Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  This artful opening statement worked on two levels. First, it was an optimistic call to arms at a moment of crisis. Second, it deftly placed Chase, and Seward’s other critics, in a tricky spot. No cabinet member was likely to openly disagree with such a glowing tribute to the group’s self-sacrificing patriotism. But the alternative to speaking out was to remain silent, and silence could only be interpreted as agreement with Lincoln’s summary of the situation. The president had neatly closed off the option of airing and discussing the cabinet’s dysfunctions and grievances—by saying at the outset that they didn’t exist.

  He then asked his colleagues not to do anything rash. Do not undertake “combined movement” to “resist this assault,” he begged. He said he was afraid “the rest of [them] might take [this] as a hint to retire also,” and “he could not afford to lose” any additional members of his council. They must remain together and be patient. Again, who could disagree?

  When Lincoln finished talking, the cabinet chattered awhile over the shocking news, each one telling the others when he first caught wind of Seward’s resignation. Blair boasted that he had known since the day before; Stanton said he had heard it from Lincoln during an earlier meeting; Bates reported learning of the news on his way to the White House that morning. Salmon Chase, however, claimed that he had known absolutely nothing of the Senate caucus or of Seward’s decision to step down until he had heard it in this room—a statement difficult to believe, when it came from such a gossipy insider. Finally, after some more rambling discussion, Lincoln adjourned the meeting. He asked them all to return at seven thirty P.M.

  Lincoln had learned something that morning: neither Chase nor any other unhappy cabinet member was willing to cross him or to level charges against Seward in front of the others. And if they wouldn’t do it among themselves, it was unlikely they would do it with the Republican senators in the room. Lincoln sent word to Collamer that he would like to meet with the Senate delegation again. They should come to the White House that evening—at seven thirty.

  * * *

  Elite Washington hummed with the electric excitement of a political crisis. Conversations leapt quickly from the rumor of Seward’s resignation to the prospect of a complete upheaval of the cabinet, and from there to the capital’s age-old pastime: touting candidates. Who should replace Seward—Sumner? Collamer? If Chase resigned, would Fessenden take his place? Or should Thomas Ewing return to Treasury? Preston King or John Dix would make a fine secretary of war when Stanton went—or should the new secretary be Frémont? Meanwhile, across the aisle, Democrats scoffed at this flurry of Republican names. They were convinced that the crackup of Lincoln’s cabinet would force the president to recall McClellan and give him greater powers than ever before. Browning, recording this line of reasoning in his diary, wrote that Little Mac would “dictate his own terms,” including “the disposal of all the commands in the army!”

  When the delegation of senators gathered again that evening in the anteroom of Lincoln’s office, they discovered they were not alone. Eyeing the cabinet members with curiosity, they waited briefly until Lincoln welcomed them all into his chamber and announced that he had taken the liberty of inviting the cabinet—minus Seward, of course—“for a free and friendly conversation.” Did the senators have any objection? Blindsided, the lawmakers had no opportunity to discuss the proposition; when Collamer acquiesced, the rest of them went along.

  Lincoln now had all of them in a room together; it was time to play his hand. The president began with an expanded version of the remarks he had tested with the cabinet that morning. It was true, he admitted, that the cabinet did not meet at regular intervals; the urgent press of the war made that impossible. But “most questions of importance had received a reasonable consideration” by the group. Furthermore, he continued, once decisions were made, the cabinet—including Seward—supported them. The president vouched personally for the secretary of state, saying that Seward was “earnest in the prosecution of the war and had not improperly interfered.”

  The delegation was deeply skeptical of these claims. Senator Fessenden and Lincoln’s old Illinois rival Lyman Trumbull, for instance, later remarked that the president’s own words furnished ample evidence that he often failed to keep the cabinet informed. Lincoln acknowledged that he had not consulted his cabinet before choosing McClellan and, later, Halleck, as general in chief. Nor did he come to them prior to reinstating McClellan as head of the army after Pope’s loss at Bull Run. Nor did he take a vote on whether he should proclaim emancipation.

  Yet, no one in the room was willing to speak up to contradict the president, so it was time for Lincoln to reveal his trump card. As evidence that his cabinet worked together harmoniously, the president declared that Seward sometimes sought advice from Chase about important diplomatic matters. Lincoln then paused, looked at Chase, and asked whether any of the cabinet members disagreed with anything he had said.

  Chase was cornered. Everyone in the room knew that he disagreed with Lincoln’s description of a collegial cabinet. But would he say so, knowing that the consequences might be dire—for himself, for Lincoln, and for the country? The treasury secretary was visibly angry. As one participant recalled, Chase finally found his voice to protest that “he should not have come here had he known that he was to be arraigned before a committee of the Senate.” Grudgingly, however, he agreed with Lincoln that the cabinet had weighed most of the important issues in the war—“though perhaps not as fully as might have been desired,” he added weakly. It was also true, he acknowledged, that the cabinet generally concurred with and supported the decisions made by the president.

