Simon Cameron remained a candidate whom Seward considered a necessary ingredient in the cabinet. Five weeks earlier, Seward had warned Lincoln that “to grieve as well as disrespect [Cameron] would produce great embarrassment…. I should dread exceedingly the army of Cameron’s friends in hostility.” In fact, after much painful deliberation, Lincoln had decided to offer Cameron a place. During his train trip through Pennsylvania, he had met with a delegation of Cameron supporters who assured him they were authorized to speak for Governor Curtin and Alexander McClure. All the charges against Cameron had been withdrawn, they told Lincoln; the state now stood strongly behind him. Apparently the fear that Pennsylvania might have no representation in the administration had brought warring factions to agree on Cameron. Telling the delegation that “the information relieved him greatly,” Lincoln remained unwilling to make his decision until he reached Washington. The problem was that Cameron still insisted on the Treasury position, which Lincoln had resolved to give to Chase. Only when Cameron realized he was not in a position to dictate what he wanted did he grudgingly accept the War Department.
When his carriage ride with Seward ended, Lincoln rested for an hour in his suite before receiving his old adversary Stephen Douglas at two-thirty. Then, while Seward went to the train station to greet Mary, he welcomed the Blairs, Francis Senior and Montgomery. “The Blairs,” Hay wrote in his diary, “have to an unusual degree the spirit of a clan. Their family is a close corporation…. They have a way of going with a rush for anything they undertake.” Lincoln understood all this, but he liked and trusted the old man and knew that he needed former Democrats and hard-liners to counterbalance Seward.
The Blairs had been appalled by Seward’s conciliatory speech. Old Man Blair warned Lincoln that Seward’s compromises resembled Mr. Buchanan’s approach and would only invite more aggression from the South. Indeed, the Blairs so violently championed their hard-line position that they effectively advocated war. Monty contended that so long as the Southerners continued to believe “that one Southern man is equal to half a dozen Yankees,” they would never submit to anything without a “decisive defeat” on the field. “It will show the Southern people that they wholly mistake the quality of the men they are taught by demagogues to despise.” Only as magnanimous victors could Northerners afford to conciliate. Beyond Seward’s premature willingness to compromise, Francis Blair, Sr., cautioned that the New Yorker would prove a perpetual thorn in Lincoln’s side. “In your cabinet his restless vanity & ambition would do nothing but mischief. He would set himself up as a rival…& make an influence to supplant all aspirants for the succession.”
While Lincoln generally respected the opinions of Old Man Blair, he had long since determined that he needed Seward for the premier post in his administration. He also hoped, however, to include Monty Blair in his cabinet. While the availability of a true Southerner would have left no room for the border-state Blair, the attempt to enlist Gilmer had apparently failed. Lincoln was prepared to offer Monty a position, most likely as U.S. Postmaster General.
As Lincoln was conversing with the Blairs, Seward made his way through the large crowd at the train depot. Unaware that Lincoln had arrived earlier that day, the throng had gathered to welcome him on the special four o’clock train. When the train finally arrived, one reporter noted, “four carriages were driven up to the rear car, from which Mr. Seward soon emerged with Mrs. Lincoln” and her sons. Once it became clear that the president-elect was not aboard, the assembled citizens began to voice their dismay. “The rain was pouring down in torrents, there was no escape, and the crowd indulged in one or two jokes, a little whistling, and considerable swearing.” This was not the welcome Mary had expected. Leaning upon Seward’s arm as she alighted at the Willard, she was anxious. She had distrusted Seward from the start, fearing that he would be a continuing rival to her husband; now she was forced to depend on him during her less than triumphant entry into the city that would be her new home.
That evening Lincoln visited Seward’s home for a dinner hosted by Fred’s wife, Anna, who served as mistress of the household while Frances remained in Auburn to complete some ongoing work on her home. Although Frances would visit several times a year, she never made Washington her home, leaving all the social duties to her husband, son, and daughter-in-law.
Lincoln returned to the Willard for a nine o’clock reception with the members of the Peace Convention, called by Virginia to attempt a compromise before Congress adjourned on March 4. As the convention members from both South and North assembled, one of the delegates, Lucius Chittenden, representing Vermont, called upon Lincoln in his suite to brief him on the workings of the convention. Chittenden knew that many of the Southern delegates had come simply “to scoff” or “to nourish their contempt for the ‘rail-splitter.’” He could not imagine how Lincoln, who had traveled for ten days and “just escaped a conspiracy against his life,” could face a gathering in which so many were openly hostile. Yet Lincoln’s “wonderful vivacity surprised every spectator,” Chittenden marveled. “He spoke apparently without premeditation, with a singular ease of manner and facility of expression.”
Representing Ohio was Salmon Chase, whom Lincoln had not seen since their meeting in Springfield. Still uncertain whether he would have a place in the cabinet, Chase stiffly assumed the responsibility of introducing Lincoln to the members of the delegation. Lincoln, Chittenden recalled, “had some apt observation for each person ready the moment he heard his name.” The introductions complete, a lively discussion ensued.
