Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  While he was dismissing the likelihood of a real battle between secessionist forces and the United States, he was probably still mulling over his Cabinet selections, although he told close aides that he had been pondering the issue since the evening he was elected president. Many years later, he told his private secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, “When I finally bade my friends good-night . . . I had substantially created the framework of my Cabinet as it now exists.”23 Nicolay, the former newspaperman, and Hay, the Brown-educated legal apprentice, said in retrospect that in assembling a Cabinet, Lincoln sought “a council of distinctive and diverse, yet able, influential, and representative men, who should be a harmonious group of constitutional advisers and executive lieutenants—not a board of regents holding the great seal in commission and intriguing for the succession.”24 Whig orthodoxy, or what was left of it, held that the Cabinet should be a check on a president, not just an esteemed team of advisers. Whigs expected presidents to follow their Cabinet, but every Whig president before Lincoln—Harrison, Taylor, and Fillmore—had rebelled against that idea once they were in office.

  The men Lincoln assembled bore only a faint resemblance to the romantic Whig ideal of a Cabinet, as described by Nicolay and Hay. Its members were neither harmonious in spirit nor particularly loyal to Lincoln, and Lincoln had no intention of deferring to their judgments. He picked prominent men who had considerable experience and reflected some geographical balance, but they were men who had been important in the formation and development of the Republican Party. Three—Seward, Bates, and Chase—had been his rivals for the presidency, and at least one other, Simon Cameron, was anything but a team player. Nonetheless, Lincoln brought them together to facilitate party unity, which he had insisted to Taylor and Crittenden should be the preeminent concern in assembling a Cabinet.

  Though Lincoln had told his Springfield friends he expected to return some day, he could not be sure whether that would ever happen. Before leaving Springfield on February 11, 1861, Lincoln stopped to spend a few days with his stepmother. During the break, he visited his father’s grave for the first and last time. He never told anyone about what he thought, did, or said there, yet it is not hard to imagine he might have looked down at his father with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness. He could only be proud of how far he had come but must have been sad to remember that his father had never seen greatness in him. It had to be enough that he had proven his father wrong.

  II

  * * *

  As plans were being formulated to respond to the impending crises, Lincoln still had to complete his Inaugural Address. In preparation, he consulted only four documents. Besides Jackson’s proclamation on South Carolina, he studied Henry Clay’s final speech in the Senate, Daniel Webster’s 1830 reply to South Carolina senator Robert Hayne’s assertion of the state’s entitlement to nullify federal laws, and the Constitution, which he quoted or referenced over twenty times in his address. Lincoln considered Webster’s speech the single “greatest oration” in American oratory (indeed, Jackson was among those who openly delighted in Webster’s speech at the time, which he had “expected” to demolish Hayne’s arguments), and Clay’s speech eloquently set forth the case against secession as Jackson had done in his proclamation.

  For his Inaugural Address, Lincoln solicited direct advice from only a few people. Seward was one. The evening before he received the dispiriting news from Anderson about Charleston, Lincoln had met with Seward. The two men differed in many ways. Lincoln towered over Seward; Seward was mercurial, temperamental, hyperactive, disheveled, but occasionally courtly, while Lincoln was steady, plodding, and unpretentious. Short, with a bulbous nose, Seward was always in motion. They had encountered each other for the first time in 1848 when they were both campaigning for Taylor. From then through the first few months of Lincoln’s presidency, Seward did not hide his disdain for Lincoln. He freely shared his harsh criticisms of Lincoln with allies and friends, such as Horace Greeley. Indifferent to decorum, he was even condescending and patronizing in Lincoln’s presence.

  For much of the transition, Lincoln had let Seward act as a spokesperson for the administration. But as late as the night before the inauguration, Seward was still playing hard to get. If he could not have the throne, he desperately wanted to be the power behind it and was pressing Lincoln to give him the power he craved, including picking the rest of the Cabinet.

  Though irritated by the persistent push of Seward and Weed to micromanage his administration, Lincoln needed Seward in his Cabinet. Seward had significant support among abolitionists in the Northeast and would bring lots of votes with him if he joined the Cabinet. As Adams had done with Henry Clay, Lincoln offered his rival the top position in the Cabinet, the post of secretary of state, widely regarded as a stepping-stone to the presidency itself.

