Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  When Chase was told to replace Smith, he angrily submitted his resignation. The president refused to accept it and, as a peace offering, agreed to appoint Chase’s selection for the Port Angelos collectorship. The secretary had been miffed by other presidential meddling in Treasury Department patronage, including the removal of Chase’s corrupt ally George S. Denison from the collectorship at New Orleans; the refusal to back Mark Howard for the collectorship at Hartford after a Connecticut senator raised objections; and the appointment in New York of Abram Hyatt, despite Chase’s accurate warning that it would cause trouble.

  The most lucrative patronage job in the Treasury Department, collector of New York, also became a source of friction between Chase and the president. Hiram Barney had been appointed to that post in 1861 at Chase’s behest and over the vehement objections of Seward and Weed. But by early 1864, Lincoln decided that Barney must go. He was, as James A. Briggs put it, “estimable as a man” but had “no ability, or tact, or talent as a politician.”217 In early January, the collector’s principal assistant, Albert N. Palmer, was arrested for expediting the issuance of bonds for goods illegally shipped to the South through Nassau. Palmer, an ally of Weed, had exercised significant control over patronage in the customhouse. Two months earlier, Deputy Collector Henry B. Stanton, husband of the feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was dismissed after being charged with various ethical lapses. When the president suggested that Preston King, a shrewd conservative Republican and former Jacksonian Democrat, be appointed to replace Barney, Chase lamely objected that King knew nothing about the collector’s duties and threatened to resign if Barney were sacked. Thurlow Weed warned the president that Barney’s assistants were “constantly intriguing” against him, and insisted that a “change in the Custom House was imperatively needed.”218 Other influential Republicans echoed those charges. Lincoln told Weed that he would replace the incumbent. The New York boss favored Abram Wakeman, postmaster of New York, but counseled that gentleman not to press his case because Lincoln was probably going to submit a different name and Wakeman “would only embarrass the question” if he agitated for the post.219 Wakeman’s friends, however, deluged the White House with recommendations for their man. Others championed Judge James W. White, who was especially popular among the Irish.

  The previous year, Barney had offered to resign because of failing health, but felt that he must stay on to defend his honor now that he was under attack. (In January the House Committee on Public Expenditures had launched an investigation into the New York customhouse.) Lincoln liked Barney, whose integrity he did not doubt, but concluded that “he has ceased to be master of his position” and that Joshua F. Bailey, a special treasury agent in New York, had become “Collector de facto, while Mr. Barney remains nominally so.”220 But to Weed’s intense disappointment, Lincoln postponed action on the collectorship because Chase threatened to resign. The president also feared that he would be merely getting “out of one muss into another,” since both Simeon Draper, who had been actively promoting Lincoln’s renomination, and Wakeman were angling for Barney’s job.221

  Tension between Chase and Lincoln continued to mount until June 1864, when it burst like an overheated boiler on a Mississippi River steamboat. The occasion for that explosion came when John J. Cisco, assistant treasurer in the New York customhouse and a key pro-Chase operative, quit because of failing health. To replace him, Chase proposed Maunsell B. Field, a sycophantic socialite with neither business experience nor political standing. He had served as a clerk in the New York customhouse and had been promoted to third assistant secretary by Lincoln as a good-will gesture to Chase. New York Senator Edwin D. Morgan adamantly objected to Field, who often failed to show up for work. In March, Morgan complained that “Chase will do nothing but what suits his purposes, and the President is slow to take any step in opposition to his wishes.” Frustrated, Morgan was “not disposed to let the matter drop.”222 He had also protested against the appointment of Democrats to customhouse positions.

