Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  The elimination of Gilmer made room for the selection of Montgomery Blair, who was on Lincoln’s initial list. He was not from the Deep South, but he did live in the slave state of Maryland, where he had campaigned vigorously for the Republican presidential ticket. Though unprepossessing in appearance, with a mean, hatchet face, Blair had considerable support among former Democrats like Trumbull and Hamlin, and John A. Andrew, the abolitionist governor of Massachusetts, was one of his backers. Despite Weed’s strong objections, Blair was picked as Postmaster General.

  Lincoln did not approach Salmon P. Chase until after he received Seward’s acceptance. The two men were such bitter rivals that an invitation to Chase might have caused Seward to decline. But now Lincoln felt free to invite him to Springfield. He had never seen the Ohioan, who had just ended his second term as governor and was about to take a place in the Senate, and wanted to talk with him before offering him an appointment. When they met on January 4 and 5, Lincoln was greatly impressed. He said later that Chase “is about one hundred and fifty to any other man’s hundred.” Tall and broad-shouldered, with a massive dome of a head that hinted at vast intellectual powers, Chase, Carl Schurz remarked, “looked as you would wish a statesman to look.”

  Even this first encounter hinted that their future relationship might not be easy. After explaining why he had offered the first place in the cabinet to Seward, Lincoln spoke to Chase about the Treasury Department. He said that Pennsylvanians had raised some objections to Chase because he was known as a free-trade advocate, but he believed these could be overcome. So he asked his visitor to “accept the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, [my] being exactly prepared to offer it to you.” Chase recorded he cagily responded to this nonoffer: “I did not wish and was not prepared to say that I would accept the place if offered.” Despite considerable pressure from Chase’s friends in Ohio and from anti-Seward Republicans in New York, Lincoln decided not to make the appointment until after he reached Washington.

  At Chicago, Lincoln had promised that his Vice President could name the cabinet member from New England. It was a generous gesture, but Lincoln was pretty sure that Hamlin’s choice would be his own: Gideon Welles, a former Democrat and editor of the influential Hartford Evening Press, who had headed the Connecticut delegation to Chicago and helped defeat Seward there. Lincoln and Hamlin settled on him for Secretary of the Navy because in the 1840s he had served as chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing for the navy.

  Meanwhile Lincoln approached another man on his original list for the cabinet. On December 15, Edward Bates came to see the President-elect in Springfield. In their very free discussion, as Bates recorded in his diary, Lincoln told Bates that his participation in the administration was “necessary to its complete success.” Finding it convenient to forget that he had written to Seward a week earlier, he assured Bates that he was “the only man that he desired in the Cabinet, to whom he [had] yet spoken... [or] written a word, about their own appointments.” Recognizing that the vast ego of the sixty-seven-year-old Missouri lawyer might lead him to expect the first place in the cabinet, Lincoln explained why it was politically necessary to offer Seward the State Department, but he made the news more palatable by giving Bates the impression that he hoped Seward would decline. In that case Bates would get the job. Until then he could offer the post of Attorney General. Suitably massaged, Bates accepted.

  Lincoln’s other cabinet selections were more difficult. Judd, who was on his original list, had the backing of the former Democrats in the Illinois Republican party but was strongly opposed by David Davis, Leonard Swett, and other former Whigs. Mary Lincoln also violently disliked him. Further to complicate matters, Lincoln had to weigh the interests of Illinois in a cabinet position against the rival claims of Indiana, which had done so much to make his nomination in Chicago possible. There Caleb B. Smith earnestly sought a cabinet seat, and David Davis reminded the President-elect: “No one rendered more efficient service from Indiana.... without his active aid and co-operation, the Indiana delegation could not have been got as a unit to go for you.” But Lincoln also had to consider the claim of Smith’s Indiana rival Schuyler Colfax, who had supported Bates for the presidential nomination but who had fought hard for Lincoln’s victory in the election. It was no wonder that Lincoln, as he told Thurlow Weed, found that “the making of a cabinet... was by no means as easy as he had supposed.”

  Eventually he decided to eliminate Judd on the grounds that Illinois had already received so much recognition as the home of the President-elect. With Judd out, he had to choose between Smith and Colfax, and he eventually settled on Smith. “Colfax is a young man, is already in position, is running a brilliant career and is sure of a bright future in any event,” he reasoned; “with Smith, it is now or never.”

  Indiana problems were simple compared to those of Pennsylvania. Lincoln did not initially plan to offer the state representation in his cabinet because Pennsylvania Republicans were so bitterly divided. One faction was loyal to Senator Cameron; another followed Governor-elect Andrew G. Curtin and A. K. McClure, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican state committee. Certain that the rivals could never agree on a candidate for the cabinet, he thought that naming Dayton of New Jersey would adequately represent Pennsylvania’s high-tariff interests.

