The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (23 page)

Nor had these and other failures of omission and commission gone unnoticed by the country at large, the voters and investors on whose will and trust the prosecution of the war depended. The Democrats, still on the outside looking in, but with substantial gains in the fall elections to sharpen their appetite for more, had seen to that: especially Ohio Representative Clement L. Vallandigham, who was savagely pointing out, from the vantage point of his seat in Congress, the administration’s errors. “Money you have expended without limit,” he told Republicans in
the House, “and blood poured out like water. Defeat, debt, taxation, and sepulchers—these are your only trophies.” Others, less violent but no less earnest, including his disaffected former allies, were accusing the President in a similar vein; so that now, perhaps, with his own critics crying out against him, he could feel more sympathy for James K. Polk than he had felt when he spoke against him in Congress, fifteen years ago this month, in the midst of another war. “I more than suspect already,” the youthful Lincoln had declared from a seat in the rear of the House, “that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong; that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven against him; that originally having some strong motive … to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory … he plunged into it and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation … he now finds himself he knows not where.… His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease.… He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity!”

The words rebounded from the target, boomeranged down the years, and came back in other forms to strike the sender. Orestes Brownson, the prominent Boston author and former transcendentalist, wrote of Lincoln: “His soul seems made of leather, and incapable of any grand or noble emotion. Compared with the mass of men, he is a line of flat prose in a beautiful and spirited lyric. He lowers, he never elevates you. You leave his presence with your enthusiasm dampened, your better feelings crushed, and your hopes cast to the winds. You ask not, can this man carry the nation through its terrible struggles? but can the nation carry this man through them, and not perish in the attempt?” Brownson was of no uncertain mind where Lincoln was concerned. “He is thickheaded; he is ignorant; he is tricky, somewhat astute, in a small way, and obstinate as a mule.… He is wrong-headed, the attorney not the lawyer, the petty politician not the statesman, and, in my belief, ill-deserving of the soubriquet of Honest. I am out of all patience with him,” he added, rather anticlimactically, and inquired: “Is there no way of inducing him to resign, and allow Mr Hamlin to take his place?” Senator William Pitt Fessenden, a Maine Republican high in the party’s councils, replied in somewhat the same vein when told that he should be a member of the cabinet in order to be at Lincoln’s elbow and give the nation the full benefit of his advice. “No friend of mine should ever wish to see me there,” he answered. “You cannot change the President’s character or conduct. He remained long enough in Springfield, surrounded by toadies and office-seekers, to persuade himself that he was specially chosen by the Almighty for this
crisis, and well chosen. This conceit has never yet been beaten out of him, and until it is, no human wisdom can be of much avail. I see nothing for it but to let the ship of state drift along, hoping that the current of public opinion may bring it safely into port.” Similarly, a Boston philanthropist, railroad magnate J. M. Forbes, convinced that Lincoln was badly off the track, was asking: “Can nothing be done to reach the President’s ear and heart? I hear he is susceptible to religious impressions; shall we send our eloquent divines to talk to him, or shall we send on a deputation of mothers and wives, or can we, the conservators of liberty, who have elected him, combine with Congress in beseeching him to save the country?”

In point of fact, one such group of “eloquent divines” as Forbes suggested did come to call on Lincoln at this time, protesting with considerable heat the lack of progress in the war; but he gave them little satisfaction beyond a brief, short-tempered lecture comparing the administration’s predicament to that of a tightrope walker in mid-act. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across the Niagara River. Would you shake the cable or keep shouting out to him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter!’ ‘Blondin, stoop a little more!’ ‘Go a little faster’; ‘Lean a little more to the north’; ‘Lean a little more to the south’? No. You would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The government is carrying an immense weight. Untold treasures are in their hands. They are doing the very best they can. Don’t badger them. Keep silence, and we’ll get you safe across.” The visit, he said afterwards, made him “a little shy of preachers” for a time. “But the latchstring is out,” he added, “and they have the right to come here and preach to me if they will go about it with some gentleness and moderation.”

Gentleness and moderation were easier to prescribe than they were to practice. An infinitely patient man, he was beginning to lose patience: with the result that some who formerly had complained that he lacked firmness were now protesting that he had assumed the prerogatives of a dictator, spurning their counsels and high-handedly overruling their objections. It was true in some respects. His accustomed tact sometimes failed him under pressure nowadays, and he gave short answers, though rarely without the saving grace of humor, the velvet glove that softened the clutch of the iron hand. This was evident, for example, in a clash with Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase about this time. An economist came to Lincoln with a plan for issuing greenbacks. Lincoln heard him out, liked the notion, but told him: “You must go to Chase. He is running that end of the machine.” The man left, then presently returned, saying that the Secretary had dismissed him with the objection that the proposal was unconstitutional. Lincoln grimaced. “Go back to
Chase,” he said, “and tell him not to bother himself about the Constitution. Say that I have that sacred instrument here at the White House, and am guarding it with great care.”

