The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (189 page)

It broke out sooner than expected, though not from an unpredictable direction, the source of the explosion being Salmon Chase, or at any rate the men around or behind him, who saw in the adverse reaction to the overlenient Amnesty Proclamation an opportunity too fruitful to be neglected. Chase had been sobered by the Cabinet crisis of mid-December, fourteen months ago, but renewed ambition apparently caused him to forget his extreme discomfort at that time. In any case, in an attempt to influence various state conventions soon to be in session, a group of the Secretary’s friends banded together and sent out in early February a “strictly private” letter afterwards known as the Pomeroy Circular. So called because it was issued over the signature of the group chairman, Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas, a prominent Jacobin and old-line abolitionist, the document charged that “party machinery and official influence are being used to secure the perpetuation of the present Administration,” asserted that “those who believe in the interests of the country and of freedom demand a change in favor of vigor and purity,” and then went on to present five main points all delegates would do well to bear in mind. The first two were against Lincoln, whose re-election was not only “practically impossible” but also undesirable, since under him “the war may continue to languish” and “the cause of human liberty, and the dignity of the nation, suffer proportionately.” The third point found “the ‘one-term principle’ absolutely essential to the certain safety of our republican institutions.” The final two were devoted to Chase, who not only had “more of the qualities needed in a President during the next four years than are combined in any other candidate,” but had developed, as well, “a popularity and strength … unexpected even to his warmest admirers.” Finally, each recipient was urged to “render efficient aid by exerting yourself at once to organize your section of the country” and to enter into correspondence with the undersigned chairman “for the purpose either of receiving or imparting information.”

Lincoln was told of the “strictly private” circular as soon as it appeared. On February 6, Ward Lamon wrote from New York that a
prominent banker there had received in his mail that morning, under the frank of an Ohio congressman, “a most scurrilous and abominable pamphlet about you, your administration, and the succession.” Copies arrived from other friends on the lookout, but got no farther than Nicolay’s desk; Lincoln would not read them. “I have determined to shut my eyes, so far as possible, to everything of that sort,” he explained. “Mr Chase makes a good Secretary, and I shall keep him where he is. If he becomes President, all right. I hope we shall never have a worse man.” He knew, of course, of the Ohioan’s machinations, which were strengthened by the dispensation of some ten thousand jobs in his department, and he said of his activities as an inside critic, “I suppose he will, like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.” But to some who advised that the “perfidious ingrate” be fired he replied: “I am entirely indifferent to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty at the head of the Treasury Department.” To others he maintained that “the Presidential grub” had much the same effect on the Secretary as a horsefly had on a balky plow horse; he got more work out of him when he was bit. Or perhaps it was even simpler than that. Perhaps Lincoln enjoyed watching the performance Chase gave. It was, after all, pretty much a repeat performance, and he already knew the outcome, agreeing beforehand with Welles, who predicted in his diary that the Pomeroy Circular would be “more dangerous in its recoil than its projectile.” His adversaries had bided their time; now he was biding his. A Massachusetts congressman, returning from a visit to the White House at the height of this latest Chase-for-President boom, informed a colleague that Lincoln was only waiting for the Treasury chief to put himself a little more clearly in the wrong. “He thinks that Mr C. will sufficiently soon force the question. In the meantime I think he is wise in waiting till the pear is ripe.”

The pear ripened over the weekend of Washington’s Birthday. On Saturday, February 20, the
Constitutional Union
printed in full the text of the circular, and when it was picked up on Monday by the
National Intelligencer
, Chase could no longer pretend to be unaware of what his friends were doing in his behalf. Writing to Lincoln that same day, he declared however that he had “had no knowledge of the existence of this letter before I saw it in the
Union.”
Some weeks ago, he went on, “several gentlemen” had called on him “in connection with the approaching election of Chief Magistrate,” and though he had not felt that he could forbid them to work as they chose, he had “told them distinctly that I could render them no help, except what might come incidentally from the faithful discharge of public duties, for these must have my whole time”; otherwise, he knew nothing of what had been done by these gentlemen. “I have thought this explanation due to you as well as to myself,” he told Lincoln. “If there is anything in my action or position which in your judgment will prejudice the public interest in
my charge, I beg you to say so. I do not wish to administer the Treasury Department one day without your entire confidence. For yourself,” he continued, appending a sort of amiable tailpiece to his tentative resignation, “I cherish sincere respect and esteem; and, permit me to add, affection. Differences of opinion as to administrative action have not changed these sentiments; nor have they been changed by assaults upon me by persons who profess to spread representations of your views and policy. You are not responsible for acts not your own; nor will you hold me responsible except for what I do or say myself. Great numbers now desire your re-election. Should their wishes be fulfilled by the suffrages of the people, I hope to carry with me into private life the sentiments I now cherish, whole and unimpaired.”

