Team of Rivals (80 page)

At the next cabinet meeting, Welles noted, “Seward was feeling very happy,” while “Chase was pale, and said he was ill, had been for weeks.” Seward magnanimously invited Chase to dine with his family on Christmas Eve. Having achieved what Nicolay termed “a triumph over those who attempted to drive him out,” Seward hoped that he and Chase could now make their peace. Though Chase declined the invitation, he sent a gracious note begging that his “unwilling absence” be excused, for he was “too really sick…to venture upon his hospitality.”

For Lincoln, the most serious governmental crisis of his presidency had ended in victory. He had treated the senators with dignity and respect and, in the process, had protected the integrity and autonomy of his cabinet. He had defended the executive against a legislative attempt to dictate who should constitute the president’s political family. He had saved his friend Seward from an unjust attack that was really directed at him, and, simultaneously, solidified his own position as master of both factions in his cabinet.

Mary Lincoln did not share her husband’s gratification in the outcome. She told Elizabeth Blair that “she regretted the making up of the family quarrel—that there was not a member of the Cabinet who did not stab her husband & the Country daily,” with the exception of Monty Blair. Her protective suspicions were reaffirmed during a visit to a Georgetown spiritualist on New Year’s Eve. Mrs. Laury’s revelations combined comforting communications from Willie with political commentary on affairs of the day. In particular, the spiritualist warned “that the cabinet were all the enemies of the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed, and others called to his aid before he had success.”

Lincoln listened patiently to Mary’s concerns, but he knew that he had now balanced his team of rivals and consolidated his leadership. “I do not now see how it could have been done better,” he told Hay. “I am sure it was right. If I had yielded to that storm & dismissed Seward the thing would all have slumped over one way & we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my own hands & I put it through.”

The happy resolution of the crisis provided an upbeat ending to a very difficult year.

A
S THE FIRST DAY
of January 1863 approached, the public evinced a “general air of doubt” regarding the president’s intention to follow through on his September pledge to issue his Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day. “Will Lincoln’s backbone carry him through?” a skeptical George Templeton Strong asked. “Nobody knows.”

The cynics were wrong. Despite repeated warnings that the issuance of the proclamation would have harmful consequences for the Union’s cause, Lincoln never considered retracting his pledge. As Frederick Douglass had perceived, once the president staked himself to a forward position, he did not give up ground. The final proclamation deviated from the preliminary document in one major respect. The document still proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves” within states and parts of states still in rebellion “are, and henceforward shall be free”; but Lincoln, for the first time, officially authorized the recruitment of blacks into the armed forces. Stanton and Chase had advocated this step for many months, yet Lincoln, knowing that it would provoke serious disaffection in his governing coalition, had hesitated. Now, as the public began to comprehend the massive manpower necessary to fight a prolonged war, he believed the timing was right.

The cabinet members suggested a few changes that Lincoln cheerfully adopted, most notably Chase’s proposal to conclude the legalistic document with a flourish, invoking “the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God…upon this act.”

On the morning he would deliver the historic proclamation, Lincoln rose early. He walked over to his office to make final revisions and sent the document by messenger to the State Department, where it was put into legal form. He then met with General Burnside, who had readied his army for “another expedition against the rebels along the Rappahannock,” only to be restrained by the president. Lincoln explained that several of Burnside’s division commanders had made forceful objections to the new plan. Troubled by the realization that he had lost the confidence of his officers, Burnside offered to resign. Lincoln managed to assuage the discord temporarily, but three weeks later, he would replace Burnside with “Fighting Joe” Hooker. A West Point graduate who had fought in the Mexican War, Hooker had served under McClellan in the Peninsula Campaign and at Antietam.

Seward returned from the State Department with the formally copied proclamation shortly before 11 a.m. Lincoln read it over once more and made ready to sign it when he noticed a technical error in the format. The document had to be returned to the State Department for correction. Since the traditional New Year’s reception was about to begin, the signing would have to be delayed until midafternoon.

