Lincoln (53 page)

Wisely Trumbull suppressed this passage—but he then went on to undermine Lincoln’s pacific purpose by denouncing secession as terrorism and vowing swift action against the “traitors” in the South.

On the night after the election Lincoln was too exhausted to sleep and, oppressed by the responsibility that would soon be his, he began casting about in his mind for advisers who could best help him. He jotted down eight names on the back of a blank card:

The list suggested the direction of his thinking. He was the nominal head of the Republican party, but he recognized that he had been chosen because of his availability rather than because of a demonstrated record of leadership. If his administration was to be successful, he needed the support of Seward,
Chase, and Bates, his principal rivals for the nomination. As he frankly told Thurlow Weed, “their long experience in public affairs, and their eminent fitness” gave them “higher claims than his own for the place he was to occupy.”

That preliminary list also indicated Lincoln’s understanding that the Republican party was not a unified, coherent organization but a collection of rival interest groups. The most important of these were the antislavery former Whigs and the free-soil Democrats, divided by party battles waged over more than a generation. If peace was to be maintained between these factions, neither must dominate the cabinet. The four names in the right-hand column had Democratic antecedents; the three cabinet members in the left column were former Whigs. Later when Weed observed that such an arrangement gave a preponderance to the Democrats, Lincoln replied: “You seem to forget that
I
expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”

Lincoln’s initial list was balanced in other ways, too. Geographically it gave one cabinet member (Gideon Welles of Connecticut) to New England, two (William H. Seward and William L. Dayton) to the Northeastern states of New York and New Jersey, two (Salmon P. Chase and Norman B. Judd) to the Northwest, and two (Edward Bates and Montgomery Blair) to the border slave states. In thinking of Dayton, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Vice President in 1856, Lincoln was not merely rewarding party service but recognizing the powerful protectionist interests of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Naming Bates gave tacit recognition to the Know Nothing element that had supported the Republican ticket in 1860. Montgomery Blair represented both the incipient Republican party in Maryland and the Blair family, powerful in the border states since Jackson’s day. Finally, in choosing Judd, Lincoln recognized the importance of Illinois and at the same time added a close friend to a cabinet otherwise made up of strangers.

Keeping this list in mind, Lincoln proceeded with his customary caution. Two days after the election he asked Hannibal Hamlin, whom he had never met face-to-face, to meet him in Chicago. There on November 21 the future President and the future Vice President began a three-day conference, which reporters described as “cordial in the highest degree.” Much of the time they were joined by Trumbull, whom the newspapers called “the President’s mouthpiece in the Senate,” and from time to time other Republican leaders, like Carl Schurz of Wisconsin, were brought in for advice.

The main item on the agenda was the selection of the cabinet. There was ready agreement that the office of Secretary of State must be offered to Seward, in recognition of his services to the Republican party and his position in the Senate. But it was not certain that Seward would accept. Hurt because the Chicago convention passed him over, he might not be willing to serve as a subordinate to Lincoln. Hence the invitation must be so phrased that if he refused it would not seem a rebuff to the new administration.

Lincoln entrusted the handling of this delicate negotiation to Hamlin, who was experienced in the intricacies of Washington politics.

Lincoln’s natural caution and his inexperience in national politics almost derailed Seward’s appointment. The delay in publicly naming the New Yorker encouraged an anti-Seward faction in the New York Republican party, which included William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the
New York Evening Post,
and important New York City businessmen like Hiram Barney, George Opdyke, and W. C. Noyes. They put their opposition to Seward principally on the ground that Weed, his ally who at times seemed to be his alter ego, had been involved in corrupting the state legislature; they wanted “honest men with clean hands” in the cabinet. Lincoln’s slowness to select Seward suggested that he was listening to these critics. Soon the rumor spread that he did not really want the New Yorker in his cabinet, that the appointment would be offered to him as a compliment with the expectation that he would decline it. So damaging was this report that Lincoln felt obliged to offer Seward an embarrassed explanation that he had all along intended to tender the State Department to him but had delayed “in deference to what appeared to me to be a proper caution in the case.” Gratified but not entirely mollified, Seward agreed to take the offer under consideration. He did not, however, accept until Weed went out to Springfield for a heart-to-heart talk with the President-elect. After Lincoln assured Weed that in the distribution of patronage he really meant to honor his pledge, “Justice to all,” Seward on December 28, “after due reflection and with much self distrust,” agreed to serve.

