BY THE TIME LINCOLN got to bed, it was two o’clock. He was exhausted but could not sleep. “The excitement which had kept him up through the campaign had passed away,” he later recalled to Gideon Welles, “and he was oppressed with the load of responsibility that was upon him.” Outside his windows, he could hear the citizens of Springfield partying in the streets, laughing, singing, and marching until they could carry on no longer. With the arrival of dawn, they finally dispersed to their homes.
Undoubtedly, Lincoln shared the elation of his neighbors. From his earliest days in politics, he had craved the opportunity to accomplish important deeds that would benefit his fellows. In modern parlance, he wanted to make a difference and now he had the opportunity to do so. Yet, keenly aware of both the fractious nature of the youthful Republican Party and the ominous threats from the South, he understood that his country was entering a most perilous time.
“I began at once to feel that I needed support,” he noted later; “others to share with me the burden.” As the exhausted townsfolk shuffled back to their homes and the city sank “into its usual quietness,” Lincoln began to compose his official family—the core of his administration. “This was on Wednesday morning,” he revealed, “and before the sun went down, I had made up my Cabinet. It was almost the same as I finally selected.”
On a blank card he wrote the names of the seven men he wanted. At the center of his list stood his chief rivals for the nomination—Seward, Chase, and Bates. The list also included Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, and Norman Judd, all former Democrats, as well as William Dayton of New Jersey, a former Whig. While several months would pass before the cabinet was assembled, subjecting Lincoln to intense pressures from all sides, he resolved that day to surround himself with the strongest men from every faction of the new Republican Party—former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery Democrats.
The stillness of this first day that allowed Lincoln to contemplate the formulation of his ideal cabinet proved to be the calm before the storm. Soon, “the mad scramble” for the lesser positions began. With letters of recommendation stuffed in their pockets and fervent hopes in their hearts, hordes of office seekers descended on Springfield. Some arrived with “muddy boots and hickory shirts,” while others were dressed in their finest linen and woolens. All were graciously welcomed by Lincoln.
He decided to hold two receptions a day, the first in the morning, the second in the late afternoon. The receptions were held in the Governor’s Room in the State House, a chamber far too small for the constant crush of visitors pushing their way through the narrow doorway, guided by Lincoln’s “clear voice and often ringing laughter.” New York Tribune correspondent Henry Villard, although initially skeptical of Lincoln’s qualifications to be president, observed that the president-elect “showed remarkable tact” with every caller. Listening patiently to each applicant, Lincoln revealed a quick-witted “adaptation to individual characteristics and peculiarities. He never evaded a proper question, or failed to give a fit answer.” What most impressed Villard was Lincoln’s remarkable ability to tell a humorous story or deliver an appropriate anecdote “to explain a meaning or enforce a point, the aptness of which was always perfect.”
While the opposition papers derided Lincoln’s penchant for telling stories, imagining that he babbled on from the moment he awakened—at mealtimes, on the street, in his office, in stores, even in his sleep (with Mary beside him in her nightcap)—the perceptive Villard understood that the president-elect’s perpetual supply of stories “helped many times to heal wounded feelings and mitigate disappointments.” Everyone Lincoln dealt with, Villard concluded, agreed that “he is the very embodiment of good temper and affability. They will all concede that he has a kind word, an encouraging smile, a humorous remark for nearly everyone that seeks his presence, and that but few, if any, emerge from his reception room without being strongly and favorably impressed with his general disposition.”
At this juncture, Lincoln was sorely in need of a second assistant. Nicolay recommended twenty-two-year-old John Hay, the young journalist and Brown University graduate who had become actively involved in the campaign and had written pro-Lincoln columns for theMissouri Democrat. Nicolay had originally met Hay in private school. When Nicolay asked his boyhood friend to help with the overflowing correspondence, the gregarious young man was delighted. Though Hay was preparing for the bar in the Springfield office of his uncle Milton Hay, he was passionate about literature. On Class Day at Brown, he had delivered a poem that was remembered for years afterward. He had hoped quixotically to make his living as a poet upon graduation, but had reluctantly settled for a career in law. He leaped at the chance to work in the White House.
For Mary, Willie, and Tad, it was an exciting time. At night, after the formal receptions were over, visitors, sketch artists, and friends flocked to their home. Mary flourished in her role as hostess, while the boys regaled visitors with laughter and stories of their own. The ardent political conversations of celebrated men surely reminded Mary of childhood evenings when her father entertained congressmen and senators, including Henry Clay, in the parlor of his Kentucky mansion. To be sure, there were unpleasant moments, as when mud was tracked into the house, or when callers would point to Mary and boisterously ask: “Is that the old woman?” But Mary seemed to take it all in stride. Her delight in victory overshadowed such small aggravations.
Even as the Lincolns entertained their colorful parade of callers, the president-elect never lost sight of the intricate task he faced in building a cabinet that would preserve the integrity of the Republican Party in the North, while providing the fairest possible representation from the South. To help with his deliberations, he asked Hannibal Hamlin, his vice president–elect, to meet him in Chicago. Once the arrangements were made, he invited his old friend Joshua Speed to join him, and suggested that he bring his wife, Fanny, to keep Mary company. Traveling by train with a small party of journalists and friends, the Lincolns took up quarters at the Tremont House, which had lodged Davis and Swett six months earlier when they managed the unexpected nomination.
