by Larry Tagg
This widespread opposition came despite reports that Lincoln was riding a swell of affection from the people. But public opinion in those days was hard to gauge. The first public opinion polls were still seventy years in the future, and no one could know for sure which way the winds were blowing, least of all the people themselves, who depended for their news on the partisan press. The confusion about public opinion helped keep power in the back rooms of the party bosses, away from the voters.
Too, public opinion was fickle, a will-o-the wisp, a vapor that trailed the slightest breeze. It could change with the next military defeat, or the next draft. One Ohioan judged that the common people went for Lincoln only because “everybody thinks that everybody else goes for Lincoln.” This shallowness was the subject of Senator Trumbull’s letter to a friend in early 1864:
The feeling for Mr. Lincoln’s reelection seems to be general, but much of it I discover is only on the surface. You would be surprised in talking with public men we meet here, to find how few when you come to get at their real sentiments are for Mr. Lincoln’s reelection. There is a distrust & fear that he is too undecided & inefficient ever to put down the rebellion. You need not be surprised if a reaction sets in before the nomination in favor of some man supposed to possess more energy & less inclination to trust our brave boys in the hands, & under the leadership of Generals who have no heart in the war.
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The problem among Lincoln’s opponents was agreeing on a rival, someone who was a through-and-through Radical and who would enforce a harsh Reconstruction applied by Congress. Hopes clustered around four men. Some were for General Grant. Others looked toward General Benjamin Butler. Many were still convinced that Frémont was the guiding star. But the first, biggest boom was for Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase.
Two things were constant in Salmon P. Chase’s political life: his opposition to slavery and his desire to be President. He had always considered himself a better man than Abraham Lincoln. In the 1840s in Ohio, he had been a leader of the anti-slavery Liberty and Free Soil parties. He had been elected Senator from Ohio in 1849, had organized the Republican Party in that state, and had been elected governor in 1855 and 1857—all while Lincoln was still drafting wills and vetting deeds in the backwoods. Once in the Cabinet, Chase had shown ability and energy.
He had never been comfortable inside Lincoln’s sloppily-run administration, however. He was the source of a steady stream of letters to those outside, bemoaning the lack of direction and energy from the President. To Horace Greeley, he wrote, “I have seen a great deal in the shape of irregularity, assumptions beyond law, extravagance, and deference to generals and reactionists which I could not approve.” To Murat Halstead, “The whole state of things is very far from satisfactory to me. But I am unable to do much outside of my own department.” To Zack Chandler, “There is no cabinet except in name. The Heads of Departments come together now and then … but no reports are made; no regular discussions held; no ascertained conclusions reached.” Recently he had called Cabinet meetings “useless.”
Chase had never lacked self-esteem. Bluff Ben Wade had remarked on it: “Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.” And now, at the head of an army of 15,000 Treasury Department agents who owed their jobs to him, there was a quickening of his ambition. While he burned for the high post, however, the pompous Secretary remained fastidious about holding to the high road, careful to maintain a seeming disinterest. On October 3, a friend of Horace Greeley called on Chase to propose plans for a campaign. Chase was careful to answer, “I could take no part—people must do as they please.”
In the peculiar code of nineteenth century politics, that meant he was off and running. The comet streak of the Chase boom can be traced by a chronicle:
October 15, 1863: A month after it marked Lincoln’s “sun at its setting,” Henry Ward Beecher’s New York Independent touts Chase to its 50,000 subscribers as “the greatest, the strongest, the boldest” leader in the party.
October 17, 1863: Chase’s candidacy becomes obvious enough that Attorney General Edward Bates remarks in his diary, “I’m afraid Mr. Chase’s head is turned by his eagerness in pursuit of the presidency.”
November 9, 1863: The New York Herald comments, “There is nothing fixed on either side, except what the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher would call ‘the great central facts’—that President Lincoln is prepared to serve another term, and that Mr. Secretary Chase expects to supersede him.”
December 9, 1863: The same day that Lincoln’s Annual Message is read in Congress, a conference of Chase’s supporters calling itself the “Organization to Make S P Chase President” is held in Washington to draft a list of prominent men who would support an organized Chase movement.
