If Lincoln had a hard time saying no to some office seekers, on occasion he could do so most emphatically. John Hay recalled sitting one day in the White House with the president “when a man who had been calling on him almost daily for weeks in pursuit of an office was shown in. He made his usual request, when Lincoln said: ‘It is of no use, my friend. You had better go home. I am not going to give you that place.’ At this the man became enraged, and in a very insolent tone exclaimed, ‘Then, as I understand it, Mr. President, you refuse to do me justice.’ At this, Lincoln’s patience, which was as near the infinite as anything that I have ever known, gave way. He looked at the man steadily for a half-minute or more, then slowly began to lift his long figure from its slouching position in the chair. He rose without haste, went over to where the man was sitting, took him by the coat-collar, carried him bodily to the door, threw him in a heap outside, closed the door, and returned to his chair. The man picked himself up, opened the door, and cried, ‘I want my papers!’ Lincoln took a package of papers from the table, went to the door and threw them out, again closed it, and returned to his chair. He said not a word, then or afterward, about the incident.”148
Massachusetts Congressman John B. Alley remembered a similar scene when two shameless office seekers accosted Lincoln on his way from the White House to the nearby War Department building. When their pestering became intolerable, the president, “evidently worn out by care and anxiety, turned upon them, and such an angry and terrific tirade, against those two incorrigible bores, I never before heard from the lips of mortal man.”149 One day on the street, when an office seeker boldly thrust a letter into the president’s hand, he angrily snapped: “No, sir! I am not going to open shop here.”150 Lincoln also lost his temper at William Houston, brother of Texas Governor Sam Houston. In July, when Henry C. Whitney mentioned William Houston, the president “frowned like a bear and said—‘don’t bother me about Bill Houston[.] he has been here sitting on his a[s]s all summer, waiting for me to give him the best office I’ve got.’ ” Whitney suggested that perhaps Houston could have a minor clerkship, prompting an explosive response that seared itself into Whitney’s memory: “ ‘I hain’t got it,’ roared Lincoln with more impatience and disgust than I ever saw manifested by him.” Whitney dropped the subject.151
Sometimes Lincoln replied to office seekers with gentle humor rather than anger. A Philadelphian who repeatedly boasted of his services to the party was told by the president: “I had in my pig sty a little bit of a pig, that made a terrible commotion—do you know why? Because the old sow had just one more little pig than she had teats, and the little porker that got no teat made a terrible squealing.” Lincoln’s caller took the hint and returned to Pennsylvania.152 When a delegation asked Lincoln to name an ill friend of theirs as commissioner of the Hawaiian Islands, where the salubrious climate might improve his health, Lincoln replied: “I am sorry to say that there are eight other applicants for that place, and they are all sicker than your man.”153
Dealing with Claims of Religion and Ethnicity
Trying to balance competing claims, Lincoln had to take into account religion as well as ideology, party antecedents, locality, and friendship. James Mitchell, a Methodist minister whom the president named to a post in the Interior Department, argued that since Methodists “aided largely to make Mr. Lincoln,” they rightfully expected him “to meet the account to the full.”154 A parson in Alexandria felt that account was overdue. “We ask the govt. to recognize our people in bestowing patronage,” he wrote, but the request went unheeded: “the treatment of our people by the Administration is an open, standing insult to the church. Episcopalians & Presbyterians have the government.”155 To redress that imbalance, prominent Methodists like Bishop Matthew Simpson of Evanston, Illinois, lobbied on behalf of their co-religionists for government jobs. For his fellow townsman, John Evans, Simpson obtained the governorship of the Colorado Territory. Professor J. W. Marshall, another Methodist worthy who solicited the bishop’s aid, was appointed consul at Leeds. When Lincoln offered Simpson the chance to name the minister to Honduras, the bishop piously disclaimed any intention to dictate patronage decisions. But he did suggest that his friend, the Pennsylvania publisher Alexander W. Cummings, be given that post. In 1865, Simpson arranged to have Cummings appointed successor to Evans as governor of Colorado. That same year, Simpson succeeded in having another friend, James Harlan—a devout Methodist and a senator from Iowa—named secretary of the interior.