  Orville Browning was his other sounding board. After Browning had helped to build a bridge between Lincoln and the Bates delegates, he remained a confidant throughout the election and transition. Thomas Hicks, the portrait painter for whom Lincoln sat after winning the Republican nomination for president, wrote that “the one man, in those days, who was always with” Lincoln, “with whom he advised, in whom he confided, with whom he talked over the Constitution of the United States in its relations to slavery, the condition of the South, and the mutterings of slave-owners, whose views accorded with his own, whom he held by the hand as a brother, was Orville H. Browning of Quincy.”25 Hicks continued, “When he and Browning met together, they discussed with thoughtful consideration many events which might occur, among which were the threatening of an unnecessary civil war, the cruelties of which, fortunately, could not be foreseen, in those peaceful days, by his friends and neighbors in the quiet town of Springfield.”26

  As the inauguration approached, Lincoln begged Browning to join the train trip he and his entourage planned to take from Springfield to Washington. Never one to like trains, much less crowded ones, Browning agreed to go as far as Indianapolis. Once there, Lincoln asked Browning back to his room in the Bates House (named for the prominent banker Hervey Bates, no relation to Edward), then the grandest hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Once there, Lincoln retrieved his traveling bag, from which he extracted a draft of his Inaugural Address. He asked if Browning “would not read it over, and frankly tell him my opinion of it.”27 After a quick review, Browning told Lincoln that it seemed “able, well considered, and appropriate.”28 Browning added, “It is, in my judgment, a very admirable document.”29 Lincoln was pleased, but asked Browning to take a closer look but “under promise” that he would speak only to Lincoln about it.30 Browning agreed “to take it back with me, and read it over more at my leisure.”31 He told Lincoln, “If I see anything in it that I think ought to be changed, I will write to you from home.”32

  As Seward and Browning read over the draft, they unsurprisingly saw the influence of Clay and particularly Jackson. It made eminent sense. Lincoln had, after all, within a few days of the election reviewed Jackson’s 1833 proclamation denouncing South Carolina’s threat of nullification and secession. As Harold Holzer notes in his study of Lincoln’s transition, “It came as no surprise that another visitor to Springfield found Lincoln on November 14th ‘reading up anew’ on the history of Andrew Jackson’s response to the 1832 Nullification Crisis. While he made no effort to conceal ‘the uneasiness which the contemplated treason gives him,’ Lincoln assured his guest that, like Jackson, he would not ‘yield an inch.’” Nearly three decades before Lincoln’s inauguration, Jackson had issued the first presidential statement to reject secession categorically, and it helped to widen the split between him and his vice president, John Calhoun, once and for all. Jackson’s proclamation was an important step in a long, intense series of moves in which Calhoun would challenge his commitment to states’ rights. They had clashed over appointments as well as when they gave dueling toasts at the end of April 1830. And so it was no surprise when two weeks after Jackson issued his proclamation, Calhoun
resigned to protest the president’s failure to embrace nullification doctrine, which held that states were entitled, especially when they were a political minority, to block proposals from the more powerful federal government that violated their rights. Some historians believe Jackson’s proclamation was largely motivated by his confidence that the issue driving nullification—a rise in tariffs—would not hurt his own plantation and that the threat would in any event eventually vanish. Nevertheless, the proclamation’s substance went further to systematically dismantle Calhoun’s doctrine. As a result, it had become popular among many Republican leaders, especially those who once had been Jacksonian Democrats.

  As his last act as vice president, Calhoun thwarted Jackson’s plan to move Van Buren from secretary of state to ambassador to Great Britain, allowing Jackson to keep Van Buren on his team but to have fulfilled his announced aim of reorganizing the Cabinet. When the nomination came to the Senate, Calhoun cast the tie-breaking vote to defeat the nomination. Elated at the outcome, Calhoun said, “It will kill him dead, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick, sir, never kick.”33

  The celebration came too soon. Because Jackson had given Van Buren a recess appointment as the ambassador to Great Britain, Van Buren was in England when he learned the news of his rejection by the Senate. British royalty assured Van Buren that the defeat would make him a martyr. Jackson agreed, “The people will properly resent the insult offered to the Executive, and the injury intended to our foreign relations, in your rejection, by placing you in the chair of the very man whose casting vote rejected you.” Jackson was right: After removing Calhoun as vice president, Jackson placed Van Buren on his ticket in the 1832 election.

  These events were well known to Lincoln and his growing inner circle, and they were undoubtedly on Seward’s mind as he advised Lincoln in the closing days of the transition. Though he had not yet committed to serving as secretary of state, Seward could not keep his hands off the draft. He meticulously scoured it and made over fifty suggestions, almost all of which reflected his concern that the new president not antagonize the South or provoke civil war.34 Seward’s object was conciliation. His suggestions helped Lincoln to soften the tone of the address.

  On February 9, shortly before Lincoln and his entourage left for Indianapolis, Browning and Lincoln met privately in Lincoln’s room at the Chenery House, a hotel in Springfield, his own house already having been rented out. According to Browning, they “discussed the state of the Country expressing our opinions fully and freely.”35 According to Browning’s notes, the president-elect

  agreed entirely with me in believing that no good results would follow the [Peace] convention now in session in Washington, but evil rather, as increased excitement would follow when it broke up without having accomplished anything. He agreed with me no concession by free States short of a surrender of everything worth preserving, and contending for would satisfy the South, and that [Kentucky Senator John Crittenden’s] proposed amendment to the Constitution [barring the extension of slavery to any new federal territories] in the form proposed ought not to be made, and he agreed with me that far less evil & bloodshed would result from an effort to maintain the Union and the Constitution, than from disruption and the formation of two confederacies.36

  That Lincoln took the time to sit with Browning and subsequently adopted his suggestions suggest that he was not merely echoing Browning’s ideas to please him.

