Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1
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Butterfield’s chances looked good, however, because the president granted cabinet members control over appointments in their departments, and Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing insisted on the Chicago attorney. Just as the final decision was about to be made, Anson G. Henry prevailed on Taylor to postpone the matter for three weeks. “I told him Butterfield[’]s appointment would ruin us in Ills.,” Henry confided to a friend. Secretary William B. Preston informed Henry that “Lincoln is the only man in Illinois that can beat Butterfield, but that he can do it if he comes on, & his friends back him up.”260 Other Illinois Whig leaders, including Josiah M. Lucas and Nathaniel G. Wilcox, implored Taylor to put off the decision until Lincoln could reach Washington. Lucas urged Lincoln to press his claims in the capital: “Things are moved here by personal importunity.… you possess an influence here.”261 According to Lucas, Taylor and Postmaster General Jacob Collamer preferred Lincoln to Butterfield. “Pocket your modesty, as the preacher did his religion,” Lucas counseled.262 On May 21, Lucas spoke with Taylor, who “expressed great partiality for Lincoln” and was “astonished” to learn from letters Lucas showed him that Butterfield was not the choice of most Illinois Whigs. According to Lucas, Ewing, Caleb B. Smith, and Truman Smith had misled the president. Taylor said he would delay his decision until he heard more from the people of the Prairie State.263
A week later, however, immediately after calling on Taylor, Duff Green’s son reported to Lincoln that the president “declined to depart from the rule he has established, to wit, to read no letters and listen to no explanations on the subject of appointments unless presented to him through the Secretaries of the respective departments. He requested me to file your letter with the secretary of the Interior, but as you desire it to be confidential I do not think proper to do so, without hearing further from you.” Green added that the “understanding in the Land Office, among the Clerks here, is that the appointment of Butterfield has been determined on, and that it is to take effect on the 1st June.”264
In response to this news, Lincoln implored Illinois friends as well as congressional colleagues to write on his behalf. Friendly newspaper editors like Allen Ford of the Lacon Illinois Gazette endorsed his candidacy. “It is beyond all doubt the almost unanimous desire of the friends of the administration in this state” that Lincoln should win the commissionership, Ford asserted.265
Casting a wider net than Lincoln, Butterfield secured endorsements from the legislatures of Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin; from many bar associations; and from northern Illinois, his home base. He also attacked Lincoln downstate, especially in Springfield, where he circulated two petitions. The first, Butterfield claimed, was “signed by the clerk of the circuit court, clerk of the county court, Judge of Probate and Sheriff of the county, being all the Whig county officers elected by the People, and also signed by the leading Whigs of the county. They offered to provide for me in addition the petition of a Majority of all the Whig voters in the county if I desired it.”266 The other petition contained the signatures of twenty-eight “Whig mechanics of the City of Springfield” who declared that they were “dissatisfied with the course of Abraham Lincoln as a member of Congress” and supported Butterfield’s application.267
It is hard to know what to make of these petitions. According to Butterfield, they proved that “Lincoln’s boasted ‘overwhelming majority’ like Falstaff’s men ‘in Buckram’ … have vanished into thin air.” But Anson G. Henry alleged that nearly all the signatures on one of them had been obtained under false pretenses. “I have the first man yet to see who does not regret having signed it,” he told Lincoln on June 11.268 Butterfield sneered that Stephen T. Logan and Lincoln were asking those who had signed this petition “in the most pathetic manner to retract, but I am informed they have all refused with the exception of one or two against whom they prevailed by threats and menaces.”269 Lincoln was suffering from the spite of disappointed patronage seekers. The first petition had been circulated by William Butler, and the second by Caleb Birchall, who resented Lincoln’s support of a rival aspirant for the Springfield postmastership.
