Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Yet other Prairie Staters won coveted places in the federal bureaucracy. Charles L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Journal, was named secretary of the U.S. legation in London, despite the objections of the minister-designate to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams. (According to a colleague in the legation, Wilson was “an ill-mannered bear,” “slovenly in dress, deficient in good breeding, lazy in his habits,” “vulgar, coarse, ill-natured, sulky, quarrelsome and disputatious.”)104 George M. Hanson of Coles County secured a post in the Northern Superintendency of California Indian reservations. Elias Wampole of Menard County went to Venezuela as a consul. (Lincoln had originally tried to give him a job in Philadelphia. When the director of the mint there balked, Lincoln told him: “You can do it for me, and you must.” He did not.)105 George W. Rives became a tax assessor. At Lincoln’s request, William W. Danenhower, a Know-Nothing journalist, lawyer, and book dealer who had stumped for him in 1858 and 1860, was given a clerkship in the Treasury Department. David Davis helped procure the appointment of William Pitt Kellogg as chief justice of the Nebraska Territory.

  When Elizabeth Ridgeway Corneau of Springfield, whom Lincoln called “a very highly valued friend,” asked a place for her brother, the president tactfully wrote to the collector of customs in Philadelphia: “I do not demand, or insist, even, that you shall make any appointment in your office; but I would be much obliged.”106 He successfully urged the secretary of the senate to give a place to the son of Alexander Sympson of Carthage, “one of my best friends whom I have not, so far, been able to recognize in any substantial way.”107

  Illinois congressmen and senators objected to some of these appointments, which were made without their advice. Lyman Trumbull complained that Lincoln ignored most of the delegation’s requests except for offices within the state and for minor posts outside it. “I see very little of Lincoln, & know little of his policy as to appointments or anything else,” Trumbull reported in late March.108 When Congressman William Kellogg sourly protested about the treatment of a friend, Lincoln found his ingratitude dismaying and in a memo composed around April 3, gave vent to his wounded feelings: “Mr. Kellogg does me great injustice to write in this strain. He has had more favors than any other Illinois member. … Is it really in his heart to add to my perplexities now?”109

  Not all of Lincoln’s Illinois friends succeeded in their quest for government positions. Usher Linder begged for any office but received none. Herndon was denied a patronage post because, Lincoln allegedly said, “he would be charged with paying the debts of personal friendship with public patronage.” (Herndon was offered a temporary assignment as a claims adjuster, which he declined.)110 In May, when William W. Orme lobbied on behalf of some Bloomington neighbors, Lincoln balked, saying “that Illinois already had over 50 per cent of her share of appointments, and he did not see how in the world he could give any more to her.”111

  Another Bloomington resident, David Davis, irritated the president with his patronage requests. The judge, said Lincoln, “has forced me to appoint Archy Williams Judge in Kansas right off and Jno. Jones to a place in the State department: and I have got a bushel of dispatches from Kansas wanting to know if I’m going to fill up all the offices from Illinois.” In naming Williams, Lincoln had not consulted with members of the Illinois congressional delegation, who were understandably angry.112 At Davis’s urging, Lincoln had also appointed Simon Cameron and Caleb B. Smith to the cabinet, and William P. Dole as commissioner of Indian affairs. Davis remained in Washington for three weeks, returning home only when Lincoln announced that he was suspending further appointments of Illinoisans. Before his departure, he told a cousin that he was “shocked and mortified beyond expression” and that Lincoln “lacks will—yields to pressure—& has been pressured by the radicals & mischievous men,” and that the administration would be “an utter failure.”113

