Lincoln (54 page)

Lincoln worried over the problem for much of December. Drawing up a memorandum of the charges against Cameron and a list of the numerous letters recommending him, he tentatively concluded that, on balance, the evidence favored the senator. He invited Cameron to Springfield, and they met in the senator’s hotel room on December 28. Apparently Lincoln liked what he saw. Despite Cameron’s malodorous reputation, he appeared to be an amiable, if somewhat reserved, gentleman, tall and thin, with a sharp face and thin lips. A self-made man like Lincoln, he had overcome the handicap of poverty by learning to be a printer and a newspaper editor before amassing a fortune in the iron and railroad business. That his reputation was not spotless was not altogether a negative; Lincoln always had a fondness for slightly damaged characters, like Mark Delahay, Lamon, and Herndon. The two very practical politicians hit it off at once and the next day, as Cameron was preparing to go home, Lincoln sent him a brief note promising that he would nominate him for either Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of War.

Exultant, Cameron showed the letter to several friends on the way back to Washington. His rejoicing, however, was premature, for his train must have passed another bearing his old enemy, A. K. McClure, bringing documents to Springfield to prove Cameron’s moral unfitness for high office. Lincoln recognized his blunder and promptly wrote Cameron that “things have developed which make it impossible for me to take you into the cabinet.” He suggested that Cameron, to save face, should decline the appointment.
In order to ease the blow, he asked Trumbull to promise that Cameron’s friends should “be, with entire fairness, cared for in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.” Restlessly he waited for the desired telegram from Cameron but none came. Hearing that the Pennsylvanian’s feelings were wounded by the abrupt phrasing of his letter, Lincoln apologized that it had been written “under great anxiety” and he drafted another, somewhat more tactfully phrased: “You will relieve me from great embarrassment by allowing me to recall the offer. This springs from an unexpected complication; and not from any change of my view as to the ability or faithfulness with which you would discharge the duties of the place.” While newspapers and politicians buzzed and hundreds of pro- and anti-Cameron letters reached Lincoln every day, the Winnebago Chief maintained total silence.

To end the stalemate Lincoln let it be known that he would appoint no Pennsylvanian to the cabinet until he reached Washington. Then, on his trip East, he mentioned in passing that it might be good for the new administration to retain one or two members of Buchanan’s cabinet, including perhaps the Secretary of the Treasury. At this point powerful business interests in Pennsylvania faced the prospect of having no voice in the Lincoln administration, and rival political factions, all of which represented the coal and iron industries, concluded it would be better to have Cameron with all his faults than to have no representation in the cabinet at all.

In this disorderly way Lincoln picked his closest official advisers. The selection process ensured that the cabinet would never be harmonious or loyal to the President.

During the winter of 1860–1861 while Lincoln was constructing his cabinet, the country was falling to pieces. On December 3 the Congress reassembled to hear the plaintive message of retiring President Buchanan, who deplored secession but said nothing could be done to stop it. Three days later South Carolinians elected an overwhelmingly secessionist state convention, which on December 20 declared that the state was no longer a part of the Union. By the end of January, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana all followed, and secession was under way in Texas. In February representatives of six states of the Deep South met at Montgomery, Alabama, and drew up a constitution for the new Confederate States of America. As the Southern states seceded, they seized federal arsenals and forts within their borders. Apart from two minor installations in Florida, only Fort Pickens at Pensacola and the fortifications at Charleston, South Carolina, remained in the control of the United States government. Late in December, Major Robert Anderson, in command at Fort Moultrie on the shoreline at Charleston, transferred his small garrison to the more defensible Fort Sumter, erected on a rock shoal in the harbor. On January 9, when the
Star of the West,
bearing supplies and
200 additional troops, tried to reinforce the Sumter garrison, the South Carolinians fired on it and forced it to retreat.

In Washington government officials could not agree on how to deal with the increasingly serious crisis. The President, along with many other conservatives, favored calling a national convention to amend the Constitution so as to redress Southern grievances. The House of Representatives created the Committee of Thirty-three, with one congressman from each state, to deal with the crisis. After much debate the committee proposed admission of New Mexico as a state, more stringent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, repeal of the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern states to prevent the reclamation of fugitives, and adoption of a constitutional amendment prohibiting future interference with slavery. The Senate set up a similar Committee of Thirteen, which was unable to agree on a program, but John J. Crittenden, one of its members, came up with a broad compromise proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the national territories, prohibiting slavery north of that line but establishing and maintaining it with federal protection south of that line. Crittenden’s plan also called for vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and for repeal of the personal liberty laws. In a parallel effort the Peace Conference, summoned to Washington by the Virginia legislature, proposed to Congress a multisectioned constitutional amendment that closely resembled Crittenden’s compromise.

The chances for a compromise in 1860–1861 were never great. The Crittenden Compromise, the most promising of the suggested agreements, was opposed by influential Southerners and Northerners alike. Only intervention by the President-elect might have changed the attitude of Republicans in Congress and, in so doing, could conceivably have induced the Southerners to reconsider their position. But Lincoln considered these compromise schemes bribes to the secessionists. Grimly he told a visitor, “I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friend to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.”

Lincoln believed the real object of the secessionists was to change the nature of the American government. In his view there were only two ways that could be done. One was through amending the Constitution, a right that everyone recognized. He himself did not desire any changes in that document, but if the people wanted a constitutional amendment, even the one forbidding interference with the domestic institutions of states—meaning slavery—he would not oppose it.