Although Hamlin had been a senator when Lincoln was in the House, this was the first time they would meet. Hamlin recalled listening to a speech Lincoln delivered that “was so full of good humor and sharp points” that the entire chamber “was convulsed with laughter.” Born in Maine the same year as Lincoln, Hamlin was a tall, powerfully built man with a swarthy complexion. He had entered politics as a Jacksonian Democrat at a young age, serving first in the Maine state legislature, then in the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally in the Senate.
The two men began their discussions in Lincoln’s room in the Tremont House, but news of their meeting soon brought “a great throng of visitors,” necessitating a public reception and a round of dinners. The following day, however, their dialogue resumed privately at a friend’s house, where Lincoln made clear his determination to create “a compact body” by drawing his former rivals into “his official household.” Hamlin apparently agreed with this notion, and the conversation turned to selecting a representative from New England. Lincoln’s original choice, Gideon Welles, was mentioned, along with Nathaniel Banks and Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Hamlin objected to Banks but agreed to look into the availability and feasibility of both Adams and Welles.
Amid the flood of political aspirants and tactical discussions, Lincoln must have coveted his time with Speed. He arranged for Fanny to visit with Mary so that he might speak with his old friend in private. Speed later recalled that Lincoln “threw himself on the bed” and said: “Speed what are your pecuniary Conditions—are you rich, or poor.” Understanding the import of the question, Speed replied: “I think I know what you wish. I’ll Speak Candidly to you—My pecuniary Conditions are good—I do not think you have any office within your gift that I can afford to take.” Though Speed’s resolve never wavered, the two friends would maintain contact during the war, and Speed would play an important role in keeping Kentucky in the Union.
While Lincoln was preoccupied with selecting his cabinet, Mary had a splendid time. She visited the scene of her husband’s triumph at the Wigwam, toured the Custom House and the Post Office, and maintained her poise and charm at the large public reception accorded the president-elect and his wife.
Returning home, Lincoln corresponded with a wide range of politicians and listened carefully to their suggestions for his cabinet. In the end, however, he alone would solve what Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later described as “an intensified crossword puzzle in which party loyalty and service, personal fitness, geographical location and a dozen other factors have to be taken into account and made to harmonize.”
From the start, Lincoln determined to give the highest place to Seward, “in view of his ability, his integrity, and his commanding influence.” The presidency now unavailable, Seward never questioned that he deserved the premier post as secretary of state. Not only had he been the overwhelming favorite for the nomination, but he had vigorously campaigned for Lincoln in the general election and had helped to bring the critical state of New York to Lincoln’s side.
“Of course, Mr. Lincoln will offer you the chief place in his Cabinet,” Charles Francis Adams wrote Seward. “I trust no considerations will deter you from accepting it…. I know of no such faith existing in the competency of any other person.” From Pennsylvania, Simon Cameron tendered a similar prediction. “You will be offered the State Dept. within a few days and you must not refuse it. The whole victory achieved by the labor of so many years, will be lost if you run away now. My whole ambition is to see you in the Presidency.”
Lincoln agreed wholeheartedly with the presumption that Seward deserved first consideration. Seward, however, harbored more elaborate ambitions. While Lincoln desired a cabinet that stitched together the various factions of the Republican Party, Seward believed the cabinet should be dominated by former Whigs like himself. The Whig Party had provided nearly two thirds of Lincoln’s total vote. Lesser posts could be given to the leading representatives of the other factions, but the former Whigs, Seward believed, deserved all the top prizes. Furthermore, Seward intended, with Weed’s help, to have a major role in choosing the remaining cabinet members, thus acquiring a position in the new government more commanding than that of Lincoln himself.
To set this in motion, Thurlow Weed invited Lincoln shortly after the election to join him at Seward’s home in Auburn so the three men might deliberate about the cabinet. As precedent, he invoked the journey of President-elect William Harrison to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1841 to confer with his rival Henry Clay. Lincoln wisely declined. When Weed suggested meeting in a more neutral setting, Lincoln again declined. While more than willing to consult with Weed and Seward on his cabinet selections, Lincoln wanted it known that the ultimate decisions would emanate from Springfield and would be his alone.
Lincoln’s careful maneuvering with Weed did not indicate any hesitation to make Seward his secretary of state. On the contrary, Lincoln responded testily to a warning from a conservative Kentucky judge that “if obnoxious men like Seward, Cassius M. Clay, &c were put in the Cabinet,” the citizens of Kentucky might feel compelled to follow South Carolina in its call for a secession convention. “In what speech,” Lincoln asked, had Seward or any prominent Republican “ever spoken menacingly of the South?” The problem was not what the Republicans said or believed but the manner in which Southerners “persistently bespotted and bespattered every northern man by their misrepresentations to rob them of what strength they might otherwise have.”
In fact, after newspapers had speculated that Seward had no interest in a cabinet post, and that, even if he did, Lincoln did not want to offer him one, Lincoln resolved to act quickly. Early in December, he directed Hamlin to ascertain Seward’s state of mind. When Hamlin approached Seward’s friend Preston King, King suggested that the vice president–elect should deal directly with Seward. Knowing this would be equivalent “to a tender of a place,” Hamlin again sought Lincoln’s instructions.
