The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Such brusque, not to say cavalier, treatment of his highly respected Treasury chief was prologue to an even rougher handling of that dignitary in mid-December, when he tripped him neatly from behind as he tried a sprint up several rungs of the political ladder. This was a time of crisis and division, in the cabinet as in the nation at large. One member, Secretary of the Interior Caleb Blood Smith, who had received his appointment as the result of a convention bargain, was leaving to accept a judgeship Lincoln had offered him in his native Indiana; his post would go to John Palmer Usher, another Hoosier, at present the Assistant Secretary. The other six members were split on the question of whether to admit West Virginia as a state under an act just passed by Congress, divorcing Virginia’s northwest counties from the Old Dominion and validating the rump government set up in Charleston during the Sumter furor. Three cabinet officers—Chase, Stanton, and Secretary of State William H. Seward—wanted Lincoln to sign the bill, converting slave soil into free soil by the stroke of a pen, and incidentally adding good Republican votes on whatever questions Congress might decide needed settling in the future; while three others—Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—recommended that he veto it, on grounds that the act was in a sense a ratification of secession. Though he could not reconcile their views, Lincoln quickly solved the problem to his own approximate satisfaction. “The division of a state is dreaded as a precedent,” he reasoned. “But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution and secession in favor of the Constitution.” On the last day of the year, though he did so with a wry face, he signed the bill. West Virginia would become in June a full-fledged state of the Union, the thirty-fifth, not discounting the eleven who had no representation in Congress pending the settlement of their claim to have abolished their old ties.

  Seward and Chase had voted together on the issue, but that was rare. In general they were diametrically opposed, as they had been in the old days when they were rivals for the office which, by a fluke, had gone to Lincoln. Chase, who was jealous of Seward’s position as the President’s chief adviser, wanted not only the seat closest to the one at the head of the table, but also, as time would show, the principal seat itself. In this connection, noting the way the wind blew, he had aligned himself with the radicals in Congress, the so-called Jacobins who had come to see Seward as the stumbling block in the way of adoption of their notions as to how the war should be fought and the country run, just as Chase had come to see him as a hurdle that would have to be removed or overleaped if he was to fulfill his own ambitions. By way of undoing their common adversary, he fanned the flames of the radicals’ hatred by reporting Seward’s every private opposition to their aims (the New Yorker, for example, had delayed the promulgation of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation by advising Lincoln to wait for a more propitious season before releasing it to the world; than which, indeed, there could be no crime greater in radical eyes) as well as by giving them a blow-by-blow account of every cabinet crisis, omitting nothing that served to thicken the atmosphere of discord and indecision. So it was that at last, on December 17—four days after the Fredericksburg fiasco, which seemed to them to prove emphatically that the prosecution of the war was in quite the wrong hands—all but one of the thirty-two Republican senators met in secret caucus on Capitol Hill and passed unanimously the following resolution, by way of advice to the leader of their party: “Resolved, that … the public confidence in the present administration would be increased by a change in and partial reconstruction of the cabinet.” It was Seward they were after, Seward alone, and lest there be any doubt on that score a committee of nine was appointed to present the resolution to Lincoln and explain to him just what it was they meant.

  The one abstaining senator was New York’s Preston King, who went at once to Seward and warned his former senatorial colleague that the Jacobins, “thirsty for a victim” in the wake of recent misfortunes, had selected his neck for the ax. Seward reacted fast when he learned thus of the resolution about to be presented. “They may do as they please about me,” he said, “but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” Accordingly he took a sheet of paper, and having scrawled a few words across it—“Sir, I hereby resign from the office of Secretary of State, and beg that my resignation be accepted immediately”—sent it forthwith to the White House. Lincoln was shocked. “What does this mean?” he asked as he put on his hat and set out for Seward’s house, which was just across the street. Seward explained what had happened, along with what was about to happen, and added that he personally would be glad to get from under the burden of official duties and political harassment. “Ah yes, Governor,” Lincoln said, shaking his head. “That will do very well for you, but I am like the starling in Sterne’s story. ‘I can’t get out.’ ” He pocketed the resignation and went sadly back across the White House lawn.

  At any rate, next morning when the committee spokesman called, he knew what to expect. He set the time for the presentation at 7 o’clock that evening; he would receive the full committee then. This was a crisis, not only for Lincoln but also for the nation, and he knew it. “If I had yielded to that storm and dismissed Seward,” he said later, “the thing would have all slumped over one way, and we should have been left with a scant handful of supporters.” Knowing what had to be done was a quite different thing, however, from knowing how to do it. Ben Wade of Ohio, George W. Julian of Indiana, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan: these and others like them were men of power and savage purpose, accomplished haters who would be merciless in revenging even an imagined slight, let alone an outright rebuff. Whatever Lincoln did had better be done without incurring their personal enmity. Besides, he not only had to avoid their anger; he also needed their support. What he required just now was someone to draw their wrath, someone to serve him much as a billygoat serves the farmer who places him in a barnlot to draw fleas. By evening, not without a certain sense of political and even poetical justice, he had chosen the someone. All that remained was to make him serve, and that could be done quite simply by branding him, in the eyes of all, for what he was.

