The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (24 page)

He knew what to do and, by now, how to do it; but he was saddened. “What do those men want?” he asked his friend Senator Orville Browning of Illinois next day. “I hardly know, Mr President,” Browning replied, “but they are exceedingly violent.…” Lincoln knew well enough what they wanted, though, and he said so: “They wish to get rid of me—and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.” Browning protested, but Lincoln shook his head. “We are now on the brink of destruction,”
he said. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.” Again Browning protested. Though he was not a member of the committee, he had attended the caucus and had voted for the resolution: which, he explained defensively, “was the gentlest thing that could be done. We had to do that, or worse.” The trouble he said was Seward. While he personally had a high regard for the Secretary, others were saying that the New Yorker had the President under his thumb. “Why should men believe a lie,” Lincoln broke in, “an absurd lie, that could not impose on a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidences to the contrary?” His sadness deepened. “The committee is to be up to see me at 7 o’clock. Since I heard last night of the proceedings of the caucus I have been more distressed than by any event of my life.”

If this was so, it did not show in his manner when he welcomed the committeemen that evening for a second round of grievance presentations. Before the discussion got under way, however, he announced to the assembled senators that he had thought it fitting to have the cabinet officers—minus Seward, of course, since even aside from the fact that his resignation was pending, that would have been too indelicate—present to answer the charge that there was discord among them and that the President seldom followed or even asked for their advice. Whereupon the door opened and the six gentlemen in question filed into the room. Lincoln had invited them at the cabinet meeting that morning, after telling them of the matter afoot and of Seward’s submission of his resignation. Mostly they had welcomed the chance to confront their accusers, although two of their number—Chase in particular—had protested that they “knew of no good that could come of an interview.” In the end, however, the two—the other was Bates—had been obliged to go along with the majority. Now here they were, face to face with critics whose accusations were based, at least in part, on information supplied in private by Chase in order to curry favor with them. Already he was squirming, as if the fleas had jumped at the sight of his large, handsome person: but the worst was still to come.

If Chase and some of the senators were embarrassed by the confrontation, Lincoln certainly was not. He began the proceedings by reading aloud yesterday’s bill of particulars, admitting as he went along that he had not consulted the cabinet on all affairs of state or war, and that he had not always followed their advice, even when he had sought it; but in the main, he said, he had valued and used their abilities, individually and collectively. As for discord, he did not think it reasonable to expect seven such independent-minded men to agree on every issue that came before them; but here again, he said, he thought they worked together mainly as a unit, and certainly he himself had no complaint. He paused, then turned to the six cabinet members present, beginning to poll them one by one. Did they or did they not agree with his statement of
the case? They did; or so they said, one by one; until he came to Chase. Chase, as it turned out, also agreed, though not without considerable hemming and hawing by way of preamble. He would never have come to the meeting, he said, if he had known he was “to be arraigned.” He seemed angry. He seemed to feel that he was being “put upon”—as indeed he was. In the end, with Wade and the others watching balefully, he admitted that matters of prime importance had usually come before the cabinet, though perhaps “not so fully as might be desired,” and that there had been “no want of unity in the cabinet, but a general acquiescence in public measures.” Thus he wound up, and the Jacobins watched him cold-eyed, contrasting what he said now, in the presence of Lincoln and his colleagues, with what he had said in private. The President did not prolong his suffering. Having more or less settled these two points of contention, he shifted the talk to the question of Seward, defending his chief minister against yesterday’s charges, and then began to poll the committeemen on their views. At that point Fessenden recoiled. “I do not think it proper,” he said, “to discuss the merits or demerits of a member of the cabinet in the presence of his associates.” Chase was quick to agree. “I think the members of the cabinet should withdraw,” he said. In solemn procession they did so, some amused, some disgruntled, and one, at least, discredited in the eyes of men whose favor he had sought.

