Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Some Marylanders shared those views. A Baltimore correspondent said that the inaugural “is generally well spoken of, and hopes are freely entertained that it will have a good effect in restoring peace to the country. Maryland will unhesitatingly support the policy of Mr. Lincoln’s inaugural, in preference to secession or disunion in any shape.”165 John Pendleton Kennedy liked the inaugural, with its “dignified and truthful” tone and “its spirit for the promotion of concord.” To that literary son of Baltimore, it seemed “conciliatory and firm—promising peace, but breathing a purpose to resist aggression against the Government.” He had “not the least doubt in the world” that the president “meant peace by it.” Kennedy rejoiced that “Lincoln is beginning to perceive the realities of the case and is growing more and more conservative.”166 The Baltimore American deemed the inaugural “pacific” and asserted that “it furnishes no pretext for disunion.”167 The Clipper also maintained that the inaugural “means only peace and nothing but peace, as far as is possibly consistent with our national honor and the public welfare.”168

  In North Carolina, John A. Gilmer thought that Lincoln had given “most cheering assurances, enough to induce the whole South to wait for the sober second thought of the North.”169 A leading newspaper in the Tarheel State judged that the inaugural “is not unfriendly to the South” and that it “deprecates war and bloodshed, and pleads for the Union.”170 State Senator Jonathan Worth insisted that it “breathes peace to any candid mind.”171

  Some Tennessee papers detected peace rather than war in Lincoln’s words. The Nashville Republican Banner commented that in light of his oath to enforce the laws, Lincoln had made a “mild and conservative address.” The editors thought it conciliatory enough “to dispel all idea of ‘coercion.’ ” Thus, “if civil war is to ensue, it will not be upon his responsibility.”172 The Knoxville Whig called the address “peace-loving and conservative in its recommendations.”173

  In the nation’s capital, John C. Rives, the slaveowning editor of the Washington Daily Globe, tellingly asked critics of the inaugural “what position … the President of the United States could possibly take, other than that taken by President Lincoln, without a palpable, open violation of his inaugural oath, and an utter abnegation and abdication of all the powers of government?”174 Border State congressmen like John S. Millson of Virginia, James M. Leach of North Carolina, and John S. Phelps of Missouri reportedly did “not endorse all the positions taken by Mr. Lincoln” but nevertheless praised “his decision and straightforwardness.”175 The Louisville Democrat sensibly observed that Lincoln “is powerless to extricate himself from the obligations of the Constitution. He cannot surrender the forts, if he desired; nor say, on the back of his oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed, that he will forbear their execution.” Yet by including modifiers like “as far as practicable” and “unless the people will withhold the requisite means, or direct otherwise,” he clearly created “a remonstrance against war.”176 In Alabama, the Mobile Register echoed that view, commenting that the tone of the inaugural “seems conciliatory, and upon the whole, rather more dignified—thanks, probably, to Mr. Seward—than recent emanations from the same source had led us to expect.”177

  The country shared the concern expressed by Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis, who admired Lincoln’s inaugural but feared that he “will be another illustration of the wide difference between a writer & thinker & a man of action—between talking & administration. If he will act on his Inaugural his administration may yet be a great success.”178

  Lincoln could breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to a peaceable solution to the secession crisis. He had delivered a firm but conciliatory address that seemed likely to strengthen the hand of Southern Unionists. Now time could work its healing wonders. “Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time,” he had said in his inaugural. Southerners would eventually realize that Lincoln was no wild-eyed abolitionist; the Upper South would probably remain in the Union; the Deep South would eventually come to understand that it was too small to survive as a viable nation and would therefore return to the fold. In May, Virginia voters would elect Unionists to Congress; in August, Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina would follow suit; in November, Maryland would do the same. The nation would be restored without bloodshed. Southern senators like Crittenden, Andrew Johnson, and Lazarus Powell of Kentucky declared “that the action of the past few days, with the Inauguration to-day, means peace and a settlement of all the National difficulties.”179 Johnson said that armed with the Thirteenth Amendment and the bills organizing the territorial governments in Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado with no provision regarding slavery, he could effectively prevail over secessionists in Tennessee.

