields, moved easily in all 
 social strata, enjoyed free opportunity of education and the other 
 blessings that comprise an independent existence, seemed, to the "mud- 
 sills" and "poor whites" of Dixieland, to be the favored sons of fortune. 
 The population of the Southern states, as a whole, Montgomery Blair 
 pointed out, belonged to this slaveless, submerged majority. Political 
 and financial power had for generations been centered in the hands of 
 great plantation owners, who had used this power to form the Con- 
 federacy, "with slavery as its keystone," and to force their states into 
 rebellion. Any plan of Reconstruction which did not make existence 
 bearable for this inarticulate majority, urged Blair, would be the rank- 
 est kind of cruelty and injustice. Genuine statesmanship would link up 
 the Federal government with the great mass of honest, sincere, and 
 loyal Southerners for the purpose of reforming the Southern common- 
 wealth in really democratic fashion. This was Lincoln's policy, and an 
 identity of purpose on this question made the Blairs about his ablest 
 co-operators in the work at hand. 
 
 But the Blairs were not only philosophers, they were also politicians 
 and feudists, and with them great battles of statesmanship, however 
 lofty the principles at stake, always involved personal conflict. And 
 the "personality" who now crossed their path at every turn was the 
 Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Portland Chase. The dispute over 
 Reconstruction involved also the presidential succession. The two issues 
 aroused particular hostility in the two states which the Blairs regarded 
 as more or less fiefs in their family, Missouri and Maryland. In both, 
 the Republican Party was split into two factions. In Maryland the two 
 wings of the party were known as radicals and conservatives; in Mis- 
 souri, the Republicans were split into the same two divisions, popu- 
 larly called "Charcoals" — a suggestion of their devotion to the dusky 
 brethren — and "Claybanks." Henry Winter Davis, bitterly hostile to 
 Lincoln since the day of his exclusion from the cabinet, championed 
 the Maryland radicals, and Montgomery Blair, his successful rival in 
 presidential preference, led the conservatives. In Missouri, B. Gratz 
 Brown and Charles D. Drake managed the cause of the Charcoals, and 
 Frank Blair that of the Claybanks. The Charcoal cohorts in Missouri 
 were strong for Chase, the Claybanks for Lincoln, and in Maryland 
 the same differences in presidential choices appeared and along the 
 same lines. 
 
 The rivalries assumed a more turbulent character in rough-and-ready 
 Missouri than in the more sedate commonwealth north of the Potomac. 
 The Chase followers in Missouri were largely formed of those idealistic 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 395 
 
 Germans who had settled in the country following the great immigra- 
 tion of the late forties and fifties, whose antislavery zeal could be 
 compared only with that of the most unrestrained abolitionists of New 
 England. These two wings of the party, with their journalistic and 
 platform supporters, kept the state in a turmoil throughout the Civil 
 War. Their respective public meetings quickly developed into riots 
 and the street parades usually degenerated into orgies of disorder. 
 From the first Chase came to the support of the Drake-Gratz Brown 
 Charcoals, endowed them liberally with patronage, and gave them, to 
 the exclusion of the Blair conservative Claybank faction, liberal permits 
 for trade in the Mississippi rebel region. Whenever members of the 
 anti-Lincoln bloc came to Washington, Chase usually went out of his 
 way to show them social attention. Receptions at the E Street house, 
 graced by the enticing smiles of daughter Kate, warmed their hearts 
 and at the same time enraged the less welcome followers of the Blairs. 
 That Chase, with his offices, his indulgences to trade, and his receptions 
 was cultivating this anti-Lincoln element with an eye to the Missouri 
 delegation at the Republican National Convention was a natural sus- 
 picion. Certainly Frank Blair entertained no doubts on the question 
 and girded himself for the fray. 
 
 In August of 1863 Frank returned from the front to find himself a 
 popular hero; his exploits at Vicksburg had been heralded in the public 
 press and the people turned out in force to welcome their soldier home. 
 Llis entrance into St. Louis was a Roman triumph, with torchlight pro- 
 cessions, public meetings, and other outbursts of public approval. That 
 the Drake-Gratz Brown Charcoal pro-Chase elements did not partici- 
 pate in these rejoicings, and even circulated in their newspapers un- 
 favorable reports of Frank's military conduct, argued ill for the future 
 peace of the town. Far from behaving in a conciliatory manner towards 
 these malcontents, Frank, in several appearances on the platform, gave 
 additional reasons for hostility. One of his speeches, made to an audi- 
 ence of wildly cheering partisans, was so uncompromising that the 
 Chase press attributed it to that indulgence in hard liquor for which 
 the orator was so well known. The whole evening, said the Missouri 
 Democrat — organ of the radicals, and constant assailant of "the Blairs" 
 — was a "disgrace" to St. Louis. That Blair should set forth in detail his 
 views on what he persisted in calling "the nigger question," that he 
 should uphold the Lincoln policy of Reconstruction, eulogize the 
 President and uphold him as the one public man to whom the nation 
 could be safely entrusted, and disembowel the radicals and all they 
 stood for, was to be expected; but it was the speaker's attack on Chase 
 that caused the hubbub. The Secretary was accused of scheming for 
 
396 
 
 Lincoln's seat, and with this end in view of creating a corrupt political 
 machine in Missouri. That issue of which Frank was to make so much 
 in the next few months — the abuse of trade regulations for political 
 purposes — figured prominently in the indictment. While a friendly 
 audience howled with delight and stamped its feet, Blair referred to 
 the dignified Chase as a "rowdy" and "a blackguard," and declared 
 that he was "no whit better than Jefferson Davis" — thus again resort- 
 ing to that "traitor" thesis which the Blairs frequently fall back upon 
 when analyzing the second member of the Lincoln cabinet. 
 
 With the hurrahs of his followers and the execrations of the partisans 
 of Chase resounding in his ears, Frank returned to his military duties 
 with the Army of the Tennessee to receive a major-generalship at the 
 hands of William Tecumseh Sherman and to win fresh laurels at Look- 
 out Mountain and Chattanooga. But the platform warfare of the Blairs 
 on Chase still continued. The voice of Frank in Missouri had scarcely 
 subsided before that of Montgomery was raised in Maryland. As an 
 offset to the Henry Winter Davis anti-Lincoln campaign, the Maryland 
 adherents of the President held what they called an "Unconditional 
 Union Meeting" at Rockville on the evening of October 3. Montgom- 
 ery Blair accepted an invitation to be chief speaker. There were other 
 considerations than radical activity in Maryland firing Montgomery's 
 zeal on this occasion. In particular Charles Sumner had recently pub- 
 lished an article in the Atlantic Monthly on "Our Domestic Relations," x 
 a broadside that had been generally accepted as a setting forth of the 
 plan of Reconstruction to which the radicals were committed. 
 
 In manner and matter it was a characteristic Sumnerian piece of 
 literature. Arrogant, magisterial, interlarded with quotations from 
 Plato, Grotius, Vattel, and other highly respected authors, it described 
 the future of the Southern states in terms diametrically opposed to the 
 plans that were known to be taking shape in Lincoln's mind. In con- 
 trast to Lincoln's hope for a peace on the basis of forgetfulness and 
 compassion, the cultured New Englander proposed one of damna- 
 tion. In a few well-turned sentences, he wiped off the map the eleven 
 states that had formed the Confederacy. By secession every state in 
 insurrection had "committed suicide"; by that act it had ceased to exist 
 as a state; its constitution had become a historical parchment, and in 
 place the Federal government found itself in possession of a large extent 
 of territory, as much virgin soil, so far as its relation to the Union was 
 concerned, as the Louisiana Purchase or the Mexican cession. These 
 states had "vacated" their government, and had consequently become 
 a clean slate — or, as Sumner preferred to put it, a tabula rasa — on 
 
 1 Atlantic Monthly, XII, 507-529, 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 397 
 
 which the Federal authority could write whatever it chose. Just what 
 their future should be was in the hands of the Federal government. 
 In the new South which was taking form in Sumner's eyes, not even the 
 old state names or the old state lines would necessarily be preserved. 
 Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, might very likely 
 take their places beside Burgundy, Aragon, and the Saxon Heptarchy, 
 which were once proud, independent sovereignties, but had long been 
 extinct in the family of nations. In their stead, Uncle Sam would have 
 a new stretch of dependent land, like Nebraska, Utah, and the Indian 
 Territory, out of which, in due course, new states might be formed and 
 admitted to the Union. Since all such territories, under the Constitution, 
 would be subject to Congress, it followed that the reorganization of 
 this new expanse would be the exclusive right and duty of that legis- 
 lative body. The principle that was to work such havoc as the basis of 
 Reconstruction after Lincoln's death was set forth in this article with 
 all the elegant English and apt quotation of which Sumner was a master. 
 No new state from the vanished old Southern regime was to be rein- 
 stated until it had adopted a constitution that met the approval of the 
 Senate and House of Representatives. By this time, certain of the pro- 
 visions that Congress would demand were well known. The onetime 
 slaves would be elevated to complete equality with the whites, with all 
 civic privileges, including the franchise. The pardons for rebels which 
 Lincoln favored on such a liberal scale would be handed out most 
 sparingly. But the all-emphatic fact was that Lincoln would have noth- 
 ing to say about Reconstruction; that would rest exclusively — except, 
 of course, as it was limited by the veto power — in the hands of Con- 
 gress; in other words, in the hands of the Jacobins who held despotic 
 influence in that body. 
 
 Montgomery Blair was on cordial personal relations with Sumner, 
 whom, in many ways, he admired; but that did not prevent him from 
 denouncing this program in words that rocked the Republican Party 
 from one end of the nation to the other. The solicitude the Abolition- 
 ists evinced for the Negro, he declared, could have only one purpose. 
 He raised high the most dangerous of issues in discussing the question: 
 that of social equality, intermarriage, and a mulatto population. Frank 
 Blair had already proclaimed that the essence of the racial problem in 
 the United States was not slavery, but the Negro; Montgomery be- 
 lieved this also, as did Lincoln himself, and the only possible solution 
 the three saw was the transportation of the colored population and its 
 colonization in some tropical climate. "The Abolition party," Mont- 
 gomery declared almost at the beginning of his Rockville exhortation, 
 "whilst pronouncing philippics against slavery, seek to make a caste of 
 
398 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 another color by amalgamating the black element with the free white 
 labor of our land and so to expand far beyond the present confines of 
 slavery the evil which makes it obnoxious to republican statesmen. And 
 now . . . they would make the manumission of the slaves the means 
 of infusing their blood into our whole system by blending with it 
 'amalgamation, equality and fraternity.' . . . The cultivators of the 
 evil," he continued, "must then become a hybrid race and our govern- 
 ment a hybrid government, ending as all such unnatural civilizations 
 have ever done: in degraded if not abortive generations and in making 
 serfdom for an inferior caste — the unmixed blood of the conquering 
 race inevitably asserting a despotism over it." This was the ambition, 
 said Blair, that underlay the scheme of wiping out the Southern states 
 and reorganizing the South as new territories. Recent articles in the 
 St. Louis Democrat and the Washington Chronicle were clearly aimed 
 at creating such a new American race, and "now comes the Atlantic 
 Monthly, which lends to the present stock at Boston all it can boast 
 of literary strength and elegance." The article in the Atlantic "may 
 justly be quoted as the programme of the movement," and as "the 
 Abolition manifesto." He then developed at length his favorite idea 
 for the reconciliation of the seceded states. The Federal government 
 should join hands, not with the ex-slaves, but with the loyal white non- 
 slaveholding citizens who made up the bulk of the population. Any 
 system of reconstruction which would punish them would constitute 
 "most outrageous injustice." Only the "traitors" in the South — that is, 
 the scheming politicians, agents of the slaveholding power — "have 
 committed suicide. . . . Treason was not committed by any state, but 
 by the individuals who made use of the states and attempted to dis- 
 member the national government." 
 
 To attack Charles Sumner and his reconstruction ideas was to attack 
 Chase. The two men thought as one on this, and most other subjects. 
 They had been intimate, daily co-workers for almost twenty years. 
 Sumner was one of the few Republican leaders of prominence who 
 regarded favorably — if not enthusiastically — Chase's presidential hopes. 
 However, Blair assailed Chase not only by striking at Sumner; certain 
 remarks in his speech hit directly at the Treasury head. When he 
 ridiculed "these movements at Washington and Boston to annihilate 
 the state governments," he had in mind, of course, the Chase-Sumner 
 partnership for that purpose. And when Blair spoke of "the co- 
 adjutors of Presidential schemers in St. Louis and throughout Missouri," 
 he might just as well have spoken Chase's name. "And do not all these 
 efforts," said Blair, as a parting shot at his cabinet colleague, "indicate 
 something of a design to command a great event in prospect of revolu- 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 399 
 
 tionary means?" The great event, of course, was the forthcoming presi- 
 dential election in 1864, for which both wings of the Republican Party- 
 were now forming their lines. The reference to "revolutionary means" 
 appears to be merely a repetition of Thurlow Weed's cynical conclu- 
 sion that Chase's real motive, in his Southern policy, was a desire to 
 keep any Southern state from taking part in the contest of 1864. 
 
I 
 
 N ITS EARLIEST stage Chase's campaign was self-conducted, 
 mainly in epistolary form. Long before anything resembling an or- 
 ganization had been created to push his candidacy, the industrious man 
 was filling the mails with an endless stream of letters, discussing his 
 fitness to succeed Mr. Lincoln in the White House. One wonders how 
 Chase, occupying one of the most exacting offices in the government, 
 at perhaps the most critical period in its history, could have found the 
 leisure for labor of this kind. Men of all stations, lofty and obscure, 
 of all trades and professions, were included among his correspondents. 
 Chase's letters on the theme that was absorbing his thoughts all followed 
 the same pattern. They began with a disavowal of aspiration for the 
 presidency, and described the insistence of influential leaders that he was 
 the one man fitted to deal with the crisis. The idea, he wrote, far from 
 originating with him, was extremely distasteful; however, if the party 
 really demanded his leadership, he had too great a sense of public duty 
 to decline. The cause was the main thing, not personal ambition, and 
 he was prepared, however unwelcome the presidency might be, to sac- 
 rifice his inclination for the good of the country. 
 
 A letter written November 26, 1863, to the millionaire politician 
 who had recently become his son-in-law may be quoted as fairly typical 
 of all. "If I were controlled by merely personal sentiments, I should 
 prefer the re-election of Mr. Lincoln to that of any other man. But I 
 doubt the expediency of re-electing anybody, and I think a man of 
 different qualities from those the President has will be needed for the 
 next four years. I am not anxious to be regarded as that man; and I am 
 quite willing to leave that question to the decision of those who agree 
 in thinking that some such man should be chosen." * "I have not the 
 slightest wish to press my claims upon the consideration of friends or 
 the public," he wrote to E. A. Spencer, December 4, 1863. "There is 
 certainly a purpose, however, to use my name, and I do not feel bound 
 to object to it. On the contrary, were the post to which these friends 
 
 1 Schuckers, op. cit., p. 494. 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 401 
 
 desire to place me as low as it is high, I should feel bound to render in 
 it all the service possible to our common country." a This same delusion 
 appears in all Chase's numerous letters of this period — that a nation, 
 as a whole, was reaching out to him to replace the incompetent Lin- 
 coln, and that, as an unselfish patriot, he was reluctantly acceding to 
 the prayer. 
 
 Presently more tangible evidences of a presidential boom appeared. 
 That autumn of 1863 was the time of the famous Vallandigham gover- 
 norship contest in Ohio. The "Peace Democrats" had nominated this 
 most remorseless of Copperheads on a platform calling for the imme- 
 diate end of the war, defiant of all the principles for which the adminis- 
 tration stood. That Chase should return to Ohio to vote, and even make 
 a speech or two against the enemy of the cause, would seem to be his 
 duty as a good citizen; but his critics immediately saw a deeper mean- 
 ing in his departure. His hardly concealed aspirations for the White 
 House naturally made him the victim of the most unworthy suspicion. 
 Blair declared that this stumping tour was an open declaration of war on 
 the President. Edward Bates could express his contempt only by classi- 
 cal allusion. "The National Intelligence of today," he notes on Oc- 
 tober 20, "contains Mr. Chase's late speech at Cincinnati (and another 
 at Indianapolis) in which he supposes that our successes are due to the 
 Proclamation of Freedom. In other parts of these speeches Mr. C. 
 attributes the success of the country to his own admirable financial sys- 
 tem, quite as intelligibly, but in language not quite as plain as Cicero's 
 — who swore 'By the immortal gods, I have saved my country!' That 
 visit to the West is generally understood as Mr. Chase's opening cam- 
 paign for the Presidency. At all events, the war is openly begun be- 
 tween Mr. Chase and the Blairs." 3 "Chase is understood to have special 
 interest in this election," 4 Welles slyly comments on the Western tour. 
 The de luxe pamphlet, Going Ho?ne to Vote, published by Chase in 
 commemoration of his excursion, lends some color to these ungenerous 
 inuendoes. The compiler of this brochure was Whitelaw Reid, who for 
 a time had been closely identified with Chase's political prospects. "I 
 have been in the habit of revising his [Chase's] speeches for publica- 
 tion," wrote Mr. Reid on September 30, 1864. "Perhaps you saw the 
 pamphlet I made for him last year, Going Home to Vote, containing 
 all his speeches on his western trip." 5 This comprised not only a re- 
 print of Chase's speeches, but a somewhat jubilant day-by-day account 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 495. 
 
 3 Bates, op. ctt., p. 311. Italics in the original. 
 
 4 Ibid., p. 469. 
 
 3 The letter from which this extract is taken was published in the New York 
 Sun, June 30, 1889. 
 
402 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 of what is pictured as a triumphal tour. It really portrays Chase in a 
 new aspect — that of a popular hero, a man who was hail-fellow with 
 the crowd, ready at repartee, an object of familiar greeting by his fel- 
 low men. The portrait is not that of the statuesque statesman, but of 
 the good-natured, almost rollicking favorite of the proletariat. From 
 Columbus to Cincinnati the train stopped at way stations for brief 
 speeches; there were blaring bands, military escorts, reception com- 
 mittees, immense congregations, and cannon salutes. Chase smiled de- 
 lightedly when the rank and file hailed him as "Old Greenbacks," and 
 joined in the roars when listeners interrupted his speech with com- 
 plimentary familiarities. The "laughter" and "cheers" bracketed in this 
 edition of the Ohio discourses indicated their popular response, even 
 though certain generals, like Grant, Sherman, and Meade, and states- 
 men like Edward Bates, were not pleased by the emphasis laid on the 
 sound financial policy of the government as responsible for recent 
 military success. 
 
 Now all over the nation laudatory editorials began appearing in the 
 papers as well as lengthy articles in magazines setting forth Chase's 
 achievements. That familiar harbinger of a presidential boom, the "cam- 
 paign biography," issued from more than one press. The most am- 
 bitious of these efforts, The Ferry Boy and Financier, followed a bio- 
 graphical pattern that has gained a considerable vogue in modern times. 
 It was a "Actionized biography," a mixture of fact and invention, writ- 
 ten by one of the most popular authors of the day, John T. Trow- 
 bridge. Chase himself supplied the material, in a series of letters ad- 
 dressed to Trowbridge amounting really to an autobiography. The 
 Ferry Boy in the title fell in with the popular taste which demanded a 
 humble origin for great men, but proved somewhat puzzling to Chase's 
 admirers. It was "more to be commended," says Schuckers, Chase's 
 secretary and one of his twin biographers, "for alliteration than de- 
 scription"; yet his dutiful research finally disclosed that, at the age of 
 twelve, Chase did, for several days, "amuse himself during some por- 
 tion of his time by ferrying passengers across the Cuyahoga." 6 Chase's 
 letters would seem to imply that he felt a little shamefaced about this 
 eulogy, which, largely because of the popularity of the author — and 
 also because of the purchase of a large number of copies by Jay 
 Cooke for free distribution — had quite a vogue, certain chapters even 
 being printed in the Atlantic Monthly. "I have read The Ferry Boy," 
 Chase wrote Trowbridge. "You have certainly thrown a great deal of 
 attraction about what I remember as very dry facts. Indeed, from in- 
 
 a Schuckers, op. cit. 3 p. 11. 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRs" 403 
 
 formation or fancy, you have collected some facts which are quite out 
 of my recollection." r 
 
 He was even more embarrassed by an account of his life, illustrated 
 by a steel engraving by John Sartain, which appeared in the American 
 Exchange & Review, of Philadelphia — an article also inspired and 
 financed by Jay Cooke. Evidently Lincoln had nudged Chase about 
 this piece of publicity and received an answer that must have enter- 
 tained him. "It was a matter in which I had no concern," Chase pro- 
 tested to his chief. "If any body wants my autograph, and I have time, 
 I give it; if any body wants to take my daguerreotype — photograph — 
 and I have time, I sit for it; if any body wants to take my life, in the 
 way of a biographical sketch, / let him take it; and, if I have time, give 
 such information as is wanted that he may take it more easily. Some 
 friends wanted such a sketch prepared, and engaged a gentleman to 
 prepare it. . . . How could I object? He asked for subscriptions and 
 obtained them. How could I control or supervise that? I was very busy 
 with the affairs of my department and had no time to look after such 
 matters, even had I been aware of what was being done. If I had been 
 consulted I should certainly have objected to any subscription by 
 Mr. Jay Cooke or his brother, except such a moderate one as any friend 
 might have made. Not that any wrong was intended to be done, but 
 because the act was subject to misconstruction and there are so many 
 to misconstrue." 8 
 
 Clearly the ethical question of Chase's relations to the Philadelphia 
 banker was pricking his conscience. The matter was, indeed, one that 
 might well have raised qualms. Mr. Cooke was at this time the chief 
 fiscal agent of the government, made so by appointment of Chase; his 
 contract for the five twenty loan proved to be a valuable one, in both 
 profit and prestige; it really established Cooke as one of America's 
 greatest bankers — a lofty position he held until the failure of his firm 
 in 1873 precipitated one of the worst financial panics in American his- 
 tory. Yet in 1864, Cooke and Chase's son-in-law, William Sprague, were 
 the main financial backers of his presidential aspirations. Chase him- 
 self says in his apologia to Lincoln that all this was "subject to mis- 
 construction," and the phrase will probably impress the present, more 
 sensitive generation as rather mild. One can perhaps dismiss Chase as a 
 guileless soul, made impervious to impropriety by an ambition that 
 verged on mania, but Cooke knew what he was doing, and his ap- 
 
 7 Warden, op. cit., p. 589. 
 
 8 Field, Maunsell B., Memoirs of Many Men and Some Women. Harper and 
 Bros., 1874. P. 305. 
 
404 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 proaches to Chase frequently betrayed the easiest of consciences. Thus, 
 in May 1862, he purchased three hundred shares of stock in the Phila- 
 delphia & Erie Railroad and carried them in Chase's name; he subse- 
 quently sold the certificates at a profit, and sent a check amounting to 
 $4200 to the Secretary of the Treasury. 9 Chase promptly returned the 
 money, but he showed no indignation, kept Cooke as one of his friends, 
 and even, six days afterward, requested the banker to make a loan to 
 Mrs. Gamaliel Bailey, widow of the editor of the New Era, a paper 
 most friendly to Chase and his presidential ambitions. 
 
 Nor did Chase apparently see anything improper in the undercover 
 work which the two Cookes — Jay and his brother-partner Henry — 
 now engaged in. Jay Cooke had one of the most far-reaching machines 
 for inexpensive publicity the country has ever known. The Fed- 
 eral banking organization which was Chase's greatest achievement as 
 Secretary of the Treasury was at his disposal. All the newly organized 
 national banks became selling agents for government bonds. Cooke 
 figured his army of salesmen at about 2500; they reached all the large 
 cities and all the towns and rural districts. All these agents were 
 utilized, under Cooke's supervision, as active workers in pressing 
 Chase's claims for the Presidency. An essential part of Cooke's selling 
 campaign was newspaper advertising. Country weeklies and city 
 dailies eagerly contended for this well-paid business. Inevitably, in days 
 of easy journalistic morals, this gave the Federal fiscal agent a power- 
 ful hold on the press and this he unblushingly manipulated in the in- 
 terest of the Secretary. All newspaper owners knew that one of the best 
 ways of obtaining this advertising was to display a friendly interest in 
 Chase's candidacy. They were the frequent recipients of articles, for 
 both the editorial and the news columns, setting forth the good points 
 of Lincoln's Treasury head. "Mr. Cooke, through the created or main- 
 tained agencies," says Cooke's biographer, "was constantly voicing the 
 praises of the Secretary of the Treasury and they were soon to be used 
 almost openly to favor Mr. Chase's candidacy for the Presidency. 10 . . . 
 Jay Cooke's loan agents and newspaper advertising system which he 
 had created were cheerfully enlisted in Chase's behalf, but the move- 
 ment was concealed under so much real patriotism and the hopes of the 
 leaders were so short-lived that no particular harm came to the banker 
 and his firms from his association with this rather unfortunate political 
 experiment. . . . Mr. Chase not only favored but indeed rather ex- 
 pected the use of the five twenty advertising agencies for his personal 
 
 9 Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxton, Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War. Macrae 
 Smith Co. I, 274-275. 
 
 10 Ibid., I, 273. 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 405 
 
 political advantage." 11 The Cookes were also associated with Kate's 
 husband, William Sprague,. in several other plans which were expected 
 to obtain the right kind of support for their favorite candidate. 
 
 That Chase should use the patronage of his office to advance the 
 cause was not surprising; such was the universal practice of the time — 
 it is not entirely unknown, indeed, to the present generation; but that 
 he should indignantly deny the charge, in view of the evidence, comes 
 as something of a shock. "I should despise myself," he wrote to Thomas 
 Heaton, one of his supporters in Cincinnati, "if I felt capable of ap- 
 pointing or removing a man for the sake of the Presidency. ... I have 
 never sought to manage newspapers. I have never undertaken, and never 
 shall undertake, to manipulate the press." 12 In May 1864, Weed's paper, 
 the Albany Evening Journal, published an editorial calling Chase to 
 account for converting the Treasury Department into a political ma- 
 chine. The Secretary wrote an indignant letter of protest to Seward, 
 Weed's political partner. "The patronage of this department is not and 
 never has been used with reference to that nomination." 13 The cynical 
 Seward must have grinned as he read this disclaimer; no one knew bet- 
 ter than Seward that Chase was as great a spoilsman as he was himself. 
 Gideon Welles insisted that Seward and Chase had an understanding 
 on patronage matters from the beginning. "These two men had po- 
 litical aspirations. . . . Chase thought he was fortifying himself by this 
 arrangement, but he often was over-reached and the arrangement was 
 one of the mistakes of his life." 14 Chase had in fact reduced the dis- 
 tribution of good things to a mathematical science; Ohio had one eighth 
 of the nation's population, and so was entitled to one eighth of the 
 offices in all the departments — with himself, of course, as the dis- 
 penser. At the height of the crisis over Sumter, Chase informed Seward 
 that there were 269 vacancies in the State Department; of these, on 
 this one-eighth basis, Ohio was entitled to thirty-three. When the Sec- 
 retary of State balked over the appointment of one of Chase's strong- 
 est Ohio henchmen to the consulship at London, the Treasury head 
 threatened to appeal to a higher court: "I have not thought it respect- 
 ful," he wrote Seward, "to go to the President about appointments in 
 your department, except through you; others do and it seems not un- 
 successfully." Both Welles and Bates noted with disapproval Chase's 
 use of the offices to promote his presidential schemes. "I think there are 
 indications," wrote the Secretary of the Navy, as the campaign ad- 
 
 11 Ibid., p. 360. 
 
 12 Warden, op. cit., p. 565. 
 
 13 Ibid., p. 597. 
 
 14 Welles, Diary. I, 138. 
 
406 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 vanced, "that Chase intends to press his pretensions as a candidate, and 
 much of the Treasury machinery and the Treasury agencies have that 
 end in view." " "I am afraid Mr. Chase's head is turned by his eager 
 pursuit of the Presidency," Bates observed on October 17, 1863. "For 
 a long time past he has been filling all the offices in his own vast pa- 
 tronage with extreme partisans and continues also to fill many vacan- 
 cies, properly belonging to other departments. In the judiciary his ap- 
 pointments seem to me particularly unfortunate, made without any 
 reference to legal or judicial qualifications." 16 In another entry Bates 
 accuses Stanton also of using his appointments to promote the pros- 
 perity of his friend. "If I were in his [Lincoln's] place I would never 
 submit to have the influence of the two most powerful departments, 
 Treasury and War, brought to bear upon the election — against the 
 President and for the aspiring Secretary." 17 One of the most power- 
 ful politicians and journalists of the time was John W. Forney, Secre- 
 tary of the United States Senate, editor of the Philadelphia Press and 
 owner of a string of influential newspapers. "If Mr. Chase sanctions 
 the unjust attacks upon the gentleman under whom he holds place," 
 Forney wrote, about March 1864, "it will require little talent at figures 
 to prove that the enormous catalogue of offices (almost a Blue Book 
 in itself) attached to the Treasury Department is crowded with the 
 personal adherents of the distinguished Secretary." 18 
 
 To newspaper editors Chase showed the most friendly spirit. Wil- 
 liam Cullen Bryant, of the New York Evening Post, was bitterly hostile 
 to Lincoln's renomination, and warmed up little to Chase as an alterna- 
 tive candidate. In February of 1864, Chase wrote Bryant, complaining 
 of this inattention but offering to give one of Bryant's friends a good 
 job. Greeley at this time was the Secretary's most important journalistic 
 support. The eccentric editor evidently regarded his idol as qualified 
 for any role; perhaps the wildest of the many crazy proposals that is- 
 sued in the course of the Civil War from this "ink-slinger" (as he called 
 himself) was that Chase be made commander of the Army of the Poto- 
 mac. "If in 1864 I could make a President (not merely a candidate)," 
 Greeley wrote Chase September 29, 1863, "you would be my first 
 choice." The Secretary responded with a fulsome letter of thanks, 
 remarking incidentally that there were two well-paying clerkships 
 vacant in the Treasury, into which he was willing that Greeley put a 
 couple of his friends. 19 Certain wiles, familiar to the present genera- 
 
 15 Ibid., I, 525. 
 
 16 Bates, op. cit., p. 310. 
 
 17 Ibid., p. 343. 
 
 18 Carman and Luthin, op. cit., p. 233. 
 
 19 Schuckers, op. cit., p. 394. 
 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 407 
 
 tion, such as the cultivation of religious and racial minorities, were not 
 beneath the dignity of Chase. In 1864 the Catholics were a numerous 
 and powerful group in Ohio, under the leadership of an extremely 
 popular prelate, Archbishop Purcell, of Cincinnati. In November 1863, 
 Chase wrote the Archbishop in glowing terms of General Rosecrans, 
 then under a cloud because of his defeat at Chickamauga, adding that 
 it was through his influence that Rosecrans had received his important 
 command. The general was one of the nation's most distinguished lay 
 Catholics. At another time Chase again took the Most Reverend Purcell 
 into his confidence; he was attempting to persuade Seward to inter- 
 cede at the Vatican, to have the Cincinnati churchman appointed suc- 
 cessor to Archbishop Hughes of New York, who had recently died. 
 Chase's agents were active with the Germans of Wisconsin and Mis- 
 souri and he was also courting the Jews and Poles of New York, already 
 a considerable element, with newspapers of their own. Senators and 
 Representatives who showed any inclination to Chase were appro- 
 priately "recognized." Learning that Senator John Conness of Cali- 
 fornia had shown an accommodating spirit, Chase wrote him broaching 
 the subject of Treasury appointments on the Pacific Coast. Conness 
 quickly saw the point and gave Chase assurances that no man ap- 
 pointed on Conness's recommendation would ever be permitted to 
 work against the Secretary's interests. "From the moment I saw and 
 heard of you," Chase replied, "I felt that Providence had sent us a 
 bold, clear-headed and faithful man on the Pacific Coast. I feel sure I 
 shall not be disappointed in the men I select in consultation with you." 
 