  That plan infuriated Cameron’s supporters, who believed that Lincoln had not been “made fully acquainted with the conversations and understandings” that David Davis and Leonard Swett had had with the Pennsylvania delegation at the Tremont House the night before the nomination. Only two days after the election Cameron’s representatives, escorted by both Davis and Swett, descended on Springfield for an interview with the Presidentelect. They found Lincoln hospitable, affable—and baffling. They learned nothing about cabinet prospects but heard story after story of frontier days.

  At Davis’s advice they went home and organized a letter-writing campaign in Cameron’s behalf. Soon Lincoln’s desk was covered with testimonials for the senator, and he could not help being impressed. Shortly afterward Swett gave him another nudge by reminding him that “the Cameron influence, as much as any thing nominated you.”

  But a chorus of opposition swelled when it became known that Cameron was under consideration for a cabinet post. Free-traders fought against appointing a man committed to a high protective tariff. Opponents of Seward and Weed feared the appointment because it would, in effect, give Seward a second vote in the cabinet. But most of the hostility stemmed from Cameron’s checkered record. During Van Buren’s administration he had served as commissioner to settle the claims of the Winnebago Indians and had allegedly defrauded his charges of $66,000; thereafter he was derisively known in Pennsylvania politics as the “Great Winnebago Chief.” Using bribery and political intimidation, much as Thurlow Weed did in New York, Cameron became the boss of the Pennsylvania Republican machine. Principled Republicans thought Cameron’s appointment to the cabinet would be disgraceful. “His general reputation is shockingly bad,” Horace White, of the Chicago Press and Tribune, wrote Trumbull. Even mild-mannered Hamlin protested that naming Cameron to the cabinet had an “odor about it that will damn us as a party.”

  Lincoln worried over the problem for much of December. Drawing up a memorandum of the charges against Cameron and a list of the numerous letters recommending him, he tentatively concluded that, on balance, the evidence favored the senator. He invited Cameron to Springfield, and they met in the senator’s hotel room on December 28. Apparently Lincoln liked what he saw. Despite Cameron’s malodorous reputation, he appeared to be an amiable, if somewhat reserved, gentleman, tall and thin, with a sharp face and thin lips. A self-made man like Lincoln, he had overcome the handicap of poverty by learning to be a printer and a newspaper editor before amassing a fortune in the iron and railroad business. That his reputation was not spotless was not altogether a negative; Lincoln always had a fondness for slightly damaged characters, like Mark Delahay, Lamon, and Herndo
n. The two very practical politicians hit it off at once and the next day, as Cameron was preparing to go home, Lincoln sent him a brief note promising that he would nominate him for either Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of War.

  Exultant, Cameron showed the letter to several friends on the way back to Washington. His rejoicing, however, was premature, for his train must have passed another bearing his old enemy, A. K. McClure, bringing documents to Springfield to prove Cameron’s moral unfitness for high office. Lincoln recognized his blunder and promptly wrote Cameron that “things have developed which make it impossible for me to take you into the cabinet.” He suggested that Cameron, to save face, should decline the appointment. In order to ease the blow, he asked Trumbull to promise that Cameron’s friends should “be, with entire fairness, cared for in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.” Restlessly he waited for the desired telegram from Cameron but none came. Hearing that the Pennsylvanian’s feelings were wounded by the abrupt phrasing of his letter, Lincoln apologized that it had been written “under great anxiety” and he drafted another, somewhat more tactfully phrased: “You will relieve me from great embarrassment by allowing me to recall the offer. This springs from an unexpected complication; and not from any change of my view as to the ability or faithfulness with which you would discharge the duties of the place.” While newspapers and politicians buzzed and hundreds of pro- and anti-Cameron letters reached Lincoln every day, the Winnebago Chief maintained total silence.

  To end the stalemate Lincoln let it be known that he would appoint no Pennsylvanian to the cabinet until he reached Washington. Then, on his trip East, he mentioned in passing that it might be good for the new administration to retain one or two members of Buchanan’s cabinet, including perhaps the Secretary of the Treasury. At this point powerful business interests in Pennsylvania faced the prospect of having no voice in the Lincoln administration, and rival political factions, all of which represented the coal and iron industries, concluded it would be better to have Cameron with all his faults than to have no representation in the cabinet at all.

  In this disorderly way Lincoln picked his closest official advisers. The selection process ensured that the cabinet would never be harmonious or loyal to the President.