He received next day a one-sentence reply, as inconclusive as it was brief. “Yours of yesterday in relation to the paper issued by Senator Pomeroy was duly received; and I write this note merely to say I will answer a little more fully when I can find the leisure to do so. Yours truly, A. Lincoln.”

Chase out would be considerably more formidable than Chase in; Lincoln had no intention of accepting a resignation which, by splitting the party, might well lose the Republicans the election, whoever the candidate was. He did wait six full days, however, before he found “the leisure” to compose his promised answer. This may have been done primarily to allow the Ohioan plenty of time to squirm, but it also afforded others a chance to contribute to the squirmer’s discomfort by heating up the griddle. When Chase spoke of “assaults upon me by persons who profess to spread representations of your views,” it was the Blairs he meant: specifically, Montgomery and Frank. Back in the fall, as principal speaker at a Maryland rally, the Postmaster General had referred to the Jacobins as “co-adjutors of Presidential schemers,” making it clear that he had the Treasury head in mind as the chief schemer, and since then he had been castigating his fellow Cabinet member at practically every opportunity. Even so, he was not as harsh in this regard as his brother Frank, the soldier member of the family of whom it was said, “When the Blairs go in for a fight they go in for a funeral.” Soon after his corps went into winter quarters near Chattanooga, Frank Blair came to Washington as a Missouri congressman. This had required the surrender of his commission as a major general, but Lincoln had promised to take care of that. He wanted Blair to stand for Speaker of the House, a post at which so stout a fighter could be of even more use to the Administration than on the field of battle, and he agreed that if this did not work out he would restore the commission and Blair could return to his duties as a corps commander under Sherman. But the plan fell through. By the time the Missourian reached the capital in early January, Indiana’s Schuyler Colfax, strongly anti-Lincoln in persuasion, had been elected Speaker. Nevertheless, since his corps was still lying
idle down in Tennessee, Blair took his seat and stayed on in Washington, alert for a chance to strike at the President’s enemies and his own. A chance was not long in coming. On February 5, the day the Pomeroy Circular began to go out across the land, Blair rose in the House to speak in defense of the Administration’s policies on amnesty and reconstruction, opposition to which he declared had been “concocted for purposes of defeating the renomination of Mr Lincoln” in order to open the way for “rival aspirants.” Everyone knew it was Chase he meant, and three weeks later, on February 27—four days into the six allowed for squirming—he made the charge specific, along with several others. Referring to the circular, he said of the candidate favored therein: “It is a matter of surprise that a man having the instincts of a gentleman should remain in the Cabinet after the disclosure of such an intrigue against the one to whom he owes his position. [However] I suppose the President is well content that he should stay; for every hour that he remains sinks him in the contempt of every honorable mind.” Beyond this, Blair asserted that “a more profligate administration of the Treasury Department never existed under any government,” and that investigation would show that “the whole Mississippi Valley is rank and fetid with the frauds and corruptions of its agents … some of [whom] I suppose employ themselves in distributing that ‘strictly private’ circular which came to light the other day.”

