Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Some die-hards would not support Lincoln for reelection under any circumstances. Alfred B. Mullet, an architect working for the Treasury Department in Washington, considered the president “entirely unfitted by nature, education, and domestic relations for the Chief Magistracy of the American Nation.” Therefore, Mullett “resolved in common with a large number of Republicans, to vote for his re-election under no circumstances. Should any loyal man be a Candidate in opposition to Mr Lincoln (should he unfortunately receive the endorsement of the Baltimore Convention) I shall feel it my duty to support him to the extent of my very humble ability. And should there be no choice between Mr Lincoln and a Copperhead, I shall not trouble myself about the matter, believing the difference between the results to be obtained from the cowardice and temporizing of one, will be very nearly the same as the treachery of the other.” Mullet assured Chase that “the Germans the Old Liberty Guard and the War Democracy of the West, despise Mr Lincoln most heartily.”140 The abolitionist Bradford Wood longed to quit his post as U.S. minister to Denmark, return home, and help nominate as Lincoln’s replacement someone “who adds capacity, energy and courage to honesty,” who “knows men,” and “for whose election an honorable man can work … without any misgivings.”141

  A lack of unity weakened the opposition to Lincoln’s renomination. As New York Senator Edwin D. Morgan observed, the president’s critics did not know “in what manner to organize their party. They are not by any means unanimous for Mr Chase, but would take Grant Fremont Banks or Butler more readily than Mr Lincoln.”142 Similarly, George Bancroft expressed disappointment “at finding everybody in Wash[ington] opposed to Lincoln & yet no concert of purpose.” There was “a very general disgust among thinking men,” according to that historian.143

  Lincoln knew all about discontent among congressional Radicals. In mid-February, he indicated to Edward Bates that he was “fully apprehensive of the schemes of the Radical leaders.” He understood “that they would strike at him at once, if they durst; but they fear that the blow would be ineffectual, and so, they would fall under his power as beaten enemies; and, for that only reason the hypocrit[e]s try to occupy equivocal ground—so that, when they fail, as enemies, they may still pretend to be friends.”144 When Shelby Cullom warned him that everybody in Washington seemed to oppose his renomination, Lincoln replied: “Well, it is not quite so bad as that,” and showed him a congressional directory in which he had marked the inclinations of all members.145

  In letters and conversations throughout the fall and winter of 1863–1864, Chase criticized the president repeatedly and expressed a willingness to replace him. On November 26, he told his son-in-law, “If I were myself controlled by merely personal sentiments I should prefer the reelection of Mr. Lincoln to that of any other man. But I doubt the expediency of reelecting any body, and I think that a man of different qualities from those the President has will be needed for the next four years.”146 That same day he spoke more bluntly to William T. Coggeshall, who summarized the treasury secretary’s remarks in his diary: “Chase despondent. Says it is no use for him to struggle with present administration. Mr. Lincoln purposeless. Firm only from his inertia. Generous, kind, in some regards, wise, but as a precocious child. Has no practical power. No cabinet meetings for two years for counsel. Meetings for jokes. Unless people recover from infatuation of confidence in Lincoln, bankruptcy inevitable. Perhaps that to come because we deserve to suffer for participation in slavery. Must be a change at the White House.”147

  To the Congregationalist minister Joshua Leavitt, who opposed Lincoln’s re-nomination, Chase recycled some of the arguments he had made in 1862: “Had there been here an administration in the true sense of the word—a President conferring with his cabinet and taking their united judgments & with their aid enforcing activity, economy, & energy in all Departments of Public Service—we could have spoken boldly & defied the world. But our condition here has always been very different. I preside over the funnel—everybody else & especially the Secretaries of War & the Navy, over the spigots—and keep them well opened, too—Mr. Seward conducts the foreign relations with very little let or help from any body. There is no unity & no system except so far as it is departmental. There is progress—but it is slow and involuntary.”148 Coyly Chase hinted that he would not object if friends championed his candidacy. In December, he wrote: “I have not the slightest wish to press any claims upon the consideration of friends, or the public. There is certainly, however, a purpose to use my name, and I do not feel at all bound to object to it.”149

