Team of Rivals (52 page)

The following day, Seward and Lincoln made an informal visit to the House and the Senate. Senators from all parties congregated to greet Lincoln. Even firebrand Southerners who refused to acknowledge his presence were consumed with curiosity. Virginia’s James Mason, one reporter noted, “affected
nonchalance
and pretended to be writing, but for the life of him he could not help looking askance, from time to time; and it may be doubted if what he wrote could be translated into plain English.”

One reporter commented that Lincoln’s “face has not yet become familiar enough to be popularly recognized here,” so “he passed to and from the Capitol yesterday without catching the attention of the multitude.” His informal visit, the
New York Times
noted, was “without a precedent. His illustrious predecessors…deemed it incompatible with the stately dignity of the Executive of the Union, to visit the coordinate departments of the Government. Clearly, the Railsplitter has, in following the dictates of his own feelings, rightly interpreted the proprieties of his position.”

In the days ahead, Lincoln confirmed two more positions for his cabinet. He chose Caleb Smith, his old Whig colleague, over Schuyler Colfax for the Department of the Interior, despite widespread support for Colfax. In a gracious letter to Colfax, he explained: “I had partly made up my mind in favor of Mr. Smith—not conclusively of course—before your name was mentioned in that connection. When you were brought forward I said ‘Colfax is a young man—is already in position—is running a brilliant career, and is sure of a bright future in any event. With Smith, it is now or never.’ I considered either abundantly competent, and decided on the ground I have stated.” Mentioning that Colfax had not supported him during his Senate campaign against Douglas, Lincoln begged him to “not do me the injustice to suppose, for a moment, that I remembered any thing against you in malice.”

At one point, Norman Judd had been in consideration for a cabinet appointment, but the opposition to him in Illinois from Lincoln’s campaign manager, David Davis, and a host of others was very strong. Mary Lincoln herself had written to Davis as an ally in the cause against Judd, charging that
“Judd
would cause trouble & dissatisfaction, & if Wall Street testifies correctly, his business transactions, have not always borne inspection.” Mary, unlike her husband, was unable to forgive Judd’s role in Trumbull’s victory over Lincoln in 1855. In the end, Lincoln decided he alone would provide sufficient representation for his state of Illinois. Instead, he offered Judd a ministry post in Berlin, which was more agreeable to Judd’s wife, Adeline.

For weeks, the newspapers had been reporting that Gideon Welles was the most likely candidate from New England. Though bitterly opposed by Seward and Weed, Welles had the full confidence of the more hard-line members of the party. Nonetheless, Welles was “in an agony of suspense during that last week in February,” as he waited in Hartford for positive word. When his son Edgar eagerly wrote from Yale that he would love to accompany his father to Washington for the inauguration, Welles replied: “It is by no means certain, my son, that I shall go myself…if not invited [by Lincoln] I shall not go at all.”

Finally, on March 1, Welles received a telegram from Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin in Washington: “I desire to see you here forthwith.” In his hurry to catch the train the next day, he discovered he had left his toiletries behind. More disconcerting, he arrived at the Willard to find the corridors so crowded that his trunks were temporarily mislaid, forcing him to remain in his rumpled clothes. Fortunately, Lincoln was dining elsewhere that evening, and a meeting was called for the following day. Lincoln offered him the navy portfolio.

With hard-liners Blair and Welles on board to balance Cameron and Bates, Lincoln still faced a difficult problem. He had resolved from the start to bring both Seward and Chase into his cabinet, but as the inauguration approached, each man’s supporters violently opposed the appointment of the other. “The struggle for Cabinet portfolios waxes warmer, hourly,” the
Evening Star
reported on March 1. Seward’s delegation met with Lincoln on March 2, claiming that Chase would make the cabinet untenable for Seward. Hoping Lincoln would agree to forsake Chase, they were dismayed when, instead, Lincoln countered that although he still preferred a cabinet with both men, he might consider offering State to William Dayton and giving Seward the ministry to Great Britain.