  Other Illinois friends, including Governor Yates, were disappointed in Lincoln. On March 7, Nicolay told Ozias M. Hatch, “Illinois is here in perfect hordes. You may look out for a tremendous crop of soreheads.”114 Among the sorest of the soreheads was Jesse K. Dubois, who tried to win posts for both himself and his son-in-law, James P. Luse, editor of the Lafayette, Indiana, Journal. “Uncle Jesse,” said the president, “there is no reason why I don’t want to appoint you, but there is one why I can’t,—you are from the town I live in myself.”115 As for Luse, Dubois insisted that he be named superintendent of Indian affairs in Minnesota, but a resident of that state won the position. “I am sorely disappointed in all my expectations from Washington,” Dubois complained to the president. “I made only two or three requests of you. One for the Northern Superintendency of Indian affairs for my Friend J. P. Luse. My heart was set on this application for him, as in his appointment I could have transferd my dying daughter from the Wabash Valley to the healthy climate of Minesotta and perhaps prolonged her life. I would not go to Washington as I did not wish to trouble you, more than I could possibly help. I did feel as though I had some claims for the favors I asked for, but in all I have been disappointed.”116 Lincoln replied that he was “as sorry as you can be,” but if he had appointed Luse “it would have been against the united, earnest, and, I add, angry protest of the republican [congressional] delegation of Minnesota. … So far as I understand, it is unprecedented, [to] send an officer into a state against the wishes of the members of congress of the State, and of the same party.”117

  When his other recommendations failed to yield results, Dubois wrote the president, bitterly observing that “I am mortified at Luse’s Defeat. … I am still so, more from the fact that I placed a too high an estimate on my relations with you, and did not know my position. For I do know that I have insulted hundreds because I would not importune you. I did suppose I had a right to a small share of the spoils, but let it pass. It is as painful to me as it can be to you.”118 (The president did oblige Dubois by giving offices to Mark W. Delahay and William Beck, both of whom proved embarrassments to the administration.) Four years later Dubois complained that “Lincoln is a singular man and I must Confess I never Knew him: he has for 30 years past just used me as a plaything to accomplish his own ends: but the moment he was elevated to his proud position he seemed all at once to have entirely changed his whole nature and become altogether a new being—Knows no one and the road to favor is always open to his Enemies whilst the door is hymetically sealed to his old friends.”119

  Dubois had a point: Lincoln often used patronage to attract new allies rather than reward old ones. When considering an appointment in Washington, Lincoln said “he thought it judicious to conciliate and draw in as much of the Democratic element as possible” and expressed a willingness to name a loyal Democrat as U.S. district attorney.120 Leonard Swett sagaciously observed that the president “would always give more to his enemies than he would to his friends” because “he never had anything to spare, and in the close calculation of attaching the factions to him, he counted upon the abstract affection of his friends as an element to be offset against some gift with which he must appease his enemies. Hence, there was always some truth in the charge of his friends that he failed to reciprocate their devotion with his favors. The reason was that he had only just so much to give away—‘He always had more horses than oats.’ ”121 Varying the livestock metaphor, Lincoln rejected the appeal of one office seeker by observing that “there are too many hogs and too little fodder!”122

  Others felt as aggrieved as Dubois. Ward Hill Lamon complained that “Lincoln’s weak point is, to cajole & pet his enemies and to allow his friends to be sacrificed and quietly look on and witness the success of his enemies at the expense and downfall of his friends.”123 In March, a frustrated office seeker from Iowa commented bitterly that senators “who never had a feeling of sympathy with Mr Lincoln” and “who fought his nomination to the last” were controlling patronage; “for a man to have been an original friend of Lincoln is now an objection to him with these men.”124

  Also feelin
g sore was David Davis, who was hurt because Lincoln gave him no office. In fact, the president had wanted to name him commissary-general of the army but did not pursue the idea after Winfield Scott objected to placing a civilian in that post. Davis was also miffed when Caleb B. Smith and Simon Cameron, both of whom he had championed for cabinet posts, ignored his recommendations for clerkships. Davis’s good friend Leonard Swett also met with frustration in his quest for government jobs. He wished to serve as consul in Liverpool, a lucrative post, but he lost out to Thomas H. Dudley of New Jersey, whose case former Governor William A. Newell of the Garden State had forcefully pled. In reluctantly acceding to Newell’s importunity, Lincoln said good-naturedly: “Well, Newell, I am like a farmer with a bundle of ‘fodder’ between two asses; and the wrong ass gets the fodder.”125 Swett was so hurt that he regretted applying for an office. Eventually, he proposed that if Davis were named to the U.S. Supreme Court, he would view that as reward enough for both of them. In 1862, Lincoln did nominate Davis to the high court, belatedly gratifying the two men who had been most instrumental in securing his nomination and election.

