Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  CHAPTER TEN

  An Accidental Instrument

  Formidable problems faced the President-elect. At the news of his election, disunion erupted in the South. On November 10 the South Carolina legislature unanimously authorized the election of a state convention on December 6, to consider future relations between the state and the Union. Eight days later Georgia followed suit. Within a month every state of the lower South had taken initial steps toward secession. Northerners were divided over how to deal with the crisis. Some few thought the dissatisfied states should be allowed—even encouraged—to go in peace. A much larger number favored a new agreement in the spirit of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 that would keep the Southern states in the Union. At least as many others opposed any concessions to the South.

  The United States government had no policy to deal with this crisis. President James Buchanan was torn between his belief that secession was unconstitutional and his conviction that nothing could be done to prevent it. The lame-duck Congress was controlled by the recently formed Republican party, a still imperfect fusion of former Whigs, former Democrats, and former members of the American party. With experience only as an opposition party, Republicans had never before been called on to offer constructive leadership.

  All eyes now turned to Springfield, where an inexperienced leader with a limited personal acquaintance among members of his own party groped his way, on the basis of inadequate information, to formulate a policy for his new administration.

  I

  In the months after the election the President-elect went steadily about his business in Springfield. Working with Nicolay, his efficient, unflappable private secretary, he dealt with several baskets of mail that arrived each day. Presently the burden of correspondence was so great that Nicolay recruited young John Hay, a recent graduate of Brown University who was studying law in his uncle’s office in Springfield, to help. Letters requesting Lincoln’s autograph were the easiest to answer. Dozens of letters of congratulation and many more requesting jobs went promptly into the waste basket. Still, much correspondence required the attention of the President-elect himself.

  At ten o’clock Lincoln opened his office in the state capitol to visitors, and they flocked in until he closed at noon, only to return for his afternoon hours from three to five-thirty. His callers were of every sort: politicians offering advice on policy and cabinet assignments; journalists looking for exclusive stories or at least local color; artists who wanted to paint his picture; women who simply asked to shake his hand; country bumpkins who came to gawk; old friends from his New Salem days. The room was always crowded. It could comfortably accommodate only about a dozen people, but Lincoln wanted to see everybody. Spying a delegation waiting in the hall, he would reach out to shake the leader’s hand and insist, “Get in, all of you.” Asking for their names, he would start a conversation and seemed never at a loss for words.

  Visitors did not know what to make of this President-elect. He surprised even his old friends by growing a beard. During the campaign some New York “True Republicans,” worried that Lincoln’s unflattering photographs would cost the party votes, suggested that he “would be much improved in appearance, provided you would cultivate whiskers, and wear standing collars.” A letter from an eleven-year-old girl in Westfield, New York, named Grace Bedell promised to get her brothers to vote for Lincoln if he let his beard grow. “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” she suggested. “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President.” Amused, Lincoln replied, “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affec[ta]tion if I were to begin it now?” He answered his own question and by the end of November was sporting a half beard, which he initially kept closely cropped. No one knew just what to make of the change. Perhaps it suggested that he was hiding his face because he knew he was not ready to be President. Or maybe it demonstrated the supreme self-confidence of a man who was willing to risk the inevitable ridicule and unavoidable puns like “Old Abe is ... puttin’ on (h)airs.” Or possibly it hinted that the President-elect wanted to present a new face to the public, a more authoritative and elderly bearded visage. Or maybe the beard signified nothing more than that the President-elect was bored during the long months of inaction between his nomination and his inauguration.

  Lincoln’s manner as well as his appearance startled visitors. Though he was often called “Old Abe,” he was, up to this point, one of the youngest presidents of the United States. Only fifty-one years old, he was a generation younger than his predecessor, James Buchanan. Vigorous and athletic, he loped along in his countryman’s gait at a pace that tired out companions twenty years younger, and he bounded up stairways two or three steps at a time. His energy seemed inexhaustible.

  So did his conversation. Visitors to his office often felt stunned by the sheer volume of his words. He showered upon them opinions, ideas, and anecdotes concerning almost every subject in the world—except secession, on which he closely kept his own counsel. What puzzled them most was his highly unpresidential habit of regaling guests with jokes and anecdotes. When telling these tales, his face lit up, and at the punch line his high-pitched laughter rang through the capitol. He might punctuate a story with a hearty slap on his thigh, and after a particularly good one he would rock with mirth, sometimes reaching out with his long arms to draw his knees up almost to his face. Lincoln liked puns, the more outrageous the better. He enjoyed Irish bulls, like the story of Patrick and his new boots: “I shall niver git em on,” said the Irishman, “till I wear em a day or two, and stre[t]ch em a little.” He delighted in tall tales, especially those with a frontier setting in Kentucky or Indiana.