Lincoln concluded the time had come to make the offer official. In reply to Hamlin, he enclosed two letters for Seward and directed Hamlin, after consulting with Trumbull in Washington, to deliver them to Seward “at once.” On the afternoon of December 10, after the Senate had adjourned, Hamlin caught up with Seward on the street. Reaching the Washington House on the corner of Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue where Hamlin was staying, the vice president–elect invited Seward in to talk. Asked if he would, in truth, reject the position of secretary of state, Seward was guarded. “If that is what you have come to talk to me about, Hamlin, we might as well stop here,” he replied. “I don’t want the place, and if I did, I have reason to know that I could not get it; therefore let us have no more talk about it.”
“Very well,” Hamlin said, “but before you express yourself to others as plainly as you have done to me, let me present you with this letter from Mr. Lincoln.” Seward “trembled” and appeared “nervous” as he took the first letter, dated December 8, which contained the formal invitation. “With your permission,” Lincoln wrote, “I shall, at the proper time, nominate you to the Senate, for confirmation, as Secretary of State, for the United States. Please let me hear from you at your own earliest convenience.”
At first, Seward said little, perhaps suspecting this was the pro forma offer that the papers had predicted all along. Moments later, he opened the second letter, labeled private and confidential, which was brilliantly designed to soothe Seward’s ego. “Rumors have got into the newspapers,” Lincoln wrote, “to the effect that the Department, named above, would be tendered you, as a compliment, and with the expectation that you would decline it. I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. On the contrary, it has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration…. I now offer you the place, in the hope that you will accept it, and with the belief that your position in the public eye, your integrity, ability, learning, and great experience, all combine to render it an appointment pre-eminently fit to be made.”
His face “pale with excitement,” Seward grasped Hamlin’s hand. “This is remarkable, Mr. Hamlin; I will consider the matter, and, in accordance with Mr. Lincoln’s request, give him my decision at the earliest practicable moment.” Three days later, on December 13, Seward wrote Lincoln a gracious note, explaining that it was an honor to have received the offer, but that he needed “a little time” to think about whether he had “the qualifications and temper of a minister, and whether it is in such a capacity that my friends would prefer that I should act if I am to continue at all in the public service.” He wished, he said, that he could confer directly with Lincoln on these questions, but he did not see how such a meeting “could prudently be held under existing circumstances.” While there was little doubt that Seward desired the post, he still wished to test the extent of his influence in selecting congenial (pro-Seward) colleagues.
AFTER TENDERING THE OFFER to Seward, Lincoln turned his attention to Bates. Through Frank Blair, arrangements were made for Bates to visit Lincoln in Springfield on December 15. Arriving the evening before, Bates took a room at the Chenery House, where he encountered John Nicolay the next morning at breakfast. Nicolay was somewhat taken aback by the elder statesman’s appearance. “He is not of impressive exterior; his hair is grey, and his beard quite white,” Nicolay recorded, “and his face shows all the marks of age quite strongly.” Nonetheless, he found “his flow of words in conversation” to be “very genial and easy.” After breakfast, Bates walked over to Lincoln’s room at the State House. Since Lincoln had not yet arrived, Nicolay gave Bates the morning paper and hastened to Lincoln’s house to inform him that Bates was waiting. Shortly, the two former Whigs settled down for what Bates described as a “free conversation—till interrupted by a crowd” of callers. In order to speak privately, Lincoln suggested that they adjourn to Bates’s room in the hotel, where they spent much of the afternoon together.
Lincoln took little time in assuring Bates that “from the time of his nomination, his determination was, in case of success, to invite [him] into the Cabinet.” In fact, Bates proudly noted in his diary, Lincoln told him that he deemed his participation in his administration “necessary to its complete success.” Lincoln acknowledged that several of Bates’s friends had urged his appointment as secretary of state, but he believed he “should offer that place to Mr. Seward,” not only “as a matter of duty to the party, and to Mr. Sewards many and strong friends,” but also because “it accorded perfectly with his own personal inclinations.” However, “he had not yet communicated with Mr. Seward, and did not know whether he would accept the appointment—as there had been some doubts expressed about his doing so.” While Lincoln may have deliberately chosen the word “communicated” to allow Bates the belief he was the first approached, he actually meant that Seward had not yet responded affirmatively to his letter. Bates understood it to mean that he was the first man to whom Lincoln had spoken about a cabinet position. Lincoln explained that although he could not offer Bates the premier slot as secretary of state, he could extend “what he supposed would be most congenial, and for which he was certainly in every way qualified, viz: the Attorney Generalship.”
Bates told Lincoln that if “peace and order prevailed in the country,” he would decline the honor much as he had refused the post of secretary of war under President Fillmore in 1850. Only two months earlier, acknowledging in his diary that “everybody expects Mr. Lincoln to offer me one of his Departments,” he had vowed to decline the position. “My pecuniary circumstances (barely competent) and my settled domestic habits make it very undesirable for me to be in high office with low pay—it subjects a man to great temptations to live above his income, and thus become dishonest; and if he have the courage to live economically, it subjects his family to ridicule.”
With the country “in trouble and danger,” however, he “felt it his duty to sacrifice his personal inclinations, and if he could, to contribute his labor and influence to the restoration of peace in, and the preservation of his country.” Lincoln knew he had his man, either for U.S. Attorney General, or, if Seward should decline, for secretary of state. When Bates suggested several days later that “a good effect might be produced on the public mind—especially in the border slave States” by leaking the news of his offer, Lincoln agreed. “Let a little editorial appear in the Missouri Democrat,” he wrote Bates, revealing that he had accepted a place in the cabinet, though “it is not yet definitely settled which Department.” The announcement of Bates’s appointment received positive marks almost everywhere. Indeed, the appointment of Bates would require the least maneuvering of all Lincoln’s selections.
