When Lincoln praised Banks as a capable administrator with a national reputation, Hamlin disagreed, calling the Bobbin Boy a “trimmer in politics.”151 Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew denounced Banks’s “relations to ‘Know Nothingism;’ his non-commitalism on any matter of principle in the face of any danger, & his willingness to make everything a subject of doubt by his logomachy of sounding and double meaning phrases.”152 Banks, who had served three terms as governor of Massachusetts and one term as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, would remain a viable candidate, despite such disapproval. He enjoyed strong support from influential Massachusetts businessmen as well as the New York Herald.
Banks’s eligibility for the New England seat, however, was compromised in the summer of 1860 when he accepted the presidency of the Illinois Central Railroad and agreed to move to Chicago. Lincoln told a friend of Banks that if the former governor had “remained in New England there would have been no second man thought of,” that Banks’s “name was in the first list that he ever made, that previous to his own election he did not feel at liberty to make any suggestion” about Banks’s move to Illinois, “but that the change put it out of his power to do what he should otherwise at once have done without a suggestion from any one.”153 In February 1861, Lincoln told friends of the former governor, “I like your man Banks, and have tried to find a place for him in my Cabinet, but I am afraid I shall not quite fetch it.”154
That left Welles as the front-runner. Months earlier he had impressed Lincoln during his campaign visit to Hartford, and the president-elect knew of the helpful role Welles had played at the Chicago Convention. The Connecticut editor also had strong backing from Hamlin, Horace Greeley, John A. Andrew, Henry B. Stanton, Edwin D. Morgan, George G. Fogg, Edward Lillie Pierce, E. S. Cleveland, Congressman John Dennison Baldwin, and Senators Henry Wilson, James Dixon, and Preston King. As Welles recalled, King, who had been a close friend for two decades, “was most earnest and emphatic in favor of my appointment, and was sleepless and unremitting in thwarting and defeating the intrigues of Weed and others against me.”155 Lincoln, fearing that Welles might be too radical an opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act, had Hamlin investigate that matter; the vice-president-to-be interviewed Connecticut Senator James Dixon, who vouched for Welles’s soundness on the issue. Hamlin also elicited a letter from Welles explaining that while he deplored that law, wanted it reformed, and thought that states rather than the federal government should assume the responsibility of carrying it out, he nevertheless supported its enforcement. Swett spoke highly of Welles. Thus, when Lincoln, who was persuaded of Welles’s obvious suitability for the position, left Springfield for Washington in mid-February, the Connecticut Republican stood the best chance of occupying the New England seat in the cabinet.
Maryland in the Cabinet
Eager to keep the Upper South and Border States in the Union, Lincoln resolved to appoint a Marylander to his cabinet. “The propriety of giving a Cabinet appointment to that State is very generally recognized,” said the New York Times.156 The two leading candidates were Montgomery Blair, the scholarly, quarrelsome, socially awkward West Point graduate and son of the long-time political insider Francis P. Blair Sr., and Whig-American Congressman Henry Winter Davis, the combative, self-righteous, vain cousin of David Davis. Blair had support from influential senators like Trumbull, Hamlin, Preston King, Zachariah Chandler, and Benjamin F. Wade; Ohioans like Congressman John A. Gurley and Governor-elect William Dennison; New Hampshire Governor Ichabod Goodwin; John C. Frémont; and some leading Maryland Republicans. But Weed and Seward supported Davis and opposed Blair because he was a former Democrat who, along with his father and brother, had worked hard at Chicago to defeat Seward. Radicals in the Free State, however, opposed both Blair and Davis in favor of Judge William L. Marshall. On Christmas Eve, Lincoln told Trumbull that he expected “to be able to offer Mr. Blair a place in the cabinet; but I can not, as yet, be committed on the matter, to any extent whatever.”157
Henry Winter Davis, who enjoyed the backing of Indianans like Governor-elect Henry S. Lane and John D. Defrees as well as leading New York newspapers and dozens of his colleagues in the U.S. House, had alienated some Maryland Republicans by campaigning for Bell in the presidential election. Congressman John Covode warned Lincoln that “Davis has scarcely enough of firmness for the times,” while Frank Blair complained that Davis “is not a Republican and has no sympathy with our party.”158 Davis himself refused to lobby on his own behalf, arguing that “Mr. Lincoln must be left free & keep himself free—or he will make shipwreck of himself and the Govt.”159
Seward as Dictator for Defense
