Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  White House Secretaries

  To help manage the patronage crush, Lincoln had each caller screened by his sober, dignified, blunt chief personal secretary, John G. Nicolay, a 29-year-old German immigrant who did not hesitate to tell people his opinion of them. He was unflatteringly described as “the bulldog in the ante-room” with a disposition “sour and crusty;” as “very disagreeable and uncivil;” and as “a grim Cereberus of Teutonic descent” who had “a very unhappy time of it answering the impatient demands of the gathering, growing crowd of applicants which obstructs passage, hall and ante-room.”37 A more charitable portrait was drawn by the journalist John Russell Young, who said Nicolay “had the close, methodical, silent German way about him. Scrupulous, polite, calm, obliging, with the gift of hearing other people talk; coming and going about the Capitol like a shadow; with the soft, sad smile that seemed to come only from the eyes; prompt as lightning to take a hint or an idea; one upon whom a suggestion was never lost, and if it meant a personal service, sure of the prompt spontaneous return.” All in all, Nicolay was a “man without excitements or emotions, … absorbed in the President, and seeing that the Executive business was well done.”38 One of his assistants, William O. Stoddard, called Nicolay a “fair French and German scholar, with some ability as a writer and much natural acuteness, he nevertheless—thanks to a dyspeptic tendency—had developed an artificial manner the reverse of ‘popular,’ and could say ‘no’ about as disagreeably as any man I ever knew.” But, Stoddard pointed out, Nicolay served Lincoln well; his “chief qualification for the very important post he occupied, was his devotion to the President and his incorruptible honesty Lincoln-ward.” The youthful German “measured all things and all men by their relations to the President, and was of incalculable service in fending off much that would have been unnecessary labor and exhaustion to his overworked patron.” Stoddard thought that Lincoln “showed his good judgment of men when he put Mr. Nicolay where he is, with a kind and amount of authority which it is not easy to describe.”39 Though unprepossessing physically, the slender Nicolay struck the president of the Illinois Central Railroad as “a man of more ability than his appearance indicates.”40 Rather than placing the First Lady in charge of social arrangements, Lincoln chose Nicolay, who efficiently prepared seating charts, guest lists, menus, and the like for state dinners and other ceremonies.

  Nicolay’s principal assistant, John Hay, also helped breast the surging tide of office seekers, a task he found disagreeable. The relations between Hay and Lincoln resembled those between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington when the former served as the latter’s principal aide. John Russell Young recalled that Hay “knew the social graces and amenities, and did much to make the atmosphere of the war[-]environed White House grateful, tempering unreasonable aspirations, giving to disappointed ambitions the soft answer which turneth away wrath, showing, as Hamilton did in similar offices, the tact and common sense which were to serve him as they served Hamilton in wider spheres of public duty.”

  (Hay’s tactfulness was put to the test one day by a gentleman who insisted that he must see Lincoln immediately. “The President is engaged now,” replied Hay. “What is your mission?” “Do you know who I am?” asked the caller. “No, I must confess I do not,” said Hay. “I am the son of God,” came the answer. “The President will be delighted to see you when you come again. And perhaps you will bring along a letter of introduction from your father,” retorted the quick-witted secretary. Other lunatics also tried unsuccessfully to see the president.)41

  Young, who often visited the White House during the Civil War, called Hay “brilliant” and “chivalrous,” quite “independent, with opinions on most questions,” which he expressed freely. At times sociable, Hay could also be “reserved” and aloof, “with just a shade of pride that did not make acquaintanceship spontaneous.” Hay, Young said, combined “the genius for romance and politics as no one … since Disraeli,” and judged that he was well “suited for his place in the President’s family.” Young depicted Hay as “a comely young man with [a] peach-blossom face,” “exceedingly handsome—a slight, graceful, boyish figure—‘girl in boy’s clothes,’ as I heard in a sniff from some angry politician.” His youthful, “almost beardless, and almost boyish countenance did not seem to match with official responsibilities and the tumult of action in time of pressure, but he did what he had to do, was always graceful, composed, polite, and equal to the complexities of any situation which might arise.” Hay’s “old-fashioned speech” was “smooth, low-toned, quick in comprehension, sententious, reserved.” People were “not quite sure whether it was the reserve of diffidence or aristocracy,” Young remembered. The “high-bred, courteous” Hay was “not one with whom the breezy overflowing politician would be apt to take liberties.” Young noticed “a touch of sadness in his temperament” and concluded that Hay “had the personal attractiveness as well as the youth of Byron” and “was what Byron might have been if grounded on good principles and with the wholesome discipline of home.”42