More may have been at work than the disaffection of unsuccessful place hunters. Herndon recalled that “Lincoln was not at all times the popular man in Sangamon County” because “he was not a social man, not being ‘hail fellow well met,’ ” and also because “he was a man of his own ideas—had the courage of his convictions and the valor of their expression.” Often “abstracted and absent minded,” Lincoln would pass friends on the street without greeting them. Herndon believed that “this was taken for coldness—dignity—pride” by some people who “misjudged and disliked” him for his seeming aloofness.270 Envy may also have poisoned the minds of some. “Lincoln outstript his contemporaries & companions and they feel a terrible jealousy against the man who overheaded—outstript them,” according to Herndon.271 Moreover, he was not a joiner; his name did not appear on the membership rolls of the Masons, the militia, the churches, or other community groups.
Butterfield believed that Lincoln was plotting to cheat him out of the commissionership by circulating petitions and taking them to Washington “on the very eve of the appointment and obtain the appointment by a coup de main, before I should have any opportunity to expose the misrepresentations contained in his petitions.” He claimed that petitions favoring Lincoln had been signed by farmers ignorant of their content. “What these petitions contain no one knows,” Butterfield told a friend on June 7, “but you know that 99 out of 100 will sign such petitions without even reading them or caring what they contain—how much reliance is to be placed on such petitions?” By contrast, Butterfield boasted, “I have circulated petitions only among professional men and leading and intelligent whigs who are presumed to know something about the nature of the office and the qualifications requisite to fill it.”272 Butterfield also complained that friends of Lincoln had falsely told cabinet members that Butterfield had suffered a stroke that had injured his mind. To counteract this charge, Butterfield obtained statements from physicians, a druggist, and Chicago’s mayor.
To prevent Lincoln’s planned visit to Washington, Butterfield proposed that neither of them travel to the capital. Lincoln demurred, telling Butterfield’s emissary “that if he were at liberty to consult his own feelings, he would cheerfully accede to your proposition, and remain at home, but he had so far committed himself to his friends that he could not now accede to it.”273
And so in the second week of June, both Lincoln and Butterfield hastened to Washington. En route, Lincoln chatted with a good-natured Kentucky gentleman who offered him a plug of tobacco, a cigar, and a glass of brandy. Lincoln politely declined each in turn, explaining that he did not chew, smoke, or drink. The Kentuckian, who had become fond of Lincoln, said: “See here, my jolly companion, I have gone through the world a great deal and have had much experience with men and women of all classes, and in all climes, and I have noticed one thing.” When Lincoln eagerly asked what that observation might be, the Kentuckian replied: “those who have no vices have d—d few virtues.” Lincoln laughed heartily and enjoyed repeating the story.274
Arriving in Washington, Lincoln was greeted by Nathaniel G. Wilcox, who informed him that Taylor planned to name Butterfield because he came from northern Illinois. In Wilcox’s room, Lincoln wrote an appeal to the president, arguing that both he and Butterfield were equally qualified and that “if it appears that I am preferred by the Whigs of Illinois,” he should be appointed, for the Prairie State deserved recognition and other Midwestern states had already received their fair share of patronage. He further maintained that central Illinois had been neglected in the allotment of offices; the marshal, Benjamin Bond, came from the south (Clinton County) and the district attorney, Archibald Williams, from the west (Quincy)—both residents of towns over a hundred miles from Springfield. Plaintively, he asked Taylor: “I am from the center. Is the center nothing?—that center which alone has given you a Whig representative? On the score
of locality, I admit the claim of the North is no worse, and I deny that it is any better than that of the center.”275
Butterfield claimed that Chicago in particular and northern Illinois in general deserved special consideration. To David Hunter he wrote on June 4: “the South and Middle Sections of the State have monopolized all the important offices … while the Northern part of the State which contains the only whig Congressional District in the State has had nothing; now you know that there is more intelligence and enterprise, more Whigs and more of the materials for making Whigs in the North part of the State than there is in all the rest of the State besides—it contains … the only Whig Congressional District.”276 Butterfield’s supporters made the same argument. The loss of the Seventh Congressional District seat by Stephen T. Logan in 1848 strengthened the hand of the northern Illinois Whigs.
