In July, Lincoln moaned that the problem of choosing a surveyor of customs for New York “has given me more trouble than any since my election.”69 He finally selected Rufus Andrews, who was favored by the Greeley wing of the party. Lincoln rejoiced on those rare occasions when the squabbling factions in the Empire State could agree on an appointment. In May, he told Chase that one Christopher Adams “is magnificently recommended; but the great point in his favor is that Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley join in recommending him. I suppose the like never happened before, and never will again; so that it is now or never.”70
Lincoln knowingly made several questionable appointments. As Gideon Welles remarked, “some things were doubtless done, which, under other circumstances and left to himself he [Lincoln] would have ordered differently.”71 Charles Francis Adams thought that Lincoln, whom he called “a vulgar man, unfitted both by education and nature for the post of President,” had been “quite obtuse” and hence had “made very bad selections for all branches of the service.”72 A conspicuous example of an unfortunate choice was the appointment of David P. Holloway as commissioner of patents. Holloway was a friend of Interior Secretary Caleb B. Smith. The senate committee investigating his nomination refused to report it out “on the ground of his presumed incompetence.”73 The main objection was his lack of any background in law or science. Nevertheless, Lincoln stood by Holloway, who beat out his chief competitor, an influential newspaperman, George G. Fogg of New Hampshire. Only by agreeing to give Fogg the Swiss mission was Lincoln able to win senate confirmation for Holloway. To George W. Julian, who denounced Holloway as “an incompetent and unworthy man,” Lincoln replied: “There is much force in what you say, but, in the balancing of matters, I guess I shall have to appoint him.”74
Some of Lincoln’s more unfortunate choices were his personal friends, most notably Mark Delahay and Ward Hill Lamon. Lincoln’s affection for the bibulous Delahay, whom Henry Villard described as “an empty-headed, self-puffing, vainglorious strut,” was curious.75 He may have felt sorry for the Kansas politico, who had little money and a large family, had been a law partner of Lincoln’s close friend Edward D. Baker, had worked on an Illinois newspaper with a loyal ally of Lincoln, and was married to Louisiana Hanks, the daughter of one of Lincoln’s cousins. Moreover, the president may have been trying to appease his old friend Jesse K. Dubois, who successfully urged Delahay’s appointment as surveyor general of Kansas and Nebraska. When Lincoln later elevated Delahay to a judgeship, the appointment aroused strong opposition from Kansans who insisted that he had no qualifications for the bench. Jackson Grimshaw had been recommended by several of Lincoln’s Illinois allies for that post and declared that it was “disgraceful to the President who knew Delahay and all his faults, but the disgrace will be greater if the Senate confirms him. He is no lawyer, could not try a case properly even in a Justice’s Court, and has no character. Mr. Buchanan in his worst days never made so disgraceful an appointment to the bench.”76 A Kansan complained that there was “not a respectable lawyer in the State that is not absolutely shocked at the appointment.”77 When Congress launched an impeachment investigation, Delahay was revealed to be a corrupt drunkard whose behavior had disgraced the court. To avoid being removed on impeachment, he resigned.
Lamon’s appointment as marshal of the District of Columbia was also highly controversial and created friction between Lincoln and Congress. “I went to Washington,” Lamon recalled, “having been promised the consulship at Paris by Mr. Lincoln. But as soon as we realized how serious was the state of political affairs, [David] Davis, seconded by Lincoln himself, persuaded me to remain near the President’s person to protect him from danger.”78 Lincoln probably felt pity for the financially straitened Lamon and gave him that remunerative post to help him out. Before nominating his one-time colleague at the bar, the president asked Republican leaders in Washington how they would react if he appointed an Illinois friend to serve as marshal, for he did not wish to name anyone objectionable to the city’s residents. It was customary to select a Washingtonian for that post.