  Hay was an excellent conversationalist, as his friend Joseph Bucklin Bishop recalled: “He loved to talk, and his keen joy in it was so genuine and so obvious that it infected his listeners. He was as good a listener as he was a talker, never monopolizing the conversation. … He talked without the slightest sign of effort or premeditation, said his good things as if he owed their inspiration to the listener, and never exhibited a shadow of consciousness of his own brilliancy. His manner toward the conversation of others was the most winning form of compliment conceivable. Every person who spent a half-hour or more with him was sure to go away, not only charmed with Hay, but uncommonly well pleased with himself.”43 In early 1861, Frederick Augustus Mitchel, who attended Brown when Hay was a student there, encountered him at Willard’s Hotel, casually leaning against a cigar stand; in response to Mitchel’s congratulations on being named assistant presidential secretary, Hay replied: “Yes. I’m Keeper of the President’s Conscience.”44

  Hay was not so much the conscience of the president as he was his surrogate son, far more like Lincoln in temperament and interests than was Robert Todd Lincoln. Hay’s humor, intelligence, love of word play, fondness for literature, and devotion to his boss made him a source of comfort to the beleaguered president in the loneliness of the White House. Though twenty-nine years younger than Lincoln, Hay became as much a friend and confidant to the president as their age difference would allow. Congressman Galusha Grow, who served as Speaker of the House from 1861 to 1863, testified that “Lincoln was very much attached” to Hay “and often spoke to me in high terms of his ability and trustworthiness.” Grow knew “of no person in whom the great President reposed more confidence and to whom he confided secrets of State as well as his own personal affairs with such great freedom.”45 Hay frequently wrote letters for Lincoln’s signature; most of them were routine but one—the famous 1864 letter of condolence to the widow Bixby—achieved world renown.46

  In 1881, when President-elect James A. Garfield invited Hay to serve another term as a White House secretary, he declined, explaining that “contact with the greed and selfishness of office-seekers and the bull-dozing Congressmen is unspeakably repulsive. The constant contact with envy, meanness, ignorance and the swinish selfishness which ignorance breeds needs a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I can boast.”47 Much as Hay disliked the bulldozing lawmakers, he felt compassion for some of them. On March 6, he reported that congressmen “are waylaid, dogged, importuned, buttonholed, coaxed and threatened persistently, systematically, and without mercy, by day and by night.”48 A month after the election, an Indiana Representative wrote: “I wish there was an office for every deserving working Republican who desired it, but alas! there will not be one for every fifty, I fear.”49

  Hay also sympathized with some office seekers, who were, as he put it, “inspired by a strange mixture of enthusiasm and greed, pushed by motives which were perhaps at bottom selfish, but which had
nevertheless a curious touch of that deep emotion which had stirred the heart of the nation in the late [1860] election.” Amid “that dense crowd that swarmed in the staircases and the corridors, there were many well-to-do men who were seeking office to their own evident damage, simply because they wished to be a part, however humble, of a government which they had aided to put in power and to which they were sincerely devoted.” Lincoln quickly found that he could not personally attend to most applicants. As Hay recalled, “the numbers were so great, the competition so keen, that they ceased for the moment to be regarded as individuals, drowned as they were in the general sea of solicitation. Few of them received office; when, after weeks of waiting one of them got access to the President, he was received with kindness by a tall melancholy-looking man, sitting at a desk with his back to a window which opened upon a fair view of the Potomac, who heard his story with a gentle patience, took his papers and referred them to one of the Departments, and that was all; the fatal pigeonholes devoured them.”50

  In late March, Nicolay persuaded his boss to limit business hours from 10 A.M. to 3 P.M.; soon thereafter he shortened them by two hours and eliminated Saturday visits.