In early June, Nathaniel G. Wilcox and Josiah M. Lucas called on Taylor to plead Lincoln’s case, arguing that he was the choice of three-fourths of the people of Illinois (“as against Butterfield, forty-nine fiftieths”), that he “was a western man” who “emigrated to Illinois when but a youth—he has grown up with her, and is loved by her people—a self made man, and now stands at the head of the bar in his state.”277 The president replied somewhat heatedly: “I had always intended to give the Commis[s]ionership of the General Land Office to Illinois. I have already given two appointments to that State—the Marshal to the Southern part, and the District Attorney to the center; and I think the commissionership should go to the north.”278 Whigs in northern Illinois also pointed out that the two previous commissioners of the General Land Office had been from central part of their state.
These arguments helped Butterfield to win the contest, much to the delight of the Chicago Journal, which praised the appointment as “a tribute alike to the Northern portion of our own State, and to her devoted Whigs.”279 Upon learning the bad news, Lincoln returned to his room and lay down in a fit of depression. He later declared: “I hardly ever felt so bad at any failure in my life.”280 The following day, when Lincoln called on Ewing to retrieve his papers, the secretary told him that if Lincoln had applied for the commissionership when the administration first came to power, instead of maintaining his support of Cyrus Edwards, he would have won it. To placate Edwards, Lincoln asked the secretary to give him a letter stating those facts. Ewing did so, but Edwards was not mollified. Believing that Lincoln had acted in bad faith, Edwards broke off their friendship.
To Edwards’s confidant and protégé Joseph Gillespie, Lincoln lamented: “The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships; and, of these, mine with Mr. Edwards was one of the most cherished.” He claimed that he had “not been false to it.” At any time before June 2, he was ready to step aside for Edwards; only after that date, when he was reliably informed that Edwards had withdrawn and that he and Butterfield were the sole Illinoisans in the running, did he decide “to be an applicant, unconditionally.”281 If Lincoln had acted in 1849 as he did in 1843, when he declared that his “honor is out with Baker” and that he would “Suffer my right arm to be cut off before I’d violate it,” he may well have preserved his friendship with Edwards. In 1850, Lincoln unsuccessfully tried to repair the damaged relationship by offering to support Edwards “cheerfully and heartily” to replace Butterfield, who was reportedly about to resign.282 Only in 1860 did Edwards finally agree to “bury the hatchet.”283
Two weeks after his defeat, Lincoln had recovered his good spirits. On July 9, he informed David Davis that “I am less dissatisfied than I should have been, had I known less of the particulars.” With characteristic magnanimity, he added: “I hope my good friends every where will approve the appointment of Mr. B[utterfield] in so far as they can, and be silent when they can not.”284 Four days later, he told Gillespie: “I am not greatly dissatisfied. I wish the office had been so bestowed as to encourage our friends in future contests.”285
Sorting out the affair afterwards, Elihu B. Washburne, who worked on Butter-field’s behalf, believed Lincoln was viewed as “a mere catspaw of Baker.” The “appointment of Lincoln would have been considered a triumph of Baker, and as such would have inspired contempt,” Washburne said.286 He also felt that Whigs in northern Illinois deserved the commissionership. Lincoln himself believed that Secretary Ewing’s support of Butterfield was decisive. Ewing evidently found Butterfield more highly qualified than Lincoln and believed that he was the best land lawyer in Illinois. Even after Ewing had determined to name Butterfield, Taylor could have overruled his secretary of the interior, as he did in some other cases; but the president chose not to do so. Lincoln may also have lacked sufficient status to gain the appointment. In 1850, when Nathaniel G. Wilcox recommended him for the post of secretary of the interior during the cabinet shakeup following Taylor’s death, Democratic Congressman William A. Richardson of Illinois replied that Orville H. Browning was the only Whig from central Illinois who stood a chance of winning that post. Butterfield had more connections in Washington than did Lincoln; among them were Daniel Webster and a justice of the Supreme Court, who was unfamiliar with Lincoln.
Lincoln was not the only one with disappointed hopes. Taylor and his cabinet generally bungled patronage distribution, awarding places in a slapdash manner. Ewing allegedly fired able Whigs and appointed bibulous Democrats in their place.
