Team of Rivals Booknote

《Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln》

/Doris Kearns Goodwin

Introduction

All four studied law, became distinguished orators, entered politics, and opposed the spread of slavery. Their upward climb was one followed by many thousands who left the small towns of their birth to seek opportunity and adventure in the rapidly growing cities of a dynamic, expanding America.
When Lincoln won the nomination, each of his celebrated rivals believed the wrong man had been chosen. Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled his first reception of the news that the “comparatively unknown name of Lincoln” had been selected: “we heard the result coldly and sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local reputation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious times.”
The comparative perspective suggests a different interpretation. When viewed against the failed efforts of his rivals, it is clear that Lincoln won the nomination because he was shrewdest and canniest of them all. More accustomed to relying upon himself to shape events, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination, displaying a fierce ambition, an exceptional political acumen, and a wide range of emotional strengths, forged in the crucible of personal hardship, that took his unsuspecting rivals by surprise.
与竞争对手的失败努力相比，林肯显然赢得了提名，因为他是其中最精明、最狡猾的人。他更习惯于依靠自己来塑造事件，在提名过程中发挥了最大的控制作用，展现出强烈的野心、卓越的政治智慧和广泛的情感力量，这些力量是在个人苦难的熔炉中锻造而成的，让毫无戒心的竞争对手大吃一惊。
Every member of this administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln. Their presence in the cabinet might have threatened to eclipse the obscure prairie lawyer from Springfield.
这届政府中的每一位成员都比林肯更出名、受教育程度更高，在公共生活中更有经验。他们进入内阁可能会使这位来自斯普林菲尔德的默默无闻的草原律师黯然失色。
Seward was the first to appreciate Lincoln’s remarkable talents, quickly realizing the futility of his plan to relegate the president to a figurehead role. In the months that followed, Seward would become Lincoln’s closest friend and advisor in the administration. Though Bates initially viewed Lincoln as a well-meaning but incompetent administrator, he eventually concluded that the president was an unmatched leader, “very near being a perfect man.” Edwin Stanton, who had treated Lincoln with contempt at their initial acquaintance, developed a great respect for the commander in chief and was unable to control his tears for weeks after the president’s death. Even Chase, whose restless ambition for the presidency was never realized, at last acknowledged that Lincoln had outmaneuvered him.
西沃德是第一个欣赏林肯非凡才能的人，他很快意识到自己让总统担任傀儡角色的计划是徒劳的。在随后的几个月里，西沃德成为了林肯政府中最亲密的朋友和顾问。尽管贝茨最初认为林肯是一个善意但无能的管理者，但他最终得出结论，这位总统是一位无可匹敌的领袖，“非常接近于一个完美的人”。埃德温·斯坦顿在最初认识林肯时曾对他不屑一顾，但最终对这位总司令产生了极大的敬意，在总统去世后的几个星期里，他都无法控制自己的眼泪。甚至连从未实现对总统宝座渴望的蔡斯，最终也承认林肯比他更胜一筹。
This, then, is a story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that, left untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease; and to learn from mistakes.
修复受伤的感情，否则这些感情可能会升级为永久性的敌意；为下属的失败承担责任；轻松地分享荣誉；并从错误中吸取教训。
But melancholy differs from depression. It is not an illness; it does not proceed from a specific cause; it is an aspect of one’s nature.
It has been recognized by artists and writers for centuries as a potential source of creativity and achievement.
Moreover, Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress.
此外，林肯对自己情绪的转变有着不可思议的洞察力，他有着深刻的自我意识，这使他能够找到建设性的方法来缓解悲伤和压力。
当怨恨和争论威胁要摧毁他的政府时，他拒绝被微不足道的不满激怒，拒绝屈服于嫉妒，也不愿沉溺于自认的轻慢。尽管他每天面临着可怕的压力，他仍然对自己国家的事业保持着坚定的信念。
As a young man, Lincoln worried that the “field of glory” had been harvested by the founding fathers, that nothing had been left for his generation but modest ambitions.
Without the march of events that led to the Civil War, Lincoln still would have been a good man, but most likely would never have been publicly recognized as a great man. It was history that gave him the opportunity to manifest his greatness, providing the stage that allowed him to shape and transform our national life.
作为一个年轻人，林肯担心“光荣的战场”已经被开国元勋们收割了，留给他们这一代人的只有微不足道的野心。
如果没有导致内战的事件，林肯仍然会是一个好人，但很可能永远不会被公认为伟人。是历史给了他展现伟大的机会，提供了舞台，让他能够塑造和改变我们的国家生活。
After living with the subject of Abraham Lincoln for a decade, however, reading what he himself wrote and what hundreds of others have written about him, following the arc of his ambition, and assessing the inevitable mixture of human foibles and strengths that made up his temperament, after watching him deal with the terrible deprivations of his childhood, the deaths of his children, and the horror that engulfed the entire nation, I find that after nearly two centuries, the uniquely American story of Abraham Lincoln has unequalled power to captivate the imagination and to inspire emotion.

1 Four Men Waiting

His features, even supporters conceded, were not such “as belong to a handsome man.” In repose, his face was “so overspread with sadness,” the reporter Horace White noted, that it seemed as if “Shakespeare’s melancholy Jacques had been translated from the forest of Arden to the capital of Illinois.” Yet, when Lincoln began to speak, White observed, “this expression of sorrow dropped from him instantly. His face lighted up with a winning smile, and where I had a moment before seen only leaden sorrow I now beheld keen intelligence, genuine kindness of heart, and the promise of true friendship.” If his appearance seemed somewhat odd, what captivated admirers, another contemporary observed, was “his winning manner, his ready good humor, and his unaffected kindness and gentleness.” Five minutes in his presence, and “you cease to think that he is either homely or awkward.”
“The adornments were few, but chastely appropriate,” one contemporary observer noted. In the center hall stood “the customary little table with a white marble top,” on which were arranged flowers, a silver-plated ice-water pitcher, and family photographs.
“Everything,” a journalist observed, “tended to represent the home of a man who has battled hard with the fortunes of life, and whose hard experience had taught him to enjoy whatever of success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in showy display.”
一位当时的观察家指出，“装饰很少，但端庄得体。”中央大厅里摆着“一张带有白色大理石桌面的通常的小桌子”，上面摆放着鲜花、一个镀银冰水罐和家庭照片。墙边摆放着几把椅子和一张沙发。一位记者评论道，“所有东西都表明，这是一个与生活搏斗的人的家，他艰苦的经历教会了他享受属于他的成功，他更注重实质而不是炫耀。”
在这些欢快的场合中，林肯总是大家关注的焦点。没有人能比得上他源源不断的故事，也没有人能比得上他如此有感染力地讲述这些故事。
历史学家罗伯特·威伯（Robert Wiebe）观察到，这些年间，政治生活“瓦解成了由相互信任联系在一起的一群人”。没有哪个政治圈比林肯在芝加哥的同胞们更忠诚了。
林肯自豪地宣称：“我们聚集了来自四面八方的奇怪、不和谐甚至敌对的力量，并团结起来战斗。”
Furthermore, in an age when speech-making prowess was central to political success, when the spoken word filled the air “from sun-up til sundown,” Lincoln’s stirring oratory had earned the admiration of a far-flung audience who had either heard him speak or read his speeches in the paper.
此外，在演讲才能是政治成功核心的时代，在“从早到晚”的演讲充斥着空气的时代，林肯的煽动性演说赢得了广大听众的钦佩，这些听众要么听过他的演讲，要么在报纸上读过他的演讲稿。
The following week, the powerful Chicago Press and Tribune formally endorsed Lincoln, arguing that his moderate politics represented the thinking of most people, that he would come into the contest “with no clogs, no embarrassment,” an “honest man” who represented all the “fundamentals of Republicanism,” with “due respect for the rights of the South.”
一周后，强大的芝加哥《新闻报》正式支持林肯，称他的温和政治代表了大多数人的想法，他将“毫无阻碍、毫无尴尬地”参加竞选，他是一个“诚实的人”，代表了共和党的“基本原则”，对“南方的权利给予应有的尊重”。
Still, Lincoln clearly understood that he was “new in the field,” that outside of Illinois he was not “the first choice of a very great many.” His only political experience on the national level consisted of two failed Senate races and a single term in Congress that had come to an end nearly a dozen years earlier.
尽管如此，林肯清楚地意识到，他“初入政坛”，在伊利诺伊州以外，他并不是“很多人的第一选择”。他在国家层面的唯一政治经验就是两次参议员竞选失败，以及十多年前结束的一个国会议员任期。
Lincoln’s strategy was to give offense to no one. He wanted to leave the delegates “in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”
“We are laboring to make you the second choice of all the Delegations we can, where we can’t make you first choice,” Scott County delegate Nathan Knapp told Lincoln when he first arrived in Chicago. “Keep a good nerve,” Knapp advised, “be not surprised at any result—but I tell you that your chances are not the worst…brace your nerves for any result.” Knapp’s message was followed by one from Davis himself on the second day of the convention. “Am very hopeful,” he warned Lincoln, but “dont be Excited.”
他希望让代表们“在不得不放弃第一选择时，仍然愿意选择我们”。
林肯刚到芝加哥时，斯科特县代表内森·纳普就告诉他：“我们正在努力让你成为所有代表团的第二选择，而不是第一选择。”“保持冷静，”纳普建议道，“不要对任何结果感到惊讶——但我告诉你，你的机会并不差……无论结果如何，都要保持冷静。”纳普的话之后，戴维斯在大会第二天也发出了信息：“我非常乐观，”他警告林肯，但“不要激动。”
几十年前，西沃德亲手种下了每一棵树，现在这些树已经有几百棵了。他花费了成千上万个小时给这些开花的灌木施肥、培土。他用“爱人的兴趣”每天检查它们。他的园艺热情与林肯形成了鲜明对比，林肯对在斯普林菲尔德的家中种植树木或花卉毫无兴趣。林肯在父亲的农场里度过了自己的童年，每天长时间劳作，他觉得耕种土地没什么浪漫或娱乐可言。
A natural politician, Seward was genuinely interested in people, curious about their families and the smallest details of their lives, anxious to help with their problems. As a public man he possessed unusual resilience, enabling him to accept criticism with good-humored serenity.
西沃德是一位天生的政治家，他真正关心人民，对他们的家庭和生活中的细枝末节都感到好奇，急切地想帮助他们解决问题。作为一名公众人物，他具有不同寻常的适应能力，能够以幽默的泰然自若接受批评。
So certain was Seward of receiving the nomination that the weekend before the convention opened he had already composed a first draft of the valedictory speech he expected to make to the Senate, assuming that he would resign his position as soon as the decision in Chicago was made.
Auburn was the only place, he claimed, where he was left “free to act in an individual and not in a representative and public character,” the only place where he felt “content to live, and content, when life’s fitful fever shall be over, to die.”
他声称，奥本镇是唯一一个他可以“自由地以个人而非代表和公众的身份行事”的地方，也是唯一一个他觉得“愿意生活并愿意在生命的短暂激情褪去后平静地死去”的地方。
She was Seward’s intellectual equal, a devoted wife and mother, a calming presence in his stormy life.
年轻的共和党领导人卡尔·舒尔茨后来回忆说，他和他的朋友们理想化了西沃德，认为他是“政治反奴隶制运动的领袖。从他那里，我们在斗争的混乱中得到了战斗的口号，因为他就是那种有时会走在公众舆论前面，而不是驯服地跟随它的脚印的人。
In a time when words, communicated directly and then repeated in newspapers, were the primary means of communication between a political leader and the public, Seward’s ability to “compress into a single sentence, a single word, the whole issue of a controversy” would irrevocably, and often dangerously, create a political identity.
Over the years, his ringing phrases, calling upon a “higher law” than the Constitution that commanded men to freedom, or the assertion that the collision between the North and South was “an irrepressible conflict,” became, as the young Schurz noted, “the inscriptions on our banners, the pass-words of our combatants.”
It was rhetoric, more than substance, that had stamped Seward as a radical—for his actual positions in 1860 were not far from the center of the Republican Party.
Such flamboyance and celebrity almost lent an aura of inevitability to his nomination.
If Seward remained serene as the hours passed to afternoon, secure in the belief that he was about to realize the goal toward which he had bent his formidable powers for so many years,
They made an exceptional team. Seward was more visionary, more idealistic, better equipped to arouse the emotions of a crowd; Weed was more practical, more realistic, more skilled in winning elections and getting things done.
While Seward conceived party platforms and articulated broad principles, Weed built the party organization, dispensed patronage, rewarded loyalists, punished defectors, developed poll lists, and carried voters to the polls, spreading the influence of the boss over the entire state.
; others disdained him as an opportunist, shifting ground to strengthen his own ambition.
the closer one studied Chase’s good-looking face, the more one noticed the unattractive droop of the lid of his right eye, creating “an arresting duality, as if two men, rather than one, looked out upon the world.”
而蔡斯英俊的面孔越看越让人注意到他右眼的眼皮耷拉下来，造成“一种引人注目的二重性，好像有两个男人，而不是一个人，在凝视着这个世界”。
Nor was he willing to wear his glasses in public, though he was so nearsighted that he would often pass friends on the street without displaying the slightest recognition.
The morning meal done, he and his elder daughter, Kate, would repair to the library to read and discuss the morning papers, searching together for signs that people across the country regarded Chase as highly as he regarded himself—signs that would bolster their hope for the Republican nomination.
Never late for appointments, he had no patience with the sin of tardiness, which robbed precious minutes of life from the person who was kept waiting.
Chase had filled his palatial house with exquisite carpets, carved parlor chairs, elegant mirrors, and rich draperies that important people of his time ought to display to prove their eminence to the world at large.
Her father’s ambitions and dreams became the ruling passions of her life. She gradually made herself absolutely essential to him, helping with his correspondence, editing his speeches, discussing political strategy, entertaining his friends and colleagues. While other girls her age focused on the social calendar of balls and soirées, she concentrated all her energies on furthering her father’s political career.
她父亲的雄心壮志和梦想成为她一生的主导激情。她逐渐变得对他不可或缺，帮助他处理信件，编辑他的演讲稿，讨论政治策略，招待他的朋友和同事。当同龄女孩专注于舞会和晚会的社交日程时，她把所有的精力都放在促进父亲的政治生涯上。
Yet if Chase was somewhat priggish and more self-righteous than Seward, he was more inflexibly attached to his guiding principles, which, for more than a quarter of a century, had encompassed an unflagging commitment to the cause of the black man. Whereas the more accommodating Seward could have been a successful politician in almost any age, Chase functioned best in an era when dramatic moral issues prevailed.
The slavery debate of the antebellum period allowed Chase to argue his antislavery principles in biblical terms of right and wrong. Chase was actually more radical than Seward on the slavery issue, but because his speeches were not studded with memorable turns of phrase, his positions were not as notorious in the country at large, and, therefore, not as damaging in more moderate circles.
然而，如果说蔡斯比西沃德更自命不凡、更自以为是，那么他也更顽固地坚持自己的指导原则。在超过四分之一个世纪的时间里，这些原则始终包含着对黑人民主事业的不懈承诺。而相比之下，西沃德则可能成为任何一个时代都成功的政治家。蔡斯在戏剧性的道德问题占据主导地位的时代，才能发挥最佳作用。
内战前关于奴隶制的辩论，使蔡斯能够用对与错的圣经语言来阐述他的反奴隶制原则。实际上，在奴隶制问题上，蔡斯比西沃德的立场更为激进，但由于他的演讲中没有令人难忘的措辞，他的立场在全国范围内并不那么臭名昭著，因此，在较为温和的圈子中，他的立场也没有那么具有破坏性。
“There may have been abler statesmen than Chase, and there certainly were more agreeable companions,” his biographer Albert Hart has asserted, “but none of them contributed so much to the stock of American political ideas as he.”
他的传记作者阿尔伯特·哈特断言：“也许有比蔡斯更优秀的政治家，也肯定有比蔡斯更合意的伙伴，但是他们中没有人像蔡斯那样为美国的政治思想宝库做出了如此巨大的贡献。”
Kate entered, greeted him, “and then let herself down upon her chair with the graceful lightness of a bird that, folding its wings, perches upon the branch of a tree…. She had something imperialin the pose of the head, and all her movements possessed an exquisite natural charm. No wonder that she came to be admired as a great beauty and broke many hearts.”
Quickly he regained control and proceeded to deliver a powerful brief demonstrating why he, rather than Seward, deserved to be considered the true leader of the antislavery forces. Schurz remained unconvinced, but he listened politely, certain that he had never before met a public man with such a serious case of “presidential fever,” to the extent of “honestly believing that he owed it to the country and that the country owed it to him that he should be President.”
The judge’s orderly life was steeped in solid rituals based on the seasons, the land, and his beloved family. He bathed in cold water every morning. A supper bell called him to eat every night. In the first week of April, he “substituted cotton for wollen socks, and a single breasted satin waistcoat for a double-breasted velvet.” In July and August, he would monitor the progress of his potatoes, cabbage, squash, beets, and sweet corn. In the fall he would harvest his grape arbors.
与西沃德和蔡斯形成鲜明对比的是，贝茨的精力没有在家人的怀抱中得到充分的释放，而蔡斯则终其一生都被未实现的野心所困扰。贝茨对当下充满激情，满足于称自己为“一个非常居家、顾家的男人”。
因此，随着1860年大选的临近，他认为，与他的青年时期和成年早期一样，他对政治职务的长期抱负早已离他远去。
Blair Senior had broken with the Democrats after the Mexican War over the extension of slavery into the territories. Although born and bred in the South, and still a slaveowner himself, he had become convinced that slavery must not be extended beyond where it already existed. He was one of the first important political figures to call for the founding of the Republican Party.
Unsurprisingly, Bates was initially reluctant to allow his name to be put forward as a candidate for president. “I feel, tho’ in perfect bodily health, an indolence and indecision not common with me,” he conceded in July 1859.
I must try to resist the temptation, and not allow my thoughts to be drawn off from the common channels of business and domestic cares.
Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheet a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character.
Gradually, however, as letters and newspaper editorials advocating his candidacy crowded in upon him, a desire for the highest office in the land took command of his nature. The office to which he heard the call was not, as he had once disdained, “a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member,” but the presidency of the United States.
Truly, if I can do my country that much good, I will rejoice in the belief that I have not lived in vain.
There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.

