Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  Skillfully Chandler presented Davis’s demand not to Lincoln himself but to “his particular friends, those who drop in and chat with him of evenings and who have his confidence.” Probably he referred to men like Leonard Swett, John W. Forney, and Noah Brooks. As Davis scornfully reported, Chandler imbued “the President’s familiar spirits... with the darkest views of Lincoln’s prospects, and sent [them] there night after night to regale him with some new tale of defection or threatened disaster.” At the end of eight days—according to Davis, who was not present—Lincoln was “in the condition of a child frightened by ghost stories and ready to take refuge anywhere.”

  In fact, Lincoln did not panic, and he resisted dismissing Blair in order to secure party unity and his own reelection. He had genuine respect for all the members of the Blair family. Francis P. Blair, Sr., had been a loyal, conservative adviser throughout the war, and Frank Blair, after his intemperate attacks on the Radicals in Congress, had displayed ability as a commander in Sherman’s army. For Montgomery Blair the President had real affection, and he was sure that Blair “had made the best Post master Genl that ever administered the Dept.”

  But the Postmaster General had become a controversial figure, more hated by the Radicals than even Seward. His blunt denunciations of abolitionists, his continuing advocacy of the colonization of African-Americans, his fierce opposition to Radical schemes for reconstruction, his zealous advocacy of Lincoln’s renomination and reelection—all aroused hostility. So did his bitter, and often unwarranted, personal enmities. He carried on a bitter feud with Frémont, he hated Chase, he despised Halleck, and he could hardly bear to be in the same room as Stanton. Lincoln was distressed by the vindictiveness Blair demonstrated in his frequent quarrels, but as he told the senior Blair, he “could not believe there was any profit to be expected on the sacrifice of a good and true friend from first to last for false ones.”

  Chandler offered to sweeten the pot by suggesting that, in return for Blair’s resignation, the President might secure not only the support of Wade and Davis but the withdrawal of Frémont from the race. Though Frémont’s campaign had been slipping, he retained a fiercely loyal following, especially among German-Americans in the West, and the President feared he might siphon off enough votes to cost the Republicans Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri and thus the election. “The President,” according to Chandler, “was most reluctant to come to terms but came.” The senator then hotfooted it to New York to see Frémont.

  Establishing headquarters at the Astor House, Chandler met several times with Frémont, urging him, in the name of the President, the Union Congressional Committee, and the National Union Executive Committee, to consider withdrawing from a race in which his candidacy could only help elect McClellan. If Frémont agreed, Chandler promised that he would receive a new command as major general in the Union army and that his old enemy, Blair, would be dismissed from the cabinet.

  Frémont took Chandler’s offer under advisement and asked the opinion of his friends. He heard dissonant voices. Wendell Phillips urged him to continue his candidacy. A supporter in Pittsburgh begged him to come out “as soon as practicable in favor of Lincoln and Johnson” after receiving “assurance of Mr. Blair’s immediate removal and also Mr. Stanton’s and the assurance that Mr. Seward will not be reappointed.” On September 17, Gustave Paul Cluseret, the editor of Frémont’s campaign newspaper, the New Nation, published an editorial supporting Lincoln and warning readers that the general listened to “any man who causes imaginary popular enthusiasm to glitter before his eyes, spends his money, profits by his natural indolence to cradle him in an illusion from which he will only awaken ruined in pocket and in reputation.” That same day Frémont decided to drop out of the race. Chandler wanted his withdrawal to be “a conditional one to get Blair out,” but Frémont honorably refused. “I will make no conditions—my letter is written and will appear tomorrow,” he said. In a public letter he announced that he was leaving the race not because he had changed his opinion of Lincoln, whose “administration has been politically, militarily, and financially a failure,” but because McClellan would restore the Union with slavery.

