Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Chase’s strategy was to approach potential supporters without expressly acknowledging that he would run. Late at night in his study, he wrote hundreds of letters to local officials, congressional leaders, generals, and journalists, citing the failures of the Lincoln administration. “I should fear nothing,” he wrote the editor of the
Cincinnati Gazette,
“if we had An
Administration
in the first sense of the word guided by a bold, resolute, farseeing, & active mind, guided by an honest, earnest heart. But this we have not. Oh! for energy & economy in the management of the War.”
A similar style prevailed in all of his letters. After detailing the flaws in Lincoln’s leadership, Chase would suggest the differences that would characterize his own presidency. He denied that he coveted the position, but said he would accept the burden if pressed by his countrymen. “If I were myself controlled merely by personal sentiments I should prefer the reelection of Mr. Lincoln,” Chase explained, but “I think that a man of different qualities from those the President has will be needed for the next four years. I am not anxious to be regarded as that man; but I am quite willing to refer that question to the decision of those who agree in thinking that some such man should be had.”
As in 1860, Chase took great pains to cultivate the press, not recognizing that it was too early to extract binding commitments. He was thrilled by Horace Greeley’s letter in late September, telling him that he knew no one “better qualified for President than yourself, nor one whom I should more cordially support.” Chase apparently discounted Greeley’s closing caveat that in six months, events might dictate the need to concentrate on another candidate. Similarly, while Chase elicited assurance from Hiram Barney, the head of the New York Custom House, that he was his “first choice for the presidency,” Barney insisted on deciding only when the time came “whether yourself, the President, or some other person should receive it.”
Lincoln was fully aware of what Chase was doing. Governor Dennison alerted him that Chase was “working like a beaver,” and Seward cautioned that several organizations were “fixing to control delegate appointments for Mr. Chase.” Ohio congressman Samuel Cox warned the White House that Chase had tied up “nearly the whole strength of the New England States.” A Pennsylvanian politician informed the White House that Chase had so ardently campaigned for his support that he could see the “Presidency glaring out of both eyes.” John Hay learned that Chase had called on the New York journalist Theodore Tilton, working “all a summer’s day” to maneuver the influential
Independent
to his side.
Whereas Lincoln’s loyal young secretary was disturbed by “Chase’s mad hunt after the Presidency,” Lincoln was amused. Chase’s incessant presidential ambitions reminded him of the time when he was “plowing corn on a Kentucky farm” with a lazy horse that suddenly sped forward energetically to “the end of the furrow.” Upon reaching the horse, he discovered “an enormous chin-fly fastened upon him, and knocked him off,” not wanting “the old horse bitten in that way.” His companion said that it was a mistake to knock it off, for “that’s all that made him go.”
“Now,” Lincoln concluded, “if Mr. [Chase] has a presidential chin-fly biting him, I’m not going to knock him off, if it will only make his department go.” Lincoln agreed that his secretary’s tactics were in “very bad taste,” and “was sorry the thing had begun, for though the matter did not annoy him his friends insisted that it ought to.” Lincoln’s friends could not understand why the president continued to approve appointments for avid Chase supporters who were known to be “hostile to the President’s interests.” Lincoln merely asserted that he would rather let “Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than getting into a snarl with him by refusing him what he asks.” Moreover, he had no thought of dismissing Chase while he was hard at work raising the resources needed to support the immense Union Army.
Lincoln’s response to Chase was neither artless nor naive. His old friend Leonard Swett maintained that there never was a greater mistake than the impression that Lincoln was a “frank, guileless, unsophisticated man.” In fact, “he handled and moved man
remotely
as we do pieces upon a chessboard.” Nor did Lincoln’s posture toward Chase imply a tepid desire for a second term. Swett was correct in supposing that Lincoln “was much more eager for it, than he was for the first one.” The Union, emancipation, his reputation, his honor, and his legacy—all depended on the outcome of the ongoing war. But he recognized it was safer to keep Chase as a dubious ally within the administration rather that to cut him loose to mount a full-blown campaign. Meanwhile, so long as Chase remained in the cabinet, Lincoln insisted on treating him with respect and dignity.
That Chase was disconcerted by Lincoln’s warmth is evident in a letter he wrote to James Watson Webb, the former editor who was now the American minister to Brazil. After criticizing Lincoln’s “disjointed method of administration” and admitting that he had “been often tempted to retire,” Chase acknowledged that “the President has always treated me with such personal kindness and has always manifested such fairness and integrity of purpose, that I have not found myself free to throw up my trust…. So I still work on.”
Lincoln told a worried Hay that he had “all along clearly seen [Chase’s] plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he [sees] 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.) 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.” Recognizing the truth of Lincoln’s words, Hay speculated that “Chase would try to make capital out of this Rosecrans business,” though Lincoln had simply relieved the general from command of the Department of the Tennessee at Grant’s request. Lincoln drolly replied: “I suppose he will, like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.”
In late September, as the rift within Missouri’s Republican Party threatened to erupt into open warfare, Chase continued his divisive plotting. Lincoln sought to keep radicals and conservatives united against the rebels. Chase aligned himself with the radicals. The struggle centered on Reconstruction. Since the Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to the loyal border states, the people of Missouri were left to determine the fate of slavery independently in their state. The conservatives, led by Frank Blair and Bates’s brother-in-law Governor Hamilton Gamble, were in favor of a gradual emancipation that provided protection to slaveholders during a transitional period. Radical leaders such as B. Gratz Brown, Charles Drake, and Henry Blow favored changes in the state constitution that would immediately extinguish slavery.
