Rise to Greatness (15 page)

Seward was not the only critic dismayed by the energy that Lincoln appeared to waste on job seekers. “He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles … of patronage, and personal questions than of the weightier matters of empire,” complained the writer and attorney Richard Henry Dana. The line of supplicants often ran from the waiting room in the president’s second-floor office, out the door, along the corridor, and down the stairs. Nicolay complained of being pestered by people wanting “‘to see the President
for only five minutes
.’ At present this request meets me from almost every man, woman and child I meet—whether it be by day or night—in the house or on the street.”

Lincoln frequently felt overwhelmed by the press of job seekers. Soon after becoming president, he compared himself to “a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.” Drowning in minutiae, he seemed not even to know which jobs were truly important. One day early in Lincoln’s tenure, Seward escorted the new U.S. ambassador to Great Britain into the president’s office. Charles Francis Adams had gold-plated credentials: he was a congressman and a noted antislavery leader, and though he had no formal experience as a diplomat, he was the son and grandson of men who had held the office now occupied by Lincoln. None of this, however, seemed to matter much to Lincoln, who had originally wanted someone else for the job. When Adams entered the president’s office, he was dismayed to find Lincoln wearing trousers worn thin at the knees and a pair of slippers on his feet. Sprawled in a chair and distracted, Lincoln only half-listened as Adams offered the customary soliloquy of gratitude for the president’s trust and confidence. “Very kind of you to say so Mr. Adams, but you are not my choice,” Lincoln answered. “You are Seward’s man.” Then, turning to Seward, Lincoln brightened and said, “Well, Governor, I’ve this morning decided the Chicago post-office appointment!”

Adams was appalled, but what he and the other critics failed to see was that Lincoln used patronage as a powerful adhesive, one that went a long way toward holding the fragile Union coalition together. His decision to fight the rebellion required that he ask many competing factions to share a grim and painful ordeal. By shrewdly dispensing the favors at his disposal, he endeavored to give all those factions a stake in the Union’s success. Two scholars estimated that in his first year as president Lincoln filled about twelve hundred jobs in “the most sweeping” turnover of the federal workforce the country had ever seen. And as the war fueled further growth of the government, that number grew.

Lincoln often welded political leaders to the Union cause by making them generals—some of them because they had relevant military experience, but many more simply because of their influence with one political group or another. “In regard to the patronage sought with so much eagerness and jealousy, I have prescribed for myself the maxim, ‘Fairness to all,’” Lincoln declared. Though Republicans seethed, Lincoln was careful to give stars to a number of prominent Democrats, never forgetting that the opposition carried nearly 45 percent of the Northern vote in 1860. He made generals of John A. Dix, a former Democratic senator from New York; John McClernand, the leading Democrat in southern Illinois; Benjamin Butler, the most prominent Massachusetts Democrat; and, most notably, George McClellan.

Lincoln also catered to ethnic groups. He made the Irish nationalist hero Thomas Meagher a brigadier general, one of a dozen Irish-born Union generals who served in the war. An order to the War Department gives a window into Lincoln’s thinking about military patronage: “There has got to be something done unquestionably in the interest of the Dutch, and to that end I want Schimmelfennig appointed.” Lincoln knew that the name alone would delight German-Americans. He even learned to be attentive to the religious denominations of his appointees, after being scolded for putting too many Episcopalians in his cabinet. “I must do something for this great Methodist church,” he told a visiting congressman. “Seward is an Episcopalian, Chase is an Episcopalian, Bates is an Episcopalian, and Stanton swears enough to be one.”

Over the course of his first year in office, Lincoln’s painstaking attention to job seekers and favor hunters—which he once compared to “bail[ing] out the Potomac with a spoon”—had come to make more sense to Seward and others as they watched the president struggle to hold the fractured Union together. In the words of Gideon Welles: “Never under any administration were greater care and deliberation required” in dispensing presidential favors, for Lincoln was shoring up “a demoralized government and a crumbling Union.”

