Seward assumed that Stanton was communicating with him alone. In fact, the cunning Stanton secretly spread word of the danger to several other Republicans, including Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Congressman Henry Dawes. “By early disclosure,” Dawes later wrote, Stanton was able to thwart some of the attempts by treasonous officers to turn supplies and arms over to “the enemies of their country.” Increasingly paranoid, Stanton invited Sumner to his office and then led him through a half-dozen different rooms before feeling safe to talk for a few minutes. Arrangements were made for papers to be “found and read by the light of the street lamp at night, and then returned to the place of deposit.”
Unaware of these other communications, Seward assumed it was on his shoulders to save the Union, that he “held the key to all discontent.” After his appointment as secretary of state was made public on January 10, 1861, when he “came to be regarded somewhat extensively as a person representing the incoming administration and the Republican party,” the pressure of his position was immense. “By common consent,” Seward’s admirer Henry Adams later wrote, “all eyes were turned on him, and he was overwhelmed by entreaties from men in all sections of the country to do something to save the Union.” As members of Congress, the cabinet, and hundreds of nervous citizens approached him “with prayers and tears,” Seward became “virtually the ruler of the country.” Or so he thought.
Intuiting that the country needed a clear, strong Republican voice, Seward announced that he would deliver a major speech in the Senate on January 12. “Never in the history of the American Congress has there been witnessed so intense an anxiety to hear a speech as that which preceded the delivery of Mr. Seward’s,” a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote. “What gave so much interest and weight to the Senator’s words, was the belief that it was equivalent to a speech from Lincoln himself.”
“The families of nearly all the Senators and Cabinet officers were present,” another correspondent reported, and the crush to get in was so great that “extravagant prices were offered to the various doorkeepers to obtain admission.” As Seward began to speak, senators on both sides of the aisle sat in rapt attention, including Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, who would soon resign the Senate to become the president of the Southern Confederacy. “No man was as usual engaged in writing letters, no one called for pages, no one answered messages,” a witness observed, “and every ear in the vast assembly was strained to catch his every word.”
Seward’s chief purpose was “to set forth the advantages, the necessities to the Union to the people…and the vast calamities to them and to the world which its destruction would involve.” He warned that disunion would give rise to a state of “perpetual civil war,” for neither side would tolerate an imbalance of strength or power. Opportunistic foreign nations would then move in, preying on the bickering factions. “When once the guardian angel has taken flight,” he predicted, “everything is lost.”
Listening from the packed galleries, a Boston reporter confessed that it was “difficult to restrain oneself from tears, when at the allusion of Seward to the great men of the country now dead and gone, and at his vivid portrayal of the horrors and evils of dissolution and civil war, we saw the venerable Senator Crittenden, who sat directly in front of Seward, shedding tears, and finally, overcome by his feelings, cover his face with his handkerchief.”
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, Seward offered the concessions he hoped might stem the tide of secession. He endeavored “to meet prejudice with conciliation, exaction with concession which surrenders no principle, and violence with the right hand of peace.” He began with Lincoln’s resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to prevent any future Congress from interfering with slavery where it already existed and suggesting a repeal of all personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. He then added several resolutions of his own, including the prospect of a Constitutional Convention “when the eccentric movements of secession and disunion shall have ended” to consider additional changes to the Constitution. When, after nearly two hours, he concluded his emotional remarks, the galleries erupted in thunderous applause.
As Seward no doubt anticipated, his speech had little impact on the seven states of the Deep South, where the secession movement continued its course. The following week, five Southern senators, including Jefferson Davis, rose to deliver farewell speeches to their colleagues before resigning their seats and heading south. Davis delivered the most wrenching farewell. Unable to sleep for days, he appeared “inexpressibly sad,” very ill, and “in a state of mind bordering on despair.”
“I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North,” he began. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.” The friendships forged over the years were not easily discarded. Seward himself had visited Davis every day during a painful illness several years earlier, when it seemed that Davis might lose his eyesight. Seated by Davis’s side, Seward would recount all the speeches delivered that day by both Democrats and Republicans. The ever-genial Seward told how at one point, “Your man outtalked ours, you would have liked it, but I didn’t.” The families of the senators likewise suffered as Southerners prepared for departure. Old Man Blair’s daughter, Elizabeth Blair Lee, and Varina Davis had been close friends for years. “Mrs Jef asked me if I was going down south to fight her,” Elizabeth told her husband, Phil. “I told her no. I would kiss & hug her too tight to let her break any bonds between us.”