  On March 6 and 7, Congressmen Horace Maynard and Thomas A. R. Nelson of Tennessee asked Lincoln how his inaugural should be interpreted. He told them “that he was for peace, and would use every exertion in his power to maintain it; that he was then inclined to the opinion that it would be better to forego the collection of the revenue for a season, so as to allow the people of the seceding States time for reflection, and that regarding them as children of a common family, he was not disposed to take away their bread by withholding even their mail facilities. He expressed a strong hope that, after a little time is allowed for reflection, they will recede from the position they have taken.”180

  The day after the inauguration, Lincoln was shown a letter demolishing that rosy scenario. From Charleston, Major Robert Anderson wrote that his Fort Sumter garrison would run out of food within six weeks. The fort, sitting on an island in the harbor and ringed by hostile South Carolina batteries, must either be resupplied or surrendered. The former course would probably lead to war, the latter to “national destruction.”181 Lincoln had to choose between them.

  21

  “A Man So Busy Letting Rooms in One

  End of His House, That He Can’t Stop

  to Put Out the Fire That Is Burning

  in the Other”

  Distributing Patronage

  (March–April 1861)

  Lincoln’s first six weeks in office taxed him so severely that in July he told his friend Orville H. Browning: “of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”1 He had to make fateful decisions regarding war or peace while dealing with importunate office seekers. Two days after the inauguration, more than a thousand place hunters thronged the White House. Less than a month into his administration, the president told the editor of the New York Times, Henry J. Raymond, that “he wished he could get time to attend to the Southern question; he thought he knew what was wanted, and believed he could do something towards quieting the rising discontent; but the office-seekers demanded all his time. ‘I am,’ said he, ‘like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can’t stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.’ ”2 Four years later, Lincoln asked a senator plaintively: “Can’t you and others start a public sentiment in favor of making no changes in offices except for good and sufficient cause? It seems as though the bare thought of going through again what I did the first year here, would crush me.”3 He said that he “was so badgered with applications for appointments that he thought sometimes that the only way that he could escape from them would be to take a rope and hang himself on one of the trees in the lawn south of the President[’]s House.”4

  Lincoln devoted much time to patronage because he wished to unite his party and, by extension, the entire North. Judicious distribution of offices could cement the many Republican factions (former Whigs, Free Soilers, Know-Nothings, and anti-Nebraska Democrats) into a harmonious whole. Some thought it an unattainable goal, given the party’s diversity. “It is morally impossible for any man, even of transcendent ability,” said an Ohio editor, “to so distribute his patronage and
shape the policy of his administration as to gratify and keep together such a heterogeneous compound of discordant materials as that of which the ‘Republican’ party is composed.”5

  As a participant in the 1849 patronage lottery, Lincoln had observed Zachary Taylor undermine his presidency by mishandling the distribution of offices. More recently, Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan had badly divided the Democratic Party not only with unwise policies regarding slavery but also with ill-advised use of the patronage power. The Buchanan administration had been warned by a Michigan senator who, while urging the selection of men “able and anxious to work for the redemption of the State,” admonished that “these little matters in the way of the small appointments, if they go wrong, hurt us more than a wrong move on any question of the magnitude of a war with England, a great deal.”6 Unlike Pierce and Buchanan, Lincoln fully appreciated the significance of patronage, and through its wise distribution, he was able to keep Congress relatively happy and his party intact.

