Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Endearing Lincoln to the voters was his remarkable unselfishness. “[A]mong the great civilians of the day,” William O. Stoddard noted in 1863, “the greatest and strongest, our good Chief Magistrate, is great and strong chiefly because the people have perfect faith in him that he has no ambition, no selfish lust of power, nor any hope for the future unconnected with the welfare of his country.” In addition, people identified with Lincoln. “He is the most perfect representative of the purely American character now in public life,” Stoddard maintained. “This is why the mutual understanding between him and the people is so perfect. This it is which enables him to exercise powers which would never by any possibility be entrusted to another man, though his equal in other respects. The people know that they can trust their great chief, and so they bid him ‘see to it that the Republic suffers no detriment.’ ”279 In early 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe noted that of all “the many accusations which in hours of ill-luck have been thrown out upon Lincoln, it is remarkable that he has never been called self-seeking, or selfish. When we were troubled and sat in darkness, and looked doubtfully towards the presidential chair, it was never that we doubted the good-will of our pilot—only the clearness of his eyesight. But Almighty God has granted to him that clearness of vision which he gives to the true-hearted, and enabled him to set his honest foot in that promised land of freedom which is to be the patrimony of all men, black and white—and from henceforth nations shall rise up to call him blessed.”280 A frustrated Wendell Phillips said that “Lincoln had won such loving trust from the people that it was impossible to argue anything against him.”281

  With Lincoln’s reelection, antislavery forces heaved a sigh of relief. Gerrit Smith said he was “more thankful than joyful over the Election—too deeply thankful to be joyful.”282 Lucy Stone was equally pleased: “how glad I am, that Mr. Lincoln [in] spite of his short comings, is re-elected.”283 George William Curtis urged friends to “thank God and the people for this crowning mercy.”284 Lydia Maria Child was delighted that she could finally “breathe freely now that this great danger is passed. If McLellan had been elected, the slave holders would have had it all their own way.” She rejoiced “to have a rail-splitter for President, and a tailor for Vice President.” She deemed Lincoln’s victory “the triumph of free schools; for it was the intelligence and reason of the people that reelected Abraham Lincoln.” The voters, Child said, were sophisticated and thoughtful enough to overlook the president’s many shortcomings: “There is no beauty in him, that men should desire him; there is no insinuating, polished manner, to beguile the senses of the people; there is no dazzling military renown; no silver flow of rhetoric; in fact, no glittering prestige of any kind surrounds him; yet the people triumphantly elected him, in spite of all manner of machinations, and notwithstanding the long, long drag upon their patience and their resources, which this war has produced.” For all his flaws and lack of polish, the president was likable, Child acknowledged. “I have sometimes been out of patience with him; but I will say of him that I have constantly gone on liking him better and better.”285

  Some Radicals were less enthusiastic. Bradford R. Wood rejoiced but “with fear and trembling for the future,” because Lincoln’s honesty meant little “if he surrounds himself with incompetent or second rate men, to be the tools of our State Banks or our plutocrats or our old political hacks.”286 Henry Winter Davis did not look forward to a second Lincoln administration: “We must for four years more rely on the forcing process of Congress to wring from that old fool what can be gotten for the nation.”287 Davis, however, would not be able to lead the forcers in Congress, for he lost his bid for renomination. (Baltimore Republicans wanted to be represented by someone who would cooperate with the administration instead of fighting it.) Moncure Conway told his English readers that “[n]ever before in America has a president been elected so detested by his own electors as Abraham Lincoln.”288 (Apropos of Conway’s criticism, George S. Hillard of Boston remarked that if it were read by everyone in Massachusetts, “it would be of no effect,” for the “faith of the most ignorant and bigoted Catholic in the pope does not equal the faith of the great majority of this community in Abraham Lincoln.” Another Bostonian remarked that Conway had “made himself a national laughing stock.”)289

  “Congratulate the President for me for the double victory,” Grant wired Stanton. “The election having passed off quietly, no bloodshed or riot throughout the land, is a victory worth more to the country than a battle won. Rebeldom and Europe will so construe it.”290