William P. Wood, a model-maker from Alexandria who was to become superintendent of the Old Capitol Prison during the Civil War, agreed to circulate a petition on behalf of Lamon. With some difficulty, Wood and his friends managed to obtain about 200 signatures. When he recommended that the assistant marshal, George W. Phillips, and all other members of the marshal’s staff be fired for disloyalty, Lamon emphatically agreed to do so. Wood then helped raise money for Lamon’s bond and did whatever else he could to facilitate his appointment. Wood, however, soon grew disenchanted with the Cavalier (as the Virginia-born Lamon was called), especially after he reneged on his pledge to fire Phillips and the others. Indignantly, Wood called at the White House four times to protest, only to be rebuffed. So in July he appealed to the senate, averring that “to enumerate in detail his [Lamon’s] many violations of honor to his friends, would require too much space for this protest; suffice it to say, that instead of Republicans for his councillors and friends he has noted secessionists and villifyers of the present Administration; he attaches less importance to his word, than to the contents of a black bottle which he regards as his nerve regulator; he has almost entirely neglected his official duties as Marshal, leaving his deputy G. W. Phillips (the man whom he pledged his honor to remove) to perform the duties of Marshal; he has made himself obnoxious to the citizens of Washington by his deception falsehoods and dissipation.” Some 2,500 such citizens signed a petition protesting against the appointment of a nonresident as marshal. Wood provided the senate with the names of several other Washingtonians who could confirm his story, including five of the dozen men who had recommended Lamon’s appointment.79 Benjamin Brown French testified that Lamon “did not attend [to] the duties at all.”80
Like Delahay, Lamon was investigated by a congressional committee, which in 1861 found him guilty of an “unwarranted and scandalous assumption of authority” in detaching a regiment from Missouri, bringing it east, and putting himself in charge of it as a brigadier general. For this misdeed, he was fined $20,000.81 The following year Lamon again antagonized Congress, this time over the issue of fugitive slaves. As marshal of the District of Columbia, he was in charge of the Washington jail, unaffectionately known as the Blue Jug, where he held alleged runaways. Lamon was holding some of the fugitives belonging to disloyal masters for safekeeping until the war’s end. During Lamon’s tenure, overcrowding became a scandal at the Blue Jug, with the prison containing four times as many prisoners as it was designed to accommodate. Lamon collected 21¢ per day per prisoner, which yielded him a handsome profit. When outraged congressional Radicals tried to visit the jail, Lamon forbade them entrance.
One of those Radicals, James W. Grimes of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, indignantly protested and took his case to Lincoln, who was too busy to receive him. The senate condemned Lamon’s actions. Relations between Grimes and Lincoln became frosty thereafter, causing the president to lament in 1864 that in all his dealings with Congress “my greatest disappointment of all has been with Grimes. Before I came here [to Washington], I certainly expected to rely upon Grimes more than any other one man in the Senate. I like him very much. He is a great strong fellow. He is a valuable friend, a dangerous enemy. He carries too many guns not to be respected in any point of view. But he got wrong against me, I do not clearly know how, and has always been cool and almost hostile to me.”82 (On another occasion, Lincoln said he must appoint William F. Turner to an Arizona judgeship. “It is Grimes’s man, and I must do something for Grimes. I have tried hard to please him from the start, but he complains, and I must satisfy him if possible.”)83 Horace White blamed the president’s moral “obtuseness” in retaining Lamon in office for causing “the coolness that existed between Grimes & Lincoln.”84
Other senators, including John P. Hale of New Hampshire and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, were highly critical of the indiscreet, belligere
nt, quarrelsome Lamon, who virtually challenged Illinois Congressman Elihu B. Washburne to a duel. The Cavalier repeatedly clashed with General James S. Wadsworth, military governor of the District. In May 1862, a constituent warned Lyman Trumbull that “there is not one matter that has & still is causing so much reproach upon Pres. Lincoln, so much great shame to his sincere friends, as this Lamon business.”85 Lamon was widely scorned for singing “nigger-songs” and obscene madrigals, for having a weak intellect, and for lacking dignity.86