  Joseph Knox, who had served as Lincoln’s co-counsel in the Rock Island Bridge case, bitterly reminded the president of his “disregard of the request of all our Judges, backed up by 130 members of our bar, for my appt. to the office of U.S. Att’y for this District.”126 In 1862, when Lincoln nominated Isaac B. Curran, a Democrat of Springfield, for a consular post, the president’s friends in the Illinois capital objected vehemently. “Our people feel disheartened, discouraged & disgraced and are ready to curse the administration and all that belong to it for its ill advised and outrageous appointments,” Lincoln’s friend James C. Conkling growled.127 Springfield Republicans were especially upset by appointments in the quartermaster and commissary departments. Like Knox, Conkling lost his bid to become a U.S. district attorney and was convinced that Lincoln had betrayed him. “I almost adored him, for many years,” Conkling said, “and spent my time and money freely for him, and did not know but that my feeling towards him were reciprocated, as least in a small degree, then to wake up to the consciousness of the fact that I was viewed by him with contempt—with disgust—as a bore to be shunned and avoided, was to me unaccountable and annoying.”128 In 1862, Horace White told William Butler he felt “the President, for whom we labored so hard two years ago, had now sacrificed you, & as many of his Illinois friends as possible.”129

  Lincoln’s old friend Ebenezer Peck was chagrined when he failed to be named postmaster of Chicago. The editors of the Chicago Tribune wanted the job for one of their own, for they saw it as a way to expand the paper’s influence. Many other newspaper proprietors coveted postmasterships for such practical reasons. The Tribune editors at first backed Joseph Medill but eventually settled on John Locke Scripps as their candidate. Lincoln, with divided loyalties, put off the decision until late March, when he gave his blessing to Scripps. The disappointed Peck wrote Lyman Trumbull that Lincoln “once said to me, that his greatest repugnance to politics was, that a man had occasion sometimes, to put his foot in the face of his best friend in order to lift himself a round higher on the ladder of ambition.”130 (Two years later Peck was appointed a judge of the U.S. Court of Claims.)

  Other Midwestern Republicans were also indignant. William M. Dickson of Cincinnati believed he had been shabbily treated and sourly remarked that “no one can feel more personally aggrieved at Mr L than I do. Glad always to call upon me before his election, since then he has entirely forgotten me.”131 An Iowa congressman, angry at the failure of his candidate to win a land office job, concluded that Lincoln “has not as much Sagacity as I could wish. He is more of a joker than thinker.”132 Another Iowan noted with disgust that the “Goths and Vandals from the [Old] Northwest take things by storm.”133 Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler told Lincoln that his state “has been utterly ignored in the distribution of offices by your administration[.] Illinois has rec’d eight times, Ohio seven, New York, Eleven & Maine three times as much as Michigan[.] Even Wisconsin has rec[eive]d more than three times as much in both honor & Emolument.”134

  Equally angry were Eastern Republicans who thought Lincoln was biased in favor of his own region. “Every thing in the way of office goes west,” groused Maine Senator William P. Fessenden, who was besieged by clamorous job seekers and would-be contractors. “We shall hardly get the paring of a toe-nail in New England, and many people feel badly about it.”135 Fessenden’s colleague, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, protested “against the appointment of so many Illinoisans and Indianans to important bureaus” in Washington.136 Some New Yorkers felt the same way. One told Lincoln that the “partiality shone to a few of the western states have given great & just offence,” for the “eastern & Northern public are not prepared to believe that all the virtue and talent is to be found in the west and therefore in the absence of proof of such facts very logically conclude it must be through the partiality of a western President.”137