  In his formal reply to the congressional committee notifying him of his reelection, Lincoln was eloquent: “Having served four years in the depths of a great, and yet unended national peril, I can view this call to a second term, in nowise more flatteringly to myself, than as an expression of the public judgment, that I may better finish a difficult work, in which I have labored from the first, than could any one less severely schooled to the task. In this view, and with assured reliance on that Almighty Ruler who has so graceously sustained us thus far; and with increased gratitude to the generous people for their continued confidence, I accept the renewed trust, with it’s yet onerous and perplexing duties and responsibilities.”291 Thurlow Weed told the president that this reply “is not only the neatest but the most pregnant and effective use to which the English Language was ever put.”292

  Lincoln’s victory reminded him of an ominous vision that he had seen four years earlier. “It was just after my election in 1860,” he told Noah Brooks, “when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great ‘Hurrah, boys!’ so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau, with a swinging-glass upon it, and looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when, sure enough, the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was ‘a sign’ that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.”293

  35

  “Let the Thing Be Pressed”

  Victory at Last

  (November 1864–April 1865)

  Republican unity, which had made Lincoln’s reelection possible, would be essential if Reconstruction were to proceed smoothly, but that unity was gravely threatened by Radicals who had supported Lincoln during the presidential campaign but might not be accommodating afterward. To keep them cooperating with Moderates and Conservatives was the president’s greatest challenge in the wake of his electoral triumph.

  Chase as Chief Justice

  On October 12, a special opportunity to conciliate Radicals presented itself with the death of octogenarian Supreme Court Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney. A year earlier, Senator Ben Wade had quipped: “I prayed with earnestness for the life of Taney to be prolonged through Buchanan’s Administration, and by God I[’]m a little afraid I have overdone the matter.” Nathaniel P. Banks opined that the Republican electoral victories of the previous day had killed Taney. Upon hearing the news, Lincoln said he would not nominate a replacement for Taney right away but would remain “shut pan” for a while.1 Preocc
upied with the election and his annual message, he postponed consideration of the matter until Congress met in December. In the meantime, he said that “he was waiting to receive expressions of public opinion from the Country.”2

  The White House mailbag overflowed with such expressions. Among the names mentioned by correspondents were New York attorney William M. Evarts, Montgomery Blair, Associate Justice Noah H. Swayne, Edward Bates, and Edwin M. Stanton. When Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson urged Lincoln to choose Stanton, the president asked: “where can I get a man to take Secretary Stanton’s place? Tell me that and I will do it.”3 To a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the president lauded his war secretary: “Mr. Stanton has excellent qualities; and he has his defects. Folks come up here and tell me that there are a great many men in the country who have all Stanton’s excellent qualities, without his defects. All I have to say is, I haven’t met ’em! I don’t know ’em! I wish I did!”4 Although Stanton hoped for the appointment, he gave no outward signs of doing so. When speculation about his potential candidacy appeared in the press, he said he favored his friend Chase.

  Charles A. Dana thought that Lincoln preferred Montgomery Blair. Fellow Democrat Gideon Welles praised the former postmaster general as an ideal candidate for the chief justice’s post, for in the navy secretary’s view Blair was a politician and not a partisan, a man in sympathy with the Republican program, personally friendly and loyal to the president. When Welles commended Blair for “his ability, his truthfulness, honesty, and courage,” Lincoln “expressed his concurrence” and “spoke kindly and complimentarily of Mr. Blair, but did not in any way commit himself.”5

  Francis P. Blair, Sr., pleaded his son’s case at the White House. Old Man Blair had been approached by Mary Lincoln, who implored him to help thwart Chase’s candidacy. The former treasury secretary and his allies, she told him, “are besieging my Husband for the Chief-Justiceship[.] I wish you could prevent them.” So he called on Lincoln and said “that if he would make one of his Ex-Cabinet men a Judge, I thought Montgomery was his man, that he had been tried as a Judge and not found wanting, that his practice in the West had made him conversant with our land law, Spanish law, as well as the common and civil law in which his university studies had grounded him, that his practice in the Supreme Court brought him into the circle of commercial and constitutional questions. That, besides on political issues he sustained him in every thing.” Lincoln replied that he could not make a choice before consulting others. He implied that while he might favor Blair, there was significant opposition to the former postmaster general: “Although I may be stronger as an authority yet if all the rest oppose, I must give way. Old Hickory who had as much iron in his neck as any body, did so some times. If the strongest horse in the team would go ahead, he cannot, if all the rest hold back.” Blair inferred that the president “is well disposed to appoint Montgomery.”6