2 The “Longing to Rise”

THE “LONGING TO RISE”
The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents. “When both the privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile,” marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, “the idea of progress comes naturally into each man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.”
OF THE CONTENDERS, William Henry Seward enjoyed the most privileged childhood. Blessed with a sanguine temperament that seemingly left him free from inner turmoil, he launched himself into every endeavor with unbounded vitality—whether competing for honors in school, playing cards with his classmates, imbibing good food and wine, or absorbing the pleasures of travel.
The regime imposed by the schoolmaster was rigorous. When young Henry faltered in his translations of Caesar or failed to decipher lines of Virgil’s poetry, he was relegated to a seat on the floor “with the classic in one hand and the dictionary in the other.” Although sometimes the pressure was “more than [he] could bear,” he persisted, knowing that his father would never accept failure.
After the isolated hours consumed by books, Henry delighted in the sociability of winter evenings, when, he recalled, “the visit of a neighbor brought out the apples, nuts, and cider, and I was indulged with a respite from study, and listened to conversation, which generally turned upon politics or religion!” His pleasure in these social gatherings left Seward with a lifelong memory and appetite. Years later, when he established his own home, he filled evenings with a continuous flow of guests, always providing abundant food, drink, and conversation.
Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why “no other black children went there.” More disturbing still, he discovered that one of his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. “He was pursued and brought back,” Seward recalled, and was forced to wear “an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule,” until he finally “found means to break the collar, and fled forever.” Seward later would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves’ plight for his resolve to fight against slavery.
虽然他的父母很早就在蔡斯灌输了这种想要出类拔萃和与众不同的渴望，但这种不眠之志却被19世纪20年代充满活力的美国社会火上浇油。历史学家乔伊斯·阿普尔比（Joyce Appleby）写道，来自欧洲的游客“看到了一个几乎完全由雄心勃勃的梦想所引导的社会的新奇之处，这些梦想在革命后被成千上万人（其中大多数是穷人和年轻人）的热烈想象力所释放。” Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions.
At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York’s prestigious Union College. His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to him “a magnificent palace…a prodigy of power.” His first glimpse of Albany, then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him—“so vast, so splendid, so imposing.” Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial development of his rapidly expanding country.
Years later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: “Need I say that we entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?”
Accustomed to winning the highest honors, Seward was initially chagrined to discover that his legal arguments failed to bring the loudest applause. His confidence as a writer faltered until a fellow law student, whose orations “always carried away the audience,” insisted that the problem was not Henry’s compositions, which were, in fact, far superior to his own, but his husky voice, which a congenital inflammation in the throat rendered “incapable of free intonation.”
He had read more extensively than anyone Seward knew and excelled as a scholar in the classics. “The domains of History, Eloquence, Poetry, Fiction & Song,” Seward marveled, “were all subservient to his command.” Berdan had entered into the study of law at the same office as Seward, but soon discovered that his vocation lay in writing, not law.
Such intimate male attachments, as Seward’s with Berdan, or, as we shall see, Lincoln’s with Joshua Speed and Chase’s with Edwin Stanton, were “a common feature of the social landscape” in nineteenth-century America, the historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered life led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence. As the young men of Seward and Lincoln’s generation left the familiarity of their small communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing, anonymous cities or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably lonely. In the absence of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for support, sharing thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate friendships developed the qualities of passionate romances.
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.
He governed his large family without a single “angry word or violent e[x]clamation from his lips.” Chase long remembered a day when he was playing a game of ninepins with his friends. His father interrupted, saying he needed his son’s help in the field. The boy hesitated. “Won’t you come and help your father?” That was all that needed to be said. “Only a look…. All my reluctance vanished and I went with a right good will. He ruled by kind words & kind looks.”
At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they afforded.”
在主日学校，他努力记住比班上其他任何人都多的《圣经》段落，“有一次，他在背诵中准确无误地重复了整篇福音书。”蔡斯渴望展示自己的能力，他向成年人吹嘘，他喜欢学习大量古代历史，并阅读莎士比亚的戏剧，“为了享受它们带来的乐趣”。
From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows.
The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”
The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal. He was “often very harsh & severe,” recalled Chase, and “among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite tyrannical.” The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical precept.
Even Chase’s sympathetic biographer Robert Warden observed that his “life might have been happier” had he “studied less and had more fun!” These early years witnessed the development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life, prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companionship of others.
No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to me to have been wasted.”
The problem with teaching, he observed, was that any “drunken, miserable dog who could thre’d the mazes of the Alphabet” could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the “profession of teachers into utter contempt.” Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the glittering whirl of Washington life. “I have always thought,” he confessed, “that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more than falls to the lot of all men to achieve.”
sleepless ambition
Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of his pupils.
Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, “under the clusters of the multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and pointed out…the stars.”
Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, “under the clusters of the multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and pointed out…the stars.”
His brother Alexander warned him that of all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation: success required mastery of “thousands of volumes” from “centuries long past,” including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary history. “In fine, you must become a universal scholar.” Despite the fact that this description was not an accurate portrait of the course most law students of the day embarked upon, typically, Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. “Day and night must be witness to the assiduity of my labours,” he vowed in his diary; “knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation…. Future scenes of triumph may yet be mine.”
“You will be a distinguished writer,” he assured Chase. “I am sure of it—You have all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk.”
“You will be a distinguished writer,” he assured Chase. “I am sure of it—You have all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk.”
“God [prospering] my exertions, I will imitate your example.”
After hearing the great Daniel Webster speak before the Supreme Court, “his voice deep and sonorous; and his sentiments high and often sublime,” he promised himself that if “any degree of industry would enable me to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils.”
Neither his opportunities nor his impressive discipline yielded Chase much in the way of satisfaction. Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough.
Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough.
The more successful Chase became, the more his pious family fretted over his relentless desire for earthly success and distinction. “I confess I almost tremble for you,” his elder sister Abigail wrote him when he was twenty-four years old, “as I observe your desire to distinguish yourself and apparent devotedness to those pursuits whose interests terminate in this life.” If his sister hoped that a warm family life would replace his ambition with love, her hopes were brutally crushed by the fates that brought him to love and lose three young wives.
Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He had not pushed her firmly enough toward God. “Oh if I had not contented myself with a few conversations on the subject of religion,” he lamented in his diary, “if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion…she might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone.”
His guilt rekindled his religious commitment, producing a “second conversion,” a renewed determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.
As a six-year-old boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the “very narrow circumstances” of his mother, left Thomas “a wandering laboring boy,” growing up “litterally without education.” He was working as a rough carpenter and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman of uncertain ancestry.
In later life, Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult circumstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence…you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”
The impact of the loss depended upon each man’s temperament and the unique circumstances of his family. The death of Chase’s father forced young Salmon to exchange the warm support of a comfortable home for the rigid boarding school of a domineering uncle, a man who bestowed or withdrew approval and affection on the basis of performance. An insatiable need for acknowledgment and the trappings of success thenceforth marked Chase’s personality. Carl Schurz perceived this aspect of Chase’s temperament when he commented that, despite all the high honors Chase eventually achieved, he was never satisfied. “He restlessly looked beyond for the will-of-the-wisp, which deceitfully danced before his gaze.”
When Sarah Bush Johnston, Lincoln’s new stepmother, returned with Thomas, she found the abandoned children living like animals, “wild—ragged and dirty.” Only after they were soaped, washed, and dressed did they seem to her “more human.”
Within a decade, Lincoln would suffer another shattering loss when his sister Sarah died giving birth. A relative recalled that when Lincoln was told of her death, he “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.” He had lost the two women he had loved. “From then on,” a neighbor said, “he was alone in the world you might say.”
In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.
Lincoln’s early intimacy with tragic loss reinforced a melancholy temperament. Yet his familiarity with pain and personal disappointment imbued him with a strength and understanding of human frailty unavailable to a man of Seward’s buoyant disposition. Moreover, Lincoln, unlike the brooding Chase, possessed a life-affirming humor and a profound resilience that lightened his despair and fortified his will.
Even as a child, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. From the outset he was cognizant of a destiny far beyond that of his unlettered father and hardscrabble childhood. “He was different from those around him,” the historian Douglas Wilson writes. “He knew he was unusually gifted and had great potential.” To the eyes of his schoolmates, Lincoln was “clearly exceptional,” Lincoln biographer David Donald observes, “and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.”
即使在孩提时代，林肯也梦想着成为英雄。从一开始，他就意识到自己的命运远非目不识丁的父亲和艰难的童年所能比拟的。“他不同于周围的人，”历史学家道格拉斯·威尔逊写道，“他知道自己天赋异禀，拥有巨大的潜力。”在同学的眼中，林肯“显然与众不同”，林肯传记作者大卫·唐纳德评论道，“他在短暂的求学经历中培养出了一种自信，相信自己从未遇到过智力相当的对手。”
If Lincoln’s developing self-confidence was fostered initially by his mother’s love and approval, it was later sustained by his stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own child. Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” Though uneducated herself, she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow. “His mind & mine—what little I had seemed to run together—move in the same channel,” she later said. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. He was Kind to Every body and Every thing and always accommodate[d] others if he could—would do so willingly if he could.” Young Lincoln’s self-assurance was enhanced by his physical size and strength, qualities that were valued highly on the frontier. “He was a strong, athletic boy,” one friend related, “good-natured, and ready to out-run, out-jump and outwrestle or out-lift anybody in the neighborhood.”
He had discovered the pride and pleasure an attentive audience could bestow. This great storytelling talent and oratorical skill would eventually constitute his stock-in-trade throughout both his legal and political careers. The passion for rendering experience into powerful language remained with Lincoln throughout his life.
He had never even set foot “inside of a college or academy building” until he acquired his license to practice law. What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his own.
When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, “the great mass of men…were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement.” To liberate “the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.”
As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.
Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.
The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln’s rivals enjoyed and the hardships he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln’s book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by his reading; there were few to talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his mind.
While Lincoln’s stepmother took “particular Care not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till [he] quit of his own accord,” his father needed help with the tiresome chores of felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, weeding, and planting.
Lincoln’s relationship with his father grew strained, particularly when his last chance for schooling was foreclosed by his father’s decision to hire him out. He labored for various neighbors butchering hogs, digging wells, and clearing land in order to satisfy a debt the family had incurred. Such conflict between father and son was played out in thousands of homes as the “self-made” men in Lincoln’s generation sought to pursue ambitions beyond the cramped lives of their fathers.
What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration.
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
Wedded to him, not through union, 与他结婚，不是通过婚姻 But through separation. 但通过分离。
Her intellect was said to be “quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.”
They shared an understanding, according to friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female Academy at Jacksonville.
After Ann’s death, Abraham seemed “indifferent, to transpiring Events,” one neighbor recalled, “had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self.” Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had “never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did.” His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never “be reconcile[d],” he said, “to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her grave.” Acquaintances feared he had become “temporarily deranged,” and that unless he pulled himself together, “reason would desert her throne.”
Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his sister, and Ann.
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”
To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.
“But, unfortunately I am not spiritual enough to find support in these reflections.”
Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. “I never saw a sadder face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met, Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed. Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln’s concluding words. Turning to Lincoln, Speed said: “You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to Speed’s unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. “Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, ‘Well, Speed, I am moved!’”
Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relationship, talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long rides in the countryside.
The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds—with the exception of Judge David Davis, whose immense girth left no room for a companion. As the historian Donald Yacovone writes in his study of the fiercely expressed love and devotion among several abolitionist leaders in the same era, the “preoccupation with elemental sex” reveals more about later centuries “than about the nineteenth.”
Here in Springfield he would carry forward the twin careers that would occupy most of his life: law and politics. His accomplishments in escaping the confines of his barren, death-battered childhood and his relentless self-education required luck, a stunning audacity, and a breadth of intelligence that was only beginning to reveal itself.