Later, Methodists railed against the “proscriptive Policy” that denied them their fair share of military patronage. “I cannot learn that we have a single voice in the Government, nor a prominent officer in the Army, notwithstanding we have furnished … more than fifty per cent of the entire Army,” complained one D. H. Whitney. “Every Presbyterian and Episcopal Private is provided with some other position than that of carrying a gun.”156 In fact, Simpson was able to help Colonel Clinton B. Fisk win a general’s stars. Dismayed by such sectarian lobbying, Lincoln declared “that he preferred the Episcopalians to every other sect, because they are equally indifferent to a man’s religion and his politics.”157
As he doled out patronage plums, Lincoln had to take into account ethnicity as well as religion. One particularly insistent group of office seekers, the German-Americans, gave him more trouble than most. “About one-third of the German population of the West are applicants for consulships,” the New York World reported humorously.158 Connecticut Republicans warned that they faced defeat in the April 1861 elections if German-Americans were not rewarded. Henry Villard wrote that native-born Republicans in the Midwest “openly acknowledge that their victory was, if not wholly, at least to a great extent, due to the large accessions they received in the most hotly contested sections from the German ranks.”159 Among those holding such a belief was Lincoln, who when distributing consulships and other foreign appointments asked Seward: “what about our German friends?”160
The secretary of state ignited an uproar by opposing the appointment of foreign-born citizens to diplomatic posts in Europe. “Next to Fort Sumter,” said the Cincinnati Commercial, Seward’s policy “excites the greatest interest.”161 At the center of the storm was Carl Schurz, the Prussian-born Wisconsin orator and indefatigable campaigner, who shamelessly lobbied for a first-class diplomatic appointment in Europe. “The celebrated Mr. Carl Schurz appears to be a difficult child for the Administration to baptize,” as one journalist observed.162 Lincoln had encouraged the young would-be diplomat, whom he liked and admired, but Seward, responding to pressure from the Catholic leadership of New York, raised objections. Other Republican leaders rightly considered Schurz “a very great egotist” whose demands were “impudent, in bad taste and selfish.”163 The secretary of state urged Schurz to accept a post in Latin America or a territorial governorship rather than a European mission. Schurz balked, insisting that he be named minister to Sardinia (i.e., Italy). He managed to persuade one competitor, Anson Burlingame, to withdraw from the field. When Schurz complained to Lincoln about Seward’s opposition, the president told him: “I would have appointed you at once, but I deemed it my duty to consult my Secretary of State, with whom I should not like to quarrel right after the organization of the Cabinet. I appreciate your pride and I like it, and I shall be just to you.” Schurz believed that his struggle for the Sardinian mission would force Lincoln to confront his domineering secretary of state. As time passed, Schurz viewed his case as part of the larger struggle Seward and his fellow compromisers were waging to control the administration.
When George Perkins Marsh of Vermont won the Sardinian post, Lincoln offered to appoint Schurz minister to Portugal, Brazil, Chile, or Peru. Schurz neither accepted nor rejected the proposed alternatives. “I gave him my mind without reserve,” the disgruntled German wrote his wife. He told Lincoln “that he and the republicans had been heretofore supposed to have elected a President, and not a sub-Secretary of State” and “that two thirds of the republican Senat
ors would be before long hostilely arrayed against the administration.” On March 19, the New York Herald reported that the question of Schurz’s appointment “seems to bother the administration more than anything else [except] the difficulty about Fort Sumter.” That day the matter appeared to be resolved when Schurz agreed to accept the position as minister to Lisbon provided that its status would be elevated to a first-class mission (with a pay increase of $4,500). Seward, however, inexplicably refused to support that change.