Despite numerous demands that he fire Lamon, Lincoln stood by his old friend, who served as an informal presidential bodyguard and companion not only on the train ride from Harrisburg to Washington but throughout the Civil War. Lincoln valued his humor, charm, high spirits, conviviality, and exceptional loyalty. Lincoln’s fondness for Lamon persisted even though the Cavalier underwent a personality change soon after the election of 1860. According to David Davis, who knew whereof he spoke, Lamon then became full of himself. “I feel sorry for Hill Lamon,” the judge wrote in January 1861, for “when he was in Bloomington with his negro boy, I made up my mind that his head was turned & that he would hereafter do no good—He makes himself ridiculous.”87 Four months later, Davis said “Hill Lamon is crazy. … I can[’]t account for it & nobody else [can].”88 An Illinois editor reported from Washington that “Lamon affects the great man here—rides up to the White House daily, & tries to be on the most familiar footing with the President. … His head is evidently turned by his prosperity.”89
Another ethically suspect personal and political friend whom Lincoln favored was Edward D. Baker, the newly elected senator from Oregon. The ethnologist George Gibbs considered him “a very corrupt man.”90 As a law partner of Stephen T. Logan, Baker had mishandled clients’ money. During the Civil War, he received substantial sums to raise a regiment; upon his death in October 1861, it was discovered that he had left $10,000 unaccounted for. His closest political adviser was the notoriously corrupt Andrew J. Butler, brother of Massachusetts politico Benjamin F. Butler.
Baker felt entitled to control all West Coast patronage because he was the only Republican senator from the Pacific Northwest. Prominent California Republicans, led by James W. Simonton of the San Francisco Bulletin, businessman Leland Stanford (who would be elected governor later in 1861), and Joseph A. Nunes, resented Baker’s presumption and complained to Lincoln. On March 30, the antagonistic factions met at the White House to discuss offices in the Far West. Baker’s opponents were particularly upset that Democrat Robert J. Stevens, a son-in-law of the senator, was being championed for superintendent of the San Francisco mint. When they called at the Executive Mansion, they were surprised to discover Baker and his henchman Butler there. The meeting began with Nunes delivering a temperate appeal, after which he handed the president a slate of suggested nominees for California posts along with a mild remonstrance against Baker’s interference. Simonton then read a bitter attack on the Oregon senator, who, he said (perhaps alluding to Butler), had “presented to the President, as a most substantial and respectable man, a person whose antecedents and reputation Mr. Simonton denounced severely.”91 (In 1862, the senate would unanimously reject the nomination of Butler to a captaincy in the army.) Simonton characterized other men endorsed by Baker as gamblers and blackguards.
Lincoln asked if he could keep the papers, including Simonton’s remarks. The editor said he would “like to make some emendations” to his manuscript. “Never mind the emendations,” replied Lincoln, “if it is mine, I want it as is.” Then, “in a withering tone of indignation,” he said that Nunes’s paper, “being somewhat respectful in its tone, I think I will keep; but this one,” holding Simonton’s text aloft, “I will show you what I will do with it.” He stepped to the fireplace and flung the offending document into the flames.92 Returning to his desk, Lincoln erupted in anger so vehemently that, as one observer put it, “everybody present quailed before it. His wrath was simply terrible.”93 He declared: “I have known Colonel Baker longer and better than any of you here, and these attacks upon him I know to be outrageous. I will hear no more of them. If you wish to do so, present your recommendations for office, and I will give them a respectful hearing, but no more of this kind of proceeding.”94 Simonton “looked as though he had been struck by a thunderbolt, but finally recovered so far as to say, ‘I have simply done my duty: I have nothing to expect from the Executive, and in doing what I did, I merely meant to protect the interests of my State.’ ”95
As the delegation left, one of Baker’s friends threatened to shoot Simonton on the spot. Soon the president called them back, but Simonton did not reappear. On being told that the editor felt insulted, Lincoln sent a special messenger to fetch him, and they reached an entente cordiale, though patronage matters were not settled then and there. Later, the president explained that Simonton’s paper “was an unjust attack upon my dearest personal friend. … The delegation did not know what they were talking about when they made him responsible, almost abusively, for what I had done, or proposed to do. They told me that that was my paper, to do with as I liked. I could not trust myself to reply in words: I was so angry.”96 It seems that Lincoln had implicitly promised Baker’s daughter that her husband, Robert J. Stevens, would receive a federal job, which he did win. (Two years later Stevens was unceremoniously removed on charges of fraud.)
