Lincoln (108 page)

It took something more than persuasion to allay the unhappiness of Conservatives like Thurlow Weed. The President sent Nicolay to New York City to negotiate changes in the customs house that would placate the boss. It was, as the secretary said, a “very delicate, disagreeable and arduous duty,” because the New York Conservatives were no longer willing to share the
patronage with the Radicals. Yielding to necessity, Lincoln, with some reluctance, ousted Hiram Barney, the collector, on September 5 and replaced him with Simeon Draper, a respected New York merchant who was an intimate of Seward and Weed. Ten days later he removed Andrews, the surveyor of the port, another Chase supporter, and appointed in his stead Abram Wakeman, the New York City postmaster who had become an intimate friend of Mrs. Lincoln. Taking hold, Draper announced that he would “hold every body
responsible,
for Mr Lincoln’s reelection, and I will countenance nothing else.” By making a few dismissals, he brought the rest of the customs house gang in line. “It is remarkable to note,” the
New York Herald
reported, “the change which has taken place in the political sentiments of some of these gentlemen within the last forty-eight hours—in fact, an anti-Lincoln man could not be found in any of the departments yesterday.”

Lincoln had also to enlist the support of the Radicals, most of whom had not favored his renomination and some of whom had been trying to replace him with another candidate. His task was made easier because many of the Radicals had an institutional loyalty to the party they had helped found. Others made a cold-eyed calculation that they stood to benefit more from the victory of a Republican candidate whom they distrusted than from the success of any Democrat.

He was fortunate that Zachariah Chandler, the blunt, self-educated Detroit businessman who represented Michigan in the Senate, took on himself the task of reconciling the Radicals and the President. Though the Michigan senator thought poorly of Lincoln’s record and believed he was “perfectly infatuated with Seward and Blair,” he was concerned for the victory of his party. “If it was only Abe Lincoln,” he wrote his wife, “I would say, go to—in your own way.” But now it was a choice between an inadequate Republican candidate and the “Traitor McLelland [sic].”

During the final weeks of August, Chandler began exploring ways to bring Wade and Davis, the two Radicals most openly critical of Lincoln, back into the regular Republican fold. Wade’s resistance was the first to crack. He had been overwhelmed by the hostile reception of the Wade-Davis Manifesto, and his friends warned that “Lincoln has been more firmly seated in the saddle than at any time since the premature action of the Baltimore convention placed him there.” Chandler persuaded him to swallow his pride and agree to endorse the Lincoln-Johnson ticket, provided that Davis did so, too. Davis was also ready to negotiate. Distrusting Lincoln, he virulently hated Blair, leader of the rival Republican faction in Maryland. He agreed to support Lincoln but only on condition that the President dismiss the Postmaster General from the cabinet. His purpose was not merely to kill off Blair but to show Lincoln up as a “mean and selfish old dog who sacrificed his
friend
to his prospects.”

Skillfully Chandler presented Davis’s demand not to Lincoln himself but to
“his particular
friends, those who drop in and chat with him of evenings and who have his confidence.” Probably he referred to men like Leonard Swett, John W. Forney, and Noah Brooks. As Davis scornfully reported, Chandler imbued “the President’s
familiar spirits
... with the darkest views of Lincoln’s prospects, and sent [them] there night after night to regale him with some new tale of defection or threatened disaster.” At the end of eight days—according to Davis, who was not present—Lincoln was “in the condition of a child frightened by ghost stories and ready to take refuge anywhere.”

In fact, Lincoln did not panic, and he resisted dismissing Blair in order to secure party unity and his own reelection. He had genuine respect for all the members of the Blair family. Francis P. Blair, Sr., had been a loyal, conservative adviser throughout the war, and Frank Blair, after his intemperate attacks on the Radicals in Congress, had displayed ability as a commander in Sherman’s army. For Montgomery Blair the President had real affection, and he was sure that Blair “had made the best Post master Genl that ever administered the Dept.”