  When the news of Frémont’s withdrawal reached Washington, Lincoln, according to Davis, grew “excited at the form of it, and showed symptoms of flying from the bargain.” But Chandler reminded him that, “offensive as it was,” Frémont’s letter was “a substantial advice to support Lincoln.” Reluctantly the President agreed to live up to the terms he had agreed on, and on September 23 asked for Blair’s resignation. To take his place he named former Governor William Dennison of Ohio, who was, as David Davis said, “honorable, highminded, pure, and dignified.” While Blair’s resignation was pending, both Wade and Henry Winter Davis took the stump in Lincoln’s behalf.

  That left Salmon P. Chase and his followers as the final group of disgruntled Republicans who were still unwilling to endorse the reelection of the President. Nursing an ego bruised by his forced resignation from the cabinet, Chase had quietly encouraged moves to replace Lincoln on the Republican ticket, but in public he assumed an air of disinterested statesmanship. He advised those who wrote him to accept Lincoln’s renomination “as decisive and to give him their support dutifully and manfully”—but he told his correspondents not to publish his views. With the collapse of the anti-Lincoln movement in September, he warmed a little and recognized Lincoln and Johnson as “nominees of the Party whose principles and measures ... I fully accept.” But he could not help adding wistfully, “We can’t have everything as we would wish.”

  In late September, Chase began giving different political signals. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was ailing (he was, after all, eighty-seven years old), and his anticipated death raised a possibility that Chase had more than once considered. Returning to Washington to consult with Fessenden on Treasury problems, he made a point of calling on Lincoln and was quite cordially received. “But he is not at all demonstrative, either in speech or manner,” Chase reported to his diary, adding the telling observation, “I feel that I do not know him.” Shortly after this visit he began to say positive things about Lincoln: “The best interests of the country require his reelection and I shall give him my active support.”

  Taney’s death on October 12 made the naming of the next Chief Justice a public question. Sumner immediately urged Lincoln to appoint Chase, reminding the President that he had several times spoken of his former Treasury Secretary for this position. Chase’s friends sent a barrage of letters to the White House backing his appointment. But there were other candidates. Attorney General Bates asked Lincoln for the appointment “as the crowning, retiring honor of my life.” Mrs. Stanton wanted her husband, exhausted by his demanding labors in the War Department, to be Chief Justice, and she enlisted Browning to urge his case with Lincoln. Dozens of letters recommended elevating Noah Swayne, the antislavery corporate lawyer whom Lincoln had named an associate justice in 1862. William M. Evarts, the careful New York lawyer, had his supporters. Francis P. Blair, Sr., earnestly implored Lincoln to appoint his son Montgomery, “to remove the cloud which his ostracism from your Cabinet” had caused.

  Lincoln listened and read but took no action. He had probably decided to name Chase, but, as he told Nicolay, he was resolved to be “very ‘shut pan’ about this matter.” Eager for the appointment, Chase wrote the President a friendly letter about Republican prospects in Ohio. Without reading it, Lincoln directed: “File it with his other recommendations.” As the President failed to act, Sumner’s urgency grew greater, and he persuaded Chase to write a letter that he could show Lincoln: “It is perhaps not exactly en règle to say what one will do in regard to an appointment not tendered to him; but it is certainly not wrong to say to you that I should accept.” Chase went on to add words that must have choked him: “Happily it is now certain that the next Administration will be in the hands of Mr Lincoln from whom the world will expect great things.” Still Lincoln did not name a Chief Justice. Finally getting the cu
e, Chase took to the stump, urging rallies at Louisville, Lexington, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago to vote for Lincoln’s reelection.

  It was all just as the New York Herald had wickedly anticipated in August. Now the “sorehead republicans”—as the paper called the dissident Radicals—were “all skedaddling for the Lincoln train and selling out at the best terms they can.” The Herald had predicted that the “ultra radical, ultra shoddy, and ultra nigger soreheads... will all make tracks for Old Abe’s plantation, and will soon be found crowing, and blowing, and vowing, and writing, and swearing and stumping the States on his side, declaring that he, and he alone, is the hope of the nation.”

