Lincoln (81 page)

It was. As the news of Fredericksburg trickled out, a wave of anger swept the North. Little of it was directed at Burnside, who frankly admitted his incompetence and expressed willingness to assume all the responsibility. Halleck was the object of much of the abuse, as was Stanton, for they were charged with failing to support the army. But most of the blame was heaped on the Lincoln administration, for the bloody defeat at Fredericksburg seemed only a part of a larger pattern of failure and incompetence. As Joseph Medill of the
Chicago Tribune
declared, “Failure of the army, weight of taxes, depreciation of money, want of cotton ... increasing national debt, deaths in the army, no prospect of success, the continued closure of the Mississippi [River]... all combine to produce the existing state of despondency and desperation.” Everybody, he concluded, felt that “the war is drawing toward a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”

The notes of complaint and disillusionment with the Lincoln administration, clearly audible since the failure of the Peninsula campaign, now became deafening. A few critics blamed the President personally. One angry Wisconsin resident demanded that both Lincoln and “the traitoress Mrs. Lincoln” resign, and Senator Wilkinson of Minnesota, outraged at the leniency Lincoln showed toward the Sioux Indians, asserted there was no hope for the country “except in the death of the President and a new administration.”

But most critics were willing to admit Lincoln’s good intentions even though they doubted his will. Recognizing that they could not replace a President who still had nearly half his term to serve, they looked for ways to give the administration backbone. Lincoln, said Senator Grimes, was only a “‘tow string’ of a President,” who had to be bound up “with strong, sturdy rods in the shape of cabinet ministers.”

Discontent with the administration, then, centered on the cabinet. Throughout the last half of 1862 newspapers frequently carried stories of
impending cabinet reorganization. Most of the reports stressed the want of harmony in the cabinet, and in many cases they were true. Except for Seward, nearly every cabinet member complained of Lincoln’s lack of system in consulting his ministers. There were, in theory, two cabinet meetings a week, but in actuality, as Gideon Welles reported, these sessions were “infrequent, irregular and without system.” Seward often failed to attend, though there was general reluctance to discuss major issues in the absence of the Secretary of State; he preferred, as Welles said censoriously, to spend “a considerable portion of every day with the President, patronizing and instructing him, hearing and telling anecdotes, relating interesting details of occurrences in the Senate, and inculcating his political party notions.” When Stanton attended, said Welles, it was only “to whisper to the President, or take the dispatches or the papers from his pocket and go into a corner with the President.” The meetings were highly informal. Charles Sumner reported that at some of the cabinet sessions he was invited to attend, the President put his feet up on the table, his heels higher than his head, and the other members appropriated extra chairs to rest their legs on. Chase complained that the meetings followed no agenda and allowed no real exchange of views among the secretaries. Secretary of the Interior Smith added that, unlike other presidents, Lincoln decided the most important questions without consulting his cabinet, seeking their advice—as he did when he was about to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—“as critics only.”

Members of the cabinet did not get along with each other. Welles and Chase distrusted Seward because they suspected his bland amiability and his perpetual optimism and believed that he failed to understand the seriousness of the nation’s crisis. Stanton’s irascible, secretive manner prevented other cabinet members from becoming his friends, though he generally managed to work amicably with Chase. Welles, wearing his massive wig, was something of a figure of fun to his colleagues. Even Lincoln made gentle jokes about “Father Neptune,” who was thought to be such an old fogy that he was “examining a model of Noah’s ark, with a view to its introduction into the United States Navy.” Nearly everybody agreed that Smith was a cabinet member of no consequence, and, as David Davis reported, a man with “neither heart nor sincerity about him.” His resignation was eagerly awaited. And Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, was bitterly opposed to anyone who might stand in the way of his, or his family’s, advancement; Chase and Stanton were the particular objects of his hatred.