December 28, 1863: Navy Secretary Gideon Welles notes that “there is an active, zealous, and somewhat formidable movement for Chase,” and that “Chase clubs are being organized in all the cities to control the nominating convention.” Chase’s long months of plying pen to paper from morning to night lining up friends in support is now paying off. By the end of December, Chase’s desk is piled with letters that gush, “You are head and shoulders above any other statesman in America,” and, “My opinion is that you ought to be our next President… . The country demands that our best and only our best, men should be placed in nomination.”
January, 1864: Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas heads an expanded Chase campaign committee, renamed the “Republican National Executive Committee.”
January 18, 1864: Chase, in a private letter to a friend, announces his candidacy.
Early February: Chase’s campaign committee circulates 100,000 copies of a pamphlet titled “The Next Presidential Election,” which states that people “have lost all confidence” in Lincoln’s ability to suppress the rebellion. The “vascillation [sic] and indecision of the president,” it says, “has been the real cause why our well-appointed armies have not succeeded in the destruction of the rebellion… . the cant about ‘Honest Old Abe’ was at first amusing, it then became ridiculous, but now it is absolutely criminal.” The pamphlet says that Lincoln is letting the war drag on to keep himself in office, warning, “With an army of more than half a million citizen soldiers under his command and an annual patronage of a thousand million in money, he can … have himself elected from term to term during his natural life.” Lincoln betrayed the party, it says, and the party now needs “a statesman professionally versed in political and economic science, one who fully comprehends the spirit of the age in which we live.”
February 20, 1864: The Washington Constitution Union publishes the “Pomeroy Circular,” signed by Chase’s campaign manager, Senator Pomeroy. It calls for the “hearty cooperation” of all who wish the elevation of Chase to the presidency, and gives five reasons:
First, that even were the reelection of Mr. Lincoln desirable, it is practically impossible.
Second, that should he be reelected, his manifest tendency towards compromises and temporary expedients of policy will become stronger … and the cause of human liberty, and the dignity and honor of the nation, suffer proportionately, while the war may continue to languish … till the public debt shall become a burden too great to be borne.
Third, that [under Lincoln] the patronage … has been so rapidly increased … as to render … the “one-term principle” absolutely essential.
Fourth, that we find united in Hon. Salmon P. Chase more of the qualities needed in a president … than are combined in any other available candidate.
Fifth, … the discussion of the Presidential question … has developed a popularity and strength in Mr. Chase unexpected even in his warmest admirers.
Lincoln had been intensely interested in the progress of Chase’s candidacy since it had lifted off in the fall of 1863. Outwardly, he professed little concern—John Hay, who was in close contact with the President every day, recorded his impression on October 28 that Lincoln “seems mu
ch amused at Chase’s mad hunt after the Presidency.” The President’s insouciance toward the Chase boom puzzled many of his followers. But his casual behavior was a tactic. Proper handling of Chase was a delicate matter, one that could not stand lightning and thunder. Dismissing Chase would split the party in two—the Radicals would regard removing him from the Cabinet as a declaration of war and insure a defeat in November. Lincoln knew that Chase, cut loose from the Cabinet, unrestrained, would be twice as dangerous as Chase in the fold.
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles’ keen eye saw that Lincoln was gnawed by the tooth of worry. “The President fears Chase, and he respects him,” Welles told his diary. “Almost daily we have some indication of Presidential aspirations and incipient operations for the campaign. The President does not conceal the interest he takes.” Alexander McClure also noticed, writing that Lincoln “carefully veiled his keen and sometimes bitter resentment against Chase, and waited the fullness of time when he could by some fortuitous circumstance remove Chase as a competitor.” Lincoln avoided a stormy confrontation in the Cabinet chamber. Instead, he fought Chase’s quiet challenge with quiet weapons: he stoked the party machinery and prepared to do battle with Chase in the state party conventions.
