Team of Rivals (66 page)

Determined to protect his position, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself with the increasingly powerful radical Republicans in Congress, led by Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner, Ohio’s Ben Wade, Indiana’s George Julian, and Maine’s William Fessenden. Though known as a conservative on the issue of slavery, Cameron began by degrees to embrace the radicals’ contention that the central purpose of the war was to bring the institution of human bondage to an end. While he had allied himself initially with Seward, Cameron turned increasingly to Chase, the single cabinet member at the time not only in favor of allowing fugitive slaves to stay within Union lines but also of enlisting and arming them.
“We
agreed,” Chase later recalled, “that the necessity of arming them was inevitable; but we were alone in that opinion.”

Acting without Lincoln’s approval, Cameron publicly endorsed the position of an army colonel who had sanctioned seizing slaves and using them for military service as one step in a more general policy of deploying “extremist measures against the rebels, even to their absolute ruin.” In cabinet sessions and at private dinners, he instigated heated arguments with Bates, Blair, and Smith, who fiercely assailed his position. Cameron maintained that black soldiers would add an essential weapon in the quest for victory. Blair claimed that Cameron was riding the “nigger hobby” for his own political advantage.

The situation came to a head in early December. Each department customarily presented an annual report to the president as he prepared his own yearly message. While drafting the War Department report, the war secretary resolved to officially advocate arming slaves who came into Union lines. Well aware that he would ignite controversy, Cameron read his draft to a series of friends, most of whom urged him to keep silent on the contentious issue.

At this point, Cameron recalled, “I sought out another counsellor,—one of broad views, great courage, and of tremendous earnestness. It was Edwin Stanton.” Cameron had called on Stanton during the summer and fall for legal advice on various contracts. This matter, however, was more delicate. Stanton “read the report carefully,” according to Cameron, and “gave it his unequivocal and hearty support.” In fact, he suggested his own provocative logic, which served to strengthen the argument for arming slaves: “It is clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves when it may become necessary,” the addition read, “as it is to take gunpowder from the enemy.”

It remains unclear whether Stanton offered his deliberately incendiary advice to encourage the war secretary openly to defy Lincoln, hoping that if Cameron were dismissed, he, Stanton, might be called upon to replace him. Perhaps he was “an abolitionist at heart,” simply waiting for the right moment to reveal his honest convictions. He had, after all, given his boyhood pledge to his father that he would fight slavery until the end of his life, and had expressed similar sentiments to Chase in the bloom of their friendship in Ohio. More significant, Charles Sumner considered Stanton “my
personal
friend,” who “goes as far [as] I do in directing the war against Slavery.” Yet when Stanton talked with fellow Democrats during this same period of time, including McClellan and his former cabinet colleague Jeremiah Black, he expressed decidedly more conservative views on the issue of slavery. Whatever Stanton’s purpose, his approval emboldened Cameron, who sent out advance copies of his report to a number of newspapers before submitting it to the president.

When the government printer brought the War Department report to the president for approval, Lincoln discovered the inflammatory paragraph. “This will never do!” he said. “Gen. Cameron must take no such responsibility. That is a question which belongs exclusively to me!” He deleted the paragraph and issued orders to seize every copy already sent. While Lincoln understood that the slaves coming into Union hands “must be provided for in some way,” he did not believe, he later wrote, that he possessed the constitutional authority to liberate and arm them. The only way that such actions, “otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful,” was if those measures were deemed “indispensable” for “the preservation of the nation,” and therefore for “the preservation of the constitution” itself. At this juncture, he was not convinced that arming seized slaves was “an indispensable necessity.” Moreover, he was undeniably aware that such a measure at this time would alienate the moderate majority of his coalition.