As the senators from the seceded states packed up their belongings to return to their hometowns, it was clear that a “regime had ended in Washington.” The mansions of the old Southern aristocracy were closed; the clothes, papers, china, rugs, and furniture that embellished their lives were stowed in heavy trunks and crates to be conveyed by steamers to their Southern plantations.
Seward understood the momentum in the Deep South. His words and hopes that winter were directed at the border states. His “great wish,” young Henry Adams observed, “was to gain time,” to give the Union men in the border states “some sign of good-will; something, no matter what, with which they could go home and deny the charges of the disunionists.” In this respect, he seemed to succeed.
“As an indication of the spirit in which the Administration of Mr. Lincoln will be conducted,” a New York Times editorial concluded, the speech “must convince every candid man that its predominant and paramount aim will be to perpetuate the Union,—that it will consult, with scrupulous care, the interests, the principles, and the sentiments of every section.” While none of the concessions would recall the seceded states back into the Union, “many are sanguine in the hope that its wide diffusion through the border Slave States will stay the tide of secession.”
During the tumultuous time from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his inauguration in March 1861, Seward “fought,” Henry Adams judged, “a fight which might go down to history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.” In the weeks that followed, “the Union men in the South took new courage.” In the critical state of Virginia, the Union party prevailed. Its members defeated the secessionists by a large margin, and proposed a Peace Convention to be held in Washington with the implied promise that no further action would be taken until the convention had completed its work. Days later, Tennessee and Missouri followed suit. “Secession has run its course,” the New York diarist George Templeton Strong happily noted, betraying the false optimism throughout the North.
Seward was in the best of spirits after the speech, believing, as he told his wife, that without surrendering his principles, he had gained time “for the new Administration to organize and for the frenzy of passion to subside.” Unfortunately, hard-liners read Seward’s speech differently. Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Salmon Chase were outraged by his conciliatory tone in the face of what they considered treason on the part of the secessionist stat
es. Animosity toward Seward was planted in the hearts of the more radical Republicans that would haunt him for the rest of his life. “I deplore S[eward]’s speech,” Sumner wrote to a friend. He “read me his speech 4 days before its delivery. When he came to his propositions, I protested, with my whole soul—for the sake of our cause…& his own good name, & I supplicated him to say no such thing.”
Thaddeus Stevens, the fiery abolitionist congressman from Pennsylvania, was beside himself. Writing to Chase, who had already spoken out against the adoption of any compromise measure, Stevens warned that if Lincoln “seeks to purchase peace by concession, and ignoring platforms, á la mode Seward, I shall give up the fight, being too old for another seven (or thirty) years war.”
The speech was particularly disappointing to those, like Carl Schurz, who had long considered Seward the leader of the great antislavery cause. “What do you think of Seward, my child?” Schurz asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power. He has trodden the way of compromise and concession, and I do not see where he can take his stand on this back track…. That is hard. We believed in him so firmly and were so affectionately attached to him. This is the time that tries men’s souls, and many probably will be found wanting.”
In the heated atmosphere of Washington, the realization that members of his own party had lost faith in him took a heavy toll on Seward. Visiting the Capitol after the speech, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stunned by Seward’s altered appearance since their journey together on the campaign train the previous September. “There he was, the same small, thin, sallow man, with the pale, wrinkled, strongly marked face—plain and imperturbable—the thick, guttural voice and the everlasting cigar. Yet it was immediately apparent that his winter’s cares had told on him, for he looked thin and worn, and ten years older than when I had left him at Auburn.”
While his conciliatory address cost him the esteem of many longtime supporters, Seward still believed that offering his hand in peace in the attempt to prevent a civil war was the right judgment. His wife, Frances, profoundly disagreed. The final speech had reached her in Auburn by telegraph hours after it was delivered. She wrote her husband a blistering letter. “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best,” she began. “You are in danger of taking the path which led Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago. Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive…these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men….
“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness…but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to warn you of your dangers.”
Stung deeply by her denunciation, Seward admitted that “I am not surprised that you do not like the ‘concessions’ in my speech. You will soon enough come to see that they are not compromises, but explanations, to disarm the enemies of Truth, Freedom, and Union, of their most effective weapons.”
Perhaps no one understood Seward’s painful position better than his oldest friend, Thurlow Weed. Weed loved the speech. “It will do to live and die by and with,” he said. Still, he realized that Seward had opened himself to continuing attack. “In the cars, most of the night,” Weed wrote, “I was thinking of the ordeal you are to pass. It is to be [a] great trial of Wisdom and Temper; in Wisdom you will not fail; but of our Tempers, at sixty, we are not so sure…. You had both once, and they made you strong. How much more you need them now when hemmed in and hedged in by envy, jealousies and hatreds.”