The rules of bare-fisted party politics as practiced since Jackson still applied in 1864, and Lincoln knew the ropes better than anyone. He had not spent countless hours in his office listening to the pleas of thousands of office seekers for nothing. His enormous investment in personal attention to patronage since the moment of his election—so thoroughly distasteful to friends and foes alike, privately and in the press—paid off at precisely this moment. Party bosses such as Thurlow Weed in New York and Simon Cameron in Pennsylvania, men to whom Lincoln had devoted hours, days, weeks in conference, were now solidly in Lincoln’s pocket. In addition, all the paymasters, postmasters, assessors, clerks, customs house officials, marshals, deputies, district attorneys, and Indian agents who Lincoln had personally placed in the last three years were now the “party regulars” on the committees of the Republican state conventions and caucuses, men who could block an enemy and advance their favorite in a thousand ways. As one upstate New York editor observed, “A glance at the list of delegates to the Republican state convention will satisfy anyone that the people have had nothing to do with their selection, and that they represent only the great army of office-holders in our state.”
The first Republican state convention was in New Hampshire on January 6. The only item on the agenda was to re-nominate Governor Joseph A. Gilmore, but a young state representative named William E. Chandler took the rostrum and, with the help of a loud chorus of Lincoln men, successfully hijacked the proceedings and rushed through a resolution declaring Lincoln “the people’s choice for re-election to the Presidency in 1864.” (Lincoln was ready with a reward. A few months later, he would appoint Chandler, not yet thirty years old, solicitor and judge advocate general of the Navy Department.)
Another trick was played in Indiana. Dissatisfaction was high among Hoosiers, and Governor Morgan, the favorite, was no fan of Lincoln. If left alone, the delegation would have been sent to the Republican convention uninstructed. At the opening of the state party convention, however, in the first burst of enthusiasm, while delegates were still taking their seats and the crowd was cheering every phrase, a friend of Lincoln mounted the stage and read a resolution that praised Lincoln and instructed the delegates to vote for Lincoln at the national convention, and then, in the same breath, read a second resolution that declared Oliver Morton—the unanimous choice—the candidate for re-election as governor. A single terrific hurrah from the hall was taken as a signal that both resolutions were passed. Thus, without any discussion, the Indiana Republicans were committed to Lincoln before all the delegates had even unfolded their chairs. The Chase men threw down their hats and swore in disgust.
Lincoln’s brawling tactics in the state conventions did not go unnoticed by the press. George Wilkes of New York’s Spirit of the Times decried “the fact that the patronage of the government is … being squandered at this moment to debauch the legislators into an illicit nomination of Mr. Lincoln,” and put it down to “the corrupting temptations of a double term.” Charles Mackay, the New York correspondent for the London Times, also noticed Lincoln’s wire-pulling and cried foul. “Even his honesty,” Mackay told his London readers, “appears to have succumbed to the veiled influences which surround him. Three years’ possession of power has familiarized him with baseness… . He has learnt to play with principles as other men play with dice, and desiring to be renominated to the Presidency, he is determined to win the game unfairly if he cannot win it otherwise.”
The Lincoln juggernaut had been put in motion, however, and it rumbled through February. The President’s soldiers in the Republican caucuses of New Jersey, Maryland, Colorado, and California all pushed through instructions for their delegations to cast their votes for him. On February 22, the “Union National Committee,” as the Republican leadership now called itself—stacked with men who owed their jobs to Abraham Lincoln and had a personal interest in continuing him in office—voted to hold the national nominating convention in Baltimore on June 7, as soon as possible, before any unfortunate events could prick his balloon.
It was at this point that Chase’s infamous Pomeroy Circular surfaced. Soon it became obvious that the Chase campaign pamphlet was, as Secretary Welles had predicted when he read it, “more dangerous in its recoil than its projectile”—that is, damaging mainly to Chase himself. Pretending to be surprised and mortified by the appearance of his own campaign emerging into print, Chase immediately wrote a letter to Lincoln denying any knowledge of the pamphlet, and offering to resign.