3 The Lure of Politics

IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human association from the smallest village to the nation’s capital, it was natural that politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.
“Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government,” Tocqueville wrote. “To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows…. An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly.”
“Who can wonder,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, “for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”
Proponents of Barton, including Bates, eventually coalesced into the Whig Party, while the Bentonites became Democrats. The Whigs favored public support for internal improvements designed to foster business in a new market economy. Their progressive agenda included protective tariffs, and a national banking system to develop and strengthen the resources of the country. The Democrats, with their base of power in the agrarian South, resisted these measures, appealing instead to the interests of the common man against the bankers, the lawyers, and the merchants.
Despite these connections, Julia had little interest in politics. Her attentions were fully focused on her family. Her surviving letters, unlike those of Frances Seward, said nothing about the issues of the day, concentrating instead on her children’s activities, their eating habits, their games, their broken bones. Her entire being, Darby observed, “was calculated to impart happiness around the domestic circle.”
his pleasure in the victory was dimmed by the necessity of leaving home and hearth.
Disquiet returned a hundredfold when he departed on the lonely journey to take up his congressional seat in Washington, leaving his pregnant wife and small son at home. Writing from various taverns and boardinghouses along the way, he confessed that he was in “something of a melancholy and melting mood.” There was a “magic” in her loveliness, which left him “like a schoolboy lover” in the absence of his “dear Julia.” Now, after only a few weeks away, he was moved to cry, “a plague upon the vanity of petty ambition! Were I great enough to sway the destinies of the nation, the meed of ambition might be worth the sacrifice which it requires; but a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member, is a contemptible price for the happiness which we enjoy with each other. It was always your opinion, & now I feel it to be true.”
“There is an intuitive perception about him, that seems to see & understand at a glance, and a winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who associate with him.”
Benton had introduced a bill under which the federal government would make its lands available to settlers at a price so low that it was almost free. Cheap land, he argued, would bridle the rampant speculation that profited the few over the many. Barton countered with the claim that such cheap land would depress the entire Western economy.
During the dispute over public lands, Bates published a pamphlet denouncing Benton that so angered “Old Bullion,” as he was known, that the two men did not speak for nearly a quarter of a century. “My piece is burning into his reputation,” Bates told Julia, “like aquafortis upon iron—the mark can never be effaced.” Beyond his open quarrel with Benton, Bates got along well with his colleagues. His natural warmth and easy manner created respect and affection. Night sessions he found particularly amusing and intriguing, despite the “roaring disorder” of people “hawking, coughing, thumping with their canes & kicking about spit boxes.” The hall, suffused with candlelight from members’ desks, and from the massive chandelier suspended from the domed ceiling, “exhibit[ed] a most magnificent appearance.”
“Oh! How I long to see & press you to my bosom,” he told Julia, “if it were but for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision—I see you with such vivid and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye.” In letter after letter, the physical immediacy of their relationship becomes clear. Responding to Julia’s admission of her own downcast spirits, he wrote: “O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine.”
His charming diary, faithfully recorded for more than three decades, provides a vivid testament to his domestic preoccupations. While ruminations upon ambition, success, and power are ubiquitous in Chase’s introspective diary, Bates focused on the details of everyday life, the comings and goings of his children, the progress of his garden, and the social events in his beloved St. Louis. His interest in history, he once observed, lay less in the usual records of wars and dynasties than in the more neglected areas of domestic laws, morals, and social manners.
“A new faculty,” Bates recorded, “is given to one who seemed to have been cut off from one of the chief blessings of humanity.”
He reminded himself that he must not “begrudge her the short respite” from the innumerable tasks of caring for a large family. Giving birth to seventeen children in thirty-two years, Julia was pregnant throughout nearly all her childbearing years.
His entries proudly record the first gas illumination of the streets, the transmission of the first telegraph between St. Louis and the eastern cities, and the first day that a railroad train moved west of the Mississippi.
Beyond commentary on his family and his city, Bates filled the pages of his diary with observations of the changing seasons, the progress of his flowers, and the phases of the moon. He celebrated the first crocus each year, his elm trees shedding seed, oaks in full tassel, tulips in their prime. So vivid are his descriptions of his garden that the reader can almost hear the rustling leaves of fall, or “the frogs…croaking, in full chorus” that filled the spring nights. With an acute eye he observed that plants change color with age. Meticulously noting variation and difference, he never felt that he was repeating the same patterns of activity year after year. He was a contented man.
Yet so skillfully and impartially did he conduct the proceedings and so eloquently did he make the case for internal improvements and development of the inland waterways that he “leaped at one bound into national prominence.” On a much smaller scale, Lincoln impressed the audience with his clever rebuttal of the arguments against public support for internal improvements advanced by Democrat Field.
No complete record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters, Weed confessed, were “too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of Reporting.”
Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad “between sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity.” He called on the various regions of the nation to speak in “voices of moderation and compromise, for only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness.”
“The immense assembly,” Bates noted in his diary, “seemed absolutely mesmerized—their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity. And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness again.”
Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been “flattered,” his “pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have withdrawn.” The experience was “more full of public honor & private gratification than any passage of my life…those three days at Chicago have given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of Congress.”
“The nation cannot afford to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism,” Weed concluded at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political life.
While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention’s close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called “the glittering bauble” of political success. Declining Weed’s appeal that he return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed to Weed, he had entertained such “noble aspirations” to make his mind “the mind of other men.” But these desires were now gone, his “habits formed and stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life.” Consequently, there was “no office in the gift of prince or people” that he would accept. His refusal, he explained, was “the natural result” of his social position, his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.
SEWARD WAS NEXT to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years of practicing law that he “had no ambition for its honors.” Though resigned to his profession “with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never suspected,” he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case. He was discovering, he said, that “politics was the important and engrossing business of the country.”
A classic example of a self-made man, he no sooner identified an obstacle to his progress than he worked with discipline to counteract it. Concerned that he lacked a native facility for remembering names and appointments, and believing that “a politician who sees a man once should remember him forever,” Weed consciously trained his memory. He spent fifteen minutes every night telling his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnemonics worked, for Weed soon became known as a man with a phenomenal recall. Gifted with abundant energy, shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as powerful political boss, familiarly known as “the Dictator.”
Such measures, Seward believed, along with a national banking system and protective tariffs, would enable the nation to “strengthen its foundations, increase its numbers, develop its resources, and extend its dominion.”
“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was “just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure…every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave unsaid three fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany.”
Seward at first reciprocated Tracy’s feelings, professing a “rapturous joy” in discovering that his friend shared the “feelings which I had become half ashamed for their effeminancy to confess I possessed.”
In time, however, Tracy’s intensity began to wear on the relationship. When Seward did not immediately respond to one of his letters, Tracy penned a petulant note. “My feelings confined in narrow channels have outstripped yours which naturally are more diffused—I was foolish enough to make an almost exclusive attachment the measure for one which is…divided with many.”
“Love—cruel tyrant as he is,” Tracy reminded Seward, “has made reciprocity both the bond and aliment of our most hallowed affections.”
Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,” increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently constituted.”
“He certainly knows more than any man I ever was acquainted with.” His conversation, she marveled, “reminds me of a book of synonyms. He hardly ever makes use of the same words to express ideas that have a shade of difference.”
Though there is no indication that Frances and Tracy ever shared a physical relationship, they had entered into something that was considered, in the subtle realm of Victorian social mores, almost as shameful and inappropriate—a private emotional intimacy.
“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government,” he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment…that men are capable of self-government.”
“What a demon is this ambition,” he lamented from Albany, baring his soul in a long, emotional letter to his wife. Ambition had led him to stray, he now realized, “in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who purely loves me.” He confessed that he had thought her love only “an incident” among his many passions, when, in truth, it was “the chief good” of his life. This realization, he feared, had come too late “to win back” her love: “I banished you from my heart. I made it so desolate, so destitute of sympathy for you, of everything which you ought to have found there, that you could no longer dwell in it, and when the wretched T. [Tracy] took advantage of my madness and offered sympathies, and feelings and love such as I [never did], and your expelled heart was half won by his falsehoods….
. When I realized most forcibly that ‘love is the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man’…even then I imputed it not to you as a fault but reproached myself for wishing to exact a return for affections which I felt were too intense.” She assured him that “the love of another” could never bring her “consolation”—God had kept her “in the right path.”
By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights, “to live for you and for our dear boys,” to be “a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings.”
How much I suffered,” he wrote, “when I was first awakened to the perception that these were only dreams…. For this you are no way responsible. You loved me as much as you could…but it was less far less than I hoped.” He explained that “this pain, this disappointment is my excuse for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed towards you.”
I part without anger, but without affection.
我离开时没有愤怒，但也没有感情。
The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the North of this period “teemed with bustling, restless men and women who believed passionately in ‘progress’ and equated it with growth and change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind.”
The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle class.
While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery, Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children she encountered along the journey. “We are told that we see slavery here in its mildest form,” she wrote her sister. But “disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught.” She could not stop thinking of the “wrongs of this injured race.”
One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave woman, who was at work “turning the ponderous wheel of a machine” in a yard. The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, “and this is all I can do now, I am so old.” When Frances asked about her family, she revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.
He had just finished and enjoyed three of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to converse with while dwelling upon them.”
More than a half century later, his son Fred “so vividly remembered” one particular evening when his father read aloud from the works of Scott and Burns that he realized “it must have been a rare event.”
He lacked but one thing to complete his happiness: “If you were here,” he told Weed, “we would enjoy pleasures that would have seduced Cicero and his philosophic friends from Tusculum.”
The slight, rumpled-looking, nearsighted young Greeley occupied a garret in New York where he had edited a small magazine called The New Yorker. The new partisan weekly became an instant success, eventually evolving into the powerful New York Tribune.
Seward believed “it was [his] duty to receive, not make a cabinet.”
During the transition period, Seward’s impulsive remarks often aggravated the ever-cautious Weed. “Your letter admonishes me to a habit of caution that I cannot conveniently adopt,” Seward replied. “I love to write what I think and feel as it comes up.” Nonetheless, Seward generally deferred to Weed, recognizing a superior strategic prudence and experience. “I had no idea that dictators were such amiable creatures,” he told Weed, no doubt provoking the approval of his proud mentor.
“There were never two men in politics who worked together or understood each other better,” Weed wrote years later in his memoir. “Neither controlled the other…. One did not always lead, and the other follow. They were friends, in the best, the rarest, and highest sense.”
His vision of an ever-expanding economy, built on free labor, widespread public education, and technological progress, offered a categorical rejection of the economic and cultural malaise he had witnessed on his Southern trip in 1835.
“Our race is ordained to reach, on this continent, a higher standard of social perfection than it has ever yet attained; and that hence will proceed the spirit which shall renovate the world,” he proclaimed to the New York legislature in the year of his election.
If the energy, ingenuity, and ambitions of Northern free labor were “sustained by a wise and magnanimous policy on our part,” Seward promised, “our state, within twenty years, will have no desert places—her commercial ascendancy will fear no rivalry, and a hundred cities will enable her to renew the boast of ancient Crete.”
In the end, the legislature passed a compromise plan that simply expanded the public school system. But the nativists, whose strength would grow dramatically in the decades ahead, never forgave Seward. Indeed, their opposition would eventually prove a fatal stumbling block to Seward’s hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860.
In a statement that brought condemnation throughout the South, Seward argued that the seamen were charged with a crime that New York State did not recognize: people were not property, and therefore no crime had been committed. On the contrary, “the universal sentiment of civilized nations” considered helping a slave escape from bondage “not only innocent, but humane and praiseworthy.”
North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded “a bigoted New England fanatic.”
He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves.
Horace Greeley editorialized that Seward would “henceforth be honored more for the three thousand votes he has lost, considering the causes, than for all he has received in his life.”
“What am I to deserve such friendship and affection?” Seward asked him in 1842 as his second term drew to its close.
To her son Gus she noted that “there are few men in America who would have sacrificed so much for the cause of humanity—he has his reward in a quiet conscience and a peaceful mind.”
Then in her early forties, she was a handsome woman, despite the hard, drawn look imparted by ill health. Over the years she had grown intellectually with her husband, sharing his passion for reading, his reformer’s spirit, and his deep hatred of slavery.
“In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’” More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.
Both his ambition and his uncertainty are manifest in the March 1832 statement formally announcing his candidacy on an essentially Whig platform that called for internal improvements, public education, and laws against usury: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” he wrote. “I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
Despite his defeat, he took pride that in his own small town of New Salem, where he “made friends everywhere he went,” he had received 277 of the 300 votes cast. This astonishing level of support was attributed to his good nature and the remarkable gift for telling stories that had made him a favorite of the men who gathered each night in the general store to share opinions and gossip.
Young Lincoln was “always the centre of the circle where ever he was,” wrote Robert Wilson, a political colleague. “His Stories…were fresh and Sparkling. never tinctured with malevolence.”
This rapid illumination of Lincoln’s features in conversation would be observed by countless others throughout his entire life, drawing many into his orbit.
LINCOLN LIKENED his politics to an “old womans dance”—“Short & Sweet.” He stood for three simple ideas: a national bank, a protective tariff, and a system for internal improvements. A state legislator could do little to promote a national bank or raise tariffs, but internal improvements, which then usually meant the improvement of roads, rivers, harbors, and railways, were largely a local matter.
The experience of earning two half dollars in a single day made the world seem “wider and fairer,” giving him confidence in the future.
Lincoln knew firsthand the deprivations, the marginal livelihood of the subsistence farmer unable to bring produce to market without dependable roads. He had been paid the meager wages of the hired hand. Primitive roads, clogged waterways, lack of rail connections, inadequate schools—such were not merely issues to Lincoln, but hurdles he had worked all his life to overcome in order to earn an ampler share of freedom. These “improvements” to the infrastructure would enable thousands of farming families to emerge from the kind of poverty in which the Lincoln family had been trapped, and would permit new cities and towns to flourish.
Economic development provided the basis, Lincoln said much later, that would allow every American “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.
Lincoln was among the six dissenting voices. With one other colleague who had also voted against the resolution, he issued a formal protest. This protest did not endorse abolitionism, for Lincoln believed then, as later, that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established. Instead, resisting the tide of public opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and affirmed the constitutional power of Congress to abolish slavery in areas under federal control, such as the District of Columbia, though he recommended “that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”
His awkwardness did not imply a lack of sexual desire. “Lincoln had terribly strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them,” said his law partner, William Herndon, who added that his “honor and a strong will…enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.” Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s companion on the circuit, agreed with this assessment, noting that “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.” Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.
Mary may have come to define Lincoln’s patience and objectivity as aloofness and inconsiderateness. We know only that at some point in the winter of 1840–41, as they approached marriage, a break occurred in their relationship.
According to Elizabeth Edwards, Lincoln was apprehensive about “his ability and Capacity to please and support a wife,” and doubtful about the institution of marriage itself. He likely feared that a wife and family would undermine his concentration and purpose. He would be responsible for the life and happiness of a woman accustomed to wealth and luxury; he would be unable to read late into the nights, pursuing new knowledge and the mastery of law and politics.
Lincoln drafted a letter to Mary ending the engagement. He asked Speed to deliver it, but Speed refused, warning that he should talk to her instead, for “once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument against you.” Lincoln did go to see Mary and, according to Speed, told her that he did not love her. As soon as she began to weep, he lost his nerve. “To tell you the truth Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.” The engagement was temporarily renewed, and Lincoln was forced into another meeting to sever the engagement. This second confrontation left him devastated—both because he had hurt Mary and because he had long held his “ability to keep [his] resolves when they are made…as the only, or at least the chief, gem of [his] character.”
Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln’s desire to engrave his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.”
Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”
Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for future growth.”
Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one’s nature. Lincoln understood this: “a tendency to melancholly,” he told Joshua’s sister, Mary, “is a misfortune not a fault.”
It was not simply Mary’s relative poverty that made her early married life difficult. Both she and Lincoln had essentially detached themselves from their previous lives, cutting themselves off from parents and relatives and thereby creating a domestic lifestyle closer to the “nuclear family” of a later age than the extended family still common in the mid-nineteenth century. When Lincoln was away, Mary was left alone to deal with her terror of thunderstorms, her worries over the children’s illnesses, and her spells of depression. Too proud to let her Springfield sisters know the difficulties she faced in these early years—particularly after the disapproval they had voiced over her choice of husband—Mary struggled stoically and proudly on her own.
“No man of his time,” the historian Albert Hart argues, “had a stronger conception of the moral issues” involved in the antislavery movement; “none showed greater courage and resolution.” His passionate awakening to the antislavery cause was not surprising, given his receptiveness to religious arguments in favor of emancipation and equality.
As time went by, however, Chase could not separate his own ambition from the cause he championed. The most calculating decisions designed to forward his political career were justified by advancement of the cause. His personal defeats would be regarded as setbacks for freedom itself.
Perhaps Chase could have argued successfully that Matilda was not a fugitive from Missouri, since she had been brought into Ohio by her father. Rather, he chose to make a fundamental assault on the applicability of the Fugitive Slave Law to the free state of Ohio. He argued that as soon as Matilda stepped into Ohio, she acquired the legal right to freedom guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the introduction of slavery into the vast Northwest Territory later occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. To many opponents of slavery in later years, including Abraham Lincoln, the Ordinance of 1787 became, like the Declaration of Independence, a sacred document expressing the intent of the founding fathers to confine slavery within the boundaries of the existing states, prohibiting forever its future spread.
Wherever [slavery] exists at all, it exists only in virtue of positive law…[and] can have no existence beyond the territorial limits of the state which sanctions it.” The right to hold a person in bondage “vanishes when the master and the slave meet together” in a place, like Ohio, “where positive law interdicts slavery.”
By anchoring his arguments firmly in history and law, he opened an antislavery approach that differed from the tactics of the allies of Garrison, who eschewed political organization, dismissed the founding fathers, and considered the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” because it condoned slavery.
Surveying the political landscape, Chase was unable to see a future for himself as either a Democrat or a Whig. Both parties, he wrote, submitted to the South upon the “vital question of slavery.”
Through the 1840s, Chase sought to guide the Liberty Party to a more moderate image so that it could gain wider appeal. Working closely with Gamaliel Bailey, Birney’s astute successor at the Philanthropist, Chase persuaded the Ohio Liberty Party to adopt a resolution that explicitly renounced any intention “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.”
Though he had never met Seward, Chase opened an intriguing correspondence with the governor, in which they freely debated the role of third parties. Seward expressed his belief that “there can be only two permanent parties.” In his view, the Democratic Party, with its strong base in the South, would always be the party of slavery, while the Whig Party would champion the antislavery banner, “more or less,” depending “on the advancement of the public mind and the intentness with which it can be fixed on the question of Slavery.”
Seward conceded that while he was disheartened by the Whig Party’s current “lukewarmness on the Subject of Slavery,” he had no choice but to stay with the party he loved, and to hope for a more advanced position in the future. “To abandon a party and friends to whom I owe so much, whose confidence I do in some degree possess,” he wrote, “would be criminal, and not more criminal than unwise.”
Chase saw the situation differently. Though originally “educated in the Whig school,” with Whiggish views of the tariff, banking, and government, he had never considered party loyalty among his defining characteristics.
The owner then brought suit against Van Zandt for “harboring and concealing” the slaves, in violation of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Chase “very willingly” agreed to represent the elderly farmer, who faced substantial penalties if found guilty. Chase’s defense of Van Zandt transcended the particulars of the Matilda case, directly challenging the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. That law, he maintained, deprived fugitives of life and liberty without due process of law.
“What is a slave?” he asked. “A slave is a person held, as property, by legalized force, against natural right…. The very moment a slave passes beyond the jurisdiction of the state, in which he is held as such, he ceases to be a slave; not because any law or regulation of the state which he enters confers freedom upon him, but because he continues to be a man and leaves behind him the law of force, which made him a slave.”
As Chase left the courtroom, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe, then a Cincinnati resident, one of the judges reflected on the unpopularity of professed abolitionists: “There goes a young man who has ruined himself to-day.”
Chase presented the constitutional arguments, while Seward dealt with the technical ones. Though the Southern-dominated court wasted little time in affirming the lower court’s ruling, the constitutional arguments Chase outlined became pillars of antislavery party doctrine.
“True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity,” he ardently claimed. “Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.”
CHASE, UNLIKE SEWARD and Lincoln, did not make friends easily. A contemporary reporter observed that he knew “little of human nature,” and that while “profoundly versed in man, he was profoundly ignorant of men.”
A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had—like the father of Hannibal against Rome—made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”
Chase tried to involve Stanton in the Van Zandt appeal, but Stanton declined, fearing he had neither the “physical nor intellectual strength sufficient to engage in the cause. Events of the past summer have broken my spirits, crushed my hopes, and without energy or purpose in life, I feel indifferent to the present, careless of the future.” Chase apparently did not reply to this letter. “Many weeks have gone by,” Stanton wrote in January 1847, “but your voice reaches me no more. Why is it? The question arises, as I move slowly & disappointed from the post office each day.”
After receiving a particularly affectionate letter from Chase, Stanton fervently replied that it “filled my heart with joy; to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” He went on to downplay reports Chase had heard that he had developed a “magnetic attraction” for a new woman. “I wish it were so,” he admitted. “To love, and to be loved, is a necessary condition of my happiness…I have met with no one that exercises upon me the least attraction beyond the general qualities of the sex.”
Yet while Seward, Chase, and Bates had each developed a national renown, few beyond Illinois knew of the raw-boned young congressman coming to the nation’s capital for the first time in his life.