  Several leading Republicans supported the ex-postmaster-general, including Seward, William Cullen Bryant, John Murray Forbes, and Joseph Medill. Montgomery Blair tried to add Edwin D. Morgan to the list: “There is one consideration which I hope you will bring to the President’s attention to prevent Chase’s appointment,” he wrote to the New York senator. “He is known to be so vindictive towards me for supporting the President, that no one would employ me as counsel to the Court if he were Chief Justice. Now the President cannot consent not only to turn me out of his Cabinet, but to drive me from the bar for life, because I supported him for the Presidency.”

  But Lincoln decided against nominating Blair because, according to Charles A. Dana, many senators “were resolved that no second-rate man should be appointed to that office.” Dana added that “if Montgomery Blair had succeeded in presenting his programme to that body, I have no doubt it would have been smashed to pieces in a moment. Mr. Blair’s idea was that one of the existing justices, as for instance Judge Swayne, should be appointed Chief Justice, and that he himself should be made an Associate justice.”7 In time, Blair thought he would move up.

  David Davis, who disliked Chase intensely, persuaded his colleagues on the high court to back Swayne for chief justice. But two of them, Stephen J. Field and Samuel Miller, eventually withdrew their support and boarded the Chase bandwagon.

  Edward Bates personally asked for the chief justiceship, which he thought would be a “crowning and retiring honor.” Lincoln told Isaac Newton he would gladly name the attorney general to that post “if not overborne by others” like Chase, who “was turning every stone, to get it.” In addition, “several others were urged, from different quarters.” When Newton informed Bates of this conversation, the attorney general cheerfully confided to his diary: “I am happy in the feeling that the failure to get the place, will be no painful disappointment for my mind is made up to private life and a bare competency.”8

  (At the end of November, Bates stepped down as attorney general, to be replaced by Lincoln’s Kentucky friend James Speed, brother of Joshua Speed. The president had wanted to name Joseph Holt, who declined and recommended Speed. In choosing Bates’s successor, geographical considerations weighed on Lincoln’s mind. “My Cabinet has shrunk up North, and I must find a Southern man,” he told Assistant Attorney General Titian J. Coffey. “I suppose if the twelve Apostles were to be chosen nowadays the shrieks of locality would have to be heeded.” In explaining his choice of Speed, Lincoln said he knew him well, but not as well as his brother Joshua: “That, however, is not strange, for I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose I ought to know him well. But James is an honest man and a gentleman, and if he comes here you will find he is one of those well-poised men, not too common here, who are not spoiled by a big office.”9 Republican senators expressed surprise that such an obscure lawyer would be chosen to replace Bates.)

  Chase was indeed turning every stone, disingenuously assuring Lincoln that he would rather be chief justice than president. When a friendly letter from him arrived at the White House, the president laconically instructed that it be filed “with his other recommendations.”10 Those recommendations were especially numerous. Chase had strengthened his chances for the job by actively campaigning for Lincoln in the fall. Coyly remaining in Cincinnati while the decision about the chief justiceship was pending, Chase urged friends to lobby the president on his behalf. Among them was Charles Sumner, who pleaded with special urgency, telling Lincoln that the country needed “a Chief Justice whose position on this great question [of slavery], in all its bearings, is already fixed and who will not need arg[umen]ts of counsel to convert him.”11 Schuyler Colfax also championed the former treasury secretary’s candidacy, praising his “fine judicial talents, robust health and promise of long life (not an unimportant condition), and soundness on many questions, financial, political and military, which the events of the War may bring before that tribunal.”12 Another Hoosier, Senator Henry Lane, assured Lincoln that “[e]very Union man in Indiana desires Gov. Chase’s appt. and every Democrat expects it.”13