  The nine committeemen were prompt; Lincoln received them in his office. By way of a beginning, seventy-one-year-old Jacob Collamer of Vermont, who had been elected spokesman, read the resolution and followed it with a paper which summed up the conclusions reached in caucus the day before. The war should be prosecuted vigorously; cabinet members should be “cordial, resolute, unwavering” in their devotion to the principles of the Republican majority; the cabinet itself, once it had been stripped and rebuilt so as to contain only such stalwarts, should have a larger voice in the running of the government. Wade rose next, a vigorous man with “burning” eyes and bulldog flews, protesting hotly that the President had “placed the direction of our military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats.” He spoke at length, going somewhat afield from the central issue, and was followed by Fessenden, who agreed that the war was “not sufficiently in the hands of its friends,” then brought the discussion back on target by charging specifically “that the Secretary of State [is] not in accord with the majority of the cabinet and [has] exerted an injurious influence upon the conduct of the war.” Others had their say along these lines, also at considerable length, but Lincoln kept his temper and said little. After three hours of listening, however, he suggested that the meeting adjourn until the following night. The senators agreed. Alone at last, he saw clearly, as he presently remarked, that if he let these men have their way “the whole government must cave in; it could not stand, could not hold water; the bottom would be out.”

  He knew what to do and, by now, how to do it; but he was saddened. “What do those men want?” he asked his friend Senator Orville Br
owning of Illinois next day. “I hardly know, Mr President,” Browning replied, “but they are exceedingly violent.…” Lincoln knew well enough what they wanted, though, and he said so: “They wish to get rid of me—and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.” Browning protested, but Lincoln shook his head. “We are now on the brink of destruction,” he said. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.” Again Browning protested. Though he was not a member of the committee, he had attended the caucus and had voted for the resolution: which, he explained defensively, “was the gentlest thing that could be done. We had to do that, or worse.” The trouble he said was Seward. While he personally had a high regard for the Secretary, others were saying that the New Yorker had the President under his thumb. “Why should men believe a lie,” Lincoln broke in, “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?” His sadness deepened. “The committee is to be up to see me at 7 o’clock. Since I heard last night of the proceedings of the caucus I have been more distressed than by any event of my life.”

  If this was so, it did not show in his manner when he welcomed the committeemen that evening for a second round of grievance presentations. Before the discussion got under way, however, he announced to the assembled senators that he had thought it fitting to have the cabinet officers—minus Seward, of course, since even aside from the fact that his resignation was pending, that would have been too indelicate—present to answer the charge that there was discord among them and that the President seldom followed or even asked for their advice. Whereupon the door opened and the six gentlemen in question filed into the room. Lincoln had invited them at the cabinet meeting that morning, after telling them of the matter afoot and of Seward’s submission of his resignation. Mostly they had welcomed the chance to confront their accusers, although two of their number—Chase in particular—had protested that they “knew of no good that could come of an interview.” In the end, however, the two—the other was Bates—had been obliged to go along with the majority. Now here they were, face to face with critics whose accusations were based, at least in part, on information supplied in private by Chase in order to curry favor with them. Already he was squirming, as if the fleas had jumped at the sight of his large, handsome person: but the worst was still to come.

  If Chase and some of the senators were embarrassed by the confrontation, Lincoln certainly was not. He began the proceedings by reading aloud yesterday’s bill of particulars, admitting as he went along that he had not consulted the cabinet on all affairs of state or war, and that he had not always followed their advice, even when he had sought it; but in the main, he said, he had valued and used their abilities, individually and collectively. As for discord, he did not think it reasonable to expect seven such independent-minded men to agree on every issue that came before them; but here again, he said, he thought they worked together mainly as a unit, and certainly he himself had no complaint. He paused, then turned to the six cabinet members present, beginning to poll them one by one. Did they or did they not agree with his statement of the case? They did; or so they said, one by one; until he came to Chase. Chase, as it turned out, also agreed, though not without considerable hemming and hawing by way of preamble. He would never have come to the meeting, he said, if he had known he was “to be arraigned.” He seemed angry. He seemed to feel that he was being “put upon”—as indeed he was. In the end, with Wade and the others watching balefully, he admitted that matters of prime importance had usually come before the cabinet, though perhaps “not so fully as might be desired,” and that there had been “no want of unity in the cabinet, but a general acquiescence in public measures.” Thus he wound up, and the Jacobins watched him cold-eyed, contrasting what he said now, in the presence of Lincoln and his colleagues, with what he had said in private. The President did not prolong his suffering. Having more or less settled these two points of contention, he shifted the talk to the question of Seward, defending his chief minister against yesterday’s charges, and then began to poll the committeemen on their views. At that point Fessenden recoiled. “I do not think it proper,” he said, “to discuss the merits or demerits of a member of the cabinet in the presence of his associates.” Chase was quick to agree. “I think the members of the cabinet should withdraw,” he said. In solemn procession they did so, some amused, some disgruntled, and one, at least, discredited in the eyes of men whose favor he had sought.