4 “Plunder & Conquest”

A few weeks later, Lincoln voted with his Whig brethren on a resolution introduced by Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, which stated that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” initiated by the president.
Having provoked both countries into war, Lincoln charged, the president had hoped “to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” He went on to liken the president’s war message to “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.”
Perhaps recalling the turtles tormented with hot coals by his boyhood friends, Lincoln employed the bizarre simile of the president’s confused mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.”
A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: “no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.”
As Seward understood better than Lincoln, Manifest Destiny was in the air.
Though he wasn’t in favor of the war, Seward’s political astuteness told him it was a mistake to argue against it.
For Chase was caught in a political dilemma. On the one hand, his antislavery allies in the Liberty Party were strongly against the war. If he wanted a seat in the U.S. Senate, however, he would need the support of Ohio Democrats, a task that would not be made easier by assaulting a Democratic president.
Of the four future presidential rivals, only Edward Bates matched the vehemence of Lincoln’s opposition. He charged Polk with “gross & palpable lying,” arguing that the true object of the war was “plunder & conquest.”
Bates said he was ashamed of his Whig brethren who voted for the war, “actuated by a narrow & groveling policy, and a selfish fear of injuring their own popularity, & injuriously affecting the coming Presidential election.” To Bates, the war was part of a conspiracy to extend the reach of slavery—a belief he shared with many other Whigs, though not with Lincoln, who argued it was simply “a war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”
Nor did he like the party’s gauzy platform, which avoided any discussion of important national issues, including the divisive Wilmot Proviso. He said that he would “very willingly” throw his support “in favor of a different candidate if it could be seen that it would hasten the triumph of Universal Freedom.”
That Bates would even be considered illustrates the fluidity of parties at this juncture, for even though he opposed slavery’s expansion, he himself remained a slaveowner, his belief in the inferiority of the black race reflecting his Southern upbringing.
Even if offered the chance to be president, he claimed, he would never agree to “join a sectional, geographical party.”
Recalling Lincoln’s “rambling, story-telling” speech more than two decades later, Seward agreed that it put “the audience in good humor,” but he pointedly noted that it avoided “any extended discussion of the slavery question.”
“We spent the greater part of the night talking,” Seward remembered years later, “I insisting that the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and boldness of utterance.” Listening with “a thoughtful air,” Lincoln said: “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”
Similar proposals had been attempted before, but Lincoln now added several elements. He included provisions to compensate owners for the full value of the slaves with government funds and to allow government officials from slaveholding states to bring their servants while on government business.
Finally, to mitigate the fears of Southern slaveholders in surrounding states, he added a provision requiring District authorities “to provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.” It was this last provision that prompted abolitionist Wendell Phillips to castigate him as “that slave hound from Illinois.”
Increasingly bitter divisiveness had eclipsed any possibility of compromise.
Zealous antislavery men objected to both the fugitive slave provision and the idea of compensating owners in any way, while Southerners argued that abolishing slavery in the District would open the door to abolishing slavery in the country at large. Disappointed but realistic in his appraisal of the situation, Lincoln never introduced his bill.
The office was awarded to another. It was just as well that Abraham Lincoln was not appointed. His strengths were those of the public leader, not the bureaucratic manager.
Despite a lisp, his power on the stump was celebrated far and wide. It was said that he could make you “feel the blood tingling through your veins to your finger ends and all the way up your spine.”
His decision stunned his friends and neighbors. “He had lived with them from childhood, and toiled with them in the fields,” his son-in-law, George Julian, observed. “He had never enjoyed the means of obtaining even a common-school education, and they regarded his course as the effect of a vain desire to defeat the designs of Providence, according to which they believed that people born in humble life should be content with their lot.”
Transfixed
There was something mysterious in his persona that led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration.
Eddie’s death left an indelible scar on her psyche—deepening her mood swings, magnifying her weaknesses, and increasing her fears. Tales of her erratic behavior began to circulate, stories of “hysterical outbursts” against her husband, rumors that she chased him through the yard with a knife, drove him from the house with a broomstick, smashed his head with a chunk of wood. Though the outbursts generally subsided as swiftly as they had begun, her instability and violent episodes unquestionably caused great upheavals in the family life.
When Mary fell into one of these moods, Lincoln developed what one neighbor called “a protective deafness,” which doubtless exasperated her fury. Instead of engaging Mary directly, he would lose himself in thought, quietly leave the room, or take the children for a walk. If the discord continued, he would head to the state library or his office, where he would occasionally remain through the night until the emotional storm had ceased.
Had his marriage been happier, Lincoln’s friends believed, he would have been satisfied as a country lawyer. Had he married “a woman of more angelic temperament,” Springfield lawyer Milton Hay speculated, “he, doubtless, would have remained at home more and been less inclined to mingle with people outside.”
Indeed, long before his political career even took shape, he had been determined to win the veneration of his fellow men by “rendering [himself] worthy” of their esteem.
Even as Lincoln focused his attention on the law, he was simply waiting for events to turn, waiting for the right time to reenter public life.
“There are two antagonistical elements of society in America,” Seward had proclaimed, “freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, and with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive.”
Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread “diffusion of knowledge.” The slave-based system, by contrast “cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression.”
Seward’s support that day for the black vote, black presence on juries, and black officeholding was startlingly radical for a mainstream politician. Even a full decade later, during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”
Seward was more willing than Lincoln to employ language designed to ignite the emotions of particular crowds, tailoring his rhetoric to suit the convictions of his immediate audience.
Can nothing be done for freedom because the public conscience is inert?
因为公众的良知是惰性的，所以就不能为自由做任何事情了吗？
Certainly, it would do a great deal of good for the career of Salmon Chase, who sanctimoniously told Morse that the only consideration in determining the next senator should be ability to best advance the cause: “Every thing, but sacrifice of principle, for the Cause, and nothing for men except as instruments of the Cause.”
“Every act of his was subsidiary to his own ambition,” charged the Ohio State Journal: “He talked of the interests of Free Soil, he meant His Own.”
Showing little intuitive sense of how others might view his maneuvering, Chase failed to appreciate that with each party shift, he betrayed old associates and made lifelong enemies. Certainly, his willingness to sever bonds and forge new alliances, though at times courageous and visionary, was out of step with the political custom of the times.
For a brief moment, Chase’s relentless need “to be first wherever I may be” was sated.
Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, was practicing law, regaling his fellow lawyers on the circuit with an endless stream of anecdotes, and reflecting with silent absorption on the great issues of the day.