  As Chase canvassed the West, he reflected on a conversation he had had some weeks earlier with a New Yorker “who thought Lincoln very wise,” observing that if he were “more radical he would have offended conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Wonderingly, Chase asked himself: “Will this be [the] judgment of history?”

  VIII

  “I cannot run the political machine,” Lincoln was quoted as saying during the campaign; “I have enough on my hands without that. It is the people’s business.” He did not take part in any of the hundreds of campaign marches and torchlight processions staged by the National Union (Republican) party throughout the North. He was not involved in the work of the Loyal Publication Societies, headed by Francis Lieber in New York and by John Murray Forbes in Boston, which distributed more than half a million Union pamphlets bearing titles like “No Party Now but All for Our Country.” He did nothing to encourage partisan newspapers that attacked the Democrats as Copperheads or charged that they were engaged in a “Peace Party Plot!” (Indeed, he discounted tales of Copperhead conspiracies as puerile.)

  Nor did Lincoln take public notice of the attacks Democrats made on him during the campaign. He did not comment on Democratic rallies where partisans carried banners reading TIME TO SWAP HORSES, NOVEMBER 8TH or NO MORE VULGAR JOKES. He probably never saw scurrilous Democratic pamphlets, like The Lincoln Catechism, Wherein the Eccentricities & Beauties of Despotism Are Fully Set Forth, which called him “Abraham Africanus the First” and quoted the first of the President’s own Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.” The repeated Democratic charge that he and the Republicans favored intermarriage of blacks and whites Lincoln acknowledged only indirectly, joking that miscegenation was “a democratic mode of producing good Union men, and I dont propose to infringe on the patent.” He did not respond to Democratic charges, raised in as respectable a journal as the New York World, that his administration was characterized by “ignorance, incompetency, and corruption.” Though he was, as Mrs. Lincoln said, “almost a monomaniac on the subject of honesty,” he did not refute the charge that he had helped a relative defraud the Quartermaster’s Department in St. Louis.

  Only once was he tempted to reply to a personal attack. Democratic newspapers now revived the canard that while touring the Antietam battlefield in September 1862 he had asked Ward Lamon to sing “a comic negro song”; they claimed that such behavior demonstrated that he was not “fit for any office of trust, or even for decent society.” Belligerently Lamon attempted to refute the slander, but Lincoln, thinking it would be better simply to state the facts, wrote out his own account of how he had indeed—days after the battle and far from the soldiers’ cemetery—asked Lamon to sing “a little sad song.” Then he told Lamon not to publish his reply, saying, “I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right.”

  Lincoln’s public appearances during the campaign were rare. In June he did attend the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia to raise money for the Sanitary Commission and other groups providing for the needs of the soldiers, but he said little. “I do not really think it is proper in my position for me to make a political speech,” he told a group at the Hotel Continental, “and ... being more of a politician than anything else,... I am without anything to say.” When volunteer regiments, on their way home as their terms of enlistment expired, came by the White House, he thanked them for their service and said nothing more partisan than that they should “rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government.”

  But if Lincoln did not take a public role in the campaign, he was intimately involved in all the details of behind-the-scenes management. Indeed, as Fessenden remarked, “The President is too busy looking after the election to think of any thing else.” Repeatedly he intervened to end party squabbling. In Pennsylvania, for example, antagonism between the Cameron and Curtin factions was so great that, as Lincoln was told, it produced “distraction and indifference, which may, possibly, be fatal.” Cameron seemed to be conducting the campaign primarily with a view to his own election to the Senate, while Governor Curtin was so disaffected that he predicted “the reelection of this admin[istration] is [going] to send us to hell.” Lincoln summoned the Pennsylvania governor, with his aide, Alexander K. McClure, to the White House and used all his personal powers of persuasion to get his people to work with the Cameron forces until after the election.