Lincoln postponed a final decision on the five unfilled cabinet positions until he could meet with congressional leaders in person. He also delayed his trip to Washington. Many people, including Seward, feared, with some reason, that disunionists were plotting to disrupt the count of the electoral vote and seize the capital. When Seward urged him to come to Washington early, Lincoln declined, explaining that in his view the inauguration “is not the most dangerous point for us. Our adversaries have us more clearly at disadvantage, on the second Wednesday of February, when the [electoral college] votes should be officially counted [in Congress]. If the two Houses refuse to meet at all, or meet without a quorum of each, where shall we be? I do not think that this counting is constitutionally essential to the election; but how are we to proceed in absence of it?”160 So he determined to remain in Springfield until February 11, when he would begin a circuitous, two-week train journey to the capital. He understandably feared that after reaching Washington “he could have no time to himself.”161
Since Lincoln was not at the center of power during the crucial weeks when the Cotton States were pulling out of the Union, Seward took it upon himself to keep the country intact at least until inauguration day. To those urging him to back the Crittenden Compromise, Seward replied that it would be politically suicidal and insisted that “you must let me save the Union in my own way.”162 He viewed himself as indispensable; if he were away from Washington for only three days, he predicted, “this Administration, the Congress, and the District would fall into consternation and despair. I am the only hopeful, calm, conciliatory person here.”163 He asserted that “the majority of those around him were determined to pull the house down & he was determined not to let them.”164 Both Buchanan and Lincoln, he crowed, “unite in devolving on me the responsibility of averting … disasters.”165 He had, he said, “assumed a sort of dictatorship for defense.”166 He envisioned his role as that of commander-in-chief; in mid-January he told his wife: “I hope what I have done will bring some good fruits, and, in any case, clear my own conscience of responsibility, if, indeed, I am to engage in conducting a war against a portion of the American people.”167 Henry Adams regarded Seward as the “virtual ruler of this country.”168 Adams’s father agreed, writing in mid-January that “Seward is even now the guiding hand at the helm.”169 When Seward spoke in favor of conciliation, the public assumed that he reflected Lincoln’s views. But, as the president-elect told a visitor in early February, “Seward made all his speeches without consulting him.”170 Instead of acting as Lincoln’s agent, the senator served as an independent negotiator between the president-elect and representatives of the Upper South and the Border States, whose loyalty was essential for the preservation of the Union.
Seward calculated that time would heal the sectional wounds. According to his friend Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, “Mr. Seward’s real view of the state of the country appears to be, that if bloodshed can be avoided until the new Government is installed, the Seceding States will in no long time return to the Confederation. He has unbounded confidence in his own skill in managing the American people.… He thinks that in a few months the evils and hardships produced by Secession will become intolerably grievous to the Southern States; that they will be completely reassured as to the intentions of the Administration; and t
hat the conservative element which is now kept under the surface by violent pressure of the Secessionists, will emerge with irresistible force. From all these causes he confidently expects that when elections … are held in the Southern States in November next, the Union Parties will have a clear majority, and will bring the Seceding States back into the Confederation. He then hopes to place himself at the head of a strong Union party, having extensive ramifications both in the North and in the South, and to make Union or Disunion not Freedom or Slavery the watchword of political parties.”171
In late December, Seward introduced four resolutions in the Committee of Thirteen, but they were not the ones that Lincoln had asked Weed to pass along to him with the recommendation that “that you substantially adopt his views.”172 Unlike the president-elect, Seward called for a guarantee of slavery in the states where it already existed. Moreover, he failed to include Lincoln’s affirmation that the Union must be preserved, as well as his support for federal enforcement of the fugitive slave provision of the Constitution and his suggestion that private citizens be exempted from the requirement to assist slave catchers. Seward reported to the president-elect that his Republican colleagues on the Committee of Thirteen, along with Senators Trumbull and Fessenden, objected to Lincoln’s resolutions because “the ground has already been covered” and that they “would divide our friends, not only in the Committee, but in Congress,” many of whom believed that the rendition of fugitive slaves was a state and not a federal responsibility.173 (Hamlin, who had been asked to pass judgment on the resolutions, found them unobjectionable.) But Seward, like his boss-to-be, did reject any concession on slavery expansion, which the South was demanding. (The territorial question lay at the heart of the Crittenden Compromise and its toned-down variant, the Border State plan.) Thus any hopes of compromise seemed doomed in the senate.