After receiving the report of his friends, and beleaguered by the strength of the opposition to him, Seward sent a note to Lincoln asking to withdraw his earlier acceptance of the State portfolio. Lincoln waited two days to answer. “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” he told Nicolay. Nonetheless, his gracious manner again soothed a troubled situation. In his reply to Seward’s withdrawal note, he wrote: “It is the subject of most painful solicitude with me; and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply inlisted in the same direction.”

Never genuinely desiring to withdraw, but hoping to pressure Lincoln to drop Chase, Seward rescinded his decision and accepted. In a letter to Frances, the New Yorker portrayed his waffling reversals in the most honorable light: “The President is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent. I was at one time on the point of refusing—nay, I did refuse, for a time to hazard myself in the experiment. But a distracted country appeared before me; and I withdrew from that position. I believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that I can endure enough to make the experiment successful. At all events I did not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance.”

All that remained was for Lincoln to secure Chase’s acceptance. He had not exchanged a single word with Chase about the appointment since his arrival in Washington. Now, without consulting the proud Ohioan, Lincoln sent Chase’s nomination as treasury secretary to the Senate. Chase was on the Senate floor when a number of his colleagues came over to congratulate him. “Ever conscious of his own importance and overly sensitive to matters of protocol,” he promptly called on the president to express his anger and his decision to decline the appointment. In the course of their ensuing conversation, Chase later recalled, Lincoln “referred to the embarrassment my declination would occasion him.” Chase promised to consider the matter further, and, as Lincoln hoped, he “finally yielded.”

In the end, Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly called Seward’s bluff. Through all the countervailing pressures, he had achieved the cabinet he wanted from the outset—a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the history of the country.

His opponents had been certain that Lincoln would fail in this first test of leadership. “The construction of a Cabinet,” one editorial advised, “like the courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the new Executive is not acquainted. There are certain little tricks which go far beyond the arts familiar to the stump, and the cross-road tavern, whose comprehension requires a delicacy of thought and subtlety of perception, secured only by experience.”

In fact, as John Nicolay later wrote, Lincoln’s “first decision was one of great courage and self-reliance.” Each of his rivals was “sure to feel that the wrong man had been nominated.” A less confident man might have surrounded himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. James Buchanan, for example, had deliberately chosen men who thought as he did. Buchanan believed, Allan Nevins writes, that a president “who tried to conciliate opposing elements by placing determined agents of each in his official family would find that he had simply strengthened discord, and had deepened party divisions.” While it was possible that his team of rivals would devour one another, Lincoln determined that “he must risk the dangers of faction to overcome the dangers of rebellion.”

Later, Joseph Medill of the
Chicago Tribune
asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet comprised of enemies and opponents. He particularly questioned the president’s selection of the three men who had been his chief rivals for the Republican nomination, each of whom was still smarting from the loss.

Lincoln’s answer was simple, straightforward, and shrewd. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”

Seward, Chase, Bates—they were indeed strong men. But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
her husband’s March 4 inauguration, Mary Lincoln was unable to sleep. She stood by her window in the Willard Hotel and watched strangers swarming in the darkened streets below. Though all the major hotels had laid out mattresses and cots in every conceivable open space, filling parlors, reception rooms, and lobbies, thousands were still left to wander the streets and wait for the great day to dawn.

Lincoln rose before sunrise to look over the inaugural address he had been crafting in his peculiar fashion. According to Nicolay, “Lincoln often resorted to the process of cumulative thought.” He would reduce complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later return to the same passage and polish it further “to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.” While Seward or Chase would consult countless books, drawing from ancient to modern history to illustrate and refine their arguments, Lincoln built the armature of his inaugural out of four documents: the Constitution, Andrew Jackson’s nullification proclamation, Daniel Webster’s memorable “Liberty and Union Forever” speech, and Clay’s address to the Senate arguing for the Compromise of 1850.