Chase’s candidacy was presently undone in his own state. Three days after the Pomeroy Circular appeared in the press, Chase’s misbegotten run for president ended at the caucus of Republican legislators in Ohio. In the fallout over the Circular, Chase’s agents proved to be no match for Lincoln’s: Ohio, too, declared for the President. Mortally wounded by this unkindest cut of all, Chase, in a public letter to a friend, resigned his campaign for the nomination.
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With the wreck of the S.S. Chase at the beginning of March, the Radicals on board swam for any floating spar. While they searched for another rival to Lincoln, a movement grew to postpone the convention from June 7 to a later date, on the pretext that the candidate should not be chosen until there was decisive news from the battlefront.
The erratic Horace Greeley, who shared the widespread suspicion that Lincoln was not the man to win a hard war, spearheaded the movement for delay. In the February 23 Tribune, Greeley broadcast his wish that all thoughts of a nominee be “banished from every loyal mind” until after July 4, “while every energy, every effort should be devoted to the one paramount object of suppressing the Rebellion and restoring Peace to our distracted country.” In the same column, he pooh-poohed the masses’ affection for Lincoln. In view of the national ordeal, he contended, they would love any president who “has not proved an utter disappointment and failure.” He reaffirmed “the salutary One Term principle,” and asked finally, “Has Mr. Lincoln proved so transcendently able and admirable a President that all consideration of the merits, abilities, and services of others should be postponed or forborne in favor of his reelection? We answer it in the negative. Heartily agreeing that Mr. Lincoln has done well, we do not regard it as at all demonstrated that Governor Chase, General Frémont, General Butler or General Grant cannot do as well.”
In an editorial issued the same day, William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post joined Greeley’s anti-Lincoln bid. On March 25, other eminent New Yorkers joined with Bryant in publishing a statement that urged awaiting the developments of the spring and summer. In Chicago, Joseph Medill of the Tribune declared, “Lincoln has some very weak and foolish traits of character,” and placed himself under Greeley’s banner, writing, “I don’t care much if the Convention is put off ti
ll August… . If Lincoln loses the nomination thereby he will have nobody but himself to blame.” Massachusetts’ powerful Springfield Republican also supported a delay. Even Charles Sumner, a constant visitor at the White House, held aloof: “I regret very much that the Baltimore convention is to be at so early a day,” he said. “I see nothing but disaster from mixing our politics with battle and blood.” Greeley confided his strategy to a friend, insisting Lincoln was “not out of the woods. I shall keep up a quiet but steady opposition and, if we should meantime have bad luck in war, I guess we shall back [Lincoln’s supporters] out.”
The wailing by the Radicals after Chase’s withdrawal was overtopped by the coloratura soprano of New England intellectual Orestes Brownson. From his tireless pen came a 5,500-word pamphlet entitled “The Next President,” a long-winded, scholarly slur of Lincoln. For sheer volume of pointy-headed disdain for the untutored President, it is unsurpassed. Here is the merest forkful of Brownson’s seven-course meal:
Mr. Lincoln evidently knows nothing of the philosophy of history, or of the higher elements of human nature. He imagines that men act only from low and interested motives, and does not suspect, because he does not feel, the presence of a heroic element, the element, Carlyle would call it, of Hero-worship, that makes men admire and cling to, and uphold a bold, daring policy, energetically proclaimed, firmly adhered to, and consistently acted on, though in the face and eyes of their interest. 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 damped, 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? He never adopts a clean policy. When he hits upon a policy, substantially good in itself, he contrives to belittle it, besmear it, or in some way to render it mean, contemptible, and useless. Even wisdom from him seems but folly. It is not his fault, but his misfortune. He is a good sort of man, with much natural shrewdness and respectable native abilities; but he is misplaced in the Presidential Chair. He lives and moves in an order of thought, in a world many degrees below that in which a great man lives and moves. We blame him not because he is mole-eyed and not eagle-eyed, and that he has no suspicion of that higher region of thought and action in which lie the great interests and questions he is called upon to deal with as President of the United States. He has done as much as was in his power to make himself, and should be respected for what he has made himself, and the fault that he is not fit for his position is the fault of us who put him there. His only fault is, the misfortune of being unconscious of his own unfitness for his place.