Lincoln informed Cameron of his action at the next cabinet meeting, emphasizing, as he had with Frémont, that any decision regarding the future of slavery rested with the president, not with a subordinate official. Although Cameron immediately conceded and agreed to delete the vetoed language, he complained that his excised recommendation was no different from the suggestion Welles had made in his annual report. “This was the moment that Welles dreaded most,” his biographer observed. Like the secretary of war, the secretary of the navy had felt compelled to make some provision for fugitive slaves who “have sought our ships for refuge and protection.” In such cases, Welles declared, the slaves “should be cared for and employed” by either the navy or the army (depending on which branch had greater need), and “if no employment could be found for them in the public service, they should be allowed to proceed freely and peaceably, without restraint, to seek a livelihood.”

Certain that he, too, would be commanded to revise his report, Welles resolved that he would resign before doing so. But to his bewilderment, Lincoln allowed the navy report to be printed without change. Shrewdly, Lincoln had recognized at once the political difference between the two situations: the army occupied territory in the border states, while the navy did not. Allowing blacks to find employment on naval ships or in surrounding harbors on the coast was fundamentally different from providing weapons to blacks in the slave states of Kentucky or Missouri, whose continued loyalty was critical to the Union. Lincoln still believed that such a step would drive the loyal citizens of these states into the Confederacy.

In fact, the president had developed his own policy for the increasing numbers of fugitive slaves who had come into Union lines. As members of Congress gathered on Capitol Hill for the opening of the winter session, he outlined his ideas in his annual message. He recognized, he wrote, that under the Confiscation Act, when Union armies secured territory where slaves had been used by their masters “for insurrectionary purposes,” the legal rights of the slaveholders were “forfeited”; slaves “thus liberated” had to be “provided for in some way.” He was hopeful that some of the loyal border states might soon “pass similar enactments.” If such actions were taken, Lincoln recommended that the Congress compensate the states for each freed slave.

Lincoln still believed that both classes of freed slaves should be colonized on a purely voluntary basis, “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too,—whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization.”

So long as Lincoln remained hopeful that the Union could be restored before the conflict “degenerate[d] into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” he was unwilling, he said, to sanction “radical and extreme measures” regarding slavery. Despite this assertion, he closed his message with a graceful and irrefutable argument against the continuation of slavery in a democratic society, the very essence of which opened “the way to all,” granted “hope to all,” and advanced the “condition of all.” In this “just, and generous, and prosperous system,” he reasoned, “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.” Then, reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his own experience, Lincoln added: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Clearly, this upward mobility, the possibility of self-realization so central to the idea of America, was closed to the slave unless and until he became a free man.

Abolitionists condemned Lincoln’s message. “Away with the unstatesmanlike scheme of Colonization, thrust so unfortunately into the face of the nation at this juncture!” the abolitionist Worthington G. Snethen wrote Chase. “Let the sword make a nation of four millions of black men free, and let them be free, as free as the white man.” Frederick Douglass was so outraged both by the idea of colonizing freed slaves, and by the president’s refusal to enlist blacks into the army, that he was close to losing all faith in Lincoln. The president did not understand that the black man was an American with no desire to live elsewhere; “his attachment to the place of his birth is stronger than iron.” Moreover, why such fearful concern about the destiny of the freed slave? “Give him wages for his work, and let hunger pinch him if he don’t work,” Douglass declared. “He is used to [work], and is not afraid of it. His hands are already hardened by toil, and he has no dreams of ever getting a living by any other means than by hard work.”

Since the beginning of the war, Douglass had avowed that nothing would terrify the South like the vision of thousands of former slaves wielding weapons on behalf of the Union Army. “One black regiment alone would be, in such a war, the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color in this case would be more terrible than powder and balls.” Predicting that a “lenient war” would be “a lengthy war and therefore the worst kind of war,” Douglass contended that the survival of the nation depended upon enlisting the “slaves and free colored people” into the army. In a speech in Philadelphia, he proclaimed: “We are striking the guilty rebels with our soft, white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man, which we keep chained behind us. We have been catching slaves, instead of arming them…. We pay more attention to the advice of the half-rebel State of Kentucky, than to any suggestion coming from the loyal North.”

