Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
It is scarcely surprising that Lincoln not long afterward showed little patience when his old friend Orville Browning requested a favor for a loyal Unionist who owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. When the Union Army overran her home and took her slaves, she had fallen into poverty. She asked if the government could provide her an equal number of Negroes whom she would pay to work her farm. Lincoln “became very much excited,” according to Browning, and “said with great vehemence he had rather take a rope and hang himself than to do it.” When Browning argued for “some sort of remuneration” for the lost property, Lincoln countered that “she had lost no property—that her slaves were free when they were taken.” Puzzled by Lincoln’s sharp reaction, Browning “left him in no very good humor.”
As was usually the case with Lincoln’s rare episodes of pique, other strains had contributed to the sharp rejoinder. Earlier that day, he had visited the sickbed of Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy, whom he considered “the best friend [he] had in Congress.” The fifty-three-year-old Lovejoy was suffering from a debilitating liver and kidney ailment that would soon take his life. Lincoln was distraught over Lovejoy’s misery and seemed to internalize the grim prospects facing his friend. “This war is eating my life out,” he told the dying Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”
On the night of February 10, a fire alarm rang in the White House. Smoke was seen issuing from the president’s private stables, which stood between the mansion and the Treasury building, and Lincoln raced to the scene. “When he reached the boxwood hedge that served as an enclosure to the stables,” a member of his bodyguard, Robert McBride, recalled, “he sprang over it like a deer.” Learning that the horses were still inside, Lincoln, “with his own hands burst open the stable door.” It was immediately apparent that the fast-moving fire, the work of an arsonist, prevented any hope of rescue. “Notwithstanding this,” McBride observed, “he would apparently have tried to enter the burning building had not those standing near caught and restrained him.”
Six horses burned to death that night. When McBride returned to the White House, he found Lincoln in tears. Ten-year-old Tad “explained his father’s emotion”: one of the ponies had belonged to his brother, Willie. A coachman who had been fired by Mary that morning was charged with setting the fire. The following day, Lincoln had collected himself and moved forward. He called Commissioner French to his office and instructed him to consult contractors, estimate the cost, and “bring the matter to the attention of Congress to-day, if possible, that measures might be taken to have it rebuilt.”
L
INCOLN’S GIFT FOR MANAGING
men was never more apparent than during the presidential boomlet for Chase that peaked in the winter months of 1864. While Chase’s supporters prematurely showed their hand, Lincoln, according to the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, “carefully veiled his keen and sometimes bitter resentment against Chase, and waited the fullness of time when he could by some fortuitous circumstance remove Chase as a competitor, or by some shrewd manipulation of politics make him a hopeless one.”
The game had begun in earnest early in January. Friends of Chase, including Jay and Henry Cooke, contributed thousands of dollars to the publisher of the
American Exchange and Review,
a small Philadelphia magazine, so he would print a flattering biographical sketch of the treasury secretary. Chase’s friend William Orton warned him that “no matter how able or ‘faithful’ the biography may be,” its publication in a “seedy” magazine with a reputation for selling its space to whomever could pay enough would be seen “as a flimsy political trick.” Orton’s note elicited no direct reply, but at some point the president had apparently questioned the involvement of the Cooke brothers, who were still official agents for selling government bonds. The president’s questions elicited a long, emotional letter from Chase.
Chase opened his letter with the assertion that his actions, as always, proceeded from the purest of motives. He claimed he had “never, consciously & deliberately, injured one fellow man.” He had been told that the publisher intended to print a series of sketches about prominent figures, starting with him. “How could I object?” Treasury business so occupied him that he had paid no further attention to the matter. “What Mr. H. D. Cooke did about the unfortunate biography was done of his own accord without any prompting from me,” Chase insisted. Had Cooke or his brother sought his consent, he would have stopped them. “Not that any wrong was intended or done; but because the act was subject to misconstruction…. You will pardon me if I write as one somewhat moved. It makes me hate public life when I realize how powerless are the most faithful labors and the most upright conduct to protect any man from carping envy or malignant denunciations.”
Embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding the
Exchange and Review
piece did not stop Chase from writing twenty-five long letters that winter to the Boston writer John Trowbridge. His missives were designed to provide the foundation for a small inspirational book about his life,
The Ferry-Boy and the Financier.