  Most stories he recounted simply because he thought they were funny. Laughing along with his visitors helped break the ice. But he also knew how to use storytelling to deflect criticism, to avoid giving an answer to a difficult question, and to get rid of a persistent interviewer. When former Governor Charles S. Morehead of Kentucky urged him to make concessions to the secessionists, Lincoln was reminded of Aesop’s fable about the lion in love with a beautiful woman, whose parents were opposed to her marrying the beast but were afraid of his long claws and sharp teeth. Claiming that their daughter was frail and delicate, they asked the lion to have his claws cut off and his tusks drawn lest he do serious injury to Her. Desperately in love, the lion consented, and as soon as his claws were clipped and his tusks removed, the parents took clubs and knocked him on the head. Disgruntled, Morehead remarked “that it was an exceedingly interesting anecdote, and very apropos, but not altogether a satisfactory answer.” Lincoln used this technique throughout his presidency, to the bafflement of those who had no sense of humor and the rage of those who failed to get a straight answer from him.

  II

  In the three months after his election Lincoln issued no public statements and made no formal addresses. At most, he could be cajoled only into offering bland observations: “Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.” He resisted the growing pressure to reassure the South or even to restate and clarify his views. “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and accessible to the public,” he explained in letters marked “Private and confidential.”

  Behind his silence lay a recognition of the weakness of his position. Though the Republicans had carried the election in November, not one vote had been cast for him personally. The presidential electors chosen in that election did not meet until December 5, and their ballots would not be officially counted until February 13, which Lincoln regarded as “the most dangerous point” in the whole election process. Until that time he had no legal standing as a public official.

  He was also following the advice of most leaders of his party. Immediately after the election Thurlow Weed, who ofte
n spoke for Seward, urged him to preserve “the self-respect, courage and dignity maintained throughout the canvass” by refusing to make any public statement. Joseph Medill warned that Lincoln must ignore the pleas of the “d——d fools or knaves who want him to make a ‘union saving speech’” to conciliate the South: “He must keep his feet out of all such wolfe [sic] traps.” In part, Lincoln was reluctant to restate his views on the sectional conflict lest he inadvertently cause demoralization and panic in the North. Any indication that he was frightened by Southern bluster would only throw his supporters in the North into disarray. Consequently when Donn Piatt, a brilliant but erratic Cincinnati journalist, warned that the Southerners meant war and that within ninety days the land would be whitened with army tents, Lincoln dismissed his fears. “Well, we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it,” he said almost flippantly. “I must run the machine as I find it.”

  But Lincoln’s stand also reflected his deeply held conviction that Unionists were in a large majority throughout the South and that, given time for tempers to cool, they would be able to defeat the secessionist conspirators. He put much faith in the old Whig element—men with whom he had worked closely in the 1848 movement to elect Zachary Taylor—and did not believe that any sizable number of rational citizens could contemplate disrupting the best government the world had ever seen. They must be bluffing. In the past Southerners had threatened to dissolve the Union—in the debates over the admission of Missouri in 1819–1820, in the controversy over the tariff and nullification in Jackson’s time, in the protracted crisis over territories acquired in the Mexican War—in order to extract concessions from the North. That must be what was happening now. Appeals for him to modify his positions were just “the trick by which the South breaks down every Northern man.” If he agreed to do it, he “would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.”

  But public pressure for him to redefine his position grew so great that he drafted two paragraphs for Senator Trumbull to insert in an address to a Republican victory celebration in Springfield on November 20. The passage pledged that under Lincoln’s administration “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order... as they have ever been under any administration.” Widely recognized as an official statement emanating from the President-elect himself, Trumbull’s speech had almost no effect in quieting public anxiety. The Boston Courier thought it foreshadowed an abandonment of Republican principles, while the Washington Constitution called it an open declaration of war upon the South. This was just what Lincoln had expected. “These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good’ possesses them entirely.” With biblical wrath he promised: “‘They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.’”

  A passage in the paragraphs Lincoln gave Trumbull showed how poorly he understood the nature and extent of secessionist sentiment. Disunionists, he wanted Trumbull to say, were “now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they can not, much longer, maintain apprehension among the Southern people that their homes, and firesides, and lives, are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government.” Then Lincoln went on to add an astonishing paragraph: “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentation of purposes may have encouraged.”

  Wisely Trumbull suppressed this passage—but he then went on to undermine Lincoln’s pacific purpose by denouncing secession as terrorism and vowing swift action against the “traitors” in the South.

  III

  On the night after the election Lincoln was too exhausted to sleep and, oppressed by the responsibility that would soon be his, he began casting about in his mind for advisers who could best help him. He jotted down eight names on the back of a blank card:

  Lincoln Judd

  Seward Chase

  Bates M. Blair

  Dayton Welles.

