President Buchanan told the states of the South there was no legal right under the Constitution to proceed to acts of secession, because the United States was an organic Union and not merely a voluntary association of states. Having denied that the federal government, under his leadership, was guilty of any abuse of Southern rights, Buchanan put Lincoln on notice. “Reason, justice, a regard for the Constitution, all require we shall wait for some overt and dangerous act on the part of the President elect, before resorting to such a remedy.” Finally, Buchanan declared that he did not have the power to mediate the conflict between the federal government and the states, something only Congress had the power to do.
Lincoln, upon reading the address, felt dismay at Buchanan’s assessment of the crisis. He realized that the lame-duck president would continue to be part of the problem.
IN HIS INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE, Lincoln found a number of letters advocating the inclusion of Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania in the cabinet. He had not included Cameron in his original list, in part because he had heard a steady refrain of charges that Cameron was a wire-puller whose politics always ended up being economically profitable for himself. Now, as Lincoln sought to resolve the final shape of the cabinet, a tug-of-war developed between pro-and anti-Cameron forces.
Lincoln also reread a letter from Henry J. Raymond. From his post as editor of the New York Times, Raymond had become aware of the public misunderstanding about the intentions of Lincoln and the new Republican administration. He had written to urge Lincoln to make some reassuring statement and, rather audaciously, sent Lincoln some sentences of what the president-elect ought to say. Lincoln, having sat on Raymond’s letter, now replied that he believed his policy of silence had “a demonstration in favor of my view.” Lincoln had been talked into inserting words into Trumbull’s speech, but now he asked Raymond, “Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech [upon its readers] with a purpose to quiet public anxiety?” Lincoln, irritated and reaching for a way to express his discontent to the New York Times editor, concluded with Jesus’s words “ ‘They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.’ ” Jesus’s words were delivered to “an evil and adulterous generation;” Lincoln characterized his own generation as possessed by “ ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good.’ ”
Lincoln’s first choice for his cabinet was Seward, but he did not consider the effect that New York politics, as well as the rumor mill, would have on his wish. While Lincoln proceeded in his own mind with all deliberate speed, others wondered aloud why he was taking so long to decide on the key appointment of secretary of state. This interval of silence allowed for the anti-Seward factions in New York to recycle their criticisms. Then political gossip began to circulate that Lincoln did not really want Seward but intended to offer him the position with the expectation that Seward would decline it. As these rumors drifted back to Springfield, Lincoln took up his pen on December 8, 1860, to write Seward directly. He admitted he had “delayed so long to communicate” because of what he thought was “a proper caution in this case.” As for the gossip, “I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. … It has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration.” Several days later, Seward thanked Lincoln for the honor of the invitation, but asked for more time to consider it.
Lincoln now contacted Bates, next in priority for the cabinet. Lincoln offered to travel the ninety miles to meet the august, bearded Bates in St. Louis, but the old-line Whig believed that would be demeaning for the president-elect, and offered to come to Springfield instead. They met in Bates’s room at the Chenery House on December 15, 1860. Lincoln offered him the position of attorney general, which he accepted. Immediately after their conference, Bates confided to his diary that he found Lincoln “free in his communications and candid in his manner.”
LINCOLN BELIEVED THAT ONE WAY to reassure the South that his was not a sectional government was to include at least one Southerner in his cabinet. Hamlin had supported this idea in their face-to-face meeting in Chicago, as did Seward and Judge Davis. Lincoln considered James Guthrie, a Kentuckian who had served both as president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and as secretary of the treasury in the Pierce administration. Lincoln sent Speed to feel out Guthrie who, about to turn seventy-two, said he supported the Union but did not want the position.
As he deliberated over his cabinet, Lincoln learned of a striking speech delivered by one of the most reasonable Southern leaders, Alexander Stephens, his old Whig colleague from the Thirtieth Congress, who had recently retired from Congress. On November 14, 1860, Stephens, even more shrunken in form than when Lincoln had known him, had pleaded in a speech to the Georgia legislature, “Don’t give up the ship. Don’t abandon her yet.”
Someone called out, “The ship has leaks in her.”
“Let us stop them if we can,” replied Stephens.
Lincoln wrote to Stephens requesting a copy of his speech. Stephens sent the speech on December 14, along with the injunction, “The country is certainly in great peril, and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibility resting upon him than you have in the present momentous crisis.”
After studying Stephens’s speech, Lincoln replied on December 22, 1860, asking, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Lincoln might have stopped there, but did not. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.”