The other way of changing a government was through revolution. Since the Mexican War, Lincoln had been on record as a defender of the right of revolution, of that “most sacred right” of a people “to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” In theory, then, he might have approved when the Southern states declared their independence. But he had always carefully qualified his support of the
right of revolution by insisting that it was a moral, rather than a legal, right that must be “exercised for a morally justifiable cause.” “Without such a cause,” he thought “revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”

That was “the essence of anarchy,” which he would not tolerate. “The right of a State to secede is not an open or debatable question,” he told Nicolay; it had been settled in Andrew Jackson’s time, during the nullification crisis. “It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing Government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment.” Consequently, as he wrote Weed, “No state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and... it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.”

Lincoln’s commitment to maintaining the Union was absolute. As a young man, he had looked to reason for guidance, both in his turbulent emotional life and in the disorderly society in which he grew up. When that proved inadequate, he found stability in the law and in the Constitution, but after the Dred Scott decision he could no longer have unqualified faith in either. The concept of the Union, older than the Constitution, deriving from the Declaration of Independence with its promise of liberty for all, had become the premise on which all his other political beliefs rested.

In objecting to all compromise measures, Lincoln was out of step with the members of his party in Congress who were better informed about affairs in the South and more alarmed as threats of secession became reality. Weed, speaking for Seward, floated the possibility of extending the Missouri Compromise line; Representative Charles Francis Adams proposed admitting New Mexico as a state without any prohibition on slavery; even Trumbull, hitherto adamantly opposed to compromise, urged that a soothing statement from Lincoln would be “the means of strengthening our friends South.”

They pressed him to accept minor concessions that would yield nothing of substance but might give some support to Southern Unionists, and reluctantly he agreed. He had always accepted the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law and now, to please the Southerners, he said he was willing to see it more efficiently enforced, provided that it contained “the usual safeguards to liberty, securing free men against being surrendered as slaves.” The personal liberty laws were enacted by the state legislatures, not the Congress, but if such laws were “really, or apparantly, in conflict with such law of Congress,” they should be repealed. As for Southern concern over the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or interference with the interstate slave trade, he wrote Seward, “I care but little, so that what is done be comely, and not altogether outrageous.” He was even willing for New Mexico to be admitted without prohibition of slavery, “if further extension were hedged against.”

But on one point he was immovable: the extension of slavery into the national territories. He continued to fear that Republicans might abandon the Chicago platform in favor of Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine. “Have none of it,” he wrote Trumbull. “Let there be no compromise on the question of
extending
slavery.” Over and over, he repeated the message to Republican congressmen: “Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”

Lincoln knew that any compromise permitting the spread of slavery into the national territories would disrupt the party that had elected him. Opposition to the extension of slavery, perhaps the only issue on which all Republicans agreed, was the central plank of the 1860 Republican platform, which Lincoln had pledged to uphold. He vowed, “By no act or complicity of mine, shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.” What is more, he had a visceral objection to rethinking a conclusion that he had reached by laborious reasoning. As Mary Lincoln observed in a different context, “He was a terribly firm man when he set his foot down ... no man nor woman could rule him after he had made up his mind.” His Springfield friends were familiar with that inflexibility. Some thought it showed that he had backbone, but, as William Jayne said, “some of our folks think he is stubborn.”

In January when the Illinois state legislature met, Lincoln had to vacate the governor’s office in the state capitol, and he rented a room in the Johnson Building. Nicolay continued to handle his correspondence, but he himself did not spend much time in the new office. Constantly badgered by office-seekers, he often took refuge in an improvised studio in the St. Nicholas Hotel, where the sculptor Thomas D. Jones was preparing a bust of the President-elect.

Increasingly he felt the need for quiet in order to reflect on his inaugural address. He asked Herndon to lend him a copy of the Constitution, of President Jackson’s proclamation against nullification, and of Henry Clay’s great speech in behalf of the Compromise of 1850. He had no need to borrow another source he intended to use, Webster’s celebrated Second Reply to Hayne, because he already knew it almost by heart; that oration extolling “Liberty
and
Union,” he told Herndon, was “the very best speech that was ever delivered.” When he had a draft that satisfied him, he asked William H. Bailhache, one of the owners of the
Illinois State Journal,
to have twenty copies secretly printed, so that he could get the advice and criticism of friends.

Like her husband, Mary Lincoln was also preparing to leave Springfield. She had found the presidential campaign tremendously exciting and the outcome highly gratifying. She was, as an Ohio cousin remarked, “an ambitious little woman,” and her husband’s triumph satisfied her heart’s desire.
To those who knew her best, she seemed little changed by victory, and Mrs. Bailhache found her “just as agreeable as ever” and “as pleasant and talkative and entertaining as she can be.” But others were troubled by her growing sense of self-importance and her extreme sensitivity to suspected social slights. A Springfield minister unkindly remarked that her ego was now so inflated “that she ought to be sent to the cooper’s and well secured against bursting by iron hoops.”

Looking forward to her new role in the White House, Mary Lincoln went to New York in January, accompanied by her brother-in-law, C. M. Smith, and Robert joined her there. Aware that in March her husband would begin drawing a salary of $25,000—at least five times as much as his average annual income in Springfield—she set about ordering a wardrobe that would show the Southern dowagers who dominated Washington society that she was no frontier woman. Eagerly merchants extended credit, and she began running up debts that she concealed from her husband. She saw nothing wrong about accepting presents from office-seekers and others who sought favors from the Lincoln administration. She was, after all, now a very important person who deserved special treatment.