  Lincoln regarded Field as morally objectionable, telling the Senate Finance Committee that “I could not appoint him. He had only recently at a social gathering, in [the] presence of ladies and gentlemen, while intoxicated, kicked his hat up against the ceiling, bringing discredit upon us all, and proving his unfitness.”223 (On a later occasion, Lincoln similarly explained why he opposed the appointment of a man highly recommended by influential supporters: “He is a drunkard. I hear bad stories of his moral character, yet his backers are among the best Republicans in the State. I like the fellow’s friends, but it goes against my conscience to give the place to a man who gambles and drinks.”)224 When Chase insisted on Field, Lincoln patiently explained that he could not “without much embarrassment” accommodate him, “principally because of Senator Morgan’s very firm opposition to it.” Lincoln offered to let Chase select among three candidates acceptable to Morgan. When the secretary asked for a White House meeting, the exasperated president replied bluntly that “the difficulty does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.” He explained that it had been “a great burden” to retain Barney in the face of intense criticism of the collector by many influential New Yorkers, and that the appointment as appraiser in the customhouse of the Radical Judge John T. Hogeboom, at Chase’s request, had brought Empire State Republicans to “the verge of open revolt.” Field’s selection against the wishes of Morgan would, on top of those other problems, strain party unity to the breaking point.225

  On June 29, Chase huffily offered his resignation yet again, doubtless assuming that the president would back down as he had done before. But Lincoln shocked him by accepting it, for as the president saw it, Chase in effect was saying: “You have been acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, & ask me to stay & agree that I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for it, I will go.”226 The president was in no mood to trifle, contending that Chase “is either determined to annoy me, or that I shall pat him on the shoulder and coax him to stay. I don’t think I ought to do it. I will not do it. I will take him at his word.”227 When Ohio Governor John Brough offered to effect a reconciliation, Lincoln replied: “This is the third [fourth] time he has thrown this [resignation] at me, and I do not think I am called to continue to beg him to take it back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.” When the governor persisted, Lincoln cut him off: “I know you doctored the matter up once, Brough, but I reckon you had better let it alone this time.”228

  Increasing the friction between Lincoln and Chase was the secretary’s voracious appetite for deference, which the president gave in insufficient quantity. John Hay claimed that it was Lincoln’s “intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority” that Chase “never could forgive.”229 Hay clearly exaggerated, for Lincoln was hardly “intellectually arrogant.” But despite his courteous, self-abnegating manner and self-deprecating humor, Lincoln had a deep-rooted sense of self that lent him dignity, strength, and confidence. These qualities were perhaps interpreted as arrogance by Hay, who may have projected onto Lincoln some of his own extreme self-regard. At all events, when Lincoln accepted Chase’s resignation, he was not acting merely out of pique; Chase wanted to dominate the administration, and the president would not let him. To be sure, Lincoln did not like Chase personally, much as he admired his ability and his commitment to freedom. Certainly, he disliked other Radicals, more because of their style than their ideology. While he shared with them a strong desire to end slavery and to prosecute the war vigorously, he was exasperated by what he called “the self-righteousness of the Abolitionists” and “the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.”230

  Chase was especially objectionable because, as General Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio observed, he was “cold, selfish, and unscrupulous.” Hayes thought “[p]olitical intrigue, love of power, and a selfish and boundless ambition were the striking features of his lif
e and character.”231 A former Whig congressman from Ohio who knew Chase well called him “ambitious, cold-hearted and utterly selfish,” one who “always disparages and never speaks well of any man who is likely to be in the way of his vaulting ambition. He is cunning and industrious in laying plans for the accomplishment of his ends, and always sees that the friends he can use are put in positions where they can have power to help him.”232 A Philadelphia abolitionist concurred, deeming Chase “[b]ig-brained, cold-hearted, selfish, suspicious and parsimonious.”233

  Having made up his mind to let Chase go, Lincoln summoned John Hay to take a message to Capitol Hill. “When does the Senate meet today?” the president asked.

  “Eleven o’clock,” replied the youthful secretary.

  “I wish you to be there when they meet. It is a big fish. Mr. Chase has resigned & I have accepted his resignation. I thought I could not stand it any longer.”