Lincoln’s boldness in framing an antislavery bill may also have hurt his chances. Years later Joshua Giddings observed that instead of cautiously avoiding the explosive slavery issue, Lincoln “saw a few members standing aloof from the Democratic and Whig organizations, working by every honorable means to call the attention of the House and country to the crimes of slavery. They were called ‘agitators,’ and the line of demarcation, which separated them from other members, was well defined.” Giddings implied that Lincoln may have injured his standing with the Taylor administration by aligning himself with such agitators.287
In fact, many Taylor Whigs hoping to win posts in the new administration avoided the slavery issue during the second session of the Thirtieth Congress lest they offend the slaveholding president-elect. In December 1848, Gamaliel Bailey scorned those cautious Whig Representatives who shied away from the slavery issue: “There be many expectants among Congressmen of comfortable appointments at home or abroad. Why compel these gentlemen to make their mark on obnoxious questions, where to vote nay you would ruin them with their constituents and to vote yea might endanger their standing with the Powers that are to be. ‘Lie low—and keep dark’ is a safe policy. Let there be no agitation. Let the ordinary party issues have free course, and suppress all vexed questions.”288 Caleb B. Smith, for example, had emphatically opposed slavery in the first session of the Thirtieth Congress but lost his enthusiasm in the second session, evidently for fear that he might jeopardize his chances for a cabinet appointment. On January 10, after voting to reconsider the Gott resolution, Smith refused to answer when Giddings asked if he wished slavery in Washington to continue.
Ewing may have employed underhanded tactics while championing Butterfield. In 1850, protests accusing Butterfield of being inefficient and behaving in an “ungentlemanly and uncouth” manner led to an examination of his original appointment.289 In the course of that inquiry, a congressional committee sought to discover whether some of Lincoln’s letters of recommendation had been fraudulently removed before the president made his decision. The committee learned that in fact letters endorsing Lincoln had somehow been suppressed. While it could not be proven beyond cavil that Ewing had ordered someone to tamper with Lincoln’s file, the suspicion arose that he had done so. In August 1850, the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald reported that there was “much opposition making its appearance here, just now, to the continuance in office of Mr. Commissioner Butterfield.… The manner in which he received his appointment, by means of the … suppression of the brief of the recommendations of his principal competitor, the Hon. Abraham Lincoln, … by a clerk in the Interio
r Department, is much talked of here and commented upon.”290
There was good reason to suspect foul play. On July 8, when Lincoln inspected the sealed file of his endorsements that Ewing had given him two weeks earlier, he was surprised to find that two of the most important documents—letters from Indiana Congressmen Richard W. Thompson and Elisha Embree—were missing. A summary of the letters indicates that Thompson “first recommended Butterfield supposing Lincoln would not accept—prefers Lincoln” and that Embree was “against Butterfield—prefers Lincoln.” Indignantly, Lincoln asked Ewing to explain the absence of the missives that may have spelled the difference between victory and defeat. He told the secretary: “I relied upon, and valued, them more than any other two letters I had, because of the high standing of the writers, because of their location within the Public Land states, and because they did (what few other members of Congress could) speak of my character and standing at home.” On June 21, Postmaster General Collamer had told Lincoln “that Mr. B[utterfield] appeared to be better recommended from the Public Land states” than he was. “I felt sure he was mistaken,” Lincoln informed Ewing. “If these letters were not before the cabinet, the judge [Collamer] was nearer right than I supposed. With them, I had the State of Indiana clearly; without them Mr. B. had it. The letter of Mr. Thompson was a recantation from Mr. B. to me; so that without it, I not only lost him, but he stood in full life, recommending Mr. B.”291
Lincoln decided against making a public protest about the letters, even though Ewing’s response did not satisfy him. In 1850, Lincoln said privately that he could have revealed the “piece of villainy” that denied him the commissionership and filled him “with indignation.” But, he added, “my high regard for some of the members of the late cabinet; my great devotion to Gen: Taylor personally; and, above all, my fidelity to the great whig cause, have induced me to be silent.” Much as he would like to “confound the guilty,” he feared that such a public exposure of the story “might also injure some who are innocent,” “disparage a good cause,” and “reflect no credit upon me.”292