  Stanton, for one, was “disgusted” by this answer. As he told Fessenden the next day, every charge contained in the caucus resolution was true, yet Chase had cut the legs out from under the senators. The war secretary asserted that he “was ashamed of Chase, for he knew better.”

  But did Stanton speak up? Did any member of the cabinet? Caleb Smith, the interior secretary, was another anti-Seward voice, and he later said that “he had felt strongly tempted to contradict Mr. Chase on the spot.” But he had already accepted Lincoln’s appointment to the federal bench and would soon be gone, so he too decided to keep quiet.

  The senators were stunned. A few days afterward, when Orville Browning heard a description of this meeting, he asked Senator Collamer “how Mr. Chase could venture to make such a statement in the presence” of the very men he had filled with stories of Seward’s “back stairs and malign influence.”

  Collamer’s answer was simple: “He lied.”

  Was Chase lying, or had he exaggerated while telling and retelling all those aggrieved tales he spread around Washington and passed on in his letters—stories in which every Union setback was merely a matter of too much Seward and not enough Chase? None of the senators in the room that evening could be sure.

  After the showdown with Chase, the conversation moved on. Various senators detailed their impatience and irritation and fears for the nation’s future. Blair and then Bates replied with long speeches about the Constitution and separation of powers and the authority of the executive. Throughout, Lincoln put in comments and anecdotes, most of which the men had heard before.

  Chase sat quietly until he abruptly interjected one unexpected piece of information. The conversation had wandered onto the subject of the September 22 cabinet meeting at which Lincoln read his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. As Lincoln was describing that day’s discussion, Chase reminded the president that Seward had actually strengthened the decree. Where the president had pledged the government to “recognize” the freedom of former slaves, Seward suggested adding the words “and maintain.” Recognize and maintain: the senators could unquestionably see the significance of that change. How did this information square with their image of a man skulking on the back stairs of the White House, secretly maneuvering on behalf of slave owners?

  It didn’t.

  After allowing the conversation to
go on a bit longer while everyone digested what they had heard, Lincoln asked the senators whether they had changed their minds about the need to force Seward out. Some had, some had not. Fessenden, for one, didn’t wish to discuss the subject in front of the president’s advisers; provided with this opening, the cabinet departed. By now it was around midnight. Lincoln and the senators kept talking for another hour, as the meeting devolved into a classic late-night airing of long-festering complaints.

  Before the session ended, Fessenden made one last stab at Seward. The question was no longer whether to force him out, the senator said; he had resigned. Now the question was whether Lincoln should invite him back in. “Under these circumstances I feel bound to say that as Mr. Seward has seen fit to resign, I should advise that his resignation be accepted,” the senator said.

  Lincoln, having accomplished over the past several hours precisely what he had intended, said nothing.

  * * *

  “The town is all in a buz,” Bates scribbled hastily in his diary on December 20. The scuttlebutt now was that Lincoln’s entire cabinet was out, and some people were actually sending lists of possible replacements to the White House in hopes that Lincoln would review them.

  But the final act of the drama remained unwritten. To allow the Senate cabal to drive out Seward would have unbalanced the government and pushed it in the radical direction; as Lincoln later put it, “the thing would all have slumped over one way [and] we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters.” On the other hand, Fessenden had correctly pointed out the night before that since everyone in town already knew about Seward’s resignation, to coax him back would tilt the administration in the opposite direction. To maintain his precarious balance, Lincoln now needed to resolve the crisis in a way that did not appear to favor one side or the other.

  He found the solution when he walked into his office that morning and discovered Chase already there, waiting for him. Welles and Stanton were there, too. The navy secretary was particularly anxious for a word with the president, having just returned from a visit to Seward’s house. Undertaken at Lincoln’s request, Welles’s mission had been to encourage the embattled secretary of state to keep quiet and have faith that “this scheme should be defeated.” Careful not to let Chase know where he had been, Welles cryptically assured Lincoln that he “had seen the man … and he assented to my views.”

  Now the president turned to Chase. As Welles recalled it, the Treasury secretary “said he had been painfully affected by the meeting last evening.” After a bit of hemming and hawing, Chase came to the point: he was resigning. He had already written the necessary letter. Later that day, Welles recorded in detail what followed:

  “‘Where is it?’ said the President quickly, his eye lighting up in a moment. ‘I brought it with me,’ said Chase, taking the paper from his pocket; ‘I wrote it this morning.’ ‘Let me have it,’ said the President, reaching his long arm and fingers toward C[hase], who held on, seemingly reluctant to part with the letter.”