 In fact it was a matter of common talk in Washington that all the 
 customhouses in the nation had been organized into a Chase machine. 
 The attitude was well brought out in a letter to Chase from George S. 
 Denison, Collector of the Port of New Orleans, now in possession of 
 the Federals: "We are forming a Chase Club here and meet for or- 
 ganization next Monday. ... I believe we can control the election of 
 delegates to the National Convention." Ninety customhouse heads were 
 removed when Chase became Secretary of the Treasury, practically 
 all of the places being filled by his partisans. Politically these were the 
 most powerful forces in their regions, for each collector of a port had 
 a great subsidiary patronage. Hiram Barney, a Chase man who had 
 been made Collector of New York, had the appointment of 1200 
 public servants at his disposal. Horace Greeley estimated that the Col- 
 lector at New York could control the New York delegation to the 
 national convention. 
 
 Naturally these familiar signs of an impending boom did not escape 
 the attention of the master politician in the White House. But they do 
 
408 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 not seem to have caused much anxiety. To the protestations of his 
 friends that he was nourishing a "traitor" in his official family Lincoln 
 usually replied with a smile. Lincoln's secretaries, John Hay and John 
 Nicolay, kept the President well informed of Chase's activities; other 
 close associates insisted that he should dismiss the man who was seek- 
 ing to displace him; bluff Tom Corwin, Minister to Mexico, told Lin- 
 coln that Chase was "embodied perfidy." But Lincoln, in a letter already 
 quoted, had set forth the grounds on which he retained or dismissed his 
 cabinet officers; their usefulness to the nation in the existing crisis was 
 the one argument he deemed worthy of consideration. Lincoln, though 
 he undoubtedly despised a man who sought the presidential nomina- 
 tion without first resigning from the cabinet, had a high regard for 
 Chase's intellect and for his ability as a financier. He considered his 
 management of the Treasury Department one of the most creditable 
 achievements of the war. That was sufficient reason for ignoring an 
 activity that was unquestionably disloyal to himself. Day after day 
 commissions were placed on Lincoln's desk from the Treasury — men 
 whom Chase had selected for public office. These were mostly extreme 
 radical politicians whom Chase was appointing, Lincoln knew, in 
 furtherance of his presidential campaign; yet Lincoln cheerfully signed 
 them, seeming to take an almost humorous satisfaction in the act. 
 
 Perhaps one reason for the President's even temper was that he 
 understood the utter folly of Chase's pretensions. "When the Presi- 
 dential grub once gets in a man, it hides well," he remarked — this in 
 reference to his own wish for renomination, which he made no effort 
 to conceal; that Chase's aspirations were doomed to humiliating failure 
 the experienced Lincoln knew from the first. While Lincoln good- 
 naturedly kept appointing Chase presidential workers to office, Repub- 
 lican conventions were meeting in state after state, all of them passing 
 resolutions demanding Lincoln's renomination and instructing the 
 delegations to vote for him at the approaching national convention. 
 That the three states from which Chase might have anticipated sup- 
 port—New Hampshire, in which he had been born, and Ohio, in 
 which he had spent most of his life, and Rhode Island, of which son-in- 
 law Sprague was supposed to be boss — ignored the Chase campaign 
 and joined the Lincoln demonstration perhaps made the humorous 
 gentleman even more indulgent. His secretaries have recorded the 
 President's comment on these strange manipulations. " 'I have decided,' 
 he said, 'to shut my eyes, as far as possible, to everything of the sort. 
 Mr. Chase makes a good Secretary and I shall keep him where he is. 
 If he becomes President, all right, I hope we may never have a worse 
 man. I have observed with regret his plan of strengthening himself. 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 409 
 
 Whenever he perceives that an important matter is troubling me, if I 
 am compelled to decide in a way to give offence to a man of some 
 influence, he always ranges himself in opposition to me, and persuades 
 the victim that he has been hardly dealt with, and that he would have 
 arranged it very differently. It was so with General Fremont, when I 
 annulled his hasty proclamation, with General Butler when he was 
 recalled from New Orleans, with those Missouri people when they 
 called the other day. I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure 
 in these schemes so long as he does his duty at the head of the Treasury 
 department.' " 20 
 
 Still personal relations between the two men became more embar- 
 rassed. They had never been on comfortable terms; one of the things 
 Chase could never understand was why Lincoln so preferred Seward's 
 society to his own. His selection of a house a mile distant from the 
 White House he regarded as a mistake; it was so easy for Lincoln to 
 drop in for a chatty afternoon visit with the Secretary of State, whose 
 home was on the east side of Lafayette Square just across the street 
 from the "Executive Mansion." Welles, too, lived on the north side of 
 the same park, and Lincoln was very fond of "Father Neptune." Per- 
 haps Chase's failure to understand what draws one human being to 
 another was no more completely illustrated than in this belief that Lin- 
 coln's lack of warmth towards himself was merely a matter of geog- 
 raphy. "Among men who called during the day," Chase notes in his 
 Diary for June 30, 1864, "was Mr. Hooper, who related a conversa- 
 tion with the President some days ago, in which the President expressed 
 regret that our relations were not more free from embarrassment, say- 
 ing that when I came to see him he felt awkward and that I seemed con- 
 strained. At the same time he expressed his esteem for me." That rather 
 completely expresses Lincoln's attitude towards his Treasury head. As 
 Chase's campaign gained momentum, his reluctance to meet the Presi- 
 dent face to face became more manifest. He had always been one of 
 the most punctilious in attending cabinet meetings, and most critical 
 of his colleagues when they were absent. In late December of 1863, 
 Welles quotes Senator Doolittle, of Wisconsin, "that there is an active, 
 zealous and somewhat formidable movement for Chase and that Chase 
 Clubs are being organized in all the cities to control the nominating 
 Convention," and adds, as to cabinet meetings, "Chase avoids coming 
 in these days." 21 
 
 20 Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. VIII, 316-317. 
 21 Welles, Diary. I, 498. 
 
¥3 
 
 H 
 
 OW MY heart sickens," wrote the garrulous Robert B. Warden, 
 Chase's official biographer, "as I make up the long list of knaves and 
 fools in whom the hero of this work confided!" Jacob Schuckers, 
 Chase's other official biographer, selected by his daughters as a kind 
 of antidote to Warden, similarly bewails the Secretary's poor judg- 
 ment of men. In particular, he says, this presidential canvass "fell into 
 bad hands; it was badly officered and badly managed." Both writers 
 have in mind chiefly the two characters who had active charge of 
 Chase's boom. These were Senator Samuel Clarke Pomeroy of Kan- 
 sas, and James M. Winchell of New York. 
 
 They had been close associates in politics and business for several 
 years, especially in Kansas during the Kansas-Missouri "border ruffian" 
 days. Pomeroy, a William Lloyd Garrison abolitionist in early life, a 
 professional antislavery agitator in the fifties, had arrived in Washing- 
 ton as first Senator from Kansas in the early part of 1861. A reputation 
 for political corruption in attaining this seat had preceded him. That he 
 had purchased it from the rough-and-ready legislature of a pioneer era 
 was the prevailing belief. This suspicion could not then be established, 
 but certain crises in Pomeroy's after career lend some color to the scan- 
 dal. A committee of the Kansas legislature which investigated Pome- 
 roy's re-election in 1867 reported unanimously that members of the 
 legislature had been bribed. In 1873 Pomeroy failed of a third term 
 because both the Kansas legislature and a committee of the Federal 
 Senate proved to the satisfaction of his constituents that money had 
 been used to purchase votes. 
 
 Pomeroy's public life in Washington accorded well with this char- 
 acter. He seemed to have had little interest in anything except the spoils 
 of the senatorial office. The feuds that constantly raged between the 
 onetime abolitionist and his colleague, the Huey-Long-like Jim Lane, 
 afforded Washington a good deal of entertainment, but caused great 
 distress to the occupant of the White House. "Lane knocks at my door 
 every morning," Lincoln remarked, and the importunities of his rival 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS ' 411 
 
 were just as insistent. Perhaps Lane received more consideration than 
 Pomeroy; at least that was Pomeroy 's conviction, and, as a result, he 
 declared war on Lincoln. Inevitably Pomeroy was drawn within the 
 presidential orbit of Salmon P. Chase. His own private interest inclined 
 him to the Secretary. Pomeroy was the owner of a considerable block 
 of stock in the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, which, under the Pacific 
 Railroad Act, passed in 1862, was entitled to certain subsidies from 
 Federal funds. The allotment of these grants lay in the discretion of 
 the Secretary of the Treasury; at least it was Chase's duty to deter- 
 mine whether the conditions had been met which would make the 
 claimant eligible to government largess. Thus the desire to stand well 
 in Chase's estimation, combined with an intense animosity against the 
 ruling executive, had combined by the latter part of 1863 to make 
 Samuel Pomeroy leader of the forces that were working to secure a 
 new dispensation in the election of 1864. 
 
 This same Pacific Railroad interest was close to the heart of two 
 other men who presently assumed leading roles in the Chase campaign. 
 James M. Winchell had also been a fiery abolitionist, newspaperman, 
 Kansas correspondent of the New York Times, and presiding officer of 
 the Wyandotte Convention, the body which had framed the consti- 
 tution on which Kansas had been finally admitted to the Union. After 
 this triumph, Winchell returned to New York, and became agent of 
 the Pacific Railroad, a position that brought him into close relations 
 with Pomeroy. A third member of the trio was a young man of a 
 stamp entirely different from either of his seniors. Edmund Clarence 
 Stedman was a cultured, educated man, a favorite in intellectual circles 
 of both New York and Washington, a poet and literary critic whose 
 writings had considerable vogue in their time, though they have fallen 
 into neglect since his death. In 1862 Stedman, aged twenty-nine, hav- 
 ing served a brief time as war correspondent for the New York World, 
 came to Washington, and obtained a post as pardon clerk under At- 
 torney General Bates. Bates evidently liked his assistant, and mentions 
 him a few times in his Diary; however, he felt obliged to discourage 
 Stedman's enthusiasm for General McClellan to which he was giving 
 utterance on all occasions. The stirring verses, "Abraham Lincoln, give 
 us a man!" — Bates presented Lincoln with a copy, which the President 
 read to his assembled cabinet — sounded that note of criticism of the 
 President which was to grow keener as the presidential year 1864 ap- 
 proached. In 1863 Stedman, tired of Washington routine, went to 
 New York and entered the banking house of Samuel Hallett and Com- 
 pany, thus beginning that mingled career of Wall Street and literature 
 which was to make him known as the "banker-poet." The Hallett firm 
 
412 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 was fiscal agent of the Pacific Railroad, and Winchell and Stedman 
 necessarily saw much of each other. The friendship had political as 
 well as financial consequences. Chase, as man and Secretary, had 
 been Stedman's chief admiration in Washington. He soon joined the 
 Pomeroy-Winchell forces, taking charge of the New York head- 
 quarters of the Chase presidential boom; for several months he led a 
 varied life, speculating in stocks with Winchell as partner, 1 managing 
 what he called a Chase "Bureau of Action" in New York, writing 
 poetry and book reviews at night, visiting Kansas in the interest of the 
 Pacific Railroad, and spending days in Washington seeking subsidies 
 from Chase for that enterprise. His literary talents were pressed into 
 service, though Stedman's Diary confesses that the labor was very 
 "distasteful" and that he did not like the breed of politicians with whom 
 he had to work. He spent much time, however, with Greeley, David 
 Dudley Field, George Opdyke, Manton Marble, editor of the Copper- 
 head World, and others who had actively enlisted in the campaign 
 against Lincoln. 
 
 Many of the men prominent in the pro-Chase campaign, as appears 
 from Stedman's companions in New York, bore names of light and 
 leading in the nation. In December 1863 —soon after Lincoln had sent 
 his message to Congress advocating moderation and commiseration in 
 Reconstruction — another group, styling itself "an organization to 
 make Samuel P. Chase President," began holding secret meetings in 
 Washington. The list of best-known members had a decidedly Ohio 
 flavor — Major General Robert C. Schenck, Rufus P. Spalding, John 
 Conness, L. E. Chittenden, and Whitelaw Reid. General Schenck, five 
 days before the first meeting, had resigned from the army to become 
 Representative from Ohio. He had been a strong antislavery Whig, 
 Congressman from 1843 to 1851, and minister to Brazil — he afterward 
 served as minister to Great Britain by appointment of President Grant. 
 Rufus P. Spalding was another Ohio Congressman, a war Democrat 
 long personally and politically attached to Chase. John Conness was 
 the Senator from California whom Chase, as already noted, had made 
 dispenser of Treasury loaves and fishes in the far distant Pacific state. 
 L. E. Chittenden, afterward one of the most laudatory writers of Lin- 
 coln memoirs, was at the time drawing a Federal salary as Register of 
 the Treasury, by appointment of Chase. Whitelaw Reid, then only 
 twenty-six years old, had already laid the foundations of a distinguished 
 journalistic career. As war correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, he 
 
 1 See Stedman, Laura, and Gould, George M., Life and Letters of Edmund Clar- 
 ence Stedman. MorTet, Yard & Co., 1910. I, 327 ff. This contains many extracts 
 from Stedman's Diary showing his work on the Chase committee. 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 413 
 
 had won national fame by his description of Shiloh and Gettysburg; 
 as political reporter in Washington, he had sharply criticized the Lin- 
 coln policies and displayed a conspicuous leaning towards Chase. In 
 1860, Reid had championed Lincoln's rising star, thereby acquiring the 
 resentment of his fellow Ohioan; the breach had since been healed and 
 the brilliant young journalist had become one of the Secretary's closest 
 friends, a relationship that lasted for the rest of the Secretary's life. Reid 
 had accompanied Chase on the "going home to vote" excursion in 
 October 1863, and by the time of the December meeting was in the 
 confidence of Greeley — whom he subsequently succeeded as editor of 
 the New York Tribune — Henry Winter Davis, Sumner, Garfield, Sher- 
 man, and other congressional antagonists of Lincoln. 
 
 How many of these eminent gentlemen approved of the most im- 
 portant achievement of this committee, the pamphlet The Next Presi- 
 dential Election, which presently inundated the mails, cannot be known. 
 Certainly John Sherman, Senator from Ohio, saw nothing objectionable 
 in it, for it was broadcast, at government expense, under his frank — 
 a favor for which he presently issued a confused explanation which de- 
 ceived nobody, for his hostility to Lincoln had been no secret. Just 
 who wrote this diatribe is not certain, though suspicion strongly pointed 
 to James M. Winchell, co-worker with Stedman in the New York base 
 of operations. This document of six closely printed pages did not advo- 
 cate the Chase candidacy; it contented itself with exposing the futility 
 of Abraham Lincoln and the utter absurdity of considering him as a 
 presidential possibility in 1864. It was intended to afford politicians 
 material for their arguments against his candidacy, and editors with in- 
 spiration for their anti-Lincoln editorials. According to the newspapers 
 one hundred thousand copies were printed and placed where they 
 would do the most good. The Lincoln that emerged from a reading of 
 this paper was certainly a different character from the one now familiar 
 to the world. This 1864 Lincoln was portrayed as an unscrupulous 
 tyrant, ready to resort to all extremes to undermine the institutions of 
 his country and settle himself in power for the rest of his days. The 
 most elaborate objection urged against his renomination rather startles 
 a reader of the mid-twentieth century. It is the one that runs through 
 all of Chase's correspondence of the day. No President should ever 
 serve for more than one term! The one- term precedent, Chase was 
 accustomed to explain — and this brochure repeats his arguments — was 
 so sanctified by custom that it had become practically a part of the 
 Constitution. Since Andrew Jackson retired to the Hermitage in 1837, 
 not one of his nine successors had occupied the presidential chair for 
 more than four years. To violate that principle now would destroy 
 
414 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the Republic and establish a dictator in the White House. In all parts 
 of the country, the pamphlet insisted, Lincoln was appointing postmas- 
 ters, customhouse officers, marshals, district attorneys, and the like — 
 all of them Lincoln politicians, who, as delegates to the nominating 
 convention, would present a unified phalanx for a second term. Nor 
 was this army to be a purely temporary host; it was to be kept in con- 
 stant preparedness, and would thus assure the President's renomination 
 for as many successive terms as he might desire. 
 
 "If President Lincoln," the pamphlet said, "can now so wield his 
 patronage as to secure his election for a second term, who so blind as 
 not to see that four years hence he will have less difficulty in securing 
 his election for a third term? For, with an army of more than half a 
 million citizen soldiers under his command and an annual patronage of 
 a thousand millions in money, he can, if he has half the brain attributed 
 to him by his friends, have himself elected from term to term during 
 his natural life." This picture of Lincoln as a military despot was con- 
 stantly present in the author's mind. The President was deliberately 
 letting the war drag on in order to keep himself in office. "If the 'military 
 necessity' supplies a reason now for his nomination and the extraordi- 
 nary patronage occasioned by the war furnishes the means of his elec- 
 tion, as a matter of course, his interest is then to prolong the war as a 
 means of perpetuating his power." Lincoln's one chance of re-election 
 was by using "the military power in his hands, by suppressing the free- 
 dom of election in the loyal states. A victory won by the sword would 
 be no victory but a lamentable defeat to the friends of liberty. . . . The 
 temptation to a military candidate to use the sword to secure his own 
 election is too great, the warnings of history too impressive for the 
 American people ever voluntarily to submit to so hazardous an experi- 
 ment." The rest of the document was devoted to Lincoln's failure as an 
 executive. He was "weak," "vacillating," "incapable of settling upon any 
 line of policy in regard to the rebellion. . . . The cant about 'honest 
 Abe' was at first amusing, it then became ridiculous and now it is ab- 
 solutely criminal." Perhaps the paragraph that most outraged Lincoln's 
 admirers was a comparison to Jefferson Davis — much to the advantage 
 of the Confederate leader. See what Davis, with only five million people 
 behind him, with no money or resources, had accomplished, and then 
 look upon the Lincoln picture: head of twenty million people, with 
 all their wealth and industry at his command — and his failure, in nearly 
 four years' blundering, to suppress the rebellion! 
 
 An avalanche of letters descended on John Sherman for using his con- 
 gressional privilege to send great quantities of this literary masterpiece 
 
CHASE AND "THE BLAIRS" 415 
 
 through the mails. One correspondent wrote him that "it was so mean 
 and dastardly in character that it will brand with infamy your character 
 as a statesman and your honor as a gentleman." It "was a stab in the 
 dark, assassin style." This reference to anonymity could not be urged 
 against another anti-Lincoln broadside that followed, about two weeks 
 afterward. To this the name of Samuel G. Pomeroy was proudly ap- 
 pended; for the first time this leader appears in the light of day, though 
 he had been actively at work behind the scenes for a considerable time. 
 This is perhaps the reason why "the Pomeroy Circular," as it is always 
 known in Lincoln literature, was less personally abusive than The Next 
 Presidential Election, though practically all the charges and insinuations 
 of its predecessor were repeated. In literary style and in matter the two 
 articles were so much alike that they probably had the same author. 
 Blair, in his usual peppery fashion, said that Chase himself had written 
 the circular, but James W. Schuckers, who, as Chase's secretary and 
 biographer, had better firsthand information, points to James M. 
 Winchell as the ghoster for Pomeroy and it is reasonably safe to con- 
 clude that he was penman also of the earlier document. The same gen- 
 eral contentions figured in both. 
 
 In only one respect did the Pomeroy Circular differ from the pre- 
 ceding theses, and this was important. It pointed out in emphatic terms 
 the one American who did possess the necessary talents for the great 
 task still confronting the nation. "We find unified in Salmon P. Chase 
 more of the qualities needed in a Presidential candidate during the next 
 four years than are combined in any other available candidate; his rec- 
 ord, clear and unimpeachable, showing him to be a statesman of rare 
 ability and an administrator of the very highest order, while his private 
 character furnishes the surest guarantee of economy and purity in the 
 management of public affairs. . . . The discussion of the Presidential 
 question, already commenced by the friends of Mr. Lincoln, has de- 
 veloped a popularity and a strength in Mr. Chase unexpected even to 
 his warmest admirers; and while we are aware that this strength is at 
 present unorganized, and in no condition to manifest its real magnitude, 
 we are satisfied that it only needs systematic and faithful effort to de- 
 velop to an extent sufficient to overcome all opposing obstacles." There- 
 fore the admirers of Mr. Chase were organizing on this platform: "The 
 speedy restoration of the Union on the basis of universal freedom," 
 and "an administration of the government during its first period of 
 new life which shall to the fullest extent develop the capacity of free 
 institutions, enlarge the resources of the country, diminish the burdens 
 of taxation, advocate the standard of private and public morality, vindi- 
 
416 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 cate the honor of die Republic before the world and in all things make 
 an American nationalist the fairest example for imitation which human 
 progress has ever achieved." 
 
 This circular, though marked "strictly private," inevitably found its 
 way into newspaper offices and was too sensational an item of news to 
 escape publication. In giving it to its readers, the Constitutional Union 
 of Washington ridiculed the injuction to secrecy. "We propose," it 
 said, "to keep closely confidential all the unmentionable things con- 
 tained in this 'strictly private document/ not by ourselves alone, but 
 aided by our 30,000 subscribers." That fairly represents the spirit in 
 which the Chase-Pomeroy manifesto was received. In hotel lobbies, 
 dinner tables, the halls of Congress, and other places in which the mat- 
 ter was eagerly discussed, criticism centered on the utter folly of the 
 thing. Chase might deny any knowledge of the circular but deceived 
 nobody; his daughter Kate certainly must have known about it, for her 
 husband, William Sprague, was one of the central group and the finan- 
 cial supporters of the enterprise. But that a member of Lincoln's cabi- 
 net should be engaged — or suffer his friends to be engaged — in these 
 attacks upon his chief, that he should be openly seeking the nomination 
 and at the same time not resigning as a member of the President's official 
 family — here was something new even in the not too high-minded 
 political scene. 
 
 Chase himself, when this letter became public, finally saw the point 
 and wrote Lincoln offering to retire from the administration. He was 
 utterly guiltless of this document, he informed the President, and had 
 known nothing of its existence until it appeared in the newspapers. It 
 was true that he had given his consent to the use of his name in the 
 approaching canvass. He had been waited on some weeks before by a 
 committee representing Senators, Congressmen, and "other distin- 
 guished citizens," and had reluctantly agreed to their request. But he 
 had done this only from a sense of public duty. "I have never wished 
 that my name should have a moment's thought in comparison with the 
 common cause of enfranchisement and restoration, or be continued be- 
 fore the public a moment after the indication of a preference by the 
 friends of that cause for another. I have thought this explanation due 
 to you as well as to myself. If there is anything in my action or position 
 which in your judgment will prejudice the public interests under my 
 charge, I beg you to say so. I do not wish to administer the Treasury 
 Department one day without your entire confidence. For yourself I 
 cherish sincere respect and esteem, and, permit me to add, affection. Dif- 
 ferences of opinion as to administrative action have not changed these 
 sentiments nor have they been changed by assaults upon me by persons 
 
CHASE AND THE BLAIRS 417 
 
 who profess themselves the special representatives of your views and 
 policy. You are not responsible for acts not your own; nor will you 
 hold me responsible, except for what I do or say myself. Great num- 
 bers now desire your re-election. Should your wishes be fulfilled by the 
 suffrages of the people, I hope to carry with me into private life the 
 sentiments I now cherish, whole and unimpaired." 
 
 Lincoln, of course, did not have the slightest intention of consenting 
 to Chase's resignation — at this time. He was too able a party manager 
 to make a mistake of that proportion. If there was any virtue in his 
 plan for a coalition cabinet, it was especially needed at this moment. 
 The dismissal of Chase, in February 1864, would have split the party 
 in two and probably have led to its defeat in the coming election. For 
 the fact could not be overlooked, and the practical Lincoln was the 
 last man to overlook it, that more than a majority in both houses of 
 Congress, and a great body of influential men in the country, supported 
 the Chase view on Reconstruction rather than his own. To have repudi- 
 ated Chase would undoubtedly have led to two Union parties and 
 Chase's nomination by one of them in opposition to the regular candi- 
 date. That would have meant handing over the country to the Demo- 
 crats and the end of the war, with the South as virtual winner. Lin- 
 coln therefore acknowledged Chase's letter in a brief note and said 
 that he would reply to it in a few days. "On consideration," he wrote 
 Chase on February 29, "I find there is really very little to say. My 
 knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy's letter having been made public came to 
 me only the day you wrote, but I had, in spite of myself, known of 
 ks existence several days before. I have not yet read it, and I think I 
 shall not. I was not shocked or surprised by the appearance of the let- 
 ter, because I had had knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy's committee, and 
 of secret issues which I supposed came from it, and of secret agents who 
 I supposed were sent out by it, for several weeks. I have known just 
 as little of these things as my friends allowed me to know. They bring 
 the documents to me, but I do not read them; they tell me what they 
 think fit to tell me, and I do not enquire for more. I fully concur with 
 you that neither of us can be justly held responsible for what our re- 
 spective friends may do without our instigation or countenance; and 
 I assure you, as you have assured me, that no assault has been made upon 
 you by my instigation or with my countenance. Whether you shall 
 remain at the head of the Treasury Department is a question which I 
 shall not allow myself to consider from any standpoint other than my 
 judgment of the public service, and, in that view, I do not perceive 
 occasion for a change." 
 
 Chase himself rather ruefully noted the one conspicuous quality lack- 
 
418 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 ing in this letter. In a note to the always sympathetic Horace Greeley, 
 he referred to this correspondence. To the Secretary's suggestion of 
 resignation "the President had replied, closing with the statement that 
 there was nothing in the condition of the public interests which called 
 for a change in the Secretaryship of the Department; but there was no 
 response in his letter to the sentiments of respect and esteem which 
 mine contained." 
 
BOOK SEVEN 
 
 C End of the Coalition 3 
 
 * <$ai> <i=£ <iaS> "^aP <*=? U> < iasP <**? <ia«P <ws9 c *sP ^ <*sP ^SssP^* 
 
I 
 
 % 
 
 HE Next Presidential Election and the Pomeroy Circular destroyed 
 such slender chances as Chase may have had for popular support. Their 
 one effect was to rally all Lincolnians to the President's side. Three 
 days after Pomeroy's pamphlet appeared in type the Union Repub- 
 licans in Ohio passed a resolution advocating Lincoln's nomination 
 for a second term. Governor Tod of Ohio wrote the President, pro- 
 testing against the unauthorized use Chase propagandists were making 
 of his name. "The fact," he said, "that Mr. Chase has been laboring for 
 the past year, at least, with an eye to promoting his own selfish purposes, 
 totally regardless of the consequences to the government, as I believed 
 to be the case, is also sufficient to induce me to oppose him." Thus the 
 same misadventure which had defeated Chase's ambitions in 1860 had 
 humiliated him again. He was a presidential candidate without the 
 delegation of his home state. James A. Garfield, John Sherman, and 
 other political intimates urged the Secretary to accept the inevitable 
 and disentangle himself, as gracefully as possible, from his embarrass- 
 ment. 
 
 Chase followed the advice of his friends, at least to outward appear- 
 ances. In a letter to James C. Hall, written March 5, and generally pub- 
 lished in the newspapers on the tenth, he went through the motion of 
 withdrawing his name. But, maladroit as ever, he did this in a way that 
 brought ridicule on his head. He had retired only from a sense of duty; 
 his presence in the field seemed likely to endanger the sacred cause; 
 his friends were still urgent that he remain a candidate. Hardened poli- 
 ticians, who knew that Chase had stepped aside only because he could 
 obtain no delegates, laughed at this pretension. They also pointed out 
 that this letter, and others addressed to personal friends, left the way 
 open for Chase to resume his aspirations if things should take a more 
 promising turn. "Mr. Chase will subside as a Presidential candidate," 
 wrote Edwin D. Morgan, Senator from New York and chairman of 
 the Republican National Committee, "after the nomination is made, not 
 before." "The Salmon is a queer fish," commented the scurrilous Ben- 
 
422 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 nett in the New York Herald, "very wary, often appearing to avoid 
 the bait just before gulping it down." The more sedate Edward Bates 
 was similarly distrustful. "This forced declention [sic] of Mr. Chase is 
 really not worth much," he wrote in his Diary for March 9, 1864. "It 
 proves that the present prospects of Mr. Lincoln are too good to be 
 openly resisted, at least, by men within the party. The extreme men, 
 who urged Mr. Chase, afraid to array themselves in open opposition to 
 Mr. L. will only act more guardedly — get up as many candidates as 
 they can, privily with the hope of bringing Mr. C. in at last, as a com- 
 promise candidate." Lincoln's campaign manager of 1860, David Davis, 
 now adorning the United States Supreme Court, diagnosed the situa- 
 tion in the same way. "Mr. Chase's declination," Justice Davis wrote 
 Thurlow Weed March 21, "is a mere sham, and very ungraceful at 
 that. The plan is to get up a great opposition to Lincoln, use Fremont 
 and others, and represent, when the Convention meets, the necessity of 
 united effort, that anybody can unite except Lincoln, etc., etc. and 
 then to present Chase. There was a meeting of Chase's friends in the 
 city [Washington] last night. They resolved not to support Lincoln, 
 etc., etc. the greater part present were Treasury officials. How long 
 can these things last?" 
 
