Lincoln (97 page)

Chase also felt that his labors in the Treasury Department were unappreciated. His exhausting efforts to borrow money and raise taxes in order to finance the war seemed to go unnoticed. Chase especially resented the President’s decentralized administrative policy of allowing each cabinet officer to run his own department without interference or even consultation with his colleagues. What was at stake here was not just Chase’s power drive; it was his sense that he was the only one responsible for keeping the government’s financial tub filled, while the War, Navy, and other departments controlled the spigots that drained it.

He was willing to admit that the President had always treated him with kindness, and he did not doubt Lincoln’s fairness or integrity of purpose. But he believed Lincoln’s policies toward the South and slavery were too slow and too cautious. The Secretary was determined that the end of the war must bring about “unconditional and immediate emancipation in all the Rebel States, no retrograde from the Proclamation of Emancipation, no recognition of a Rebel State as a part of the Union, or [any] terms with it except on the extinction, wholly, at once and forever of slavery.” Repeatedly he prodded the President to extend his Emancipation Proclamation to areas in the South under Union military control, which Lincoln had excepted. Increasingly he came to share Sumner’s belief that the only true Unionists in the South were the blacks, and he favored the participation of “colored loyalists” in the reconstruction of the rebellious states.

Lincoln was aware of these dissatisfactions of his Secretary of the Treasury. For the most part, Chase openly and honorably expressed his dissents, and the President made no complaint about them. Nor did he object when Chase sought to make the army of Treasury Department employees, a force greatly enlarged after the passage of the Internal Revenue Act of 1862, loyal to him personally, rather than to the administration. He did not even protest when the Secretary made heavy-handed efforts to woo the support of key senators, as when he allowed John Conness of California to nominate the customs collector at San Francisco. But Lincoln could not help noticing that whenever he made a decision that offended some influential person, the Secretary promptly ranged himself in opposition and tried to persuade the victim that he had been unjustly dealt with and that things would have been different had Chase been in control. Thus he leapt to ingratiate himself with Frémont after Lincoln required him to withdraw his hasty proclamation against slavery in Missouri, with General Hunter after his emancipation order was overruled, with General Butler after he was recalled from New Orleans, with General Rosecrans when he was replaced by Thomas, and with the Missouri Radicals after they failed to get the President’s endorsement. “I
am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes,” Lincoln told John Hay, “so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”

For the most part Lincoln regarded Chase’s rather clumsy efforts to promote himself with detached amusement. Generally he was willing to appoint the Secretary’s partisans to positions in the Treasury Department, preferring, as he said, to let “Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than getting into a snarl with him by refusing him what he asks.” When he learned that Chase was trying to make political capital out of the removal of Rosecrans, he laughed and said, “I suppose he will, like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.” Behind Lincoln’s easy tolerance was his recognition that his Secretary of the Treasury would probably make a very good President—and his confidence that he would never have a chance to do so.

The President could afford to be confident because throughout the North his partisans were quietly working to secure his renomination. It was not considered proper for a presidential candidate himself to seem to have anything to do with these maneuvers, and Lincoln kept a strict public silence about them. But whenever Republican party leaders came to Washington, they gained easy access to the White House and were often closeted with the President for hours. Out of these conferences arose the strategy of opening the offensive against Chase in New Hampshire, the state of his birth. When Republicans of the Granite State met in Concord on January 7, their only stated business was to renominate Governor Joseph A. Gilmore, but young William E. Chandler seized the occasion to rush through a resolution praising Lincoln’s “unequaled sagacity and statesmanship” and declaring him “the people’s choice for re-election to the Presidency in 1864.” Chase’s supporters had to be content with the backhanded compliment of a resolution that expressed confidence in the financial abilities of the Secretary of the Treasury—but urged him “promptly to detect, expose and punish all corruption and fraud upon the Government.”