  Lincoln managed to get the sealed envelope from Chase and tore it open. “An air of satisfaction spread” over his face as he realized that Chase had given him the perfect way out. The letter, the president declared, “cuts the Gordian knot,” and when Stanton took that as a cue to offer his own resignation, Lincoln immediately replied: “I don’t want yours. This … is all I want—this relieves me—my way is clear—the trouble is ended.”

  With that, he dismissed the trio, and Chase made his way home to his mansion at Sixth and E streets, slightly baffled. Eventually it dawned on him that the president would now refuse to accept either Seward’s resignation or his own. The friends of Seward and the friends of Chase would be equally pleased and equally disappointed; as a consequence, Lincoln would keep his cabinet intact and preserve the delicate balance of his administration.

  This was exactly right. Though Chase wrote Lincoln a pleading letter arguing that the president should instead accept both resignations, by the time he delivered it Lincoln had already acted. Seward cheerfully agreed to return to work; Chase followed dyspeptically a day later. The crisis was over.

  Somehow, from his lowest point, Lincoln had managed by cool cunning to master a situation that days earlier seemed to threaten disaster. He not only survived what Doris Kearns Goodwin called “the most serious governmental crisis of his presidency,” he emerged from it stronger than ever. Reflecting upon his handling of the revolt, Lincoln told John Hay matter-of-factly: “I do not now see how it could have been done better.”

  More challenges lay ahead, but all of them would end the same way, with Lincoln “more firmly than ever in the saddle,” as his secretaries put it. The president liked that equestrian metaphor, and later in December he used a variation of it with Senator Ira Harris of New York to explain what it felt like to have Seward and Chase restored to the cabinet and balance maintained in the government. “Now I can ride,” he said. “I have a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”

  * * *

  The country shared none of this confidence—not yet, and not for a long time to come. “The war! I have no heart to write about either it or the political aspect of affairs,” wrote Mary Lincoln’s adviser Benjamin French. “Defeat at Fredericksburg—the Cabinet breaking up—our leading men fighting with each other! Unless something occurs very soon to brighten up affairs, I shall begin to look upon our whole Nation as on its way to destruction.” The stalwart Republican proprietor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, cataloged the woes of the Union: “Failure of the army, weight of taxes, depreciation of money, want of cotton, increasing national debt, deaths in the army”—the list went on. “All combine to produce the existing state of despondency” and lead to the conclusion that “the war is drawing toward a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”

  John Dahlgren waxed eloquent in his journal. “So we can raise larger armies than any other nation, and make generals as fast as paper money. We can be so rich that a thousand millions may be squandered and not be felt. But we cannot make soldiers or leaders.… It is an army of postmasters or other civil placemen with arms in their hands. The nation only wants one man—a General!” Dahlgren was wrong in his lament. The Union was teaching men to be fine soldiers and leaders, but the process took time and the school was harsh and unforgiving.

  Even as the gloomy sailor was writing those words, in fact, the one man he pined for—the store clerk on his way to becoming a General—was learning a few more lessons the hard way. Ulysses Grant had cleared the Rebels from Oxford, Mississippi, but now his army was sustained by a lifeline of parallel iron rails that grew less reliable with each mile. The Rebel cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest looked on that vulnerable railroad like a lion sizing up a limping gazelle. Darting through the Tennessee countryside in the rear of Grant’s army, Forrest broke up the railroad at various points along a sixty-mile stretch and slashed Grant’s telegraph lines so effectively that the general was unable to communicate with the outside world for two weeks. This taught Grant, in his own words, “the impossibility of maintaining so long a line” to supply “an army moving in any enemy’s country.”

  As the general pondered his next move, he continued to fret over the unsolved problem of shady cotton traders in his zone of occupation. Despite numerous complaints from the field, Washington had done little to help, and Grant was at the end of his patience. His frustration deepened his reflexive anti-Semitism until finally, on December 17, he dashed off his Order No. 11, one of the most regrettable documents of the war. “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department … are hereby expelled,” Grant wrote. He directed post commanders throughout his department to find and evict “all of this class of people” within twenty-four hours, and arrest any who remained.

  Grant’s adjutant, John Rawlins, saw instantly that the order was grossly unjust and would mar the general’s reputation, but when he tried to talk his superior out of sending it, Grant reportedly barked, “They
can countermand this from Washington if they like.”

  Lincoln did exactly that. When Grant’s order reached Paducah, Jewish merchants there raised a delegation to travel immediately to Washington and protest. As spokesman they chose Cesar Kaskel, the vice president of the recently established Paducah Union League. The men boarded a steamer and started up the Ohio River; within days they were sitting in Lincoln’s office. The president heard their complaint and boiled it down to its biblical essence: “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” he asked good-naturedly.

  Kaskel was quick on his feet: “Yes,” he said, “and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”