Stephens replied on December 30, 1860. “In addressing you thus, I would have you understand me as being not a personal enemy, but as one who would have you do what you can to save our common country.” Yet, Stephens did believe slavery was right, and resented any party that continued to make slavery the primary issue in the country. Lincoln had undoubtedly misinterpreted Stephens’s understanding of the Union. He felt a Union upheld by force was “nothing short of a consolidated despotism.” In concluding, Stephens appealed to wisdom from Proverbs 25:11 to encourage Lincoln to speak publicly before it was too late. “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’ ” Lincoln never replied.
Although Lincoln was a reconciler by nature, and his first instinct was to reach out to his former rivals, after Stephens’s reply he became more hesitant about including Southerners in his cabinet. In an editorial he placed in the Illinois State Journal on December 12, 1860, affirming the “frequent allusion to a supposed purpose on the part of Mr. Lincoln to call into his cabinet two or three Southern gentlemen, from the parties opposed to him politically,” he asked two questions.
Would such a person “accept a place in the cabinet?”
“Does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political differences between them?”
Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Judge Davis nevertheless continued to press Lincoln to consider a Southerner. He hosted Weed for a two-day meeting in Springfield on December 20 and 21, 1860. They were joined by Davis and Swett. Weed, a tall man whose elongated nose was compared by cartoonists to Cyrano de Bergerac’s, had earned a reputation as a tough political operator in New York. He found himself surprised by his attraction to Lincoln. “While Mr. Lincoln never underestimated the difficulties which surrounded him, his nature was so elastic, and his temperament so cheerful, that he always seemed at ease and undisturbed.” Lincoln told Weed that “the making of a cabinet” was not nearly as easy as he had supposed.
Weed encouraged Lincoln to have at least two members of the cabinet from slaveholding states, but Lincoln wondered if these “white crows” could be trusted over the long haul. Vice President–elect Ham-lin proposed North Carolina congressman John A. Gilmer, a
slaveholder and former Whig. Gilmer had written a long letter to Lincoln on December 10, 1860. “For one politically opposed to you” Gilmer had encouraged Lincoln to write a “clear and definite exposition of your views,” which “may go far to quiet, if not satisfy all reasonable minds, that on most of them it will become plain that there is more misunderstanding than difference.” To probe what differences there were, Gilmer asked Lincoln six detailed questions. Lincoln replied on December 15 with a question of his own: “May I be pardoned if I ask whether even you have ever attempted to procure the reading of the Republican platform, or my speeches, by the Southern people?” Lincoln wanted to know why a new statement would “meet a better fate? … It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness.” Lincoln referred Gilmer to chapter and verse in the published Joint Debates but also answered his questions in some detail. In the end, he said to Gilmer what he said to Alexander Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Lincoln did, however, authorize Weed to explore a cabinet position with Gilmer. The matter lingered on through January, Lincoln telling Seward on January 12, 1861, that he still hoped Gilmer would “consent to take a place in the cabinet.” Gilmer wrote on January 29 declining the invitation.
A struggle ensued over whether to appoint Henry Winter Davis, a former Whig, or Montgomery Blair, a former Democrat, both from Maryland, where they were locked in a bitter rivalry for leadership of the Republican Party. In the end, Blair prevailed. At some point Weed asked Lincoln if it was wise to give former Democrats a majority of one in the new cabinet. Lincoln, with his wrinkled smile, replied, “But why do you assume that we are giving that section of our party a majority of the cabinet? You seem to forget that /expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”
With Bates and now Blair joining the cabinet, Lincoln was content that his choices would appease Southerners. He overestimated the effect the appointment of two border-state politicians—one of whom had been a candidate for the Republican nomination for president—would have on the South’s perception of him and failed to understand the violent feelings represented by leaders such as Senators Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Robert Toombs of Georgia, and John Slidell of Louisiana.
IN LINCOLN’S TRANSITION WINTER, he would spend much more time than he expected in dealing with a Republican house divided. The Republicans of 1856 found cohesion in their role as an opposition party. The Republicans in the winter of 1860–61 had become an institution in power torn between radicals and conservatives who represented different regions and had different viewpoints on slavery and the South.
Lincoln won his leadership spurs in Illinois by building a coalition brought together by initial opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Stephen Douglas and staying together because of its hatred of Pierce, Buchanan, and Democratic corruption. Many ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats became Republicans more for what they were against than what they were for. Now, Lincoln faced Republican acrimony not only in states such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland, but also on the national stage of the House and Senate in Washington.
The question on everyone’s lips was where Lincoln stood in the midst of this spectrum of beliefs. His nomination gave all sides hope that he was on their side. Conservatives voted for him both because he was a former Whig, and because they could not vote for Seward. Radicals knew of his persistent stand against the extension of slavery. As rumors swirled about his cabinet selections, some Republicans became fearful he would surround himself with old-line Whigs; others worried that he would be open to too many ex-Democrats. All factions within the party believed they could persuade him to move in their direction.