5 The Turbulent Fifties

The principal weapon of political combatants was the speech. A gift for oratory was the key to success in politics. Even as a child, Lincoln had honed his skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump.
Speeches on important occasions were exhaustively researched and closely reasoned, often lasting three or four hours. There was demagoguery, of course, but there were also metaphors and references to literature and classical history and occasionally, as with some of Lincoln’s speeches, a lasting literary glory.
The great majority of papers were highly partisan.
Editors and publishers, as the careers of Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley illustrate, were often powerful political figures.
Newspapers in the nineteenth century, author Charles Ingersoll observed, “were the daily fare of nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common, that, like air and water, its uses are undervalued.”
The constitutional compromise that protected slavery in states where it already existed did not apply to newly acquired territories. Thus, every expansion of the nation reignited the divisive issue.
A similar affliction infested national discourse as every other topic was subsumed by slavery. “We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us. Here it is, this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!”
Of course, slavery was not the only issue that divided the sections. The South opposed protective tariffs designed to foster Northern manufacturing and fought against using the national resources for internal improvements in Northern transportation.
“It is a great mistake,” warned John Calhoun in 1850, “to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process…that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important.” If these common cords continue to rupture, he predicted, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.”
The ties that bound the Union were not simply institutions but a less tangible sense of nationhood—shared pride in the achievements of the reolutionary generation, a sense of mutual interests and common aspirations for the future.
Clay recognized that the compromise resolutions demanded far greater concessions from the North than he had asked from the slave states, but he appealed to the North to sustain the Union.
Northern objections to slavery were based on ideology and sentiment, rather than on the Southern concerns with property, social intercourse, habit, safety, and life itself. The North had nothing tangible to lose.
But Clay was mistaken, she claimed, if he believed the wound between North and South could be sutured by his persuasive charm.
Most upsetting was Clay’s claim that “Northern men were only activated by policy and party spirits. Now if Henry Clay has lived to be 70 years old and still thinks slavery is opposed only from such motives I can only say he knows much less of human nature than I supposed.”
Seward began by maintaining flatly that he was opposed to compromise, “in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed.”
Finally, staunchly affirming the Wilmot Proviso, he refused to accept the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.
“I find no man so congenial to me as yourself,” Chase confided in Sumner. For his part, Sumner considered Chase “a tower of strength” whose election to the Senate would “confirm the irresolute, quicken the indolent and confound the trimmers.”
“The local belles came in to see and be seen,” fellow circuit rider Henry Whitney recalled, “and the court house, from ‘early morn till dewy eve,’ and the tavern from dewy eve to early morn, were replete with bustle, business, energy, hilarity, novelty, irony, sarcasm, excitement and eloquence.” In some villages, the boardinghouses were clean and comfortable and the food was excellent; in others, there were “plenty of bedbugs” and the dirt was “half an inch thick.” The lawyers generally slept two to a bed, with three or four beds in a room. While most of the traveling bar regularly bemoaned the living conditions, Lincoln savored the rollicking life on the circuit.
“He arrogated to himself no superiority over anyone—not even the most obscure member of the bar…. He was remarkably gentle with young lawyers…. No young lawyer ever practised in the courts with Mr. Lincoln who did not in all his after life have a regard for him akin to personal affection.”
Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did.
On the contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that “such of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.”
Learning that an old woman still possessed a dress that “she had worn in the Revolutionary War,” he traveled to her house and asked to see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it. “The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of wearing apparel and she said: ‘Stranger if you want to kiss something old you had better kiss my ass. It is sixteen years older than that dress.’”
This process of repetition is central to the oral tradition; indeed, Walter Benjamin in his essay on the storyteller’s art suggests that repetition “is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.
According to Whitney, Lincoln thought there was merit in retaining the notion of a Washington without blemish that they had all been taught as children. “It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect,” Lincoln argued, “that human perfection is possible.”
“he read hard works—was philosophical—logical—mathematical—never read generally.”
Lincoln was apparently “struggling with a calculation of some magnitude, for scattered about were sheet after sheet of paper covered with an unusual array of figures.” When Herndon inquired what he was doing, he announced “that he was trying to solve the difficult problem of squaring the circle.” To this insoluble task posed by the ancients over four thousand years earlier, he devoted “the better part of the succeeding two days…almost to the point of exhaustion.”
, “and he was always studying and mastering every subject which came before him.”
“They cannot see,” Seward complained to Frances, “how much of the misery of human life is derived from the indulgence of wrath!”
Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in his speeches or writings. While she conceded that “worldly wisdom certainly does impel a person to ‘swim with the tide’—and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port,” she continued to argue for “a more elevated course” that would “reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary.”
A brilliant woman, Frances once speculated whether the “various nervous afflictions & morbid habits of thought” that plagued so many women she knew had their origin in the frustrations of an educated woman’s life in the mid-nineteenth century. Among her papers is a draft of an unpublished essay on the plight of women: “To share in any kind of household work is to demean herself, and she would be thought mad, to run, leap, or engage in active sports.” She was permitted to dance all night in ballrooms, but it “would be deemed unwomanly” and “imprudent” for her to race with her children “on the common, or to search the cliff for flowers.” Reflecting on “the number of invalids that exist among women exempted from Labour,” she suggested that the “want of fitting employment—real purpose in their life” was responsible.
Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions. “There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation. How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and pleasures, except at intervals.”
“It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit,” he advised. “Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by another…. No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to constitutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self culture.”
With equal ire, he denounced both “the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over slavery was simply “a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,” with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.
He specifically condemned Seward’s “higher law” supposition invoked to invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that “in Civil government, such as we have, there can be no law higher than the Constitution and the Statutes. And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave.”
“A HUMAN BEING,” the novelist Thomas Mann observed, “lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries…if the times, themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle,” do not provide opportunity, he continued, “the situation will have a crippling effect.”
More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers.
They were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who faced the “task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were “inseparably linked” with the experiment of providing the world, “a practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time.”
Such modest aspirations, he argued, would never satisfy men of “towering genius” who scorned “a beaten path.”
On the contrary, Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights?…No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man.”
[Here is] the opening of a great drama that…inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and freedom.
“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free.”
Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril. The Nebraska Act “took us by surprise,” Lincoln later said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” The fight to stem the spread of slavery would become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.
Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale.
“I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”
While Douglas simply asserted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their roots as a people, to the founding of the nation—a story that still retained its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention.
but the structure of the speech was so “clear and logical,” the Illinois Daily Journal observed, the arrangement of facts so “methodical,” that the overall effect was strikingly original and “most effective.”
The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by analogy—“because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!”
Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining—in a word, communicating an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of moral persuasion.
At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity,” since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society.
Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”
“I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.”
More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.”
Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.
As he wound to a close, Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the Declaration of Independence and “return [slavery] to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace.” This accomplishment, he pledged, would save the Union, and “succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
Conservative and contemplative by temperament, he embraced new positions warily. Once he committed himself, however, as he did in the mid-fifties to the antislavery cause, he demonstrated singular tenacity and authenticity of feeling.
Ambition and conviction united, “as my two eyes make one in sight,” as Robert Frost wrote, to give Lincoln both a political future and a cause worthy of his era.

6 The Gathering Storm

Lincoln was adamant, insisting that if his name remained on the ballot, “you will lose both Trumbull and myself and I think the cause in this case is to be preferred to men.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1855, disappointment piled upon disappointment. Six months after his loss to Trumbull, Lincoln’s involvement in a celebrated law case forced him to recognize that his legal reputation, secure as it might have been in frontier Illinois, carried little weight among the preeminent lawyers in the country.
Years later, Harding could still recall the shock of his first sight of the “tall, rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle.”
The sophisticated arguments were “a revelation” to Lincoln, recalled Ralph Emerson, one of Manny’s partners. So intrigued was he by Stanton’s speech, in particular, that he stood in “rapt attention…drinking in his words.” Never before, Emerson realized, had Lincoln “seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared.”
Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton’s bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton “the most powerful civilian post within his gift”—the post of secretary of war. Lincoln’s choice of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness.
They both loved history, literature, and poetry. Together, they read Gibbon, Carlisle, Macaulay, Madame de Staël, Samuel Johnson, Bancroft, and Byron. “We years ago were lovers,” he wrote her after the children were born. “We are now parents; a new relation has taken place. The love of our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. We look forward now to life, not for ourselves only, but for our children. I loved you for your beauty, and grace and loveliness of your person. I love you now for the richness and surpassing excellence of your mind. One love has not taken the place of the other, but both stand side by side. I love you now with a fervor and truth of affection which speech cannot express.”
His words were penned with an unsteady hand, he confessed, with “tears obscuring his vision” and an “anguish of heart” driving him periodically from his chair. He would have preferred to wait until the boy was older and better able to understand; “but time, care, sickness, and the vicissitudes of life, wear out and efface the impression of the mind. Besides life is uncertain. I may be called from you…. You might live and die without knowing of the affection your father and mother bore for you, and for each other.”
Despite his encouragement, Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most worrisome, “his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.”
Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that “there is so much of the hard and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.”
In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state funds to Catholic schools.
The Richmond Enquirer spoke for many when it pronounced the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.”
So enthralled were those in the audience that reporters cast aside their pens so as to concentrate on what Lincoln said, and the unrecorded speech has become known to history as the famous “Lost Speech.” Lincoln was now the acknowledged leader of the new Republican Party in Illinois.
The 7–2 decision was breathtaking in its scope and consequences. The Court ruled that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”
The Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later said, was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted wounds.”
The decision of the Supreme Court, “the accredited interpreter of the Constitution and arbiter of disagreements between the several States,” the Enquirer continued, has destroyed “the foundation of the theory upon which their warfare has been waged against the institutions of the South.”
Antislavery men were staggered, the Enquirer claimed, left “nonplused and bewildered, confounded and confused.”
“Sheer blasphemy,” Republicans responded. The ruling was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” The New York Tribune argued that the Supreme Court had forfeited its stature as “an impartial judicial body,” and predicted that its attempt to derail the Republican Party, which had come so close to victory in the previous presidential election, would fail.
Seward had defined the sectional conflict as driven by fundamental differences rather than the machinations of extremists who exaggerated discord for their own political ends.
He had taken his stand on an issue, Kenneth Stampp suggests, “that troubled the politicians of his generation as it has since troubled American historians: Was the conflict that ultimately culminated in the Civil War repressible or irrepressible?”
“At an age when most girls are shy and lanky,” the Cincinnati Enquirer noted, “she stepped forth into the world an accomplished young woman, able to cross swords with the brightest intellects of the nation.”
A child less strong-willed and high-spirited than Kate might have been crushed by the vicissitudes of her father’s demanding love, which he bestowed or denied depending on her performance.
In her case, however, the unremitting stress on good habits, fine manners, and hard work paid off.
While Kate projected a mature poise, she was yet a spirited young girl with a rebellious streak. Her craving for excitement and glamour led to a tryst with a wealthy young man who had recently married the daughter of a well-known Ohio journalist. The dashing figure reportedly “began his attentions by little civilities, then mild flirtations,” building familiarity to take Kate for carriage rides and call on her in the Governor’s Mansion.
He cared not whether slavery was voted up or down; but the decision “was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas, and did not embody their will.” To Douglas, the clash with the Buchanan administration must have seemed unavoidable. Support for Lecompton would have betrayed his own doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” on which he had staked his political future, and seriously diminished his chances for reelection to the Senate from Illinois.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said, echoing the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, as he began his now famous acceptance speech at Springfield.
Reminding his audience that Douglas had always been among the foremost carpenters in the Democratic plan to nationalize slavery, Lincoln made it clear that the Republican cause must be “intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work” of shoring up the frame first raised by the founding fathers. While Douglas might be “a very great man,” and the “largest of us are very small ones,” he had consistently used his influence to distort the framers’ intentions regarding slavery, exhibiting a moral indifference to slavery itself.
SO THE STAGE WAS SET for a titanic battle, arguably the most famous Senate fight in American history, a clash that would make Lincoln a national figure and propel him to the presidency while it would, at the same time, undermine Douglas’s support in the South and further fracture the Democratic Party.
Lincoln readily conceded that Douglas was far better known than he. As he outlined the advantages of Douglas’s stature, however, his audience laughed with glee. “All the anxious politicians of his party,” Lincoln told a crowd at Springfield, “have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.” When the cheers and laughter drawn forth by this comical image subsided, Lincoln went on, “Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle, alone.”
As Lincoln repeatedly said in many forums, slavery was a violation of the Declaration’s “majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe,” allowed by the founders because it was already among us, but placed by them in the course of ultimate extinction.
For Douglas, the crux of the controversy was the right of self-government, the principle that the people in each territory and each state should decide for themselves whether to introduce or exclude slavery. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.”
If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.

Team of Rivals_1

While it did not matter to Douglas what the people of Kansas decided, so long as they had the right to decide, for Lincoln, the substance of the decision was crucial. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties on the leading issue of this contest,” declared Lincoln, “is, that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong; and the action of each…is squared to meet these views.”
Cheers nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted his opinion that “the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men…. I hold that this government was established…for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others.”
Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
His comments on race here and throughout the debates reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.
He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the world of politics.
“The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me,” he told Crittenden, “but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.”

7 Countdown to the Nomination

He was always careful to conceal his ambitions. Whenever he was asked about the upcoming election, he would speak with well-modulated enthusiasm of other candidates.
Yet all his actions were consistent with a cautious and politically skillful pursuit of the nomination.
If the details of his early life and his “efforts on the slavery question” could be “sufficiently brought before the people,” he could be made “a formidable, if not a successful candidate for the presidency.”
Skeptical, Lincoln noted that Seward and Chase and others were “so much better known.” With an equivocal modesty, he asked: “Is it not, as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have carried this movement forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think so.”
As for a campaign biography, he curtly answered, “there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else.”
By “fit,” the self-confident Lincoln meant only to suggest that he did not necessarily have the credentials or experience appropriate to the office, not that he lacked the ability.
It was important that any efforts on his behalf be squelched until the timing was right. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.
Seward took as his theme the enduring quality of the national compact. Though he maintained his principled opposition to slavery, he softened his tone, referring to the slave states as “capital States,” while the free states became the “labor States.” His language remained tranquil throughout, with no trace of the inflammatory phrases that had characterized his great speeches in the past. It seemed, one historian observed, that “‘the irrepressible conflict’ between slavery and freedom had graciously given way to the somewhat repressible conflict of the political aspirants.”
Secluding himself at home, Bates never developed a clear understanding of the varied constituencies that had to be aligned, a deficit that resulted in a number of missteps.
Though the Bates camp maintained faith that their man was bound to win the nomination, Bates confided in his diary that “knowing the fickleness of popular favor, and on what small things great events depend, I shall take care not so to set my heart upon the glittering bauble, as to be mortified or made at all unhappy by a failure.”
While Seward was still touring Europe and the Middle East, Lincoln was introducing himself to tens of thousands of Westerners. “I think it is a mistake,” a leading New Yorker wrote Lincoln, “that Senator Seward is not on his own battlefield, instead of being in Egypt surveying the route of an old Underground Rail Road, over which Moses took, one day, a whole nation, from bondage into Liberty.” Lincoln capitalized on Seward’s absence. The crowds that greeted him grew with every stop along the way. Most of his audiences had never laid eyes on him, and he invariably forged an indelible impression. Once he began speaking, the Janesville Gazette reported, “the high order of [his] intellect” left a permanent impact upon his listeners, who would remember his “tall, gaunt form” and “his points and his hits” for “many a day.”
The next day, his speech was described in the Cincinnati Gazette “as an effort remarkable for its clear statement, powerful argument and massive common sense,” and possessed of “such dignity and power as to have impressed some of our ablest lawyers with the conclusion that it was superior to any political effort they had ever heard.”
“Your visit to Ohio has excited an extensive interest in your favor,” former congressman Samuel Galloway told him. “We must take some man not hitherto corrupted with the discussion upon Candidates. Your name has been again and again mentioned…. I am candid to say you are my choice.”
Lincoln’s ability to bridge these divisions would prove of vital importance to his campaign.
On October 16, 1859, as Lincoln prepared for a trip to Kansas, the remaining bonds of union were strained almost to the point of rupture when the white abolitionist John Brown came to Virginia, in the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, “with foolish pikes/And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.” Brown and his band of thirteen white men and five blacks seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a bold but ill-conceived plan of provoking a slave insurrection. The arsenal was swiftly recaptured and Brown taken prisoner by a federal force under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.
Brown was tried and sentenced to death. “I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness,” Brown wrote his family, “feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God; & of humanity.” In the month between the sentence and his hanging, the dignity and courage of his conduct and the eloquence of his statements and letters made John Brown a martyr/hero to many in the antislavery North. His death, when it came, was mourned by public assemblies throughout the Northern states. “Church bells tolled,” the historian David Potter writes, “black bunting was hung out, minute guns were fired, prayer meetings assembled, and memorial resolutions were adopted.”
“Harper’s Ferry,” wrote the Richmond Enquirer, “coupled with the expression of Northern sentiment in support…have shaken and disrupted all regard for the Union; and there are but few men who do not look to a certain and not distant day when dissolution must ensue.”
The raid at Harpers Ferry, one historian notes, was “like a great meteor disclosing in its lurid flash the width and depth of that abyss,” which cut the nation in two. Herman Melville, in his poem “The Portent,” would use the same metaphor, calling “Weird John Brown/ The meteor of the war”—the tail of his long beard trailing out from under the executioner’s cap.
At the time of Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that “the attempt to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an electioneering dodge.” He wisely sought the middle ground between the statements of radical Republicans, like Emerson, who believed that Brown’s execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and conservative Republicans, who denounced Brown for his demented, traitorous scheme. He acknowledged that Brown had displayed “great courage” and “rare unselfishness.” Nonetheless, he concluded, “that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”
As Lincoln’s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published and distributed. After warning Fell that “there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” Lincoln detailed, without a hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in “a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”
He took as the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Fully endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the founders, concluding that they had marked slavery “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
Denunciation was being met by denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” To have expected either side to respond differently once the rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed.”
Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new metaphor in Hartford to perfectly illustrate his distinction between accepting slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road,” Lincoln began, “any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them…. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!…The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.”
This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud.”
the instant accessibility
It would require more effort to defuse the increasingly bitter feud between Norman Judd and John Wentworth. In public forums, Wentworth would drag out past wrongs, continuing to accuse Judd and his former Democratic allies of conspiring to defeat Lincoln in 1855, of “bungling” Lincoln’s campaign in 1858, and of working now “to advance Trumbull as a presidential candidate, at Lincoln’s expense.”
To head off possible desertions, Lincoln’s friends introduced a resolution on the second day of the meeting: “That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by the Chicago Convention, and to vote as a unit for him.”
Though he often claimed to be a fatalist, declaring that “what is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree,” his diligence and shrewd strategy in the months prior to the convention belied his claim.

