The president’s meeting with the Missourians lasted over two hours. Drake read his list of demands “as pompously as if it were full of matter instead of wind,” noted John Hay. Lincoln listened attentively, allowing his critics to enumerate their grievances. He knew well that these men would be important in the coming presidential canvass, but felt their call for Schofield’s dismissal was misguided. He explained his position clearly, calmly, and forcefully, both at the meeting that day and in a letter drafted a few days later. While he acknowledged their version of the turmoil facing Missouri, he was not convinced that Schofield was “responsible for that suffering and wrong.” On the contrary, he suggested, all the troubles they described could be explained by the fact that during a civil war, confusion abounds: “Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.” Until he received evidence that Schofield had used his powers arbitrarily for or against a particular faction, he could not, in good conscience, remove him from command. That evidence had not been provided.
“The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay noted proudly in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.” Lincoln emerged from the meeting “in a good humor,” Bates observed. “Some of them he said, were not as bad as he supposed.” Yet, while clarifying the fact that “whoever commands in Missouri, or elsewhere” was responsible to him, “and not to either radicals or conservatives,” Lincoln once again moved to defuse the situation without alienating vital constituents. On the day the radicals left town, he wrote to remind Schofield that his authority to “arrest individuals, and suppress assemblies, or newspapers” was limited only to those who were “working palpable injury to the Military.”
Indeed, several months later, when Lincoln became convinced that Schofield was actually leaning toward the conservatives instead of using “his influence to harmonize the conflicting elements,” he decided to replace him with Rosecrans, a man long favored by the radicals. But even then, he engineered the transfer in a manner that protected Schofield’s good name, while preserving his own presidential authority to determine when and where to change his commanders.
At this juncture, Frank Blair seriously aggravated matters. That October, returning to Missouri after heroic duty with Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg, the soldier-politician escalated the dissension with an explosive speech. Before an overflowing crowd at Mercantile Library Hall in St. Louis, he proclaimed his firm opposition to every one of the radicals’ Reconstruction ideas. Condemning their call for the immediate emancipation of Missouri’s slaves, he insisted that no action should be taken until the war was won. He argued that Missourians should focus solely on supporting the Union, deferring all issues regarding slavery. He warned that if the radicals gained control, the country would “degenerate into a revolution like that which afflicted France.” They would set themselves up as “judges, witnesses and executioners alike.” They would send to the guillotine “men who come back grimed all over with powder from our battle fields” but who happen to disagree with them on Reconstruction.
Blair then turned his ire on Chase, fully aware that the treasury secretary was hoping to ride the radicals’ support to the White House. Loyalty to Lincoln and hatred for Chase combined to produce a vitriolic rant in which Blair accused the secretary of manipulating Treasury regulations that governed the cotton trade between North and South to benefit his radical friends and prevent conservative merchants, who “were among the first men to come forward and clothe and arm the troops,” from receiving the cotton they desperately needed. As a friendly audience roared its approval, Blair accused Chase of using his cabinet post to create a political machine designed to unseat Lincoln in the next election. In sum, the treasury secretary was a traitor and blackguard indistinguishable from Jefferson Davis himself.
Blair’s speech outraged the radicals, who promptly denounced him as a Copperhead and a traitor. The Liberator criticized his vindictive language, observing that “his style of address does him no honor, and will not advance the ideas of public policy which he advocates.” Even his sister, Elizabeth, remarked that he could “not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of his resentment.”
Lincoln was dismayed by the whole affair, realizing that Frank, whom he liked a great deal, had seriously compromised his future. He wrote a letter to Monty, offering advice as if the tempestuous Frank “were my brother instead of yours.” He warned that by “a misunderstanding,” Frank was “in danger of being permanently separated from those with whom only he can ever have a real sympathy—the sincere opponents of slavery.” By allowing himself to be provoked into personal attacks, he could end up exiled from “the house of his own building. He is young yet. He has abundant talent—quite enough to occupy all his time, without devoting any to temper.” If Frank decided to resume his seat in the House when the new Congress assembled, he should bear this in mind. Otherwise, he would “serve both the country and himself more profitably” by returning to the military, where his recent promotion to corps commander proved that he was “rising in military skill and usefulness.”
Lincoln’s counsel to Frank was echoed in a gentle letter of reprimand to another young man whose intemperate words had made him vulnerable. Captain James Cutts, Jr., had been court-martialed for using “unbecoming language” in addressing a superior officer and for publicly derogating his superior’s accomplishments to the point where a duel almost took place. Young Cutts was the brother of Adele Cutts, Stephen Douglas’s second wife. In remitting the sentence, Lincoln wrote, “You have too much of life yet before you, and have shown too much of promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered.” He tried to impart some of the measured outlook that had served him so well: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
Frank Blair’s battle against Chase in Missouri was carried forward by Monty Blair in Maryland, where a similar struggle over Reconstruction had arisen. Chase again intervened, lending his support to the radical Henry Winter Davis as a candidate for Congress. Davis was a proponent of immediate uncompensated emancipation and rigorous standards for defining eligibility to vote. Monty voiced his opposition at Rockville in early October, flaying the radicals’ program, and arguing that the “ultra-abolitionists” were as despotic as the old slaveocrats. If they succeeded in their draconian measures toward the rebel states, he warned, it would be “fatal to republican institutions.” He excoriated Sumner’s proposition that the rebel states had forfeited their rights to equal participation in the Union by committing suicide by secession. Although Blair’s speech met with approval from his partisan audience, it aroused deep hostility in Congress. Fifty congressmen signed a petition calling on Lincoln to remove Blair from his cabinet.