In Congress, Republicans and many Democrats—having lost confidence in President Buchanan—scurried to forge some kind of consensus on secession. With Lincoln publicly silent in Springfield, others stepped in to fill the void. Seward became viewed by many as the unofficial head of the party. Once he accepted his new role as secretary of state—a position that in the first seventy-two years of the Republic exhibited far more power over administrative policy than in modern times—he began to exercise leadership, sometimes on his own accord.
Old John J. Crittenden, the unobtrusive seventy-three-year-old senator from Kentucky, offered compromise legislation that he hoped could stop the secessionist impulse. Born during the Constitutional Convention and first entering the Senate at the inauguration of President James Monroe in 1817, Crittenden, an old-line Henry Clay Whig, had seen it all. With his still-erect angular frame, sparkling dark eyes, iron-gray hair, and a tobacco quid in his jaw, he was calm and thoughtful in demeanor. He shone not in speeches on the Senate floor but in the art of private negotiation.
If Lincoln believed he knew Kentucky, Crittenden was convinced he understood it much better. His legislation grew from his experiences in a border state he thought of as three states. Unbridled secessionists nestled together on the southern border with Tennessee, Unionists tended to live along the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, and the central part of the state was inhabited by people who simply wanted to get along. Crittenden believed that in this sense Kentucky represented a microcosm of the nation at large.
Crittenden rose in the Senate on December 18, 1860, to offer a comprehensive package of six constitutional amendments that would remove slavery from federal jurisdiction for all time. The Kentucky senator believed that all agreements since 1787 had been legislative compromises that were always subject to overturning by later Congresses. The first amendment would reinstate the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific Ocean with the effect of protecting slavery south of the line. The second amendment would prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery in slave states. He also called for a congressional resolution on the fugitive slave law that would recognize the law as constitutional but amend it to take out some clauses “obnoxious” to citizens in the North.
Lincoln watched from Springfield as what became known as the Crittenden Plan gathered momentum. Petitions poured into Congress supporting it. Business interests in the North and some Republican leaders believed it could provide a way out of the mounting crisis.
Lincoln opposed the Crittenden Plan because it would permit slavery to expand into the West. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and Senator Lyman Trumbull were Lincoln’s eyes and ears in Congress during these critical months. Washburne wrote from Washington, “The secession feeling has assumed proportions of which I had but a faint conception when I saw you at Springfield, and I think our friends generally in the west are not fully apprised of the imminent peril which now environs us.” Lincoln, aware that anxiety would push some in his own party toward compromise, wrote to Trumbull, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Washburne, “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends … entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort. … hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
Despite popular support for the Crittenden Plan, including the backing of some Republicans, Lincoln won high marks for steeling Republicans in the Senate to back away from the illusory compromise.
THE SOUTHERN PRESS was filled with indignation at Lincoln’s election. “The election of Lincoln … means all the insult … that such an act can do,” spewed the Wilmington (North Carolina) Herald. The New Orleans Crescent summed up the editorial comment of countless Southern papers: “The Northern people, in electing Mr. Lincoln, have perpetrated a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage on the people of the slaveholding states.” In the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, editors spoke out against talk of secession and disunion. St. Louis’s Missouri Democrat, a Republican newspaper, wrote, “Throughout the campaign … [Lincoln] has been portrayed by most newspapers as an Abolitionist; a fanatic of the John
Brown type. Never was a public man so outrageously misrepresented.” Nevertheless, the Richmond Enquirer, which Lincoln had long read to keep up with the sentiment of the South, charged that “the Northern people, by a sectional vote, have elected a President for the avowed purpose of aggression on Southern rights.” The Enquirer concluded, “This is a declaration of war.”
Lincoln continued to believe that the strong Southern talk was mostly bluff. The North had encountered this bluster before, in 1820 and 1850, and also at the time of the formation of the Republican Party in 1856. The plantation owners were angry, but Lincoln was convinced that the ordinary yeoman farmers, whom he believed he understood, would not, in the end, go along with disunion. He continued to think that sensible leaders would stop any final moves toward separation.
The “tug” Lincoln spoke of in his letter to Trumbull became a jolt on December 20, 1860, when a South Carolina convention, meeting in Charleston, voted unanimously to secede from the Union. The die was cast. Or was it? As politicians and editors raged, everyone wondered about Lincoln’s attitude. Even as he refrained from public speaking, people looked to the Illinois State Journal for clues to Lincoln’s thinking. The Journal editorialized that South Carolina could not pull out of the Union without a fight. “If she violates the laws, then comes the tug of war.” Editor Baker, in regular conversation with Lincoln, had taken Lincoln’s tug analogy from the Trumbull letter. “The President of the United States has a plain duty to perform.” The Journal worried, “Disunion by armed force, is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards.”
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