Meanwhile, after receiving Lincoln’s offer, Seward consulted Weed, as he had at every critical juncture in his long career. Weed had already established a strong working relationship with Leonard Swett, who had assured him after the election that “we all feel that New York and the friends of Seward have acted nobly…. We should be exceedingly glad to know your wishes and your views, and to serve you in any way in our power.” Weed now contacted Swett to secure an invitation to discuss Seward’s thoughts on the design of the cabinet with Lincoln. “Mr. Lincoln would be very glad to see you,” Swett informed Weed on December 10. “He asks me to tell you so…. Mr. Lincoln wants your advice about his Cabinet, and the general policy of his administration.”
With Weed en route to Illinois, Seward wrote to inform Lincoln of his conversations with Weed, who would convey his “present unsettled view of the subject upon which you so kindly wrote me a few days ago.” Weed arrived in Springfield on December 20. For weeks, reporters representing New York papers had been scanning the guest lists of the local Springfield hotels for signatures of any of their fellow New Yorkers. They were about to conclude that the Eastern establishment was deliberately shunning Lincoln when they uncovered the name of Thurlow Weed on the register at the Chenery House: “The renowned chief of the Albany lobby—the maker and destroyer of political fortunes—the unrivaled party manager—the once almighty Weed,” a newspaper in Rochester noted, has “migrated towards the rising sun!”
Lincoln and Weed settled down opposite each other in Lincoln’s parlor, with Swett and Davis in attendance. Swett would never forget the image of the two men, who “took to each other” so strongly, both “remarkable in stature and appearance,” with “rough, strongly marked features,” both having “risen by their own exertions from humble relations to the control of a nation.” Despite their mutual respect, Lincoln’s resolve regarding his cabinet choices undoubtedly dismayed Weed, who had assumed that he and Seward would have a critical role in the composition of the entire body. To Lincoln’s appointment of Bates, Weed did not object; neither did he complain when the conversation turned to Caleb Smith of Indiana and Simon Cameron. Though Cameron was a former Democrat, Weed understood that Pennsylvania deserved an appointment. Besides, Cameron was a practical man, a politician after his own heart. When mention was made, however, of Salmon Chase, Gideon Welles, and Montgomery Blair—all former Democrats, all unfriendly to Seward—Weed “made strong opposition.”
Chase, Weed argued, was an abolitionist. Welles and his Democratic colleagues in Connecticut had been thorns in the side of Weed and Seward for years. To Welles, “more than any one, perhaps, Weed attributed the defeat of Mr. Seward at Chicago,” for the Connecticut delegation was “unanimously opposed to Mr. Seward” and set the tone for other New England states. Far better than Welles, Weed recommended, would be Charles Francis Adams or George Ashmun, both former Whigs and good friends of both Seward and Weed. Lincoln somewhat disingenuously claimed that since Hamlin was from New England, where so much shipping was located, the vice president–elect had been designated to choose the New England representative for the Navy Department. Since Hamlin had chosen Welles, “the only question was as to whether he [Welles] was unfit personally.” In fact, Hamlin and Lincoln had discussed various men for the post, including Welles. Hamlin preferred Charles Francis Adams, but Lincoln wanted the former Democrat Welles to help balance the Whig members of his cabinet. Indeed, several years later, in a conversation with Welles, Lincoln claimed that his mind was “fixed” on Welles from the start. Though his choice was “confirmed” by Hamlin and others, recalled Lincoln, “the selection was my own, and not theirs.”
Understanding that Lincoln would not be swayed from Welles, Weed playfully suggested a fanciful alternative for secretary of the navy. The president-elect could purchase “an attractive figure-head, to be adorned with an elaborate wig and luxuriant whiskers, and transfer it from the prow of a ship to the entrance of the Navy Department,” which would be “quite as serviceable as his secretary, and less expensive.” Lincoln immediately appreciated the humor in the resemblance between Weed’s image of a wigged, bewhiskered figurehead and Father Neptune, as he would later call Welles. He reckoned, however, he needed “a live secretary of the navy.”
Next, Lincoln brought up the name of Montgomery Blair. “Has he been suggested by any one except his father, Francis P. Blair, Sr.?” Weed mocked. The question prompted from Lincoln an amusing anecdote that made it all too clear to Weed that Blair was Lincoln’s choice. Still, Weed argued that Lincoln would eventually regret his selection. Lincoln explained that he needed a representative from the border states. Montgomery’s appointment would ensure support both in Maryland and through his brother, Frank, in Missouri. Weed suggested instead John Gilmer of North Carolina, a loyal Union man. Lincoln knew Gilmer and liked him, but doubted if any Southerner would accept a post. Nonetheless, he conceded that if Gilmer were contacted and agreed, and if “there was no doubt of his fidelity, he would appoint him.”