While the radical press criticized Lincoln’s message, moderate and conservative Republicans lauded his tact. “It appeals to the judgment,—the solid convictions of the people, rather than their resentments or their impatient hopes and aspirations,” the
New York Times
concluded, and as “the moderate men compose nine-tenths of the population of the country, the message will doubtless meet with popularity.” Even the normally critical
New York Tribune
conceded that the “country and the world will not fail to mark the contrast” between the magnanimity of Lincoln’s message and a recent “truculent” address by Jefferson Davis. Though Davis was “commonly presumed the abler of the two” statesmen, and “certainly the better grammarian,” the
Tribune
observed, the address of the Confederate chief was “boastful, defiant, and savage,” whereas Lincoln “breathes not an unkind impulse” and “deals in no railing accusations.”

T
HE
L
INCOLNS HOSTED
the traditional New Year’s Day reception to mark the advent of 1862. The day was “unusually beautiful,” the
New York Times
reported, “the sky being clear and bright, and the air soft and balmy, more like May than January.” Frances Seward, who had joined her husband for the holidays, found the festive atmosphere reassuring. “For the first time since we have been here,” she told her sister, “the carriages are rolling along the streets as they used to do in old times.” Bates, too, was braced by the glorious day. “All the world was out,” he noted. Thousands of citizens streamed into the White House when the gates were opened at noon. The Marine Band played as members of the public shook hands with the president and first lady. They mingled with Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, foreign ministers, military officers, and cabinet officials. At long last, Fanny met the first lady, whom she described as “a compact little woman with a full round face,” wearing “a black silk, or brocade, with purple clusters in it—and some appropriate velvet head arrangement.”

Though Lincoln cordially greeted every guest, he was under great pressure. In the ninth month of the war, tales of corruption and mismanagement in the War Department combined with lack of progress on the battlefield to prevent Chase from raising the funds the Treasury needed to keep the war effort afloat. As public impatience mounted, Lincoln feared that “the bottom” was “out of the tub.” While the disgruntled public might focus on various members of the military and the cabinet, the president knew that he would ultimately be held responsible for the choices of his administration. “If the new year shall be only the continuation of the faults, the mistakes, and the incapacities prevailing during 1861,” diarist Count Gurowski warned, “then the worst is to be expected.”

Lincoln had been so reticent during the summer and fall, when Cameron was first criticized for his lax administration and questionable contracts, that Seward questioned whether the president was sufficiently attentive to the unsavory situation. Then, one night in January, the secretary of state recalled, “there was a ring at my door-bell.” The president entered, seated himself on the sofa, “and abruptly commenced talking about the condition of the War Department. He soon made it apparent that he had all along observed and known as much about it as any of us…his mind was now settled, and he had come to consult me about a successor to Mr. Cameron.”

Choosing the right successor to Cameron was vital. Lincoln’s initial preferences may have included Joseph Holt, Buchanan’s war secretary who had crucially supported the Union during the secession crisis, or West Point graduate Montgomery Blair. According to Welles, Blair “had exhibited great intelligence, knowledge of military men, sagacity and sound judgment” during cabinet discussions. Instead of either man, in a decision that would prove most significant to the course of the war, Lincoln selected Edwin Stanton, the gruff lawyer who had humiliated him in Cincinnati six years earlier and whose disparaging remarks about his presidency were well known in Washington circles.

Washington insiders attributed the choice to the combined influence of Seward and Chase. These two rivals rarely agreed on policy or principle, but each had his own reasons for advocating Stanton. Seward would never forget Stanton’s contribution as his informant during the last weeks of the Buchanan tenure. The intelligence provided by Stanton had helped root out traitors and keep Washington safe from capture. It had also fortified Seward’s role as the central figure in the critical juncture between Lincoln’s election and inauguration. Chase’s far more intimate friendship with Stanton had grown from their earlier days in Ohio when Stanton had assured Chase that “to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” Equally important, Chase believed that Stanton would be a steadfast ally in the struggle against slavery.