  To succeed Chase, Lincoln picked another former governor of Ohio, David Tod, a Douglas-Democrat-turned-Republican whom he described as a friend “with a big head full of brains.” Tod was also a successful businessman and a gifted raconteur whom Lincoln praised for “telling the best story of any man in Ohio.” But the Senate Finance Committee thought he lacked the necessary stature and experience for the job. When members of that body called at the White House, some were mad and others frightened. Lincoln explained “that he had not much personal acquaintance with Tod,” that he “had nominated him on account of the high opinion he had formed of him while Governor of Ohio,” that “the Senate had the duty & responsibility of considering & passing upon the question of fitness, in which they must be entirely untrammeled.” But he “could not in justice to himself or Tod withdraw the nomination.” When the incumbent governor of Ohio, John Brough, urged him to do so, Lincoln said “emphatically that he would not.” Brough accurately predicted that Tod would decline because of poor health and because the nomination itself gave him prestige without requiring him to work hard. Moreover, Brough noted, Tod was a sensible, realistic fellow who would not deliberately take on a job he knew was too much for him.

  Men in and out of Congress felt depressed and gloomy, regarding the abrupt change as a worrisome sign that the administration was breaking up. A panicky Elihu Washburne told Lincoln that it was “a great disaster: At this time, ruinous; this time of military unsuccess, financial weakness, Congressional hesitation on [the] question of conscription & imminent famine in the West.” Another congressman, the influential Samuel Hooper of Boston, said that he felt “very nervous & cut up,” and a colleague declared that June 30 was “the gloomiest day seen in Washington since the first Bull Run.” The solicitor of the treasury informed Lincoln about a threatened mass resignation in the department. On July 3, a New York judge expressed fear that “there cannot fail to be an explosion if a more sane course is not pursued than that upon which the President seems now bent.” Hay concluded that “the President has made a mistake,” while financiers and merchants worried that Lincoln’s willingness to appoint so little-known a man as Tod showed that he failed to appreciate how serious a financial crisis loomed.234

  Indeed, Lincoln had blundered. Although his frustration with Chase was entirely understandable, his decision to let the treasury secretary go at such a time showed poor judgment. As D. W. Bartlett remarked, the president “seems to have been deserted of his usual good sense” when he submitted Tod’s name, for the “feeling was unanimous in Congress that for such a man to succeed Mr. Chase would be ruinous to the finances.”235 The blow-up did not surprise Interior Secretary Usher, who remarked that there had “been a bad state of feeling for a long time, and since the Pomeroy circular no attempt at concealment.” Chase “has rarely attended Cabinet meetings and has been apparently greatly disgusted at every body.”236

  That night, as Governor Brough had predicted, Tod wired his declination to the president. Immediately Lincoln, whose spirits had sunk quite low, authorized Hay to inform the senate. There Tod received a backhanded compliment from one member: “Not such a fool as I thought he was.”

  On July 1, upon waking, Lincoln decided to nominate William Pitt Fessenden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in his stead. As that senator sat in the White House reception room (unaware of Lincoln’s decision) awaiting an interview, the president dispatched Hay with the nomination to the Senate, where it was instantly ratified. When Lincoln told him of this move, the amazed senator, pleading poor health, said: “But it hasn’t reached there—you must withdraw it—I can[’]t accept.” Lincoln protested: “If you decline, you must do it in open day: for I shall not recall the nomination.”237 The senator turned down the offer in a letter to Lincoln, who refused to receive it, “saying that Providence had pointed out the man for the crisis,” that “none other could be found,” and that he “had no right to decline.” When Fessenden insisted that the job would kill him, Lincoln replied: “Very well, you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.” At the president’s urging, several leading Republicans lobbied Fessenden, insisting that he must rescue the nation. From chambers of commerce and individuals, telegrams and letters poured into his office warning that if he refused, the public credit would be ruined. In response to this overwhelming pressure, he reluctantly acquiesced with what he called “all the feeling of a man being led to execution.”238