On March 21, the president, secretary of state, and Schurz held a stormy meeting during which the young German refused to back down despite Seward’s entreaties. “Lincoln grew quite pale, but I stood firm,” Schurz told his wife. Though “fed up” with politics and Washington, Schurz felt obliged to stay because of “the possibility of breaking Seward’s power over Lincoln, which would ruin the whole Administration.” Schurz asserted that in “all things, including for example the Fort Sumter affair, Seward’s fatal influence makes itself felt.” With characteristic immodesty, he boasted: “I have done more than all the others to keep Lincoln on the right track.” The president asked Montgomery Blair to act as an intermediary and persuade Schurz to accept the mission to Russia or Spain. Schurz agreed to the Spanish post, which had already been assigned to Cassius M. Clay. “Seward’s hostility against me is so sharp and his influence over Lincoln is so great, that I am not sanguine enough to expect a favorable result,” Schurz wrote. After mulling over the matter, Lincoln authorized Blair to ask Clay to give up the Spanish mission. To Schurz it seemed that “Lincoln has finally made up his mind to act independently.” On March 28, the three-week struggle ended when Clay agreed to accept the mission to Russia rather than to Spain. The president thanked the Kentuckian, saying: “Clay, you have relieved me from great embarrassment.”164
“So Seward’s influence is conquered, and I am master of the battlefield,” Schurz crowed. By stiffening Lincoln’s backbone, he may have made it easier for the president to stand up to Seward when the Fort Sumter crisis reached a climax.165 One strong critic of appeasing the South reported that it “is a matter of congratulation today among Seward’s opponents that he has suffered the first serious defeat wh[ich] he has yet experienced in respect to any app[ointmen]t—in the instance of Schurz, against whom for a European Mission he had made an especial point.”166
Although Seward opposed Schurz’s appointment in part because of the young German-American’s Radical antislavery views, several of the ministers sent abroad were staunch critics of the peculiar institution. In addition to Schurz, Marsh, and Clay, they included George G. Fogg (Switzerland), Norman B. Judd (Prussia), John Lothrop Motley (Austria), Rufus King (Papal States), Friedrich Hassaurek (Ecuador), Bradford R. Wood (Denmark), Anson Burlingame (China), and James Shepherd Pike (Holland). Many consuls were also militant opponents of slavery, among them Zebina Eastman (Bristol), Joshua R. Giddings (Montreal), John Bigelow (Paris), Thomas H. Dudley (Liverpool), Charles Dexter Cleveland (Cardiff), Thaddeus Hyatt (La Rochelle), Richard Hildreth (Trieste), Freeman H. Morse (London), and Hinton Rowan Helper (Buenos Aires). They helped educate their hosts about the fundamental issues of the Civil War. Radical antislavery leaders also won a large share of the three dozen posts in the western territories. The South reacted to these appointments indignantly, while Northern abolitionists applauded them.
In addition to Schurz, several other German-Americans won diplomatic assignments. In 1862, Koerner replaced Schurz at Madrid. (A delay in that appointment led Koerner to complain that Lincoln’s “kindness to Mr. Schurz [which is really a very great weakness] had had a very unkind effect upon me.” It was “very strange that a man whose true character he does not know at all, and who opposed him to the very last at Chicago, should be permitted to trifle with him and the Senate, and that I should be disgraced again, whom he does know, and who had ever stood by him. … If Lincoln prefers office-seekers and adversaries to old and tried friends very well.”)167 When Lincoln named Friedrich Hassaurek of Cincinnati as minister to Ecuador, whose capital, Quito, sits 9,000 feet above sea level, the witty Ohioan thanked the president “for appointing him to the highest place in his gift.”168 Charles N. Riotte of Texas represented the United States in Costa Rica. German-American consuls included Francis J. Klauser and George E. Wiss (the Netherlands), Henry Boernstein (Bremen), John P. Hatterscheidt (Moscow), George Schneider (Elsinore), and Charles L. Bernays (Zurich).
Other Diplomatic Appointments
One of Lincoln’s first appointments was Norman B. Judd as minister to Berlin, a lucrative job. The president explained that although Judd was not his oldest friend, he was “so devoted and self-sacrificing a friend as to make the distinction of an early nomination to that mission a well due tribute.”169 When some Illinois associates objected to the selection of Judd, Lincoln replied: “It seems to me he has done more for the success of the party than any one man in the state, and he is certainly the best organizer we have.”170 To assist Judd, Herman Kreismann was named secretary of the legation. This irritated Seward, who complained about Lincoln’s “utter absence of any acquaintance” with foreign affairs, “and as to men he was more blind and unsettled than as to measures.” The nominations of Judd and Kreismann, he said, “were made without consultation, merely in fulfillment of a promise to give the former a Cabinet appointment, which he had been compelled to give up.”171 When a senator objected that Judd spoke no German or French, Stephen A. Douglas replied that Judd knew as much of those languages as the incumbent minister to Prussia.
The president filled other diplomatic and consular posts swiftly to counteract Confederate efforts at gaining recognition from European nations, some of which objected to the Republican high tariff. Henry S. Sanford of Connecticut, an experienced diplomat, was appointed quickly so that he could head off Rebel initiatives in London and Paris before settling into his post at Brussels. Fearing that the Confederacy would attack Mexico, Lincoln promptly appointed Thomas Corwin of Ohio as minister to that country in the hopes that he could negotiate a treaty guaranteeing its territorial integrity.