As the conversation was drawing to an end, Weed pointed out that the inclusion of Chase, Cameron, Welles, and Blair in the cabinet along with Seward, Bates, and Smith would give the Democrats a majority, slighting the Whigs who made up the major portion of the Republican Party. “You seem to forget,” Lincoln replied, “that I expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”
Weed returned to Albany convinced that Lincoln was “capable in the largest sense of the term.” In the Albany Evening Journal, he wrote: “his mind is at once philosophical and practical. He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself and for himself.”
While publicly praising Lincoln’s independence, Weed was privately so chagrined by the complexion of the cabinet that he was no longer certain Seward should accept. “In one aspect all is gone,” Weed wrote Seward on Christmas Day, likely indicating Welles, “nor do I know how much can be saved in the other,” probably referring to Blair.
The following evening, Seward sent a note to Charles Francis Adams, asking him to call in the morning. With a tone of sorrow in his voice, Seward told Adams he had imagined that when Lincoln offered him the premier position in the cabinet, he “would have consulted him upon the selection of the colleagues with whom he was to act”; but Weed had returned from Springfield empty-handed. He had hoped Adams would be awarded the Treasury, but the likely choice of Welles would fill New England’s quota, closing the door on Adams. “This was not such a Cabinet,” Seward confided to Adams, “as he had hoped to see, and it placed him in great embarrassment what to do. If he declined, could he assign the true reasons for it, which was the want of support in it? If he accepted, what a task he had before him!” Adams replied that “in this moment of great difficulty and danger, there was no alternative for him but acceptance.” This is probably what Seward wanted to hear all along, after he had expressed his distress at not being able to bring his friend Adams along.
The next day, Seward wrote to Lincoln that “after due reflection and with much self distrust,” he had “concluded; that if I should be nominated to the Senate…it would be my duty to accept.” That evening, he wrote to his wife, “I have advised Mr. L. that I will not decline. It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.” Frances was not surprised by her husband’s acceptance. Though she wanted him to close the curtain on his political career and come home to his family in Auburn, when huge worshipful crowds met his whirlwind summer tour for Lincoln, she had foreseen that his driving ambition would never be satisfied in tranquil Auburn. Nor was she surprised by his grandiose claim that he would try to save freedom and his country. She often saw her man with a clearer eye than he saw himself.
WITH 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.
WHILE LINCOLN 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.”
Although increasingly infuriated by Southern misrepresentations of his positions, Lincoln confined expression of his anger to private letters. Upon hearing from the New York Times’s Henry Raymond that one of his correspondents, a wealthy Mississippi gentleman named William Smedes, had justified the state’s “blaze of passion” for secession on the grounds that Lincoln was “pledged to the ultimate extinction of slavery, holds the black man to be the equal of the white, & stigmatizes our whole people as immoral & unchristian,” Lincoln issued a blistering reply. As evidence, Smedes had cited an “infamous” speech Lincoln had purportedly given on the occasion when Chase was presented with his silver pitcher by the free blacks of Cincinnati. For such a speech, Smedes proclaimed, he would “regard death by a stroke of lightning to Mr. Lincoln as but a just punishment from an offended deity.”
“What a very mad-man your correspondent, Smedes is,” Lincoln replied, countering that he “was never in a meeting of negroes in [his] life; and never saw a pitcher presented by anybody to anybody.” Moreover, he went on, “Mr. Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinctincton of slavery; does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly as Mr. S. states it; and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.”
However justifiable Lincoln’s anger at what he rightly called a “forgery out and out,” his response reveals the gulf still separating him from Chase on the issue of race. Although Lincoln’s views on racial equality reflected the majority position in the North, Chase regarded his call at the pitcher ceremony to eradicate the Black Laws one of the proudest moments of his life.
WHILE OUTRAGED BY the South’s willful distortions of his positions, Lincoln was far more troubled by the growing rancor splitting his own party. Conciliators believed that with the proper compromises, the eight remaining slaveholding states could be kept in the Union, hoping that without expansion, the secession movement would ultimately die out. Hard-liners, meanwhile, ranged from those who thought compromise would only embolden the South to extremists who believed that military force alone would bring the South back to the Union fold. As president-elect, Lincoln had to balance two emerging poles of the Republican Party, a task made all the more difficult by the over 700 miles that separated Springfield from Washington.
Yet, almost unnoticed, Lincoln managed through a series of complex and subtle maneuvers to keep the Republican Party intact through the “Great Secession Winter.” Whatever conciliatory measures he might consider, Lincoln was adamant, he told Trumbull, that there must be “no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again…. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” If the door were opened to slavery in any of the new territories, Lincoln feared that the South would eventually try to annex Cuba or invade Mexico, thereby restarting the long struggle.
Though Lincoln remained inflexible on the territorial question, he was willing, he told Seward, to compromise on “fugitive slaves, District of Columbia, slave trade among the slave states, and whatever springs of necessity from the fact that the institution is amongst us.” Knowing that two parallel committees in the House and Senate were set to address the sectional crisis, Lincoln relayed a confidential message to Seward that he had drafted three short resolutions. He instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield. The first resolved that “the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.” The second would amend the Fugitive Slave Law “by granting a jury trial to the fugitive.” The third recommended that all state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed.
Seward agreed to introduce Lincoln’s resolutions without revealing their source, though he was of the opinion that they would do nothing to stop the secession movement. The best option, he told Lincoln, was to focus on keeping the border states in the Union, though he feared “nothing could certainly restrain them” short of adopting the series of proposals authored by Kentucky’s John Crittenden. The Crittenden Compromise, among other provisions, offered to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thereby initiating the very extension of slavery into the territories Lincoln had pledged to prevent.