 The unobtrusive author of the Pomeroy Circular, James M. Winchell, 
 held similar views. He insisted several years afterward that Chase's real 
 purpose in withdrawing his name was to spur the wavering spirits of his 
 campaigners. Evidently Pomeroy and his co-worker, Kate's husband, 
 had run to cover in face of the wave of indignation that greeted their 
 literary efforts. "The movement in favor of the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, Mr. Chase" — so wrote Winchell in a reminiscent article — "had 
 culminated in disaster; that gentleman's chief supporters, including his 
 senatorial son-in-law, having manifested a plentiful lack of nerve or 
 zeal, when the critical question became public, of arraying him against 
 his official chief, made haste to take him at his word of declination, 
 diplomatically spoken, in order to rouse their flagging spirits." 1 
 
 Another element in the Lincoln fellowship did not take too seriously 
 this withdrawal. In all this fury the Blairs had not been quiescent. 
 Chase's pretensions, indeed, afforded them the greatest opportunity of 
 their career. In January 1864, Frank Blair returned from the battlefields 
 of Chickamauga and Chattanooga to resume his secondary duties as 
 Representative from Missouri. In a sense he came at the invitation of 
 Lincoln himself. As the time drew near for the assembling of the Thirty- 
 eighth Congress, Montgomery Blair candidly asked the President what 
 were his wishes concerning Frank; should he resign his commission, 
 
 1 Galaxy Magazine, July 1873. "Three Interviews with Lincoln." 
 
END OF THE COALITION 423 
 
 give up the military life and devote himself exclusively to his career of 
 lawmaker? Lincoln knew that the approaching legislative session was 
 to be a difficult one. In the fierce lines being formed against his Recon- 
 struction policy, he would need all the support that could be enrolled. 
 There had been a good deal of talk, on the Lincolnian side, of Frank 
 Blair as the next Speaker of the House. In such a post he would be a 
 tower of strength to the Lincoln forces. On the other hand, as an ordi- 
 nary member of the House, his services could have a doubtful value. 
 His unrestrained oratory, his Blair habit of pursuing his foes, especially 
 his favorite one, Chase, with heroic vituperation might do the ad- 
 ministration more harm than good. Lincoln thought this decision con- 
 cerning Frank Blair so important that he put his views in writing. Let 
 Frank come to Washington, he decided, and place his resignation as 
 major general in the President's hands; then let him enter the contest 
 for the speakership. If he succeeded in attaining that distinction, Lin- 
 coln would accept the resignation and Frank could devote all his time 
 in future to statesmanship. If he failed, Lincoln would replace his com- 
 mission in his hands, and he could resume his duties with the army. 
 By the time Frank reached Washington, in early January, Schuyler 
 Colfax, openly anti-Lincoln, had been elected Speaker. Frank, however, 
 lingered on; the Chase situation was getting critical, and he saw several 
 ways in which he might spend a few weeks profitably to the Blair 
 family and to the Lincoln administration. 
 
 The program of his new attack Frank had already outlined in news- 
 paper articles and speeches in the summer of 1863. Chase, he insisted, 
 was busily constructing his presidential machine, not only by the use 
 of Treasury patronage, but by another device that was even more pro- 
 ductive of results. The trading that had been going on between North 
 and South for nearly three years had caused one of the most sordid 
 scandals of the Civil War. The problem had become an acute one after 
 the outbreak of hostilities. The cessation of commercial intercourse 
 that inevitably followed Sumter had caused great inconvenience and 
 even suffering to both sides. Since the beginning of the government the 
 Southern states had been dependent on the North for most of the es- 
 sentials of existence. Wearing apparel, shoes, tea, many kinds of food, 
 and above all medicines, were articles of everyday need that could 
 be obtained only from the region with which the Confederacy was 
 now at war; the blockade had become so effective that they could not 
 be obtained from Europe. On the other hand, the North was depend- 
 ent on Southern states for certain staples such as cotton, tobacco, sugar, 
 resin, tar, and other things without which its normal economy could 
 not be sustained. The most important, of course, was cotton. The 
 
424 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Union needed this commodity not only to keep its own mills in opera- 
 tion, but to pacify the increasing demand from England and France. 
 As the Northern armies began advancing into Southern states, 
 especially those in the Mississippi Valley — Kentucky, Tennessee, Mis- 
 sissippi, Arkansas, Louisiana — great areas of formerly rebellious terri- 
 tory passed under Federal control. These sections contained accumula- 
 tions of cotton and the other commodities sadly needed in the North. 
 They contained also large populations, a considerable proportion loyal 
 to the Union, which had been reduced to misery by the lack of neces- 
 saries of which the North possessed a large supply. Would there be 
 any harm in re-establishing trade between these now redeemed areas 
 — sections that had virtually become again parts of the Federal Union, 
 and were under the administration of Federal armies — and their former 
 customers in the North? 
 
 Formulated in this simple fashion, there seemed to be one reply pos- 
 sible to the question. From this situation rapidly developed several 
 Acts of Congress which made legal certain trading operations with the 
 onetime enemy. The whole difficult matter was placed under the juris- 
 diction of the Secretary of the Treasury. Chase was authorized to or- 
 ganize agencies and to grant special permits for this kind of intercourse. 
 That such an arrangement gave opportunity for favoritism and cor- 
 ruption is evident; and, in fact, the depredations of the speculators who 
 seized the chance of making quick fortunes forms one of the darkest 
 stories of the time. Frank Blair claimed that Chase had used these pre- 
 rogatives to strengthen his political machine. "Permits to trade" in rebel 
 territory were valued higher than most political offices — they were 
 likely to prove more profitable; and naturally the pressure from poli- 
 ticians and their friends for such privileges became ferocious. Blair 
 asserted that Chase was distributing these favors in ways that would 
 best promote his presidential prospects. In Missouri, he said, only radi- 
 cals received the "permits" while the other wing — the Lincolnian 
 wing — in the Republican Party was ignored. When Blair resumed his 
 congressional seat in January, almost his first move was to rise and 
 demand the appointment of a committee to investigate the granting of 
 "trade permits" in the Mississippi Valley. The Chase forces in the 
 House, under the leadership of James A. Garfield and the Speaker, 
 Schuyler Colfax, who, if not openly supporting Chase's candidacy, 
 were opposing Lincoln, succeeded in blocking this resolution. The 
 popular revulsion caused by the Pomeroy Circular, however, gave Blair 
 another opening, and on February 27 he came into the House with a 
 prepared speech, which appeared in the Congressional Globe under the 
 title, "The Jacobins of Missouri." 2 
 
 2 Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, I Session. Appendix 46-51. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 425 
 
 It was devoted chiefly to Chase and his trade practices in the South- 
 ern states. It was also a spirited defense of Lincoln against his pam- 
 phleteering assailants. Pay no attention, Blair cried, to certain activities 
 in Missouri and Maryland, states where a certain type of Republican 
 was pledging support to Lincoln, but secretly working to undermine 
 him. The vote of the recent Maryland state Republican convention at 
 Baltimore endorsing the President was cited as a sample of the hypoc- 
 risy so prevalent in these doubtful regions. The radicals in that con- 
 vocation openly had taken a stand for Lincoln's renomination, but 
 secretly they were seeking his destruction. Henry Winter Davis and 
 his pro-Chase organization had not dared to outrage the sentiment of 
 the people so far as to vote against Lincoln, but had sought, "while 
 thus putting the left arm around his neck, saying, 'How art thou, 
 my brother?' to stab him under the fifth rib. ... It is a matter of 
 surprise that a man having the instincts of a gentleman should remain 
 in the cabinet after the disclosure of such an intrigue against the one 
 to whom he owes his position. I suppose the President is well content 
 that he should stay; for every hour that he remains sinks him in the 
 contempt of every honorable mind." Why did this Mr. Chase and his 
 supporters in Congress oppose the investigation of his "trade per- 
 mits"? Why did his friends in the House interpose when attempts 
 were made to scrutinize these so-called favors to politicians "enlisted 
 in the Chase campaign"? "I say here in my place and upon my respon- 
 sibility as a Representative that a more profligate administration of the 
 Treasury Department never existed under any government, that the 
 whole Mississippi Valley is rank and fetid with the frauds and corrup- 
 tions of its agents; that 'permits' to buy cotton are just as much a mar- 
 ketable commodity as the cotton itself; that these permits to buy cot- 
 ton are brought to St. Louis and other western cities by politicians and 
 favorites from all parts of the country and sold on 'change' to the high- 
 est bidder, whether he be a secessionist or not, and that too, at a time 
 when the best Union men in these cities are denied permits." The same 
 was true, continued Blair, of the "trade stores" which the Secretary had 
 been authorized to establish in sections redeemed from the Confeder- 
 acy. "These trade stores are given to political partisans and favorites, 
 who share the profits with other men who furnish the capital, Mr. 
 Chase furnishing capital to his friends and partisans in the shape of 
 permits and privilege to monopolize the trade of a certain district or 
 city; and furthermore it can be established that the practice of taking 
 bribes on the part of these Treasury agents for permits to trade and 
 for conniving at violations of law is so common that it has almost ceased 
 to attract attention or excite comment." Such was the state of affairs, 
 concluded Blair, that the Chase supporters refused to investigate! 
 
426 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 "These dependents of the Secretary, these agents and missionaries of 
 his presidential aspirations, are still extant and receive their salaries. 
 Some of them, I suppose, employ themselves in distributing that 
 Strictly private' circular which came to life the other day which in- 
 forms us that the friends of Mr. Chase have been secretly forming an 
 organization in his favor all over the country and which charges the 
 administration of Mr. Lincoln with corruption. None know better 
 than the friends of Mr. Chase at whose door does that corruption lie 
 as their efforts to stifle investigation here so plainly prove." 
 
 And now Garfield succeeded in "stifling" such an inquiry once more. 
 His method was to offer a resolution providing for an investigation but 
 stipulating that it should be held by the Committee on the Conduct 
 of the War. Of course that put the whole matter in the hands of the 
 Chase party. On this motion Blair demanded the "yeas" and "nays." 
 "I want to see how many men there are in this house who wish to white- 
 wash Mr. Chase." The Garfield proposal passed by a vote of seventy- 
 five to sixty-three. Two months afterward, the irrepressible Blair again 
 pressed his demand. This time the House granted his request, but the 
 committee appointed by Speaker Colfax was headed by Garfield as 
 chairman, and comprised a majority of Chase adherents. This commit- 
 tee never carried out the instructions of the House; it declined to call 
 any witnesses, and after several weeks of inaction asked to be relieved 
 of the duty of investigating the Blair indictment. As to the actual facts 
 perhaps the nearest approach to an impartial verdict is that of Edward 
 Bates, an admirer neither of the Blairs nor of Chase. "How the President 
 will take it I know not," he wrote, "but if he'll just let me 'take the re- 
 sponsibility' I'll make short work of Mr. Chase's knot of ignorant and 
 rapacious swindlers, from the Balise to Cairo." 3 
 
 By this time the Blair-Chase contention had reached a stage of fever 
 heat almost without parallel in the eighty years' history of Congress. 
 The attack of February 27 proved to be a mild affair compared with 
 the philippic that the younger Blair delivered two months afterward. 
 Those who gathered in the upper house on April 23 understood, by a 
 glance in the gallery, that the anticipated storm was not exclusively the 
 affair of the younger Blair, but of the whole Blair family. There con- 
 spicuously sat the venerable head of the clan, freshly arrived from Silver 
 Spring, and by his side his sprightly daughter Betty Lee, a handsome, 
 smiling, valiant sister, all eager to cheer on one brother, while he engag- 
 ingly vituperated the cabinet colleague of another. The remaining gal- 
 lery seats were occupied, for news had leaked out of the forthcom- 
 
 8 Bates, op. cit., p. 382. Bates here includes as the area of irregularities the Missis- 
 sippi Valley, from the Gulf to the Ohio. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 427 
 
 ing performance; the Senate almost en masse abandoned its own quar- 
 ters and crowded into the House, as it usually did on the promise of 
 rough-and-tumble excitement in the lower chamber. Certain new de- 
 velopments had added fuel to Blair's sufficiently fiery temperament. 
 The repeated refusals of the Garfield Committee to investigate Chase's 
 "trade permits," even when directed to do so by the House, seemed 
 partisanship of the most unscrupulous kind. The Jay Cooke newspapers 
 — heavily endowed with Treasury advertising — had started a campaign 
 of unrestrained mud-slinging against the Missouri soldier-statesman. 
 The Chase cohorts in Missouri had sought to turn the tables on Frank 
 by accusing him of grafting in government contracts and conducting 
 an illicit trade in supplying whiskey and other drinkables to the army. 
 The House did appoint, on Blair's demand, a committee to investigate 
 these charges. The report dismissed them as calumnies and brought 
 forth a fact that made Frank a popular hero once more, for it showed 
 that the document on which his enemies had relied to support their 
 statement was a forgery. 
 
 In his speech Frank placed this forgery directly at the door of Secre- 
 tary Chase, for the crime, he said, if not instigated by the Secretary 
 himself, was clearly the work of his agents. The scene was one of the 
 most turbulent that the House had ever staged. Most of the members 
 were on their feet the larger part of the time, Chase's friends yelling 
 demands for order, Blair's adherents coming to his support with shouts 
 of "good," "go ahead," "keep it up"; Speaker Colfax, completely los- 
 ing control of the body, kept viciously pounding his gavel, declaring 
 the speaker "out of order," ordering him to stop — in vain, for the 
 House overruled his parliamentary decisions, perhaps because the 
 show was too enjoyable a one to be shut off on technicalities. Who was 
 responsible, asked Frank, for these "forgeries" against him published 
 in certain newspapers? "These dogs have been set on me by their mas- 
 ter, and since I have whipped them back into their kennels I mean to 
 hold their master for this outrage and not the curs who have been set 
 upon me." Many of the charges had been put in circulation by a news- 
 paper "pensioned by the Secretary of the Treasury. ... I am simply 
 endeavoring to show the motives which caused me to oppose Mr. Chase 
 and which opposition caused him to retort upon me by an assault upon 
 my character and reputation by the forgeries committed and dissemi- 
 nated by his understrappers." 
 
 "The gentleman is out of order!" shouted Speaker Colfax, bringing 
 down his gavel with a mighty bang. "You're all right!" responded the 
 Blair supporters. "Go ahead," and Frank did, ignoring the presiding 
 officer's interruption. 
 
428 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 "I propose to show," he continued, "that the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury is using these abandoned plantations and grasping at all the pow- 
 ers and patronage for the purpose of providing a fund to carry out the 
 operations of the Pomeroy committee against the administration which 
 gave him place." Chase was rewarding supporters in every direction. 
 He was giving his son-in-law, William Sprague, permits to buy cotton 
 that would yield him millions of dollars. He was granting Ohio adher- 
 ents the exclusive privilege of supplying the Southern regions with 
 medicines. "AH the southern people, in and out of our lines, loyal and 
 disloyal, and even the contrabands, must get their pills from Cincin- 
 nati." Yet the committee refused to investigate these things! "Mr. 
 Chase cannot escape. He is sure to answer, and however deeply the 
 committee may lay the whitewash on, it cannot conceal the dark back- 
 ground. . . . The time will come when he will be held to strict ac- 
 countability, when he will be called to the bar to answer for all he has 
 done; and all the efforts made by his friends thus indirectly to shield 
 him from the charges made against him will not serve their purpose." 
 Then Blair passed to the chief promoters of Chase's candidacy. "Mr. 
 Chase's banking agents, as well as his Treasury agents and special and 
 supervising agents have all been brought into requisition to forge and 
 counterfeit and tell lies to break me down for exposing and holding up 
 to public contempt and scorn their employer and master. ... A mil- 
 lion and three quarters dollars realized by a banking firm in less than 
 nine months is a comfortable competency for two or three private 
 gentlemen and would aid in establishing a good many newspapers in 
 the interest of Mr. Chase by these men, who are shown to be banking 
 on political capital to a greater extent than upon their own money. 
 Accordingly we find a great many newspapers in favor of Chase for 
 President, and very few people." Blair's general conclusion was "that 
 treasury officials, by means of outsiders, are now engaged in the most 
 gigantic robberies of modern times, exceeding the famous operations 
 of Clive in India." 
 
 Chase's withdrawal from the presidential contest should not be 
 taken seriously. "Nobody is simple enough to believe that the distin- 
 guished Secretary has really retired from the canvass for nomination 
 to the Presidency, though he has written a letter, declining to be a candi- 
 date. That letter was written because the 'strictly private' circular of 
 the Pomeroy Committee unearthed his underground and underhanded 
 intrigue against the President. It was such a disgraceful and disgusting 
 sight to make use of patronage and power given him by the President 
 against his chief, that even Chase got ashamed to occupy such a position 
 publicly. For that reason his letter was written; he wanted to get down 
 
END OF THE COALITION 429 
 
 and work under the ground and work there in the dark, as he is now 
 doing and running the Pomeroy machine on the public money as vigor- 
 ously as ever. The work is now being done in Fremont's name and that 
 poor creature is unconscious of being made a cat's paw to accomplish 
 the objects of his intriguing rival. His program is to hold a convention 
 of Jacobins and red Republican revolutionary Germans at Cleveland, 
 Ohio, precisely as Calhoun used poor John Tyler to hold a side con- 
 vention in 1844 to force the Democrats to drop Van Buren. The Cleve- 
 land convention is a whip convention which will say to the Union 
 Convention to be held at Baltimore, 'if you insist on the nomination of 
 Lincoln we will nominate Fremont against him as an independent 
 candidate.' In this way, if the delegates who have been instructed to 
 vote for Lincoln can be bought with greenbacks or frightened by the 
 Jacobin hobgobblin, it is expected that Chase, who has so magnani- 
 mously declined to be a candidate will then be taken up as a compro- 
 mise candidate. This is the program of the Secretary and the compro- 
 mise candidate. It combines the tactics, the intrigues, the corruption 
 and the frauds of Calhoun and Biddle combined." 4 
 
 At this point the Speaker's "hammer fell" and definitely, for Blair's 
 time was up. Frank left the House never to return; his next appearance 
 in Congress was in 1871 when he came as United States Senator from 
 Missouri. Leaving the Capitol after this farewell speech, Frank went 
 up to the White House, received from Lincoln his commission as major 
 general and the command of an army corps. He became part of Sher- 
 man's campaign in Tennessee and Georgia, and on the March to the 
 Sea won new laurels for bravery and ability in the field. 
 
 The President's act in restoring Frank Blair to his command in the 
 army and sending him to the front apparently with his blessing caused 
 more perturbation than the speech itself. What could this mean except 
 that Lincoln had approved Blair's attack on the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury? That Lincoln was the inspiring source behind the Missourian's 
 anti-Chase campaign, that, indeed, Blair had been brought to Washing- 
 ton for this express purpose, the radicals had for some time been whis- 
 pering; the presidential accolade, after Frank's most sensational out- 
 burst, seemed to confirm this suspicion. The fury and disgust of such 
 vehement Chase men as Garfield were unrestrained. Lincoln's "crea- 
 ture," Garfield wrote a friend, "was sent here for a special purpose, 
 which, when accomplished, he puts him back in his place, thus rati- 
 fying all he said and did when here. . . ." It was a "flagrant outrage 
 against, the rights of the Senate and the House, against the Constitution 
 and the army, against the men who had put him in power and against 
 
 4 Congressional Globe. 38th Congress, 1st session. Part 2, 1830-1832. 
 
430 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 one of his own cabinet. . . . The President is bound hand and foot to 
 the Blairs and they are dragging him and the country down the chasm." B 
 
 Salmon P. Chase, when he received news of the two acts — Frank 
 Blair's oration and the apparent reward bestowed upon him by the Pres- 
 ident — became an entirely different person from the placid, dignified, 
 philosophic Chase so familiar to history. Volcanic rage is not the char- 
 acteristic usually associated with this man, but all who caught glimpses 
 of Chase in the next few days picture him as unrestrained, violent, mak- 
 ing both Blair and Lincoln the victims of his explosive temper. One ob- 
 server in particular, A. G. Riddle, radical Congressman from Ohio, 
 has left a picture of Chase in this unusual mood. The Secretary was at 
 the railroad station, with his two daughters, Kate and Nettie, about to 
 step on a train for Baltimore, when the news from Capitol Hill reached 
 him. Riddle reports that his face was ashen, his voice hoarse, almost a 
 croak; "his body so shaking with fury that the railroad car in which 
 he was sitting fairly trembled under his feet. ... I was shown to Mr. 
 Chase's presence in the car set apart for his use. He was alone, and in a 
 frightful rage and controlled himself with difficulty as he explained 
 the cause. The recital seemed to kindle his anger and aggravate its in- 
 tensity. . . . 'All this,' " Chase told Riddle, " 'has been done with the 
 cordial approval of the President, a view fully shared by some of my 
 immediate friends.' . . . Mr. Chase thought of remaining in the city, 
 at once tendering his resignation to the President. I implored him not 
 to act hastily and said that next week — after a better ascertainment of 
 the facts — he would be able to act in accordance with a dignified 
 consideration of all the conditions, as was his usual rule." Then the 
 train started, greatly to Riddle's relief. 6 
 
 The lobbies of the Washington hotels and of Congress were natu- 
 rally alive with rumors. That Chase would retire from the Lincoln ad- 
 ministration was assumed as a matter of course. How could a self-re- 
 specting public man act otherwise? How could he continue to sit in 
 the cabinet of a President who had shown such favor to a politician- 
 soldier immediately after he had inflicted about the worst castigation 
 any public man had been subjected to in the memory of the living 
 generation? How could he keep on, facing across the cabinet table 
 Montgomery Blair, brother of the outrageous Frank, and probably his 
 co-worker in the preparation of the speech? Already gossip was busy 
 fixing on Chase's successor. The complete disintegration of the Lincoln 
 administration seemed unavoidable. That long anticipated final break 
 between Lincoln and the radicals, so many times averted, now was 
 
 5 Smith, op. cit. I, 376. 
 
 6 Riddle, A. G., Recollections of War Times. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905. P. 267. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 431 
 
 apparently at hand. Only some satisfactory explanation from Lincoln, 
 even an apology to Chase, would avert the calamity. Blair's attack had 
 been made on Saturday; on Sunday party leaders were busy with plans 
 that might, at the last moment, save the situation. Chase, it was said, 
 had even drafted a paper, to be signed by the President, denying all 
 responsibility for Blair and expressing confidence in the Treasury De- 
 partment. Finally the Ohio delegation in Congress appointed two of 
 Chase's most earnest champions, A. G. Riddle and Rufus P. Spalding, 
 a committee of two to wait upon the President and attempt to arrange 
 some satisfactory compromise. 
 
 They were received by Lincoln in his executive office Monday morn- 
 ing. Both the emissaries were shocked by Lincoln's careworn appear- 
 ance; "he looked like a man harassed by petty fault-finding and criti- 
 cism, until he had turned at bay." Lincoln, after the usual salutations, 
 withdrew to the end of the cabinet table and sat down, not, however, 
 inviting his visitors to do likewise. "Mr. Lincoln received us politely 
 but with no pretense of cordiality," Riddle subsequently recorded. 
 Riddle began the session by stressing the need of harmony in the 
 Republican ranks at this time; the salvation of the nation, he said, 
 demanded Lincoln's re-election and recent events had endangered the 
 harmony that was indispensable to success. He frankly told Lincoln 
 that Blair's speech, followed by the President's apparent endorsement 
 in renewing his military commission, "seemed as if planned for dra- 
 matic effect, as part of a conspiracy against a most important member 
 of the cabinet and the administration. . . . The always alert, jealous 
 and somewhat exacting abolitionists believe that Blair must have had 
 at least your countenance in this wretched business and they demand 
 the instant resignation of Mr. Chase. It is only by the strenuous exertion 
 of one or two persons that this has been delayed. . . . Mr. President, 
 Mr. Chase's abrupt resignation now would be equal in its effects to a 
 severe set-back of the army under Grant. It would foretell the defec- 
 tions of his friends at Baltimore, equal in effect to the defeat of that 
 army in a pitched battle. Their defection in November might be the 
 destruction of our cause. I pray you to remember who these abolition- 
 ists are. They are the first, the oldest antislavery men — the abolitionists 
 who conquered, first of all, the pro-slavery North, and who, with later 
 allies, have conducted the great struggle to the issue of war, who made 
 your accession to power possible. I know they have at times been over 
 hasty. They were, however, the first to leap to your side and who have 
 pressed most closely after you, nay, would push you forward." 
 
 At the end of these introductory remarks Lincoln's not too friendly 
 countenance changed; he rose, came forward, shook the two Congress- 
 
432 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 men by the hand and, standing, spoke for nearly an hour. His remarks, 
 so far as Riddle recorded them, were as follows: — 
 
 "Gentlemen, I am glad to meet you, glad for your mission, and 
 especially glad for your way of executing it. It makes my statement 
 easier than I expected. I nevertheless will say about what I intended. 
 Your frankness and cordiality shall be fully responded to." 
 
 Then, taking up a batch of papers from the table, Lincoln asked: 
 "Have you seen my letter to Mr. Chase of February 27, in reply to 
 his of the twenty-second, concerning his candidacy and offering his 
 resignation?" 
 
 "I have," replied Spalding. 
 
 "I have not," said Riddle. 
 
 Lincoln read the document. Then, placing it back on the table, he 
 remarked, with a slight smile: "The Blairs are, as you know, strong, 
 tenacious men, having some peculiarities, among them the energy with 
 which their feuds are carried on." 7 
 
 "Yes," interposed Riddle, "Montgomery says that when the Blairs 
 go in for a fight they go in for a funeral." 
 
 "Exactly," said Lincoln, and then he referred to the Blairs' work in 
 building an antislavery party in Missouri. "Frank has in some way 
 permitted himself to be put in a false position. He is in danger of being 
 kicked out of the house built by himself. You know that they contrib- 
 uted more than any twenty men to bring forward Fremont in 1856. I 
 know that they mainly induced me to make him a major-general and 
 send him to Missouri." 
 
 Lincoln gave what information he had on the recent disturbances 
 in Congress. Frank had called on him and said that he wished to make 
 a speech in the House on the Mississippi trade regulations. "I told him 
 that if he did the subject justice he would be doing a public service. 
 'But if you intend to make it the occasion of pursuing a personal war- 
 fare, you had better remain silent.' " Lincoln said that the speech had 
 greatly annoyed him. The trade regulations had been made by the 
 cabinet. "When it assailed Mr. Chase for the working of the machinery 
 it did him an injustice." 
 
 This reference, of course, was to Frank's first speech — that of Feb- 
 ruary 27, on the "permit" system in the Mississippi. Lincoln then took 
 up the latest explosion — that of the preceding Saturday, which formed 
 the basis of the present protest. Before making his second speech, Lin- 
 coln explained, Frank had again called at the White House. He was 
 leaving for the front that evening, and would like to resume his com- 
 mission as major general. The President sent to the War Department 
 
 7 See supra, p. 387. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 433 
 
 and ordered Frank's resignation to be canceled. This, of course, auto- 
 matically restored him to his old place in the army. In this interview 
 Frank had said nothing to Lincoln about the farewell address he had 
 been putting together for some time. "Within three hours," Lincoln 
 said, "I heard that this speech had been made and I knew that another 
 bee-hive was kicked over. My first thought was to have cancelled the 
 order restoring him to the army and assigning him to command. Per- 
 haps this would have been best. On such reflection as I was able to 
 give the matter, however, I concluded to let them stand. If I was wrong 
 in this, the injury to the service can be set right. And there you see how 
 far I am responsible for Frank Blair's assaults on Mr. Chase." 
 
 The two envoys of Congress were delighted at the President's dis- 
 claimer. "Mr. President," said Spalding, "spare us all further details. 
 We only ask your word." "Your word," Riddle chimed in, "is the 
 highest human evidence." 
 
 Only one point remained. Did the President's letter of February 29, 
 deprecating Chase's resignation, represent Mr. Lincoln's present feel- 
 ing? "I can not see now," the President replied, "as I could not see then, 
 how the public service could be advanced by his retirement." Thus the 
 interview that had begun so unfavorably had a happy conclusion. 
 Riddle, ending his account, said that Lincoln "was plain, sincere and 
 most impressive." 8 
 
 One man, however, was still dissatisfied. Chase insisted that the 
 President's disavowal of responsibility for Blair's oratory, or fore- 
 knowledge of it, be put in writing. Unless the President should do 
 this, he kept writing and telling his friends, he would not remain in 
 the administration. Jay Cooke urged Chase to stand firm on this ulti- 
 matum. "If I were you," he wrote Chase May 4, "I would demand of 
 Lincoln an open reprimand of Blair, and a disavowal of all sympathy 
 with such base charges." "I hope my wrathiness," Chase replied May 
 5, "was not excessive. Indeed it was vexatious to think that all my labors 
 to serve our country had found recompense, so far as Mr. Lincoln's 
 special friends were concerned, and with his apparent (but as I hope, 
 and believe, merely apparent) endorsement, only in outrageous cal- 
 umny. I seldom consult personal considerations in my public conduct 
 and so suppressed my personal inclination to resign my office, and de- 
 nounce the conspiracy of which the Blairs are the most visible embodi- 
 ments. After returning from Baltimore, I conferred with Governor 
 Brough and other friends, who were earnest in advising against resigna- 
 tion, and I yielded to their judgment which, indeed, coincided with 
 my own, though exceedingly contrary to my impulses." On Monday 
 
 8 Riddle, op. cit., pp. 270 ff. 
 
434 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Chase had learned "that the President disavowed in the most explicit 
 terms all connection with, or all responsibility for Blair's assault, and 
 expressed his decided disapproval of it." But this was merely "verbal" 
 and Chase and his friends insisted on "a distinct statement in writing" 
 which was "due to me, to Ohio and to the country." 9 A few days later 
 he uttered the same complaint to Miss Susan Walker, one of the platonic 
 friends whom he liked to take into his confidence. "I use as much 
 philosophy as I can in relation to the Blairs, and really want to act in 
 relation to them on Christian principles. But I cannot well command 
 my equanimity when I reflect upon the unprovoked character of their 
 assaults; the damage I see being done to our cause and country; and 
 the apparent indifference to it all of Mr. Lincoln, who, though he dis- 
 claims all sympathy with them in their speech and action, does nothing 
 to avert either." 10 What he called Lincoln's "endorsement" of Blair, 
 Chase wrote another correspondent at about the same time, "must be 
 disavowed by an act as public as that which made it apparently such. 
 I presume it will be cheerfully conceded by Mr. Lincoln. This time I 
 shall have no personal ground of complaint, though nothing can change 
 the character of the Blair-Lincoln transaction so far as the public is 
 concerned." u 
 
 However, Lincoln made no public disavowal. And Chase, despite his 
 often-repeated threats of resignation if no such statement were forth- 
 coming, did not resign. 
 
 9 Warden, op. cit., p. 584. 
 
 10 Ibid., p. 588. 
 
 11 Ibid., p. 587. 
 
II 
 
 Th 
 
 HAT DISGRUNTLED soldier-politician whom Lincoln's inti- 
 mates regarded merely as a stalking horse for Chase now makes a brief 
 appearance on this troubled scene. In his lurid speech in the House 
 Frank Blair had made several references to John C. Fremont and also 
 attacked a convention of the miscellaneous disaffected which was soon 
 to be held in Cleveland, Ohio. In the Riddle and Spalding meeting with 
 Lincoln there were guarded references to this same gathering. The 
 movement had originated in Missouri, in that faction of the Republican 
 Party known as Charcoals, which had been most outspoken in hostility 
 to Lincoln and the Blairs, and most unbridled in admiration of Chase, 
 though similar elements in other regions, especially New York and the 
 New England states, had given it a somewhat guarded benediction. 
 To what extent the Fremont come-outers represented a serious attempt 
 to split the Republican Party in two, and to what extent it was merely 
 a threat to create such a schism, is a matter of conjecture. However, 
 in April a "call," signed by names that, for the most part, suggested 
 a Teutonic background, was issued for a convention to be held in late 
 May, to nominate a candidate for President who would more accept- 
 ably fulfill the needs of the hour than Abraham Lincoln. That this 
 candidate would be John C. Fremont was the general expectation. 
 
