Lincoln (57 page)

The selection of Chase was a bitter dose for Seward, who had increasingly come to think of himself as the premier of the incoming Lincoln administration. In his mind the brilliant policy he had pursued in the Senate had saved the country during the months since the election. By conciliating the South, he believed that he had stopped the hemorrhage of secession after the withdrawal of the seven states of the lower South. Though the legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas authorized conventions to consider secession, Unionists were in control in all these states. He was convinced that they would remain loyal so long as peace was preserved.

Seward did not take seriously Lincoln’s remarks made on the way to Washington and was confident he could persuade the President-elect to agree that the fever of secession should be allowed to run its course in the Deep South while Unionism should be fostered in the upper South by avoiding all provocations. He did not count on impressing Lincoln by his appearance. Slight in build, stooped and thin, with sallow complexion, a beaklike nose, and shaggy eyebrows, he was, unlike Chase, not an imposing figure. But he counted on his enormous intelligence and undeniable charm to win over the President-elect and was constantly with him at breakfasts, meetings, receptions, and dinners. Delighted with Seward’s ebullience and lack of pomposity and sharing his fondness for jokes, Lincoln appeared docilely to follow the lead of his premier. “Old Abe is honest as the sun, and means to be true and faithful,” growled Greeley, who distrusted Seward; “but he is in the web of very cunning spiders and cannot work out if he would.”

In naming Chase, Lincoln broke out of the web. Seward was furious, but he could not have been surprised. He already knew from reading the draft of the inaugural address at the request of the President-elect that his policies were not Lincoln’s. Selecting Chase, who bluntly denounced secession and made his motto “Inauguration first—adjustment afterwards,” was a further signal that Lincoln was not going to follow Seward’s cautious and conciliatory approach toward the South.

Frustrated and despondent, Seward remonstrated with Lincoln. He told the President-elect that he and Chase had irreconcilable differences. Out of
“his conviction of duty and what was due to himself” he “must insist on excluding Mr. Chase if he, Seward, remained.” Failing to convince Lincoln, Seward on March 2 dashed off a curt note: “Circumstances which have occurred since I expressed ... my willingness to accept the office of Secretary of State seem to me to render it my duty to ask leave to withdraw that consent.”

Lincoln faced a dilemma. He needed the New Yorker in his cabinet, but as he told Nicolay, “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick.” He signaled that Seward was not irreplaceable. When a deputation of New York merchants friendly to Seward descended on the President-elect to protest the appointment of Chase, he listened to their arguments that Chase’s commitment to free trade and his hostility toward compromise with the South would further injure business prospects. Beyond that, they insisted, Seward could never work with Chase. Agreeing that he needed a harmonious administration, Lincoln brought out two lists—one his preferred choice of cabinet members, which included both Seward and Chase, and the other, he said, a poorer one naming Dayton as Secretary of State with Seward as minister to England. With that the stunned delegation shuffled out. He gave the same message to Judd, who was vastly excited about possible last-minute changes in the cabinet list. Knowing that Judd was an intimate of Weed and that anything said to him would be immediately reported to Seward, the President-elect vowed, “When that slate breaks again, it will break at the top.”

But Lincoln said nothing directly to Seward, and he did not even acknowledge Seward’s letter of withdrawal. On Sunday, the day before the inauguration, just as though nothing had happened, the President-elect gave a dinner party for all the prospective members of his cabinet, including both Seward and Chase. The next morning, while the inauguration procession was forming, he sent Seward a brief note, asking him to reconsider his decision. Lincoln’s tactful handling of a difficult situation gave Seward time to reflect. Genuinely worried about the fate of the nation, the New Yorker felt that he did “not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance”—i.e., to Abraham Lincoln. He continued to doubt Lincoln’s plan for what he termed “a compound Cabinet,” but he told his wife, “I believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that I can endure enough to make the experiment successful.” He agreed to serve.

At noon on March 4, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln entered an open barouche at Willard’s Hotel to begin the drive down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Determined to prevent any attempt on Lincoln’s life, General Scott had stationed sharpshooters on the roofs of buildings along the avenue, and companies of soldiers blocked off the cross streets. He stationed
himself with one battery of light artillery on Capitol Hill; General John E. Wool, commander of the army’s Department of the East, was with another. The presidential procession was short and businesslike, more like a military operation than a political parade.

Entering the Capitol from the north through a passageway boarded so as to prevent any possible assassination attempt, Buchanan and Lincoln attended the swearing in of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and then emerged to a smattering of applause on the platform erected at the east portico. Introduced by his old friend, the silver-tongued E. D. Baker, Lincoln rose but was obviously troubled by what to do with his tall stovepipe hat. Noting his perplexity, Douglas said, “Permit me, sir,” took the hat, and held it during the ceremony. Lincoln read his inaugural, an eyewitness recalled, in a voice “though not very strong or full-toned” that “rang out over the acres of people before him with surprising distinctness, and was heard in the remotest parts of his audience.” When he finished, the cadaverous Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, now nearly eighty-four years old, tottered forth to administer the oath of office to the sixteenth President of the United States.