  Political Pressure and Unfortunate Appointments

  Lincoln intended to call on his cabinet and Congress to help select applicants, but, as he told a friend, he “found to his Surprise, that members of his Cabinet, who were equally interested with himself, in the success of his administration, had been recommending parties to be appointed to responsible positions who were often physically, morally, and intellectually unfit for the place.” Apparently, he added, “most of the Cabinet officers and members of Congress, had a list of appointments to be made, and many of them were such as ought not to be made, and they knew, and their importunities were urgent in proportion to the unfitness for the appointee.”51

  Congressmen, senators, and cabinet members were in fact less deeply concerned with the success of the administration than with their own short-term political gain. Adam Gurowski, an irascible, combative Polish nobleman and Radical abolitionist, noted in his diary that cabinet secretaries “have old party debts to pay, old sores to avenge or to heal, and all this by distributing offices.” Through the use of patronage, “everybody is to serve his friends and his party, and to secure his political position. Some of the party leaders seem to me similar to children enjoying a long-expected and ardently wished-for toy. … They, the leaders, look to create engines for their own political security.”52 Gurowski was right. Patronage greased the wheels of political machines, and party service counted for more than honesty and competence when government jobs were being filled. Friendship or family ties with the powerful also weighed heavily in the balance.

  Members of Congress could be touchy about their prerogatives in patronage matters. Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania angrily protested to Lincoln about the failure of his wife’s brother to receive a judgeship. An onlooker was surprised when Grow spoke “impertinently” and “used threats.” The president apologized and said that when making appointments he had forgotten about Grow’s brother-in-law, who would get a place soon.53 Charles Francis Adams somewhat mistakenly opined that the “difficulty with Mr Lincoln is that he has no conception of his situation. And having no system in his composition he has undertaken to manage the whole thing as if he knew all about it. The first evidence of this is to be found in his direct interference in the removal of Clerks in the Departments. The second is his nomination of persons suggested by domestic influence.”54

  A more accurate analysis of the administration’s troubles appeared in the New York Tribune: the president and his cabinet “must alienate many by their distribution of the patronage; were they angels they could not fail to do this.”55 Lincoln felt bound to follow the well-established rule that Congress must be consulted about appointments. When the governor of Rhode Island protested against the administration’s nominee for postmaster of Providence, Lincoln noted that both of the state’s senators as well as two of its Representatives favored that candidate. “In these cases,” he explained, “the Executive is obliged to be greatly dependent upon members of Congress; and while, under peculiar circumstances, a single member or two, may be occasionally over-ruled, I believe as strong a combination as the present never has been. I therefore beg you to be assured that if I follow the rule in this case, as it appears to me I must, it will be with pain and not with pleasure, that you are not obliged.”56

  Lincoln objected to some pestiferous lawmakers badgering him on behalf of their clamorous constituents. According to Stoddard, the president listened to office seekers and their congressional patrons “with a degree of patience and good temper truly astonishing. At times, however, even his equanimity gave way, and more than one public man finally lost the President’s good will by his pertinacity in demanding provision for his personal satellites. Some Senators and Congressmen really distinguished themselves in this respect. I remember a saying of Mr. Lincoln’s that comes in pretty well here: ‘Poor _______, he is digging his political grave!’

  “Why, how so, Mr. President? He has obtained more offices for his friends than any other man I know of,” said Stoddard.

  “That’s just it; no man can stand so much of that sort of thing. You see, every man thinks he deserves a better office than the one he gets, and hates his ‘big man’ for not securing it, while for every man appointed there are five envious men unappointed, who never forgive him for their want of luck. So there’s half a dozen enemies for each success. I like _______, and don’t like to see him hurt himself in that way; I guess I won’t give him any more.”57

  Not all members of Congress were so insensitive. When Ohio Senator John Sherman pressed him about some appointments, Lincoln slumped in his seat with a look of despair. This prompted Sherman to confess his shame at bothering him with such minor concerns and to promise that he would stop pestering him about them. The president’s expression abruptly brightened, he sat upright, and his entire demeanor changed.