Some diplomatic appointees drew critical fire. Swiss-Americans objected to Charles L. Bernays, named consul at Zurich, because he was Jewish. (Jews were forbidden to reside in Switzerland.) George G. Fogg’s displacement of Theodore S. Fay as minister to Switzerland dismayed an admirer, who said that even though Fogg “is a good fellow,” he “is not fitted at all for a diplomatic position, and Fay sh[oul]d never have been superseded. He is the best informed man on European history & diplomacy and has the most valuable and intimate range of diplomatic social acquaintance of all the representatives of the U.S. abroad, & he is an anti-slavery man of long standing—from conviction.”172 Washington buzzed with criticism of many others for their lack of diplomatic experience and language skills and their membership in “the insolvent & the medium class.”173 Traditionally, diplomatic posts had been “the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle,” said the New York Tribune. “A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.”174 Among the more shameful emissaries representing the Great Republic were drunkards, smugglers, debauchees, and duelists. This was especially true of the consular service. Benjamin Moran, secretary of the U.S. legation in London, thought that “Mr. Lincoln’s Consular appointments are the very worst yet made in my time.”175
Decades after the Civil War, the former American consul in Rome, William James Stillman, echoed Moran’s complaint. He wrote that “with the exception of Adams, at London, and Marsh, at Turin, we had hardly a representative abroad, either consular or diplomatic, who was a credit to the country. As the war continued, the importance of being respected in Europe became more evident, and a change took place; but the few men of respectable standing who were in foreign countries representing the United States of America were appointed on account of political pressure, and not on their merits.”176
Lincoln admitted that political considerations played a role in foreign appoint
ments. He chose Marsh minister to Sardinia and Anson Burlingame as minister to Austria, he said, “because of the intense pressure of their respective states, and their fitness also.”177 Marsh, who would achieve renown as a pioneering conservationist, was the uncle of Vermont Senator George F. Edmunds. It was widely believed that his experience as a diplomat, scholarly attainments, command of many European languages, and polished manners qualified him well for the post. When the Hapsburgs declared Burlingame, who had been defeated for reelection to Congress in 1860, persona non grata because of his support of Hungarian and Italian uprisings against Austrian rule, Lincoln sent him to China as U.S. minister plenipotentiary. The mercurial, egotistical, tempestuous James Watson Webb, a long-time friend of Seward and editor of the New York Courier and Express, lobbied hard for the post of minister to England but had to settle for Brazil, where he disgraced the diplomatic service by extorting a large sum from the local government. He had been offered the mission to Turkey, which he regarded insulting and wrote a churlish letter to Seward. When the secretary tried to show it to Lincoln, he declined to read it and evidently said some sharp things about Webb.
Webb was among the more unfortunate choices, but on the whole the diplomatic corps under Lincoln served creditably. As The Nation argued in 1867, Lincoln had put into office “the best set of foreign ministers we have had in many a day.”178 In addition to Adams and Marsh, others serving with honor included John Lothrop Motley in Vienna, Sanford in Brussels, Schurz in Madrid, John Bigelow in Paris, Edward Joy Morris in Turkey, and Burlingame in China.
Although Adams was the most distinguished of that group, he was not Lincoln’s first choice as minister to the Court of St. James; the president initially favored William L. Dayton, a political wheeler-dealer from New Jersey who had been the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1856. Seward and Chase persuaded Lincoln that Adams, son of one president and grandson of another, was better qualified than the Jerseyman. Adams uncharitably ascribed Lincoln’s reluctance to appoint him to “that jealousy of Mr. Seward’s influence that seems to pervade the narrow mind of the chief.”179 When Adams called at the White House to express his thanks, Lincoln replied: “Very kind of you to say so Mr Adams but you are not my choice you are Seward’s man.” He then turned to the secretary of state and said, “Well Seward I have settled the Chicago Post Office.” Appalled by the president’s seeming indifference to the importance of his high diplomatic office, Adams deprecated the “dull and inappreciative” Lincoln: “The impression which I have received is that the course of the President is drifting the country into war, by its want of decision. Every where at this place [Washington] is discouragement, not loud in words but in hopelessness of a favorable issue. For my part I see nothing but incompetency in the head. The man is not equal to the hour.”180
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 17