The House devised an alternative to the Crittenden and Border State panaceas. On December 20, Henry Winter Davis metaphorically fired “a cannon shot clear through the line” with a proposal to admit the New Mexico Territory, thus finessing the vexed question of slavery in territories south of 36° 30’.174 (In 1859 the residents of New Mexico had adopted a slave code, but in the future they might frame a constitution outlawing slavery.) Davis’s suggestion was taken up by the House Committee of Thirty-Three, where some Southerners, “starting as if a bomb-shell had fallen among them,” quickly rejected it.175 Not deterred, Chairman Thomas Corwin and another influential member, Charles Francis Adams (known as the “Archbishop of Antislavery”), bundled it with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the security of slavery in the states where it already existed. Seward, who was a close friend of Adams and a frequent caller at his house, probably persuaded the Massachusetts congressman to introduce this amendment, which may well have been written by the New Yorker himself. Believing that the slavery issue had been “substantially settled by the late election,” Adams took the lead in championing this package, which antislavery militants denounced as the work of a traitor to the cause.176
In the Committee of Thirty-Three, nine of fifteen Republicans voting supported the admission of New Mexico with the understanding that it might become a Slave State. They argued that even if it did so, it was so huge that no more such states would enter the Union. One opponent, who believed that “Peon Slavery” in New Mexico was “worse than African Slavery,” bitterly remarked that the Republicans would for their efforts “only get nicely b[ull]shit.”177 While Southern hotheads were vexed, Southern Moderates were temporarily placated by this compromise, which demonstrated that the North could offer something positive instead of merely objecting to the Crittenden and Border State plans. The New York Tribune’s James Shepherd Pike observed that the New Mexico Compromise provided Southern Moderates “a temporary holding-ground during the height of the Secession storm.”178 Iowa Senator James Harlan considered it “the only practical measure that could be adopted with honor by the Republicans.”179 For the time being at least, the Upper South would not cast its lot with the Cotton States. Adams and Seward had achieved their short-term goal, driving a wedge between the Upper South and the Lower South and buying time to allow for the inauguration of Lincoln with most Slave States still in the Union. Throughout January and into February, Congress tried valiantly to blend the Border State and the Davis-Adams-Corwin schemes.
Meanwhile, Seward publicly championed a different plan. In a major speech on January 12, he shocked Radical Republicans by urging immediate concessions to keep the Upper South in the Union and offering a long-range proposal to settle outstanding differences between the sections. When Seward spoke, the atmosphere in the senate chamber, packed with 2,000 spectators, was tense. Three days earlier, South Carolina authorities had fired on an unarmed ship, the Star of the West, laden with supplies for the Fort Sumter garrison, forcing the vessel to abandon its mission. This news had deeply disturbed Lincoln and many other Northerners. The nation seemed to teeter on the brink of war. Could Seward keep the peace? After extolling the advantages of the Union for all sections, including the South, the senator, in conciliatory tones, endorsed the creation of two huge new states, one slave and one free, out of the existing western territories; a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery where it already existed; a modification of the Fugitive Slave Act exempting bystanders from any role in the pursuit of runaways; and a law forbidding invasions of one state by residents of another. He also recommended a cooling-off period of two or three years, to be followed by a national constitutional convention.