8 Showdown in Chicago

Every seat was occupied: in addition to delegates, the train carried dozens of newspapermen, professional applauders, henchmen, office seekers, and prizefighters hired “to keep the peace,” recalled one young passenger, “for in those hot days men’s opinions often cost them broken heads.”
Still, the night was young, the battle only just begun.
“There was no unity of action, no determination of purpose,” one Chase supporter later lamented; there was “a weakness in the spinal column in the Ohio delegation at Chicago, most pitiable to behold.” Ohio’s inability to settle firmly on Chase, another delegate told him, proved catastrophic.
“There are lots of good feeling afloat here for you,” one of Chase’s friends told him, “but there is no set of men in earnest for you…I think the hardest kind of death to die is that occasioned by indecisive, or lukewarm friends.”
“Men gather in little groups,” observed Halstead, “and with their arms about each other, and chatter and whisper as if the fate of the country depended upon their immediate delivery of the mighty political secrets with which their imaginations are big.” Rumors multiplied with each passing hour; “things of incalculable moment are communicated to you confidentially, at intervals of five minutes.”
Although some of Lincoln’s men had political ambitions of their own, Henry Whitney observed, “Most of them worked con amore, chiefly from love of the man, his lofty moral tone, his pure political morality.” Working in his “typically methodical way,” Davis designated specific tasks to each member of his team.
According to one committee member, “Mr. Dudley of New Jersey then proposed that for the general good of the party,” Pennsylvania should give up its favorite son after the first ballot, as would New Jersey. The proposition was generally agreed upon, but Pennsylvania required further negotiations to ratify the agreement.
According to Henry Whitney, Davis had previously sent a telegram to Lincoln informing him that if Cameron were promised a space in the cabinet, Pennsylvania might be procured. Lincoln scribbled his answer in the margin of a newspaper, which an emissary carried to the convention. “Make no contracts that will bind me.” When the message arrived, Whitney writes, “Everybody was mad, of course. Here were men working night and day to place him on the highest mountain peak of fame, and he pulling back all he knew how. What was to be done? The bluff Dubois said: ‘Damn Lincoln!’ The polished Swett said, in mellifluous accents: ‘I am very sure if Lincoln was aware of the necessities…’ The critical Logan expectorated viciously, and said: ‘The main difficulty with Lincoln is…’ Herndon ventured: ‘Now, friend, I’ll answer that.’ But Davis cut the Gordian knot by brushing all aside with: ‘Lincoln ain’t here, and don’t know what we have to meet, so we will go ahead, as if we hadn’t heard from him, and he must ratify it.’”
A voice rose from the crowd: “Abe Lincoln has it by the sound, let us ballot!” The efforts of Lincoln’s men to corral more supporters had paid off. “This was not the most deliberate way of nominating a President,” Swett later confessed, but “it had its weight.”
For the Sewardites, the defeat was devastating. “Great men wept like boys,” one New Yorker observed, “faces drawn, white and aged as if ten years had passed in that one night of struggle.” Everyone looked to Thurlow Weed, but there was no solace he could give. The work of his lifetime had ended in defeat, and he, too, could not restrain his tears. His failure to serve his country by making his good friend president, Weed later acknowledged, was “the great disappointment of his life.”
All across the chamber, representatives rose, clamoring to change their votes so that Lincoln could achieve a unanimous victory. Their emotional tone revealed that the defeated Seward still had a great hold on their hearts. When Michigan shifted its votes to Lincoln, Austin Blair confessed that his state was laying down “her first, best loved candidate…with some bleeding of the heart, with some quivering in the veins; but she does not fear that the fame of Seward will suffer,” for his story will be “written, and read, and beloved long after the temporary excitement of this day has passed away, and when Presidents are themselves forgotten.”
The most poignant moment came when New York’s chairman, William Evarts, stood up. “Mounting a table, with grief manifest in his countenance, his hands clenched nervously,” he delivered a powerful tribute to Seward: “Gentlemen, it was from Governor Seward that most of us learned to love Republican principles and the Republican party.” He finally requested that New York shift its votes to Lincoln. So moving was his speech, one reporter noted, that “the spectator could not fail to be impressed with the idea that a man who could have such a friend must be a noble man indeed.”
Finally, the unwelcome telegram announcing Lincoln’s nomination on the third ballot arrived. Seward turned “as pale as ashes.” He understood at once, as did his supporters, his son Fred would remember, “that it was no ordinary political defeat, to be retrieved in some subsequent campaign. It was…final and irrevocable.”
Later that night, writing in his diary in Washington, Charles Francis Adams could not stop thinking of his defeated friend, “of his sanguine expectations, of his long services, of his large and comprehensive philosophy, and of his great ambition—all now merged for a time in a deep abyss of disappointment. He has too much of alloy in his composition to rise above it. Few men can.”
Informed that the editor of the local evening paper could find no one in the disconsolate town willing to write and comment on the news announcing Lincoln and Hamlin’s nominations, Seward took up his own pen. “No truer or firmer defenders of the Republican faith could have been found in the Union,” he graciously stated, “than the distinguished and esteemed citizens on whom the honors of the nomination have fallen.”
Before he retired that night, Seward wrote to Weed: “You have my unbounded gratitude for this last, as for the whole life of efforts in my behalf. I wish that I was sure that your sense of the disappointment is as light as my own.”
Beneath his graceful facade, Seward was angry, hurt, and humiliated. “It was only some months later,” the biographer Glyndon Van Deusen writes, “when the shock had worn off and hope of a sort had revived, that he could say half ruefully, half whimsically, how fortunate it was that he did not keep a diary, for if he had there would be a record of all his cursing and swearing” when the news arrived.
Supposing that the “adhesion of the Illinois delegation” yielded Lincoln “a higher gratification” even than “the nomination itself,” Chase confessed that the perfidy of his own delegation was unbearable.
Modestly, Lincoln insisted that “he did not suppose the honor of such a visit was intended particularly for himself as a private citizen but rather as the representative to a great party.”
FOR GENERATIONS, people have weighed and debated the factors that led to Lincoln’s surprising victory. Many have agreed with the verdict of Murat Halstead, who wrote that “the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.” Seward himself seemed to accept this analysis.
When asked years later why Lincoln had won, he said: “The leader of a political party in a country like ours is so exposed that his enemies become as numerous and formidable as his friends.” Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, “comparatively unknown, had not to contend with the animosities generally marshaled against a leader.”
Chance, positioning, and managerial strategy—all played a role in Lincoln’s victory. Still, if we consider the comparative resources each contender brought to the race—their range of political skills, their emotional, intellectual, and moral qualities, their rhetorical abilities, and their determination and willingness to work hard—it is clear that when opportunity beckoned, Lincoln was the best prepared to answer the call.
Having risen to power with fewer privileges than any of his rivals, Lincoln was more accustomed to rely upon himself to shape events.
When ardent Republicans heard Lincoln speak, they knew that if their beloved Seward could not win, they had in the eloquent orator from Illinois a man of considerable capacity whom they could trust, one who would hold fast on the central issue that had forged the party—the fight against extending slavery into the territories. Though Lincoln had entered the antislavery struggle later than Seward or Chase, his speeches possessed unmatched power, conviction, clarity, and moral strength.
At the same time, his native caution and precision with language—he rarely said more than he was sure about, rarely pandered to his various audiences—gave Lincoln great advantages over his rivals, each of whom tried to reposition himself in the months before the convention.
Nor, as the Chicago Press and Tribune pointed out, was “his avoidance of extremes” simply “the result of ambition which measures words or regulates acts.” It was, more accurately, “the natural consequence of an equable nature and a mental constitution that is never off its balance.”
In his years of travel on the circuit through central Illinois, engaging people in taverns, on street corners, and in shops, Lincoln had developed a keen sense of what people felt, thought, needed, and wanted.
Like Lincoln, Chase had spent many months traveling throughout his home state, but his haughty demeanor prevented him from truly connecting with the farmers, clerks, and bartenders he met along the way.
Bates, meanwhile, had isolated himself for so long from the hurly-burly of the political world that his once natural political savvy was diminished.
Finally, Lincoln’s profound and elevated sense of ambition—“an ambition,” Fehrenbacher observes, “notably free of pettiness, malice, and overindulgence,” shared little common ground with Chase’s blatant obsession with office, Seward’s tendency toward opportunism, or the ambivalent ambition that led Bates to withdraw from public office. Though Lincoln desired success as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause.

9 “A Man Knows His Own Name”

“A MAN KNOWS HIS OWN NAME”
THE NEWS THAT Lincoln had defeated Seward came as a shock to much of the country, especially to the Eastern Republican establishment. On Capitol Hill, word of Lincoln’s nomination “was received with general incredulity,” conceded Charles Francis Adams, “until by repeated announcements from different quarters it appeared that he had carried the day by a union of all the anti-Seward elements…. The House was in such a state of confusion that it was clear no business would be done, so we adjourned.”
Since people were unaware of the skill with which he had crafted his victory, Lincoln was viewed as merely the accidental candidate of the consolidated anti-Seward forces. Still an obscure figure, he was referred to by half the journals representing his own party as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.”
Pointing out that when Lincoln had visited the Historical Library at Hartford the previous March, he signed the visitors’ book as “Abraham Lincoln,” the Democratic New York Herald caustically noted that “it is but fair to presume that a man knows his own name.”
Not content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”
More violent attacks appeared in the Charleston Mercury, which scornfully asked: “After him what decent white man would be President?”
Lincoln, on the other hand, was “the beau ideal of a relentless, dogged, freesoil border-ruffian.” He was “an illiterate partizan,” claimed the influential Richmond Enquirer, “possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections for negro equality.”
Holding myself the humblest of all whose names were before the convention,” Lincoln wrote Chase, “I feel in especial need of the assistance of all; and I am glad—very glad—of the indication that you stand ready.” His ego soothed, Chase spoke at numerous Republican gatherings in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan during the weeks that followed. Though he harbored a lasting bitterness toward the Ohio delegation, he affirmed his hopes for the nation, arguing “first, that the Republican party is an inevitable party; secondly, that it grows out of the circumstances of the country; thirdly, that it proposes no measure which can be injurious to the true interests of the people.”
During their conversation, Bates “declined to take the stump” but promised to pen a public letter supporting Lincoln, even though he was aware, he said later, that in doing so, he would “probably give offense to some members of the Constitutional Union party.”
While Lincoln worked to enlist the cooperation of all his rivals, he knew that the active support of William Henry Seward would be pivotal to his campaign. Seward’s following among Republicans had brought him to the edge of nomination. His reverberant phrase making—“irrepressible conflict,” “higher law than the Constitution”—though too flammable for some, had emblazoned the banners and helped define the Republican cause.
“When I went out to market this morning,” he told one friend, “I had the rare experience of a man walking about town, after he is dead, and hearing what people would say of him. I confess I was unprepared for so much real grief, as I heard expressed at every corner.”
But he understood that a decision to resign would look petulant and would, as his friend Israel Washburn warned, “give the malignants” an opportunity to damage him further.
The log cabin was emblematic of the dignity of honest, common, impoverished origins ever since William Henry Harrison had been triumphantly dubbed the “log-cabin, hard-cider” candidate twenty years earlier. Harrison had merely been posed in front of a log cabin. Lincoln had actually been born in one. One Republican worker wrote: “It has also afforded me sincere pleasure to think of Mr. Lincoln taking possession of the White House; he, who was once the inmate of the log cabin—were he the pampered, effeminated child of fortune, no such pleasing emotions would be inspired.” Answering the charge that Lincoln would be a “nullity,” the New York Tribune suggested that a “man who by his own genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and uneducated flat boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”
Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage, especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable political asset.
Underlying this policy of self-restraint was another important but unvoiced political reality: Lincoln had to maintain the cohesion of the new Republican Party, a coalition of old Democrats, former Whigs, and members of the nativist American Party. Informing a Jewish friend that he had never entered a Know Nothing lodge, as accused by Democrats, he cautioned that “our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.”
Lincoln “was a revelation,” young Adams recorded in his diary. “There he was, tall, shambling, plain and good-natured. He seemed shy to a degree, and very awkward in manner; as if he felt out of place, and had a realizing sense that properly the positions should be reversed. Seward too appeared constrained.”
Lincoln always understood the importance of what he described as “the dry, and irksome labor” of building organizations to get out the vote, while most politicians preferred “parades, and shows, and monster meetings.”
For weeks, Stephen Douglas had been barnstorming the country, having decided immediately after his nomination to defy custom. Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country, from the New England states to the Northwest, from the border states to the South, becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”
Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election. “The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.” Their dismissal of the looming possibility of secession was in part, but only in part, a deliberate tactic to ignore the threat so that voters would not be scared away from the Republican ticket.
The first dispatch, indicating a strong Republican win in Decatur, Illinois, was “borne into the Assembly hall as a trophy of victory, to be read to the crowd,” who responded with great shouts of joy. Though the early returns were incomplete, it was observed that Lincoln “seemed to understand their bearing on the general result in the State and commented upon every return by way of comparison with previous elections.”
Too often in the past his dreams had collapsed at the last moment.
Lincoln’s concerns proved groundless, for Thurlow Weed’s unparalleled organization had been at work since dawn, rounding up Republican voters in every precinct. “Don’t wait until the last hour,” Weed had instructed his workers. “Consider every man a ‘delinquent’ who doesn’t vote before 10 o’clock.” He left his organization plenty of time to prod, push, and, if necessary, carry voters to the polls.
Soon after midnight, the returns from New York and Brooklyn came in, revealing that Democratic control of New York City was not enough to counter the Republican vote throughout the state.