Once again, Lincoln was forced to balance the interests of contentious factions. Many assumed incorrectly that Blair was speaking for the White House. In fact, Lincoln refused to support Blair’s candidate against Winter Davis, insisting that a Union convention had nominated Davis and it “would be mean to do anything against him.” In the end, the president’s most vital objective for Maryland was realized in the election—a dramatic Republican victory over the Copperheads, ensuring that the former slave state stood firmly behind the Union’s cause. Noah Brooks attended a mass rally in Baltimore to celebrate the triumph of Winter Davis and the entire Republican ticket. As he surveyed the festive banners proclaiming: “Slavery is dead,” h
e marveled at the thought that not long before, the state “was almost coaxed into open rebellion against the government, in simulated defense of slavery.” The enthusiastic crowd signaled that “a great and momentous revolution” had occurred in the hearts and minds of the people. “Do we dream,” marveled Brooks, “or do we actually hear with our own ears loyal Marylanders making speeches in favor of immediate emancipation and a loyal crowd of Baltimoreans applauding to the echo the most radical utterances.”
Chase was a featured speaker at the celebration, and, according to Brooks, “his simple words of sympathy and cheer for the struggling sons of freedom in Maryland were received with wildest enthusiasm.” The complete triumph of the emancipationists was read as a sharp rebuke to Monty Blair and his “fossil theories.” Chase was elated, telling Greeley that he attached “a great deal of importance” to the occasion, for it suggested “the time is ripe” for a “great unconditional Union Party, with Emancipation as a Cardinal principle”—a party with Salmon Chase, presumably, at its head.
Worried that Lincoln’s adversaries were successfully eclipsing him by appealing to the “radical element,” Leonard Swett recommended that the president call for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. “I told him if he took that stand, it was an outside position and no one could maintain himself upon any measure more radical,” Swett recalled, “and if he failed to take the position, his rivals would.” Lincoln, too, could see the “time coming” for a constitutional amendment, and then whoever “stands in its way, will be run over by it”; but the country was not yet ready. The “discordant elements” of the great coalition still had to be held together to ensure victory in the war. Moreover, he objected, “I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don’t like to begin now.”
Herein, Swett concluded, lay the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership. “It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical results.” John Forney of the Washington Daily Chronicle observed the same intuitive judgment and timing, arguing that Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”
CHAPTER 22
“STILL IN WILD WATER”
AS THE FALL 1863 ELECTIONS in the crucial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania approached, Lincoln was visibly unsettled. Recalling the disastrous midterm elections of the previous autumn, he confided to Welles in October that his anxiety was greater than during his presidential race in 1860.
If the antiwar Democrats had gained ground since the previous year, it would signal that Northern support for the war was crumbling. Such results would dispirit the army and invigorate rebel morale. While recent battlefield victories augured well for Republican chances, the divisive issues of civil liberties, slavery, and Reconstruction threatened to erode support in many places. Civil liberties was also a divisive issue in the Confederacy, which had suspended habeas corpus, imposed martial law, and instituted conscription. The former Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs accused “that scoundrel Jeff Davis” of pursuing “an illegal and unconstitutional course” that “outraged justice” and brought a “tide of despotism” upon the South. People in both North and South were becoming increasingly restive.
Lincoln was particularly concerned about Ohio, where Democrats had chosen Copperhead Clement Vallandigham as their gubernatorial candidate against the pro-Union John Brough. Conducting his campaign from exile in Canada, Vallandigham was running on a platform condemning the war as a failure and calling for “peace at any price”—even if slavery was maintained and the Union divided. Lincoln was disheartened that the historic Democratic Party had selected “a man [such] as Vallandigham” for “their representative man.” Whatever votes he received would be “a discredit to the country.”
In Pennsylvania, the Democrats were running George Woodward, an archly conservative judge, against Republican governor Andrew Curtin. Though not as incendiary as Vallandigham’s, Woodward’s opinions were well known. “Slavery,” he had once said, “was intended as a special blessing to the people of the United States.” The contest tightened when the Woodward campaign received a welcome letter of support from George McClellan, written from his residence in New Jersey. If he were voting in Pennsylvania, McClellan wrote, he would “give to Judge Woodward my voice & my vote.”
