Team of Rivals (48 page)

W
ITH ACCEPTANCES
from Seward and Bates in hand, Lincoln turned his attention to his third rival, Salmon Chase. Knowing that Chase would never accept a subordinate position, Lincoln had slated him for the Treasury Department. As soon as he received Seward’s written acceptance, he wrote to Chase: “In these troublous times, I would [much] like a conference with you. Please visit me here at once.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.

But Lincoln’s plans for Chase were temporarily waylaid by intense pressure for the appointment of Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as secretary of the treasury. Exactly what promises Swett and Davis had made to Cameron’s men at the convention for their switch to Lincoln on the second ballot went unrecorded. We know from Swett’s letter to Lincoln, however, that he had given his word to the Cameron men that “they should be placed upon the same footing as if originally they had been your friends.” The lobbying for Cameron began days after Lincoln’s election with a deluge of letters “from very strong and unexpected quarters.” Lincoln had understood from the start the importance of satisfying Pennsylvania. Initially, he had hoped Pennsylvania would accept New Jersey’s William Dayton, who, like Cameron, was a staunch protectionist. As testimonials to Cameron poured in, however, Lincoln dispatched Swett to Harrisburg to invite Cameron to Springfield.

“The unexpected arrival of [Cameron] was somewhat of a stunner,” Henry Villard confessed, “not only to your correspondent but to a majority of the political schemers and intriguants in Springfield.” Considering Lincoln’s “well known rigid adherence to honesty,” it seemed impossible to Villard that Honest Abe would besmirch his cabinet with someone of Cameron’s unsavory reputation. For years, charges of bribery and bad dealings with the Winnebago Indians had sullied Cameron’s name. However compromised his reputation, the campaign on the Pennsylvanian’s behalf was organized with great skill and effectiveness.

As soon as Cameron reached the Chenery House on December 30, he sent a note to Lincoln. “Shall I have the honor of waiting on you,—or will you do me the favor to call here?” Lincoln told him to come to his office, where they spoke for several hours. The conversation continued that evening at the Chenery House. Their talks were candid and enjoyable, for even those opposed to Cameron acknowledged his winning personality, shrewd understanding of politics, and repertoire of intriguing stories. At the end of the interview, Lincoln told Cameron he would appoint him to the cabinet, as either secretary of the treasury or secretary of war. The wily Cameron asked Lincoln to put the offer in writing, which Lincoln somewhat impulsively did, on the promise that it remain confidential. Unfortunately, when Cameron returned home, he brandished the offer among his friends like “an exuberant school boy.”

As word of the probable appointment leaked out, opposition flared. “There is an odor about Mr. C. which would be very detrimental to your administration,” Trumbull warned Lincoln in a letter that probably reached Springfield shortly after Cameron left. “Not a Senator I have spoken with, thinks well of such an appointment.” Then, on January 3, 1861, Alexander McClure, representing one of Pennsylvania’s anti-Cameron factions, came to Springfield carrying papers that purportedly revealed Cameron’s lack of moral fitness, particularly inappropriate for stewardship of the Treasury. Recognizing that he had acted too hastily, Lincoln sent a private note to Cameron on January 3: “Since seeing you things have developed which make it impossible for me to take you into the cabinet. You will say this comes of an interview with McClure; and this is partly, but not wholly true. The more potent matter is wholly outside of Pennsylvania.” To save face, Lincoln suggested that Cameron decline the appointment, in which case Lincoln would “not object to its being known that it was tendered you.”

Hopeful that Cameron would cooperate, Lincoln looked forward to his meeting with Chase, who arrived in Springfield on Friday, January 4, “travel-stained and weary after two days on the cramped, stuffy cars of the four different railroads he took from Columbus.” Ever meticulous about his appearance, Chase barely had time to wash up before being notified that Lincoln was downstairs in the lobby of the Chenery House. Though discomfited by the awkwardness of their introduction, Chase was immediately disarmed by Lincoln’s warm expression of thanks for Chase’s support in 1858 during his failed Senate campaign against Douglas.