  Like Simon Cameron a year ago, the Treasury chief had learned the hard way what it meant to tangle with Lincoln. Cameron was in Russia now, a victim of political decapitation, and Chase was determined to avoid such punishment. He would forestall the headsman by submitting, however regretfully, his resignation. This was exactly what Lincoln wanted: as was shown next morning, December 20, when he came into his office and found Chase, Welles, and Stanton grouped around the fire. Chase began to complain of yesterday’s damage to his dignity. It had affected him most painfully, he said, for it seemed to indicate a lack of confidence. In fact—he hesitated—he had written out his resignation at home the night before.… Lincoln’s reaction to this was not at all what the Secretary had expected. His expression was one of downright joy.

  “Where is it?” he said eagerly.

  “I brought it with me,” Chase replied, taking a letter from his inside coat pocket.

  “Let me have it,” Lincoln said, and he put out a long arm.

  Chase drew back, but not in time. Lincoln already had hold of the paper, and the Secretary suffered the added shock of having it snatched from his grasp. Reading it quickly through, Lincoln laughed; “a triumphal laugh,” Welles called it in his diary. “This cuts the Gordian knot,” he exclaimed. “I can dispose of this subject now without difficulty. I see my way clear.” Stanton, who had been guilty of some of the same backstairs maneuvers—though he did not know whether the President suspected him, or what he might do if he did—remarked stiffly that he was prepared to tender his resignation, too. But Lincoln already had what he had been working toward. “You may go to your department,” he said gaily. “I don’t want yours. This”—he held up 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.”

  His satisfaction was obvious, amounting to delight. What he had had in mind all along, and had achieved through skillful handling, was a balance: Chase’s resignation against Seward’s, which the Jacobins were still urging him to accept. Now, however, with Chase’s inseparably included—“If one goes, the other must,” he presently notified the senators; “they must hunt in couples”—they would be much less insistent; for, whatever their disgust with the Treasury chief’s performance the day before, they still believed that he could be useful to them within the administration’s private councils. Lincoln himself described the situation with a metaphor out of his boyhood in Kentucky, where he had seen farmers riding to market with a brace of pumpkins lodged snugly in a bag, one at each end in order to make a balanced load across the horse’s withers. “Now I can ride,” he said. “I have got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.” Accordingly, he sent polite, identical notes to the two ministers, declining to accept their resignations and requesting them to continue as members of his official family. Seward, who had watched the maneuvers with amusement from a seat behind the scene, agreed at once; but Chase held off, still suffering from the fleabites, which were no less painful for being figurative. “I will sleep on it,” he said. However, after a day of meditation and prayer—for it was a Sunday and he was intensely religious, spending a good part of each Sabbath on his knees—he agreed to remain at his post, as Lincoln had confidently expected.

  Here was a case of double salvation, in more ways than one. Within the confines of his office in the White House, Lincoln had planned and fought a three-day battle as important to the welfare of the nation, and the progress of the war through united effort, as many that raged in the open field
with booming guns and casualties by the thousands. In addition to retaining the services of Seward and Chase, both excellent men at their respective posts, he had managed to turn aside the wrath of the Jacobins without increasing their bitterness toward himself or incurring their open hatred, which might well have been fatal. Nor was that all. Paradoxically, because of the way he had gone about it, in avoiding the disruption of his cabinet he had achieved within it a closer harmony than had obtained before. This was partly because of the increased respect his actions earned him, but it was also because of the effect the incident had on the two ministers most intimately concerned. For all his loyalty to Lincoln through the storm, Seward had not previously abandoned the notion that he was the man directly in line for his job. Now, though, with all but one of the senators in his own party having expressed a desire to see him removed from any connection with the executive branch of the government, the presidential itch was cured. From that hour, his devotion to his duties was single-minded and his loyalty acquired an added zeal. So much could hardly be said for Chase, exactly, but he too had been sobered, and his ambition taken down a notch, by the cold-eyed looks the radical leaders had given him while he squirmed. It was no wonder, then, that Lincoln indulged in self-congratulation when he reviewed the three-day maneuver. “I do not see how I could have done better,” he remarked.