An excerpt appeared that spring in the
Atlantic Monthly.
These letters were but a small part of a massive campaign to extol his own virtues at Lincoln’s expense. From early morning until late at night, Chase toiled to maintain his stream of correspondence with friends and supporters. “So far,” he told a friend in Cincinnati, “I think I have made few mistakes. Indeed, on looking back over the whole ground with an earnest desire to detect error and correct it, I am not able to see where, if I had to do my work all over again, I could in any matter do materially otherwise than I have.”
With Kate married and Nettie away at school, Chase resumed his sporadic correspondence with Charlotte Eastman. “I think of you constantly,” he assured her, “and—if any feeling is left in me—with the sincerest affection…. How I wish you were here in our house—in this little library room—and that we could talk, instead of this writing by myself, while you are—where?” Such romantic inclinations were probably never consummated. Similarly, though he enjoyed the company of Susan Walker, an educated “bluestocking” from Cincinnati, the relationship never seemed to deepen.
“I wish
you could come to Washington,” he wrote Miss Walker in late January, “though I could probably see so little of you that it would be difficult to tell which would be greater, the pleasure of seeing you, or the sensation of not seeing you enough.” Though Chase obviously admired both Eastman and Walker, his intense focus on his ambition for the presidency kept him from ever making the time to unbend in their company.
The second push in Chase’s race for the presidential nomination opened with the public announcement of a “Chase for President” committee. The committee, headed by Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy and a successful railroad agent, James Winchell, was another enterprise backed by Jay Cooke. In this case, however, Chase’s son-in-law, William Sprague, contributed the largest share of the funds. Pomeroy and Winchell were both committed abolitionists who believed Chase would best protect the rights of blacks. Their appearance of altruistic principle was compromised by the fact that they stood to benefit financially if Chase released funds for the construction of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad in which both held a large interest.
Lincoln’s old friend Judge David Davis was incensed that Chase was “eating a man’s bread and stabbing him at the same time.” Chase, unsurprisingly, viewed things differently. Since one-term presidencies had become the rule, Chase felt justified in presenting himself as an alternative. While the committee was being organized, Chase busied himself lining up support in Ohio, determined to avoid the humiliation he had suffered in 1860, when his own state had withheld its support.
Optimistic that he might defeat Lincoln, Chase told his old law partner Flamen Ball that he was immensely “gratified” by the newly formed committee and the quality of the people supporting his candidacy, for they tended to be “men of great weight.” Much would depend on the Buckeye State, for “if Ohio should express a preference for any other person, I would not allow my name to be used.” Should all go well, Chase believed he would put up a good fight against the president, for, sad to say, the prairie lawyer was simply not up to the job. “If to his kindliness of spirit and good sense he joined strong will and energetic action, there would be little left to wish for in him. As it is, I think that he will be likely to close his first term with more honor than he will the second, should he be reelected.”
Nor did Chase confine his criticisms of Lincoln to conversation and correspondence with trusted friends. Speaking with Gideon Welles early in February, he “lamented the want of energy and force by the President, which he said paralyzed everything.” Disregarding Welles’s silence, he went on to suggest that the president’s “weakness was crushing” the nation. When Welles still “did not respond to this distinct feeler,” Chase finally let the matter drop. Chase was equally indiscreet with Bates, seeming not to recognize that while the Attorney General occasionally criticized the president, he “immeasurably” preferred him to any other candidate.
Lincoln seemed unfazed by the machinations surrounding the race. Welles reported with delight an exchange with a “fair plump lady” who appeared in the hallway just before a cabinet meeting. She said she lived in Iowa and had come to get a look at the president. Hearing her story, Lincoln invited her into his office. “Well, in the matter of looking at one another,” said he with a smile and a chuckle, “I have altogether the advantage.”
In February, the Pomeroy Committee distributed a confidential circular to one hundred leading Republicans throughout the North. Intended to mobilize support for Chase, the circular opened with a slashing critique of the president, claiming that “even were the reelection of Mr. Lincoln desirable, it is practically impossible,” given the widespread opposition. Furthermore, “should he be reelected, his manifest tendency toward compromises and temporary expedients of policy will become stronger during a second term than it has been in the first.” The war would “continue to languish,” the country would be bankrupted, and “the dignity of the nation” would suffer. Therefore, in order to win the war, establish the peace, and “vindicate the honor of the republic,” it was essential that Republicans unite in nominating the one man with “more of the qualities needed in a President, during the next four years, than are combined in any other available candidate”—Salmon P. Chase.