  Back in Quincy, Browning wrote to Lincoln on February 17, 1861, with his suggestions on the draft.37 Browning agreed with Lincoln on the arguments against secession and proposed that Lincoln’s first move—to send supplies or arms to Sumter—would likely induce South Carolina to attack the fort, “and then the government will stand justified before the entire country, in repelling that invasion, and retaking the forts.”38 He advised, “Without an aggressive act by the federal government, the South would appear to be in an unjustified position.”39 Lincoln agreed and therefore dropped a clause from the draft in which he had threatened to lead the federal government into reclaiming seized federal property in the South. (Lincoln’s private secretaries later described Browning’s suggestion as “the most vital change in the document.”)40 With Browning’s help, Lincoln had his commitments set forth more clearly and also had a plan for addressing the immediate threats to disunion stirring in South Carolina almost a month before his inauguration—one nearly identical to the plan that he eventually followed.

  Lincoln’s Inaugural Address was only the second presidential declaration formally opposing secession. On this occasion, as had been the case for Jackson, the most direct threat to the Union came from South Carolina. The inaugural crowd was substantial, so consumed were the citizens in and around the District of Columbia with worry about the country’s future. As Lincoln had prepared to take his oath of office, dozens of newspapers in the North, Midwest, and West urged Lincoln to emulate Jackson. Lincoln made it clear he had gotten the message. His speech was a unique blend of Jackson, Clay, and Webster, with vivid imagery and language inspired by decades of reading Shakespeare and other poetry. Lincoln had adapted Jackson’s arguments and even some of its wording to the current crisis facing the nation. Jackson had declared that the “most important” of the Constitution’s “objects” was “‘to form a more perfect Union.’”41 Lincoln said, “One of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’”42

  Pierce and Buchanan had blamed the impending hostilities on Northern abolitionists. Like Clay and Jackson before him, Lincoln blamed them on Southern secessionists, agreeing with Jackson that nullification and secession undermined the all-important object of maintaining the Union. In Jackson’s words, “I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”43 Lincoln echoed him: “But if destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.”44

  Because the objective of the Constitution was to “form a more perfect Union,” Jackson had suggested that nullification was treason.45 “To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States is not a nation.”46 Lincoln went further, arguing, as Webster had in his widely known debate with Hayne, that secession, like nullification, promised “anarchy.”47 Like Jackson and Webster, Lincoln refuted the right of a political minority to refuse to abide by a majority’s will, the right that Calhoun and Hayne had insisted made secession legitimate. Lincoln said, “If a minority . . . will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority.”48 Lincoln then asked rhetorically, “Why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again. [All] who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.”49 Disunion was a word that was common to Jackson, Clay, and Webster; they had used it in each of their famous declarations opposing nullification. Lincoln’s use of the same term linked his message to theirs.

  Jackson had gone further to refute the idea that the sovereignty of states was absolute. With some irony, he listed many of the same constitutional provisions that John Marshall had used in some of his most famous cases to support the basic idea that the Constitution itself and any federal laws consistent with it were the supreme law of the land. One plain inference from this foundational concept was that states were not preserved certain rights under the Constitution, but rather that states could not impede lawful federal action.

  Next, Lincoln again echoed Jackson in emphasizing that the Constitution derives its authority not from the
states but from the people of the United States, who were the country’s principal sovereign. Jackson had declared,

  The people of the United States formed the Constitution, acting through the State legislatures, in making the compact, to meet and discuss its provisions, and acting in separate conventions when they ratified those provisions; but the terms used in its construction show it to be a government in which the people of all the States collectively are represented. We are ONE PEOPLE in the choice of the President and the Vice President.50

  Describing the Constitution as a “contract” that could not be nullified by a single party, Lincoln agreed with Jackson that “the Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people.”51

  Jackson had emphasized that his “oath” and presidential duties required him to stand firmly against nullification or any other effort that threatened to undermine the Union and the Constitution, declaring that it “is the intent of [the Constitution] to PROCLAIM [that] the duty imposed on me by the Constitution ‘to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ shall be performed to the extent of the powers already vested in me by law, or of such others as the wisdom of Congress shall devise and Entrust to me for that purpose.”52 Near the end of his proclamation, Jackson reiterated the point but with greater clarity and bluntness:

  I rely with equal confidence on your undivided support in my determination to execute the laws—to preserve the Union by all constitutional means—to arrest, if possible, by moderate but firm measures, the necessity of recourse to force, and if it be the will of Heaven that the recurrence of the primeval curse on man for the shedding of a brother’s blood should fall upon our land, that it not be called down by any offensive act on the part of the United States.53