Such brusque, not to say cavalier, treatment of his highly respected Treasury chief was prologue to an even rougher handling of that dignitary in mid-December, when he tripped him neatly from behind as he tried a sprint up several rungs of the political ladder. This was a time of crisis and division, in the cabinet as in the nation at large. One member, Secretary of the Interior Caleb Blood Smith, who had received his appointment as the result of a convention bargain, was leaving to accept a judgeship Lincoln had offered him in his native Indiana; his post would go to John Palmer Usher, another Hoosier, at present the Assistant Secretary. The other six members were split on the question of whether to admit West Virginia as a state under an act just passed by Congress, divorcing Virginia’s northwest counties from the Old Dominion and validating the rump government set up in Charleston during the Sumter furor. Three cabinet officers—Chase, Stanton, and Secretary of State William H. Seward—wanted Lincoln to sign the bill, converting slave soil into free soil by the stroke of a pen, and incidentally adding good Republican votes on whatever questions Congress might decide needed settling in the future; while three others—Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—recommended that he veto it, on grounds that the act was in a sense a ratification of secession. Though he could not reconcile their views, Lincoln quickly solved the problem to his own approximate satisfaction. “The division of a state is dreaded as a precedent,” he reasoned. “But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is
our
secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution and secession in favor of the Constitution.” On the last day of the year, though he did so with a wry face, he signed the bill. West Virginia would become in June a full-fledged state of the Union, the thirty-fifth, not discounting the eleven who had no representation in Congress pending the settlement of their claim to have abolished their old ties.

Seward and Chase had voted together on the issue, but that was rare. In general they were diametrically opposed, as they had been in the old days when they were rivals for the office which, by a fluke, had gone to Lincoln. Chase, who was jealous of Seward’s position as the President’s chief adviser, wanted not only the seat closest to the one at the head of the table, but also, as time would show, the principal seat itself. In this connection, noting the way the wind blew, he had aligned himself with the radicals in Congress, the so-called Jacobins who had come to see Seward as the stumbling block in the way of adoption of their notions as
to how the war should be fought and the country run, just as Chase had come to see him as a hurdle that would have to be removed or overleaped if he was to fulfill his own ambitions. By way of undoing their common adversary, he fanned the flames of the radicals’ hatred by reporting Seward’s every private opposition to their aims (the New Yorker, for example, had delayed the promulgation of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation by advising Lincoln to wait for a more propitious season before releasing it to the world; than which, indeed, there could be no crime greater in radical eyes) as well as by giving them a blow-by-blow account of every cabinet crisis, omitting nothing that served to thicken the atmosphere of discord and indecision. So it was that at last, on December 17—four days after the Fredericksburg fiasco, which seemed to them to prove emphatically that the prosecution of the war was in quite the wrong hands—all but one of the thirty-two Republican senators met in secret caucus on Capitol Hill and passed unanimously the following resolution, by way of advice to the leader of their party:
“Resolved
, that … the public confidence in the present administration would be increased by a change in and partial reconstruction of the cabinet.” It was Seward they were after, Seward alone, and lest there be any doubt on that score a committee of nine was appointed to present the resolution to Lincoln and explain to him just what it was they meant.

The one abstaining senator was New York’s Preston King, who went at once to Seward and warned his former senatorial colleague that the Jacobins, “thirsty for a victim” in the wake of recent misfortunes, had selected his neck for the ax. Seward reacted fast when he learned thus of the resolution about to be presented. “They may do as they please about me,” he said, “but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” Accordingly he took a sheet of paper, and having scrawled a few words across it—“Sir, I hereby resign from the office of Secretary of State, and beg that my resignation be accepted immediately”—sent it forthwith to the White House. Lincoln was shocked. “What does this mean?” he asked as he put on his hat and set out for Seward’s house, which was just across the street. Seward explained what had happened, along with what was about to happen, and added that he personally would be glad to get from under the burden of official duties and political harassment. “Ah yes, Governor,” Lincoln said, shaking his head. “That will do very well for you, but I am like the starling in Sterne’s story. ‘I can’t get out.’ ” He pocketed the resignation and went sadly back across the White House lawn.

At any rate, next morning when the committee spokesman called, he knew what to expect. He set the time for the presentation at 7 o’clock that evening; he would receive the full committee then. This was a crisis, not only for Lincoln but also for the nation, and he knew it. “If I had yielded to that storm and dismissed Seward,” he said later, “the thing would have all slumped over one way, and we should have been left
with a scant handful of supporters.” Knowing what had to be done was a quite different thing, however, from knowing how to do it. Ben Wade of Ohio, George W. Julian of Indiana, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan: these and others like them were men of power and savage purpose, accomplished haters who would be merciless in revenging even an imagined slight, let alone an outright rebuff. Whatever Lincoln did had better be done without incurring their personal enmity. Besides, he not only had to avoid their anger; he also needed their support. What he required just now was someone to draw their wrath, someone to serve him much as a billygoat serves the farmer who places him in a barnlot to draw fleas. By evening, not without a certain sense of political and even poetical justice, he had chosen the someone. All that remained was to make him serve, and that could be done quite simply by branding him, in the eyes of all, for what he was.

The nine committeemen were prompt; Lincoln received them in his office. By way of a beginning, seventy-one-year-old Jacob Collamer of Vermont, who had been elected spokesman, read the resolution and followed it with a paper which summed up the conclusions reached in caucus the day before. The war should be prosecuted vigorously; cabinet members should be “cordial, resolute, unwavering” in their devotion to the principles of the Republican majority; the cabinet itself, once it had been stripped and rebuilt so as to contain only such stalwarts, should have a larger voice in the running of the government. Wade rose next, a vigorous man with “burning” eyes and bulldog flews, protesting hotly that the President had “placed the direction of our military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats.” He spoke at length, going somewhat afield from the central issue, and was followed by Fessenden, who agreed that the war was “not sufficiently in the hands of its friends,” then brought the discussion back on target by charging specifically “that the Secretary of State [is] not in accord with the majority of the cabinet and [has] exerted an injurious influence upon the conduct of the war.” Others had their say along these lines, also at considerable length, but Lincoln kept his temper and said little. After three hours of listening, however, he suggested that the meeting adjourn until the following night. The senators agreed. Alone at last, he saw clearly, as he presently remarked, that if he let these men have their way “the whole government must cave in; it could not stand, could not hold water; the bottom would be out.”