Spurred by the action of New Hampshire, Simon Cameron sprang into action in Pennsylvania. Loyal to a President who had generously accepted part of the blame for his mismanagement of the War Department, Cameron also recognized that Lincoln’s renomination would be a blow to the rival Republican faction in Pennsylvania headed by Thaddeus Stevens. Back in December, finding the President pessimistic about his chances for renomination, Cameron reminded him that when Andrew Jackson sought a second term his managers outflanked any possible rivals by procuring a petition from the members of the Pennsylvania legislature asking him to run again. “Cameron,” asked Lincoln, “could you get me a letter like that?” “Yes I think I might,” replied the wily Pennsylvanian, and he went to work. By January 9 he had secured the signatures of all the Republican members of the Pennsylvania house and senate to a request that the President would allow himself to be reelected. “I have kept my promise,” he told John Hay.

Promptly other Republican organizations began to swing into line. Throughout the North chapters of the Union League, originally formed in 1862 to restore Northern morale shaken by political and military reverses, came out in support of Lincoln’s reelection. The Philadelphia Union League, for example, praised the President for “showing himself the leader of a people and not a party.” The Trenton Union League declared that he had shown “his pre-eminent fitness” for the presidency. The New England Loyal Publication Society, which issued patriotic broadsides distributed to nearly nine hundred newspapers, broke its rule against taking a position on political contests and published a powerful editorial urging Lincoln’s reelection. The Union members of the legislatures of New Jersey, Kansas, California, and the Territory of Colorado all came out in favor of a second term.

With Lincoln’s supporters on the move, Chase’s backers were forced into the open. They had begun to organize as early as December 9, the day after Lincoln issued his amnesty proclamation, when an advisory committee met in Washington to consider plans to make Chase the next President. The core membership included two Ohio congressmen, an Ohio army paymaster who was in the employ of the Treasury Department, and Whitelaw Reid, the consistently pro-Chase Washington correspondent of the
Cincinnati Gazette.
Subsequently it was expanded by the addition of Senator John Sherman and Representative James A. Garfield, both of Ohio, and Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas, who felt aggrieved because Lincoln had favored his rival fellow senator, James H. Lane, in the distribution of Kansas patronage.

Early in February the Chase campaign tested the waters by issuing a pamphlet,
The Next Presidential Election,
which deplored efforts to procure “the formal nomination of Mr. Lincoln in State Legislatures and other public bodies.” “The people have lost all confidence in his ability to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union,” the pamphlet continued. The “vascillation [sic] and indecision of the President,” “the feebleness of his will,” and his “want of intellectual grasp” were responsible for the failure of Union armies to crush the rebellion. “Mr. Lincoln cannot be re-elected to the Presidency,” the argument ran. The next Republican candidate must be “an advanced thinker; a statesman profoundly versed in political and economic science, one who fully comprehends the spirit of the age.” Salmon P. Chase’s name was not mentioned; it did not have to be.

This secret, anonymous attack on Lincoln backfired on its authors. As early as February 6, Ward Hill Lamon learned of this “most scurrilous and abusive pamphlet” and warned the President of its existence. When it was circulated in Ohio under the franks of Senator Sherman and Representative James M. Ashley, Lincoln’s supporters were already on the alert. The document was “so mean and dastardly in its character,” one correspondent wrote Sherman, “that it will brand with infamy your character as a statesman and your honor as a gentleman.” Another protested this attempt on the part of “a few politicians at Washington” to turn the people against “Old Honest Abe” and instructed the senator: “You cant do it and Mr. Sherman you need
not try it. If you were to resign tomorrow you could not get 10 votes in the Legislature.... If you cant do anything better you had better quit.”

Undeterred, Chase’s backers continued to organize and in late February, under the signature of Senator Pomeroy, distributed a second circular, again marked “Private,” declaring that the reelection of Lincoln was “practically impossible.” This time they frankly announced that Chase, with his “record, clear and unimpeachable, showing him to be a statesman of rare ability, and an administrator of the very highest order,” possessed “more of the qualities needed in a President during the next four years, than are combined in any other available candidate.” Sent to hundreds of Republicans throughout the North, this Pomeroy Circular promptly became a matter of public knowledge. The
Washington Constitutional Union
published it on February 20, and two days later the
National Intelligencer
gave it broad circulation.