Lincoln had his own recollections of Stanton, not all of which were negative. He had watched Stanton at work on the Reaper trial and had been impressed instantly by the powerful reasoning of Stanton’s arguments, the passion of his delivery, and the unparalleled energy he had devoted to the case. “He puts his whole soul into any cause he espouses,” one observer noted. “If you ever saw Stanton before a jury,” you would see that “he toils for his client with as much industry as if his case was his own…as if his own life depended upon the issue.” Energy and force were desperately needed to galvanize the War Department, and Stanton had both in abundance.

On Saturday, January 11, the president sent an uncharacteristically brusque letter to Cameron. In light of the fact that the war secretary had previously “expressed a desire for a change of position,” he wrote, “I can now gratify you, consistently with my view of the public interest,” by “nominating you to the Senate, next monday, as minister to Russia.” After receiving the dismissal letter on Sunday, Cameron is said to have wept. “This is not a political affair,” he insisted, “it means personal degradation.”

After dinner that night, Cameron went to see Chase. They apparently talked over the troubled situation and decided to enlist Seward’s help. Chase drove Cameron back to Willard’s and then went alone to Seward’s house. As planned, Cameron came in soon after, brandishing the president’s letter, which, he said, was “intended as a dismissal, and, therefore, discourteous.” Cameron was finally convinced “to retain the letter till morning, and then go and see the President.” Later that night, Chase confided in his diary: “I fear Mr. Seward may think Cameron’s coming into his house pre-arranged, and that I was not dealing frankly.” As usual, however, so long as the high-minded Chase was certain that he had “acted right, and with just deference to all concerned,” he was able to rationalize his machinations.

The next day, presumably briefed by Seward and Chase, Lincoln agreed to withdraw his terse letter and substitute a warm note indicating that Cameron had initiated the departure. Since the desirable post at St. Petersburg was vacant, the president would happily “gratify” Cameron’s desire. “Should you accept it, you will bear with you the assurance of my undiminished confidence, of my affectionate esteem, and of my sure expectation that…you will be able to render services to your country, not less important than those you could render at home.” He also asked Cameron to recommend a successor. Cameron expressed his fervent opinion that his fellow Pennsylvanian Stanton was the best man for the job. In fact, Lincoln had already made his decision, but Cameron left believing he was responsible for Stanton’s selection. In the end, each of the three men—Seward, Chase, and Cameron—assumed he was instrumental in Lincoln’s appointment of the new secretary of war.

After settling matters with Cameron, Lincoln asked George Harding, whom he had made head of the Patent Office, to bring his old law partner Stanton to the White House. Stanton was then forty-seven, though the grizzled brown hair and beard made him look older, as did the glasses that hid his bright brown eyes. Harding was afraid that disagreeable recollections from the Reaper trial would cast a pall on the meeting. Both Lincoln and Stanton seemed to have put the past behind them, however, leaving Harding “the most embarrassed of the three.”

The urgency of the situation left Stanton little time to deliberate. He consulted his wife, Ellen, who, according to her mother, “objected to his acceptance.” The move to the War Department would substantially diminish the lifestyle of the Stanton family, slashing a legal income of over $50,000 a year to $8,000. Stanton, too, tormented all his life by fears of insolvency, must have been concerned about the drastic diminution of income. Nevertheless, he could not refuse to serve as secretary of war in the midst of a great civil war. And if he served with distinction, his life, however short in years, might be made “long by noble deeds,” as Chase had once prophesied. He accepted the post, on the condition that he could retain Peter Watson, his old friend and assistant on the Reaper trial, “to take care of the contracts,” for he realized he would “be swamped at once” without Watson’s aid.