The first hour of the three-hour reception was reserved for Washington officials—diplomats, justices, and high officers in the armed forces. All the cabinet members and their families were there, with the exception of Caleb Smith, who had recently resigned his Department of Interior post to become a district judge in Indiana. Young Fanny Seward anxiously anticipated the occasion, for she had just passed her eighteenth birthday and this was her “coming out” day. Outfitted in blue silk with a white hat and an ivory fan, Fanny was thrilled when the president and first lady remembered her. Between the “full court dress” of the diplomatic corps and the dazzling costumes of the ladies, “the scene,” Fanny recalled, was “very brilliant.” She recorded in her diary that Mary “wore a rich dress of black velvet, with lozenge formed trimming on the waist,” but she was especially captivated by Kate Chase, “looking like a fairy queen” in her lace dress: “Oh how pretty she is.”

At noon, the cabinet members left to prepare for their own receptions and the gates to the White House were opened to the general public. The immense and disorderly crowd surged into the mansion at the cost of torn coattails and lost bonnets. The journalist Noah Brooks was relieved when he finally reached the Blue Room, where a single line formed to shake the president’s hand. He had recently noted how Lincoln’s appearance had “grievously altered from the happy-faced Springfield lawyer” he had first met in 1856. “His hair is grizzled, his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.” Nonetheless, the president greeted every visitor with a smile and a kind remark, “his blessed old pump handle working steadily” to ensure that his “People’s Levee” would be a success. Benjamin French, standing beside Mary during the first part of the public reception, noted her doleful appearance. “Oh Mr. French,” she said, “how much we have passed through since last we stood here.” This was the first reception since Willie’s death, and Mary was “too much overcome by her feelings to remain until it ended.”

After mingling with the crowd, Noah Brooks took his California friends “a-calling” at the homes of various cabinet members. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the streets were jammed with carriages. At Chase’s mansion, they were greeted by a “young gentleman of color who had a double row of silver plated buttons from his throat to his toes.” Handing their “pasteboards” to the doorkeeper, they were brought into the crowded parlor, where they shook hands with the secretary and his “very beautiful” daughter. Chase was “gentlemanly in his manners,” Brooks noted, “though he has a painful way of holding his head straight, which leads one to fancy that his shirt collar cuts his ears.” Their next stop was Seward’s Lafayette Square house, where Brooks’s eye, initially drawn to the elegant furnishings in the upstairs parlor, came to rest on “the prodigious nose” of the secretary, who greeted each visitor “with all of his matchless
suaviter in modo.”

Of all the receptions that day, the Stantons’ was the most elaborate. Brooks was overwhelmed by the abundant supply of “oysters, salads, game pastries, fruits, cake, wines…arranged with a most gorgeous display of china, glass, and silver.” Remarking on Stanton’s “little, aristocratic wife,” Ellen, Brooks wondered if her lavish style was depleting the fortune Stanton had accumulated during his years as a lawyer. His observation was perceptive: while Stanton’s salary had been reduced markedly by his decision to leave private practice, Ellen continued to spend money as though large retainers were still coming in. Yet Stanton refused to puncture Ellen’s dreams, even as his rapidly diminishing wealth stirred old worries about bankruptcy.

At 2 p.m., Lincoln, wearily finished with his own reception, returned to his office. Seward and Fred soon joined him, carrying the corrected proclamation in a large portfolio. Not wishing to delay any longer, Lincoln commenced the signing. As the parchment was unrolled before him, he “took a pen, dipped it in ink, moved his hand to the place for the signature,” but then, his hand trembling, he stopped and put the pen down.

“I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” he said. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” His arm was “stiff and numb” from shaking hands for three hours, however. “If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation,” Lincoln said, “all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’” So the president waited a moment and then took up the pen once more, “slowly and carefully” writing his name. “The signature proved to be unusually bold, clear, and firm, even for him,” Fred Seward recalled, “and a laugh followed, at his apprehensions.” The secretary of state added his own name and carried it back to the State Department, where the great seal of the United States was affixed before copies were sent out to the press.

In cities and towns all across the North, people had anxiously waited for word of Lincoln’s action. Count Gurowski was in despair as the day dragged on without confirmation that the proclamation had been signed. “Has Lincoln played false to humanity?” he wondered. At Tremont Temple in Boston, where snow covered the ground, an audience of three thousand had gathered since morning, anticipating “the first flash of the electric wires.” Frederick Douglass was there, along with two other antislavery leaders, John S. Rock and Anna Dickinson. At the nearby Music Hall, another expectant crowd had formed, including the eminent authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, and strengthened our fears,” Douglass recalled. “A line of messengers” connected the telegraph office with the platform at Tremont Temple, and although the time was passed with speeches, as it reached nine and then ten o’clock without any word, “a visible shadow” fell upon the crowd.