Seward retained his equanimity amid the onslaught due largely to his belief that Lincoln not only endorsed but had covertly orchestrated his actions, for Lincoln himself had confidentially suggested several of the compromises that Seward had offered. Furthermore, in a private letter, Lincoln encouraged him: “Your recent speech is well received here; and, I think, is doing good all over the country.” Meeting in the Capitol with Charles Francis Adams a few weeks after the speech, Seward confided that “he had heard from Mr. Lincoln, who approved his course, but was so badgered at Springfield that he felt compelled to keep uncommitted on it at present.”
The president-elect was engaged in a more intricate game of political engineering than Seward realized. While undoubtedly pleased that Seward’s conciliatory tone had produced a calming effect on the border states, Lincoln knew that if he personally called for compromise, he would lose the support of an important wing of the Republican Party. Instead, he maintained firmness through silence while Seward absorbed the backlash for what might prove an advantageous posture of conciliation.
When Carl Schurz visited Lincoln in Springfield after Seward’s speech, Lincoln told the idealistic young man that “Seward made all his speeches without consulting him,” a technically accurate if undeniably misleading statement. “[Lincoln] is a whole man,” Schurz assured his wife, “firm as a stone wall and clear as crystal…. He himself will not hear of concessions and compromises, and says so openly.”
In the end, though Lincoln’s role was not fully recognized at the time, he was the one who kept his fractious party together when an open rupture might easily have destroyed his administration before it could even begin. By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.
CHAPTER 11
“I AM NOW PUBLIC PROPERTY”
AS THE CONFUSION and turmoil of secession swept Washington, the Lincolns made final preparations for their departure from Springfield. In early January 1861, Mary journeyed to New York, both to spend time with her son Robert, whom she had been “wild to see” since he had left for the East Coast a year earlier, and to shop for a wardrobe befitting a first lady. Staying at the Astor Hotel, she was fêted by merchants eager to sell her fancy bonnets, richly textured shawls, kid gloves, and bolts of the finest antique silk for fashionable dresses. The store owners happily extended her credit, encouraging an extravagant spree, the first of many. After years of making do on a limited budget, this woman who was raised in a wealthy household took great pleasure in acquiring everything she wanted, even to the point of outspending her wealthier sisters.
“Buying was an intoxication with her,” her biographer Ruth Randall writes, “it became an utterly irrational thing, an obsession.” Mary’s desire for elegant clothes reflected more than vanity, however. She was undoubtedly aware of the whispering comments about her plain looks and her husband’s lack of breeding: “Could he, with any honor, fill the Presidential Chair?” one guest at an elegant restaurant was overhead saying. “Would his western gaucherie disgrace the Nation?” Her fighting spirit stimulated, she was determined to show the world that the civility of the West was more than equal to that of the East.
Entranced by her experience in New York, Mary stayed three extra days without notifying her husband, who plunged vainly through sleet and snow three nights running to meet her train. When she did return, Mary was in the best of spirits, as was her handsome, well-dressed son, whose “outward appearance” was said to present “a striking contrast to the loose, careless, awkward rigging of his Presidential father.”
The Lincolns decided to rent out their house on Eighth Street, selling some of the furnishings and putting the rest into storage. Before packing their belongings, however, they held a farewell levee in the twin parlors of their home. Mary was in her element as she graciously welcomed a crowd of seven hundred Springfield friends. It was, Villard commented, “the most brilliant affair of the ki
nd witnessed here in many years.”
Mary was thrilled by the attention and relished the lavish gifts presented by office seekers. Nonetheless, she became increasingly apprehensive about her husband. Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome present from South Carolina—a painting depicting Lincoln “with a rope around his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and feathers.” For Mary, terrified of thunderstorms and fearing death with every illness, the gruesome painting undoubtedly left her cold with foreboding.
For Lincoln, the hours of his remaining Springfield days must have seemed too short. The never-ending procession of office seekers and the hard work of packing left little time or space for the most important task of all—the composition of his inaugural address. Unable to concentrate either in his home or in the governor’s office, he sought places to isolate himself and be undisturbed. For several precious hours each morning, he wrote and honed the words that were awaited anxiously by both the conciliators and the non-compromisers alike.
As the time for departure drew near, Lincoln appeared “unusually grave and reflective,” saddened by the prospect of “parting with this scene of joys and sorrows during the last thirty years and the large circle of old and faithful friends.” He journeyed to Farmington for an emotional farewell to his beloved stepmother, Sarah, and to visit his father’s grave. Returning home, he called on Billy Herndon, his law partner for sixteen years. He wanted to assure Herndon that his election would only interrupt their partnership in the firm. “If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practising law as if nothing had ever happened.”
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