Lincoln faced a dual challenge in this long-awaited speech, his first significant public address since his election. It was imperative that he convey his staunch resolution to defend the Union and to carry out his responsibilities as president, while at the same time mitigating the anxieties of the Southern states. Finding the balance between force and conciliation was not easy, and his early draft tilted more toward the forceful side. Among the first people to see the draft was Orville Browning. Browning had intended to accompany Lincoln on the train from Springfield to Washington, but finding “such a crowd of hangers on gathering about him,” he decided to end the journey in Indianapolis. Before Browning left, Lincoln handed him a copy of his draft.

Browning focused on one imprudent passage that he feared would be seen in the South as a direct “threat, or menace,” and would prove “irritating even in the border states.” Lincoln had pledged: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government….” Browning suggested he delete the promise to reclaim what had already fallen, such as Fort Moultrie or Castle Pinckney, limiting himself to “hold, occupy, and possess” what was still in Union hands. “In any conflict which may ensue between the government and the seceding States,” Browning argued, “it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong.” Though in a number of private conversations during the long secession winter Lincoln had expressed his determination to take back the fallen properties, he accepted Browning’s argument and took out the promise to reclaim places that the seceding states had already taken.

Of all who read the draft, it was Seward who had the largest impact on Lincoln’s inaugural address. Seward had read the initial draft with a heavy heart. Though he believed Lincoln’s argument for the perpetuity of the Union was “strong and conclusive,” he felt that the bellicose tone of the text would render useless all the hard work, all the risks taken during the previous weeks to stop the secession movement from expanding. Working on the draft for hours, seated in his favorite swivel chair, Seward wrote a long, thoughtful letter to Lincoln that contained scores of revisions. Taken together, his suggested changes softened the tone of the draft, made it more conciliatory toward the South.

Lincoln’s text had opened on a forceful note, pledging himself “bound by duty…upon the plainest grounds of good faith” to abide by the Chicago platform, without “liberty to shift his position.” Since many seceders considered the Chicago platform one of the touchstones of their withdrawal from the Union, this was clearly a provocative beginning. Even Bates had lambasted the Chicago platform as “exclusive and defiant…needlessly exposing the party to the specious charge of favoring negro equality.” Seward argued that unless Lincoln eliminated his words pledging strict adherence to the platform, he would “give such advantages to the Disunionists that Virginia and Maryland will secede, and we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty, days be obliged to fight the South for this capital…. In that case the dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration of a Republican Administration.” Lincoln agreed to delete the reference to the Chicago platform entirely.

Seward also criticized Lincoln’s pledge to reclaim fallen properties and to hold those still belonging to the government. He suggested that the text refer more “ambiguously” to “the exercise of power.” Lincoln had already planned to change the text as Browning advised, so he ignored this overly compromising suggestion and retained his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess” the properties still belonging to the federal government, including Fort Sumter.

Seward’s revisions are evident in nearly every paragraph. He qualified some, removed rough edges in others. Where Lincoln had referred to the secession ordinances and the acts of violence as “treasonable,” Seward substituted the less accusatory “revolutionary.” With the
Dred Scott
decision in mind, Lincoln warned against turning the “government over to the despotism of the few men [life officers] composing the court.” Seward deleted the word “despotism” and elevated the Court to read “that eminent tribunal.”

Lincoln had decried the idea of an amendment to the Constitution to ensure that Congress could never interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. “I am, rather, for the old ship,” he had written, “and the chart of the old pilots.” Lincoln’s stance put Seward in a difficult position; at Lincoln’s behest, he had introduced the controversial resolution that called for the amendment in the first place. Lincoln’s reversal now would leave Seward exposed. Treading carefully, Seward suggested that Lincoln acknowledge a diversity of opinion surrounding the proposed amendment, and that his own views would only “aggravate the dispute.” As it happened, Lincoln went further than Seward had suggested. In the early hours of the night before the inauguration, Congress, in its final session, had passed the proposed amendment “to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States.” In light of this action, Lincoln reversed his position yet again. He revised his passage to say that since Congress had proposed the amendment, and since he believed “such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable.”

Seward’s greatest contribution to the tone and substance of the inaugural address was in its conclusion. Lincoln’s finale threw down the gauntlet to the South: “With
you,
and not with
me,
is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’” Seward recommended a very different closing, designed “to meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear in the East. Some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” He suggested two alternate endings. Lincoln drew upon Seward’s language to create his immortal coda.