  Although Lincoln said he knew that Chase’s head was “full of Presidential maggots,” and while the president was “trying to keep that maggot out of his head,” he was “much amused” at the secretary’s “mad hunt after the Presidency.”150 When told about Chase’s frequent criticism of him, he replied that he did not care, for the secretary was “on the whole, a pretty good fellow and a very able man” whose “only trouble is that he has ‘the White House fever.’ ”151 To be sure, Lincoln thought Chase’s maneuvering to win the nomination was in “very bad taste,” but he said in October 1863 that he “shut his eyes to all these performances.” Because Chase did good work at the Treasury Department, he would be kept in the cabinet. If he were to become president, Lincoln thought it would be “all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.” For months he had observed Chase currying favor with malcontents. The secretary resembled, Lincoln said, “a bluebottle fly” who lays “his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.” Whenever Chase saw “that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim that he has been hardly dealt by and that he (C[hase]) would have arranged it very differently. It was so with Gen. Fremont—with Genl. Hunter when I annulled his hasty proclamation—with Gen. Butler when he was recalled from New Orleans—with these Missouri people when they called the other day. I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.” Lincoln even saw an advantage in Chase’s ambition, which he likened to “a horsefly on the neck of a ploughhorse—which kept him lively about his work.”152 Months later, when Shelby Cullom urged that Chase be fired, Lincoln replied: “Let him alone; he can do no more harm in here than he can outside.”153

  But Lincoln was not always so indulgent of Chase and his backers. In January 1864, he apparently sent the secretary a sharp note, no longer extant, about a fulsome puff piece touting the treasury secretary that appeared in an obscure journal. Chase denied that he had done anything to encourage its publication. The following month, Lincoln discussed with Edward Bates the Radical attempts to supplant him. Those men, the president said, “were almost fiendish” hypocrites, but he optimistically believed that his allies could defeat Radical schemes.154

  Much to the dismay of his supporters, Lincoln seemed passive in the face of the Chase challenge. Joseph Medill urged him to act: “Without your own assistance the efforts of your friends won’t avail much. You have it in your power by a few simple moves on the chess board to defeat the game of your rivals, and finally check mate them.”155 Mark Delahay observed that Lincoln’s “only fault is he will not help himself.”156 David Davis groused, “Mr. Lincoln annoys me more than I can express, by his persistence in letting things take their course,—without effort or organization when a combined organization in the Treasury Dept. is in antagonism.” The president, Davis reported, “seems disposed to let the thing run itself & if the people elect him, he will be thankful, but won[’]t use means to secure the thing.”157 But when Davis described how Treasury Department employees were being forced to contribute to Chase’s campaign fund, and how those who resisted were threatened with dismissal, Lincoln said with a grin that if such threats were carried out, “the head I guess would have to go with the tail.”158

  Chase’s candidacy was no secret to political observe
rs, though he did not openly announce it until mid-January 1864, when he wrote an Ohio state senator that he approved of efforts being made on his behalf. He insisted that he was motivated only by a desire to promote the public good and not by personal ambition: “If I know my own heart, I desire nothing so much as the suppression of this rebellion and the establishment of union, order, and prosperity on sure and safe foundations; and I should despise myself if I felt capable of allowing any personal objects to influence me to any action which would affect, by one jot or tittle, injuriously, the accomplishment of those objects.”159 Few men have been as capable of self-deception as Chase.

  A Chase-for-president committee was organized in Washington under the leadership of Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas. Among Chase’s other backers in the capital were members of the Ohio congressional delegation (Representatives Robert C. Schenck, Rufus P. Spalding, James M. Ashley, James A. Garfield, and Senator John Sherman), the journalists Whitelaw Reid and James M. Winchell, and Senators B. Gratz Brown of Missouri and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. Chase’s wealthy son-in-law William Sprague and financier Jay Cooke helped raise funds. The poet and stockbroker Edmund C. Stedman persuaded Chase to release $640,000 to a client, the Kansas-Pacific Railroad, for work it had not completed. The corporation was entitled to the money under the Railroad Act of 1862 only after the roadbed had been laid, which was patently not the case of the Kansas-Pacific. In turn, Stedman became a leading force in the Chase organization, raising money from railroad men and operating a New York office.