A similar fate befell Thomas J. Dryer, commissioner to the Hawaiian Islands and editor of the Portland Oregonian. Dryer, who claimed that he paid his good friend Baker several hundred dollars for his support in obtaining the commissionership, won that post despite allegations that he was “a vile, low, contemptible drunkard, unworthy to associate with honorable men.”97 In 1863, after much hesitation, Lincoln dismissed him in response to complaints from the Hawaiian government that he was a drunkard. Reportedly, Dryer was “rude, rough and repulsive to genteel society,” and regularly flouted “all the proprieties of social life by a want of savoir faire or rather rough vulgarity or boorishness, which offends propriety, decency and conventional usage.”98
Although Lincoln honored most of Baker’s requests, the senator was disgusted when one of his opponents, William Rabe, was named postmaster at San Francisco. After the first round of patronage distribution ended, Baker mused: “Mr Lincoln has acted peculiarly, and although my very good friend … he has not done what … I would have expected, yet I am sure he has a real attachment to me.”99
Lincoln’s outburst against Simonton was regarded as “the first symptom of the much vaunted, but rather tardy Jacksonism of ‘Old Abe.’ ”100 (Other signs of the president’s “latent Jacksonism” were manifesting themselves in late March as he dealt with the Fort Sumter dilemma.)
Illinois Appointees
Lincoln was especially vexed by patronage-hungry Illinoisans. Secretary of War Cameron complained that “the scramble is so great here, from all quarters, and especially Illinois, that we begin to despair.”101 John Hay misleadingly asserted that there “never was a President who so little as Lincoln admitted personal consideration in the distribution of places. He rarely gave a place to a friend—still more rarely because he was a friend.” Lincoln “was entirely destitute of gratitude for political services rendered to himself.”102 Actually, the president did reward many of his Illinois friends, especially those who had helped him during his early days in the Prairie State. Uncle Jimmy Short, Lincoln’s benefactor in New Salem, became agent for the Round Valley Indian reservation in California. Oliver G. Abell, son of a New Salem woman who acted as a surrogate mother to Lincoln, was appointed messenger in the General Land Office. Ethelbert P. Oliphant, who served with Lincoln in the Black Hawk War, became a judge in the Washington Territory. Lincoln’s good friends and fellow clerks from New Salem days, William G. Greene and Charles Maltby, were named collectors of internal revenue.
Other Illinois friends of the president fared well at the patronage trough. Anson G. Henry was named surveyor general of the Washington Territory; Simeon Francis b
ecame a paymaster in the army; Allen Francis received a consulate in Canada; and Theodore Canisius served as consul in Vienna. Lincoln picked Archibald Williams as U.S. district attorney for Kansas. Samuel C. Parks served as associate justice of the Idaho Territory’s Supreme Court. The pastor of Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church, James Smith, whom Lincoln described as “an intimate personal friend of mine,” represented U.S. interests as a consul in his native Scotland.103 Jackson Grimshaw became a collector of internal revenue and Gustave Koerner minister to Spain (after Carl Schurz resigned). For governor of the Washington Territory, Lincoln chose yet another Illinois friend, William Pickering, who had long served as a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature. Lawrence Weldon was named district attorney for southern Illinois. Thomas J. Pickett became an agent of the Quartermaster’s Department. William Jayne, Lincoln’s personal physician and a brother-in-law of Lyman Trumbull, was appointed governor of the Dakota Territory. When Trumbull’s brother Benjamin was made a land office receiver at Omaha, some Republicans howled in protest.
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