  The President intervened in congressional contests when local feuds among Republicans threatened to affect the outcome of the election. In New York, a group of Conservative Republicans was working to defeat the election of Roscoe Conkling, the party’s nominee for Congress. When Conkling’s friends asked Lincoln’s assistance, he replied with a strong letter: “I am for the regular nominee in all cases; and... no one could be more satisfactory to me as the nominee in that District, than Mr. Conkling.” Again, when he learned that the postmaster of Philadelphia was using his influence to defeat Representative William D. Kelley, he summoned the official to Washington and told him bluntly: “I am well satisfied with Judge Kelly as an M.C. and I do not know that the man who might supplant him would be as satisfactory.” The postmaster could vote for whom he chose, but he must “not constrain any of [his] subordinates to do other than as he thinks fit.”

  Lincoln recognized the influence that newspapers had on public opinion, and he tried to enlist the support of prominent editors. He even went so far as to approach the notorious James Gordon Bennett, whose New York Herald had yet to take a public position on the election. Because the circulation and influence of the Herald were so great, Lincoln’s New York friends suggested that it might be worthwhile to woo the editor with flattery. They knew that Bennett, whose reputation for immorality was as well deserved as his paper’s reputation for scandal, longed for respectability. When they approached him, the canny editor asked bluntly, “Will I be a welcome visitor at the White House if I support Mr. Lincoln?” The President may have shared John Hay’s conviction that Bennett was “too pitchy to touch,” and he initially offered only a vague promise that “whoever aids the right, will be appreciated and remembered” after the election. Bennett responded that the offer “did not amount to much.” When intermediaries began to explore the possibility that Lincoln might offer Bennett an appointment as American minister to France, the tone of the Herald toward the administration became notably kinder. Bennett did not endorse Lincoln, telling a go-between to say to the President “that puffs did no good, and he could accomplish most for you by not mentioning your name.” But the bitterness of his attacks on Lincoln diminished. Though he continued to call Lincoln a failure, he termed McClellan “no less a failure... though a failure perhaps in a less repulsive way,” and in the end the Herald endorsed neither candidate. After the election Lincoln paid the price for Bennett’s neutrality by offering the editor the French ministry, which he knew he would decline.

  But there were limits to what Lincoln would do to secure a second term. He did not even consider canceling or postponing the election. Even had that been constitutionally possible, “the election was a necessity.” “We can not have free government without elections,” he explained; “and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered a
nd ruined us.” He did not postpone the September draft call, even though Republican politicians from all across the North entreated him to do so. Because Indiana failed to permit its soldiers to vote in the field, he was entirely willing to furlough Sherman’s regiments so that they could go home and vote in the October state elections—but he made a point of telling Sherman, “They need not remain for the Presidential election, but may return to you at once.”

  Though it was clear that the election was going to be a very close one, Lincoln did not try to increase the Republican electoral vote by rushing the admission of new states like Colorado and Nebraska, both of which would surely have voted for his reelection. On October 31, in accordance with an act of Congress, he did proclaim Nevada a state, but he showed little interest in the legislation admitting the new state. Despite the suspicion of both Democrats and Radicals, he made no effort to force the readmission of Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Southern states, partially reconstructed but still under military control, so that they could cast their electoral votes for him. He reminded a delegation from Tennessee that it was the Congress, not the Chief Executive, that had the power to decide whether a state’s electoral votes were to be counted and announced firmly, “Except it be to give protection against violence, I decline to interfere in any way with any presidential election.”

  IX

  Both what Lincoln did in the campaign of 1864 and what he refrained from doing reflected his sense of the importance of this election. In part, as he admitted, he sought a second term out of “personal vanity, or ambition.” “I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” he said frankly. “God knows I do not want the labor and responsibility of the office for another four years. But I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years Administration endorsed.” Honestly believing that he could “better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do,” he wanted the opportunity “to finish this job of putting down the rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country.”