  Lincoln, whose spirits had revived, exclaimed to Seward: “The Lord has never yet deserted me, and I did not believe he would this time!” To Hay, he recounted his thought process while mulling over Chase’s replacement: “It is very singular, considering that this appointment of F[essenden]’s is so popular when made, that no one ever mentioned his name to me for that place. Thinking over the matter two or three points occurred to me. First he knows the ropes thoroughly: as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance he knows as much of this special subject as Mr. Chase. 2nd he is a man possessing a national reputation and the confidence of the country. 3d He is a radical.” But there were some potential drawbacks, he told Hay: “the Vice President [Hamlin] & Sec Treasury coming from the same small state—though I thought little of that: then that Fessenden from the state of his health is of rather a quick & irritable temper: but in this respect he should be pleased with this incident; for, while for some time he has been running in rather a pocket of bad luck—such as [the] failure to renominate Mr. Hamlin [for vice-president] makes possible a contest between him & the V. P. the most popular man in Maine for the election [to the Senate] which is now imminent—& the fact of his recent spat in the Senate where Trumbull told him his ill-temper had left him no friends—this thing has developed a sudden & very gratifying manifestation of good feeling in his appointment, his instant confirmation, the earnest entreaties of every body that he may accept & all that. It cannot but be very grateful to his feelings.”239

  The appointment of Fessenden undid much of the damage caused by Chase’s resignation. Republican newspapers lauded the new secretary as a “Senator who never left his post, never made a speech without a purpose, and always sharp, clear, brief in debate … a positive, daring statesman.” Even the Democratic New York World called Fessenden “[u]nquesionably the fittest man in his party for that high trust.”240 Another Democratic newspaper, the New York Daily News, expressed doubt that Fessenden could repair all the damage that “Mr. Chase and his nigger ideas” had done.241

  After a few weeks on the job, Fessenden praised Lincoln as “a man of decided intellect, and a good fellow—able to do well any one thing, if he was able, or content, to confine his attention to that thing until it was done.” Unfortunately, however, “[i]n attempting to do too many [things],” the president “botches them all.”242

  Renomination

  With Chase out of the presidential race, Lincoln’s chances for renomination, which he keenly desired, seemed excellent. A Republican leader in Pennsylvania thought that “anxiety for a renomination was the one thing ever uppermost in his mind during the third year of his administration.”2
43 The provost marshal general noted that although Lincoln “had no bad habits,” he did have “one craving that he could not overcome: that was for a second term.”244 Lincoln, whose sense of duty was strong, would not have regarded his ambition as a “bad habit,” although he once referred to ambition as an “infirmity,” and on another occasion told William Herndon: “If ever American society and the United States government are demoralized and overthrown it will come from the voracious desire of office—this struggle to live without toil—work and labor—from which I am not free myself.”245 Yet, as he told Joseph Hooker, he considered that ambition “within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm.”246 Seldom in history has anyone’s ambition produced as much good as Lincoln’s.

  Lincoln frankly acknowledged his desire for a second term. “If the people think that I have managed their case for them well enough to trust me to carry up to the next term, I am sure that I shall be glad to take it,” he remarked in 1863.247 “A second term would be a great honor and a great labor, which together, perhaps I would not decline, if tendered,” he wrote to E. B. Washburne in October of that year.248 Two months later he made a similar statement to Leonard Swett and Thurlow Weed: “Until very recently I expected to see the Union safe and the authority of the Government restored before my term of office expired. But as the war has been prolonged, I confess that I should like to see it out, in this chair. I suppose that everybody in my position finds some reason, good or bad, to gratify or excuse their ambition.”249 (Swett thought Lincoln “was much more eager” for a second term than he had been for his first.)250 To a congressman, Lincoln explained that the only reason he wished for re-nomination was “that such action on the part of the Republican party would be the most emphatic indorsement which could be given to the policy of my Administration.”251 When Thaddeus Stevens spoke to him of his electoral chances, the president remarked: “I confess that I desire to be re-elected. God knows I do not want the labor and responsibility of the office for another four years. But I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years Administration endorsed.”252