  Lincoln faced challenges greater than his immediate predecessors had, for he must weed out disloyal civil servants as well as corrupt and incompetent ones. As Navy Secretary Gideon Welles noted, extensive “removals and appointments were not only expected, but absolutely necessary.”7 In his first week as president, Lincoln remarked “that all the departments are so penetrated with corruption, that a clean sweep will become necessary. This, however, will be the work of some months, too hasty removals being prejudicial to public business.”8 (He joked about the president whom he replaced. When one of his favorite journalists, Simon P. Hanscom, wrote that the Lincoln administration would be “a reign of steel,” the pun-loving president asked: “Why not add that Buchanan’s was the reign of stealing?”)9

  As Lincoln went about the Herculean effort of replacing 1,100 civil servants, an observer noted that “[a]ll parties are rapidly finding out that the President has a will of his own.”10 Unlike Buchanan and Pierce, he would not be dominated by strong-minded cabinet members or overbearing party leaders.

  The Engulfing Tide of Office Seekers

  The crush of brazen self-promoters applying for office was fierce. Seward, who regularly visited the White House, told his wife in mid-March that its “grounds, halls, stairways, closets, are filled with applicants, who render ingress and egress difficult.” Lincoln, he added, “takes that business up, first, which is pressed upon him most. Solicitants for offices besiege him, and he, of course, finds his hands full for the present.”11 An economic slump helped swell the ranks of aspirants for even the worst-paying jobs. An Indiana congressman was sickened at the way Republicans were “fighting over offices worth one hundred to five hundred dollars.”12 If those clamoring for government posts “would bestow on some reputable calling the energy and toil they waste in securing a spoonful of Government pap,” remarked Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “they would die happier and wealthier men.”13

  On March 15, writing from the White House, John Hay told a friend that the “throng of office-seekers is something absolutely fearful. They come at daybreak and still are coming at midnight.”14 Hay’s coadjutor, John G. Nicolay, was constantly hounded by supplicants who wanted “to see the President for only five minutes.”15 Assisting Nicolay and Hay was William O. Stoddard, serving as secretary to sign land patents, who recalled vividly the onslaught of office seekers: “such a swarm! Mingled with men of worth, energy, efficiency and highly meritorious political services, were the broken-down, used-up, bankrupt, creditless, worthless, the lame, the halt and the blind, from all the highways and byways of the North. To judge by the claims set forth, there were a thousand men at least upon whose individual labors and prowess had turned the fate of that eventful canvass [of 1860]. Men there were who had never been known to pay an honest debt in their lives, but who, nevertheless, ‘expended their entire fortunes to secure Mr. Lincoln’s election,’ and who deemed it only fair that their immense expenditures should somehow be reimbursed from the overflowing coffers of Uncle Sam.”16

  One of those appealing to Lincoln’s sense of gratitude, Hay recalled, “brought a good deal of evidence to prove that he was the man who originated his nomination. He attacked the great chief in the vestibule of the Executive Mansion, and walked with him to the War Department, impressing this view upon him.” Waiting patiently while the president conducted his business, the aspirant “walked back to the White-House with him, clinching his argument with new and cogent facts. At the door the President turned, and, with that smile which was half sadness and half fun, he said: ‘So you think you made me President?’ ‘Yes, Mr. President, under Providence, I think I did.’ ‘Well,’ said Lincoln, opening the door and going in, ‘it’s a pretty mess you’ve got me into. But I forgive you.’ ”17 (Another version of this story has Lincoln tell the supplicant, “I’ll give you an office very quick if you will undo your work!”)18