Lincoln, however, had learned from the bitter election of the previous year and took steps to ensure better results. Any government clerk from Ohio or Pennsylvania who wanted to go home to vote was given a fifteenday leave and provided with a free railroad pass for the trip. Recognizing that the absence of the army vote had been devastating to Republicans in 1862, the president also arranged for soldiers in the field to receive furloughs to return home to vote.
A week before the election, Chase called on Lincoln with a suggestion. If the president granted him a leave of absence from the Treasury, he, like his clerks, would go home to vote the Union ticket. Lincoln had no doubt that Chase would use the campaign trip to bolster his own drive for the presidency. Nevertheless, Chase’s presence in Ohio might well help the Union ticket.
To ensure publicity, Chase invited the journalist Whitelaw Reid to accompany him on the train to Columbus and write regular dispatches for the Cincinnati Gazette and the Associated Press as they traveled around the state. Advance word of the train’s arrival was circulated, and an enormous crowd greeted Chase in Columbus at 2 a.m. The delighted secretary was met with “prolonged cheering, and shouts of ‘Hurrah for our old Governor,’ ‘How are you, old Greenbacks?’ ‘Glad to see you home again.’” Chase indicated his gratitude for this “most unexpected welcome,” and proceeded to give a speech that ostensibly praised the president as a man who “is honestly and earnestly doing his best,” even though the war was not being prosecuted “so fast as it ought.” With a different leader, he hinted, “some mistakes might have been avoided—some misfortunes averted.”
At each stop in his swing through Ohio, Chase encountered huge crowds of supporters. “I come not to speak, but to vote,” he insisted, before launching into a series of self-promoting speeches laced with subtle denigration of Lincoln. Military bands followed him through the streets, creating a festival-like atmosphere. In Cincinnati, a long procession and a military escort accompanied Chase, seated in a carriage drawn by six white horses, to the Burnet House, the site of Lincoln’s unpleasant encounter with Stanton during the Reaper trial. From the balcony of the elegant hotel, he delivered a few words, followed by a lengthy address that evening before a packed audience at Mozart Hall. With slavery and Reconstruction as his themes, he once again covertly criticized the president. He acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation was “the great feature of the war,” without which “we could not achieve success,” but hastened to add that “it would have been even more right, had it been earlier, and without exceptions.”
Lincoln had calculated correctly by giving Chase permission for the trip. His tour helped draw record numbers of pro-Union supporters to the polls. In public squares lit by bonfires and torchlights, the former governor called upon his fellow Ohioans to regard the election as “the day of trial for our Country. All eyes turn to Ohio.” On the Monday before the voting, he begged his audiences “to remember that to-morrow is the most important of all the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.”
On Election Day, Lincoln took up his usual post in the crowded telegraph office. By midnight, everything indicated good results in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. Still, the president refused to retire until he was certain. At 1:20 a.m., a welcome telegram arrived from Chase: “The victory is complete, beyond all hopes.” Chase predicted that Brough’s margin over Vallandigham would be at least 50,000, and would rise higher still when the soldiers’ vote was counted. By 5 a.m.,
Brough’s margin had widened to 100,000. “Glory to God in the highest,” Lincoln wired to the victorious governor-elect. “Ohio has saved the Nation.” The results from Pennsylvania, where Governor Curtin defeated his antiwar challenger, produced another jubilant outburst in the telegraph office. “All honor to the Keystone State!” Stanton wired to John Forney. In July, he wrote, the state “drove rebel invaders from her soil; and, now, in October, she has again rallied for the Union, and overwhelmed the foe at the ballot-box.”
When Welles called on the president to congratulate him, he found him “in good spirits.” Republicans had crushed Copperheads in the two bellwether states, boding well for the congressional elections the following month. Chase had been instrumental in achieving these signal victories. If his journey home to Ohio had also advanced the secretary’s presidential aspirations, so be it. Lincoln understood Chase’s thirst for the presidency. “No man knows what that gnawing is till he has had it,” he said. Should Chase become president, he told Hay, “all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.”
Lincoln might “shut his eyes” to Chase’s stratagems so long as Chase remained a good secretary, but members of his cabinet possessed less tolerance. “I’m afraid Mr. Chase’s head is turned by his eagerness in pursuit of the presidency,” Bates recorded in his diary. “That visit to the west is generally understood as [his] opening campaign.” Perusing newspaper accounts of Chase’s speeches, the Attorney General noted derisively that his colleague had attributed “the salvation of the country to his own admirable financial system”—much as Cicero had sworn, “By the immortal Gods, I have saved my country.” Chase ought to have focused solely on his cabinet position, Bates observed, but “it is of the nature of ambition to grow prurient, and run off with its victim.” Like Bates, Welles believed that Chase’s presidential aspirations had “warped” his judgment, leading him to divisively exploit the Reconstruction issue to consolidate the radical wing of the party behind him. Yet these critiques were moderate compared to the scathing indictments the Blairs poured forth in daily correspondence to their friends.
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