  Trouble Saying “No” to Some (But Not All) Office Seekers

  For all his shrewdness in distributing patronage, Lincoln found it difficult to resist applicants’ tales of woe. “If I have one vice,” he confessed, “and I can call it nothing else, it is not to be able to say no! Thank God for not making me a woman, but if He had, I suppose He would have made me just as ugly as He did, and no one would ever have tempted me. It was only the other day, a poor parson whom I knew some years ago in Joliet came to the White House with a sad story of his poverty and his large family—poor parsons seem always to have large families—and he wanted me to do something for him. I knew very well that I could do nothing for him, and yet I couldn’t bear to tell him so, and so I said I would see what I could do. The very next day the man came back for the office which he said that I had promised him—which was not true, but he seemed really to believe it. Of course there was nothing left for me to do except to get him a place through one of the secretaries. But if I had done my duty, I should have said ‘no’ in the beginning.”138 California Senator John Conness complained that Lincoln had a “too kindly heart” and thus “would yield to the pressure for place.”139 In January 1861, Charles Henry Ray predicted that if Lincoln were to fail, “his dislike to say no to friends” would be the cause.140

  Occasionally, Lincoln could avoid saying no and still turn aside importunate friends. When childhood chums William Jones and Nat Grigsby called in quest of jobs, the president skillfully finessed them before they could make their wishes known. He greeted them warmly and took them to the White House living quarters, where he introduced them to his wife: “Mary, here are two of my old Jonesboro friends who have journeyed all the way up here just to see their old friend. You know the office seekers are pestering the life out of me and I tell you it is a comfort to me to have these boys here especially when I know they do not come to bother me about some position or office. I must hurry back to the office and I want you to take good care of these boys till I can pull loose.” Acting on this hint, Jones and Grigsby returned home without asking for anything.141

  Lincoln was criticized not just for excessive tenderheartedness in distributing patronage but also for yielding too easily to pushy office seekers. One of them said “the practice seems to be with Lincoln that he yields to the man that bores [i.e., pesters] him the most.”142 Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, who deemed the president a man “of no account,” reported that he “yields not to merit or to the force with which an application is asked, but to importunity in the applicant.”143 Interior Secretary Smith agreed that in distributing patronage, the president “yields to the pressure brought to bear upon him.”144

  To avoid saying no, Lincoln sent many persistent job applicants to the Treasury Department and to the Arsenal with notes of introduction. So many would-be messengers, watchmen, and janitors armed with such notes descended on the treasury that George Harrington, assistant secretary of that department, protested. “Why, bless you,” replied Lincoln, “d
id you suppose I expected you to appoint every one bringing you a note? Why, but for you and Genl Ramsey at the arsenal I should die. One week I send all such applicants to you and the next week to Genl Ramsey. I cannot refuse to see those needy people and I am forced to put them upon you and Ramsey. If I have a special desire for an appointment I will let you know.” Lincoln’s eyes twinkled as he made this confession.145

  Sometimes in his desire to be accommodating, Lincoln inadvertently got himself into trouble with office seekers. In 1862, he explained to his Illinois friend George W. Rives, who sought work as a tax assessor: “I will not say unconditionally that I will appoint you, before the [internal revenue] law is passed, because I have been placed in an awkward position, heretofore, by promises made in advance, which I was urged to fulfill, but I think I know all about you, and can decide upon that readily when the time shall come for action.”146 Months earlier he observed that “he was glad that he had but four years to stay in Washington,” for when he left Illinois, said he: “I was reputed an honest man, but here I hardly know what my friends do call me. I am beset by hundreds of men anxious for place, and in the hurry of the moment I sometimes give encouragement to people who in consequence charge me with a want of truth, if they do not receive the office for which they apply. It is much easier to please your neighbors and maintain a fair reputation in Springfield than in Washington!”147