Even before Seward accepted, he and Weed had begun to press Lincoln to deviate from his original list and name one or more cabinet members from the South. This move would assure the slave states that Lincoln was going to head a truly national administration—and at the same time it could block the appointment of Salmon P. Chase or other rivals of Seward. Lincoln was attracted by the idea but was not sure it was practical. To test its feasibility he wrote a short editorial for anonymous publication in the
Illinois State Journal,
inquiring whether any Southern “gentleman of character” would accept a place in his cabinet and on what terms: “Does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political difference between them?”

The strongest of the Southern Unionists that Weed proposed—Lincoln called them “white crows”—was Representative John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, a conservative Whig opponent of secession. Impressed by Gilmer’s sincere Unionism, Lincoln invited him to Springfield, but the North Carolinian failed to understand the signal and declined. In January, Weed and Seward approached Gilmer with a positive offer of a cabinet post, but he insisted that Republicans must offer federal protection to slavery in the territories in order to appease his “maddened brethren of the South.” With that Gilmer’s candidacy died.

The elimination of Gilmer made room for the selection of Montgomery Blair, who was on Lincoln’s initial list. He was not from the Deep South, but he did live in the slave state of Maryland, where he had campaigned vigorously for the Republican presidential ticket. Though unprepossessing in appearance, with a mean, hatchet face, Blair had considerable support among former Democrats like Trumbull and Hamlin, and John A. Andrew, the abolitionist governor of Massachusetts, was one of his backers. Despite Weed’s strong objections, Blair was picked as Postmaster General.

Lincoln did not approach Salmon P. Chase until after he received Seward’s acceptance. The two men were such bitter rivals that an invitation to Chase might have caused Seward to decline. But now Lincoln felt free to invite him to Springfield. He had never seen the Ohioan, who had just ended his second term as governor and was about to take a place in the Senate, and wanted to talk with him before offering him an appointment. When they met on January 4 and 5, Lincoln was greatly impressed. He said later that Chase “is about one hundred and fifty to any other man’s hundred.” Tall and broad-shouldered, with a massive dome of a head that hinted at vast intellectual powers, Chase, Carl Schurz remarked, “looked as you would wish a statesman to look.”

Even this first encounter hinted that their future relationship might not be easy. After explaining why he had offered the first place in the cabinet to Seward, Lincoln spoke to Chase about the Treasury Department. He said that Pennsylvanians had raised some objections to Chase because he was known as a free-trade advocate, but he believed these could be overcome. So he asked his visitor to “accept the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, [my] being exactly prepared to offer it to you.” Chase recorded he cagily responded to this nonoffer: “I did not wish and was not prepared to say that I would accept the place if offered.” Despite considerable pressure from Chase’s friends in Ohio and from anti-Seward Republicans in New York, Lincoln decided not to make the appointment until after he reached Washington.

At Chicago, Lincoln had promised that his Vice President could name the cabinet member from New England. It was a generous gesture, but Lincoln was pretty sure that Hamlin’s choice would be his own: Gideon Welles, a former Democrat and editor of the influential
Hartford Evening Press,
who had headed the Connecticut delegation to Chicago and helped defeat Seward there. Lincoln and Hamlin settled on him for Secretary of the Navy because in the 1840s he had served as chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing for the navy.