Lincoln was not only aware of this dissonance; he was prepared to tolerate, and perhaps even to encourage, creative friction among his advisers. He understood that the conflicts among his cabinet members were not so fundamental as they seemed. The irritable clashes among the cabinet officers reflected differences in personality, not ideology; unconsciously they were rivals for the esteem and affection of the President. It was a problem that Lincoln, like other men of enormous personal magnetism, had to live with
throughout his life; and he understood that the rivalry between Seward and Chase, or between Stanton and Welles, was much like that between Herndon and Mary Lincoln back in Springfield, or between Mrs. Lincoln and Nicolay and Hay during the White House years.

During the months when the President seemed to be on a radical course, it was the Conservative Republicans who demanded that he reorganize his cabinet. For instance, in early September, Samuel Galloway warned that the cabinet members’ “selfish purposes [had] over-borne their patriotism” and tried to persuade Lincoln to drop Chase, whom he considered too radical on the slavery question. Even within the cabinet itself, Montgomery Blair, after consulting with Seward, went to the President with a report that the nation was “going to ruin for the want of a proper Head to the War Dept.” and begged him to oust Stanton.

But after early November most of the demands for cabinet changes came from the Radical, antislavery wing of Lincoln’s party. In calling for a reorganization of the cabinet, Radicals often hoped to oust Smith, who was “nothing but a doughface,” and Bates, who was “a fossil of the Silurian era.” But the chief focus of their attention was Seward, who had come to represent everything that was wrong with the Lincoln administration. The Secretary of State, they alleged, had never had his heart in the war: he had tried to negotiate with the Confederate envoys during the secession crisis; he had opposed making a stand at Fort Sumter; he had been McClellan’s principal defender; he had opposed, and then delayed, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation; he and Thurlow Weed had undermined the candidacy of Radical General Wadsworth for governor of New York. The publication in December of Seward’s diplomatic dispatches to Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London, gave further evidence that the Secretary failed to understand the meaning of the American conflict; as late as July 5, Seward denounced both “the extreme advocates of African slavery and its most vehement opponents,” the abolitionists, as being equally responsible for the Civil War. “Seward must be got out of the Cabinet,” Joseph Medill of the
Chicago Tribune
announced. “He is Lincoln’s evil genius. He has been President
de facto,
and has kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.”

Lincoln became aware of the full extent of the hostility to the Secretary of State on December 16, three days after the battle of Fredericksburg, when a messenger brought him a note from Seward: “I hereby resign the office of Secretary of State of the United States, and have the honor to request that this resignation may be immediately accepted.” In identical language Frederick W. Seward, his son, resigned as assistant secretary of state. With a face full of pain and surprise the President turned to Senator Preston King of New York, who accompanied the messenger, and asked: “What does this mean?”

King reported that because of the immense popular excitement over the defeat at Fredericksburg there had been an extraordinary caucus of
Republican senators that afternoon in order “to ascertain whether any steps could be taken to quiet the public mind and to produce a better condition of affairs.” The real purpose of the caucus became clear when Senator Wilkinson accused Seward of exercising “a controlling influence upon the mind of the President” and predicted that “so long as he remained in the Cabinet nothing but defeat and disaster could be expected.” Senator Grimes offered a resolution declaring a want of confidence in the Secretary of State and calling for his removal from office. The highly respected Jacob Collamer argued that “the President had no Cabinet in the true sense of the word,” and sharp-spoken William Pitt Fessenden said that “there was a back-stairs influence which often controlled the apparent conclusions of the Cabinet itself.” He refused to name Seward but declared that “senators might draw their own conclusions.” Taken by surprise, the friends of the Secretary of State were nevertheless able to prevent unanimous adoption of Grimes’s resolution of censure. Frustrated, Seward’s opponents pressed for adjournment until the next day and, by a vote of 16 to 13, got their way.

King had not stayed for the final vote but went immediately to Seward’s house, where he reported the proceedings to the Secretary. “They may do as they please about me,” Seward declared, “but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” He wrote out a letter of resignation.