 Fremont had been living for some time in retirement in New York 
 City, nursing his grievances against Lincoln and enjoying his exaltation 
 as a hero to the ultras in the Republican Party. That Fremont, though 
 nominally a Republican, would eagerly respond to the demand that 
 he stand as a third candidate in the coming fall election could be taken 
 for granted. Yet there were those who saw a deeper plan in the demon- 
 stration than appeared on the surface. As practical politics, the Fremont 
 movement was, of course, the last word in futility. Even the wild-eyed 
 New England abolitionists and the German idealists who made up the 
 larger part of its rank and file could not have expected to elect their 
 candidate or to make any considerable showing at the polls. Another 
 explanation — that by holding their convention a week before the 
 
436 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 regular party met in Baltimore the malcontents could induce it to 
 accept Fremont in order to avoid a split that would spell disaster in 
 November — seemed also unreasonable. In all attempts to disorganize 
 the Republican Party Lincoln's friends were sure to detect the evil 
 genius of Chase, and perhaps it was this now ingrained habit that led 
 them to point to the Secretary as the real promoter of the Fremont 
 secession. If not Chase directly, at least his supporters. Gideon Welles 
 leaned to this explanation. Edward Bates wrote most disrespectfully 
 in Biblical terms of his A4issouri friends who were "going a-whoring 
 after Fremont." That expert in political intrigue, David Davis, believed 
 that Chase, or his advocates, were at the bottom of the Cleveland mani- 
 festation. Frank Blair had openly made the same charge in his famous 
 diatribe. Montgomery Blair stigmatized the Fremont movement as a 
 "Chase operation." The fact that the elements previously identified 
 with the Chase boom were showing an oblique, but still friendly, dis- 
 position to Fremont lent some color to this suspicion. The New York 
 World, always a champion of Chase, was now booming the insurgent. 
 Twenty-six German-language newspapers, big and little, were doing 
 the same. Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House, who had never for- 
 given Lincoln for his exclusion from the cabinet, was now regarded 
 as most friendly to the Pathfinder; he had publicly proclaimed that he 
 would not support Lincoln. Henry Winter Davis, the anti-Blair feudist 
 of Maryland, would probably have favored any candidate who could 
 have driven Lincoln from the field. "Davis," wrote Montgomery Blair, 
 "was in full fellowship ... in the Fremont movement." Governor 
 Andrew of Massachusetts, Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania, David 
 Dudley Field of New York, all onetime supporters of Chase, were now 
 regarded as well disposed to Fremont, and there were many others of 
 similar importance. The real strategy of the Fremonters Blair had 
 explained in his explosive speech. It was to create such dissension in 
 Republican ranks that the need of a compromise candidate, one who 
 could heal all animosities and unite the party, would become imperative. 
 Fremont would do as a temporary shadow candidate, but the man on 
 whom all would unite would be Chase. 
 
 However, few of these undercover supporters appeared at the con- 
 vention. Most of them, even the most fiery St. Louis Charcoals, were 
 politicians; much as they might secretly sympathize with this anti- 
 Lincoln proceeding, they had their future to look out for, and this 
 departure from party regularity, in the all too probable event of 
 Lincoln's election, might have most disastrous personal consequences. 
 As a result, the much-heralded Fremont convention turned out to be 
 really an assembly of political nobodies. The newspapers gave it little 
 
END OF THE COALITION 437 
 
 space, except the Democratic organs, which naturally rejoiced at any 
 maneuver that promised to shatter the Republican Party. There were 
 really no delegates; the convention kept open house, asking for no 
 credentials from anybody; any person with nothing else to do could 
 stray in, take a seat, air his opinions, and cast his vote. Certain ludicrous 
 episodes lightened the otherwise dull proceedings. One perfectionist 
 offered a resolution to the effect that every "delegate" should pledge 
 himself not to accept office in the next administration, which was voted 
 down amid roars of laughter. The German contingent, most of whom, 
 besides being political philosophers, were freethinkers in religion, ob- 
 jected to any mention of God in the records. The presence of Elizabeth 
 Cady Stanton exhilarated a disrespectful generation which had not yet 
 learned to take seriously women in politics and led one humorist to 
 describe the conglomeration as composed "of the gentler sex of both 
 genders." The convention itself solemnly climaxed these absurdities 
 by nominating Fremont, of New York, for President and John Coch- 
 rane, also of New York, for Vice-President — thus ignoring the consti- 
 tutional provision that the candidates for these two offices could not 
 be citizens of the same state. Lincoln, by one of his most famous pleas- 
 antries, added to the general ridicule. He asked a group of friends 
 assembled in his office how many persons had gone to Cleveland. When 
 told there were about four hundred, he reached for the Bible which 
 he knew so well, quickly turned to the passage in Samuel I, and read: 
 "And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, 
 and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; 
 and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about 
 four hundred men." x 
 
 If the object of the Cleveland Fremonters had been to entice the 
 regular Republican Party with a candidate on whom both sides could 
 agree, that purpose did not succeed, for when the Republican cohorts 
 assembled in Baltimore on June 7, about a week after the rump assem- 
 blage had adjourned, they nominated Lincoln almost by acclamation. 
 But this ostentatious unanimity did not really represent the sentiment 
 of the delegates. In fact there was a good deal of hostility in the two 
 days' proceedings both towards Lincoln and towards the cabinet. So 
 far as Lincoln, the dutifully accepted candidate for a second term, was 
 
 1 In 1866, John Bright made all England laugh and added a new word to the 
 language — Adullamite — by quoting this same passage as descriptive of the seces- 
 sion of a group of dissenters from the Liberal to the Conservative Party. Lincoln 
 had used the same comparison two years before. Charles Sumner was a regular 
 correspondent of Bright, retailing all the news and much of the gossip of Wash- 
 ington. One wonders whether he could have told Bright this story in one of his 
 letters. 
 
438 LINCOLN S WAR CABINET 
 
 concerned, this feeling was subterranean; in the matter of the cabinet, 
 however, especially Blair, and in less degree Seward, the animosity 
 was open and blatant. The convention showed its dissatisfaction with 
 the President, in both speeches and platform, by taking a stand on 
 pending issues directly opposed to his own; and it literally made the 
 rafters ring with disapproval of Blair. Thus it would not be inaccurate 
 to describe the Republican National Convention of 1864 as anti-Lincoln, 
 anti-Blair, anti-Seward, and anti-cabinet. "How can we hope to live as 
 a nation through the crisis before us," exclaimed Lucius Robinson, the 
 most conspicuous sponsor in New York of the Fremont uprising, 
 "with a weak executive and a cabinet in a state of discord and anar- 
 chy?" In the Baltimore convention these same manifestations — anti- 
 Lincoln, anti-Blair, anti-cabinet — though not expressed in such extreme 
 terms, were by no means silent. The assemblage had come together to 
 nominate Lincoln for a second term; practically all the delegates, ex- 
 cept those from Missouri, were under instructions for that purpose. 
 The plan was executed with a noisy enthusiasm that seemingly pro- 
 claimed a hearty satisfaction. Yet the prevailing tone of speakers and 
 platform was radical. The principles underlying the Reconstruction 
 policy, as set forth in Lincoln's message and amnesty proclamation of 
 the previous December, found no endorsement. One of the most in- 
 congruous spectacles was that of the Reverend Robert J. Breckinridge 
 of Kentucky, an honored member of the Episcopal clergy, who, clothed 
 in full canonicals, acted as temporary chairman. His speech almost sa- 
 distically demanded blood atonement by the South. "The fearful truth 
 runs through the whole history of mankind," exclaimed the reverend 
 gentleman, "that whatever else may be done to give stability to author- 
 ity, whatever else may be done to give perpetuity to institutions, 
 however wise, however glorious, practical and just may be the philoso- 
 phy of it, it has been found that the only imperishable element of all 
 free institutions has been the blood of traitors. No government has ever 
 been built upon imperishable foundations, which foundations were not 
 laid in the blood of traitors." This was something far different from 
 the Christian charity that Lincoln was preparing to extend to the 
 South, yet no references to Lincoln brought forth anything like the 
 unrestrained applause that greeted these remarks. Henry J. Raymond's 
 formal eulogy on Mr. Lincoln's administration, reported the New York 
 Tribune correspondent, "fell heavily on hackneyed ears." The editorial 
 on Lincoln's nomination, published in the Tribune on June 9, held 
 forth scant hope for party harmony. The leading Republican organ in 
 the nation frankly regretted that Lincoln had been nominated, though 
 it accepted the result as inevitable, and as unquestionably representing 
 
END OF THE COALITION 439 
 
 the will of the party voter. "That the President has made grave mistakes 
 in the prosecution of our great struggle," wrote Greeley, "all are 
 aware; that he has meant to do wrong, nobody believes. We cannot 
 but feel that it would have been wiser and safer to spike the most 
 serviceable guns of our adversaries by nominating another for Presi- 
 dent and thus dispelling all motives, save that of naked disloyalty, for 
 further warfare upon this administration. We believe that the rebellion 
 should have lost something of its cohesion and venom from the hour 
 in which it was known that a new President would surely be inaugu- 
 rated on the 4th of March next. . . . All that is of the past. The will 
 of a great majority of the Unionists has been heard and it says, 'Let us 
 have Abraham Lincoln as our President for another term.' We bow to 
 their decision, and ardently hope that the result may vindicate their 
 sagacity and prove our apprehension unfounded." 2 
 
 When Chase wrote complainingly to a friend that "the convention 
 will not be regarded as a Union convention, but simply as a Blair- 
 Lincoln convention" he showed his usual lack of judgment in apprais- 
 ing political portents. In only one respect could the assemblage at 
 Baltimore have been regarded as a "Blair" proceeding. That was in its 
 name. "National Union" had been the designation chosen by the Blairs 
 for the new party as far back as 1860; the word "Republican" savored 
 of abolitionism and sectionalism, and was disliked by the antislavery 
 Democrats and the several other factions and wings of factions which 
 it was desirable to bring into one organization. The fact is that the 
 convention came with another duty in mind as important as, and prob- 
 ably much more pleasurable than, the nomination of Lincoln. The 
 blood of the whole Blair family was as much its quarry as that of the 
 "rebels and traitors" against whom the Reverend Mr. Breckinridge had 
 declaimed. At that particular moment, indeed, the fortunes of "the 
 Blairs" had reached their lowest stage. Delegations of radicals had 
 sought audiences with Lincoln demanding that he dismiss Frank from 
 the army and Montgomery from the cabinet — demands that the Presi- 
 dent had summarily rejected. The House of Representatives, almost at 
 the time of the Republican convention in Baltimore, was expelling 
 Frank from that body and giving his seat to one Samuel Knox, who had 
 for some time been contesting the election. At the Baltimore conven- 
 tion, two delegations from Missouri had appeared, one representing 
 the Blairs, the other their radical opponents. The ensuing struggle for 
 recognition gave the gathering its most exciting episode. When the 
 committee on credentials read its report, seating all the anti-Blair dele- 
 gates and throwing the Blair adherents out of the convention, the whole 
 
 2 New York Tribune, June 8, 1864. 
 
440 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 body rocked and shrieked with approbation. "The roof of the theatre 
 lifted," wrote one correspondent, when the Blair delegates walked out. 
 
 If the Blairs had suffered any illusions as to their standing in the Re- 
 publican or National Union Party, the votes presently taken on this 
 finding removed all doubts. Four hundred and forty delegates voted 
 against the Blairs and only four cast ballots in their favor. But the con- 
 vention was not satisfied with thus reading the unpopular trio out of the 
 party; it sought to read them out of the administration. To the several 
 attempts of Senators and politicians which have been set forth in these 
 pages to dictate to Lincoln as to his cabinet must now be added that 
 of this convention which nominated him for a second term. Henry J. 
 Raymond, editor of the New York Times and national chairman of the 
 party, made this almost the "keynote" of the occasion when, in a 
 speech to the New York delegates he exclaimed, "Gentlemen, the 
 necessities of the hour require the reconstruction of the cabinet." The 
 Sumner cohorts had set apart not only Blair, but Seward and perhaps 
 Welles and Bates, for "reconstruction." In this new campaign against 
 Seward the Massachusetts delegation showed more Machiavellianism 
 than is usually accredited to the downright Puritan character. As an 
 offering for Vice-President they brought forward Daniel S. Dickinson, 
 a war Democrat and high-ranking member of the bar. These abolition- 
 ists worked so zealously for this unexpected candidate that he received 
 108 votes on the first ballot. Their motives may have been obscure to 
 the ordinary citizen, but seasoned politicians like Seward and Weed 
 had no difficulty in explaining the maneuver. Mr. Dickinson was a New 
 Yorker and, according to the political mores of that day, no state could 
 have two representatives in the same administration. Mr. Dickinson's 
 elevation to the Vice-Presidency would therefore have automatically 
 exacted Mr. Seward's retirement from the cabinet. The nomination of 
 Andrew Johnson made safe his political head. 
 
 But the real enemy whom the cabinet reconstructors had in view 
 was Montgomery Blair. The first paragraph in the platform contained 
 an attack not only on him but on Lincoln himself, for it declared in 
 support of the radicals' plan, not the President's, for rebuilding the 
 Southern states. The culminating clause demanding that the "rebels 
 and traitors" arrayed against the Union should receive "the punishment 
 due to their crimes" could not have made agreeable reading to the 
 author of the Amnesty Proclamation. And never before had a political 
 convention inserted in its party creed a condemnation of the cabinet 
 of the President it was selecting for a second term, and whose admin- 
 istration and whose "practical wisdom" and "unselfish patriotism" and 
 "unswerving fidelity" it had, in the previous section, commended to 
 
END OF THE COALITION 441 
 
 the nation. "Resolved, that we deem it essential to the general welfare 
 that harmony should prevail in the general council and we regard as 
 worthy of public confidence and official trust those only who cordially 
 endorse the principles proclaimed in these resolutions and which should 
 characterize the administration of the government." This "sixth resolu- 
 tion," wrote Alexander K. McClure many years afterward, "read in 
 the light of the present, would seem to be a very harmless and proper 
 expression on general principles, but every member of the convention 
 voted for it, well understanding that it meant a demand from the su- 
 preme authority of the party that Montgomery Blair should retire 
 from the position of Postmaster General." 3 
 
 Blair himself quickly saw the point. A few days after the convention 
 adjourned he called on Lincoln and offered his resignation. Lincoln 
 refused to accept it. Blair told him, however, that it would be cheer- 
 fully placed at the President's disposal any time he thought the situation 
 should demand it. In fact he gave the President his resignation, undated, 
 so that it could go into effect any time that political exigencies required 
 it. Blair was a man experienced enough to understand that the action 
 of the national convention and the disharmonious state of the party 
 had made inevitable his retirement, at an early date. 
 
 3 McClure, Alexander K., Our Presidents and How We Make Them. Harper & 
 Bros., 1900. Pp. 188-189. 
 
II 
 
 H 
 
 OWEVER, Blair's head was not the first to fall on the altar of 
 party solidarity. That of his august opponent, Salmon P. Chase, pre- 
 ceded his by nearly three months. 
 
 When John J. Cisco, in the latter part of June, 1864, resigned his 
 post as assistant treasurer at New York, he embarrassed Lincoln with 
 both a financial and a political problem of serious proportions. The 
 position that Mr. Cisco had so capably filled for more than a decade 
 was, especially in Civil War times, a highly important one. Certain 
 observers described it as the most influential post in the government 
 next to the cabinet itself. Politically this assistant treasurer may not 
 have possessed the power of the collectorship, but he ruled almost 
 supreme over the financial concerns of the government. Not far from 
 90 per cent of the nation's revenues originated in the City of New York. 
 The success or failure of the bond offerings which financed its military 
 campaigns depended on the co-operation of New York's financial 
 houses. The assistant treasurer of New York was the connecting link 
 between the moneyed interests of the nation and the Treasury Depart- 
 ment, a function that demanded personal tact, financial knowledge and 
 skill, and unselfish devotion to the cause. Mr. Cisco had possessed these 
 qualities in high degree. In an era of extreme office- jobbing, his experi- 
 ence stood out as a shining exception. Appointed by Franklin Pierce in 
 1853, Mr. Cisco had made himself so indispensable to the Treasury 
 that, though a Democrat, a supporter of Buchanan in 1856 and of 
 Douglas in 1860, he escaped the general proscription of 1861, and was 
 kept in office. His record justified this clemency. Mr. Cisco served the 
 Lincoln administration with the utmost loyalty, and was undoubtedly 
 the largest single contributor to the success its financial measures 
 achieved. When Secretary Chase visited New York, Mr. Cisco brought 
 him into personal relations with the city's great men of money; his 
 magnetic influence smoothed their differences, brought them together 
 on essential questions, and really made the banking resources of the 
 nation's financial capital available for the purposes of war. Obviously, 
 
END OF THE COALITION 443 
 
 good sense and good politics demanded a man of the same type as his 
 successor. It seemed difficult to find one. The office was offered to three 
 men in turn, all of them of the highest standing in banking and business 
 circles. All three declined the post. 
 
 Now the politicians became active. For some time the Democratic 
 atmosphere of the assistant treasurer's office had poignantly grieved 
 the political leaders of New York. Mr. Cisco, appointed as a Democrat 
 on nonpartisan grounds, had followed this excellent example in his 
 treatment of his hundred or so subordinates. Most of these employees, 
 on the advent of the Lincoln administration, were Democrats — some- 
 thing hardly surprising in that day, since most of them had been 
 selected under Democratic Presidents Pierce and Buchanan. Mr. Cisco 
 retained these men on the same enlightened principle of fitness and 
 necessity that had led the Lincoln administration to retain himself. 
 Such partiality naturally did not please the several factions then en- 
 gaging in a cutthroat struggle for power in the Republican stronghold. 
 The demand now arose that the assistant treasurer's office be "re- 
 formed." The reformation in question contemplated the immolation 
 of all Democrats and their supercession by gentlemen who professed 
 the true faith. One day at the height of the Cisco crisis, Senator Edwin 
 D. Morgan of New York appeared in Chase's office with a formidable 
 paper in his hand. This turned out to be a censored list of all the 
 employees in the treasurer's New York office, and against most of the 
 names had been inscribed the incriminating letter "D." This graphic ex- 
 hibit, Mr. Morgan informed Chase, displayed the extent to which the 
 hated Democratic enemy had obtained control of valuable patronage, 
 and the need of a successor to Mr. Cisco, who would administer the 
 appropriate remedy. Mr. Morgan, himself a successful financier and 
 businessman, several times a millionaire, and ex-governor of the state, 
 was speaking not only for himself, but for the Seward- Weed faction 
 of New York Republicanism to which he belonged. 
 
 That element regarded itself as having been inadequately considered 
 by the administration. The opposing group, pro-Chase and anti-Lincoln, 
 had built itself up strongly in the Empire State, on the foundation of 
 rich "patronage" from the Treasury Department. The trip of the three 
 active leaders of the anti-Seward wing to Springfield in January 1861, 
 to protest to the President-elect against the appointment of Seward as 
 Secretary of State, has already been described. This trio, the very men- 
 tion of whose names would act like an electric shock on the Seward- 
 Weed cohorts, had enjoyed great favor at the hands of the Treasury. 
 Mr. Hiram Barney, the leader, had been made Collector of the Port of 
 New York — an office in which he had not proved to be a great success. 
 
444 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 Judge Hogebloom, another of the famous anti-Seward pilgrims to 
 Springfield, had been appointed appraiser of the port — a position only 
 second to that of the collector in political power. The third member 
 of the band, George Opdyke, had been elected mayor of New York, 
 largely by virtue of the political strength his associates had 'obtained 
 from the Federal government. All three, if not open supporters of the 
 Chase presidential boom — something that would have been rather dif- 
 ficult in view of their official positions under Lincoln — were known 
 to have been secretly sympathetic. The Cisco resignation gave Chase 
 an opportunity to repair a great wrong. Would the Secretary of the 
 Treasury place another of his henchmen in a place of such strategic 
 importance? That he was still angling for a presidential nomination of 
 some kind Weed and Seward and Senator Morgan devoutly believed. 
 The mere fact that the Republican convention had met and named 
 Lincoln for a second term did not still their apprehensions, for the 
 underground movement had already been put in motion to force 
 Lincoln to withdraw in the interest of some other candidate. Senator 
 Morgan had already given Lincoln the names of three men, any one 
 of whom would be satisfactory to him, as Senator from New York. 
 All three were men of high character and ability, worthy successors to 
 A4r. Cisco, but all had the disqualification, in Chase's eyes, of not be- 
 longing to his following in the Republican ranks, and of being con- 
 servatives on Reconstruction and intensely loyal to Lincoln. Between 
 these two belligerent wings of his party there was little question where 
 Lincoln's preference would incline, when it came to choosing a suc- 
 cessor to Mr. Cisco. The President's personal feelings towards Chase 
 had not increased in warmth as a result of the proceedings of the last 
 few weeks, nor did he wish to widen the breach in the Republican 
 ranks in the largest state of the Union by adding to the overwhelming 
 emoluments Chase had already obtained at his hands. As for the public 
 interest, there was little fear that any one of the three men proposed 
 by Senator Morgan would be able to carry on the office with an 
 efficiency and honesty comparable to that which Mr. Cisco had dis- 
 played. 
 
 Lincoln was rather astonished, therefore, when word came that 
 Chase had fixed upon a gentleman by the name of Maunsell B. Field as 
 his choice for the vacancy. That Mr. Field was a Democrat, probably 
 a radical, since Chase had selected him, was known, but these qualities 
 had little importance in this case, for he was a man without political 
 influence or following of any kind, and, indeed, with no known inter- 
 ests or achievements in public life. For less than a year, he had been 
 serving as Third Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, a position that 
 
, END OF THE COALITION 445 
 
 Chase had created for his particular benefit; but his relation to Chase 
 had rather a personal than an official character. He was a man of in- 
 gratiating presence, good education, polished manners, and of some 
 slight ability as a writer, but he had never figured in public life, even 
 in a minor degree. Perhaps the most informing summation of Mr. 
 Field's career and interests can be derived from the title of a book of 
 reminiscences which he published in his later period: Memories of 
 Many Men and Some Women, being personal recollections of Emper- 
 ors, Kings, Queens, Yrinces, Presidents, Statesmen, authors, and artists, 
 at home and abroad, during the last thirty years. That is, Field's attrac- 
 tions were flamboyantly social; he was endowed with the kind of talents 
 that made him a favorite master of ceremonies and head of reception 
 committees. When distinguished foreigners, such as Prince Jerome 
 Bonaparte, Jenny Lind, the Prince of Wales, and other stars of this 
 magnitude, paid occasional visits to democratic America, Mr. Field 
 was usually at the forefront, escorting them from place to place and 
 generally making their sojourn a pleasant experience. In Europe he had 
 been attached, in minor capacity, to several diplomatic staffs, in this 
 way acquiring — according to his own story — a really astonishing col- 
 lection of intimates in the loftiest social station. Chase himself had a 
 weakness for associating with highly placed ladies and gentlemen, and 
 not unnaturally was drawn to so accomplished a person as Mr. Field. 
 The two first met at Mr. Cisco's office in New York, for Mr. Field had 
 been one of those obnoxious "D's" who, in the opinion of the politically 
 minded Senator Morgan, were destined for "reformation." In business 
 he had no more experience than in politics; indeed, he had had no 
 career except a social one, knew nothing of banking or finance, and 
 was totally lacking in that familiarity with the money kings which had 
 made Mr. Cisco so valuable to the government. 
 
 Mr. Field had become a kind of social mentor to Chase on his visits 
 to New York, and had charmed that susceptible official so completely 
 that he was finally taken to Washington and installed in the Treasury 
 Department. His associates there, perhaps from envy, spoke and wrote 
 of him in disrespectful terms. According to Lucius E. Chittenden, 
 register of the Department, Field had wormed himself into Chase's 
 admiration by gross adulation. "Secretary Chase," wrote Chittenden, 
 "was fond of those who recognized his eminence and were ready to 
 serve him as their acknowledged superior." Field had "attached himself 
 to his personal service . . . attended to his social engagements and be- 
 came the authorized agent for communication with him. . . . His 
 service was so attentive that the Secretary came to regard him as a 
 kind of personal society representative." While paying due tribute to 
 
446 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 the man's cultivation and grace, Mr. Chittenden hints at unrevealed 
 faults that detracted from his usefulness as a servant of his country. 
 "There were facts, of which it is impossible that the Secretary long 
 remained ignorant, which, though not reflecting upon his personal 
 integrity, necessarily disqualified him for any position of trust or 
 responsibility. . . . He was absent from the Treasury sometimes for 
 weeks together, mysterious disappearances for which no one knew the 
 reason. ... It seemed impossible," concluded Mr. Chittenden, "to ac- 
 count for this nomination upon the ordinary motives which control 
 human action." x Senator Morgan, in protesting the selection to Presi- 
 dent Lincoln, said that, if desired, he could procure a written protest 
 against Mr. Field's promotion, signed by every Republican member 
 of Congress. 
 
 By this time relations between Lincoln and his Finance Minister had 
 reached a point where they were communicating with each other 
 chiefly by written notes. Lincoln's son, young Robert Todd, described 
 their association accurately as one of "armed neutrality." The Presi- 
 dent still retained his high opinion of Chase as a financier, but that 
 feeling of constraint and awkwardness on personal contact which both 
 men admitted to their friends had grown more acute. Chase's announce- 
 ment of Maunsell Field as Cisco's successor strained this almost to the 
 breaking point. Intentional rudeness was not one of Lincoln's charac- 
 teristics, especially where members of his cabinet were concerned, but 
 this obvious attempt of Chase to add the assistant treasurer's office in 
 New York to his already large resources of Federal patronage proved 
 too severe a test of Lincoln's perhaps most dominant quality — his 
 infinite patience. By naming Field to this post Chase was simply naming 
 himself, for the man, once installed, would become his automaton. The 
 day after Field's selection had been forwarded to the White House, 
 Lincoln wrote Chase declining to accept his candidate. "I cannot, with- 
 out much embarrassment, make this appointment, principally because 
 of Senator Morgan's very firm opposition to it. . . . Governor Morgan 
 tells me he has mentioned the three names to you, to wit: R. M. Blatch- 
 ford, Dudley S. Gregory, and Thomas Hillhouse. It will really oblige 
 me if you will make choice among these three, or any other man that 
 Senators Morgan and Harris will be satisfied with, and send me a 
 nomination for him." This was really a peremptory command, but 
 instead of obeying instructions, Chase asked for a personal interview. 
 This the President refused — in itself an unprecedented snub from the 
 head of the state to the second man in his cabinet, "because," he wrote 
 
 1 Chittenden, Lucius E., Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administra- 
 tion. Harper and Bros., 1891. P. 371. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 447 
 
 Chase, "the difficulty does not lie within the range of a personal con- 
 versation between you and me. As the proverb goes, no man knows so 
 well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it. I do not think Mr. 
 Field a very proper man for the place." 
 
 The disconsolate Mr. Chase went home, seeking comfort in the 
 region that usually served as a refuge from the travail of his official 
 life. "Oh for more faith and clearer light!" he wrote in his Diary that 
 evening. "How stable is the city of God! How disordered is the city 
 of man." However, he discovered, with more resourcefulness than he 
 commonly evinced, a way out of his dilemma. That his efforts in the 
 interest of Field had failed was evident. But Chase, in addition to other 
 human weaknesses, had a strong vein of obstinacy and was determined 
 not to yield to what today would be called a "directive" from the 
 highest authority. There remained only one possible avenue of escape. 
 The Secretary telegraphed Mr. Cisco, begging him, as a patriot, to 
 withdraw his resignation and retain his office for at least another three 
 months. To this appeal Mr. Cisco acceded, and the difficulty seemed 
 to have been postponed at least until the following October. Between 
 June and October many things could happen. By that time the country 
 would know, for example, whether it was to have a new administration, 
 or whether Mr. Lincoln was to remain in power for another quadren- 
 nium — for, in this period of history, the summer and October elections 
 fairly indicated the outcome of the national contest in November. 
 
 Under ordinary circumstances, Mr. Cisco's act should have ended 
 the impasse. There being now no vacancy in the assistant treasurer's 
 office, no occasion existed for continuing the discussion about his suc- 
 cessor. Chase, however, was still smarting from Lincoln's unwillingness 
 to recognize Chase's supremacy over the Treasury patronage, an im- 
 portant matter in view of a complex presidential situation. Above all, 
 Chase evidently thought that the Cisco business offered the opportunity 
 of testing the supreme issue with Lincoln — of settling the question of 
 who really was master. Chase profoundly believed himself indispensa- 
 ble to Lincoln. No other man, he thought, could maintain the credit 
 of the government, without which the war could not be continued. 
 He was also convinced that this was Lincoln's opinion. Up to June 
 1864 he had offered his resignation four times — perhaps five — and 
 each time Lincoln had persuaded him to remain. On one of these occa- 
 sions Lincoln had left the White House, called at Chase's home, and 
 after a long discussion induced him to change his mind. "Here, Chase," 
 he said, with the latest resignation in hand, "is a paper with which I 
 want nothing to do. Take it back and be reasonable." Not strangely, 
 perhaps, the Secretary had concluded that nothing could induce the 
 
448 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 President to part with his services. The arrogant man now decided to 
 put on the screws again. No cabinet officer in history had ever claimed 
 the right to conduct his department independently of the Executive. 
 Seward could be imperious, but he never presumed to make important 
 appointments without consulting his chief. The letter which Chase 
 now sent Lincoln gave the President one of two choices. The Treasury 
 Department was to become a tightly sealed compartment, practically 
 disconnected from the White House, its vast patronage to remain ex- 
 clusively in Chase's hands, or he would no longer preside over its 
 destiny. "The withdrawal of Mr. Cisco's resignation," Chase wrote 
 Lincoln on June 29, "which I inclose, relieves the present difficulty; but 
 I cannot help feeling that my position here is not altogether agreeable 
 to you, and it is certainly too full of embarrassment and difficulty and 
 painful responsibility to allow in me the least desire to retain it. I think 
 it my duty, therefore, to inclose to you my resignation. I shall regard 
 it as a real relief if you think proper to accept it, and will most cheer- 
 fully render to my successor any aid he may find useful in entering 
 upon his duties." 
 