Meanwhile Lincoln approached another man on his original list for the cabinet. On December 15, Edward Bates came to see the President-elect in Springfield. In their very free discussion, as Bates recorded in his diary, Lincoln told Bates that his participation in the administration was “necessary to its complete success.” Finding it convenient to forget that he had written to Seward a week earlier, he assured Bates that he was “the only man that
he desired in the Cabinet, to whom he [had] yet spoken... [or] written a word, about their own appointments.” Recognizing that the vast ego of the sixty-seven-year-old Missouri lawyer might lead him to expect the first place in the cabinet, Lincoln explained why it was politically necessary to offer Seward the State Department, but he made the news more palatable by giving Bates the impression that he hoped Seward would decline. In that case Bates would get the job. Until then he could offer the post of Attorney General. Suitably massaged, Bates accepted.

Lincoln’s other cabinet selections were more difficult. Judd, who was on his original list, had the backing of the former Democrats in the Illinois Republican party but was strongly opposed by David Davis, Leonard Swett, and other former Whigs. Mary Lincoln also violently disliked him. Further to complicate matters, Lincoln had to weigh the interests of Illinois in a cabinet position against the rival claims of Indiana, which had done so much to make his nomination in Chicago possible. There Caleb B. Smith earnestly sought a cabinet seat, and David Davis reminded the President-elect: “No one rendered more efficient service from Indiana.... without his active aid and co-operation, the Indiana delegation could not have been got as a unit to go for you.” But Lincoln also had to consider the claim of Smith’s Indiana rival Schuyler Colfax, who had supported Bates for the presidential nomination but who had fought hard for Lincoln’s victory in the election. It was no wonder that Lincoln, as he told Thurlow Weed, found that “the making of a cabinet... was by no means as easy as he had supposed.”

Eventually he decided to eliminate Judd on the grounds that Illinois had already received so much recognition as the home of the President-elect. With Judd out, he had to choose between Smith and Colfax, and he eventually settled on Smith. “Colfax is a young man, is already in position, is running a brilliant career and is sure of a bright future in any event,” he reasoned; “with Smith, it is now or never.”

Indiana problems were simple compared to those of Pennsylvania. Lincoln did not initially plan to offer the state representation in his cabinet because Pennsylvania Republicans were so bitterly divided. One faction was loyal to Senator Cameron; another followed Governor-elect Andrew G. Curtin and A. K. McClure, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican state committee. Certain that the rivals could never agree on a candidate for the cabinet, he thought that naming Dayton of New Jersey would adequately represent Pennsylvania’s high-tariff interests.

That plan infuriated Cameron’s supporters, who believed that Lincoln had not been “made
fully acquainted
with the conversations and understandings” that David Davis and Leonard Swett had had with the Pennsylvania delegation at the Tremont House the night before the nomination. Only two days after the election Cameron’s representatives, escorted by both Davis and Swett, descended on Springfield for an interview with the Presidentelect. They found Lincoln hospitable, affable—and baffling. They learned nothing about cabinet prospects but heard story after story of frontier days.

At Davis’s advice they went home and organized a letter-writing campaign in Cameron’s behalf. Soon Lincoln’s desk was covered with testimonials for the senator, and he could not help being impressed. Shortly afterward Swett gave him another nudge by reminding him that “the Cameron influence, as much as any thing nominated you.”

But a chorus of opposition swelled when it became known that Cameron was under consideration for a cabinet post. Free-traders fought against appointing a man committed to a high protective tariff. Opponents of Seward and Weed feared the appointment because it would, in effect, give Seward a second vote in the cabinet. But most of the hostility stemmed from Cameron’s checkered record. During Van Buren’s administration he had served as commissioner to settle the claims of the Winnebago Indians and had allegedly defrauded his charges of $66,000; thereafter he was derisively known in Pennsylvania politics as the “Great Winnebago Chief.” Using bribery and political intimidation, much as Thurlow Weed did in New York, Cameron became the boss of the Pennsylvania Republican machine. Principled Republicans thought Cameron’s appointment to the cabinet would be disgraceful. “His general reputation is
shockingly bad,”
Horace White, of the
Chicago Press and Tribune,
wrote Trumbull. Even mild-mannered Hamlin protested that naming Cameron to the cabinet had an “odor about it that will damn us as a party.”