Lincoln then directly addressed the point of the meeting. “I have done with you,” he said, “what I would not perhaps have ventured to do with any other man in the country—sent for you to ask you whether you will accept the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, being exactly prepared to offer it to you.” The problem, Lincoln explained, would be garnering acceptance for Chase’s appointment in Pennsylvania, a prospect complicated by the unresolved Cameron situation and by Chase’s previous support for free trade that had enraged industrial Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s straightforward manner impressed Chase, even as it irritated him. “I frankly said to him that I desired no position & could not easily reconcile myself to the acceptance of a subordinate one; but should gladly give to his admn., as a Senator, all the support which a sincere friend…could give.” [Chase had once again been elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio legislature.]

As the interview continued, however, Chase began to relax. Lincoln explained that had Seward declined the State Department, he would have “without hesitation” offered it to Chase, certain that Seward and Chase deserved the two top positions in his cabinet. His dignity restored, Chase promised to consider the contingent Treasury offer “under the advice of friends.” He and Lincoln continued their discussion on Saturday, and Chase attended Sunday church with the Lincoln family.

After this long weekend meeting, Lincoln considered Chase’s inclusion in the cabinet essential. But what of Cameron, who had refused to withdraw from consideration? Early that Sunday morning, Lincoln walked over to the Chenery House, where Gustave Koerner was still in bed. Lincoln rounded up Judd and returned to Koerner’s room. Speaking in an agitated voice, Lincoln said: “I am in a quandary. Pennsylvania is entitled to a cabinet office.” He had received “hundreds of letters, and the cry is ‘Cameron, Cameron!’…The Pennsylvania people say: ‘If you leave out Cameron you disgrace him.’” Nonetheless, he had his mind “already fixed on Chase, Seward and Bates, my competitors at the convention.” Koerner and Judd expressed themselves strongly against Cameron but were unable to solve Lincoln’s dilemma.

By Monday morning, as Chase left for Columbus, Lincoln had reached a tentative solution. He would not offer Cameron the Treasury but would hold open the possibility of another post. “It seems to me not only highly proper, but a
necessity,”
he confided in Trumbull that day, “that Gov. Chase shall take [the Treasury]. His ability, firmness, and purity of character, produce the propriety.” As for the necessity, his name alone would reconcile the merchant class in New York who had long opposed Seward. “But then comes the danger that the protectionists of Pennsylvania will be dissatisfied; and, to clear this difficulty, Gen. C. must be brought to co-operate.” The solution was to persuade him to take the lesser position of the War Department.

Moving carefully, Lincoln wrote a conciliatory letter to Cameron, admitting that his first letter was written “under great anxiety,” and begging him to understand that he “intended no offence.” He promised that if he made a cabinet appointment for Pennsylvania before he arrived in the capital, he would not do so without talking to Cameron, “and giving all the weight to your views and wishes which I consistently can.”

Uncertain about Lincoln’s complex plans, Chase left Springfield with some ambivalence. Although he had to admit that his conversations with Lincoln “were entirely free & unreserved,” he had not been given the firm offer he coveted, even as he claimed a preference to remain in the Senate. On the train back to Ohio, he penned notes urging several friends to visit Lincoln and support his case. “What is done must be done quickly & done judiciously,” he told Hiram Barney, “with the concurrence of our best men & by a deputation to Springfield.”

Chase’s friends appealed to Lincoln, but the trouble occasioned by his impulsive letter to Cameron had convinced Lincoln to make no more official offers until he reached Washington in late February. Uncertainty left Chase increasingly agitated. “I think that in allowing my name to be
under consideration…
and to be tossed about in men’s mouths and in the press as that of a competitor for a seat which I don’t want, I have done all that any friends can reasonably ask of me,” he wrote Elizabeth Pike. “And it is my purpose by a note to Mr. Lincoln within the present week to put my veto on any further
consideration
of it. If he had thought fit to tender me the Treasury Department with the same considerate respect which was manifested toward Mr. Seward and Mr. Bates I might have felt under a pretty strong obligation to defer to the judgment of friends and accept it.” In the end, Chase never did send a note requesting Lincoln to withdraw his name from further cabinet consideration. His desire for position and glory, as Lincoln shrewdly guessed, would allow Lincoln alone to determine the time and place of his appointment.