The announcement of Cameron’s resignation and Stanton’s appointment took the majority of the cabinet by surprise. “Strange,” Bates confided in his diary, that “not a hint of all this” was discussed at the cabinet council the previous Friday, “and stranger still,” the president had sent for no one but Seward over the weekend. Welles heard the dramatic news from Monty Blair, whom he met on the street. Neither one of them, Welles confessed, had been “taken into Lincoln’s confidence.” Indeed, Welles had never even met Stanton. Stanton’s nomination dismayed radical Republicans on Capitol Hill. The powerful William Fessenden, fearful that Stanton’s Democratic heritage would incline him toward a soft policy on both slavery and the South, worked to delay the Senate confirmation until he ascertained more about Stanton’s position. He conferred with Chase, who assured Fessenden that “he, Secretary Chase, was responsible for Mr. Stanton’s selection,” and that he would arrange a meeting that very evening between the Maine senator and Stanton. Seward’s role in the selection was not publicized, allowing the radicals to assume that Chase, their man in the cabinet, was the chief architect of the appointment. After a lengthy conversation with Stanton, Fessenden told Chase that he was thoroughly convinced that Stanton was “just the man we want.” The senator was delighted to find that he and Buchanan’s former Attorney General concurred “on every point,” including “the conduct of the war” and “the negro question.” The Senate confirmed Stanton’s nomination the next day.

News of Stanton’s replacement for Cameron met with widespread approval. The public generally assumed that Cameron had retired voluntarily. “Not only was the
press
completely taken by surprise,” Seward told his wife, “but with all its fertility of conjecture, not one newspaper has conceived the real cause.” Cameron’s reputation was preserved until the House Committee on Contracts published its 1,100-page report in February 1862, detailing the extensive corruption in the War Department that had led to the purchase of malfunctioning weapons, diseased horses, and rotten food. According to one newspaper report, the committee “resolved to advise the immediate passage of a bill to punish with death any person who commits a fraud upon the Government, whereby a soldier is bodily injured, as for instance in the sale of unsound provisions.” Though Cameron was never charged with personal liability, the House voted to censure him for conduct “highly injurious to the public service.”

Cameron was devastated, knowing that he would never recover from the scandal. Lincoln, however, made a great personal effort to assuage his pain and humiliation. He wrote a long public letter to Congress, explaining that the unfortunate contracts were spawned by the emergency situation facing the government in the immediate aftermath of Fort Sumter. Lincoln declared that he and his entire cabinet “were at least equally responsible with [Cameron] for whatever error, wrong, or fault was committed.”

Cameron would never forget this generous act. Filled with gratitude and admiration, he would become, Nicolay and Hay observed, “one of the most intimate and devoted of Lincoln’s personal friends.” He appreciated the courage it took for Lincoln to share the blame at a time when everyone else had deserted him. Most other men in Lincoln’s situation, Cameron wrote, “would have permitted an innocent man to suffer rather than incur responsibility.” Lincoln was not like most other men, as each cabinet member, including the new war secretary, would soon come to understand.

On his first day in office, the energetic, hardworking Stanton instituted “an entirely new
régime”
in the War Department. Cameron’s department had been so inundated by office seekers and politicians that officials had little time to answer letters or file telegraphs they received. As a result, requests for military supplies were often delayed for weeks. Stanton decreed that “letters and written communications will be attended to the first thing in the morning when they are received, and will have precedence over all other business.” While Cameron had welcomed congressmen and senators every day but Sunday, Stanton announced that the War Department would be closed to all business unrelated to military matters from Tuesdays through Fridays. Congressmen and senators would be received on Saturdays; the general public on Mondays.

Stanton quickly removed many of Cameron’s people and surrounded himself with men much like himself, full of passion, devotion, and drive. He made it clear from the beginning that he would not tolerate unmerited requests for even the smallest job. The day after he took office, Stanton later recalled, he met with a man he instinctively judged to be “one of those indescribable half loafers, half gentlemen,” who carried with him “a card from Mrs. Lincoln, asking that the man be made a commissary.” Stanton was furious. He ripped up the note and sent the man away. The very next day, the man returned with an official request from Mary that he be given the appointment. Stanton did not budge, dismissing the job seeker once again. That afternoon, Stanton called on Mrs. Lincoln. He told her that “in the midst of a great war for national existence,” his “first duty is to the people” and his “next duty is to protect your husband’s honor, and your own.” If he appointed unqualified men simply to return favors, it would “strike at the very root of all confidence.” Mary understood his argument completely. “Mr. Stanton you are right,” she told him, “and I will never ask you for anything again.” True to her word, Stanton affirmed, “she never did.”