 Maunsell Field, the storm center of this episode, has left the most 
 graphic account of Lincoln, when this missive reached the White 
 House. The President, very busy with other matters, had placed Chase's 
 letter aside, thinking that it dealt with routine concerns of minor con- 
 sequence. "I went down to lunch" — so Field quotes the President — 
 "and suddenly recalled that I hadn't answered it. As soon as I was back 
 here, I took pen and paper and prepared to write, but then it occurred 
 to me that I might as well read the letter before I answered it. I took 
 it out of the envelope for that purpose, and, as I did, another inclosure 
 fell from it to the floor. I picked it up, read it and said to myself, 'Halloa, 
 this is a horse of different color.' It was his resignation. I put my pen 
 into my mouth and grit my teeth upon it. I did not long reflect." 2 Nor 
 did the words that presently flowed from the presidential pen deal 
 in ambiguous phrases or superfluous compliments. "Your resigna- 
 tion of the office of Secretary of the Treasury, sent me yesterday, 
 is accepted. Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and 
 fidelity I have nothing to unsay and yet you and I have reached a 
 point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems 
 cannot be overcome or longer sustained consistently with the public 
 service." 
 
 In view of all the attendant circumstances, especially the fact that 
 Chase had not made this great refusal with any idea of retiring from 
 the cabinet, but merely as a maneuver in that struggle for power which 
 
 2 Field, op. cit., pp. 296 ff . 
 
END OF THE COALITION 449 
 
 had been waged for some time between himself and Lincoln, this letter 
 amounted virtually to a curt dismissal. As always, Lincoln rested his 
 decision on public grounds; he had declined his several precedent resig- 
 nations because he believed Chase's conduct of the Treasury essential 
 to the success of the war; he now relieved him from duty because the 
 time had arrived when the man was no longer useful from that point 
 of view. Naturally the news, which gained rapid circulation in Wash- 
 ington and the country, took everybody by surprise. After all, Chase 
 was a great figure in national affairs, and represented in the cabinet the 
 most numerous wing of the Republican or National Union Party. Of 
 all Americans the one most astounded by Lincoln's act was Chase him- 
 self. His letters and Diary entries of the next few days betray the 
 several emotions which stirred him. Astonishment, Christian fortitude, 
 anger, vexation, complacent satisfaction with his own achievements, 
 regret at his own temerity in thus challenging face to face the quiet 
 man in the White House, now and then an outburst almost suggesting 
 a snarl, are manifest in these self-communings. "I found a letter from 
 the President," Chase wrote on June 30, "accepting my resignation, 
 and putting the acceptance on the ground of the difference between 
 us, indicating a degree of embarrassment in our official relations which 
 could not be continued or sustained consistently with the public service. 
 I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him; but what he had 
 found from me I could not imagine, unless it has been caused by my 
 unwillingness to have offices distributed as spoils or benefits, with more 
 regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques, and individuals, than 
 to fitness of selection. He has never given me the active and earnest 
 support I was entitled to; and even now Congress was about to adjourn 
 without passing sufficient tax bills, though making appropriations with 
 lavish provision, and he was, notwithstanding my appeals, taking no 
 pains to insure a different result." 3 
 
 Why had the President, Chase asked himself, not insisted on the 
 withdrawal of his resignation? "I can see but one reason — that I am too 
 earnest, too anti-slavery, and say, too radical, to make him willing to 
 have me connected with his administration; just as my opinion that he 
 is not earnest enough, not anti-slavery enough, not radical enough, but 
 goes naturally with those hostile to me, rather than with me, makes me 
 willing and glad to be disconnected from it." 4 An utterly unwarranted 
 insinuation against Lincoln — that he was prepared to end the war and 
 re-establish the Union without ending slavery — creeps more than once 
 into Chase's meditations on his dethronement. But it is clear that he 
 
 8 Warden, op. cit., p. 619. Italics in original. 
 *Ibid., p. 623. 
 
450 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 was not so eager to be "disconnected" with the cabinet as his words 
 would imply. He notes several times efforts made by his friends to in- 
 duce the President to change his mind, and seemed to regret, half wist- 
 fully, that Lincoln had proved adamant. His Pittsburgh friend, Gover- 
 nor Morehead, who had been one of Jay Cooke's associates in Chase's 
 presidential campaign, called at the White House the day following 
 the resignation, in company with Congressman Williams, also from 
 Pennsylvania, to urge Chase's restoration. "They attempted to induce 
 him to send for me with a view to my return to the Department; but 
 he would not consent to this. He thought we would not agree, and it 
 was without use; and in this he was, I think, right." 5 On the same day 
 Samuel Hooper, Congressman from Massachusetts, called upon Chase 
 to report certain appreciative remarks Lincoln had made on his deposed 
 Secretary. "I said that it was quite possible, had any such expression of 
 good will reached me, I might, before the present difficulty arose, have 
 gone to him and had a fresh understanding, which would have pre- 
 vented it; but I did not see now how I could change my position. 
 Indeed, if such were the real feelings of Mr. Lincoln, he would hardly 
 have refused a personal interview with me when I asked it, or required 
 me to consult local politicians in the choice of an officer whose charac- 
 ter was so vitally important to the department." 6 Senator William 
 P. Fessenden, w r hom Lincoln appointed Chase's successor, told his friend 
 that the President had expressed a hope that the new Secretary "would 
 not, without a real necessity, remove any friends of Governor Chase." 
 "Had the President," Chase communes, "in reply to my note tendering 
 my resignation, expressed himself as he did now to Mr. Fessenden, I 
 should cheerfully have withdrawn it." There are plenty of other indi- 
 cations showing how little the unfortunate man had expected that 
 Lincoln would grasp this opportunity of extruding him from the cabi- 
 net and how Chase really lamented the outcome. 
 
 Other manifestations added to his misery. There seemed to be no 
 tendency, in press or private communications, to treat his departure 
 as a public calamity. A few ultraradical organs bewailed the loss of so 
 distinguished a public servant, and certain sympathizing friends, such 
 as Sumner, Garfield, and Pomeroy, called to express their indignation, 
 but for the most part a general feeling prevailed that Lincoln had acted 
 with judgment and wisdom. His brother cabinet members, with the 
 exception of Stanton, hailed Chase's ousting with what he himself 
 described as "indecent rejoicing." That Thurlow Weed should exclaim 
 in the Albany Journal, "Heaven be praised for this gleam of sunshine!" 
 
 5 Ibid., p. 620. 
 
 6 Ibid., p. 618. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 451 
 
 was to be expected, but that solid citizens like his cabinet colleagues 
 Gideon Welles and Edward Bates should exult almost as jubilantly was 
 a different matter. "In coming to the conclusion that a separation must 
 take place, the President was prompted by some and sustained by all 
 his cabinet without exception," wrote Welles. "Chase's retirement has 
 offended nobody and has gratified almost everybody." 7 And again: 
 "The retirement of Chase, so far as I hear opinions expressed — and 
 they are generally freely given — appears to give relief rather than 
 otherwise. ... I look upon it as a blessing. ... I have little doubt 
 that he was greatly surprised that it was accepted." 8 
 
 "I have not conversed with many," observed Bates, "but as far as my 
 information goes there seems to be a vague feeling of relief from a 
 burden, and a hope of better things. I should not be a bit surprised if 
 Stanton follows Chase. In that I see no public misfortune, for I think 
 it hardly possible that the war office could be worse administered. I 
 fancy that I see in this movement another effort of the radicals to bolt 
 the Baltimore convention. If they could find a feasible candidate, I am 
 sure they would do it. Mr. Lincoln, I hope, will find out, in time, the 
 danger of leaning upon that broken reed." One explanation of Chase's 
 resignation, according to Bates, "is that Mr. Chase hopes for the nomi- 
 nation for the Democratic convention to meet at Chicago and that 
 Fremont and his friends will waive the nomination at Cleveland in his 
 favor." 9 "We have a cabinet crisis," Seward contentedly wrote his 
 wife July 2, "of which I might tell you much, but can write you noth- 
 ing, except that from the first day of the administration the causes have 
 been upheaving in the cabinet and in the country. It is well that the 
 explosion produced no more severe shock than has occurred." 10 Natu- 
 rally, this change in the cabinet was regarded as a personal triumph by 
 the Blairs, whom Chase regarded as primarily responsible for his exit. 
 "Chase, you see," the elder Blair wrote Frank, "hung on as long as 
 possible, and dropped off at the last like a rotten pear, unexpectedly 
 to himself and to everybody else. He supposed he could bully Lincoln 
 by threatening to resign unless he was permitted to make the Treasury 
 appointments without control." 
 
 In mid-July Chase left Washington, seeking rest and consolation in 
 the New Hampshire hills among which he had been born. Only one 
 member of the cabinet paid him the compliment of a farewell call. 
 "Half of my fifty-seventh year is ended," he wrote. "Today I leave 
 Washington a private citizen. Saw Stanton before leaving; he was warm 
 and cordial as ever. No other head of a department has called." 
 
 7 Welles, Diary. II, 94. 9 Bates, op. cit., p. 381. 
 
 8 Ibid. II, 63. 10 Seward's Seward, III, 230. 
 
IV 
 
 E 
 
 DWARD BATES'S suspicion that Chase, even after retiring from 
 the cabinet, had not completely abandoned all hope of the Presidency- 
 is borne out by his behavior in this summer of 1864. For the exiled 
 statesman that was a period of brooding and unconcealed resentment. 
 The most critical election in the nation's history, one, indeed, on which 
 the continued existence of that nation depended, elicited no word or 
 action in the President's behalf. Instead, in letters to friends, in the daily 
 self-communings of his Diary, in general conversation, Chase evinced 
 an unappeased bitterness against his former chief. Samuel Bowles, ed- 
 itor of the Springfield Republican, notes this attitude of non-co-opera- 
 tion as late as September 4 — three months after Lincoln's nomination. 
 "Do you notice," he wrote a friend, "that the 'Anti-Slavery Standard' 
 and the 'Liberator,' the representatives of the old abolitionists, are both 
 earnest for Lincoln? Yet a new crop of Radicals have sprung up, who 
 are resisting the President and making mischief. Chase is going around, 
 peddling his griefs in private ears, and sowing dissatisfaction about Lin- 
 coln. Oh how little great men can be!" * 
 
 Charles Sumner, in a letter to Richard Cobden, pictured again his 
 friend's state of indecision, incidentally evoking a parallel hardly Plu- 
 tarchian in discernment. "Chase for a long time hesitated in support of 
 Mr. Lincoln; he did not think him competent. . . . The President 
 made a great mistake in compelling him to resign. It was very much as 
 when Louis XVI overthrew Necker; and, by the way, I have often 
 observed that Mr. Lincoln resembles Louis XVI more than any other 
 ruler in history. I once said to Chase that I should not be astonished if, 
 like Necker, he was recalled! to which he replied that might be, if 
 Mr. Lincoln were king and not politician!" 2 The redoubtable Senator 
 Pomeroy — proponent of the "Circular" — breakfasted with Chase on 
 July 6. "He cannot support Lincoln," Chase commented, "but won't 
 
 1 Merriam, George S., Life and Times of Samuel Bowles. Century Co., 1885. 
 I, 413. 
 
 2 Pierce, op. cit. IV, 196-197. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 453 
 
 desert his principles. I am much of the same sentiments, though not 
 willing now to decide what duty may demand next fall." Pomeroy told 
 Chase that he would avoid the issue by going on a buffalo hunt; not the 
 Western prairie, however, but an ambition nearer home was keeping 
 Chase close to the political field. Even in the time of his abortive presi- 
 dential boom, Chase had had his eye upon the Democrats. The radical 
 majority of the Republican Party, allied to the "War Democrats," with 
 himself as the candidate of both, seemed, in Chase's eyes, the ideal 
 combination. His letters of the summer of 1864 show that this combi- 
 nation still entranced him. He was so purblind to realities that he 
 absurdly believed in the possibility of the Democrats dropping McClel- 
 lan and the Clevelandites giving up Fremont and uniting on him as the 
 man who could heal all differences. His little court of sycophants ap- 
 parently stimulated this aspiration. "Pomeroy remarked that, on the 
 news of my resignation reaching the Senate, several of the Democratic 
 senators came to him and said, 'We'll go with you now for Chase.' This 
 meant nothing but a vehement desire to overthrow the existing ad- 
 ministration, but might mean much if the Democrats would only cut 
 loose from slavery, and go for freedom and the protection of labor by 
 a national currency. If they would do that, I would cheerfully go for 
 any man they might nominate." 3 
 
 The unprecedented political situation that summer of 1864 explains 
 to a considerable extent the uncertainties and hesitations of Chase at 
 this time. The Republicans, radical and regular, had held two conven- 
 tions and nominated two sets of candidates, yet neither the decisions 
 of the Lincoln convention nor those of the Cleveland bolters were 
 generally accepted as settling the question. The two conventions had 
 adjourned sine die but hardly had the crowds departed when ir- 
 reconcilable elements in both demanded that they reassemble, rescind 
 their decisions, and select new candidates. "The Baltimore conven- 
 tion," growled Edward Bates in his Diary of June 10, "(National 
 Union, I believe it called itself) has surprised and mortified me greatly. 
 It did indeed nominate Mr. Lincoln, but in a manner and with at- 
 tendant circumstances, as if their object were to defeat their own nom- 
 ination. They were all (nearly) instructed to vote for Mr. Lincoln, 
 but many of them hated to do it, and only 'kept the word of promise 
 to the ear,' doing their worst to break it to the hope." 4 Military disasters 
 heightened the disaffection. Three days before Lincoln's nomination 
 the battle of Cold Harbor had been fought, and this and other bloody 
 reverses enshrouded the nation in gloom. Lincoln himself, as tragedy 
 
 3 Warden, op. cit. y p. 627. 
 
 4 Bates, op. cit., p. 372. 
 
454 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 followed tragedy, despaired of re-election. His famous sealed memoran- 
 dum of August 23, recording his belief that the administration would 
 be defeated, and pledging himself and his cabinet to co-operate with 
 McClellan to save the Union before inauguration, merely reflected the 
 pessimism that affected most loyal citizens. 
 
 With the possibility that both the regular and the bolting Repub- 
 licans would drop their candidates in favor of another man, the hopes 
 of Chase rose once more. News arrived in the middle of August, at 
 probably the most despairing moment of the war, that a movement 
 had been launched to persuade Lincoln voluntarily to abdicate his nom- 
 ination, or, if he refused, to eject him forcibly from the contest. The 
 insurrection had a far more formidable sponsorship than such an insane 
 proceeding would seem to have deserved. Its leader was David Dudley 
 Field of New York, whose brother, Stephen J. Field, Lincoln had a 
 short time before appointed to the United States Supreme Court; and 
 his most active co-worker was that same George Opdyke whose name 
 has several times appeared in these pages as one of the chieftains of the 
 anti-Seward-Weed contingent in New York. At a secret meeting in 
 Mr. Field's New York home on August 14, eminent representatives of 
 politics, journalism, and the professions prepared a "call" for a conven- 
 tion to be held in Cincinnati on September 18, "to consider the state 
 of the nation, and to consecrate the Union strength on some one can- 
 didate, who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new 
 nomination, if necessary." Horace Greeley, representing the New York 
 Tribune, Parke Godwin, William Cullen Bryant's son-in-law, repre- 
 senting the Evening Post, Theodore Tilton, representing the Independ- 
 ent, the nation's most widely circulated religious weekly, were present. 
 Whitelaw Reid, of the Cincinnati Gazette, did not attend, but was ac- 
 tively concerned in the demonstration. "That which I could do in the 
 direction you indicate," Reid wrote, "has been done in inducing the 
 Gazette to come out for Mr. Lincoln's withdrawal. The article has 
 been telegraphed east and I hope has done some good." What Greeley 
 thought of the situation was set forth in a letter to Mr. Opdyke, writ- 
 ten some days after the session. "Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He can- 
 not be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter 
 overthrow. If we had such a ticket as could be made by naming Grant, 
 Butler, or Sherman for President, and Farragut for Vice, we could make 
 a fight yet. And such a ticket we ought to have anyhow, with or with- 
 out a convention." Other participants in the discussion were Henry 
 Winter Davis, William Curtis Noyes, and Francis Lieber, the idealistic 
 German-American philosopher and scholar. 
 
 Greeley's inspired suggestion of Ben Butler as a candidate preferable 
 
END OF THE COALITION 455 
 
 to Lincoln gives some notion of the opinion entertained by these in- 
 tellectuals of the man whom, even in 1864, they regarded as an igno- 
 rant, uncouth bungler. Chase himself was invited to an adjourned meet- 
 ing at the home of George Opdyke on August 30, but refrained on 
 the plea of previous engagements. His letter of regret, however, be- 
 trayed a guarded sympathy with the great cause at stake. "I sincerely 
 hope that the deliberations of the gentlemen who will confer under 
 your roof may be fruitful of benefit to our country, never more in 
 need of wise counsel and fearless action by and among patriotic men. 
 Mr. Noyes knows my views as well, perhaps, as anybody, and expects 
 to be present at your meeting. But my views are by no means as clear 
 as I could wish and I should be very glad to have the advantage of the 
 clearer and better knowledge of other and better informed gentlemen." 
 Honest old Jacob Collamer, of Vermont, replied in sharply contrast- 
 ing strain; unlike Chase, his views were completely formed and needed 
 no clarification from the confidential sessions being held in the draw- 
 ing rooms of Mr. Opdyke and Mr. Field. In language as direct as cour- 
 tesy would permit, he declined to have anything to do with the enter- 
 prise; instead he urged the malcontents to use all "their energies and 
 efforts" in behalf of Lincoln's election, and said that any such plan as 
 they were contemplating would "prove almost certainly disastrous." 5 
 
 Chase's letter may be taken as a fairly complete revelation of his men- 
 tal operations during this difficult summer. For him it was a period of 
 indecision and of watchful waiting. Anything so dangerous as personal 
 participation in the New York uprising was gently pushed aside. Yet 
 he would not repudiate this attempt to force Lincoln from the contest; 
 apparently he chose to stand in obscurity and await events. 
 
 And events now abruptly destroyed any chances which the anti- 
 Lincolnian demonstration might have had for success. On August 29, 
 the Democratic convention — Gideon Welles called it "a nest of foul 
 birds" — met in Chicago and named its predestined candidate, George B. 
 McClellan. The dominant personality at this gathering was Clement L. 
 Vallandigham, the nation's most impassioned Copperhead, the man 
 whom Lincoln, a year before, after his conviction of treason by a 
 military court, had punished by exiling to the Confederate states. By 
 blockade running and other valiant methods, Vallandigham had escaped 
 to Canada, and campaigned for governor of Ohio while still sojourning 
 outside the United States. Defiantly crossing the border, he started on a 
 stumping tour, to the accompaniment of rioting mobs, preaching again 
 
 5 On June 30, 1889, the New York Sun published a collection of letters dealing 
 with the Field-Opdyke meetings. The quotations in the text are taken from these 
 letters. 
 
456 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 his favorite thesis — the secession of Western and Northwestern states 
 from the Federal government and their adherence to Mr. Jefferson 
 Davis's Confederacy; he wound up this campaign of education in 
 Chicago, haranguing from street corners and finally appearing in the 
 McClellan convention, where he was permitted to write the most 
 critical plank in the platform. This consisted of a few lines that have 
 passed into history as the most destructive blunder ever committed by 
 a great party. It stigmatized the war as a "failure" and demanded "that 
 immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities." McClellan, 
 indeed, in accepting a nomination for which he had been intriguing 
 for three years, repudiated these defeatist words, but his rejection did 
 not help matters much; especially as the war, which all summer had 
 been going badly, almost magically upsurged on the path to victory. 
 The Democratic delegates, who had voted the war a failure, returned 
 home with the frenzied cheers of the populace rising at every hand, 
 and found the newspapers, which had paid scant attention to their own 
 deliberations, filled with the triumphs of the Union arms. Bonfires 
 were burning in every street, bells were ringing in all Northern towns 
 and villages, cannon were pounding forth salutes, services of thanks- 
 giving and prayer were filling all the churches. Sherman had captured 
 Atlanta and had started on that march to the sea which was to leave the 
 South a military ruin. Other victories, especially Sheridan's in the Shen- 
 andoah, added to the certainty of Confederate doom. Farragut, by seiz- 
 ing Mobile, had wrested from the Confederacy almost its last remain- 
 ing port. The Democratic proposal to abandon the fight and yield to a 
 Confederate triumph, combined with the abundant signs that the South, 
 in a martial sense, was approaching annihilation, changed the political 
 prospect in a twinkling. At the time of the first meeting of David Dud- 
 ley Field's insurgents, on August 14, Lincoln seemed to be a losing 
 cause; on the date scheduled for the final confabulation, August 30, 
 no fact was more certain than his overwhelming success. No record 
 has been preserved of this ultimate session, if indeed it was ever held. 
 Most of its chosen spirits, after these almost simultaneous historical 
 events, had precipitated themselves into the Lincoln ranks; Sumner and 
 his companions began heralding the Union candidate from a hundred 
 platforms. Greeley's Tribune at last decided that the nation could be 
 safely entrusted to "old Abe" for another four years and Henry Ward 
 Beecher presently waxed as fervent in praise as he had previously wailed 
 in detraction. On September 27, a great meeting assembled in Cooper 
 Union in New York over which Chase's accredited spokesman, William 
 Curtis Noyes, presided and at which many of the leaders of the "Lin- 
 coln withdrawal movement" sat conspicuously on the platform, all in 
 
END OF THE COALITION 457 
 
 admiration of the candidate they had sought to displace. By Septem- 
 ber 17, Chase no longer hesitated as to his course. He returned to Wash- 
 ington and called upon the President. "His manner was cordial and 
 so were his words; and I hear of nothing but good will from him. But 
 he is not at all demonstrative, either in speech or manner. I feel that I 
 do not know him, and I found no action on what he says or does. . . . 
 It is my conviction that the cause I love and the general interests of 
 the country will be best promoted by his election and I have resolved 
 to join my efforts to those of almost the whole body of my friends in 
 securing it." 6 In the short time that remained before the voting, Chase 
 made several speeches in Lincoln's favor, the most ambitious in his home 
 town, Cincinnati. 
 
 Chase's deposition had not solved all of Lincoln's cabinet problems. 
 The difficult question of Blair still remained. Something would have to 
 be done about him, for the retirement of the Treasury head certainly 
 left the presidential council in an unbalanced state. The disenthrone- 
 ment of Chase had naturally elated the conservative elements, but the 
 radicals, who made up the majority of the party, at least in Congress, 
 were correspondingly enraged. The split which Lincoln had so dreaded 
 had now opened wide. Blair, Bates, Seward, Welles — apparently the 
 leading advocates of considerate treatment for the South, after its sub- 
 jugation — had won the day in the party counsels. That left only Stan- 
 ton and Chase's successor, Fessenden, as upholders of radical gospel, for 
 Usher, who had succeeded Smith, counted for nothing in the cabinet 
 either way. To cast Chase into outer darkness and to keep Blair was 
 almost more than the party equilibrium could stand. Moreover, the 
 final source of Republican authority, the national convention, had prac- 
 tically expelled Blair from the party — and this by a cataclysmic vote 
 of 440 to 4 — and had asked for his removal from the cabinet. Lincoln 
 could properly ignore such a demand when it was put forth by in- 
 surgent Senators, as he had shown in the case of Seward; but this mani- 
 festo by the party as a whole was a different matter. On September 23, 
 therefore, Lincoln took advantage of Blair's offer, many times made, to 
 withdraw from his official family, and appointed William Dennison, of 
 Ohio, his successor. 
 
 Here, then, is the simple explanation for Blair's retirement; it is essen- 
 tially the explanation that Lincoln himself gave Gideon Welles, 7 who 
 was much upset by his friend's downfall and a little inclined, at first, 
 to be critical of Lincoln. Blair himself said that he was a sacrifice to 
 comfort the Fremonters — meaning those radicals and ultraradicals who 
 
 6 Schuckers, op. cit., p. 511. 
 7 Welles, Diary. II, 153. 
 
458 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 had taken stand, in open battle, against the President. In essence this 
 was the case; Blair's diagnosis does not materially differ from the one 
 Lincoln gave Welles in his confidential talk. The legend that has been 
 evolved from these plain facts, however — that Blair's resignation was 
 the result of a political "deal" by which the President immolated his 
 Postmaster General as a price of Fremont's withdrawal from the presi- 
 dential contest and his reluctant support of Lincoln — does not neces- 
 sarily follow. Fremont did give up his preposterous candidacy the day 
 before Blair's resignation in a snarling letter denouncing Lincoln in 
 terms that do not suggest an amicable "bargain" with the President. 
 Zack Chandler always claimed the credit for arranging the treaty by 
 which Lincoln is supposed to have traded Blair for the Pathfinder's 
 support. His anonymous biographer first brought the story to public 
 notice, and, more recently, a collection of Chandler's letters to his wife, 
 illiterate, boastful, excited and disjointed, give a self-portrait of the 
 Senator as ambassador between the White House and Fremont's home 
 in New York, seeking to patch up an arrangement that would ensure 
 Lincoln, if not the support, at least not the vicious hostility of the 
 Fremont enthusiasts. That Lincoln may have confided to Chandler his 
 intention of reorganizing his cabinet is probable — for he had made the 
 same statement to others; he was also politician enough to reap such 
 capital as he could by taking the Senator into his confidence. It is not 
 likely, however, that Chandler's arguments, or enticements, had any- 
 thing to do with his decision. Soon after the Baltimore convention, 
 Lincoln had told a committee of radicals, headed by George W. Bout- 
 well, who had called to ask for Blair's resignation in accordance with 
 the request of the national convention, that he intended, if elected, to 
 make certain changes in his cabinet. Everyone understood, of course, 
 that this referred to Montgomery Blair. Personally fond as Lincoln 
 was of his Postmaster General, and highly as he esteemed his abilities 
 and his worth, his presence in the cabinet had been an embarrassment 
 for a considerable time. The biographer of the Blair family says that 
 Blair had signed his death warrant when he made his miscegenation 
 speech at Rockville in October 1863, almost a year before his retire- 
 ment. 8 
 
 Frank Blair's vituperation of Chase in the House had added to the 
 President's discomfort. Montgomery's constant attacks on his col- 
 leagues, Chase, Seward, and Stanton, in themselves made his presence 
 an incongruity in the cabinet. After his celebrated denunciation of 
 Stanton as a "coward and poltroon," Lincoln had read his chosen in- 
 
 8 Smith, William Ernest, Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics. Macmillan, 
 1933. II, 245. 
 
END OF THE COALITION 459 
 
 timates a little allocution — which he regarded as of sufficient impor- 
 tance to put in writing — warning them against such explosions in the 
 future, and plainly intimating that anyone who so indulged himself 
 would lose his job. That had not restrained Montgomery in the least; 
 he still kept up his pressure on Lincoln to get rid of Stanton and Sew- 
 ard. 9 Zachary Chandler's eloquence was not needed to persuade Lincoln 
 to take a step upon which he had decided long before. Nor did his presi- 
 dential prospects require it. By September 23, when Chandler claimed 
 to have achieved his coup, everybody knew that his re-election was 
 certain; none knew it better than Fremont and that is the reason why 
 he abandoned his candidacy. 
 
 On Friday, September 23, Edward Bates and Gideon Welles had 
 just left a cabinet meeting and were chatting for a few moments on the 
 west side of the White House grounds. Blair came up to them, remark- 
 ing, almost casually, "I suppose that you are both aware that my head 
 has been decapitated — that I am no longer a member of the cabinet.'* 
 Blair pulled a letter from his pocket. He had found it on his desk that 
 morning on coming in from Silver Spring. He then read it to his former 
 colleagues. "Executive Mansion, Washington, Sept. 23, 1864. Hon. 
 Montgomery Blair. My dear sir: You have generously said to me more 
 than once that, whenever your resignation would be a relief to me, it 
 was at my disposal. That time has come. You very well know that this 
 proceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you personally or offi- 
 cially. Your uniform kindness has been unsurpassed by that of any 
 friend, and while it is true that the war does not seem greatly to add 
 to the difficulties of your department as to those of some others, it is 
 not too much to say, which I most truly can, that in the three years 
 and a half during which you have administered the general post office 
 I remember no single complaint against you in connection therewith. 
 Yours as ever, Abraham Lincoln." 
 
 In parting with Blair, Welles notes, "the President parts with a true 
 friend and he leaves no adviser so able, bold, sagacious. Honest, truth- 
 ful and sincere, he has been wise, discriminating, and correct." 10 Blair 
 expressed no resentment. "He thinks," says Welles, "it right and will 
 eventuate well." All three Blairs accepted Lincoln's act in the same 
 spirit. Montgomery's conduct and that of Chase after "decapitation" 
 bring out into bold contrast the characters of the two men. Chase had 
 retired to New England, cultivating his grievances, and watching the 
 political outlook for any sign that might be turned to his personal ac- 
 count. From June to early September — which comprised the time 
 
 'Nicolay and Hay, op. cit. IX, 340. 
 10 Welles, Diary. II, 156-157. 
 
460 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 when Lincoln needed all the assistance he could get from his friends — 
 he kept silence, showing no disposition to assist the cause. Montgomery 
 Blair left the cabinet and immediately took the stump for the Lincolnian 
 ticket. In a letter to his wife, written immediately after penning his 
 resignation, he expresses a natural regret that the "President has given 
 himself and me too an unnecessary mortification in this matter; but 
 then I am not the best judge and I am sure he acts from the best motives" 
 and "it is the best all around." The fiery Frank, recently wounded and 
 on a thirty-day leave, wrote his father that "the failure to elect Mr. Lin- 
 coln would be the greatest disaster that could befall the country and 
 the sacrifice made by the Judge X1 to avert this is so incomparably small 
 that I felt it would not cost him a pang to make." One week after leav- 
 ing the cabinet Montgomery appeared at a great Lincoln rally in 
 Cooper Union, New York. His speech was an eloquent eulogy of Lin- 
 coln and a plea for his overwhelming election. Referring to his recent 
 withdrawal Montgomery said: "I retired upon the recommendation of 
 my father. My father has passed that period of life when its honors or 
 its rewards or its glories have any charm for him. ... He would not 
 permit a son of his to stand in the way of the glorious and patriotic 
 President who leads us on to success and to the final triumph that is in 
 store for us." This continued to be Blair's attitude towards Lincoln the 
 rest of his life. Up to the day of his death, in 1883, any man who at- 
 tacked Lincoln's memory invariably found Montgomery Blair a most 
 aggressive defender. On re-election, Lincoln offered Montgomery the 
 choice of the ministership to Spain or Austria, but he declined, with the 
 utmost good grace. After Lincoln's death the tide of Reconstruction, 
 on the model of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, drove him and 
 Frank into the Democratic Party, but Lincoln never had a greater 
 friend and admirer than the man whom political necessity had forced 
 him to remove from his cabinet. 
 
