Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  There had been yet another convention in May, mostly of old Whigs, meeting in Baltimore. They called themselves the Constitutional Union Party, and announced that their sole aim was to uphold the Constitution, the Union, and the laws. Noble goals. But what should the laws be? That they would not say. Fanatical in their moderation, they tapped John Bell, a sixty-four-year-old Whig and former senator from Tennessee.

  Faced with a split in the Democratic Party, Lincoln seemed bound for victory, unless the plethora of candidates kept him from winning a majority in the Electoral College, which would throw the choice to the House. This had already happened in the election of 1824, and some politicians still active remembered the occasion.

  The four candidates divided the national political map on sectional lines. Breckinridge and Bell would make pitiful showings in most northern states; Lincoln would win a mere 1,000 votes each in Virginia and in his birthplace, Kentucky, and was not even on the ballot in any state farther south. Douglas was the only man running nationwide. His campaign was both desperate and heroic. Breaking all precedent, he barnstormed the country, as if he could buck the odds by sheer effort. The other candidates relied on their party’s platforms and on their own past statements to make their views known.

  Some of the most interesting past statements had been uttered by Bell’s running mate, Edward Everett, an old Massachusetts Whig. Everett, a former congressman, governor, and diplomat, had since 1856 served as the self-appointed posthumous spokesman for George Washington. He had crisscrossed the country giving an oration entitled “The Character of George Washington” dozens of times, donating his fees to an association of patriotic ladies who aimed to buy a now-decrepit Mount Vernon from Washington’s great-grand-nephew, and restore it. Everett’s speech was a charitable enterprise; it was also an effort to summon the nation to Washington’s principles, as Everett understood them. “The Character of George Washington” was a much better speech than the one Robert Winthrop had given at the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. Everett compared Washington intelligently and favorably to other titans of the eighteenth century: the Duke of Marlborough, Peter and Frederick the Great, Napoleon. But Everett’s political message for America was the same as Winthrop’s: Washington was the icon of unity—unity over everything, unity without content: “O, that from the heavens to which he has ascended, his voice might even now be heard and teach us to unite again in the brotherhood of love, as we are united on one precious remembrance of the past.” It was the best that those who merely idolized Washington could offer. It was paltry enough.

  Lincoln’s near-silence as the campaign proceeded was dictated not only by custom, but also by memories of the blunders of Henry Clay, who had lost a nomination in 1840 and an election in 1844 with his too-clever maneuvers to win southern votes. Now was the time for rallies with rails.

  Lincoln did decide to make an important change to his image: he grew a beard. The inspiration is usually assigned to a letter he received in October from Grace Bedell, an eleven-year-old girl in New York State, who told him that “all the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s [sic] to vote for you.” We are used to the result, but Grace’s advice was unfortunate. Of all the facial hair of the mid-nineteenth century, whose now looks good? Only Ulysses Grant’s trim number, and Grant was quite a handsome man to begin with. Shaven, Lincoln’s face had acquired an austere plainness like that of a cigar store Indian or an Easter Island head. With a beard he looked like an Easter Island head that had been rolled over the floor of a barber shop.

  But the beard served two functions. It made him seem venerable—the admirer of the founding fathers could look even more fatherly than his fifty-one years. The beard was also a way to hide. There was no hiding from what was to come, of course, but whiskers sprouted in midlife can give the bearer an illusion of security.

  Early signs were good for Lincoln. The practice of holding national and state elections on the same day was not yet universal, so state elections that occurred in October served as weather vanes for the national vote the following month. In October 1860 Republicans did well in Pennsylvania and Indiana. Douglas learned the news while campaigning in Iowa. “Mr. Lincoln is the next president,” he said nobly. “We must try to save the union.” Whereupon he made a swing through the South, condemning secession.

  Lincoln passed the national Election Day, November 6, in Springfield. Everything went as the Republicans had hoped. One hundred and fifty-two electoral votes were needed for victory. Bell carried 12.5 percent of the popular vote and three states—Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee—for 39 electoral votes. Breckinridge carried just over 18 percent of the popular vote and eleven states—the remainder of the South plus Delaware and Maryland—for 72 electoral votes. Douglas won almost 30 percent of the popular vote, but his support was so diffuse that he managed to carry only two states—Missouri and New Jersey—for 12 electoral votes. (He should have gotten 16 electoral votes, but confusion among rival anti-Lincoln slates in New Jersey allowed Lincoln to pick up 4 electoral votes there.)

  Two states had joined the Union since the last presidential election, Oregon and Minnesota, and Lincoln carried them both. He carried all the states that John Frémont had—New England, New York, Ohio, and the upper Midwest. Besides his 4 electoral votes in New Jersey, he also carried Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California. He carried Illinois, the first non-Democratic presidential candidate to do so, beating Douglas by almost 51 percent to 47 percent. He won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide and 180 electoral votes.

  If every man who voted for Douglas, Breckinridge, or Bell had voted for only one of them, Lincoln would have lost Oregon, California, and his 4 electoral votes in New Jersey, but he would still have won 169 electoral votes and the White House.