10 “An Intensified Crossword Puzzle”

Yet, keenly aware of both the fractious nature of the youthful Republican Party and the ominous threats from the South, he understood that his country was entering a most perilous time.
“I began at once to feel that I needed support,” he noted later; “others to share with me the burden.” As the exhausted townsfolk shuffled back to their homes and the city sank “into its usual quietness,” Lincoln began to compose his official family—the core of his administration. “This was on Wednesday morning,” he revealed, “and before the sun went down, I had made up my Cabinet. It was almost the same as I finally selected.”
On Class Day at Brown, he had delivered a poem that was remembered for years afterward. He had hoped quixotically to make his living as a poet upon graduation, but had reluctantly settled for a career in law. He leaped at the chance to work in the White House.
Hamlin recalled listening to a speech Lincoln delivered that “was so full of good humor and sharp points” that the entire chamber “was convulsed with laughter.
The following day, however, their dialogue resumed privately at a friend’s house, where Lincoln made clear his determination to create “a compact body” by drawing his former rivals into “his official household.”
Speed later recalled that Lincoln “threw himself on the bed” and said: “Speed what are your pecuniary Conditions—are you rich, or poor.” Understanding the import of the question, Speed replied: “I think I know what you wish. I’ll Speak Candidly to you—My pecuniary Conditions are good—I do not think you have any office within your gift that I can afford to take.”
Returning home, Lincoln corresponded with a wide range of politicians and listened carefully to their suggestions for his cabinet. In the end, however, he alone would solve what Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later described as “an intensified crossword puzzle in which party loyalty and service, personal fitness, geographical location and a dozen other factors have to be taken into account and made to harmonize.”
Seward “trembled” and appeared “nervous” as he took the first letter, dated December 8, which contained the formal invitation. “With your permission,” Lincoln wrote, “I shall, at the proper time, nominate you to the Senate, for confirmation, as Secretary of State, for the United States. Please let me hear from you at your own earliest convenience.”
While there was little doubt that Seward desired the post, he still wished to test the extent of his influence in selecting congenial (pro-Seward) colleagues.
Lincoln took little time in assuring Bates that “from the time of his nomination, his determination was, in case of success, to invite [him] into the Cabinet.” In fact, Bates proudly noted in his diary, Lincoln told him that he deemed his participation in his administration “necessary to its complete success.” Lincoln acknowledged that several of Bates’s friends had urged his appointment as secretary of state, but he believed he “should offer that place to Mr. Seward,” not only “as a matter of duty to the party, and to Mr. Sewards many and strong friends,” but also because “it accorded perfectly with his own personal inclinations.” However, “he had not yet communicated with Mr. Seward, and did not know whether he would accept the appointment—as there had been some doubts expressed about his doing so.” While Lincoln may have deliberately chosen the word “communicated” to allow Bates the belief he was the first approached, he actually meant that Seward had not yet responded affirmatively to his letter. Bates understood it to mean that he was the first man to whom Lincoln had spoken about a cabinet position. Lincoln explained that although he could not offer Bates the premier slot as secretary of state, he could extend “what he supposed would be most congenial, and for which he was certainly in every way qualified, viz: the Attorney Generalship.”
Only two months earlier, acknowledging in his diary that “everybody expects Mr. Lincoln to offer me one of his Departments,” he had vowed to decline the position. “My pecuniary circumstances (barely competent) and my settled domestic habits make it very undesirable for me to be in high office with low pay—it subjects a man to great temptations to live above his income, and thus become dishonest; and if he have the courage to live economically, it subjects his family to ridicule.”
With the country “in trouble and danger,” however, he “felt it his duty to sacrifice his personal inclinations, and if he could, to contribute his labor and influence to the restoration of peace in, and the preservation of his country.” Lincoln knew he had his man, either for U.S. Attorney General, or, if Seward should decline, for secretary of state.
Though his choice was “confirmed” by Hamlin and others, recalled Lincoln, “the selection was my own, and not theirs.”
Understanding that Lincoln would not be swayed from Welles, Weed playfully suggested a fanciful alternative for secretary of the navy. The president-elect could purchase “an attractive figure-head, to be adorned with an elaborate wig and luxuriant whiskers, and transfer it from the prow of a ship to the entrance of the Navy Department,” which would be “quite as serviceable as his secretary, and less expensive.” Lincoln immediately appreciated the humor in the resemblance between Weed’s image of a wigged, bewhiskered figurehead and Father Neptune, as he would later call Welles. He reckoned, however, he needed “a live secretary of the navy.”
Weed returned to Albany convinced that Lincoln was “capable in the largest sense of the term.” In the Albany Evening Journal, he wrote: “his mind is at once philosophical and practical. He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself and for himself.”
The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.
To save face, Lincoln suggested that Cameron decline the appointment, in which case Lincoln would “not object to its being known that it was tendered you.”
Though discomfited by the awkwardness of their introduction, Chase was immediately disarmed by Lincoln’s warm expression of thanks for Chase’s support in 1858 during his failed Senate campaign against Douglas.
Lincoln then directly addressed the point of the meeting. “I have done with you,” he said, “what I would not perhaps have ventured to do with any other man in the country—sent for you to ask you whether you will accept the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, being exactly prepared to offer it to you.” The problem, Lincoln explained, would be garnering acceptance for Chase’s appointment in Pennsylvania, a prospect complicated by the unresolved Cameron situation and by Chase’s previous support for free trade that had enraged industrial Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s straightforward manner impressed Chase, even as it irritated him. “I frankly said to him that I desired no position & could not easily reconcile myself to the acceptance of a subordinate one; but should gladly give to his admn., as a Senator, all the support which a sincere friend…could give.” [Chase had once again been elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio legislature.]
Speaking in an agitated voice, Lincoln said: “I am in a quandary. Pennsylvania is entitled to a cabinet office.” He had received “hundreds of letters, and the cry is ‘Cameron, Cameron!’…The Pennsylvania people say: ‘If you leave out Cameron you disgrace him.’” Nonetheless, he had his mind “already fixed on Chase, Seward and Bates, my competitors at the convention.” Koerner and Judd expressed themselves strongly against Cameron but were unable to solve Lincoln’s dilemma.
His desire for position and glory, as Lincoln shrewdly guessed, would allow Lincoln alone to determine the time and place of his appointment.
WHILE LINCOLN WAS PREOCCUPIED with the construction of his official family, the country was tearing itself apart.
For Lincoln, who would not take office until March 4, it was a time of mounting anxiety and frustration. He strongly believed, he told John Nicolay, that the government possessed “both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” but there was little he could do until he held the reins of power.
While he was “indefatigable in his efforts to arrive at the fullest comprehension of the present situation of public affairs,” relying not simply on the newspapers he devoured but on “faithful researches for precedents, analogies, authorities, etc.,” it was hard to stand by while his country was disintegrating. He declared at one point that he would be willing to reduce his own life span by “a period of years” equal to the anxious months separating his election and the inauguration.
Besieged with requests to say something conciliatory, Lincoln refused to take “a position towards the South which might be considered a sort of an apology for his election.” He was determined to stand behind the Republican platform, believing that any attempt to soften his position would dishearten his supporters in the North without producing any beneficial impact on the South. When asked by the editor of a Democratic paper in Missouri to make a soothing public statement that would keep Missouri in the Union, Lincoln replied: “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and accessible to the public. Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers, like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers, there can be no further misunderstanding…. I am not at liberty to shift my ground—that is out of the question…. The secessionists, per se believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.”
He simply repeated that once he assumed power, “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”
“On the contrary,” he wrote the New York Times’s Henry Raymond, “the Boston Courier, and its’ class, hold me responsible for the speech, and endeavor to inflame the North with the belief that it foreshadows an abandonment of Republican ground by the incoming administration; while the Washington Constitution, and its’ class hold the same speech up to the South as an open declaration of war against them.” The South, he claimed, “has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear.”
However justifiable Lincoln’s anger at what he rightly called a “forgery out and out,” his response reveals the gulf still separating him from Chase on the issue of race. Although Lincoln’s views on racial equality reflected the majority position in the North, Chase regarded his call at the pitcher ceremony to eradicate the Black Laws one of the proudest moments of his life.
Lincoln’s clear resolve never to accept any measure extending slavery prevented the wavering Seward and other like-minded Republicans from backing the Crittenden Compromise. As one Southern state after another withdrew from the Union, Seward came to believe that only conciliation could save the Union.
With Lincoln’s iron hand guiding the way in this matter, however, Seward conceded that there was not “the slightest” chance that the Republican side would adopt the Compromise.
“sedition will be growing weaker and Loyalty stronger.”
In late December, a rumor reached Springfield that Buchanan had instructed Major Anderson “to surrender Fort Moultrie if it is attacked.” When Lincoln heard the news, he told Nicolay: “If that is true they ought to hang him!”
Stanton was driven to distraction when President Buchanan could not “be made to believe, the existence of this danger,” and would not credit the treasonous plot, which, Stanton feared, would include an attempt to assassinate Lincoln before his inauguration.
The question what either of us could or ought to do at the time for the public welfare was discussed and settled,” Seward later recalled.
The speech was particularly disappointing to those, like Carl Schurz, who had long considered Seward the leader of the great antislavery cause. “What do you think of Seward, my child?” Schurz asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power. He has trodden the way of compromise and concession, and I do not see where he can take his stand on this back track…. That is hard. We believed in him so firmly and were so affectionately attached to him. This is the time that tries men’s souls, and many probably will be found wanting.”
The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive…these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men….
“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of unkindness…but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to warn you of your dangers.”
Stung deeply by her denunciation, Seward admitted that “I am not surprised that you do not like the ‘concessions’ in my speech. You will soon enough come to see that they are not compromises, but explanations, to disarm the enemies of Truth, Freedom, and Union, of their most effective weapons.”
By privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating situation.

11 “I Am Now Public Property”

“Buying was an intoxication with her,” her biographer Ruth Randall writes, “it became an utterly irrational thing, an obsession.” Mary’s desire for elegant clothes reflected more than vanity, however. She was undoubtedly aware of the whispering comments about her plain looks and her husband’s lack of breeding: “Could he, with any honor, fill the Presidential Chair?” one guest at an elegant restaurant was overhead saying. “Would his western gaucherie disgrace the Nation?” Her fighting spirit stimulated, she was determined to show the world that the civility of the West was more than equal to that of the East.
Lincoln would never return to Springfield.
For most of the ride to the first major stop in Indianapolis, Villard noted, Lincoln “sat alone and depressed” in his private car, “forsaken by his usual hilarious good spirits.”
If such acts were considered coercion, he continued, then “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement.”
Seward himself was immensely relieved to “have passed the 13th safely,” believing, he wrote home, that “each day brings the people apparently nearer to the tone and temper, and even to the policy I have indicated…. I am, at last, out of direct responsibility. I have brought the ship off the sands, and am ready to resign the helm into the hands of the Captain whom the people have chosen.” Despite his stated intentions, Seward would make one later effort to resume the helm.
Never comfortable with extemporaneous speech, he was forced to speak at dozens of stops along the way. He was determined not to foreshadow his inaugural address or to disturb the tenuous calm that seemed to have descended upon the country. He chose, therefore, to say little or nothing, projecting an optimistic tone that belied the seriousness of the situation.
In Ashtabula, Ohio, he playfully answered calls for Mrs. Lincoln by suggesting that “he should hardly hope to induce her to appear, as he had always found it very difficult to make her do what she did not want to.”
In his diary, Charles Francis Adams lamented that Lincoln’s remarks on his journey toward Washington “are rapidly reducing the estimate put upon him. I am much afraid that in this lottery we may have drawn a blank…. They betray a person unconscious of his own position as well as of the nature of the contest around him. Good natured, kindly, honest, but frivolous and uncertain.”
In fact, Lincoln was not oblivious to the abyss that could easily open beneath his feet. While he “observed the utmost caution of utterance and reticence of declaration,” John Nicolay noted, “the shades of meaning in his carefully chosen sentences were enough to show how alive he was to the trials and dangers confronting his administration.”
he maintained, he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
Lincoln’s ominous mention of assassination may have been prompted by the previous day’s report of a plot to kill him during his scheduled stop in Baltimore, a city rampant with Southern sympathizers.
What is certain is that Seward greeted the president-elect with “a virtuoso performance,” attempting to control his every movement and make himself indispensable to the relative newcomer.
Lincoln’s surprise call disconcerted Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece, who had brilliantly performed the role of hostess for her bachelor uncle. The appearance of Buchanan’s successor signaled the end of her days in the White House.
The problem was that Cameron still insisted on the Treasury position, which Lincoln had resolved to give to Chase. Only when Cameron realized he was not in a position to dictate what he wanted did he grudgingly accept the War Department.
“The Blairs,” Hay wrote in his diary, “have to an unusual degree the spirit of a clan. Their family is a close corporation…. They have a way of going with a rush for anything they undertake.”
Chittenden knew that many of the Southern delegates had come simply “to scoff” or “to nourish their contempt for the ‘rail-splitter.’” He could not imagine how Lincoln, who had traveled for ten days and “just escaped a conspiracy against his life,” could face a gathering in which so many were openly hostile. Yet Lincoln’s “wonderful vivacity surprised every spectator,” Chittenden marveled. “He spoke apparently without premeditation, with a singular ease of manner and facility of expression.”
In a gracious letter to Colfax, he explained: “I had partly made up my mind in favor of Mr. Smith—not conclusively of course—before your name was mentioned in that connection. When you were brought forward I said ‘Colfax is a young man—is already in position—is running a brilliant career, and is sure of a bright future in any event. With Smith, it is now or never.’
Mentioning that Colfax had not supported him during his Senate campaign against Douglas, Lincoln begged him to “not do me the injustice to suppose, for a moment, that I remembered any thing against you in malice.”
All that remained was for Lincoln to secure Chase’s acceptance. He had not exchanged a single word with Chase about the appointment since his arrival in Washington. Now, without consulting the proud Ohioan, Lincoln sent Chase’s nomination as treasury secretary to the Senate. Chase was on the Senate floor when a number of his colleagues came over to congratulate him. “Ever conscious of his own importance and overly sensitive to matters of protocol,” he promptly called on the president to express his anger and his decision to decline the appointment. In the course of their ensuing conversation, Chase later recalled, Lincoln “referred to the embarrassment my declination would occasion him.” Chase promised to consider the matter further, and, as Lincoln hoped, he “finally yielded.”
In the end, Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly called Seward’s bluff. Through all the countervailing pressures, he had achieved the cabinet he wanted from the outset—a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the history of the country.
His opponents had been certain that Lincoln would fail in this first test of leadership. “The construction of a Cabinet,” one editorial advised, “like the courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the new Executive is not acquainted. There are certain little tricks which go far beyond the arts familiar to the stump, and the cross-road tavern, whose comprehension requires a delicacy of thought and subtlety of perception, secured only by experience.”
In fact, as John Nicolay later wrote, Lincoln’s “first decision was one of great courage and self-reliance.” Each of his rivals was “sure to feel that the wrong man had been nominated.” A less confident man might have surrounded himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. James Buchanan, for example, had deliberately chosen men who thought as he did. Buchanan believed, Allan Nevins writes, that a president “who tried to conciliate opposing elements by placing determined agents of each in his official family would find that he had simply strengthened discord, and had deepened party divisions.” While it was possible that his team of rivals would devour one another, Lincoln determined that “he must risk the dangers of faction to overcome the dangers of rebellion.”
Later, Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune asked Lincoln why he had chosen a cabinet comprised of enemies and opponents. He particularly questioned the president’s selection of the three men who had been his chief rivals for the Republican nomination, each of whom was still smarting from the loss.
Lincoln’s answer was simple, straightforward, and shrewd. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”