 The venerable jurist who, in 1835, had succeeded John Marshall as 
 Chief Justice of the United States, by conveniently dying on Octo- 
 ber 12, 1864, at the age of eighty-seven, ushered in the final episode in 
 this Lincoln-Chase-Blair melodrama. Justice Taney's age and increas- 
 ing feebleness had long riveted many anxious eyes on his probable suc- 
 cessor. President Lincoln had already appointed three members of 
 this highest court and that, in the natural course of mortality, he 
 would be called upon to name its seventh presiding Justice had caused 
 much apprehensive speculation. This anxiety was expressed in Ben 
 Wade's indecent jest, that he had prayed God that Taney would sur- 
 
 11 In the Blair family Montgomery was always called "the Judge." 
 
END OF THE COALITION 461 
 
 vive the administration of James Buchanan but that the tenacious via- 
 bility of the Chief Justice made it look as though he had overdone his 
 invocations. Wade did not wish the proslavery Buchanan to appoint as 
 Taney's successor another adherent of the principles which Taney had 
 expounded in the Dred Scott case. General public opinion, well-based 
 or not, that Jefferson Davis and the rebel cause had had, for more than 
 three years, an ally in the Chief Justice of the United States did not 
 cause that widespread regret over Taney's demise to which his great 
 legal talents and high personal character would have entitled him. In 
 the inevitable forecasts as to his successor, the name of Salmon Portland 
 Chase had for some time held chief place. His views on slavery and 
 Reconstruction made him the ideal candidate of the radicals. Those who 
 believed in the soundness of his financial system regarded Chase as the 
 man who could safely be entrusted with its defense and interpretation. 
 Chase had not attained first eminence as a lawyer, for his practice had 
 been constantly interrupted by his political career, and had, moreover, 
 been most conspicuously identified with the defense of the black man; 
 but most observers, including Lincoln, esteemed highly his intellectual 
 powers, and had every confidence in his qualifications for the Supreme 
 Bench. Chase had told Lincoln, more than once, that his real ambition 
 was not the White House, but the Chief Justiceship. He had often re- 
 marked to intimates that he would like to spend the rest of his life on 
 this court, but in no other capacity, he characteristically added, than 
 as its head. Lincoln had said to several associates that, should a vacancy 
 exist at any time during his presidential term, Chase would be the man. 
 Not unnaturally, the Secretary had come to regard the appointment as 
 already set apart for him. Hardly had Taney been laid to rest in his 
 native Maryland when Charles Sumner and other radical leaders in the 
 Senate and Fessenden and Stanton in the cabinet began besieging the 
 President to fulfill general expectation and endow Mr. Chase with the 
 property that had long been predestined to him. 
 
 That the elevation of Chase to what was generally regarded as the 
 second place in the Federal system would rescue him from the embar- 
 rassments in which his foolish ambitions had enmeshed the man was one 
 of the motives inciting his friends. But the more politically minded 
 raised practical arguments against the choice. In the Seward-Thurlow 
 Weed type of mind, Chase had lost all claim to consideration at Lin- 
 coln's hands. Seward's hostility toward Chase may be estimated from 
 the man he urged Lincoln to appoint. He endorsed Montgomery Blair, 
 a cabinet colleague with whom he was scarcely on speaking terms. Ed- 
 ward Bates also revolted from Chase as Chief Justice, in part perhaps 
 because a hope was lurking in his breast that the President might look 
 
462 Lincoln's war cabinet 
 
 approvingly in his own direction. Bates had a national reputation as a 
 jurist, and except for his seventy years might have been a favored can- 
 didate. 
 
 Welles, like Seward, favored Blair, but for different reasons; as al- 
 ways, Welles looked on the matter exclusively from public considera- 
 tions; he had the highest respect for Blair's mentality, regarded the de- 
 fender of Dred Scott as a great man of the law, and did not rank Chase 
 highly for legal knowledge. Lincoln hesitated over Chase for one reason 
 only. He did not accept at face value the Secretary's confession that his 
 real ambition had always been John Marshall's seat and not the Presi- 
 dency. Lincoln believed that, once in this exalted post, Chase would 
 seek to use it as a steppingstone to the higher office. The President un- 
 folded his mind freely to Charles Sumner, who was haunting his pres- 
 ence day and night in the interest of his friend. Would it not be a good 
 idea, Lincoln asked Sumner, for him to send for Chase, and explain 
 frankly the doubts that stood in the way of his preferment? He would 
 tell Chase that if he would place behind him forever this impossible de- 
 sire and devote his great powers exclusively to the bench, he would 
 make one of the greatest Chief Justices in history. What Lincoln had 
 in mind was to pledge Chase to lay aside all presidential hope in ex- 
 change for this appointment. Sumner pointed out a fact that had not 
 occurred to him: that crass popular suspicion would charge that Lin- 
 coln had used his office as a means of getting rid of a troublesome po- 
 litical opponent. Lincoln agreed and abandoned the idea. If he could 
 have followed his own personal inclinations, he would have selected 
 Blair, whose father was pursuing him with almost the same assiduity as 
 Sumner. But the idea was utterly impracticable. No man in the adminis- 
 tration except Seward had been so unpopular with the Senate as Blair; 
 there was no likelihood of his confirmation. The appointment would 
 rip open again the party wounds that, had been in large measure healed 
 by his exit from the cabinet. To the pleas of Chase-hating politicians, 
 who wrote and repeated to Lincoln all the hostile words and acts of 
 which Chase had been guilty, he gave the same impatient reply. The 
 President cared nothing, he said, for such arguments; the interests of 
 the nation and the party were the only things to be considered. Per- 
 sonally he heartily disliked the man. Welles quotes William E. Chan- 
 dler, Congressman from New Hampshire, to whom Lincoln confided 
 that he would "rather swallow his buckthorn chair" than appoint Chase. 
 One day, at the height of the excitement, one of Lincoln's secretaries 
 placed on his desk a paper. "What is it?" asked Lincoln. It was a letter 
 from Chase, couched in the most friendly terms. The President did not 
 read it, but said, with a weary smile: "File it with his other recom- 
 
END OF THE COALITION 463 
 
 mendations." On December 6, Lincoln wrote out with his own hand 
 and sent to the Senate the following document: "I nominate Salmon P. 
 Chase of Ohio, to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, vice Roger B. Taney, deceased." 12 
 
 Lincoln's fear was justified that Chase, after donning the Chief Jus- 
 tice's robe, would not drop his presidential yearning. Charles Sumner, 
 after the nomination, rushed eagerly to the Chase home, to be the first 
 man to congratulate him. He was met at the door by daughter Kate. 
 The charming lady shook her forefinger, half mockingly, half in ear- 
 nest, in Sumner's face. "And you, too, Mr. Sumner! You in this business 
 of shelving papa? But never mind, I will defeat you all!" And almost 
 at once father and daughter began laying plans for Chase's nomination 
 in 1868. Despairing of any success from the Republicans, who would 
 listen to no other candidate except Grant, father and daughter cen- 
 tered their hopes on the Democrats. As a result of their efforts, Chase 
 received one half of one vote as the candidate of the convention that 
 met in Tammany Hall, New York, and nominated Horatio Seymour. 
 Yet at one time Chase's chances had seemed fairly good. "Competent 
 judges have believed," wrote Albert Bushnell Hart, "that had Kate 
 Chase been able to go into the convention and make her combinations 
 on the spot she would have secured his nomination." 13 
 
 Lincoln did not live long enough to witness the fulfillment of his 
 belief that Chase would continue intriguing to become his successor. 
 The last time the two men met face to face was on March 4, 1865, 
 on the porch of the Capitol. On that occasion, Salmon P. Chase, Chief 
 Justice of the United States, administered the oath of office to Abraham 
 Lincoln, on his inauguration for his second term. One would like a 
 record of the thoughts concealed in the minds of both men on this 
 solemn occasion. 
 
 12 Curiously, Lincoln does not give the appointee his correct title. The Con- 
 stitution calls him simply "Chief Justice of the United States." 
 
 13 Life of Salmon Portland Chase, in American Statesmen series. Ed. by J. T. 
 Morse, Jr. Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 420. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abolitionists, 5, 20-21, 33, 38, 245-246, 
 269-270, 273, 274, 275, 282, 358, 383, 
 397-398, 410-411, 440, 452; Bates's 
 opinion of, 46, 50; Seward opposes in 
 cabinet, 79, 83, 119; criticize Seward, 
 145; on Stanton, 237-238, 252; Jacobins 
 want abolition cabinet, 277; despised 
 by McClellan, 286; shocked by Sew- 
 ard correspondence, 325; oppose 
 Blairs, 387-388; demand resignation of 
 Chase, 431; hopes for Fremont con- 
 vention in Cleveland, 435. See also 
 Antislavery movement 
 
 Adams, Charles Francis, 71, 83, 117, 187, 
 245; on Seward, 146, 149-150; affair 
 of the Confederate commissioners, 
 192-196; his skill in handling prob- 
 lem, 197-198; recognition of Confed- 
 eracy, 211-212; Alabama affair, 213; 
 privateers, 214; diplomatic corre- 
 spondence with Seward, 325-326 
 
 Adams, Ephraim D., 214 
 
 Adams, Henry, 162; comment on na- 
 tional affairs, 128; picture of Seward, 
 146-148 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 13, 15, 22, 339 
 
 Alabama (Confederate vessel), 213 
 
 Albany Evening Journal, 16; criticizes 
 Chase's campaign, 405. See also Weed, 
 Thurlow 
 
 Albany plan, 86, 98, 118 
 
 Alexander, Appoline, 67 
 
 American Exchange and Review, 403 
 
 American party or "Americans." See 
 Know-Nothings 
 
 Amnesty proclamation, 440 
 
 Anderson, Robert, wants help for Fort 
 Sumter, 128; retires to Sumter, 156; 
 Seward would recall, 156, 159-160; 
 still at Sumter, 168-169; transfer to 
 Fort Sumter, 248-249. See also Fort 
 Sumter 
 
 Andrew, Governor, of Massachusetts, 
 83, 202, 436 
 
 Antietam, 318, 323 
 
 Antislavery movement, 7, 25-26, 50, 68, 
 71, 245; Cameron seeks approval, 231- 
 
 232; antislavery of Wade, 269; new 
 party formed, 272, 273. See also Abo- 
 litionists, Jacobins, Radicals 
 
 Antislavery Standard, 452 
 
 Army, interference of committee on 
 the war, 281-282; criticized for pro- 
 slavery views, 336; needs Negro labor, 
 355. See also Cameron, Simon 
 
 Army of the Potomac, 282, 301, 307; 
 McClellan head of, 283; McClellan's 
 feat in organizing, 287; McClellan 
 again leads, 315-318; McClellan re- 
 moved and Burnside in command, 324 
 
 Army of Virginia, 306 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 253, 275, 396-398, 402 
 
 Bailey, Gamaliel, 245 
 
 Baltimore American. See Wales, Wil- 
 liam 
 
 Baltimore convention of 1840, 244; of 
 1864, 429, 437-441, 453 
 
 Bancroft, Frederic, on Seward, 182 
 
 Bancroft, George, 63, 73; shocked by 
 Seward, 187 
 
 Banks, Nathaniel P., 73, 83, 391 
 
 Barbour, James, 136, 141 
 
 Barlow, Samuel M. L., 287, 302 
 
 Barney, Hiram, 85, 104, 381; view of 
 Lincoln, 117; on emancipation picture, 
 364; no supporter of Chase, 385; col- 
 lector of New York a Chase man, 
 407, 443 
 
 Bates, Edward, 6, 10, 26, 76, 186, 258, 
 277, 457, 459; Chicago convention, 29, 
 42, 56, 60, 69; his political affiliations, 
 43; his early life, 43; leader in South- 
 west, 44-46; his appearance and char- 
 acter, 46-47; Diary, 47; as presidential 
 candidate, 48-50; Lincoln wants, in 
 cabinet, 82-84; his loyalty to Union, 
 85; Lincoln and Weed discuss, 100; 
 visits Lincoln and meets Cameron, 
 107; on first cabinet meeting, 127; 
 wants moratorium on agitation, 130; 
 would evacuate forts, 161; distrusts 
 Seward, 187; protests Seward's ac- 
 tions, 191; approves Trent affair, 202; 
 
466 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Bates, Edward {continued) 
 
 on Cameron dismissal, 234; favors 
 Carrington, 259; on reconstruction 
 and the Jacobins, 267-268; his opinion 
 on Chandler and Wade, 273; quotes 
 McClellan on slavery, 287; McClel- 
 lan's contempt for, 289; on McClellan, 
 297; on effect of Peninsular campaign, 
 299; his part in cabinet upheaval on 
 McClellan, 308-315; responsible for 
 Collamer committee, 337; his reaction 
 to Emancipation Proclamation, 354; 
 retires, 369; his lack of harmony with 
 cabinet, 370; opposes Chase, 385; on 
 Blair family, 390-392; to be ousted 
 from cabinet, 391; comment on 
 Chase's campaign, 401-402, 406; men- 
 tions Stedman, 411; distrusts Chase, 
 422; his opinion on trade with the 
 enemy, 426; and of Fremont, 436; 
 Baltimore convention anti-Bates, 440; 
 on Chase's resignation, 451; on Balti- 
 more convention, 453; does not want 
 Chase for Chief Justice, 461-462 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, 25, 383, 456 
 
 Belmont, August, 302 
 
 Benjamin, Judah P., 8, 40; still in Wash- 
 ington, 144; on Seward's diplomacy, 
 209, 212 
 
 Benton, Thomas Hart, 44, 67-68 
 
 Bigelow, John, 215-216 
 
 Black, Jeremiah S., on Stanton, 237, 253; 
 his friendship with Stanton, 245-246; 
 sends Stanton to California, 247; trans- 
 ferred to State Department, 248; his 
 part in Buchanan crisis on Fort Sum- 
 ter and South Carolina, 248-252 
 
 Blair, Francis Preston, 61-66; friend of 
 Welles, 75-76; gives Lincoln views on 
 Sumter, 164 
 
 Blair, Francis Preston, Jr. (Frank Blair) , 
 66-70, 458; holds Missouri in Union, 
 161-162; organizes Wide-A wakes, 162; 
 his character, political and military 
 career, 387-390; as leader of Clay- 
 banks, 394; returns to Missouri as 
 hero, but is assailed by radicals, 395— 
 396; criticizes Chase, 396; returns to 
 army, 396; returns to Congress, 422- 
 423; his attack on Chase in Congress, 
 424-429; Chase forces lead in counter- 
 attack, 427, 429; returns to army, 429; 
 President excuses speeches, 432-433; 
 House of Representatives disqualifies, 
 439 
 
 Blair, James, 66-67 
 
 Blair, Montgomery, 44, 64-68, 136, 186, 
 258; counsel for Dred Scott, 69; for 
 cabinet post, 70; would destroy har- 
 mony of cabinet, 80; Lincoln wants 
 in cabinet, but Seward opposes, 82- 
 83, 98, 103, 119; Lincoln and Weed 
 discuss, 100-101; his appointment as- 
 sured, 113; attitude of cabinet towards, 
 127; could not hold Maryland, 140; 
 would hold forts, 161, 163-164; de- 
 scribes Southern character, 162; his 
 tirade against Scott, 171-172; demands 
 reinforcement of Sumter, 172; de- 
 nounces Seward, 178, 182; criticizes 
 Lincoln-Seward friendship, 187; dis- 
 approves of Trent affair, 202; opposes 
 colored troops, 229; on Cameron dis- 
 missal, 234-235; on Stanton, 240, 259- 
 260, 264; well fitted for cabinet post, 
 262; his reconstruction aims, 267; sup- 
 ports McClellan, 296; his devotion to 
 Lincoln, 311; his opinion on Pope, 
 311, 315; on cabinet consultations, 339; 
 defends Seward, 340; his reaction to 
 Emancipation Proclamation, 356; his 
 resignation from cabinet, 369; and lack 
 of harmony with cabinet, 370; opposes 
 Chase, 385; wants reorganization of 
 cabinet with father as dictator, 391; 
 attacks Sumner's views on reconstruc- 
 tion, 397-399; on Chase's campaign, 
 401; on Pomeroy circular, 415; Balti- 
 more convention turns against, 438- 
 441; offers his resignation, 441; Lin- 
 coln accepts resignation of, 457-458; 
 and replies to it, 459; keeps up attack 
 on Stanton and Seward, 458-459; 
 Seward suggests for Chief Justice, 
 461; favored by Welles, 462; would 
 have been Lincoln's personal choice, 
 462 
 
 Blair family, 70, 426; criticized in Diary 
 of a Public Man, 116; services to 
 Union of, 161; hold war inevitable, 
 162; friendship with Lincoln of, 385- 
 390; attempt to control President, 389; 
 support Lincoln on reconstruction, 
 393, 395; charge Fremont movement 
 a Chase operation, 436; reaction of, to 
 Chase's resignation, 451; always loyal 
 to Lincoln, 459-460 
 
 Blatchford, R. M., 446 
 
 Border states, 44, 70, 160, 173, 276-277, 
 350-351; Lincoln feels it necessary to 
 hold, 100, 103; in favor of Union, 
 140-141; held by tenuous thread, 142, 
 
INDEX 
 
 467 
 
 152; held by Seward's policy, 149; 
 importance of Missouri to, 161; Sew- 
 ard hopes to hold, 176; to keep 
 slavery, 227, 229; fate of, still in 
 balance, 229-230; no fear emancipa- 
 tion would alienate, 353 
 
 Botts, John M., 136, 141; wanted by 
 Seward in cabinet, 80; and by Weed, 
 102, 114 
 
 Boutwell, George S., 71, 458 
 
 Bowles, Samuel, 71, 452 
 
 Breckinridge, Robert J., 246, 263, 438 
 
 Bright, John, 200, 205-206, 437 n. 
 
 Brooks, Preston (Bully Brooks), 63; 
 beats Sumner, 25, 271, 274 
 
 Brown, B. Gratz, 394 
 
 Browning, Orville H., 337; on first in- 
 augural, 152; on Chase, 343 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen, 85, 309, 454; 
 friend of Welles, 77; opposes Seward- 
 Weed machine, 77, 104; favors 
 Welles but against Cameron, 105; 
 friendly to Chase's campaign, 406 
 
 Buchanan, James, 51, 114, 263, 302, 325, 
 330, 442, 461; his weakness in face of 
 secession, 128; wants to seize Cuba, 
 136; on Seward, 145-146; last days of 
 his administration, 146, 156; his truce 
 with South on the forts, 159; his in- 
 action over rebellion, 163; corruption 
 of his administration, 221-222; his rela- 
 tions with Stanton, 245-252; on cabi- 
 net crisis and alleged Confederate 
 plot, 254-256; Stanton corresponds 
 with, 257-259 
 
 Buchananites, 247 
 
 Buckner, 295 
 
 Bull Run, first battle of, 282-283, 287; 
 second battle of, 306, 315 
 
 Burnside, Ambrose E., 282, 316-317; 
 appointed to command Army of the 
 Potomac, 324 
 
 Butler, Benjamin F., 224, 287, 330, 356, 
 391, 409, 454; holds slaves contraband 
 of war, 228-229; favorite of the 
 Jacobins, 282 
 
 Cabinet, first made up, 3-4; experiment 
 in conciliation of, 6; Border state 
 members of, 43; New England in the, 
 71-72; many political groups in, 79; 
 Seward wants to choose and domi- 
 nate all -Whig, 79, 81; and advocates 
 basing on British system, 80; Lincoln 
 wants union of all parties in, 82; still 
 a coalition, 103; Lincoln postpones 
 
 choice of, 105; appointments on in- 
 auguration and on March 5, 113, 
 118, 121, 123; pledged to preserve 
 Union, 114; slate to break at top, 119; 
 Lincoln wants to reconcile conflict- 
 ing interests of, 120; members uncon- 
 genial, 127; views on holding forts, 
 160-161, 163-164; meeting on Fort 
 Sumter, 170-172, 224; Seward would 
 eliminate, 176, 189-192; Lincoln- 
 Seward friendship in, 185; on Trent 
 affair, 201, 206-208; schism over Cam- 
 eron, 232; Buchanan's crisis on Fort 
 Sumter and South Carolina, 248- 
 252, 254-255; Jacobin distrust of, 276- 
 277; McClellan's contempt for, 289; 
 in state of dissolution, 292; support 
 for McClellan, 296; effect of Penin- 
 sular campaign on, 299; effect of 
 McClellan's defeats on, 306; upheaval 
 of McClellan, 307-315; meeting after 
 second battle of Bull Run, 315-317; 
 crisis of, after Fredericksburg, 324— 
 347; Fessenden advocates parliamen- 
 tary system, 328; Collamer committee 
 wants power in, 336; place of, under 
 Constitution, 340-347; hears Emanci- 
 pation Proclamation, 350-351; reaction 
 of, to Proclamation, 354-363; por- 
 trait of, by Carpenter, 363-365; re- 
 organization and lack of harmony in, 
 369-370; views on admission of West 
 Virginia, 390; Montgomery Blair 
 wants to reorganize, 391; Chase avoids 
 meetings of, 409; disintegration of 
 predicted, 430; Baltimore convention 
 demands reconstruction of, 440-441; 
 reaction to Chase's leaving, 450-451; 
 unbalanced state of, 457. See also 
 Bates, Edward; Blair, Montgomery; 
 Cameron, Simon; Chase, Salmon P.; 
 Seward, William H.; Smith, Caleb B.; 
 Welles, Gideon; and Dennison, Wil- 
 liam; Fessenden, William P.; Stanton, 
 Edwin M.; Usher, John Palmer 
 Calhoun, John C, 7, 23, 76, 240, 429 
 California, land frauds in, 242, 247 
 Cameron, Simon, 6, 26, 29, 48, 63, 65, 
 174, 258, 277, 294; unreliable char- 
 acter of, 51-52; political career of, 
 52-56; early life of, 53; agent for 
 Winnebago Indians, 54; at Chicago 
 convention, 1860, 57-58; promised 
 cabinet post, 58; his record as Demo- 
 crat, 83; meets Davis, Swett, Weed in 
 New York, 91; proposed as Secretary 
 
468 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cameron, Simon (continued) 
 of the Treasury, 92-93; Lincoln and 
 Weed discuss, 101-102; New York 
 politicians denounce, 104-105; his ap- 
 pointment urged by Davis, 105; op- 
 posed by Carey, Sumner, Chase, 
 Trumbull, Herndon, 106; invites 
 Swett to Lochiel, 107; visits Lincoln, 
 107; Bates's impression of, 107; Lin- 
 coln promises Treasury or War post 
 to, 108; tries to withdraw, 109-110; 
 probably Secretary of War, 113, 118; 
 attitude of cabinet towards, 127; 
 would evacuate forts, 161; ordered by 
 Lincoln to relieve Sumter, 172; en- 
 raged at Seward, 188; cheers Wilkes, 
 201; on graft and corruption in War 
 Dept., 219-223; his dismissal inevita- 
 ble, 223; brings Scott under Seward's 
 wing, 223-225; resents Seward's as- 
 sumption of power, 224-225; transfers 
 affections to Chase, 226; would create 
 colored army in spite of Lincoln's 
 objections, 226-231; called to account 
 by Lincoln, 231; and finally dis- 
 missed, 232-235; nominated minister 
 to Russia, 233; friend of Stanton, 260; 
 Stanton urges McClellan to arrest, 
 261; wanted Stanton as successor, 
 262; opposed by Julian, 276; Blair's 
 opinion on, 392 
 
 Campbell, John A., 157, 166-169, 173- 
 174 
 
 Canada, Seward's hope to annex, 210 
 
 Carey, Henry C, opposes Cameron, 
 196 
 
 Carpenter, Francis B., 231, 240, 353, 360; 
 Emancipation portrait, 362-365 
 
 Carrington, Edward C, 259 t 
 
 Cass, Lewis, 248 
 
 Cataline (ship), 221 
 
 Central America, Southerners want to 
 seize, 135-136 
 
 Chancellorsville, battle of, 282 
 
 Chandler, William E., 462 
 
 Chandler, Zachariah, 226, 230, 232, 303, 
 328, 369, 458, 459; friend of Stanton, 
 260; his early life, 272; his political 
 career, 272-274; his appearance, 273; 
 his hatred of Southerners, 274; as 
 leader of Jacobins, 276; his opinion of 
 Seward, 277; and hostility to Lin- 
 coln, 278; his influence in War De- 
 partment, 280-281, 293-294; criticizes 
 McClellan, 294, 299; no support to 
 Chase, 384 
 
 "Charcoals," 394-395, 435-436 
 Charleston Harbor. See Fort Sumter 
 Chase, Kate. See Sprague, Kate Chase 
 Chase, Salmon Portland, 6-7, 10, 24-26, 
 48, 76, 136, 186, 224, 239, 245, 258, 277; 
 at Chicago convention, 29, 56; ap- 
 pearance, characteristics of, 32, 35- 
 36, 39-41; his political parties, 32-33; 
 seeks presidential nomination, 33; his 
 religion, 33-34; his education and 
 early life, 34; starts seminary in Wash- 
 ington, 35; marriages of, 36-38; aboli- 
 tionist, 38-39; elected to U. S. Senate, 
 40; defeated presidential nomination, 
 1860, 41-42; favorite candidate of 
 Welles, 77; Lincoln works for his 
 appointment, 82, 100, 110, 112, 113; 
 Seward-Weed machine opposes, 83, 
 92, 98, 103, 118-121; New York poli- 
 ticians favor, 104; against Cameron, 
 106; dislikes position secondary to 
 Seward, 110; visits Lincoln, 110-112; 
 in apartment near Lincoln, 114; 
 opinion of cabinet on, 127; on Sew- 
 ard's speech, 145; would hold forts, 
 161, 172; Russell's opinion of, and of 
 his daughter, 169; disapproves Lin- 
 coln-Seward friendship, 188; wants 
 regular cabinet meetings, 191; his 
 opinion on Trent affair, 202; on 
 Cameron dismissal, 233-235; com- 
 pared to Stanton, 240; favors Stanton 
 for District Attorney, 259; friend of 
 Stanton, 260-262; works for his ap- 
 pointment, 262-264; his reconstruction 
 aims, 267; Wade's opinion on, 270; 
 plans to be President, 292; admires 
 McDowell, 296; blames McClellan for 
 Bull Run, 306-307; his part in Mc- 
 Clellan cabinet upheaval, 307-315; 
 angry at McClellan's reinstatement, 
 316; his part in cabinet crisis of Dec. 
 1862, 324, 329-330; defended by John 
 Sherman, 332; responsible for Col- 
 lamer committee, 337; angry at Col- 
 lamer committee, 341; denounced by 
 Neiv York Herald, 343; resignation of, 
 344-345; but Lincoln declines to ac- 
 cept, 346; effect of Collamer episode 
 on Chase, 347; records Lincoln's views 
 on Emancipation Proclamation, 352; 
 his reaction to Proclamation, 356— 
 358; his views on treatment for the 
 Negro, 358; on Emancipation picture, 
 363; his resignation from cabinet, 369- 
 370; determined to succeed Lincoln, 
 
INDEX 
 
 469 
 
 371-374; his constant criticism of Lin- 
 coln and administration, 371-374; his 
 friendship with women, 379-380; his 
 low income, 380-381; support for his 
 election, 383; Welles's opinion on, 
 387; opposes Frank Blair, 389; his in- 
 surrection, 390; but is kept in cabinet, 
 391-392; supported by "Charcoals," 
 394-395; Blair attacks reconstruction 
 views of, 398-399; pushes campaign 
 for Presidency, 400-404; his use of 
 political patronage, 404-406; protests 
 Weed's article, 405; and special 
 groups, 407; his use of customhouses 
 in political machine, 407; Lincoln 
 overlooks his pretensions, 408^409; 
 his avoidance of cabinet meetings, 
 409; campaigned for by Pomeroy, 
 Winchell, Stedman, 410-416; again 
 •offers his resignation, 416; and Lincoln 
 again declines to accept, 417-418; loses 
 Republican support, 421; withdraws 
 name from campaign, 421; called a 
 sham, 422; Blair charges with political 
 corruption, 424-429; Chase forces lead 
 counterattack, 427, 429; forces attack 
 on Lincoln, 429; rage at Blair's 
 ; speech, 430; his friends effect com- 
 promise with President, 431-433; 
 wants written disavowal from Presi- 
 dent, 433; does not receive it, 434; his 
 supporters back Fremont, 436; com- 
 plains about Baltimore convention, 
 439; reliance on Cisco, 442; crisis with 
 Lincoln over Treasury patronage, 
 444-446; wants to control, 447-448; 
 Lincoln accepts his resignation, 448- 
 449; astounded at President's act, 449- 
 450; and at general reaction, 450^451; 
 hopes for presidential nomination, 
 451, 453-455; goes to New Hamp- 
 shire, 451; bitter towards Lincoln, 
 452; decides to support Lincoln and 
 • calls on him, 457; attacked by Blair, 
 45S; conduct on resignation com- 
 pared to Blair's, 459; appointed Chief 
 Justice, 461-463; Lincoln fears still 
 has presidential aspirations, 462; fears 
 justified, 463; defeated Democratic 
 nomination, 1868, 463 
 
 'Chicago, convention, 1860, 5-6, 28-30, 
 56-60, 69, 76, 220, 270; platform, 152, 
 158; Democratic convention, 1864, 
 455-456 
 
 Chicago Tribune. See Medill, Joseph 
 
 Chickamauga, 282 
 
 Chittenden, L. E., 42, 445-446 
 
 Cincinnati convention, 1864, 454, 456 
 
 Cincinnati Gazette, 412. See also Reid, 
 Whitelaw 
 
 Cisco, John J., 442-446 
 
 Civil War, chances of postponing, 98; 
 Blairs bent on, 116, 162; "big busi- 
 ness" hopes to avert, 131; or submis- 
 sion, 143; Southern character real 
 cause of, 163; decision rests on Lin- 
 coln, 164, 192; peaceable secession or, 
 169; Jacobins want to manage, 280- 
 282; McClellan's views on object of, 
 304; dissatisfaction with conduct of, 
 325; trading with enemy scandals, 
 423-428; excitement over sudden turn 
 to victory, 456 
 
 Civil War diplomacy. See Confederacy, 
 recognition of; Trent affair 
 
 Clay, Cassius M., 232-233 
 
 Clay, Henry, 7, 13, 74, 80, 93-94 
 
 Claybanks, 394-395 
 
 Cleveland convention, 1864, 429, 435— 
 437 
 
 Clinton, De Witt, 13 
 
 Coalter, Julia Davenport, 45 
 
 Cobb, Howell, 128, 248, 252 
 
 Cobden, Richard, 200, 205-206, 452 
 
 Cochrane, John, 230, 294, 437 
 
 Cold Harbor, battle of, 453 
 
 Colfax, Schuyler, 113, 327, 423-124, 
 426-427, 436 
 
 Collamer, Jacob, 77, 333-335, 455 
 
 Colored troops, 226-235 
 
 Committee on conduct of war, 280-282, 
 288-289, 293-294, 426 
 
 Compromise measures, 41; Seward for, 
 98; Lincoln opposed, 135-136; all 
 compromises failed, 136; Seward- 
 Weed in favor of, 136-137; sign of 
 weakness, 143; day of compromise 
 over, 149; Blair on, 162; Lincoln dis- 
 regards Seward's policy, 192. See also 
 Crittenden Compromise; Missouri 
 Compromise 
 
 Confederacy, 4, 44, 304; seizes Federal 
 property, 128, 151; should be no 
 coercion of, 141-142, 166; Seward 
 still feels loyal to Union, but seces- 
 sion long planned, 142-143; sends 
 Crawford mission to Washington, 
 154; question of Federal recognition, 
 155; sends diplomatic mission to Lon- 
 don, 155-156, 192-198; seeks to 
 hold all forts, 159; surrender of 
 Sumter a recognition of Southern 
 