Seward suggested: “I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.”

Lincoln proceeded to recast and sharpen Seward’s patriotic sentiments into a concise and powerful poetry: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Most significant, Seward’s “guardian angel” breathes down on the nation from above; Lincoln’s “better angels” are inherent in our nature as a people.

A
FTER PLACING HIS FINISHING TOUCHES
on the final draft, Lincoln read the speech to his family. Then he asked to be left alone. Several blocks away, Seward had finished reading the morning newspapers and was getting ready to go to the Capitol when a chorus of voices outside attracted his attention. Hundreds of devoted followers were assembled in front of his house. Moved by the spirit of the serenade, Seward spoke to them with emotion. “I have been a representative of my native State in the Senate for twelve years, and there is no living being who can look in my face and say that in all that time I have not done my duty toward all—the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the bond and the free.”

Perhaps this show of popular support softened the wrenching realization that his chance had come and gone. When a congressman argued with him that a certain politician would be disappointed if he didn’t get an appointment in the new administration, Seward lost his composure: “Disappointment! You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer!”

As the clock struck noon, President Buchanan arrived at the Willard to escort the president-elect to the ceremony. Lincoln, only fifty-two, tall and energetic in his shiny new black suit and stovepipe hat, presented a striking contrast to the short and thickset Buchanan, nearly seventy, who had a sorrowful expression on his aged face. As they moved arm in arm toward the open carriage, the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” The carriage made its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, while cheering crowds and hundreds of dignitaries mingled uneasily with the hundreds of troops put in place by General Scott to guard against an attempted assassination. Sharpshooters looked down from windows and rooftops. Cavalry were placed strategically throughout the entire route.

Along the way, an ominous sound was heard. “A sharp, cracking, rasping sort of detonation, at regular intervals of perhaps three seconds” set everyone’s nerves on edge, the Washington
Evening Star
reported. The perplexed police finally identified the sound as issuing from the New England delegation. They wore their customary “pegged” shoes, with heavy soles designed for the ice and snow of the north country. In the more temperate climate of Washington, the “heat and dryness of the atmosphere” had apparently “shrunk the peg timber in the foot-gear excessively, occasioning a general squeaking with every movement, swelling in the aggregate” when the delegation marched in step.

As the day brightened, Washington, according to one foreign observer, “assume[d] an almost idyllic garb.” Though the city “displayed an unfinished aspect”—with the monument to President Washington still only one third of its intended height, the new Capitol dome two years away from completion, and most of the streets unpaved—the numerous trees and gardens were very pleasing, creating the feel of “a large rural village.”

The appearance of Lincoln on the square platform constructed out from the east portico of the Capitol was met with loud cheers from more than thirty thousand spectators. Mary sat behind her husband, their three sons beside her. In the front row, along with Lincoln, sat President Buchanan, Senator Douglas, and Chief Justice Taney, three of the four men Lincoln had portrayed in his “House Divided” speech as conspiring carpenters intent on destroying the original house the framers had designed and built.

Lincoln’s old friend Edward Baker, who had moved to Oregon and won a seat in the Senate, introduced the president-elect. Lincoln made his way to the little table from which he was meant to speak. Noting Lincoln’s uncertainty as to where to place his stovepipe hat, Senator Douglas reached over, took the hat, and placed it on his own lap. Then Lincoln began. His clear high voice, trained in the outdoor venues of the Western states, could be heard from the far reaches of the crowd.

Having dropped his opening pledge of strict fealty to the Chicago platform, Lincoln moved immediately to calm the anxieties of the Southern people, quoting an earlier speech in which he had promised that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He turned then to the controversial Fugitive Slave Law, repeating his tenet that while “safeguards” should be put in place to ensure that free men were not illegally seized, the U.S. Constitution required that the slaves “shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Although he understood that the Fugitive Slave Law offended “the moral sense” of many people in the North, he felt compelled, under the Constitution, to enforce it.