When the Pomeroy circular was leaked to the press, it created a political explosion. Lincoln’s friends were furious, while Democrats celebrated the open division in Republican ranks. “No sensible man here is in doubt that Chase was privy to this,” David Davis told a friend. “They did not expect that it wd see the light so soon…. I wd dismiss him [from] the cabinet if it killed me.”
In a state of panic, Chase sent Lincoln a letter in which he claimed he “had no knowledge” of the circular until it was printed in the
Constitutional Union
on February 20. Though he had been approached by friends to use his name in the coming election, he had not been consulted about the formation of the Pomeroy Committee and was unfamiliar with its members. “You are not responsible for acts not your own,” he reminded Lincoln, “nor will you hold me responsible except for what I do or say myself.” Yet, he proclaimed, “if there is anything in my action or position which, in your judgment, will prejudice the public interest under my charge I beg you to say so. I do not wish to administer the Treasury Department one day without your entire confidence.”
It is unlikely that Lincoln believed Chase’s protestations of innocence. Indeed, a decade later, the circular’s author, James Winchell, testified that Chase had been fully informed about everything and had personally affirmed “that the arraignment of the Administration made in the circular was one which he thoroughly indorsed, and would sustain.” Still, Lincoln restrained his anger and carefully gauged his response, taking a dispassionate view of the situation. He understood the political landscape, he assured Bates. There was a number of malcontents within his own party who “would strike him at once, if they durst; but they fear that the blow would be ineffectual, and so, they would fall under his power, as
beaten enemies.”
So long as he remained confident that he had the public’s support, he could afford to let the game play out a little longer. Keeping Chase in suspense, Lincoln simply acknowledged receipt of the letter and promised to “answer a little more fully when I can find time to do so.” Then he sat back to measure the reaction of the people to the circular.
It did not take long. The morning it was printed, Welles correctly predicted: “Its recoil will be more dangerous I apprehend than its projectile. That is, it will damage Chase more than Lincoln.” Even papers friendly to Chase lamented the circular’s publication. “It is unworthy of the cause,” the
New York Times
proclaimed. “We protest against the spirit of this movement.” Four days later, Nicolay happily informed his fiancée, Therena, that the effect of the circular had been the opposite of what its authors intended, for “it has stirred up all Mr. Lincoln’s friends to active exertion,” seriously diminishing Chase’s prospects. In state after state, Republicans met and passed unanimous resolutions in favor of Lincoln’s renomination. Even in Pomeroy’s home state of Kansas, a counter-circular was distributed among Republicans that denounced the efforts to carry the state for Chase and rallied support for Lincoln.
Noting the “long list” of state legislatures that had come out for Lincoln, the
Times
acknowledged that the “universality of popular sentiment in favor of Mr. Lincoln’s reelection, is one of the most remarkable developments of the time…. The faith of the people in the sound judgment and honest purpose of Mr. Lincoln is as tenacious as if it were a veritable instinct. Nothing can overcome it or seriously weaken it. This power of attracting and holding popular confidence springs only from a rare combination of qualities. Very few public men in American history have possessed it in an equal degree with Abraham Lincoln.”
Harper’s Weekly
agreed. In an editorial endorsing the president’s reelection, it claimed that “among all the prominent men in our history from the beginning none have ever shown the power of understanding the popular mind so accurately as Mr. Lincoln.” In moving gradually toward emancipation, as he had done, the
Harper’s
editor observed, Lincoln understood that in a democracy, “every step he took must seem wise to the great public mind.” Thus, he had wisely nullified the premature proclamations issued by Frémont and Hunter, waiting until “the blood of sons and brothers and friends would wash clear a thousand eyes that had been blinded.” In his grudging fashion, even Lincoln’s critic Count Gurowski acknowledged the president’s hold on the people’s affections. “The masses are taken in by Lincoln’s
apparent
simplicity and good-naturedness, by his awkwardness, by his vulgar jokes, and, in the people’s belief, the great shifter is earnest and honest.”