  (Lincoln’s campaign also raised funds in questionable ways. According to Charles G. Halpine, a knowledgeable New York Democrat and good friend of John Hay, in early 1864 Congress had passed a “Whiskey Bill” allowing certain Republican operatives to corner the local liquor market. In return for this favor, the beneficiaries were expected to contribute half their profits to the “Lincoln Movement.” Halpine cited as an example the fifth ward of New York, where soon after passage of the whiskey legislation the “Weed wire-pullers” who had gained advantages from it paid $600 to establish a “Lincoln Head Quarters.” They printed posters and handbills, hired bands, sponsored ward meetings, and did whatever they could to promote a “Lincoln Endorsement.”)160

  In February, Chase’s supporters issued two documents that embarrassed him mightily. The first, a pamphlet titled “The Next Presidential Election,” denounced the Lincoln administration. Without mentioning Chase, it called for the nomination of “a statesman profoundly versed in political and economic science, one who fully comprehends the spirit of the age in which we live,” and criticized the president as inept.161 The second document, known as the “Pomeroy Circular,” was not so coy. It asserted that Chase deserved the nomination because he had “more of the qualities needed in a President during the next four years than are combined in any other available candidate; his record is clear and unimpeachable, showing him to be a statesman of rare ability, and an administrator of the very highest order, while his private character furnishes the surest obtainable guaranty of economy and purity in the management of public affairs.” Lincoln could not be reelected, the circular argued, and even if he were able to win a second term, the “cause of humanity liberty and the dignity and honor of the nation” would suffer, for he would then temporize even more than he had during his first term.162 The document’s author, James M. Winchell, said “the arraignment of the Administration made in the circular was one which he [Chase] thoroughly indorsed, and would sustain.”163

  An ally had advised Chase that Lincoln’s “integrity & apparent unselfishness entitle him to every courtesy,” but these two documents were highly discourteous, to say the least.164 John Sherman mailed out copies of the pamphlet under his senatorial frank and received numerous complaints from offended constituents, who denounced it as “a violent, bitter attack on President Lincoln.”165 It “might do for Vallandigham to send such documents with his endorsement,” wrote one. “But for a Senator elected by the loyal people of Ohio to be guilty of such an act is truly mortifying. There is no use however for a few politicians at Washington to think they can influence the people against ‘Old Honest Abe.’ You can’t do it and, Mr. Sherman, you need not try it. If you were to resign tomorrow, you could not get ten votes in the Legislature provided it could be shown that you have been circulating such stuff as this.”166

  (The previous year, while campaigning in Ohio, Sherman had praised Lincoln as “one of the kindest and honestest men that the world affords” and scoffed at charges that the president was trying to establish a despotism. On the contrary, Sherman “had often thought that Mr. Lincoln was altogether too kind for the emergency. He hoped his democratic friends would live to be ashamed of all this violent criticism and gross personal abuse as unjust and unpatriotic.”)167

  The two documents, however, did win Chase the endorsement of some New York newspapers, including the Tribune, the Independent, and George Wilkes’s Spirit of the Times. But in general the circular and the pamphlet backfired, alienating many who might have sympathized with Chase. As Samuel Galloway told the president, Pomeroy’s action “has utterly annihilated the pretensions and prospects of Mr Chase—and has rallied, with a new and more efficient zeal your friends to the support of the Administration. ‘The gun has recoiled and kicked the owner over.’ ”168

  When friends attempted to call the Pomeroy circular to Lincoln’s attention, he refused. Earlier he had protested impatiently: “I wish they would stop thrusting that subject of the Presidency into my face. I don[’]t want to hear anything about it.”169 On February 20, newspapers published the circular, impelling Chase to offer his resignation. Secretary of the Interior Usher, who regarded the Pomeroy circular as “a most indecent thing” that was “badly conceived” and “badly worded,” predicted that it would “cause a rupture in the cabinet.”170 But Lincoln told Chase that he had not read the document and did not intend to. Moreover, he wished the treasury secretary to remain at his post. To Usher, the president explained that he believed Chase’s denial that he had authorized the circular, “for he thought it impossible for him (Mr. Chase) to have done such a thing.”171