Lincoln’s clear resolve never to accept any measure extending slavery prevented the wavering Seward and other like-minded Republicans from backing the Crittenden Compromise. As one Southern state after another withdrew from the Union, Seward came to believe that only conciliation could save the Union. With Lincoln’s iron hand guiding the way in this matter, however, Seward conceded that there was not “the slightest” chance that the Republican side would adopt the Compromise. Still, Seward retained his characteristic optimism, assuring Lincoln that with the passage of time, “sedition will be growing weaker and Loyalty stronger.”
Events soon eclipsed the slender hope that time would bring about a peaceful solution to the sectional crisis. There were three federal forts in South Carolina: Fort Moultrie, under the command of Major Robert Anderson; Fort Sumter; and Castle Pinckney. South Carolina announced that all three were in its domain and that three commissioners of the new “republic” had been named to negotiate the matter with the Buchanan administration. “From the first,” John Nicolay reported, it was apparent that “the Carolinians intended somehow to get possession of these fortifications, as it was the only means by which they could make any serious resistance to the federal government.”
In late December, a rumor reached Springfield that Buchanan had instructed Major Anderson “to surrender Fort Moultrie if it is attacked.” When Lincoln heard the news, he told Nicolay: “If that is true they ought to hang him!” Straightaway, he sent a message to General Scott through his friend Congressman Washburne, to be prepared at the time of the inauguration “to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require.”
In fact, the ever-vacillating Buchanan had not decided to surrender the forts. The issue produced an open rift in his already compromised cabinet. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb of Georgia had resigned and departed for his native state, but several secessionists remained, “vying…for Buchanan’s ear” with staunch Unionists Secretary of State Jeremiah Black and Postmaster General Joseph Holt. In the midst of the cabinet crisis, Black prevailed on Buchanan to offer the attorney generalship to his good friend Edwin Stanton, who was still practicing law in Washington. Black also pressured Stanton to accept the post, adding a third ally to bolster Buchanan’s will. While Buchanan waffled over the proper course of action, Anderson preempted his decision on the night of December 26, 1860, by deciding to move his troops from Fort Moultrie to the less vulnerable Fort Sumter. The next day, South Carolina took possession of the abandoned Fort Moultrie as well as Castle Pinckney.
Under the influence of Black, Holt, and Stanton, Buchanan agreed to send reinforcements to Anderson at Sumter. In early January, the same day that Lincoln met with Chase in Springfield, an unarmed merchant vessel, the Star of the West, headed for Charleston Harbor equipped with men and supplies. The mission failed when the weaponless vessel was fired upon by shore batteries. The Star of the West turned back immediately and headed north.
These dramatic events created what Seward called “a feverish excitement” in Washington. No one felt more apprehensive than the newest member of Buchanan’s cabinet, Edwin Stanton. Thoroughly loyal to the Union, excitable and suspicious by nature, he became convinced that secessionists planned to seize the nation’s capital and prevent Lincoln’s inauguration. From his position inside the government, Stanton feared that “every department in Washington then contained numerous traitors and spies.” He discovered that the army had been deployed in far-flung places and that treasonous officers had shifted arms and guns from arsenals in the North to various places in the South. If Maryland and Virginia could be provoked into secession, Stanton believed secessionists would be in a position to take Washington. With the essentially defenseless capital captured, they would possess “the symbols of government, the seals and the treaties—the treasuries & the apparent right to control the army & the navy.” Stanton was driven to distraction when President Buchanan could not “be made to believe, the existence of this danger,” and would not credit the treasonous plot, which, Stanton feared, would include an attempt to assassinate Lincoln before his inauguration.
At this juncture, his co-biographers report, Stanton “came to a momentous decision: he decided to throw party fealty and cabinet secrecy to the winds and to work behind the President’s back.” With the White House paralyzed and the Democratic Party at loggerheads, he determined that “Congress and its Republican leaders were the last hope for a strong policy, the last place for him to turn.” Stanton knew that becoming an informer violated his oath of office, but concluded that his oath to support the Constitution was paramount.
Seeking the most powerful conduit for his information, Stanton chose Seward. Knowing they could not openly communicate, fearful that secessionists lurking on every corner would report the meetings in newspapers, Stanton prevailed on Peter Watson—the same Watson who had initially interviewed Lincoln for the Reaper trial—to act as his middleman. Almost every evening, Watson would call on Seward at his home to deliver oral and written messages from Stanton. Watson would then return to Stanton with Seward’s responses. “The question what either of us could or ought to do at the time for the public welfare was discussed and settled,” Seward later recalled.
The first meeting between Seward and Watson likely took place on December 29, prompting the flurry of private letters that Seward penned late that night. “At length I have gotten a position in which I can see what is going on in the Councils of the President,” Seward wrote Lincoln. “It pains me to learn that things are even worse than is understood…. A plot is forming to seize the Capitol on or before the 4th of March…. Believe that I know what I write. In point of fact the responsibilities of your administration must begin before the time arrives. I therefore renew the suggestion of your coming here earlier than you otherwise would…. I trust that by this time you will be able to know your correspondent without his signature, which for prudence is omitted.” That same evening, Seward confided in Frances that “treason is all around and amongst us,” and warned Weed, whose presence in Washington he would welcome, that a plot to seize the government had “abettors near the President.”