  Presidents then were inaugurated in March, not January, so the transition to a new administration lasted four months, not two. But then, as now, the mad rush of the presidency began the moment the votes were tabulated. From the day Lincoln became president-elect in Springfield until the end of his life, he was like a man lashed to a locomotive in full view of all he passed, with no chance to get off or even pause.

  In some ways, a mid-nineteenth-century president had less to do than a contemporary one. The premodern state was smaller, and the president’s role in it was more restricted. Lincoln, to take only one example, would never travel abroad to meet a foreign head of state. Then, however, a president’s time was filled with other kinds of business that his successors are spared. Since there was no civil service, every federal job was potentially a patronage appointment, and although cabinet members and lesser functionaries usually parceled such jobs out, the final responsibility rested with the president. The parade of job-seekers began immediately and never ceased.

  An object lesson in the politics of patronage was given to Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of presidents, early in the Lincoln administration. Adams, a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, went to the White House with the new secretary of state to consult about the job he was about to embark upon: minister to Britain. Adams was astonished when Lincoln, after a few words, turned to the secretary of state and boasted that he had just settled a job in the Chicago post office. Lincoln in fact had his priorities straight: patronage was the glue that held a political party together, and a united party was the foundation of a successful administration. (Both of Adams’s president forebears, John and John Quincy, had been unpopular onetermers; perhaps they should have paid more attention to post-office appointments.)

  Official etiquette in the nineteenth century was simple, and security almost nonexistent, so ordinary citizens as well as office-seekers could see Lincoln in person. The flow of visitors could be regulated somewhat by his personal secretaries—he had two, both young men who had started working for him in Springfield: John G. Nicolay, a German-American journalist, and John Hay, a recent Brown graduate. They would follow him to Washington, where they would be assisted by a t
iny White House staff. But the influx with which they contended was endless. Admirers and critics, the prominent and the obscure, the eloquent and the tongue-tied, crackpots and the merely curious, flocked around Lincoln like flies.

  Lincoln’s first task before his inauguration was to pick a cabinet. (The Republican convention had tapped Hannibal Hamlin, a Maine senator, as his running mate, but nineteenth-century vice presidents had little to do, unless the president died.) Lincoln’s first choices for his cabinet, made while he was still in Springfield, were two of the men he had beaten for the Republican nomination, Seward and Bates. Seward, the defeated front-runner, got the most important of cabinet posts, secretary of state (it was he who would accompany Adams to the White House for his lesson in politics). Bates became attorney general. Later, Chase and Cameron, the other also-rans, were included, Chase as treasury secretary and Cameron as secretary of war.

  One slot, postmaster general, went in effect to a family. Francis Blair Sr., a feisty sixty-nine-year-old, was a veteran of the Jackson administration, who in the preceding decade had become a Free Soil Democrat, then a Republican. His personality and his politics were shared by his sons, Francis Jr. (who had argued Dred Scott’s case before the Supreme Court) and Montgomery. Francis Sr. and Jr. lived in Maryland; Montgomery was a Republican congressman from Missouri. Hay compared the Blair family to a “close corporation” (the Blairs answered only to each other). Lincoln made Montgomery his postmaster general. By turning to the Blairs, Lincoln repaired his breach with the Whig bugaboo, Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s martial firmness, it seemed, could be useful when invoked in causes of which one approved.

  Two Republican politicians who had swung their delegations to Lincoln at the Chicago convention—Gideon Welles of Connecticut and Caleb Smith of Indiana—rounded out the cabinet as secretaries of the navy and the interior.

  Lincoln, like most presidents, tried to pick a cabinet that balanced regions. The border states (Bates and Blair), the Midwest (Chase and Smith), Pennsylvania (Cameron), New York (Seward), and New England (Welles) were all represented. Only the South was unaccounted for. As the first-time president of a new party, Lincoln also sought a balance of prior party affiliations. Seward, Bates, and Smith were ex-Whigs; Chase, Cameron, Blair, and Welles ex-Democrats. When Thurlow Weed complained that this gave the ex-Democrats a four-to-three edge, Lincoln reminded him that he had forgotten one ex-Whig: “I expect to be there.”

  Harder to balance were the personalities and ideologies of these men. Smith was a cipher and Bates was old, but the others bustled with contending demands and visions. How should the new administration handle southern hardliners? The Blairs, asking themselves What would Jackson do?, were for confrontation, the sooner the better. Until southerners experienced a “decisive defeat,” wrote Montgomery Blair, they would believe “one southern man is equal to half a dozen Yankees.” But Seward, who had coined the phrase “irrepressible conflict,” now wanted to repress the conflict; before taking the reins of the State Department, he gave a speech in the Senate calling for conciliation, concession, and extending “the right hand of peace” to a disaffected South. Lincoln reserved that decision for himself.

  Seward, meanwhile, would not extend the right hand of peace to Chase. Each man recognized in the other the desire to be first among equals, and Seward went so far as to tell Lincoln, as inauguration day approached, that he could not serve in the cabinet after all (by which he meant he could not serve in a cabinet alongside Chase). Lincoln won Seward back, first by ignoring him, then by asking him to reconsider. Ignoring Seward gave him time to think; asking him to reconsider gave Seward a token of respect. Seward finally agreed to give in and become secretary of state.