So flammable had the dispute become that Governor Gamble worried the radicals intended to overthrow the elected state government. For their part, the radicals had come to believe that General John M. Schofield, the military commander of Missouri whom Lincoln had put in place as a neutral figure, had become a conservative partisan. He was accused of abusing his authority by arresting leading radicals and suppressing radical papers under the guise of military necessity.
On September 30, a delegation of radicals led by Charles Drake journeyed to Washington to demand Schofield’s removal. The night before the scheduled meeting, Lincoln talked with Hay about the tense situation. He acknowledged Hay’s argument that “the Radicals would carry the State and it would be well not to alienate them.” Moreover, he believed that “these Radical men have in them the stuff which must save the state and on which we must mainly rely.” They would never abandon the cause of emancipation, “while the Conservatives, in casting about for votes to carry through their plans, are tempted to affiliate with those whose record is not clear.” If he had to choose, Lincoln told his aide, “if one side
must
be crushed out & the other cherished,” he would “side with the Radicals.” On another occasion, he had expressed this affinity more strongly, stating that “they are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally.” While they might be “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with…their faces are set Zionwards.”
Nevertheless, Lincoln refused to be coerced into choosing one faction or the other, and resented the radicals’ demand that he treat Gamble, Frank Blair, and the conservatives “as copperheads and enemies to the Govt.” rather than as mere political opponents. “This is simply monstrous,” Lincoln declared, to denounce men who had courageously upheld the Union in the early days, when that affiliation threatened not only their political futures but their very lives. By contrast, the delegation’s vociferous leader, Charles Drake, was originally a Southern-leaning Democrat who had delighted in railing against Black Republicans. “Not that he objected to penitent rebels being radical: he was glad of it: but fair play: let not the pot make injurious reference to the black base of the kettle: he was in favor of short statutes of limitations.” Welles understood Lincoln’s dilemma. “So intense and fierce” were these radicals, he wrote in his diary, that they might well “inflict greater injury—on those Republicans…who do not conform to their extreme radical and fanatical views than on the Rebels in the field.” Such vindictiveness, he lamented, was “among the saddest features of the times.”
Lincoln assured Hay that if the radicals could “show that Schofield has done anything wrong & has interfered to their disadvantage with State politics,” he would consider their case. But if Schofield had “incurred their ill will by refusing to take sides with them,” then it would be an entirely different matter. Indeed: “I cannot do anything contrary to my convictions to please these men, earnest and powerful as they may be.”
No sooner had the delegates settled themselves at the Willard Hotel than they received an invitation to spend the evening at Chase’s home. When Bates learned of the invitation, he told Gamble he was “surprised and mortified” that Chase had extended his hand to those men he considered mortal enemies, and “still more surprised” when Chase invited him as well. He immediately declined. “I refuse flatly to hold social, friendly intercourse with men, who daily denounce me and all my friends, as traitors.” Gamble replied that Bates should hardly be shocked by Chase’s willingness to entertain “these dogs persons,” for “Mr. Chase is the author of our troubles here.” His “criminal ambition” for the presidency had led him to incite the struggle, and he would undoubtedly have the support of every radical paper in the state if he were to decide to run against Lincoln.
The president’s meeting with the Missourians lasted over two hours. Drake read his list of demands “as pompously as if it were full of matter instead of wind,” noted John Hay. Lincoln listened attentively, allowing his critics to enumerate their grievances. He knew well that these men would be important in the coming presidential canvass, but felt their call for Schofield’s dismissal was misguided. He explained his position clearly, calmly, and forcefully, both at the meeting that day and in a letter drafted a few days later. While he acknowledged their version of the turmoil facing Missouri, he was not convinced that Schofield was “responsible for that suffering and wrong.” On the contrary, he suggested, all the troubles they described could be explained by the fact that during a civil war, confusion abounds: “Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.” Until he received evidence that Schofield had used his powers arbitrarily for or against a particular faction, he could not, in good conscience, remove him from command. That evidence had not been provided.
“The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay noted proudly in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.” Lincoln emerged from the meeting “in a good humor,” Bates observed. “Some of them he said, were not as bad as he supposed.” Yet, while clarifying the fact that “whoever commands in Missouri, or elsewhere” was responsible to him, “and not to either radicals or conservatives,” Lincoln once again moved to defuse the situation without alienating vital constituents. On the day the radicals left town, he wrote to remind Schofield that his authority to “arrest individuals, and suppress assemblies, or newspapers” was limited only to those who were “working
palpable
injury to the Military.”
Indeed, several months later, when Lincoln became convinced that Schofield was actually leaning toward the conservatives instead of using “his influence to harmonize the conflicting elements,” he decided to replace him with Rosecrans, a man long favored by the radicals. But even then, he engineered the transfer in a manner that protected Schofield’s good name, while preserving his own presidential authority to determine when and where to change his commanders.
At this juncture, Frank Blair seriously aggravated matters. That October, returning to Missouri after heroic duty with Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg, the soldier-politician escalated the dissension with an explosive speech. Before an overflowing crowd at Mercantile Library Hall in St. Louis, he proclaimed his firm opposition to every one of the radicals’ Reconstruction ideas. Condemning their call for the immediate emancipation of Missouri’s slaves, he insisted that no action should be taken until the war was won. He argued that Missourians should focus solely on supporting the Union, deferring all issues regarding slavery. He warned that if the radicals gained control, the country would “degenerate into a revolution like that which afflicted France.” They would set themselves up as “judges, witnesses and executioners alike.” They would send to the guillotine “men who come back grimed all over with powder from our battle fields” but who happen to disagree with them on Reconstruction.