But the Postmaster General had become a controversial figure, more hated by the Radicals than even Seward. His blunt denunciations of abolitionists, his continuing advocacy of the colonization of African-Americans, his fierce opposition to Radical schemes for reconstruction, his zealous advocacy of Lincoln’s renomination and reelection—all aroused hostility. So did his bitter, and often unwarranted, personal enmities. He carried on a bitter feud with Frémont, he hated Chase, he despised Halleck, and he could hardly bear to be in the same room as Stanton. Lincoln was distressed by the vindictiveness Blair demonstrated in his frequent quarrels, but as he told the senior Blair, he “could not believe there was any profit to be expected on the sacrifice of a good and true friend from first to last for false ones.”

Chandler offered to sweeten the pot by suggesting that, in return for Blair’s resignation, the President might secure not only the support of Wade and Davis but the withdrawal of Frémont from the race. Though Frémont’s campaign had been slipping, he retained a fiercely loyal following, especially among German-Americans in the West, and the President feared he might siphon off enough votes to cost the Republicans Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri and thus the election. “The President,” according to Chandler, “was most reluctant to come to terms
but came.
” The senator then hotfooted it to New York to see Frémont.

Establishing headquarters at the Astor House, Chandler met several times with Frémont, urging him, in the name of the President, the Union Congressional Committee, and the National Union Executive Committee, to consider withdrawing from a race in which his candidacy could only help elect McClellan. If Frémont agreed, Chandler promised that he would receive a
new command as major general in the Union army and that his old enemy, Blair, would be dismissed from the cabinet.

Frémont took Chandler’s offer under advisement and asked the opinion of his friends. He heard dissonant voices. Wendell Phillips urged him to continue his candidacy. A supporter in Pittsburgh begged him to come out “as soon as practicable in favor of Lincoln and Johnson” after receiving “assurance of Mr. Blair’s immediate removal and also Mr. Stanton’s and the assurance that Mr. Seward will not be reappointed.” On September 17, Gustave Paul Cluseret, the editor of Frémont’s campaign newspaper, the
New Nation,
published an editorial supporting Lincoln and warning readers that the general listened to “any man who causes imaginary popular enthusiasm to glitter before his eyes, spends his money, profits by his natural indolence to cradle him in an illusion from which he will only awaken ruined in pocket and in reputation.” That same day Frémont decided to drop out of the race. Chandler wanted his withdrawal to be “a
conditional
one to get Blair out,” but Frémont honorably refused. “I will make no conditions—my letter is written and will appear tomorrow,” he said. In a public letter he announced that he was leaving the race not because he had changed his opinion of Lincoln, whose “administration has been politically, militarily, and financially a failure,” but because McClellan would restore the Union with slavery.

When the news of Frémont’s withdrawal reached Washington, Lincoln, according to Davis, grew “excited at the form of it, and showed symptoms of flying from the bargain.” But Chandler reminded him that, “offensive as it was,” Frémont’s letter was “a substantial advice to support Lincoln.” Reluctantly the President agreed to live up to the terms he had agreed on, and on September 23 asked for Blair’s resignation. To take his place he named former Governor William Dennison of Ohio, who was, as David Davis said, “honorable, highminded, pure, and dignified.” While Blair’s resignation was pending, both Wade and Henry Winter Davis took the stump in Lincoln’s behalf.

That left Salmon P. Chase and his followers as the final group of disgruntled Republicans who were still unwilling to endorse the reelection of the President. Nursing an ego bruised by his forced resignation from the cabinet, Chase had quietly encouraged moves to replace Lincoln on the Republican ticket, but in public he assumed an air of disinterested statesmanship. He advised those who wrote him to accept Lincoln’s renomination “as decisive and to give him their support dutifully and manfully”—but he told his correspondents not to publish his views. With the collapse of the anti-Lincoln movement in September, he warmed a little and recognized Lincoln and Johnson as “nominees of the Party whose principles and measures ... I fully accept.” But he could not help adding wistfully, “We can’t have everything as we would wish.”

In late September, Chase began giving different political signals. Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney was ailing (he was, after all, eighty-seven years old), and his anticipated death raised a possibility that Chase had more than once considered. Returning to Washington to consult with Fessenden on Treasury problems, he made a point of calling on Lincoln and was quite cordially received. “But he is not at all demonstrative, either in speech or manner,” Chase reported to his diary, adding the telling observation, “I feel that I do not know him.” Shortly after this visit he began to say positive things about Lincoln: “The best interests of the country require his reelection and I shall give him my active support.”