The audience could not be quite sure what the new President’s policy toward secession would be because his inaugural address, like his cabinet, was an imperfectly blended mixture of opposites. The draft that he completed before leaving Springfield was a no-nonsense document; it declared that the Union was indestructible, that secession was illegal, and that he intended to enforce the laws. “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen,” he pledged, “to hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports.” Promising that “there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none unless forced upon the national authority,” Lincoln urged secessionists to pause for reflection: “In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war.... With
you,
and not with
me,
is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’”

Lincoln showed this warlike draft to several of his associates. David Davis’s comments were not recorded. Francis P. Blair, Sr., remembering his glory days when Andrew Jackson stared down the South Carolina nullifiers, approved it and urged that no change be made. Browning found it “able, well considered, and appropriate” but strongly advised Lincoln to delete the pledge to reclaim federal forts that had fallen into Confederate hands because this would be “construed into a threat or menace” in the Deep South and would be “irritating” in the border states. Lincoln accepted the suggestion.

More significant were the changes that Seward advised. Granting that Lincoln’s basic argument was “strong and conclusive, and ought not to be in any way abridged or modified,” Seward thought the speech much too provocative. If Lincoln delivered it without alterations, he warned, Virginia
and Maryland would secede and within sixty days the Union would be obliged to fight the Confederacy for possession of the capital at Washington. Dozens of verbal changes should be made, deleting words and phrases that could appear to threaten “the defeated, irritated, angered, frenzied” people of the South. Something more than argument was needed “to meet and remove
prejudice
and
passion
in the South, and
despondency
and
fear
in the East.” Entreating Lincoln to include “some words of affection,” some “of calm and cheerful confidence,” he proposed a less martial concluding paragraph: “I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln made many of the changes Seward proposed. Seward’s suggested final paragraph was too ornate for his taste, but he incorporated its ideas in language distinctively his own:

Reaction to the address was largely predictable. In the Confederacy it was generally taken to mean that war was inevitable. A correspondent of the
Charleston Mercury
viewed this pronouncement from “the Ourang-Outang at the White House” as “the tocsin of battle” that was also “the signal of our freedom.” In the upper South the
Richmond Dispatch
said the message “inaugurates civil war,” and the
Richmond Enquirer
said it meant that Virginia must choose between invasion by Lincoln’s army or Jefferson Davis’s. In the North, Republican papers generally praised the address. The
Indianapolis Daily Journal
called it “strong, straightforward and manly,” and the
Detroit Daily Tribune
found it “able, firm, conciliatory, true to principle and of transparent honesty.” But the
Albany Atlas and Argus,
a Douglas paper, dismissed this “rambling, discursive, questioning, loose-jointed stump speech,” and the pro-Breckinridge
Columbus Daily Capital City Fact
predicted that Lincoln’s policy meant that “blood will stain the soil and color the waters of the entire continent—brother will be arrayed in hostile front against brother.”

The most thoughtful verdict was offered by the
Providence Daily Post,
a Democratic paper, which seemed to sense the differences between Lincoln’s original draft and the address that he actually delivered: “If the President selected his words with the view of making clear his views, he was, partially at least, unsuccessful. There is some plain talk in the address; but... it is immediately followed by obscurely stated qualifications.”

On the morning after the inauguration Lincoln found on his desk a report from Major Robert Anderson that the provisions for his garrison at Fort Sumter would be exhausted in about six weeks. Unless he was resupplied within that time, he would have to surrender. He warned that it would take a force of 20,000 well-disciplined men to make the fort secure.

Lincoln was not prepared for this emergency. As yet there was no executive branch of the government. The Senate had yet to confirm even his private secretary, John G. Nicolay. None of his cabinet officers had been approved. His Secretary of State-designate had not yet agreed to serve, and Salmon P. Chase had not even been informed of his nomination.

Lincoln needed all the help he could get because, as he freely admitted later, when he became President “he was entirely ignorant not only of the duties, but of the manner of doing the business” in the executive office. He tried to do everything himself. There was no one to teach him rules and procedures, and he made egregious mistakes. For example, he thought he could issue orders directly to officers in the navy, without even informing Secretary Welles, and he attempted, without congressional authorization, to create a new Bureau of Militia in the War Department headed by his young friend Elmer Ellsworth. “The difficulty with Mr Lincoln is that he has no conception of his situation,” Senator Charles Sumner concluded. “And having no system in his composition he has undertaken to manage the whole thing as if he knew all about it.”

The new President allowed office-seekers to take up most of his time. From nine o’clock in the morning until late at night, his White House office was open to all comers, and sometimes the petitioners were so numerous that it was impossible to climb the stairs. As Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden said, they made up an “ill-bred, ravenous crowd,” and Lincoln lamented that he was considered “fair game for everybody of that hungry lot.” The pressure was so great, Nicolay wrote, that “we have scarcely had time to eat sleep or even breathe.” Browning scolded the President: “You should not permit your time to be consumed, and your energies exhausted by personal applications for office.” But Lincoln was incorrigible. With a sad smile he explained to Henry Wilson, the Massachusetts senator, that these people “dont want much and dont get but little, and I must see them.”

The news from Fort Sumter forced this inexperienced and overworked administrator to make a hard choice: he must either reinforce Anderson’s garrison or evacuate it. Lincoln’s options were sharply limited by two principles firmly enunciated in his inaugural address. One promised to avoid “bloodshed or violence ... unless it be forced upon the national authority.” The other pledged to “hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government.” That included Fort Sumter.