470 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Confederacy (continued) 
 
 independence, 167-168; Seward's pro- 
 gram an aid to, 173; assistance of 
 Europe necessary, 177; Confederate 
 envoys and Trent affair, 199-208; 
 recognition of by Great Britain and 
 France prevented, 209-213, 299; 
 agents plan to seize Washington, 253— 
 256; its parliamentary cabinet, 328; 
 again threatened, 354, 360; defeat a 
 certainty, 456 
 
 Congress, U. S., votes on Maximilian in 
 Mexico, 215; on graft in War Dept., 
 221; censures Cameron, 235; House 
 committee on Confederate plot, 255— 
 256; description of, in days of Chan- 
 dler and Wade, 270-271, 274; Jacobins 
 want Congress to run war, 280-281; 
 attempt to seize executive power, 
 324-347, 390; Committee declines to 
 act on Blair's charges, 426-427; House 
 excludes Frank Blair, 439. See also 
 Committee on conduct of war 
 
 Conkling, Roscoe, 379 
 
 Connecticut politics. See Welles, Gideon 
 
 Conness, John, 407, 412 
 
 Conservatives, 267, 394 
 
 Constitutional government, Congress 
 seeks to destroy, 324-347 
 
 Constitutional Union, 416 
 
 Cooke, Jay, 381, 450; his opinion of 
 Kate Chase, 376; backs Chase's cam- 
 paign, 402-404; uses Treasury as po- 
 litical machine, 404-405; attacks Blair, 
 427; urges Chase to be firm, 433 
 
 Copperheads, 287, 302, 388, 401, 412, 
 455 
 
 Corwin, Tom, 408 
 
 Covode, John, 384 
 
 Cowan, Edgar, 110 
 
 Cox, Sunset, 287 
 
 Crawford, Martin J., and Crawford 
 mission, 154, 156, 168, 173, 182 
 
 Crawford, Samuel W., 164-165 
 
 Crittenden Compromise, 135-137, 141, 
 144, 149, 176, 274 
 
 Cuba, Buchanan wants to seize, 136 
 
 Cummings, Alexander, 23, 58, 91, 220 
 
 Curtin, Andrew, 31, 55-57, 86, 92, 108, 
 436 
 
 Curtis, George Ticknor, 250, 302 
 
 Cushing, Caleb, on Trent affair, 200 
 
 Diary North and South, 169 
 Diary of a Public Man, 115, 156, 257; 
 perhaps written by Amos Kendall, 
 
 116; his views of Lincoln, 117, and 
 Seward, 117-118, 120 
 
 Dallas, George M., 194 
 
 Dana, Charles A., Ill, 133, 294, 383 
 
 Dana, Richard Henry, on Trent affair, 
 200 
 
 Davis, David, 30-31, 58-60, 70, 274; 
 meets Weed, 86-87, 90; political 
 career of, 87-88; as campaign man- 
 ager, 89-90; bargains with Cameron 
 and Smith, 90; visits New York to 
 get Seward-Weed support, 91-92; 
 aids Weed, 94-95; confers with Lin- 
 coln, Weed and Swett, 98; approves 
 choice of Henry W. Davis, 101; his 
 pledge to Cameron, 107, 110, 113; 
 arranges apartment for Lincoln, 114; 
 works for Seward-Weed Saratoga 
 pact, 118; helps Cameron, 127; wants 
 to acquire Latin American territory, 
 135; his promise to Cameron, 220; 
 declares Chase's declination a sham, 
 422 
 
 Davis, Henry Winter, 70, 394, 396, 
 413, 425, 454; foe of Lincoln, 88; 
 Weed proposes in place of Blair, 
 101-102; Lincoln did not favor, 113, 
 119; his aid in keeping Maryland in 
 Union, 140; backs Fremont, 436 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 8, 9, 30, 50, 141, 167, 
 177, 209, 248, 253, 283, 354, 414, 456, 
 461; holds secession meetings in Cap- 
 itol, 128; still in Washington, 144; 
 sends commission to Washington, 154 
 
 Dawes, Henry L., 221-222, 255 
 
 Dayton, William L., 6, 26, 197, 212; 
 wanted by Lincoln in cabinet, 82; 
 suggested as Secretary of State, 120 
 
 Democratic convention. See Chicago 
 Democratic convention, 1864 
 
 Democratic-Republicans, 13 
 
 Democrats and Democratic Party, 22, 
 25, 33, 39-40, 43, 54-55, 59, 63, 64, 71, 
 244-246, 248, 259, 261, 272, 276-277, 
 282, 299, 302-303, 305, 325, 332, 371, 
 417, 429, 437, 442-445, 453; split in 
 1860, 77; Seward opposes in cabinet, 
 79-80; Cameron as Democrat, 83; 
 outnumber Whigs in cabinet, 102; 
 Cameron intrigue, 105; control gov- 
 ernment, 253; wanted Lincoln's re- 
 election, 384 
 
 Dennison, William, appointed Post- 
 master General, 457 
 
 Despatch No. 10, 193-198 
 
 Dickinson, Daniel S., 373, 440 
 
INDEX 
 
 471 
 
 Dix, John A., 252 
 
 Dodge, William E., 114, 373 
 
 Douglas, Stephen A., 27, 286, 442; his 
 
 opinion on Blairs, 116; candidate in 
 
 1860, 246 
 Draper, Simeon, 119 
 Dred Scott case, 22, 69, 246, 461^62 
 
 Eames, Charles, 234-235 
 
 Early, Jubal, 389 
 
 Emancipation, 69, 282, 325-327; radicals 
 want immediate, 228-229; demanded 
 by Jacobins, 276; by Fremont in Mis- 
 souri, 278; McClellan ridicules, 287, 
 304; prerogative of President, 330; 
 Lincoln and Blairs agree on, 386-387 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation, 349-363; 
 Lincoln decides on, 349; reads to 
 cabinet, 350; his entire responsibility, 
 351-352; reaction of cabinet to, 354— 
 363; Chase opposed to indemnity 
 policy of, 358; a military prerogative, 
 359; picture of reading of, by Car- 
 penter, 363-365; Chase resents, 371 
 
 Etheridge, Emerson, 136; Seward wants 
 in cabinet, 80, 83, 114 
 
 Evarts, William M., 30 
 
 Everett, Edward, on Trent affair, 200 
 
 Executive power, 174-193, 280-291, 308- 
 315, 324-347, 351-352, 359, 390-392, 
 447-448 
 
 Farragut, David Glasgow, 75, 454, 456 
 Father Neptune. See Welles, Gideon 
 Federal government, weakness of in 
 
 face of secession, 128 
 Federal Party, 12 
 
 Federal property, 142, 151, 154-155 
 Federal Union, devotion to, 44, 50, 65, 
 267, 393; loyalty of Bates to, 85; of 
 Border states, 140; question of set- 
 tled, 140-141; Virginia loyalty con- 
 ditional on slavery, 141; Union in 
 three units, 142; should North agree 
 on dissolution, 143; North holds in- 
 dissoluble, 155; considered by Seward 
 vital issue, 175-176; existence of threat- 
 ened by Trent affair, 206; preserva- 
 tion of, main objective, 226; Stanton's 
 loyalty to, 240, 244; McClellan's 
 loyalty to, 261; issue of Union or war, 
 274; war to save union, 276; Lincoln's 
 aim to save and emancipation of, 
 349 
 Ferry Boy and Financier, 402 
 Fessenden, Samuel, 245 
 
 Fessenden, William Pitt, 25, 226, 228, 
 277, 333; friend of Stanton, 260; and 
 approved by him, 292; wants British 
 cabinet system, 328; on Stanton, 330; 
 Secretary of Treasury, 330; no sup- 
 port to Chase, 384; appointed Chase's 
 successor, 450, 457, 461 
 
 Field, David Dudley, 85, 412, 436, 454, 
 456 
 
 Field, Maunsell B., 370; Chase appoints 
 assistant treasurer of New York, 444; 
 lacks proper qualifications, 444-446; 
 Lincoln turns down appointment, 
 446-448 
 
 Fillmore, Millard, 43, 45, 49 
 
 Finance of government. See Chase, 
 Salmon; Cisco, John 
 
 Floyd, John B., 128, 248-250, 252-255 
 
 Forney, John W., 406 
 
 Forsyth, John, 154 
 
 Fort Pickens and other forts, 141, 156, 
 159, 170-172, 175-176 
 
 Fort Sumter, Blair believes government 
 should hold, 116; cannot longer hold 
 out, 128; should not relieve, 141-142; 
 South Carolina seeks, 156; symbol of 
 power to North and South, 159; 
 Lincoln believes government should 
 hold, 159-160; cabinet views on forts, 
 160-164; Seward says will be evacu- 
 ated, 166-168; surrender a recognition 
 of Southern independence, 167, 173; 
 can only be held two weeks, 169; 
 Gen. Scott quoted on evacuation of, 
 170-171; Fort Sumter to be relieved, 
 172; Seward would abandon, 174-176; 
 Seward blocks relief of, 178-184; 
 Cameron and Seward on, 223-224; 
 Anderson moves to, 248; Buchanan's 
 cabinet crisis on, 249-252. See also 
 Anderson, Robert 
 
 Fox, Gustavus Vasa, 163, 182, 386 
 
 France, 177; in danger from her sym- 
 pathy with South, 192; recognition 
 of Confederacy as belligerent, 194; 
 would mean war, 195; would aid 
 Britain in war, 206; her recognition 
 of Confederacy, 209, 211, 299, 354, 
 360-361; her imperial schemes in 
 Mexico, 215-216 
 
 Fredericksburg, battle of, 282, 324 
 
 Free-Soilers, 5, 33, 40, 65, 68, 79-80, 83, 
 244-245, 272 
 
 Freeman, defense by Seward, 22 
 
 Freemasons. See Masons and Anti- 
 masons 
 
472 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fremont, John C, 57, 66, 68-69, 228- 
 229, 270, 278, 294, 327, 330, 336, 356, 
 384, 409, 432, 453; presidential can- 
 didate, 26; darling of Jacobins, 282; 
 Chase hopes to make use of in cam- 
 paign, 422; used as front for Chase, 
 429; candidate for President, 435; 
 nominated for President, 437; gives 
 up candidacy, 458-459 
 
 Fugitive Slave Law, 226 
 
 Garfield, James A., 365, 376, 413, 421, 
 424, 426, 450; no supporter of Chase, 
 384; attacks Blair, 429 
 
 Garniss, Catherine, 36-37 
 
 Garrison, William Lloyd, 38, 46, 119, 
 245, 274, 358-359, 383 
 
 Genius of Universal Emancipation, 238 
 
 Germans, 395, 407, 429, 435-^37. See 
 also Schurz, Carl 
 
 Giddings, Joshua R., 25, 38, 50, 383; 
 his partnership with Wade, 269; 
 Julian married daughter of, 275 
 
 Gilmer, John A., 136; Seward and 
 Weed want in cabinet, 80, 83, 102, 
 114 
 
 Gist, Violet, 62 
 
 Gladstone, advocates recognition of 
 Confederacy, 354 
 
 Godwin, Parke, 454 
 
 Going Home to Vote, 401-402 
 
 "Gorilla," McClellan's and Stanton's 
 term for President, 289-290 
 
 Graft in War Department. See Cam- 
 eron, Simon 
 
 Graft in Treasury Department. See 
 Chase, Salmon P. 
 
 Grant, U. S., 267, 353, 384, 389, 402, 454; 
 not favored by Jacobins, 282; Stanton 
 praises, 294-295 
 
 Great Britain, Confederate embassy to, 
 155-156; Seward would start war 
 with, 177; in danger from her sym- 
 pathy wtih South, 192; United States 
 protests her receiving Confederate 
 commissioners, 192-193; her recogni- 
 tion of Confederacy as belligerent 
 would mean war, 194-195; Adams 
 and Lord Russell come to amiable 
 agreement, 196-198; Trent affair 
 causes crisis in, 199; popular feeling 
 aroused in, 200; blames Seward and 
 begins war preparations, 201; is 
 finally appeased, 208; her fear of war 
 with U. S., 209-213; Alabama affair 
 with, 213; fears American privateers, 
 
 213-214; in danger if Confederacy- 
 recognized, 299, 354, 360-361 
 
 Greeley, Horace, 17, 25-26, 29, 33, 48, 
 58, 89, 158, 369, 383, 412-413; opposes 
 Seward, 104; his hostility to Lincoln, 
 187; his criticism of McClellan, 288; 
 approves Stanton, 292, 295; and de- 
 nounces Seward, 327; Lincoln's let- 
 ter to, 350, 354; denounces Blairs, 387; 
 favors Chase's campaign, 406; letter 
 from Chase to, 418; is apprehensive 
 over Lincoln, 438-439, 454; decides 
 to support Lincoln, 456 
 
 Green, Duff, 75-76 
 
 Gregory, Dudley S., 446 
 
 Gresham, Matilda, 60 
 
 Grimes, 333 
 
 Guadalupe, Treaty of, 247 
 
 Hale, John P., 25, 33, 134, 245, 277 
 
 Hall, James C, 421 
 
 Halleck, General, 315, 339, 389 
 
 Hallett, Samuel, firm, New York, 411 
 
 Hamlin, Hannibal, 94-95; his interview 
 with Seward, 96; tries to protect 
 President during inauguration, 114 
 
 Harris, Senator from New York* 332— 
 333, 446 
 
 Harrison, Benjamin, 22 
 
 Harrison, William Henry, 93-94 
 
 Harrison's Landing, 298, 301, 303 
 
 Hart, Albert Bushnell, 463 
 
 Hartford Times. See Welles, Gideon 
 
 Harvey, James E., 183-184 
 
 Hay, John, 69-70, 205, 278, 318, 342.. 
 347, 363, 381, 408; on Stanton, 237, 
 253; on Jacobins, 268; describes Lin- 
 coln's visit to McClellan, 290-291 
 
 Herndon, William H., 59, 106, 138-139. 
 257 
 
 Hill, David B., 39 
 
 Hillhouse, Thomas, 446 
 
 Hogebloom, Judge, 104; appraiser of 
 New York port, 444 
 
 Holt, Joseph, 249-252, 391 
 
 Hooker, General, 282, 316-317 
 
 Hooper, Samuel, 450 
 
 Horses for army, purchased by graft, 
 222 
 
 House of Representatives. See Congress, 
 U. S. 
 
 Howard, Anna, 241 
 
 Howard, William, 255, 333 
 
 Howe, Samuel G., 145 
 
 Hughes, Archbishop, of New York, 18, 
 57 
 
INDEX 
 
 473 
 
 Hunt, Randall, 136 
 
 Hunter, General David, 160, 287, 327, 
 
 330, 336, 358 
 Hunter, R. M. T, 157 
 Hurlburt, S. A., 169 
 Hutchinson singers, 287 
 Hutchison, Ellen M., 240 
 
 Illinois Central Railroad, 283, 286 
 Inaugural message, first, 138-140, 143, 
 
 150-151 
 Independent. See Leavitt, J.; Tilton, 
 
 Theodore 
 Index (Confederate weekly), 213 
 Indian property, theft of, 248 
 Indiana. See Smith, Caleb B. 
 Indiana politics, 60. See also Lane, 
 
 Henry S. 
 Interior Department. See Smith, Caleb 
 
 B.; Usher, John P. 
 International law, on Trent affair, 199- 
 
 208 
 Ives, Malcolm, 303 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 13, 32, 51, 61-62, 64- 
 65, 73, 75-76, 116, 161, 163, 240, 302, 
 413 
 
 Jackson, Claiborne, 162 
 
 Jackson, Stonewall, 307 
 
 Jacobins, 46, 275, 303, 317, 424, 429; 
 name explained, 268; program of, 
 276; and Julian joins, 276; think 
 Lincoln ministry disgraceful, 277; 
 hostile to Lincoln, 277-278; wanted 
 war managed by Congress, 280; want 
 all army of their faith, 282; dislike 
 for McClellan, 285-287; McClellan's 
 contempt for, 289; enraged by Mc- 
 Clellan's conduct, 298-301; attempt to 
 seize executive power, 324-347; anger 
 at Seward, 325; force emancipation, 
 354; little support to Chase, 384. See 
 also Radicals 
 
 Jay, William, 20 
 
 Johnson, Andrew, 226, 237, 300-302; 
 Jacobins' faith in, 278; nominated 
 Vice-President, 440 
 
 Judd, N. B., Lincoln wants in cabinet, 
 82; minister to Prussia, 113; his inter- 
 view with Lincoln, 119 
 
 Julian, George Washington, 25, 38, 294, 
 328; friend of Stanton, 260, 292; ac- 
 count of his life, 275; Lincoln too 
 conservative for, 276; leader of 
 Jacobins, 276-277; and hostility 
 towards, 278; member committee on 
 
 the war, 280-281; no support to Chase, 
 384 
 Justice Department. See Bates, Edward 
 
 Kansas, 271; disputation, 246; constitu- 
 tion, 411 
 
 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 22, 24-25, 272 
 
 Kendall, Amos, 64, 75. See also Diary of 
 a Public Man 
 
 King, Horatio, 252 
 
 King, Preston, 95, 332-333, 392 
 
 Know-Nothings, 18, 33, 40, 43, 49-50, 
 52, 55, 57, 71, 79, 83 
 
 Knox, Samuel, 439 
 
 Koerner, Gustav, 106 
 
 Lairds, shipbuilders, 213-214 
 
 Lamon, Ward H., 169, 386 
 
 Lane, Henry S., 57, 59 
 
 Lane, Jim, 410 
 
 Lawson, Mary, 240-241 
 
 Leavitt, J., 373 
 
 Lecompton Constitution, 246 
 
 Lee, Robert E., 282, 284, 315, 323-324 
 
 Lee, Samuel Phillips, 386 
 
 Letters of marque and reprisal, 213 
 
 Liberator, 452 
 
 Liberty Party, 5, 33, 83. See also Abo- 
 litionists 
 
 Lieber, Francis, 454 
 
 Limantour, Jose, 247 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 3, 50, 58, 71, 76; 
 self-reliance and leadership, 6-7; his at- 
 titude on slavery, 20; House divided 
 speech, 24—25; his Cooper Union 
 speech, 27; criticized by Seward, 27; 
 nominated for President, 1860, 29-30, 
 41^2, 56, 60; first mentioned by 
 Bates, 48-49; authorizes no bargains, 
 58-59; and the Blairs, 69-70; New 
 England leans to, 77; Welles sees 
 greatness of, 77-78; chosen head of 
 new party, 79, 81; Seward wants to 
 dominate, 79; but intends to have 
 Seward on his own terms, 81; wants 
 to build up Republican administra- 
 tion, 82; his interview with Bates 
 on make-up of cabinet, 84; visit from 
 Weed, 86-87; admiration of Davis 
 for, 89; mourns Davis's political prac- 
 tices, 90; anxious over electoral vote, 
 91; dissatisfied with Saratoga pact, 
 93; refuses to visit Seward, 93-94; his 
 dubious invitation to Weed, 94-95; 
 sends Seward invitation to join cab- 
 inet, 96-97; opposes extension of 
 
474 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham (continued) 
 
 slavery, 98; his appearance compared 
 to Weed's, 99; firmly fixed on choice 
 of Seward and Chase, 99-100; asks 
 Weed's opinion of Bates, Welles, and 
 Blair, 100-101; and of Cameron, 101- 
 102; determined to head administra- 
 tion, 103; promises justice to all 
 friends, 104; postpones choice of 
 cabinet, 105; hesitates to appoint 
 Cameron, 105-106; receives visit from 
 Cameron, 107; and from Bates, 107; 
 and decides to appoint Cameron, 108; 
 considers fate of Republican Party, 
 108; visited by McClure, 108-109; 
 tries to withdraw Cameron appoint- 
 ment, 109-110; worried over appoint- 
 ment of Chase, 110; and offers him 
 Treasury post, 112; worried over 
 Seward's attitude, 112; his cabinet 
 on inauguration, 113; feels he must 
 redeem party promises, 113; distracted 
 over cabinet appointments, 114; worn 
 out by inauguration, 115; discussed 
 by Public IVlan, 117; restates his view 
 of Justice for all, 118-121; threatens 
 to make Seward minister to Great 
 Britain, but keep Chase, 120; is still 
 determined to have Seward on his 
 own terms, 121; and succeeds, 122— 
 123; and completes cabinet, 123; 
 gulf between his ideas and Seward's, 
 128; his opinion on slavery, 130-131; 
 opposed to compromise, 135-136; 
 characteristics of, 138; has no doubt 
 on questions of the hour, 138; his 
 first inaugural message, 138-139; 
 would keep Union intact, 139; even 
 by armed conflict, 140, 143; will have 
 no extension of slavery, 145, 152; 
 partly accepts Seward's changes in 
 first inaugural, 150-151, 153; will re- 
 claim public property, 151-152; his 
 position on Fort Sumter, 159-160, 
 164, 165; Seward finally consults on 
 Sumter, 168; obtains information of 
 S. Carolina, 169; his cabinet meeting 
 on Sumter, 170-172; Seward seeks to 
 control, 174-176; and his response, 
 177-178; takes blame for Seward's 
 trickery, 180-181; writes to Fox on 
 Fort Sumter, 182; his friendship with 
 Seward, 185-198; agreement on recon- 
 struction problems, 187; orders regu- 
 lar cabinet meetings, 191-192; his wiil 
 on policies prevails, 192-193; revises 
 
 Seward's despatch to Adams, 192- 
 198; Seward acknowledges leader- 
 ship of, 198; lus position in the Trent 
 affair, 204, 207-208; his forebodings 
 on Cameron, 219, 223; Cameron op- 
 poses on Fort Sumter, 223; wants ac- 
 curate military reports, 225; his opin- 
 ion on freeing slaves, 226, 228-230; 
 Cameron seeks to overrule on colored 
 army, 230-231; calls Cameron to ac- 
 count, 231, and finally dismisses, 232— 
 235; appoints Stanton Secretary of 
 war, 235; hears of Confederate plot, 
 253-255; Stanton's rude treatment of, 
 256-259; Stanton a vexation to, 262, 
 264; his reconstruction aims, 267; 
 Julian considers too conservative, 
 276; rejects Jacobin program, 276; 
 Jacobins oppose, 277-278, 282; Mc- 
 Clellan's opinion of, 287, 289-291; 
 is criticized for tolerating McClellan, 
 297; his dissatisfaction with McClel- 
 lan, 298-300; worries over Peninsular 
 campaign, 299; and protection of 
 Washington, 300-301; replaces Mc- 
 Clellan with Pope, 301-302; his at- 
 titude to McClellan's political mani- 
 festo, 302-305; Bates's opinion of, 
 310; Welles's high regard for, 312— 
 313, 318-319; restores McClellan to 
 command of Army of the Potomac, 
 315-318; demands that he follow up 
 Antietam victory, 323-324; again re- 
 moves McClellan, 324; and appoints 
 Burnside, 324; his views on and con- 
 duct of war displease Jacobins, 324; 
 fights with Jacobins over executive 
 power, 324-347; his views on seces- 
 sion and union, 325-326; shocked over 
 Seward's diplomatic correspondence, 
 326; thinks emancipation prerogative 
 of President, 330; criticized by John 
 Sherman, 332; his masterly handling 
 of cabinet crisis, 334-347; defends 
 Seward, 339; and his enhanced pres- 
 tige, 347; Emancipation Proclamation 
 of, 349-365; his attitude on re-elec- 
 tion, 370-371; hopes Seward will be 
 successor, 371; Chase's opinion on, 
 371-373; Kate Chase considers an 
 enemy, 379; radicals oppose re-elec- 
 tion; but favored by rank and file, 
 383-384; his friendship with Blair 
 family, 385-390; Blair's attempt to 
 control; and his independence, 389- 
 391; his Message of Dec. 8, 1863, on 
 
INDEX 
 
 475 
 
 reconstruction, 393; supported by 
 Claybanks, 394; overlooks Chase's pre- 
 tensions, 408^409; picture of, in next 
 presidential election, 413-415; declines 
 to accept Chase's resignation, 417-418; 
 gains Republican support, 421, 422; his 
 plans for Frank Blair, 423; Blair de- 
 fends, 425; attacked for giving Blair 
 commission, 429; disintegration of 
 cabinet predicted, 430; receives Riddle 
 and Spalding, 431; and disclaims re- 
 sponsibility for Blair's speeches, 431— 
 433; on the Cleveland convention, 437; 
 Baltimore convention renominates, 
 437; but attacks his policies, 438; and 
 his cabinet, 440-441; does not accept 
 Blair's resignation, 441; crisis between 
 Lincoln and Chase over patronage, 
 444, 446-448; accepts Chase's resigna- 
 tion, 448-449; and Chase's reaction, 
 449-450; his pessimism after Balti- 
 more convention, 453-454; his abdica- 
 tion sought, 454; his victory certain, 
 456, 459; finally accepts Blair's resig- 
 nation, 457-458; his warning to Blairs, 
 458-459; His reply to Blair resignation, 
 459; Blairs always loyal to, 459^60; 
 appoints Chase Chief Justice, 461- 
 463; inaugurated for second term, 463 
 
 Lincoln, Mary Todd, hatred of Seward, 
 186; Wade's comment on, 278; rivalry 
 with Kate Chase, 376-377, 381 
 
 Lincoln, Robert Todd, 446 
 
 "Little Giant," See Douglas, Stephen A. 
 
 "Little Mac." See McClellan, George 
 Brinton 
 
 London Observer, 250 
 
 London Times. See Times, London 
 
 Lossing, Benson J., 201, 204 
 
 Louis Napoleon, 299 
 
 Louisiana Purchase, 44 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, advocates Lin- 
 coln's re-election, 383 
 
 Ludlow, Sarah Dunlop, 38 
 
 Lundy, Benjamin, 238, 245 
 
 Lyons, Lord, 380; on Seward and Trent 
 affair, 203-206; recognition of Con- 
 federacy, 211-212 
 
 McClellan, George Brinton, 212, 282, 
 339, 453-454; Seward and McClellan 
 inseparable, 225; on Stanton, 256; 
 friend of Stanton, 260-261; friendship 
 of Chase, 260-262; his views on slavery 
 and Union, 261; Radicals want de- 
 posed, 261; detested by Chandler, 
 
 272-273; appointed head of Army of 
 the Potomac, 283; his career, 283-284; 
 his military reputation, 284; his sym- 
 pathy with Southern views, 284, 286; 
 has salvation of country on his 
 shoulders, 284-285, 289; his character, 
 appearance, education, 285-286; his 
 views on slavery and the South, 286- 
 287; "slave-catching" general, 287; 
 his feat in organizing army, 287; his 
 heart not in war, 288; his contempt 
 for Congress and the President, 288— 
 291; feels Stanton his friend, 292- 
 293; but is disillusioned, 294; ineffi- 
 ciency of, 294; loathes Stanton, 295- 
 296; cabinet supports, 296; his chance 
 to be presidential candidate, 296; 
 Chase opposes, 296; his strength and 
 weakness as general, 297-298, 316; 
 his defeat at Manassas, 298; denounced 
 for Peninsular campaign, 299-301; re- 
 placed by Pope, 301-302; presidential 
 aspirations of, 302-303, 305; his po- 
 litical manifesto on policy of war 
 and reconstruction, 302-305; blamed 
 for defeat at second Bull Run, 306- 
 307; cabinet seeks removal of, 307-315; 
 reinstated in command, 315-318; de- 
 feats Lee at Antietam, 318-319; but 
 lets him escape, 323-324; is finally re- 
 moved from command, 324; attacks 
 government, 336; attacked by radi- 
 cals, 349; Blairs defend, 390; verses in 
 praise of, 411; nominated for Presi- 
 dent, 455^156 
 
 McClure, Alexander K., 19, 31, 441; 
 visits Lincoln about Cameron appoint- 
 ment, 108-109; his recollections of 
 Cameron, 219-220; on Cameron dis- 
 missal, 233-234 
 
 McCormick reaper case, 242, 257 
 
 McDowell, 282, 294, 296 
 
 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 64 
 
 Manassas, battle, 298 
 
 Mann, on mission to London, 155, 157; 
 Confederate commissioner to Eng- 
 land, 194-198 
 
 Marble, Manton, 302, 412 
 
 Marcy, William L., 17-18 
 
 Maryland, 140, 353. See also Blair family 
 
 Mason, John Murray, 30, 140, 157, 274; 
 still in Washington, 144; captured by 
 Wilkes, in Trent affair, 200-208 
 
 Masons and Antimasons, 14-16 
 
 Massachusetts delegation at Baltimore 
 convention, 440 
 
476 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Maximilian of Austria, 215-216. See also 
 Mexico 
 
 Meade, General, 283, 402 
 
 Medill, Joseph, 27, 46, 60, 89, 327, 383 
 
 Meigs, Colonel, 224 
 
 Memories of Many Men and Some 
 Women, 445 
 
 Mercer, Samuel, 178-181, 183 
 
 Merchant marine. See Shipping 
 
 Merrimac, 242 
 
 Mexican aggression, 62 
 
 Mexican War, 22, 75, 244, 247, 269, 283 
 
 Mexico, Southerners want to seize, 135- 
 136; Maximilian enterprise in, 177; 
 French imperial schemes in, 206; 
 French invasion of, 215-216 
 
 Michigan admiration for Chandler, 273 
 
 Miller, Frances, 12 
 
 Miscegenation speech of Blair, 458 
 
 Mississippi, 21 
 
 Missouri, 353: importance to Union of, 
 161-162; Baltimore convention un- 
 seats Blair delegates, 439. See also 
 Bates, Edward; Blair family- 
 Missouri Compromise, 22, 271 
 
 Moderates, 226 
 
 Monroe Doctrine, 177, 215 
 
 Montgomery convocation, 159 
 
 Morgan, Edwin D., 421, 443; wanted 
 to name Cisco's successor, 444; pro- 
 tests appointment of Field, 446 
 
 Morgan, William, 14 
 
 Motley, John Lothrop, 361 
 
 Myers, William Starr, 285 
 
 Napoleon III, 215-216 
 
 Napoleon of the Potomac Army. See 
 McClellan 
 
 Narrative of events, 224 
 
 National Era, 245 
 
 National Republicans, 13 
 
 "National Union Convention," 50 
 
 National Union Party. See Republican 
 Party 
 
 Navy, Toucey sends to foreign ports, 
 249 
 
 Navy Department. See Welles, Gideon 
 
 Nebraska Act of 1854, 41 
 
 Negro, franchise of, 39; divergent views 
 on, 46, 267; colonization of, 69, 358; 
 status after war, 267; Wade's views 
 on, 269-270; Jacobin program for, 
 276; rights of citizenship of, 282, 
 358; McClellan's attitude towards, 
 304; Chase's opinion on, 371; Blair's 
 speech on, 397-399. See also Aboli- 
 
 tionists; Antislavery; Colored troops; 
 
 Emancipation; Slavery 
 Nelson, Samuel, 166, 168 
 New Mexico and slavery, 146 
 New York politics, 15-18, 20-21, 104, 
 
 443^48. See also Seward, William; 
 
 Weed, Thurlow; Cisco, John J. 
 New York Evening Post. See Godwin, 
 
 Parke; Bryant, William Cullen 
 New York Herald, 235, 302, 343, 421 
 New York Times. See Raymond, 
 
 Henry J. 
 New York Tribune, 104, 232, 438. See 
 
 also Greeley, Horace; Dana, Charles 
 
 A.; Reid, Whitelaw 
 New York World, 302, 436. See also 
 
 Marble, Manton; Stedman, Edmund 
 
 Clarence 
 Newton, Isaac, 391 
 Next Presidential Election (pamphlet), 
 
 413-415, 421 
 Nicolay, John, 84, 205, 237, 253, 278, 
 
 318, 342, 347, 408 
 North American Review, 193, 275. 
 