  Lincoln rose early and spent at least twelve hours a day meeting with callers. The Cincinnati Gazette reported that he “is about the busiest person in Washington. He is working early and late. His time is taken up mostly with the ceaseless tide of office seekers constantly pouring in upon him. … His family only see him at dinner, he being compelled from fatigue to retire to his room as soon as he leaves his office.” He “is besieged from morning till night in his ante-rooms, in his parlors, in his library, in his office, at his matins, at his breakfast, before and after dinner, and all night, until wearied and worn he goes to rest.”19 He allowed himself little time for meals, which he often left before his fellow diners finished eating. A frustrated office seeker observed that the president “is working himself down to a shadow in the vain struggle to consider every case himself.”20 At first, Lincoln planned to examine applications closely to keep patient merit from being eclipsed by the unworthy. Perhaps recalling his own experience in pursuing the commissionership of the General Land Office eleven years earlier, he told Carl Schurz in 1860: “Men like you, who have real merit and do the work, are always too proud to ask for anything; those who do nothing are always the most clamorous for office, and very often get it, because it is the only way to get rid of them. But if I am elected, they will find a tough customer to deal with, and you may depend upon it that I shall know how to distinguish deserving men from the drones.”21 Lincoln was “profoundly disgusted with the importunate herd of office beggars” and complained about being cooped up all day dealing with them.22 He estimated disapprovingly that 30,000 office seekers flocked to Washington, but he quickly added that there were “some 30,000,000 who ask for no offices.”23 He predicted that “if this government is ever overthrown, utterly demoralized, it will come from this struggle and wriggle for office, a way to live without work; from which nature I am not free myself.”24 In July, shortly after the Union army’s defeat at Bull Run, he asked an Illinois friend: “What do you think has annoyed me more than any one thing? … the fight over two post offices—one at our Bloomington, and the other at _______, in Pennsylvania.”25

  Some observers feared that Lincoln’s health would be ruined by the unending demands of office seekers, who kept him confined to his office night and day. On March 13, he had to cut short his office hours to take a nap. Five days later, it was alleged that his time “is almost wholly engrossed in hearing applications for office. His order is, that all visitors shall be treated courteously and have a fair opportunity of communicating with him personally.” Such a schedule “exposes him to harassing importunity, and seriously interferes with his own comfort and health.”26 A brief respite in mid-March afforded little relief, for as Lincoln noted, “when the flies commence leaving in the fall, the few remaining ones always begin to bite like the devil.”27 On March 24, it was reported that the “incessant calls upon the President are terrible. He is disturbed early in the morning and late in the night, and nothing but the persistent efforts of his friends induced him yesterday to issue an order to the effect that he would receive no visits, either of friendship or official, and yet he was intruded
upon by some who ought to have commiserated his trouble.”28

  Many did commiserate. Lincoln’s longtime friend Hawkins Taylor observed in late March that “Mr Lincoln is now more to be pitied than any man living; he is literally run down day and night.”29 Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden wrote that the “poor President is having a hard time of it. He came here tall strong & vigorous, but has worked himself almost to death. The good fellow thinks it is his duty to see every body, and do every thing himself.”30 When Henry Villard expressed sympathy, Lincoln replied: “Yes, it was bad enough in Springfield, but it was child’s play compared with the tussle here. I hardly have a chance to eat or sleep. I am fair game for everybody of that hungry lot.”31 But he empathized with many of them, saying: “They do not want much, and they get very little. Each one considers his business of great importance, and I must gratify them. I know how I would feel in their place.”32

  Others criticized Lincoln for wasting valuable time on patronage matters while the nation trembled on the brink of civil war. The New York Times declared: “Mr. Lincoln owes a higher duty to the country, to the world, to his own fame, than to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters, in whose eyes the loss of a thousand-dollar clerkship would be a catastrophe little inferior to the downfall of the Republic!”33 On March 17, a leading Republican senator threatened that “if the administration did not soon commence devoting time to more momentous questions than the distribution of the spoils he would have to denounce it.”34 Senator James W. Nesmith of Oregon told his colleagues that “the Administration should have something else to think about. It is said that Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and here are forty thousand office-seekers fiddling around the Administration for loaves and fishes, while the Government is being destroyed.” If he were in the president’s shoes, Nesmith declared, he “would turn the federal bayonets against the office seekers” and “drive them from the purlieus of this city.”35 Orville H. Browning urged Lincoln not to “permit your time to be consumed, and your energies exhausted by personal applications for office.”36