  “I do not meddle in these matters,” Lincoln informed a caller. “If any man thinks my present position desirable to occupy, he is welcome to try it, as far as I am concerned.”172 Struck by Lincoln’s preternatural forbearance, David Davis observed that he “is a wise man, & he won[’]t quarrel with Chase. I w[oul]d dismiss him [from] the cabinet, if it killed me. He pursues the wiser course.”173 According to Usher, “Lincoln says but little[,] finds fault with none & judging from his deportment, you would suppose he was as little concerned as any one about the result.”174 It was widely recognized that, as Supreme Court Justice Noah H. Swayne put it, if Lincoln “were not the self denigrating & most magnanimous man that he is there would be an explosion.”175

  The Chase boomlet, which never stood much chance of success, ended with a whimper. Even among Radicals, its support was weak. Joseph Medill observed in December 1863 that “Chase’s friends are working for his nomination. But it is all lost labor[;] Old Abe has the inside track so completely that he will be nominated by aclamation when the convention meets.” He predicted that the electorate will say to Chase: “you stick to finances and be content until after 1868,” and to Grant, “give the rebels no rest, put them through. Your reward will come in due time, but Uncle Abe must be allowed to boss the reconstruction of the Union.”176 Similarly, David Davis noted that Chase “is doomed to disappointment,” even though politicians would “put Mr. Lincoln aside, if they dared. They know their constituents don[’]t back them, & hence they grumble, rather than make open war.”177

  Republicans throughout the North shared this view of Lincoln’s popularity. Elihu B. Washburne concluded that “Lincoln is ahead of all competitors for President. He is very popular and very justly so.”178 Horace Greeley believed that the people thought of the president “by night & by day & pray for him & their hearts are where they h
ave made so heavy investments.”179 The New York Times regarded the “universality of popular sentiment, in favor of Mr. Lincoln’s reelection” as “one of the most remarkable developments of the time,” while the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican noted that the “people hold him to be honest in intention and in act, sound and reliable, and as fast as it is safe to be.”180 The Republican’s Washington correspondent explained that Lincoln’s “immense hold … upon the affections of the people to-day arises principally from the fact that they believe that he is one of them, that he loves them, and that he never attempted to flatter or tickle them for the sake of office.”181 Republican Senator Lafayette Foster of Connecticut found it anomalous that the president “has a wonderful popularity in the country—nothing seems to shake it. His policy and measures are severely criticised and censured,” and paradoxically the critics “lose all popularity, and indeed become quite obnoxious to the people, while the Presdt. himself escapes unscathed. This is a strange world.”182

  John W. Forney’s Washington Chronicle declared that Republicans believed in Lincoln, “for he was their party choice. The loyal Democrats believe in him, for he has been kind and considerate to them, and has always, in the most magnificent manner, recognized their devotion to the country. His action in Missouri, where he refused to become a partizan of extreme radicals, and his action in Maryland, where he refused to become a partizan of the slave aristocracy, have united around him men of extreme differences of opinion—and they will support him as the leader of the Union party in the Presidential campaign. He, above all men, can unite the friends of the cause.”183 David Davis concurred: “I conscientiously believe that no man could have kept the incongruous elements of which the Republican party consists, better than he has. I know of none that could have done it so well.”184 The New York Times also paid tribute to Lincoln’s remarkable ability to unify the North. The editors speculated that perhaps “his peculiar transparency of character, his remarkable faculty—never equaled in any other President since the first—of inspiring every one with a sense that he is a thoroughly honest and trustworthy man, has been the only thing that prevented faction from obtaining a fatal ascendancy at the crisis of the war. The people were willing to trust Abraham Lincoln with an amount of power they would have hardly confided to any other man.”185 Chase supporters acknowledged grudgingly that the president “is daily becoming more popular with the unthinking masses.”186