  Cabinet secretaries engaged in fierce patronage battles. On March 26, Attorney General Bates reported that his colleagues “are squabbling around me … about the distribution of loaves & fishes.”58 Seward in particular aroused anger by meddling outside his department. Chase, too, poached on others’ turf. Upset by the treasury secretary’s attempt to dictate post office appointments, Samuel Galloway of Ohio warned that if Lincoln “permits his judgment to be swayed by the dictation of Chase he will soon draw upon himself universal contempt & condemnation. Chase has already alienated by his selfishness some of his warmest adherents in Ohio.” In fact, Galloway asserted, “Chase is doomed and dead in Ohio.”59

  The treasury secretary protested both to Lincoln and to Seward that Ohio was not receiving its fair share of diplomatic appointments, which fell under the aegis of the State Department. Others protested that consulates were given disproportionally to Easterners and to ex-Whigs. (The president eventually ruled that the 262 diplomatic and consular posts should be distributed among the states based on their population.) Annoyed when Seward blocked the nomination of Chase’s brother as a U.S. marshal in New York, the treasury secretary successfully appealed to Lincoln.

  The intense battles between Chase and Seward reflected the antagonism between former Democrats and ex-Whigs. As journalist John W. Forney noted, the president would have to exercise unusual “tact and skill to prevent it [the cabinet] from exploding into ugly divisions.”60 Lincoln showed that he had what Forney thought necessary: exceptional tact and preternatural skill. Thurlow Weed, who worked hard on behalf of his own faction, was widely regarded as a master wire-puller, but Lincoln was shrewder. As the astute, Harvard-educated Daniel Wilder of Kansas noted, Weed “was not a fractional quarter section [160 acres] to Lincoln’s township [23,040 acres].”61 To Seward, the president explained his guiding principle: “In regard to the patronage, sought with so much eagerness and jealousy, I have prescribed for myself the maxim, ‘Justice to all.’ ”62 No one faction of the party w
as allowed to hog the best jobs.

  An especially contentious struggle arose over the New York customhouse, whose leaders had a vast amount of patronage at their disposal and enjoyed munificent incomes. Members of the Horace Greeley faction, some of whom had worked for Lincoln’s nomination at Chicago, urged the president to keep Seward from monopolizing the patronage. In the midst of their meeting with the president, a staff member interrupted with a message from the First Lady: “She wants you.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said without making a move.

  Soon thereafter the messenger returned and exclaimed: “I say, she wants you!”

  Lincoln, though “evidently annoyed,” paid no attention to this interruption. Instead he told his visitors: “One side shall not gobble up everything. Make out a list of places and men you want, and I will endeavor to apply the rule of give and take.”63

  Lincoln later said that Greeley and his allies demanded the top two posts in the customhouse and that they were “in favor of having the two big puddings on the same side of the board.”64 The puddings would be served up equitably on both sides of the board. Lincoln kept track of New York appointments in a little book, making sure to award “each faction more than it could get from any other source, yet never enough to satisfy its appetite,” as Weed put it.65

  A case in point was the battle over the collectorship of New York. “Whether Fort Sumpter shall be reinforced or surrendered, is less bruited than whether the strongholds of the New York custom house, post offices, &c., shall be surrendered to the ‘irrepressibles,’ or held on to by the ‘conservatives,’ ” the Cincinnati Commercial reported in early March.66 Seward and Weed fought to have Simeon Draper named collector of the port of New York, while their opponents championed the reserved, mild-mannered Hiram Barney, a prominent lawyer and a close friend and political ally of Chase. For years Lincoln had served as Barney’s collecting agent in Springfield, and the two enjoyed a pleasant and mutually advantageous business relationship. Barney said that Lincoln “is as good as a brother to me.”67 Deferring to his treasury secretary, whose department had charge of customs collection, Lincoln selected Barney, who proved to be a disappointment. He was considered “an excellent man,” but lacked popularity with the party as well as the merchants.68 Weed protested in vain against Barney’s selection, but he did manage to persuade Lincoln to give his faction other desirable places in the custom house despite Barney’s reluctance to fire loyal, patriotic Democrats. Meanwhile, anti-Seward men complained that they received too few patronage plums.