 See also Diary of a Public Man; 
 
 Lowell, James Russell 
 North Carolina, 141 
 Noyes, William Curtis, 454-456 
 Nullification, 240 
 
 Ohio. See Chase, Salmon P.; Wade, Ben 
 Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, 283 
 Old Greenbacks. See Chase, Salmon P. 
 Opdyke, George, 104, 412, 444, 454-455 
 "Organization to make Samuel P. Chase 
 
 President," 412 
 Orr, James L., 251 
 Orr, John L., 156 
 
 Pacific Railroad, 144, 411-412 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, 28, 200, 213-214, 299, 
 354 
 
 Payton, Bailey, 102 
 
 Peace Convention of Virginia, 149 
 
 "Peace Democrats," 401 
 
 Peninsular campaign, 288, 294, 296, 299- 
 301, 303, 305-306 
 
 Pennsylvania, political control of War 
 Department, 220; necessary to admin- 
 istration, 232. See also Cameron, Si- 
 mon; Stanton, Edwin M. 
 
 Pennsylvania v. Wheeling, 242 
 
 Pennsylvania Railroad, 220-221 
 
 Permits to trade, 424-428 
 
 Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, 404 
 
 Philadelphia convention, 1856, 26 
 
INDEX 
 
 477 
 
 Philadelphia Press. See Forney, John W. 
 
 Phillips, Wendell, 25, 46, 134, 359, 383 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 23, 65, 283, 442 
 
 Polk, James K., 51, 62, 244 
 
 Pomeroy, Samuel Clarke, 333, 410-416, 
 422, 450, 453 
 
 Pomeroy Circular, 415, 421, 422, 424, 
 428 
 
 Pope, John, 294; in command of Army 
 of the Potomac, 301; battle of Bull 
 Run, 306, 315; Blair's opinion of, 311, 
 315; loses post to McClellan, 315 
 
 Porter, David Dixon, 178-182 
 
 Post Office Dept. See Blair, M.; Denni- 
 son, W. 
 
 Powhatan, 178-182 
 
 "Premier, the." See Seward, William H. 
 
 President, powers of. See Executive 
 power 
 
 Presidential convention. See Chicago 
 convention, 1860; Baltimore conven- 
 tion, 1864 
 
 Privateers, destruction of shipping, 213- 
 214 
 
 Public Man. See Diary of a Public 
 Man 
 
 Radicals, 25, 38, 134, 226, 263, 424-425, 
 444, 451-453, 457-458, 461; want im- 
 mediate emancipation, 228-229; back 
 Chase on colored troops, 228-231; al- 
 liance with Stanton, 237, 260; Stanton 
 a hero to, 252-253, 292; against Mc- 
 Clellan, 261; reconstruction views of, 
 267, 393; denounce McClellan, 299- 
 301, 306; emancipation question set- 
 tled, 349; dared not oppose Lincoln's 
 re-election, 384; oppose Blairs, 387- 
 388; of Maryland, 394; friends of 
 Chase attack Lincoln and Blair, 429; 
 control Baltimore convention, 438; 
 demand that Lincoln dismiss Blairs, 
 439. See also Jacobins 
 
 Raymond, Henry J., 31, 49, 438, 440 
 
 Reconstruction, Stanton opposes, 263; 
 divergent views on, 267; violent Sen- 
 ate views on, 270; struggle between 
 Congress and President, 280; cabinet 
 views on, 370, 457; Lincoln's message 
 on, 393; views of Sumner on, 396-397; 
 Blair attacks Sumner's views, 397-399; 
 views of Republicans, 417; Baltimore 
 convention does not endorse Lincoln's 
 policy, 438, 440 
 
 Reid, Whitelaw, 383, 412-413, 454; Go- 
 ing Home to Vote, 401-402 
 
 Republican national convention. See 
 Chicago convention, 1860; Cleveland 
 convention, 1864; Baltimore conven- 
 tion, 1864 
 
 Republicans and Republican Party, 4-7, 
 16, 25-27, 33, 40, 43, 48-50, 52, 55, 57, 
 59, 61, 68, 71-72, 164, 245, 252, 272- 
 273, 276, 281, 286, 294, 303, 329, 378, 
 397-399, 408, 417, 424-425, 429, 443, 
 449; Welles certain of success of in 
 1860, 76-77; need national character, 
 80, 108; Lincoln hopes to build up, 82; 
 neglected in cabinet, 102; Seward on, 
 130; platform on slavery, 134-135; con- 
 demn Seward program, 145; split in 
 two camps, 226, 229, 267, 394; views on 
 Lincoln-Cameron trouble, 232; unity 
 essential to, 233; opposed to Blairs, 
 262; Chandler a power in, 272-273; 
 want Seward's dismissal, 327; caucus 
 on Seward, 331-333; emancipation 
 question settled, 349, 354; want Lin- 
 coln's re-election, 384; rally to Lin- 
 coln's support, 421-422; need of har- 
 mony in, 431; Fremont's and Chase's 
 attempt to split, 435-436; two conven- 
 tions in 1864, 453; uncertainty over 
 election in 1864, 453; seek Lincoln's 
 abdication, 454; demand Blair's resig- 
 nation, 457. See also Jacobins; Radicals 
 
 Rhodes, James Ford, 317; opinion on 
 Seward, 168 
 
 Rich Mountain, battle of, 283 
 
 Riddle, A. G., describes Chase's rage, 
 430; on committee of two to see 
 Lincoln, 430-433 
 
 Ritchie, Thomas, 63 
 
 Robinson, Lucius, 438 
 
 Roman, Andre B., 154, 158 
 
 Rosecrans, General, 282, 295, 407 
 
 Rost, on mission to London, 155; Con- 
 federate commissioner to England, 
 194-198 
 
 Russell, John (Lord), 28, 354; receives 
 Yancey and Mann, 157; affair of 
 Confederate commissioners, 192-198; 
 Trent affair, 203-204, 206; on recog- 
 nition of Confederacy, 211-212; on 
 Alabama, 213; and American shipping, 
 213-214 
 
 Russell, William Howard, 9, 169-170, 
 211 
 
 Russia, 177, 210 
 
 St. Louis "Charcoals." See "Charcoals" 
 St. Louis Democrat, 398 
 
478 
 
 INDEX 
 
 San Domingo, 177 
 
 San Jacinto, 199 
 
 Sanderson, John P., 58, 91, 107, 110, 
 220 
 
 Saratoga conference, 92-93, 98, 118 
 
 Schenck, Robert C, 412 
 
 Schleiden, Baron, 80 
 
 Schuckers, J. W., 402, 410, 415 
 
 Schurz, Carl, visit to Chase, 375-376 
 
 Scott, Thomas A., 220, 233 
 
 Scott, General Winfield, 302; would 
 evacuate all forts, 170; echoes Seward's 
 views, 171; ordered to hold forts, 
 178; Cameron brings under Seward's 
 wing, 223-225; angry with McClellan, 
 225-226 
 
 Secession, 44, 50, 108, 227, 240, 248, 325- 
 326, 393; Buchanan powerless to pre- 
 vent, 128; "big business" views on, 131; 
 Virginia convention on, 141; long 
 planned, 143; four states seceded, 144; 
 question of recognition, 154-157; un- 
 constitutional, 155; opposed by Nelson 
 and Campbell, 166; and peace or war, 
 169; influence of Fort Sumter on, 
 170, 173 
 
 Senate. See Congress, U. S. 
 
 Seward, William H., 6-7, 48, 304, 443, 
 454, 457-459, 461-462; general appear- 
 ance and characteristics of, 8-9; wife, 
 home life of, 10; early life, 11; early 
 political career of, 12-16; becomes 
 Whig, 13; Seward-Weed machine, 
 17-22; attitude on slavery, 19-20; Gov- 
 ernor of New York, 20-21; anti- 
 slavery leader, 21-23, 38; elected to 
 Senate, 22; vacillating opinions of, 
 23-25; "irrepressible conflict" speech, 
 24-25; leader of party, 26; disap- 
 pointed in 1856 convention, 26-27; 
 European tour, 1859, 27-28; defeated 
 for presidential nomination, 1860, 
 29-31, 42, 56-57, 59-60; would not ac- 
 cept cabinet post, 31; friend of 
 Charles Francis Adams, 71; accepts 
 Banks as candidate, 71; hostility to 
 Welles, 72; Welles's opinion of, 73; 
 claims New England in Chicago con- 
 vention, 76; nomination opposed by 
 Welles, 77; wants all-Whig cabinet or 
 will not serve, 79, 82, 92; to conciliate 
 South, 80; wants cabinet on British 
 system with Seward as Prime Min- 
 ister, 80, 81; fate of Union on his 
 shoulders, 81; expects to choose 
 rest of cabinet, 81-82; opposes Lin- 
 
 coln's choice of cabinet, 83; re- 
 luctant to aid Lincoln-Hamlin cam- 
 paign, 91; reconciled to Cameron, 
 but determined to keep Chase out 
 of cabinet, 92; meets Lincoln, 93; 
 Lincoln writes to, 95; Hamlin de- 
 livers invitation to join cabinet to, 
 96-97; confers with Weed, 97; con- 
 siders all-Seward cabinet, 98; pol- 
 icy of conciliating South and of 
 controlling administration, 98; to have 
 little influence in selecting cabinet, 
 102; accepts cabinet post and believes 
 salvation of nation in his hands, 103; 
 opposition to Seward from New York, 
 104-105; Lincoln worried over atti- 
 tude to Chase, 112; with Lincoln at 
 inauguration, 114; discussed by Public 
 Man, 117; works with Weed to keep 
 out Chase, Blair, and Welles, 118-121; 
 resents declining position as boss, 118; 
 informed he must come into cabinet 
 on President's terms, 121; angry, with- 
 draws from appointment, 121; with- 
 draws withdrawal for sake of na- 
 tion, 122, 123, 128; refuses to take cab- 
 inet seriously, 127; reverses attitude 
 on slavery, 130; hopes to conciliate 
 South, 130-131; relationship to Weed, 
 132-133; tries to repudiate Weed's ar- 
 ticle on conciliation, 133-135; their 
 compromise plans, 136-137; on Border 
 states, 140; hails Virginia convention, 
 141; feels South still loyal, 142-143; 
 spokesman of new administration, 
 143; pleads for peace and union, 
 144; reaction to speech, 145-146; holds 
 nation at peace, 146-148; described 
 by Henry Adams, 147-148; his con- 
 ciliation policy fallacious, 149; but 
 delays crisis, 149; proposes changes 
 in Lincoln's first inaugural, 150-153; 
 his conciliatory policy to Southern 
 commissioners, 156; believes Anderson 
 should be recalled, 156, 159; finally re- 
 fuses to see them, after seeking a secret 
 meeting, 157-158; would not coerce 
 Confederacy, 158; would evacuate 
 Sumter, 160; his confidence in loy- 
 alty of the South, 160, 176-177; Blairs 
 oppose policy of, 162; again refuses 
 to meet South's commissioners, 166; 
 asserts Sumter will be evacuated, 
 166-168; officious vanity of, 168; his 
 influence on General Scott, 170-171; 
 would abandon Fort Sumter, but 
 
INDEX 
 
 479 
 
 keep Pickens, 172, 175; his program 
 an aid to Confederacy, 173; com- 
 mitted to preventing war, 174, 178; 
 his astounding communication to Lin- 
 coln and Lincoln's reply, 174—175, 
 177; would start European war, 175— 
 177; would be dictator, 176, 178; tries 
 to abolish cabinet, 176, 189-192; 
 blocks relief of Fort Sumter, 178— 
 184; cabinet denounces trickery of, 
 180-184; acknowledges President's 
 leadership, 182-183, 198; informs 
 Harvey Sumter will be evacuated, 
 183; appoints him minister to Portu- 
 gal, 183-184; his friendship with 
 President, 185-198; agree on recon- 
 struction, 187; meddles in other de- 
 partments, 191; Lincoln overrules 
 policies of, 192-193; and revises his 
 despatch to Adams, 192-198; refuses to 
 go to war on Trent affair, 199; Eng- 
 lish blame, 201; finds way out of 
 deadlock, 207-208; his success in pre- 
 venting recognition of Confederacy, 
 209-213; his reputation in Europe, 
 210; and Alabama affair, 213; on 
 French intervention in Mexico, 215— 
 216; a great foreign secretary, 216; 
 Cameron makes an ally of, 223; feels 
 he is Secretary of War, 224-225; 
 wants nomination in 1864, 229; tries 
 to console Cameron, 234; and Cam- 
 eron's dismissal, 235; compared to 
 Stanton, 240; worried on Confederate 
 plot, 254-255; favors Stanton for 
 District Attorney, 259; friend of Stan- 
 ton, 260; backs Stanton's appointment, 
 262-264; his reconstruction aims, 267; 
 Jacobins' hatred of, 277; McClellan's 
 contempt for, 289-290; supports Stan- 
 ton, 296; his retirement likely, 299; 
 avoids cabinet ultimatum to Presi- 
 dent, 311, 315; charges against, 325; 
 his diplomatic correspondence with- 
 Adams shocks abolitionists, 325-326; 
 regards himself as head of nation, 
 326; radicals want removed from 
 post, 326-347; Republicans hold 
 caucus on, 331; sends resignation to 
 Lincoln, 334; committee presents 
 grievances against, 334-347; Lincoln 
 and Blair defend, 339-340; Lincoln 
 declines to accept resignation of, 346; 
 effect of Collamer episode on, 346; 
 learns about Emancipation Proclama- 
 tion, 349; reaction to, 360-362; his 
 
 mercurial character revealed, 362- 
 365; still in cabinet, 369; supports 
 Lincoln's re-election, 370-371; op- 
 poses Chase as candidate, 385; his 
 "Thoughts," 390; to be ousted from 
 cabinet, 391-392; letter from Chase to, 
 on Weed article, 405 ; his use of politi- 
 cal patronage, 405; Baltimore conven- 
 tion anti-, 438-440; his reaction to 
 Chase's resignation, 451 
 
 Seymour, Horatio, 463 
 
 Sheridan, General, 456 
 
 Sherman, John, 332, 413-415, 421 
 
 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 229, 267, 
 282, 389, 396, 402, 454, 456 
 
 Shipping destruction by privateers, 213— 
 214 
 
 Sickles, Daniel E., 243 
 
 Silver Spring, Md., 385-387, 389. See 
 also Blair family 
 
 Slavery, 4-5, 11, 19-23, 25, 32, 43, 49, 
 62-63, 65, 69, 116, 119, 284, 393; 
 Welles opposed to extension of, 72; 
 and Lincoln, 98; views of Lincoln 
 and Seward on, 130-135; "big busi- 
 ness" views on, 131-132; Weed to 
 restore Missouri Compromise, 132, 
 134; Crittenden Compromise, 135; 
 Lincoln opposed to, 135-136; to ex- 
 tend in Latin America, 135-136; 
 Virginia insists on, 141-142; Seward 
 proposes compromise on, 144; Lincoln 
 condemns, 145; Seward would aban- 
 don as issue, 175-176; Fort Sumter 
 not issue of, 178; Cameron and the 
 fight for a colored army, 226-235; 
 Stanton's hatred of, 238, 244, 246; 
 divergent views of Stanton on, 248, 
 260; McClellan's views on, 261; ex- 
 tinction of, object of war, 267; Jaco- 
 bins to destroy, 277; Fremont's free- 
 ing of slaves, 278, 282; McDowell's 
 views on, 296; a state prerogative, 
 350-351; powerful prop to South, 355. 
 See also Abolitionists; Antislavery 
 movement; Emancipation 
 
 Slidell, John, 8; still in Washington, 
 144; captured by Wilkes in Trent 
 affair, 200-208 
 
 Smith, Caleb Blood, 26, 82, 174, 258, 
 277; at Chicago convention, 59-60; 
 Lincoln obliged to appoint, 113; 
 would evacuate forts, 161; opposed 
 by Julian, 276; retirement of likely, 
 299; his part in McClellan cabinet 
 upheaval, 308-315; leaves cabinet, 347; 
 
480 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Smith, Caleb Blood {continued) 
 
 dies Jan. 1864, 347; his reaction to 
 Emancipation Proclamation, 356 
 
 Smith, Eliza Ann, 38 
 
 Smith, Gerrit, 20 
 
 "Some thoughts for the President's con- 
 sideration," 175 
 
 Soule, Pierre, 9 
 
 South Carolina, 21; delegation to Wash- 
 ington on secession claims, 156, 251; 
 rebellion of 1833 checked, 163; people 
 for secession, 169; nullification of, 
 239; secession of, 248 
 
 South Mountain, battle of, 318 
 
 Southern states, Seward and others hope 
 to conciliate, 98, 131-132; plan to se- 
 cure Latin American territory, 135; 
 Seward still feels loyal to, 142, 160, 
 176; Blair describes character of, 163; 
 views of McClellan on, 287; trading 
 with North during war, 423-428; de- 
 feat a certainty, 456. See also Border 
 states; Confederacy; Reconstruction 
 
 Spain, 177 
 
 Spalding, Rufus P., 412; on committee 
 of two to see Lincoln, 430-433 
 
 Sprague, Kate Chase, 38, 416; her char- 
 acter, appearance, early life, marriage, 
 and devotion to father and his career, 
 375-382; seeks Chase's nomination in 
 1868, 463 
 
 Sprague, William, 416; marriage to Kate 
 Chase, 380-381; life and character of, 
 381-382; backs Chase's campaign, 403, 
 405, 422; Blair attacks, 428 
 
 Springfield Republican, See Bowles, 
 Samuel 
 
 Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 187, 303, 
 450-451, 457-^59, 461; nominated Sec- 
 retary of War, 233; approves arming 
 of slaves, 236; legal adviser to War 
 Dept., 236; his early life, 236-240; and 
 hatred of slavery, 238, 244; suffers 
 from asthma, 238-239; his general ap- 
 pearance, 240; his loyalty to Union, 
 240, 244; and his career at law, 240- 
 244; his sanity doubted, 241; his politi- 
 cal activities, 244-246; enters Buchanan 
 administration, 247; uncovers Califor- 
 nia land frauds, 247; becomes Attor- 
 ney General, 248; his part in Buchanan 
 crisis on Fort Sumter and S. Carolina, 
 248-252; fears Confederate plot, 253— 
 256; his criticism of Lincoln, 256-259; 
 corresponds with Buchanan, 257-259; 
 loses appointment as District Attor- 
 
 ney, 259-260; friend of McClellan, 
 260-261; has friends in both Seward 
 and Chase, and the radicals, 260, 
 292; appointed Secretary of War, 262- 
 264; capable and honest administrator, 
 267; reconstruction views, 267; 
 McClellan looks on as friend, but is 
 disillusioned, 292-293; confirmed by 
 Senate, 293; his campaign to remove 
 McClellan, 294; Greeley praises, 295; 
 McClellan loathes, 295-296; de- 
 nounces McClellan's strategy, 300- 
 301, 306; his part in McClellan 
 cabinet upheaval, 307-315; angry at 
 McClellan's reinstatement, 316; his 
 part in cabinet crisis, Dec. 1862, 324, 
 329-330; responsible for Collamer 
 committee, 337; his reaction to Eman- 
 cipation Proclamation, 354-356; his 
 lack of harmony with cabinet, 370; 
 supporter of Chase, 385; demands 
 Blair's dismissal, 389; insurrection of, 
 390; to be ousted from cabinet, 391— 
 392; Blair's opinion on, 392 
 
 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 437 
 
 State rights. See Emancipation; Seces- 
 sion 
 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, in charge 
 of Chase's campaign, 411-413 
 
 Stephens, Alexander H., 177, 365 
 
 Stevens, Simon, 220 
 
 Stevens, Thaddeus, 52, 237, 307, 383, 
 384, 388-389; his views on reconstruc- 
 tion, 270 
 
 Stoeckl, Baron, 158 
 
 Sumner, Charles, 8, 9, 25, 38, 40, 46, 63, 
 134, 210, 226, 228-230, 232, 245, 277, 
 287, 333, 369, 383, 413, 437 n., 440, 450; 
 opposes Cameron, 106; protests Sew- 
 ard's speech, 145; criticizes Lincoln- 
 Seward friendship, 187; his influence 
 in Trent affair, 205-206, 208; supports 
 Cameron's nomination to Russia, 235; 
 on Stanton, 237, 252; Stanton tells 
 him about plot, 253-254; friend of 
 Stanton, 260, 292; beaten by Brooks, 
 271, 274; voted with Jacobins, 275; 
 his remark on slavery, 276; aroused 
 over Seward correspondence, 326, 
 328; visits Kate Chase, 378; opposes 
 Frank Blair, 389; to be put in cabinet, 
 391; "Our Domestic Relations," arti- 
 cle by, 396-397; writes on Lincoln 
 and Chase, 452; decides to support 
 Lincoln, 456; advocates Chase for 
 Chief Justice, 461-463 
 
INDEX 
 
 481 
 
 Sumner, General, 316-317 
 Supreme Court, suspends sessions, 241 
 Swett, Leonard, 30-31, 58; meets Weed, 
 86-87, 89-92; his appearance and char- 
 acter, 90; bargains with Cameron and 
 Smith, 90; aids Weed, 94-95; con- 
 fers with Lincoln, Davis, and Weed, 
 98, 101; visits Cameron, 107; renews 
 campaign for Cameron, 110 
 
 Taney, Roger B., dies, 460-461 
 
 Tariff, 53, 55, 119, 239 
 
 Taylor, Zachary, 22, 276, 302 
 
 Tennessee, 141 
 
 Texas, annexation of, 244, 269 
 
 Thomas, Philip F., 248, 252 
 
 Thompson, Elizabeth, 365 
 
 Thompson, Jacob, 128, 248, 252, 255 
 
 Thorough, policy of, 267 
 
 Tilton, Theodore, 373, 383, 454 
 
 Times, London, 200-201. See also Rus- 
 sell, William Howard 
 
 Toombs, Robert, 144, 167, 274; his trib- 
 ute to Seward, 137; his opinion on 
 Seward's program, 173; defied by 
 Wade, 271 
 
 Toucey, Isaac, 248, 252; sends Federal 
 fleet to foreign ports, 249; Stanton's 
 warning against, 255 
 
 Trading with the enemy, 423-428 
 
 Treasury Dept. See Chase, Salmon P.; 
 Cisco, John J.; Fessenden, William P. 
 
 Trent affair, 199-208 
 
 Tribune, New York. See New York 
 Tribune 
 
 Trowbridge, John T., 229, 402 
 
 Trumbull, Lyman, 95, 104-106, 159, 275, 
 277, 292, 333, 342, 382; voted for 
 Johnson's acquittal, 279; wants Con- 
 gress to run army, 280 
 
 Tucker, John, 221 
 
 Tyler, John, 429 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 245 
 Union. See Federal Union 
 Union clubs, 162 
 
 Union convention. See Baltimore con- 
 vention, 429 
 Usher, John Palmer, 348, 457 
 
 Vallandigham, Clement L., 287, 304, 
 
 388, 401, 455-456 
 Van Buren, Martin, 13, 33, 62, 65, 244- 
 
 245, 429 
 Vanzanda, John, 39 
 Victoria, Queen, 28, 194, 200, 206, 212 
 
 Villard, Henry, 382 
 
 Virginia, controversy with New York, 
 21; possibility of keeping for Union, 
 140-141; convention on secession, 141- 
 142; Peace Convention, 149 
 
 Wade, Benjamin, 25, 38, 134, 226, 229, 
 230, 232, 237, 277, 303, 328, 333, 369, 
 460-461; friend of Stanton, 260; his 
 appearance and early life, 268-270; 
 his opinion on Chase, 270; fights in 
 Congress, 271-272; Bates's opinion of, 
 273; his hatred of Southerners, 274; 
 leader of Jacobins, 276; his hostility 
 to Lincoln, 278; might have been 
 President, 278; chairman, committee 
 on the war, 280-281; his influence in 
 War Department, 293-294; denounces 
 McClellan, 299; censures Lincoln, 
 332; no support for Chase, 384 
 
 Wales, William, 383 
 
 War Department. See Cameron, Simon; 
 Stanton, Edwin M. 
 
 Warden, Robert B., 317, 379, 410 
 
 Washington, D. C, during Lincoln's 
 first inauguration, 115; at end of 
 Buchanan administration, 146; Con- 
 federate agents plan to seize, 253-256; 
 importance of safety of, 299-301; 
 condition of, after Bull Run, 315 
 
 Washington Chronicle, 398 
 
 Watson, 254-255 
 
 Webb, James Watson, 33 
 
 Webster, Daniel, 7, 23, 94 
 
 Weed, Thurlow, 15-17, 56, 127, 254, 
 399, 440, 443, 454, 461; boss, political 
 machine, 16-17; his influence on 
 Seward, 23, 26; Chicago convention, 
 29-31; Weed and Cameron, 53; his 
 hostility to Welles, 72; Welles's opin- 
 ion of, 73, 189; claims New England 
 in Chicago convention, 76; author of 
 Albany plan, 86; visits Lincoln, and 
 meets Davis and Swett, 86-87, 90; re- 
 luctant to aid Lincoln-Hamlin cam- 
 paign, 91; his opposition to Chase, 92; 
 suggests Lincoln-Seward meeting, 93- 
 94; must go to see Lincoln at Spring- 
 field, 94, 97; seeks terms on which 
 Seward will enter cabinet, 98; his 
 appearance compared to Lincoln's, 
 99; discusses Bates, Welles, Blair, 100- 
 101; and Cameron, 101-102; Weed 
 fails to make Seward head of cabinet, 
 102; his opposition to Seward-Weed 
 machine, 104-105; wants Lincoln 
 
482 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Weed, Thurlow (continued) 
 available to all at inauguration, 114; 
 works with Seward to keep out 
 Chase, Blair, and Welles, 118; wants 
 to restore Missouri Compromise, 132— 
 134; partnership with Seward, 132— 
 133; and compromise plans of, 136— 
 137; on Trent affair, 206; on War 
 Dept. graft, 221; on Stanton and Fort 
 Sumter, 250; talk with Lincoln, 370; 
 and Chase, 373; opposes Chase as 
 candidate, 385; letter from Davis to, 
 422; on Chase, 450 
 
 Welles, Gideon, 3, 96, 119, 136, 186, 
 457-458; New England member of 
 cabinet, 72; his character attracts re- 
 spect, 72-73; writer and editor, 73; 
 his courage and honesty, 74; post- 
 master in Hartford and joins Navy- 
 Department, 75; his insight into 
 men, 75; and letters and friends, 75; 
 his influence in Connecticut politics, 
 76; opposes Seward nomination, 77; 
 his impressions of Lincoln, 77-78; 
 Seward opposes in cabinet, 80, 83; 
 letter from Lincoln to, 82; his opin- 
 ion of Weed, 86; meets Weed, 87; 
 on the Saratoga pact, 93; Seward 
 hopes to keep out of cabinet but fails, 
 98, 103; Lincoln and Weed discuss, 
 100; New York politicians favor, 104; 
 also Bryant, 105; on Cameron, 107, 
 220; selected for cabinet, 113; attitude 
 of cabinet towards, 127; would evacu- 
 ate forts, 161; Russell's opinion on, 
 169-170; would hold Sumter, 172; kept 
 ignorant of Seward's order to Pow- 
 hatan, 178-179; protests to President, 
 180-181; criticizes Seward, 182-183, 
 188-190, 224; Welles and the Harvey 
 incident, 183; praises Wilkes, 202; 
 quotes Lincoln on Trent affair, 205; 
 on Cameron dismissal, 233-235; on 
 Stanton, 237, 242, 256, 260,^262-264; 
 Free-Soiler, 245; on iMcClellan, 261, 
 297; his reconstruction aims, 267; 
 Chandler's opinion of, 277; his opin- 
 ion on Barlow, 287; McClellan's con- 
 tempt for, 289; on Chase, 296, 357; 
 his retirement likely, 299; quotes 
 Chase on McClellan, 307; his part in 
 cabinet upheaval over McClellan, 307— 
 
 315; has high regard for Lincoln, 312- 
 313, 318-319; meets McClellan, 319; 
 does not want Lincoln to see Col- 
 lamer committee, 334-335; learns 
 about Emancipation Proclamation, 349; 
 records President's views, 352; his re- 
 action .to Proclamation, 356, 359, 360; 
 still in cabinet but not in harmony 
 with, 369, 370; opposes Chase, 385; 
 opinion on Chase and the Blairs, 387; 
 to stay in cabinet, 391; his comment 
 on Chase's campaign, 401; and on 
 Seward and Chase patronage, 405; 
 and on Fremont and Chase, 436; Bal- 
 timore convention anti-Welles, 440; 
 on Chase's resignation, 451; on demo- 
 cratic convention, Chicago, 1864, 455; 
 on Blair's resignation, 459; favors 
 Blair for Chief Justice, 462; quotes 
 Lincoln on Chase, 462 
 
 West Point, 281-282, 296 
 
 West Virginia, 283, 390 * 
 
 Whigs, 6, 13, 16, 22-23, 25-26, 32, 40, 
 43, 45, 49, 54, 55, 59, 71, 90, 93-94, 
 98, 170, 272, 276, 412; Seward wants 
 all -Whig cabinet, 79, 136; more Demo- 
 crats than Whigs in cabinet, 102-103; 
 his opinion on secession, 131 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 287; his poem 
 on Seward, 145 
 
 "Wide- Awakes," 162 
 
 Wilkes, Captain, and Trent affair, 199- 
 208 
 
 Wilmot Proviso, 244 
 
 Wilson, Henry, 237, 253, 255, 282, 383 
 
 Winchell, James M., has charge of 
 Chase's boom, 410-415; his opinion on 
 Chase's withdrawal, 422 
 
 Winnebago Indians, 54, 106 
 
 Wirt, William, 15, 35 
 
 Wolcott, Christopher P., 249 
 
 Woodbury family, 386 
 
 Woodward, George W., 54, 305 
 
 Wyandotte convention, 411 
 
 Yancey, wants to acquire Latin Ameri- 
 can territory, 135; on mission to 
 London, 155, 157; Confederate com- 
 missioner to England, 194-198 
 
 Yorktown peninsula. See Peninsular 
 campaign 
 
 Young, John, 372