Despite his initial skepticism about the president’s abilities, Seward gradually came to see the discipline and cold calculation behind Lincoln’s every decision. Friendship, Seward discovered, rarely clouded the president’s view. In early 1862, when Lincoln chose his first Supreme Court justice, he declined to appoint his close friend Orville Browning, whose wife, Eliza, had pleaded with Lincoln on her husband’s behalf. He also passed over David Davis, another Illinois friend and the chief engineer of Lincoln’s presidential nomination. Instead, he picked an Ohio attorney, Noah H. Swayne—who, not coincidentally, was sponsored by one of Lincoln’s most dangerous antagonists, Ben Wade of the congressional joint committee. “He would always give more to his enemies than he would to his friends,” a disappointed Davis supporter later wrote. “And the reason was, because he never had anything to spare.” Or, as Lincoln himself put it, he “always had more horses than oats.” The president trusted that his friends would remain his friends, even when he disappointed them; meanwhile, he took great care to make sure that his enemies were appeased.

In the year since he’d joined the administration, Seward had earned his way into Lincoln’s confidence and even his affections, “spen[ding] a considerable portion of every day with the President,” according to one cabinet colleague. His adroit handling of the
Trent
affair proved his diplomatic skill, and on a personal level, the two men had much in common. Both were informal, careless about their grooming, and sometimes uncouth. Both liked children and pets. When Seward discovered that the Lincolns had a soft spot for cats, he promptly delivered two kittens to the White House. Both men loved yarns and jokes, including ribald and off-color ones. Lincoln liked to claim that he was the better storyteller: “Mr. Seward is limited to a couple of stories which repeating he believes are true,” Lincoln teased. “The two men found it easy to drop into nonsensical and preposterous dialogue,” a Seward biographer wrote. Emerson, during his visit in February, caught the flavor of their banter when Seward recounted a typical exchange. “The President said yesterday, when I was going to tell him a story, ‘Well, Seward, don’t let it be smutty.’”

Where the two men were different, they complemented each other. Lincoln was indifferent to food and took no interest in entertaining guests. Seward, on the other hand, was renowned in Washington as an extravagant and enthusiastic host; his eleven-course dinner parties began with soup and ran through fish, beef, and fowl; then the guests tarried over ice cream and fruit before the evening ended four hours later with port and fine Cuban cigars. As a consequence, he picked up plenty of useful intelligence at his dinner table and other tables around town. More important, Seward’s sturdy optimism bolstered the melancholy Lincoln. The secretary of state projected this buoyancy through his frequent letters to U.S. emissaries abroad, so that he became a brash and sunny face of the embattled nation. On March 6, for instance, he visited Lincoln to preview his latest dispatch to Adams in London; his cheerful nature rang from nearly every sentence. “It is now apparent that we are at the beginning of the end of the attempted revolution,” Seward wrote. “That end may be indeed delayed by accidents or errors at home, as it may be by aid or sympathy on the part of foreign nations. But it can hardly be deemed uncertain.”

*   *   *

Many Confederates might secretly have agreed, for their situation was suddenly beginning to look precarious. On a rainy late February morning in Richmond, Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy. In his first message to the Confederate Congress, Davis spoke bluntly of the recent failures of the rebel army. “The Government has attempted more than it had the power successfully to achieve,” Davis admitted. The South simply had too many borders and not enough men; it was hopeless to try “to protect by our arms the whole territory of the Confederate states, seaboard and inland.” Davis had summoned General Robert E. Lee to Richmond, asking Lee to suspend his work preparing coastal defenses and advise him on strategy.

The Confederacy’s long-term prospects were also being eroded by the North’s increasing financial strength. Lincoln had put it simply: “I must have money.” Expanding on the theme, he added, “The result of this war is a question of resources. That side will win in the end where the money holds out longest.”

Accordingly, the House of Representatives was hard at work on developing a massive system of taxes to pay for a protracted war if necessary. Under their plan, a new commissioner of internal revenue would be appointed, and virtually every money stream in the Union would be tapped—starting with income, which had never been taxed before. Sales taxes were instituted: two cents per pound on sugar, a penny per pound on coffee, ten cents per gallon on coal oil, fifty cents per clock, ten cents per pound on cheap cigars and twenty cents per pound on good ones—on and on went the list, page after page of levies covering rail fares, steamboat tickets, stock transactions, and newspaper advertisements. “Nearly every class will probably find something to complain of,” one newspaper allowed.