“On the side of doubt,” Douglass recalled, “it was said that Mr. Lincoln’s kindly nature [toward the South] might cause him to relent at the last moment.” It was rumored that Mary Lincoln, “coming from an old slaveholding family,” might have stayed his hand, persuading him to “give the slaveholders one other chance.” These speculations, which “had absolutely no foundation,” hurt Mary “to the quick,” her niece Katherine noted. In fact, Mary had rushed a photograph of her husband to Sumner’s abolitionist friend Harvard president Josiah Quincy, hoping it would “reach him, by the 1st of Jan” to mark the joyous occasion.

Finally, at roughly 10 p.m., when the anxiety at Tremont Temple “was becoming agony,” a man raced through the crowd. “It is coming! It is on the wires!!” Douglass would long remember the “wild and grand” reaction, the shouts of “joy and gladness,” the audible sobs and visible tears. The happy crowd celebrated with music and song, dispersing at dawn. A similar elation poured forth in the Music Hall. “It was a sublime moment,” Quincy’s daughter, Eliza, wrote Mary; “the thought of the millions upon millions of human beings whose happiness was to be affected & freedom secured by the words of President Lincoln, was almost overwhelming…. I wish you & the President could have enjoyed it with us, here.”

In Washington, a crowd of serenaders gathered at the White House to applaud Lincoln’s action. The president came to the window and silently bowed to the crowd. The signed proclamation rendered words unnecessary. While its immediate effects were limited, since it applied only to enslaved blacks behind rebel lines, the Emancipation Proclamation changed forever the relationship of the national government to slavery. Where slavery had been protected by the national government, it was now “under its ban.” The armed forces that had returned fugitive slaves to bondage would be employed in securing their freedom. “Whatever partial reverses may attend its progress,” the
Boston Daily Evening Transcript
predicted, “Slavery from this hour ceases to be a political power in the country…such a righteous revolution as it inaugurates never goes backward.” Ohio congressman-elect James Garfield agreed, though he retained a low opinion of Lincoln, doubtless shaped by his close friendship with Chase. “Strange phenomenon in the world’s history,” he wrote, “when a second-rate Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch memorable in all future ages.”

Lincoln did not need any such confirmation of the historic nature of the edict. “Fellow-citizens,” he had said in his annual message in December,
“we
cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

When Joshua Speed next came to visit, Lincoln reminded his old friend of the suicidal depression he had suffered two decades earlier, and of his disclosure that he would gladly die but that he “had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” Now, indicating his Emancipation Proclamation, he declared: “I believe that in this measure…my fondest hopes will be realized.”

G
RAVE QUESTIONS REMAINED:
Had Lincoln chosen the right moment to issue his revolutionary edict? Would the Union cause be helped or hindered? Even Republican papers worried that the edict would create “discord in the North and concord in the South,” strengthening “the spirit of the rebellion” while it diminished “the spirit of the nation.” Lincoln’s most intimate counselor, Seward, repeatedly warned that the situation demanded “union and harmony, in order to save the country from destruction.”

All his life, Lincoln had exhibited an exceptionally sensitive grasp of the limits set by public opinion. As a politician, he had an intuitive sense of when to hold fast, when to wait, and when to lead. “It is my conviction,” Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” If the question of
“slavery and quiet”
as opposed to war and abolition had been placed before the American people in a vote at the time of Fort Sumter, Walt Whitman wrote, the former “would have triumphantly carried the day in a majority of the Northern States—in the large cities, leading off with New York and Philadelphia, by tremendous majorities.” In other words, the North would not fight to end slavery, but it would and did fight to preserve the Union. Lincoln had known this and realized that any assault on slavery would have to await a change in public attitudes.

The proposition to enlist blacks in the armed forces had required a similar period of preparation. “A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit,” Lincoln explained. “Let him attempt to
force
the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently
wait,
and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!” He had watched “this great revolution in public sentiment slowly but
surely
progressing.” He saw this gradual shift in newspaper editorials, in conversations with people throughout the North, and in the views expressed by the troops during his own visits to the field. He had witnessed the subtle changes in the opinions of his cabinet colleagues, even those who represented the more conservative points of view. Although he knew that opposition would still be fierce, he believed it was no longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.”