  Numerous critics denounced Chase as a treacherous schemer who was “never distinguished at the bar or on the Bench for his judicial attainments.”14 Gideon Welles called him “selfishly stubborn,” lacking “moral courage and frankness,” “fond of adulation, and with official superiors … a sycophant.”15 Thomas Ewing told the president that the former treasury secretary “has no considerable reputation as a lawyer. He is a politician rather than a lawyer and unless he change[s] his nature always will be even if made Chief Justice. I am unwilling to see a Chief Justice of the U S intriguing and trading for the Presidency.”16

  Lincoln, too, worried that Chase’s insatiable desire for the presidency would undermine his ability to be a good chief justice. To Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, who urged Chase’s appointment as a gesture to placate Radicals, Lincoln said: “He is a man of unbounded ambition, and has been working all his life to become President; that he can never be; and I fear that if I make him Chief Justice, he will simply become more restless and unea
sy, and neglect the place in his strife and intrigue to make himself President. He has got the Presidential maggot in his head and it will wriggle there as long as it is warm. If I were sure that he would go upon the bench and give up his aspirations to do anything but make himself a great judge, I would send in his name at once.”17 To another Radical senator, Lafayette Foster of Connecticut, he predicted that if Chase “keeps on with the notion that he is destined to be President,” he “will never acquire that fame and usefulness as a Chief Justice which he would otherwise certainly attain.”18 Should Chase continue his quest for the White House from the bench, he said, it would “be very bad for him and very bad for me.”19 Presciently, he speculated that if Chase attained “so high and honorable a place,” it might well “heighten rather than banish political ambition.”20 Sumner and Schuyler Colfax assured the president that once Chase was chief justice, he would quit pursuing the presidency. A more accurate opinion came from Edwards Pierre-pont, who noted that Chase was “ambitious as Satan” and “so soon as he is rested a little he will start again for the Presidency, and will tire of the Bench within a year.”21

  Chase’s supporters may have cynically exploited Lincoln’s desire to avoid appearing petty or vindictive. Colfax asked fellow Congressman James A. Garfield to suggest to Lincoln that if, in the face of the “overwhelming public sentiment” in favor of Chase, “he app[ointe]d some one else, History might … say that he did so” because Chase “had dared to be a candidate for the Presdt. nomination agst. him.”22

  Lincoln’s desire to avoid giving such an impression was intense. He told a close friend: “Mr. Chase’s enemies have been appealing to the lowest and meanest of my feelings. They report ill-natured remarks of his upon me and my Administration. If it were true that he made them, I could not be so base as to allow the fact to influence me in the selection of a man for the Chief-Justiceship.”23 To tale-bearers recounting the treasury secretary’s severe attacks on him, he stoically remarked: “I do not mind that” and said those attacks “will make no difference whatever in my action.”24 When some Ohioans showed him Chase’s letters sharply critical of the president, Lincoln good-naturedly replied “that if Mr. Chase had said harsh things about him, he, in his turn, had said harsh things about Mr. Chase, which squared the account.”25 To New York Congressman Augustus Frank, he explained that Chase had stood with him “in the time of trial, and I should despise myself if I allowed personal differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office of Chief Justice.”26 (Lincoln’s reference to a time of trial probably referred to the 1858 Illinois senatorial contest, when Chase was one of the very few nationally prominent Republicans to stump the Prairie State.) In early December, Lincoln told Noah Brooks: “I have been all day, and yesterday and the day before, besieged by messages from my friends all over the country, as if there were a determination to put up the bars between Governor Chase and myself.” Gesturing toward a pile of letters and telegrams, he said those correspondents had nothing new to impart, for “I know meaner things about Governor Chase than any of those men can tell me.”27 Lincoln resented their tactics, telling John D. Defrees that “he had often been mortified at some of our friends who urged him not to appoint Chase because he had abused him at a public table at Newport—and on other occasions.” The president took offense at the implication that he was “capable of being influenced in making an appointment of such importance to the country by mere personal considerations.” Those “appeals were made to the worst side of him and he did not like it.”28