  One of Lincoln’s first jobs for Denton Offut three decades earlier had been to maneuver thirty hogs onto one flatboat. He would face similar tasks many, many times with the members of his cabinet.

  The knottiest personal disputes of the next four years would be those that pit some of these men against Lincoln himself. So many of Lincoln’s associates had wanted to be in his place; some of them never acknowledged that he deserved to be in his place. Lincoln believed he deserved it, and this was the bitterest pill the envious had to swallow.

  It was “absurd,” Hay would write after Lincoln’s death, to call him “a modest man.” Beneath the self-mocking stories and the rube/boob persona, Lincoln knew he had reached the White House as a result of six concentrated years of thinking and speaking, persuading and working. He, not his rivals, deserved to be the founders’ successor, in large part because he, not they, understood the founders better. Of course he had moments of trepidation, when he told Washington-in-the-back-house jokes and tried to hide his face—he would have been insane not to feel them—but he believed that he had earned his moment, and that he was a better man for this crisis than any of the men around him. What Hay called his “unconscious assumption of superiority” ate at the minds of some of them like a canker. After a brief spell of disappointment, Seward embraced the role of helper, of assistant—of inferiority. Chase never did.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin analyzed Lincoln’s cabinet as a team of rivals, a phrase that has been picked up by political commentators and management texts as a recipe for success—a model to be emulated. But in 1860 a team of rivals had only bad precedents. Washington’s first cabinet, with Jefferson at State and Hamilton at Treasury, was the first and greatest team of rivals. Washington got good service out of both men. But neither he nor they suspected there would be any rivalry when he first appointed them; the two secretaries became estranged only over time, as Hamilton favored commerce and Britain, Jefferson farming and the French Revolution. Their feuding, once it commenced, made life hell for all concerned. Presidents who were less politic or less fortunate had not been able to manage internecine rivalry at all. John Adams presided over a rebellious cabinet that fought him at every turn (they were all Federalists, but who was a better Federalist?); Andrew Jackson’s cabinet was wracked by personal quarrels (the secretary of war’s wife was thought, by the wives of all the other secretaries, to be a loose woman); Harrison’s unlike-minded vice president, John Tyler, single-handedly derailed the Whig Party after Harrison’s death. All this was the common lore of American politics; the fate of the Harrison administration was a painful memory for ex-Whigs.

  Lincoln was driven to pick a team of rivals by the necessities of a new party in a time of upheaval. To manage them, he had to employ all the arts he had acquired years ago in Illinois, avoiding duels and sharing out congressional nominations—only now he was playing at the highest level, and any mistake could be dire.

  In the midst of these personnel decisions, Lincoln exchanged some letters with his past.

  Alexander Stephens, the Georgia Whig whose philippic on the Mexican War Lincoln had called the best hour-long speech he had ever heard, had continued serving in the House until 1859. He had become a Democrat after the Whigs collapsed, but had maintained his Whiggish nationalism. Lincoln’s election had not distressed him. Privately he wrote a fellow Georgian that his old colleague was “not a bad man” and might make an even better president than Millard Fillmore. On November 14 Stephens appeared before the Georgia legislature to argue that “the election of no man, constitutionally chosen, is sufficient cause for any state to separate from the union.”

  Lincoln felt the lack of a southerner in his cabinet and considered asking Stephens to be secretary of the navy. Perhaps to break the ice after eleven years, Lincoln wrote him from Springfield asking for a copy of his speech to the legislature. Stephens’s reply evidently mentioned the peril facing the country.

  Peril indeed. On November 9 the South Carolina legislature had resolved that the election of “Abram [sic] Lincoln” was an act of “open and avowed hostility” to the slaveholding states. Six weeks later, on December 20, a state convention declared that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.
”

  States had challenged the federal government several times in American history. During the administration of John Adams, Virginia and Kentucky, led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, had called on the states to interpose their authority against the Alien and Sedition Acts, laws the Republicans considered unconstitutional. During the administration of James Madison, Federalists returned the favor, calling a convention of New England states in Hartford, Connecticut, to condemn the War of 1812. Both episodes had stopped at the stage of posturing, thanks to changes in the political scene: the Republican Party had managed to beat Adams in the election of 1800 and repeal the odious acts; the Federalists collapsed after Madison’s war ended in victory at the Battle of New Orleans.

  During the Nullification Crisis of 1832, South Carolina had asserted a right to nullify the tariff, a federal law. In his eulogy for Henry Clay, the man who had resolved that crisis, Lincoln simply assumed that South Carolina was peculiar, calling it a hotbed of “political eccentricities and heresies.” But never had that state gone so far as secession.

  On December 22 Lincoln wrote Stephens, assuring him that the incoming administration had no intention of interfering with the slaves of southerners: “The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.” But Stephens wanted more. Both North and South were being driven by “passions,” he wrote back on December 30, yet no one was trying to allay them. He gave John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry the year before as an example: it had filled the South with fear, yet it had not been condemned by “any of the leading members” of the Republican Party. Stephens wanted Lincoln as president-elect to do so. He ended with a Bible verse, Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’”