In the end, the Peace Convention produced no proposal that could command a majority in Congress, indicating that the time for compromise had passed. That evening at the Willard, however, the delegates had gotten a revelatory glimpse of the president-elect. “He has been both misjudged and misunderstood by the Southern people,” William Rives of Virginia said. “They have looked upon him as an ignorant, self-willed man, incapable of independent judgment, full of prejudices, willing to be used as a tool by more able men. This is all wrong. He will be the head of his administration, and he will do his own thinking.” Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina considered Lincoln’s unwillingness to make concessions on the territorial issue a great “misfortune,” but was relieved to hear of his hearty support of the Constitution.
The next morning, a “clear and blustering” day with “a wind that sweeps over this city with mighty power,” Seward escorted Lincoln to St. John’s Episcopal Church; then, returning to Seward’s house, they conferred for two hours. “Governor Seward, there is one part of my work that I shall have to leave largely to you,” Lincoln said. “I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.” At some point that morning, Lincoln handed Seward a draft of his inaugural address and asked for his suggestions.
The following day, Seward and Lincoln made an informal visit to the House and the Senate. Senators from all parties congregated to greet Lincoln. Even firebrand Southerners who refused to acknowledge his presence were consumed with curiosity. Virginia’s James Mason, one reporter noted, “affected nonchalance and pretended to be writing, but for the life of him he could not help looking askance, from time to time; and it may be doubted if what he wrote could be translated into plain English.”
One reporter commented that Lincoln’s “face has not yet become familiar enough to be popularly recognized here,” so “he passed to and from the Capitol yesterday without catching the attention of the multitude.” His informal visit, the New York Times noted, was “without a precedent. His illustrious predecessors…deemed it incompatible with the stately dignity of the Executive of the Union, to visit the coordinate departments of the Government. Clearly, the Railsplitter has, in following the dictates of his own feelings, rightly interpreted the proprieties of his position.”
In the days ahead, Lincoln confirmed two more positions for his cabinet. He chose Caleb Smith, his old Whig col
league, over Schuyler Colfax for the Department of the Interior, despite widespread support for Colfax. In a gracious letter to Colfax, he explained: “I had partly made up my mind in favor of Mr. Smith—not conclusively of course—before your name was mentioned in that connection. When you were brought forward I said ‘Colfax is a young man—is already in position—is running a brilliant career, and is sure of a bright future in any event. With Smith, it is now or never.’ I considered either abundantly competent, and decided on the ground I have stated.” Mentioning that Colfax had not supported him during his Senate campaign against Douglas, Lincoln begged him to “not do me the injustice to suppose, for a moment, that I remembered any thing against you in malice.”
At one point, Norman Judd had been in consideration for a cabinet appointment, but the opposition to him in Illinois from Lincoln’s campaign manager, David Davis, and a host of others was very strong. Mary Lincoln herself had written to Davis as an ally in the cause against Judd, charging that “Judd would cause trouble & dissatisfaction, & if Wall Street testifies correctly, his business transactions, have not always borne inspection.” Mary, unlike her husband, was unable to forgive Judd’s role in Trumbull’s victory over Lincoln in 1855. In the end, Lincoln decided he alone would provide sufficient representation for his state of Illinois. Instead, he offered Judd a ministry post in Berlin, which was more agreeable to Judd’s wife, Adeline.
For weeks, the newspapers had been reporting that Gideon Welles was the most likely candidate from New England. Though bitterly opposed by Seward and Weed, Welles had the full confidence of the more hard-line members of the party. Nonetheless, Welles was “in an agony of suspense during that last week in February,” as he waited in Hartford for positive word. When his son Edgar eagerly wrote from Yale that he would love to accompany his father to Washington for the inauguration, Welles replied: “It is by no means certain, my son, that I shall go myself…if not invited [by Lincoln] I shall not go at all.”
Finally, on March 1, Welles received a telegram from Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin in Washington: “I desire to see you here forthwith.” In his hurry to catch the train the next day, he discovered he had left his toiletries behind. More disconcerting, he arrived at the Willard to find the corridors so crowded that his trunks were temporarily mislaid, forcing him to remain in his rumpled clothes. Fortunately, Lincoln was dining elsewhere that evening, and a meeting was called for the following day. Lincoln offered him the navy portfolio.
With hard-liners Blair and Welles on board to balance Cameron and Bates, Lincoln still faced a difficult problem. He had resolved from the start to bring both Seward and Chase into his cabinet, but as the inauguration approached, each man’s supporters violently opposed the appointment of the other. “The struggle for Cabinet portfolios waxes warmer, hourly,” the Evening Star reported on March 1. Seward’s delegation met with Lincoln on March 2, claiming that Chase would make the cabinet untenable for Seward. Hoping Lincoln would agree to forsake Chase, they were dismayed when, instead, Lincoln countered that although he still preferred a cabinet with both men, he might consider offering State to William Dayton and giving Seward the ministry to Great Britain.