Taney’s death on October 12 made the naming of the next Chief Justice a public question. Sumner immediately urged Lincoln to appoint Chase, reminding the President that he had several times spoken of his former Treasury Secretary for this position. Chase’s friends sent a barrage of letters to the White House backing his appointment. But there were other candidates. Attorney General Bates asked Lincoln for the appointment “as the crowning, retiring honor of my life.” Mrs. Stanton wanted her husband, exhausted by his demanding labors in the War Department, to be Chief Justice, and she enlisted Browning to urge his case with Lincoln. Dozens of letters recommended elevating Noah Swayne, the antislavery corporate lawyer whom Lincoln had named an associate justice in 1862. William M. Evarts, the careful New York lawyer, had his supporters. Francis P. Blair, Sr., earnestly implored Lincoln to appoint his son Montgomery, “to remove the cloud which his ostracism from your Cabinet” had caused.

Lincoln listened and read but took no action. He had probably decided to name Chase, but, as he told Nicolay, he was resolved to be “very ‘shut pan’ about this matter.” Eager for the appointment, Chase wrote the President a friendly letter about Republican prospects in Ohio. Without reading it, Lincoln directed: “File it with his other recommendations.” As the President failed to act, Sumner’s urgency grew greater, and he persuaded Chase to write a letter that he could show Lincoln: “It is perhaps not exactly
en règle
to say what one will do in regard to an appointment not tendered to him; but it is certainly not wrong to say to you that I should accept.” Chase went on to add words that must have choked him: “Happily it is now certain that the next Administration will be in the hands of Mr Lincoln from whom the world will expect great things.” Still Lincoln did not name a Chief Justice. Finally getting the cue, Chase took to the stump, urging rallies at Louisville, Lexington, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago to vote for Lincoln’s reelection.

It was all just as the
New York Herald
had wickedly anticipated in August. Now the “sorehead republicans”—as the paper called the dissident Radicals—were “all skedaddling for the Lincoln train and selling out at the best terms they can.” The
Herald
had predicted that the “ultra radical, ultra shoddy, and ultra nigger soreheads... will all make tracks for Old Abe’s plantation, and will soon be found crowing, and blowing, and vowing, and
writing, and swearing and stumping the States on his side, declaring that he, and he alone, is the hope of the nation.”

As Chase canvassed the West, he reflected on a conversation he had had some weeks earlier with a New Yorker “who thought Lincoln very wise,” observing that if he were “more radical he would have offended conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Wonderingly, Chase asked himself: “Will this be [the] judgment of history?”

“I cannot run the political machine,” Lincoln was quoted as saying during the campaign; “I have enough on my hands without
that.
It is
the people’s
business.” He did not take part in any of the hundreds of campaign marches and torchlight processions staged by the National Union (Republican) party throughout the North. He was not involved in the work of the Loyal Publication Societies, headed by Francis Lieber in New York and by John Murray Forbes in Boston, which distributed more than half a million Union pamphlets bearing titles like “No Party Now but All for Our Country.” He did nothing to encourage partisan newspapers that attacked the Democrats as Copperheads or charged that they were engaged in a “Peace Party Plot!” (Indeed, he discounted tales of Copperhead conspiracies as puerile.)

Nor did Lincoln take public notice of the attacks Democrats made on him during the campaign. He did not comment on Democratic rallies where partisans carried banners reading
TIME TO SWAP HORSES, NOVEMBER 8TH or NO MORE VULGAR JOKES
. He probably never saw scurrilous Democratic pamphlets, like
The Lincoln Catechism, Wherein the Eccentricities & Beauties of Despotism Are Fully Set Forth,
which called him “Abraham Africanus the First” and quoted the first of the President’s own Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.” The repeated Democratic charge that he and the Republicans favored intermarriage of blacks and whites Lincoln acknowledged only indirectly, joking that miscegenation was “a democratic mode of producing good Union men, and I dont propose to infringe on the patent.” He did not respond to Democratic charges, raised in as respectable a journal as the
New York World,
that his administration was characterized by “ignorance, incompetency, and corruption.” Though he was, as Mrs. Lincoln said, “almost a monomaniac on the subject of honesty,” he did not refute the charge that he had helped a relative defraud the Quartermaster’s Department in St. Louis.