Once again, Chase found himself in the embarrassing position of appearing disloyal to the President to whose favor he owed his office, and he quickly disclaimed responsibility for the Pomeroy Circular. He was, he wrote Lincoln, only a reluctant candidate, and he had not been consulted by the friends who were organizing in his behalf. Choosing his words very carefully, he denied knowledge of the existence of the Pomeroy Circular before it was published—a statement that may have been literally true, though the author of the document, James M. Winchell, remembered that the Secretary was informed in advance of the plan to send it out and fully approved it. Chase offered his resignation, declaring, “I do not wish to administer the Treasury Department one day without your entire confidence.”

Coolly Lincoln acknowledged the Secretary’s letter, promising to answer fully when he could find time to do so, and he left Chase dangling in the wind. Lincoln’s aides were furious over the “unscrupulous and malicious” activities of the “treasury rats” who were out to injure the President, but Lincoln held his peace for a week. Then, in a rare attempt to discuss political questions with Robert, who was home from Harvard for the holidays, he strolled into his son’s room one evening and showed him Chase’s letter.

Calling for pen and paper, the President drafted a reply to the Secretary, stating that he did “not perceive occasion for a change” in the Treasury Department. He had not read the Pomeroy Circular and did not think he would read it. He was, however, “not shocked, or surprised” by its appearance, for he had been aware of Pomeroy’s pro-Chase organization for several weeks. “I have known just as little of these things as my own friends have allowed me to know,” he assured Chase. “They bring the documents to me, but I do not read them—they tell me what they think fit to tell me, but I do not inquire for more.”

When Robert asked in surprise if he really had not seen the circular, his father replied almost sternly that, though “a good many people had tried to tell him something he did not wish to hear,” his answer to Chase was literally true.

Before his low-key letter reached Chase, Lincoln had already delivered a
different sort of reply. On February 22 the National Committee of the Republican party (which in the forthcoming election was to call itself the National Union party) met in Washington, and four-fifths of its members, who were mostly federal officeholders appointed by Lincoln, expressed support for his reelection. The committee also followed the President’s wishes in appointing an early date, June 7, for the national convention, to be held in Baltimore. The next day in Indianapolis, where John D. Defrees, the superintendent of the Government Printing Office, had been working with the President’s knowledge and approval to check the Chase forces, the Indiana Republican convention endorsed Lincoln’s reelection. Two days later the President’s supporters in the Ohio state Republican convention rammed through a resolution urging his renomination. Then, on February 27 in the House of Representatives, Frank Blair, on leave from his army command by permission of the President, launched a savage attack on corruption in the Treasury Department and placed the blame squarely on Chase. Referring directly to the Pomeroy Circular, Blair remarked, “It is a matter of surprise that a man having the instincts of a gentleman should remain in the Cabinet after the disclosure of such an intrigue against the one to whom he owes his portfolio,” and he speculated, “I presume the President is well content that he should stay; for every hour that he remains sinks him deeper in the contempt of every honorable mind.”

Sore and unhappy, Chase withdrew from the presidential contest on March 5, on the grounds that his home state of Ohio had expressed a preference for another candidate. He sent a copy of his letter of withdrawal to the President. Few took Chase’s declination at face value. Playing on the first name of the Secretary of the Treasury, the
New York Herald
reminded its readers: “The salmon is a queer fish, very shy and very wary. Often it appears to avoid the bait just before gulping it down; and even after it is hooked it has to be allowed plenty of line and must be ‘played’ carefully before it can be safely landed.” So Chase, it suggested, was still playing with the bait of a presidential nomination, and he would probably leap at it again. David Davis, now an associate justice of the Supreme Court but still a political adviser to the President, was more blunt: “Mr. Chase’s declination is a mere sham, and very
ungracefully
done. The plan is to get up a great opposition to Lincoln through Fremont and others and..., when the convention meets,... present Chase again.”