W
HILE
L
INCOLN WAS PREOCCUPIED
with the construction of his official family, the country was tearing itself apart. On December 20, 1860, the same day that Lincoln met with Thurlow Weed, South Carolina held a state convention in the wake of the Republican victory and passed an ordinance to secede from the Union. The vote was unanimous. Throughout the Deep South, such “a snowballing process” began that over the next six weeks, six additional states followed suit—Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas.

For Southern radicals, a correspondent for the
Charleston Courier
observed, Lincoln’s victory opened the door to the goal “desired by all true hearted Southerners, viz: a Southern Confederacy.” The night after the election, the citizens of Charleston had turned out in droves for a torchlight parade featuring an effigy of Lincoln, with a placard in its hand reading: “Abe Lincoln, First President Northern Confederacy.” Two slaves hoisted the figure to a scaffold, where it was set afire and “speedily consumed amid the cheers of the multitude.”

As the various secession ordinances made clear, the election of a “Black Republican” was merely the final injury in a long list of grievances against the North. These documents cited attempts to exclude slaveholders from the new territories; failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; continued agitation of the slavery question that held Southerners up to contempt and mockery; and the fear of insurrection provoked by the John Brown raid.

Though Southern newspapers had long threatened that secession would follow fast upon a Lincoln victory, the rapidity and vehemence of the secession movement took many in the North, including President Buchanan, by surprise. The bachelor president was attending a young friend’s wedding reception when he heard news of South Carolina’s secession. A sudden disturbance heralded the entrance of South Carolina congressman Lawrence Keitt. Flourishing his state’s session ordinance over his head, he shouted: “Thank God! Oh, thank God!…I feel like a boy let out from school.” When Buchanan absorbed the news, he “looked stunned, fell back, and grasped the arms of his chair.” No longer able to enjoy the festivities, he left immediately.

For Lincoln, who would not take office until March 4, it was a time of mounting anxiety and frustration. He strongly believed, he told John Nicolay, that the government possessed “both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” but there was little he could do until he held the reins of power. While he was “indefatigable in his efforts to arrive at the fullest comprehension of the present situation of public affairs,” relying not simply on the newspapers he devoured but on “faithful researches for precedents, analogies, authorities, etc.,” it was hard to stand by while his country was disintegrating. He declared at one point that he would be willing to reduce his own life span by “a period of years” equal to the anxious months separating his election and the inauguration.

Besieged with requests to say something conciliatory, Lincoln refused to take “a position towards the South which might be considered a sort of an apology for his election.” He was determined to stand behind the Republican platform, believing that any attempt to soften his position would dishearten his supporters in the North without producing any beneficial impact on the South. When asked by the editor of a Democratic paper in Missouri to make a soothing public statement that would keep Missouri in the Union, Lincoln replied: “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and accessible to the public. Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers, like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers, there can be no further misunderstanding…. I am not at liberty to shift my ground—that is out of the question…. The secessionists,
per se
believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.”

As panic began to affect the stock market and the business community in the North, Lincoln reluctantly agreed to insert an authorized passage in a speech Trumbull was scheduled to make in Chicago. He simply repeated that once he assumed power, “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 within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”

Just as Lincoln had predicted, however, the speech had no positive impact. “On the contrary,” he wrote the
New York Times
’s Henry Raymond, “the Boston Courier, and its’ class, hold me responsible for the speech, and endeavor to inflame the North with the belief that it foreshadows an abandonment of Republican ground by the incoming administration; while the Washington Constitution, and its’ class hold the same speech up to the South as an open declaration of war against them.” The South, he claimed, “has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear.”