Seward assumed that Stanton was communicating with him alone. In fact, the cunning Stanton secretly spread word of the danger to several other Republicans, including Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Congressman Henry Dawes. “By early disclosure,” Dawes later wrote, Stanton was able to thwart some of the attempts by treasonous officers to turn supplies and arms over to “the enemies of their country.” Increasingly paranoid, Stanton invited Sumner to his office and then led him through a half-dozen different rooms before feeling safe to talk for a few minutes. Arrangements were made for papers to be “found and read by the light of the street lamp at night, and then returned to the place of deposit.”
Unaware of these other communications, Seward assumed it was on his shoulders to save the Union, that he “held the key to all discontent.” After his appointment as secretary of state was made public on January 10, 1861, when he “came to be regarded somewhat extensively as a person representing the incoming administration and the Republican party,” the pressure of his position was immense. “By common consent,” Seward’s admirer Henry Adams later wrote, “all eyes were turned on him, and he was overwhelmed by entreaties from men in all sections of the country to do something to save the Union.” As members of Congress, the cabinet, and hundreds of nervous citizens approached him “with prayers and tears,” Seward became “virtually the ruler of the country.” Or so he thought.
Intuiting that the country needed a clear, strong Republican voice, Seward announced that he would deliver a major speech in the Senate on January 12. “Never in the history of the American Congress has there been witnessed so intense an anxiety to hear a speech as that which preceded the delivery of Mr. Seward’s,” a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote. “What gave so much interest and weight to the Senator’s words, was the belief that it was equivalent to a speech from Lincoln himself.”
“The families of nearly all the Senators and Cabinet officers were present,” another correspondent reported, and the crush to get in was so great that “extravagant prices were offered to the various doorkeepers to obtain admission.” As Seward began to speak, senators on both sides of the aisle sat in rapt attention, including Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, who would soon resign the Senate to become the president of the Southern Confederacy. “No man was as usual engaged in writing letters, no one called for pages, no one answered messages,” a witness observed, “and every ear in the vast assembly was strained to catch his every word.”
Seward’s chief purpose was “to set forth the advantages, the necessities to the Union to the people…and the vast calamities to them and to the world which its destruction would involve.” He warned that disunion would give rise to a state of “perpetual civil war,” for neither side would tolerate an imbalance of strength or power. Opportunistic foreign nations would then move in, preying on the bickering factions. “When once the guardian angel has taken flight,” he predicted, “everything is lost.”
Listening from the packed galleries, a Boston reporter confessed that it was “difficult to restrain oneself from tears, when at the allusion of Seward to the great men of the country now dead and gone, and at his vivid portrayal of the horrors and evils of dissolution and civil war, we saw the venerable Senator Crittenden, who sat directly in front of Seward, shedding tears, and finally, overcome by his feelings, cover his face with his handkerchief.”
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, Seward offered the concessions he hoped might stem the tide of secession. He endeavored “to meet prejudice with conciliation, exaction with concession which surrenders no principle, and violence with the right hand of peace.” He began with Lincoln’s resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to prevent any future Congress from interfering with slavery where it already existed and suggesting a repeal of all personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. He then added several resolutions of his own, including the prospect of a Constitutional Convention “when the eccentric movements of secession and disunion shall have ended” to consider additional changes to the Constitution. When, after nearly two hours, he concluded his emotional remarks, the galleries erupted in thunderous applause.
As Seward no doubt anticipated, his speech had little impact on the seven states of the Deep South, where the secession movement continued its course. The following week, five Southern senators, including Jefferson Davis, rose to deliver farewell speeches to their colleagues before resigning their seats and heading south. Davis delivered the most wrenching farewell. Unable to sleep for days, he appeared “inexpressibly sad,” very ill, and “in a state of mind bordering on despair.”
“I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North,” he began. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.” The friendships forged over the years were not easily discarded. Seward himself had visited Davis every day during a painful illness several years earlier, when it seemed that Davis might lose his eyesight. Seated by Davis’s side, Seward would recount all the speeches delivered that day by both Democrats and Republicans. The ever-genial Seward told how at one point, “Your man outtalked ours, you would have liked it, but I didn’t.” The families of the senators likewise suffered as Southerners prepared for departure. Old Man Blair’s daughter, Elizabeth Blair Lee, and Varina Davis had been close friends for years. “Mrs Jef asked me if I was going down south to fight her,” Elizabeth told her husband, Phil. “I told her no. I would kiss & hug her too tight to let her break any bonds between us.”
As the senators from the seceded states packed up their belongings to return to their hometowns, it was clear that a “regime had ended in Washington.” The mansions of the old Southern aristocracy were closed; the clothes, papers, china, rugs, and furniture that embellished their lives were stowed in heavy trunks and crates to be conveyed by steamers to their Southern plantations.
Seward understood the momentum in the Deep South. His words and hopes that winter were directed at the border states. His “great wish,” young Henry Adams observed, “was to gain time,” to give the Union men in the border states “some sign of good-will; something, no matter what, with which they could go home and deny the charges of the disunionists.” In this respect, he seemed to succeed.