Like Simon Cameron a year ago, the Treasury chief had learned the hard way what it meant to tangle with Lincoln. Cameron was in Russia now, a victim of political decapitation, and Chase was determined to avoid such punishment. He would forestall the headsman by submitting, however regretfully, his resignation. This was exactly what Lincoln wanted: as was shown next morning, December 20, when he came into his office and found Chase, Welles, and Stanton grouped around the fire. Chase began to complain of yesterday’s damage to his dignity. It had affected him most painfully, he said, for it seemed to indicate a lack of confidence. In fact—he hesitated—he had written out his resignation at home the night before.… Lincoln’s reaction to this was not at all what the Secretary had expected. His expression was one of downright joy.

“Where is it?” he said eagerly.

“I brought it with me,” Chase replied, taking a letter from his inside coat pocket.

“Let me have it,” Lincoln said, and he put out a long arm.

Chase drew back, but not in time. Lincoln already had hold of the paper, and the Secretary suffered the added shock of having it snatched from his grasp. Reading it quickly through, Lincoln laughed; “a triumphal laugh,” Welles called it in his diary. “This cuts the Gordian knot,” he exclaimed. “I can dispose of this subject now without difficulty. I see my way clear.” Stanton, who had been guilty of some of the same backstairs maneuvers—though he did not know whether the President suspected him, or what he might do if he did—remarked stiffly that he was
prepared to tender his resignation, too. But Lincoln already had what he had been working toward. “You may go to your department,” he said gaily. “I don’t want yours. This”—he held up Chase’s letter—“is all I want; this relieves me; the case is clear; the trouble is ended. I will detain neither of you longer.”

His satisfaction was obvious, amounting to delight. What he had had in mind all along, and had achieved through skillful handling, was a balance: Chase’s resignation against Seward’s, which the Jacobins were still urging him to accept. Now, however, with Chase’s inseparably included—“If one goes, the other must,” he presently notified the senators; “they must hunt in couples”—they would be much less insistent; for, whatever their disgust with the Treasury chief’s performance the day before, they still believed that he could be useful to them within the administration’s private councils. Lincoln himself described the situation with a metaphor out of his boyhood in Kentucky, where he had seen farmers riding to market with a brace of pumpkins lodged snugly in a bag, one at each end in order to make a balanced load across the horse’s withers. “Now I can ride,” he said. “I have got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.” Accordingly, he sent polite, identical notes to the two ministers, declining to accept their resignations and requesting them to continue as members of his official family. Seward, who had watched the maneuvers with amusement from a seat behind the scene, agreed at once; but Chase held off, still suffering from the fleabites, which were no less painful for being figurative. “I will sleep on it,” he said. However, after a day of meditation and prayer—for it was a Sunday and he was intensely religious, spending a good part of each Sabbath on his knees—he agreed to remain at his post, as Lincoln had confidently expected.

Here was a case of double salvation, in more ways than one. Within the confines of his office in the White House, Lincoln had planned and fought a three-day battle as important to the welfare of the nation, and the progress of the war through united effort, as many that raged in the open field with booming guns and casualties by the thousands. In addition to retaining the services of Seward and Chase, both excellent men at their respective posts, he had managed to turn aside the wrath of the Jacobins without increasing their bitterness toward himself or incurring their open hatred, which might well have been fatal. Nor was that all. Paradoxically, because of the way he had gone about it, in avoiding the disruption of his cabinet he had achieved within it a closer harmony than had obtained before. This was partly because of the increased respect his actions earned him, but it was also because of the effect the incident had on the two ministers most intimately concerned. For all his loyalty to Lincoln through the storm, Seward had not previously abandoned the notion that he was the man directly in line for his job. Now, though, with all but one of the senators in his own party having expressed a desire to see him removed from any connection with the executive
branch of the government, the presidential itch was cured. From that hour, his devotion to his duties was single-minded and his loyalty acquired an added zeal. So much could hardly be said for Chase, exactly, but he too had been sobered, and his ambition taken down a notch, by the cold-eyed looks the radical leaders had given him while he squirmed. It was no wonder, then, that Lincoln indulged in self-congratulation when he reviewed the three-day maneuver. “I do not see how I could have done better,” he remarked.