Such charges hurt badly. Damage to Chase’s reputation was damage to his soul, and though he thought of himself as a scrupulous administrator of the nation’s funds, he knew quite well that for political reasons he had made agents of men who could by no means be said to measure up to his own high standards. In any case—perhaps out of pity, for the punishment was heavy—Lincoln ended at least a part of the Secretary’s torment, two days later, by declining his resignation. “On consideration,” he declared, “I find there is really very little to say. My knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy’s letter having been made
public
came to me only the day you wrote; but I had, in spite of myself, known of its
existence
several days before. I have not yet read it, and I think I shall not. I was not shocked or surprised by the appearance of the letter, because I had had knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy’s committee, and of secret issues which I supposed came from it, and of secret agents who I supposed were sent out by it, for several weeks.” He was saying here that if he could know so much of what was going on behind his back, Chase must have known about it too, despite his fervent denial. However that might be, Lincoln continued, “I have known just as little of these doings as my friends have allowed me to know … and I assure you, as you have assured me, that no assault has been made upon you by my instigation or with my countenance.” Then came the close, the answer he had promised: “Whether you shall remain at the head of the Treasury Department
is a question which I will not allow myself to consider from any standpoint other than my judgment of the public service, and, in that view, I do not perceive occasion for a change.”

Chase was both relieved and pained: relieved to learn that he would remain at his post, which the long wait had taught him to value anew by persuading him that he was about to lose it, and pained because, as he plaintively observed, “there was no response in [the President’s] letter to the sentiments of respect and esteem which mine contained.” All this was rather beside the original point, however. Welles’s prediction as to the “recoil” of the Pomeroy maneuver had already been borne out, its principal effect having been to rally Lincoln’s friends to his support. And of these, as events had shown, there were many. By the time of his belated reply to Chase on Leap Year Day, no less than fourteen states, either by formal action of their legislatures or by delegates in convention, had gone on record in favor of a second term for the man in office. Among them were New Hampshire, where the Secretary had been born, Rhode Island, where his new son-in-law was supposedly in political control, and finally—unkindest cut—Ohio. In fact, Chase was advised by men from his home state to disentangle himself from the embarrassment into which his ambition had led him, and this he did in a letter to a Buckeye supporter, requesting that “no further consideration be given my name.” He also made it clear, however, that he was only asking this from a sense of duty to the cause, which must not be endangered, even though he was still convinced that “as President I could take care of the Treasury better with the help of a Secretary than I can as Secretary without the help of a President. But our Ohio folks don’t want me enough.” There was the rub; there was what had given him his quietus. “I no longer have any political side,” he presently was saying, “save that of my country, and there are multitudes who like me care little for men but everything for measures.”

The upshot of this pose of “honorable disinterestedness,” as one of the newspapers reprinting the letter called it, was a general impression that he was merely awaiting a more favorable chance to get back in the running. A member of the Pomeroy group referred to the withdrawal as “a word of declination diplomatically spoken to rouse [our] flagging spirits,” and David Davis likened its author to Mr Micawber waiting for something to “turn up.” Chase had dreamed too long and too grandly for those who knew him to believe that he had stopped, even though it had been demonstrated conclusively, twice over, that his dreams would not come true. “Mr Chase will subside as a presidential candidate after the nomination is made, not before,” the chairman of the Republican National Committee remarked, while the New York
Herald
ventured a comparison out of nature: “The Salmon is a queer fish, very wary, often appearing to avoid the bait just before gulping it down.”

•  •  •

Whether Chase continued to dream and scheme made little difference now, though; Lincoln—with the Ohioan’s unintentional assistance—had the nomination cinched. The election, however, was quite another matter. Despite the encouragement Republicans could draw from their successes at the polls in the past season, the outcome of the contest in November would depend even more on military than on political events of the next eight months, through spring and summer and into fall. For one thing, the fighting would be expensive both in money and blood, and the voters, as the ones who would do the paying and the bleeding, were unlikely to be satisfied with anything less than continuous victory at such prices. The past year had been highly satisfactory in this regard; Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge, even Gettysburg and Helena, were accomplishments clearly worth their cost. But the new year had started no better than the old year had ended. Sherman’s destruction of Meridian could scarcely be said to offset Meade’s unhappy stalemate at Mine Run or Seymour’s abrupt defeat at Olustee, let alone Kilpatrick’s frustration outside Richmond or the drubbing Sooy Smith had suffered at Okolona or the unprofitable demonstration Thomas had attempted against Dalton. A good part of the trouble seemed to proceed from mismanagement at the top, and the critics were likely to hold the top man responsible: especially in light of the fact that he had had a direct hand in a good proportion of these failures, all of which had been undertaken with his permission and some of which had been launched against the judgment of those below him on the military ladder. Now a reckoning time was coming, when the voters would have their say.