“As an indication of the spirit in which the Administration of Mr. Lincoln will be conducted,” a New York Times editorial concluded, the speech “must convince every candid man that its predominant and paramount aim will be to perpetuate the Union,—that it will consult, with scrupulous care, the interests, the principles, and the sentiments of every section.” While none of the concessions would recall the seceded states back into the Union, “many are sanguine in the hope that its wide diffusion through the border Slave States will stay the tide of secession.”
During the tumultuous time from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his inauguration in March 1861, Seward “fought,” Henry Adams judged, “a fight which might go down to history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.” In the weeks that followed, “the Union men in the South took new courage.” In the critical state of Virginia, the Union party prevailed. Its members defeated the secessionists by a large margin, and proposed a Peace Convention to be held in Washington with the implied promise that no further action would be taken until the convention had completed its work. Days later, Tennessee and Missouri followed suit. “Secession has run its course,” the New York diarist George Templeton Strong happily noted, betraying the false optimism throughout the North.
Seward was in the best of spirits after the speech, believing, as he told his wife, that without surrendering his principles, he had gained time “for the new Administration to organize and for the frenzy of passion to subside.” Unfortunately, hard-liners read Seward’s speech differently. Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Salmon Chase were outraged by his conciliatory tone in the face of what they considered treason on the part of the secessionist states. Animosity toward Seward was planted in the hearts of the more radical Republicans that would haunt him for the rest of his life. “I deplore S[eward]’s speech,” Sumner wrote to a friend. He “read me his speech 4 days before its delivery. When he came to his propositions, I protested, with my whole soul—for the sake of our cause…& his own good name, & I supplicated him to say no such thing.”
Thaddeus Stevens, the fiery abolitionist congressman from Pennsylvania, was beside himself. Writing to Chase, who had already spoken out against the adoption of any compromise measure, Stevens warned that if Lincoln “seeks to purchase peace by concession, and ignoring platforms, á la mode Seward, I shall give up the fight, being too old for another seven (or thirty) years war.”
The speech was particularly disappointing to those, like Carl Schurz, who had long considered Seward the leader of the great antislavery cause. “What do you think of Seward, my child?” Schurz asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power. He has trodden the way of compromise and concession, and I do not see where he can take his stand on this back track…. That is hard. We believed in him so firmly and were so affectionately attached to him. This is the time that tries men’s souls, and many probably will be found wanting.”
In the heated atmosphere of Washington, the realization that members of his own party had lost faith in him took a heavy toll on Seward. Visiting the Capitol after the speech, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stunned by Seward’s altered appearance since their journey together on the campaign train the previous September. “There he was, the same small, thin, sallow man, with the pale, wrinkled, strongly marked face—plain and imperturbable—the thick, guttural voice and the everlasting cigar. Yet it was immediately apparent that his winter’s cares had told on him, for he looked thin and worn, and ten years older than when I had left him at Auburn.”
While his conciliatory address cost him the esteem of many longtime supporters, Seward still believed that offering his hand in peace in the attempt to prevent a civil war was the right judgment. His wife, Frances, profoundly disagreed. The final speech had reached her in Auburn by telegraph hours after it was delivered. She wrote her husband a blistering letter. “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best,” she began. “You are in danger of taking the path which led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago. Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive…these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men….
“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness…but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to warn you of your dangers.”
Stung deeply by her denunciation, Seward admitted that “I am not surprised that you do not like the ‘concessions’ in my speech. You will soon enough come to see that they are not compromises, but explanations, to disarm the enemies of Truth, Freedom, and Union, of their most effective weapons.”
Perhaps no one understood Seward’s painful position better than his oldest friend, Thurlow Weed. Weed loved the speech. “It will do to live and die by and with,” he said. Still, he realized that Seward had opened himself to continuing attack. “In the cars, most of the night,” Weed wrote, “I was thinking of the ordeal you are to pass. It is to be [a] great trial of Wisdom and Temper; in Wisdom you will not fail; but of our Tempers, at sixty, we are not so sure…. You had both once, and they made you strong. How much more you need them now when hemmed in and hedged in by envy, jealousies and hatreds.”
Seward retained his equanimity amid the onslaught due largely to his belief that Lincoln not only endorsed but had covertly orchestrated his actions, for Lincoln himself had confidentially suggested several of the compromises that Seward had offered. Furthermore, in a private letter, Lincoln encouraged him: “Your recent speech is well received here; and, I think, is doing good all over the country.” Meeting in the Capitol with Charles Francis Adams a few weeks after the speech, Seward confided that “he had heard from Mr. Lincoln, who approved his course, but was so badgered at Springfield that he felt compelled to keep uncommitted on it at present.”
The president-elect was engaged in a more intricate game of political engineering than Seward realized. While undoubtedly pleased that Seward’s conciliatory tone had produced a calming effect on the border states, Lincoln knew that if he personally called for compromise, he would lose the support of an important wing of the Republican Party. Instead, he maintained firmness through silence while Seward absorbed the backlash for what might prove an advantageous posture of conciliation.
When Carl Schurz visited Lincoln in Springfield after Seward’s speech, Lincoln told the idealistic young man that “Seward made all his speeches without consulting him,” a technically accurate if undeniably misleading statement. “[Lincoln] is a whole man,” Schurz assured his wife, “firm as a stone wall and clear as crystal…. He himself will not hear of concessions and compromises, and says so openly.”
In the end, though Lincoln’s role was not fully recognized at the time, he was the one who kept his fractious party together when an open rupture might easily have destroyed his administration before it could even begin. By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.