Few would disagree with this assessment, even among the frock-coated politicians he had bested, whether senators or members of his cabinet. In point of fact, whatever shocks they had suffered along the way, there should have been little surprise at the outcome; for the matter had been essentially political, and politics (or statesmanship, if you will, which he once defined as the art of getting the best from men who all too often were intent on giving nothing better than their worst) was a science he had mastered some time back. The military art was something else. Whether Lincoln would ever do as well as Commander in Chief of the nation’s armies as he had done as its Chief Executive was more than doubtful—particularly in the light of current testimony as to the condition of the largest of those armies, still on the near bank of the Rappahannock attempting to recover from the shock of its mid-December blood bath.

“Exhaustion steals over the country. Confidence and hope are dying,” the Quartermaster General wrote privately this week to its commander. “The slumber of the army since [the attack at Fredericksburg] is eating into the vitals of the nation. As day after day has gone, my heart has sunk and I see greater peril to our nationality in the present condition of affairs than I have seen at any time during the struggle.” Complaints were heard from below as well as above, and though these were not addressed to Burnside personally, accusing fingers were leveled in his direction and even higher. “Our poppycorn generals kill men as Herod killed the innocents,” a Massachusetts private declared, and a Wisconsin major called this winter “the Valley Forge of the war.” A bitterness was spreading through the ranks. “Alas my poor country!” a New York corporal wrote home. “It has strong limbs to march and meet the foe, stout arms to strike heavy blows, brave hearts to dare. But the brains, the brains—have we no brains to use the arms and limbs and eager hearts with cunning? Perhaps Old Abe has some funny story to tell, appropriate to the occasion.… Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak,” he added. “I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”

There was a snatch of doggerel, sung to the tune of the old sea chanty “Johnny, Fill up the Bowl,” making the rounds:

Veterans in the Army of the Potomac took up the refrain, “all played out,” and made it their own. Once they had pretended cynicism as a cover for their greenness and their fears, but now they felt they had earned it and they found the phrase descriptive of their outlook through this season of discontent. “The phrensy of our soldiers rushing to glory or death has, as our boys amusingly affirm,
been played out,”
a regimental chaplain wrote. “Our battle-worn veterans go into danger when ordered, remain as a stern duty so long as directed, and leave as soon as honor and duty allow.” Case-hardened by their recent experience over the river, particularly in the repeated fruitless assaults on the stone wall at the base of Marye’s Heights, they had no use for heroic postures or pretensions nowadays. When they saw magazine illustrations showing mounted officers with drawn sabers leading smartly aligned columns of troops unflinchingly through shellbursts, they snickered and jeered and whooped their motto: “All played out!”

Lincoln already knew something of this, but he learned a good deal more on December 29 when two disgruntled brigadiers hurried from Falmouth to Washington on short-term passes, intending to warn their congressmen of what they believed was imminent disaster. Burnside was planning to recross the Rappahannock any day now, having issued three days’ cooked rations the day after Christmas, along with orders for the troops to be held in readiness to move on twelve hours’ notice. What alarmed the two brigadiers—John Newton and John Cochrane, the latter a former Republican congressman himself—was that the army, which they were convinced was in a condition of near-mutiny, would come apart at the seams if it was called upon to repeat this soon the tragic performance it had staged two weeks ago in the same arena, and therefore they had come to warn the influential Bay State senator Henry Wilson, chairman of the Senate Military Committee, in hopes that he could get the movement stopped. In the intensity of their concern, as they discovered when they reached the capital, they had failed to take into account the fact that Congress was in recess over the holidays; Wilson had gone home. Undeterred, they went to see the Secretary of State, a former political associate of Cochrane’s. When Seward heard their burden of woes he took them straight to the President, to whom—though they were somewhat daunted now, never having intended to climb this
high up the chain of command—they repeated, along with hasty assurances that the basis for their admittedly irregular visit was patriotism, not hope for advancement, their conviction that if the Army of the Potomac was committed to battle in its present discouraged state it would be utterly destroyed. Not only would it be unable to hold the line of the Rappahannock; it would not even be able to hold the line of the river from which it took its name. Lincoln, who had known nothing of the pending movement, and scarcely more of the extent of the demoralization Cochrane and Newton claimed was rampant, was infected with their fears and got off a wire to Burnside without delay: “I have good reason for saying that you must not make a general movement without first letting me know of it.”