The North’s ability to collect so much revenue from so many new taxes suggested its enormous economic advantage. In 1860, the eleven states that formed the Confederacy had just 10 percent of the nation’s industrial capacity. The North, by contrast, had not only a legion of thriving industries, but also nine of the ten largest cities, and two thirds of all railroad tracks. Meanwhile, the manufacturing capacity of many of the Southern states was shrinking. Between 1840 and 1860, Virginia lost one third of its manufacturing jobs; on the eve of the war, it employed approximately the same number of factory workers as the tiny state of Rhode Island.

As spring began arriving across the South, Union forces continued to rally. Troops and gunboats under the command of Brigadier General John Pope raced down the Mississippi and laid siege to the Confederate town of New Madrid, Missouri. A force led by former speaker of the house Nathaniel Banks—one of Lincoln’s purely political appointees—started up the Shenandoah Valley from Harpers Ferry toward Winchester, Virginia. Brigadier General Samuel Curtis, a former congressman with West Point training, led some 12,000 bluecoats into northwest Arkansas, where they confronted a larger Rebel force under Earl Van Dorn at a place called Pea Ridge, near Fayetteville. When the battle commenced on March 7, a cold, wet Friday, the Rebels got the early advantage, but Curtis skillfully divided his army to scatter first one wing of the Confederate force, then the other. It was the biggest battle of the war fought west of the Mississippi, and Curtis’s victory effectively ended the danger that the Rebels might peel Missouri away from the Union.

Outside Washington, Joseph E. Johnston weighed the acres of blue spread out around the capital and concluded that he must fall back toward Richmond or risk being cut off by a flanking maneuver. In early March, he very quietly abandoned fortifications that the Rebels had occupied since the battle of Bull Run the previous summer. The Union high command in Washington would not notice his departure for several days, but here, as elsewhere, the South was falling back. Alarmed, the Confederate Congress passed a law requiring military authorities to burn cotton and tobacco rather than let it fall into the hands of advancing Federal troops.

So much had happened so quickly. Now, with the breeze finally at his back, Lincoln concluded that the time had come to raise the stakes against slavery.

*   *   *

He had broached the idea gingerly in his message to Congress in December: the federal government should offer to buy freedom for the slaves. Explaining his reasoning to the abolitionist Moncure Conway, Lincoln said that slavery “was the disease of the entire nation,” and that Northerners “should be ready and eager to share largely the pecuniary losses to which the South would be subjected if emancipation should occur.… All must share the suffering of its removal.”

Having slipped this proposal into public view, he began mentioning it in meetings with various influential visitors. As he told one caller: “American slavery is no small affair, and it cannot be done away with at once.… It belongs to our politics, to our industries, to our commerce, and to our religion. Every portion of our territory in some form or other has contributed to the growth and the increase of slavery.… It is wrong, a great evil indeed, but the South is no more responsible for the wrong done to the African race than is the North.” To another visitor, he put it this way: “Slavery existed … by the act of the North as of the South; and in any scheme to get rid of it, the North, as well as the South, was morally bound to do its full and equal share.”

The details of such a scheme had been taking shape in Lincoln’s mind for years. Once he became president, he enlisted Congressman George Fisher, of Delaware, to help investigate the idea. The results were not entirely encouraging, but by March Lincoln concluded that military successes had made him strong enough to give the plan a big, formal push. He proposed that Congress issue a joint resolution offering to “co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.”

Like the hanging of Captain Gordon—who had been executed on February 21—this proposal represented a profound change in the federal government’s stance toward slavery. But Lincoln played down that fact; rather than promote emancipation as a moral imperative or a social revolution, he framed it as part of the war effort. Knowing that Confederate leaders nursed hopes of attracting the border states to join their side, he reasoned that he might be able to dash their dreams by persuading those states to give up on slavery. “To deprive them of this hope, substantially ends the rebellion,” Lincoln asserted. He also took a moderate position on the pace of this proposed change, writing: “In my judgment, gradual, and not sudden emancipation, is better for all.”