That evening the President called at Seward’s house but found the Secretary resolute in his determination to resign. He wired his family, who had been planning to join him in the capital, not to come, and he and his son began packing up their books and papers in preparation for a return to his home in Auburn, New York.

Keeping Seward’s resignation secret during the next two days, the President anxiously awaited the outcome of the Republican caucus. For months the Radicals in this group had been in frequent contact with Secretary Chase, who fed them stories of Lincoln’s failure to consult with his cabinet advisers. For instance, he told Zachariah Chandler that there was “at the present time no cabinet except in name”; though the heads of departments met now and then, “no reports are made; no regular discussions held; no ascertained conclusions reached.” Chase was also the source of Fessenden’s statement about Seward’s “back-stairs” influence at the White House. Believing Chase’s rumors, the caucus agreed on a resolution calling for “a change in and a partial reconstruction of the Cabinet.” The senators then voted unanimously—with only two Republican senators absent, and Senator King not voting—to name a committee to present their views to the President.

Lincoln, who had a good idea of what went on in the caucus, was in anguish because of this new assault, coming so close after the devastating news from Fredericksburg. When he met Browning in the afternoon of December 18, he asked, “What do these men want?” And he answered himself: “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.” “We are now on the brink of destruction,” he told Browning.
“It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.”

But when the committee representing the Senate caucus called at the White House at seven o’clock that evening, he had regained his composure, and he greeted his visitors with what Fessenden called “his usual urbanity.” Patiently he listened as Collamer, the chairman of the committee, read resolutions that the senators had agreed on, which, in very general terms and without mentioning any names, called for changes in the composition of the cabinet so that its members would agree with the President “in political principles and general policy” and urged that no important military command should go to anyone who was not “a cordial believer and supporter of the same principles.”

Wade then bluntly censured Lincoln for entrusting the conduct of the war to “men who had no sympathy with it or the cause,” and blamed Republican defeats in the recent elections on “the fact that the President had placed the direction of our military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats.”

After professing confidence in the integrity and patriotism of the President, Fessenden alleged “that the Cabinet were not consulted as” a council—in fact, that many important measures were decided upon not only without consultation, but without the knowledge of its members.” Seward, he claimed, exerted an injurious influence upon the conduct of the war. Branching out in his indictment, he went on to say that the commanders of the armies were “largely pro-slavery men and sympathized strongly with the Southern feeling,” and some of them, like McClellan, had used their position to blame the administration for failing to support them and their men.

At this point Lincoln interrupted. From his long experience in the courtroom he knew the value of a well-timed digression as a way of defusing hostility. If the occasion had not been so serious, he might have told the senators an anecdote. Instead, producing a large bundle of papers, he spent nearly half an hour in reading aloud his letters to McClellan, showing that the government had consistently sustained him to the best of its powers.

By the time the senators got back to their main subject, their tempers had cooled, and nobody got very excited about Sumner’s charge that Seward had written offensive diplomatic dispatches, “which the President could not have seen or assented to.”

After three hours the meeting broke up without taking any action. By the end of the session the President was, as Fessenden thought, “apparently in cheerful spirits,” and he promised to give careful consideration to the resolutions submitted by the committee. As they left the White House, Radical Republicans were exultant “at the prospect of getting rid of the
whole Cabinet”
and Chandler rejoiced with “our best and truest men” that they were going to oust Seward, “the millstone around the Administration.”

The President had other plans. The next morning at a cabinet meeting where all members except Seward were present, he reported on the resignation
of the Secretary of State and on his visit from the committee representing the Republican caucus. He observed that they considered Seward “the real cause of our failures.” “While they believed in the President’s honesty,” he said in his quaint language, “they seemed to think that when he had in him any good purposes Mr. S[eward]. contrived to
suck them out of him unperceived.”
He then asked the cabinet members to meet with him again, “to have a free talk,” that evening at seven-thirty.