“It is the speech of an adroit politician rather than of a great statesman,” wrote New York Congressman Charles B. Sedgwick; it afforded “skulking ground for those who wish to dodge and compromise,” seemed to offer a reward “for rascality and treachery,” and “has hurt Seward and shaken the confidence of many of his strongest friends.”180 The editor of the Washington Constitution asserted that “Seward’s speech fell like a pall over the entire community. When he finished speaking all hope seemed to have fled, and even Mr. Crittenden despaired.”181 The leading Radical in the U.S. House, Thaddeus Stevens, confessed himself “mortified and discouraged” by Seward’s backsliding.182 It was reported that while “practical men, smarting under the return of the Star of the West, think it not strong, too cool, too calm,” Radicals “feel that it yields too much” and “are suspicious of one who will yield so much to evil.”183
Although Lincoln was allegedly “not overpleased with Seward’s speech,” he told the senator that it “is well received here [in Springfield], and, I think, is doing good all over the country.”184 The Illinois State Journal praised the address, noting that a constitutional convention “will take time, and time is all that is necessary to cure the secession fever.” Seward, said the editors, “thinks that time will settle the matter—that reason will return, and secession will die.”185 Lincoln shared that view, as John Hay reported in the Missouri Democrat: “I have reason to believe that he coincides with Gov. Seward in favoring a convention of the people to suggest amendments to the Constitution. Conscious of nothing in his acts or sentiments which should justly excite alarm, he will insist upon his quiet inauguration, without further assurances on his part; but when once at the head of the nation, those who are laboring for peace with singleness of heart, will never find their plans balked by any factious opposition from him.”186
Although the reaction to Seward’s address was generally positive, the New Yorker knew that he must win over Lincoln for any compromise. To this end, he enlisted the aid of Illinois Congressman William Kellogg, who visited Springfield on January 20. To Kellogg’s appeal for concessions on the territorial issue, Lincoln emphatically replied that he would endorse no measure betraying the Chicago Platform, but he did indicate that if the American people wished to call a convention dealing with Southern grievances, he would not object. During his meeting with Kellogg, Lincoln received a dispatch from Trumbull urging him to do nothing until he received letters that the senator was forwarding from
Washington. The president-elect informed Kellogg that he would honor Trumbull’s request and then write to Seward explaining his position on compromise measures.
Frustrated yet again, Seward sank into depression. In late January, he warned Lincoln that compromise was necessary to prevent the Upper South from seceding: “The appeals from the Union men in the Border states for something of concession or compromise are very painful since they say that without it those states must all go with the tide, and your administration must begin with the free states, meeting all the Southern states in a hostile confederacy. Chance might render the separation perpetual. Disunion has been contemplated and discussed so long there that they have become frightfully familiar with it, and even such men as Mr Scott and William C. Rives are so far disunionists as to think that they would have the right and be wise—in going if we will not execute new guaranties which would be abhorrent in the North. It is almost in vain that I tell them to wait, let us have a truce on slavery, put our issue on Disunion and seek remedies for ultimate griefs in a constitutional question.” Seward predicted that “you are to meet a hostile armed confederacy when you commence—You must reduce it by force or conciliation—The resort to force would very soon be denounced by the North, although so many are anxious for a fray. The North will not consent to a long civil war—A large portion, much the largest portion of the Republican party are reckless now of the crisis before us—and compromise or concession though as a means of averting dissolution is intolerable to them. They believe that either it will not come at all, or be less disastrous than I think it will be—For my own part I think that we must collect the revenues—regain the forts in the gulf and, if need be maintain ourselves here—But that every thought that we think ought to be conciliatory forbearing and patient, and so open the way for the rising of a Union Party in the seceding states which will bring them back into the Union.”187
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