  The list suggested the direction of his thinking. He was the nominal head of the Republican party, but he recognized that he had been chosen because of his availability rather than because of a demonstrated record of leadership. If his administration was to be successful, he needed the support of Seward, Chase, and Bates, his principal rivals for the nomination. As he frankly told Thurlow Weed, “their long experience in public affairs, and their eminent fitness” gave them “higher claims than his own for the place he was to occupy.”

  That preliminary list also indicated Lincoln’s understanding that the Republican party was not a unified, coherent organization but a collection of rival interest groups. The most important of these were the antislavery former Whigs and the free-soil Democrats, divided by party battles waged over more than a generation. If peace was to be maintained between these factions, neither must dominate the cabinet. The four names in the right-hand column had Democratic antecedents; the three cabinet members in the left column were former Whigs. Later when Weed observed that such an arrangement gave a preponderance to the Democrats, Lincoln replied: “You seem to forget that I expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”

  Lincoln’s initial list was balanced in other ways, too. Geographically it gave one cabinet member (Gideon Welles of Connecticut) to New England, two (William H. Seward and William L. Dayton) to the Northeastern states of New York and New Jersey, two (Salmon P. Chase and Norman B. Judd) to the Northwest, and two (Edward Bates and Montgomery Blair) to the border slave states. In thinking of Dayton, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Vice President in 1856, Lincoln was not merely rewarding party service but recognizing the powerful protectionist interests of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Naming Bates gave tacit recognition to the Know Nothing element that had supported the Republican ticket in 1860. Montgomery Blair represented both the incipient Republican party in Maryland and the Blair family, powerful in the border states since Jackson’s day. Finally, in choosing Judd, Lincoln recognized the importance of Illinois and at the same time added a close friend to a cabinet otherwise made up of strangers.

  Keeping this list in mind, Lincoln proceeded with his customary caution. Two days after the election he asked Hannibal Hamlin, whom he had never met face-to-face, to meet him in Chicago. There on November 21 the future President and the future Vice President began a three-day conference, which reporters described as “cordial in the highest degree.” Much of the time they were joined by Trumbull, whom the newspapers called “the President’s mouthpiece in the Senate,” and from time to time other Republican leaders, like Carl Schurz of Wisconsin, were brought in for advice.

  The main item on the agenda was the selection of the cabinet. There was ready agreement that the office of Secretary of State must be offered to Seward, in recognition of his services to the Republican party and his position in the Senate. But it was not certain that Seward would accept. Hurt because the Chicago convention passed him over, he might not be willing to serve as a subordinate to Lincoln. Hence the invitation must be so phrased that if he refused it would not seem a rebuff to the new administration.

  Lincoln entrusted the handling of this delicate negotiation to Hamlin, who was experienced in the intricacies of Washington politics.

  Lincoln’s natural caution and his inexperience in national politics almost derailed Seward’s appointment. The delay in publicly naming the New Yorker encouraged an anti-Seward faction in the New York Republican party, which included William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post, and important New York City businessmen like Hiram Barney, George Opdyke, and W. C. Noyes. They put their opposition to Seward principally on the ground that Weed, his ally who at times seemed to be his alter ego, had been involved in corrupting the state legislature; they wanted “honest men with clean hands” in the cabinet. Lincoln’s slown
ess to select Seward suggested that he was listening to these critics. Soon the rumor spread that he did not really want the New Yorker in his cabinet, that the appointment would be offered to him as a compliment with the expectation that he would decline it. So damaging was this report that Lincoln felt obliged to offer Seward an embarrassed explanation that he had all along intended to tender the State Department to him but had delayed “in deference to what appeared to me to be a proper caution in the case.” Gratified but not entirely mollified, Seward agreed to take the offer under consideration. He did not, however, accept until Weed went out to Springfield for a heart-to-heart talk with the President-elect. After Lincoln assured Weed that in the distribution of patronage he really meant to honor his pledge, “Justice to all,” Seward on December 28, “after due reflection and with much self distrust,” agreed to serve.

  Even before Seward accepted, he and Weed had begun to press Lincoln to deviate from his original list and name one or more cabinet members from the South. This move would assure the slave states that Lincoln was going to head a truly national administration—and at the same time it could block the appointment of Salmon P. Chase or other rivals of Seward. Lincoln was attracted by the idea but was not sure it was practical. To test its feasibility he wrote a short editorial for anonymous publication in the Illinois State Journal, inquiring whether any Southern “gentleman of character” would accept a place in his cabinet and on what terms: “Does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political difference between them?”

  The strongest of the Southern Unionists that Weed proposed—Lincoln called them “white crows”—was Representative John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, a conservative Whig opponent of secession. Impressed by Gilmer’s sincere Unionism, Lincoln invited him to Springfield, but the North Carolinian failed to understand the signal and declined. In January, Weed and Seward approached Gilmer with a positive offer of a cabinet post, but he insisted that Republicans must offer federal protection to slavery in the territories in order to appease his “maddened brethren of the South.” With that Gilmer’s candidacy died.