After receiving the report of his friends, and beleaguered by the strength of the opposition to him, Seward sent a note to Lincoln asking to withdraw his earlier acceptance of the State portfolio. Lincoln waited two days to answer. “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” he told Nicolay. Nonetheless, his gracious manner again soothed a troubled situation. In his reply to Seward’s withdrawal note, he wrote: “It is the subject of most painful solicitude with me; and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply inlisted in the same direction.”
Never genuinely desiring to withdraw, but hoping to pressure Lincoln to drop Chase, Seward rescinded his decision and accepted. In a letter to Frances, the New Yorker portrayed his waffling reversals in the most honorable light: “The President is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent. I was at one time on the point of refusing—nay, I did refuse, for a time to hazard myself in the experiment. But a distracted country appeared before me; and I withdrew from that position. I believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that 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.”
All that remained was for Lincoln to secure Chase’s acceptance. He had not exchanged a single word with Chase about the appointment since his arrival in Washington. Now, without consulting the proud Ohioan, Lincoln sent Chase’s nomination as treasury secretary to the Senate. Chase was on the Senate floor when a number of his colleagues came over to congratulate him. “Ever conscious of his own importance and overly sensitive to matters of protocol,” he promptly called on the president to express his anger and his decision to decline the appointment. In the course of their ensuing conversation, Chase later recalled, Lincoln “referred to the embarrassment my declination would occasion him.” Chase promised to consider the matter further, and, as Lincoln hoped, he “finally yielded.”
In the end, Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly called Seward’s bluff. Through all the countervailing pressures, he had achieved the cabinet he wanted from the outset—a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the history of the country.
His opponents had been certain that Lincoln would fail in this first test of leadership. “The construction of a Cabinet,” one editorial advised, “like the courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the new Executive is not acquainted. There are certain little tricks which go far beyond the arts familiar to the stump, and the cross-road tavern, whose comprehension requires a delicacy of thought and subtlety of perception, secured only by experience.”
In fact, as John Nicolay later wrote, Lincoln’s “first decision was one of great courage and self-reliance.” Each of his rivals was “sure to feel that the wrong man had been nominated.” A less confident man might have surrounded himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. James Buchanan, for example, had deliberately chosen men who thought as he did. Buchanan believed, Allan Nevins writes, that a president “who tried to conciliate opposing elements by placing determined agents of each in his official family would find that he had simply strengthened discord, and had deepened party divisions.” While it was possible that his team of rivals would devour one another, Lincoln determined that “he must risk the dangers of faction to overcome the dangers of rebellion.”
Later, Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet comprised of enemies and opponents. He particularly questioned the president’s selection of the three men who had been his chief rivals for the Republican nomination, each of whom was still smarting from the loss.
Lincoln’s answer was simple, straightforward, and shrewd. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”
Seward, Chase, Bates—they were indeed strong men. But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.
PART II
MASTER AMONG MEN
In this composite, Lincoln has taken over Seward’s central position in the Republican Party, becoming the clear leader of a most unusual team of rivals.
SECOND FLOOR OF THE LINCOLN WHITE HOUSE
CHAPTER 12
“MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY”
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE her husband’s March 4 inauguration, Mary Lincoln was unable to sleep. She stood by her window in the Willard Hotel
and watched strangers swarming in the darkened streets below. Though all the major hotels had laid out mattresses and cots in every conceivable open space, filling parlors, reception rooms, and lobbies, thousands were still left to wander the streets and wait for the great day to dawn.
Lincoln rose before sunrise to look over the inaugural address he had been crafting in his peculiar fashion. According to Nicolay, “Lincoln often resorted to the process of cumulative thought.” He would reduce complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later return to the same passage and polish it further “to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.” While Seward or Chase would consult countless books, drawing from ancient to modern history to illustrate and refine their arguments, Lincoln built the armature of his inaugural out of four documents: the Constitution, Andrew Jackson’s nullification proclamation, Daniel Webster’s memorable “Liberty and Union Forever” speech, and Clay’s address to the Senate arguing for the Compromise of 1850.
Lincoln faced a dual challenge in this long-awaited speech, his first significant public address since his election. It was imperative that he convey his staunch resolution to defend the Union and to carry out his responsibilities as president, while at the same time mitigating the anxieties of the Southern states. Finding the balance between force and conciliation was not easy, and his early draft tilted more toward the forceful side. Among the first people to see the draft was Orville Browning. Browning had intended to accompany Lincoln on the train from Springfield to Washington, but finding “such a crowd of hangers on gathering about him,” he decided to end the journey in Indianapolis. Before Browning left, Lincoln handed him a copy of his draft.
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