  IV

  During the winter of 1860–1861 while Lincoln was constructing his cabinet, the country was falling to pieces. On December 3 the Congress reassembled to hear the plaintive message of retiring President Buchanan, who deplored secession but said nothing could be done to stop it. Three days later South Carolinians elected an overwhelmingly secessionist state convention, which on December 20 declared that the state was no longer a part of the Union. By the end of January, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all followed, and secession was under way in Texas. In February representatives of six states of the Deep South met at Montgomery, Alabama, and drew up a constitution for the new Confederate States of America. As the Southern states seceded, they seized federal arsenals and forts within their borders. Apart from two minor installations in Florida, only Fort Pickens at Pensacola and the fortifications at Charleston, South Carolina, remained in the control of the United States government. Late in December, Major Robert Anderson, in command at Fort Moultrie on the shoreline at Charleston, transferred his small garrison to the more defensible Fort Sumter, erected on a rock shoal in the harbor. On January 9, when the Star of the West, bearing supplies and 200 additional troops, tried to reinforce the Sumter garrison, the South Carolinians fired on it and forced it to retreat.

  In Washington government officials could not agree on how to deal with the increasingly serious crisis. The President, along with many other conservatives, favored calling a national convention to amend the Constitution so as to redress Southern grievances. The House of Representatives created the Committee of Thirty-three, with one congressman from each state, to deal with the crisis. After much debate the committee proposed admission of New Mexico as a state, more stringent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, repeal of the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern states to prevent the reclamation of fugitives, and adoption of a constitutional amendment prohibiting future interference with slavery. The Senate set up a similar Committee of Thirteen, which was unable to agree on a program, but John J. Crittenden, one of its members, came up with a broad compromise proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the national territories, prohibiting slavery north of that line but establishing and maintaining it with federal protection south of that line. Crittenden’s plan also called for vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and for repeal of the personal liberty laws. In a parallel effort the Peace Conference, summoned to Washington by the Virginia legislature, proposed to Congress a multisectioned constitutional amendment that closely resembled Crittenden’s compromise.

  The chances for a compromise in 1860–1861 were never great. The Crittenden Compromise, the most promising of the suggested agreements, was opposed by influential Southerners and Northerners alike. Only intervention by the President-elect might have changed the attitude of Republicans in Congress and, in so doing, could conceivably have induced the Southerners to reconsider their position. But Lincoln considered these compromise schemes bribes to the secessionists. Grimly he told a visitor, “I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friend to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.”

  Lincoln believed the real object of the secessionists was to change the nature of the American government. In his view there were only two ways that could be done. One was through amending the Constitution, a right that everyone recognized. He himself did not desire any changes in that document, but if the people wanted a constitutional amendment, even the one forbidding interference with the domestic institutions of states—meaning slavery—he would not oppose it.

  The other way of changing a government was through revolution. Since the Mexican War, Lincoln had been on record as a defender of the right of revolution, of that “most sacred right” of a people “to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” In theory, then, he might have approved when the Southern states declared their independence. But he had always carefully qualified his support of the right of revolution by insisting that it was a moral, rather than a legal, right that must be “exercised for a morally justifiable cause.” “Without such a cause,” he thought “revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”

  That was “the essence of anarchy,” which he would not tolerate. “The right of a State to secede is not an open or debatable question,” he told Nicolay; it had been settled in Andrew Jackson’s time, during the nullification crisis. “It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing Government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment.” Consequently, as he wrote Weed, “No state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and... it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.”

  Lincoln’s commitment to maintaining the Union was absolute. As a young man, he had looked to reason for guidance, both in his turbulent emotional life and in the disorderly society in which he grew up. When that proved inadequate, he found stability in the law and in the Constitution, but after the Dred Scott decision he could no longer have unqualified faith in either. The concept of the Union, older than the Constitution, deriving from the Declaration of Independence with its promise of liberty for all, had become the premise on which all his other political beliefs rested.

  In objecting to all compromise measures, Lincoln was out of step with the members of his party in Congress who were better informed about affairs in the South and more alarmed as threats of secession became reality. Weed, speaking for Seward, floated the possibility of extending the Missouri Compromise line; Representative Charles Francis Adams p
roposed admitting New Mexico as a state without any prohibition on slavery; even Trumbull, hitherto adamantly opposed to compromise, urged that a soothing statement from Lincoln would be “the means of strengthening our friends South.”

  They pressed him to accept minor concessions that would yield nothing of substance but might give some support to Southern Unionists, and reluctantly he agreed. He had always accepted the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law and now, to please the Southerners, he said he was willing to see it more efficiently enforced, provided that it contained “the usual safeguards to liberty, securing free men against being surrendered as slaves.” The personal liberty laws were enacted by the state legislatures, not the Congress, but if such laws were “really, or apparantly, in conflict with such law of Congress,” they should be repealed. As for Southern concern over the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or interference with the interstate slave trade, he wrote Seward, “I care but little, so that what is done be comely, and not altogether outrageous.” He was even willing for New Mexico to be admitted without prohibition of slavery, “if further extension were hedged against.”

  But on one point he was immovable: the extension of slavery into the national territories. He continued to fear that Republicans might abandon the Chicago platform in favor of Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine. “Have none of it,” he wrote Trumbull. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery.” Over and over, he repeated the message to Republican congressmen: “Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”