12 “Mystic Chords of Memory”: Spring 1861

According to Nicolay, “Lincoln often resorted to the process of cumulative thought.” He would reduce complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later return to the same passage and polish it further “to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.”
While Seward or Chase would consult countless books, drawing from ancient to modern history to illustrate and refine their arguments, Lincoln built the armature of his inaugural out of four documents: the Constitution, Andrew Jackson’s nullification proclamation, Daniel Webster’s memorable “Liberty and Union Forever” speech, and Clay’s address to the Senate arguing for the Compromise of 1850.
“In any conflict which may ensue between the government and the seceding States,” Browning argued, “it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong.” Though in a number of private conversations during the long secession winter Lincoln had expressed his determination to take back the fallen properties, he accepted Browning’s argument and took out the promise to reclaim places that the seceding states had already taken.
Of all who read the draft, it was Seward who had the largest impact on Lincoln’s inaugural address. Seward had read the initial draft with a heavy heart. Though he believed Lincoln’s argument for the perpetuity of the Union was “strong and conclusive,” he felt that the bellicose tone of the text would render useless all the hard work, all the risks taken during the previous weeks to stop the secession movement from expanding.
Lincoln’s text had opened on a forceful note, pledging himself “bound by duty…upon the plainest grounds of good faith” to abide by the Chicago platform, without “liberty to shift his position.” Since many seceders considered the Chicago platform one of the touchstones of their withdrawal from the Union, this was clearly a provocative beginning. Even Bates had lambasted the Chicago platform as “exclusive and defiant…needlessly exposing the party to the specious charge of favoring negro equality.” Seward argued that unless Lincoln eliminated his words pledging strict adherence to the platform, he would “give such advantages to the Disunionists that Virginia and Maryland will secede, and we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty, days be obliged to fight the South for this capital…. In that case the dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration of a Republican Administration.” Lincoln agreed to delete the reference to the Chicago platform entirely.
Seward also criticized Lincoln’s pledge to reclaim fallen properties and to hold those still belonging to the government. He suggested that the text refer more “ambiguously” to “the exercise of power.” Lincoln had already planned to change the text as Browning advised, so he ignored this overly compromising suggestion and retained his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess” the properties still belonging to the federal government, including Fort Sumter.
Seward’s revisions are evident in nearly every paragraph. He qualified some, removed rough edges in others. Where Lincoln had referred to the secession ordinances and the acts of violence as “treasonable,” Seward substituted the less accusatory “revolutionary.” With the Dred Scott decision in mind, Lincoln warned against turning the “government over to the despotism of the few men [life officers] composing the court.” Seward deleted the word “despotism” and elevated the Court to read “that eminent tribunal.”
Lincoln had decried the idea of an amendment to the Constitution to ensure that Congress could never interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. “I am, rather, for the old ship,” he had written, “and the chart of the old pilots.” Lincoln’s stance put Seward in a difficult position; at Lincoln’s behest, he had introduced the controversial resolution that called for the amendment in the first place. Lincoln’s reversal now would leave Seward exposed. Treading carefully, Seward suggested that Lincoln acknowledge a diversity of opinion surrounding the proposed amendment, and that his own views would only “aggravate the dispute.” As it happened, Lincoln went further than Seward had suggested. In the early hours of the night before the inauguration, Congress, in its final session, had passed the proposed amendment “to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States.” In light of this action, Lincoln reversed his position yet again. He revised his passage to say that since Congress had proposed the amendment, and since he believed “such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable.”
Seward’s greatest contribution to the tone and substance of the inaugural address was in its conclusion. Lincoln’s finale threw down the gauntlet to the South: “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’” Seward recommended a very different closing, designed “to meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear in the East. Some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” He suggested two alternate endings. Lincoln drew upon Seward’s language to create his immortal coda.
Perhaps this show of popular support softened the wrenching realization that his chance had come and gone. When a congressman argued with him that a certain politician would be disappointed if he didn’t get an appointment in the new administration, Seward lost his composure: “Disappointment! You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer!”
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”
The Commercial Advertiser of New York claimed that the inaugural was “the work of Mr. Lincoln’s own pen and hand, unaltered by any to whom he confided its contents.”
In ominous language, the Wilmington, North Carolina, Herald warned that the citizens of America “might as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.”
Indeed, Seward was greatly relieved, not only because he realized many of his suggestions had been adopted, but because Lincoln’s conciliatory stance had given him cover with his critics in Congress. He could now leave the Senate, he told his wife, “without getting any bones broken,” content with having provided a foundation “on which an Administration can stand.”
The dramatic life of the former slave who became an eloquent orator and writer was well known in the North. He had been owned by several cruel slaveholders, but his second master’s kindly wife had taught him to read. When the master found out, he stopped the instruction immediately, warning his wife that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read…there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…. It would make him…discontented and unhappy.” These words proved prescient. Young Douglass soon felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” He fervently wished that he were dead or perhaps an animal—“Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” Only the faraway hope of escaping to freedom kept him alive. While waiting six years for his chance, he surreptitiously learned to write.
Douglass believed that the election of a Republican president foretold a rupture in the power of the slaveocracy. “It has taught the North its strength, and shown the South its weakness. More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency.”
The president needed time to think, but scarcely had a moment “to eat or sleep” amid the crush of office seekers. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, pressed in as soon as the doors were opened, ignoring the barriers set up to keep them in line. As Lincoln moved throughout the house to take his lunch—which was generally limited to bread, fruit, and milk—“he had literally to run the gantlet through the crowds.” Each aspirant had a story to tell, a reason why a clerkship in Washington or a job in their local post office or customs house would allow their family to survive. Time and again, Lincoln was faulted for wasting his energies. “You will wear yourself out,” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts warned. “They don’t want much,” Lincoln replied, “they get but little, and I must see them.”
Such openheartedness indicated incompetence to many, or, worse, a sign of terrible weakness. He “has no conception of his situation,” Sumner told Adams. “He is ignorant, and must have help,” Adams agreed, citing Seward as “our only security now.” The New York Times reproved Lincoln repeatedly, writing disdainfully that he “owes a higher duty to the country…than to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters.”
Just as President Jackson stopped the attempted secession of South Carolina in 1833 by making it clear that punishment would follow, so Lincoln must now take “measures which will inspire respect for the power of the Government and the firmness of those who administer it.”
Hurlbut spent two days in his native city. He returned with “no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable” that Unionist sentiment in both city and state was dead, “that separate nationality is a fixed fact.”
At the formal dinner, “there was a Babel of small talk,” Russell observed, “except when there was an attentive silence caused by one of the President’s stories…for which he is famous.” As he reeled off one humorous anecdote after another, no one could have guessed that earlier that day, Lincoln had received devastating news from General Scott.
“A very oppressive silence succeeded,” Blair recalled, interrupted only by his own angry retort that Scott was playing “politician and not General,” a comment directed at Seward’s influence with Scott. Like his son, Blair Senior had long believed that Lincoln should have announced the reinforcement of Sumter at the time of his inauguration and he blamed Seward for Lincoln’s “timid temporizing policy.” It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”
“Thunder, George! What are you talking about?” Seward asked. “It cannot be.” When Harrington repeated his news, Seward was irate. “I want no more at this time of the Administration which may be defeated. We are not yet in a position to go to war.” Seward’s success in getting Lincoln to soften the tone of his inaugural address, coupled with the cabinet vote on March 15, decisively echoing his own advice to evacuate Sumter, had left him with the mistaken conviction that he was the power behind a weak president.
Flattering letters from the South had compounded Seward’s erroneous assumption. Frederick Roberts in North Carolina assured him that everyone was looking to him for “a peaceful adjustment of the difficulties.” While Lincoln, the letter continued, was considered throughout the state as “a 3rd rate man,” Seward was looked upon as “the Hector or Atlas of not only his Cabinet, but the giant intellect of the whole north.” Another admirer swore that “Unionists look to yourself, and only to you Sir, as a member of the Cabinet—to save the country.” With these judgments of both the president’s failings and his own stature, Seward wholeheartedly agreed. He confided to Adams that Lincoln had “no conception of his situation—much absorption in the details of office dispensation, but little application to great ideas.” Adams needed little convincing. Despite accepting the high-ranking appointment as minister to Great Britain, he remained dismissive of Lincoln, writing in his diary: “The man is not equal to the hour.” The only hope, he repeatedly wrote, lay in the secretary of state’s influence with the president.
For weeks, Seward had acted under “two supreme illusions”: first, that he was in reality the man in charge; and second, that Southerners would be appeased by the abandonment of Sumter and would eventually return to the Union.
Seward’s mistake was not the diabolical plot that some critics later charged, but a grave misreading of the situation and a grave misunderstanding of Lincoln.
Nor did Seward’s overreaching end there. The previous February, Seward had informed a German diplomat “that there was no great difference between an elected president of the United States and an hereditary monarch.” Neither truly ran things. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party.” Seward had conceived of himself as a prime minister, with Lincoln the figurehead. Testing this presumptuous notion, Seward closed with the idea that “whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it…. Either the President must do it himself…or DEVOLVE it on some member of his Cabinet…. It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” As Nicolay later wrote, “had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet.” Seward’s effrontery easily could have provoked a swift dismissal. Yet, as happened so often, Lincoln showed an “unselfish magnanimity,” which was “the central marvel of the whole affair.”
Concerning the assertion that the administration was “without a policy,” Lincoln reminded Seward of his inaugural pledge that “the power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government.” This was the “exact domestic policy” that Seward called for, “with the single exception, that it does not propose to abandon Fort Sumpter.” As for the charge that the administration lacked a foreign policy, “we have been preparing circulars, and instructions to ministers…without even a suggestion that we had no foreign policy.” The idea of engineering a foreign war to reunify the country did not even rate a response.
Lincoln responded most emphatically to Seward’s suggestion that perhaps the secretary of state was needed to design and pursue a vigorous policy where the president had not. In unmistakable language, Lincoln wrote: “I remark that if this must be done, I must do it.”
To the astonishment of Welles, Lincoln “took upon himself the whole blame—said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more careful and attentive.” In fact, Welles continued, Lincoln “often declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them.”

13 “The Ball Has Opened”: Summer 1861

While the executive branch needed Congress to raise armies and authorize spending, Lincoln was advised that “to wait for ‘many men of many minds’ to shape a war policy would be to invite disaster.”
Seward was particularly adamant on this point, believing that “history tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.”
虽然行政部门需要国会征兵并授权支出，但林肯被告知，“等待‘很多有不同想法的人’来制定战争政策，无异于自取灭亡。”
“In this hour of trial it becomes the duty of every patriotic citizen to sustain the General Government,” one Douglas paper began. Another urged “every man to lay aside his party bias…give up small prejudices and go in, heart and hand, to put down treason and traitors.”
The enthusiastic solidarity of the North dangerously underestimated the strength and determination of the South. Seward predicted that the war would be over in sixty days. John Hay expressed the condescending wish that it would “be bloody and short, in pity to the maniac South. They are weak, ignorant, bankrupt in money and credit. Their army is a vast mob, insubordinate and hungry…. What is before them but defeat, poverty, dissensions, insurrections and ruin.”
“I come to you on the part of President Lincoln,” Blair began, “to ask whether any inducement that he can offer will prevail on you to take command of the Union army?” Lee responded “as candidly and as courteously” as he could: “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
Though he could apprehend “no necessity for this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed,” he was unable, he explained, “to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State (with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.” Shortly thereafter, Lee was designated commander of the Virginia state forces.
“Are you not feeling well, Colonel Lee?” Helm asked. “Well in body but not in mind,” Lee replied. “In the prime of life I quit a service in which were all my hopes and expectations in this world.” Helm showed Lee Lincoln’s offer and asked for advice, saying, “I have no doubt of his kindly intentions. But he cannot control the elements. There must be a great war.” Lee was “too much disturbed” to render advice, urging Helm to “do as your conscience and your honor bid.”
When Helm reached Kentucky and spoke with General Simon Bolivar Buckner and his friends, he realized he must decline Lincoln’s offer and “cast his destinies with his native southland.” The time spent in drafting his reply to Lincoln proved to be, he told a friend, “the most painful hour of his life.” Soon after, he received a commission in the Confederate Army, where he eventually became a brigadier general.
Meanwhile, the secession of Virginia jeopardized the Norfolk Navy Yard. With its strategic location, immense dry dock, great supply of cannons and guns, and premier vessel, the Merrimac, the Norfolk yard was indispensable to both sides. Welles had encouraged Lincoln to reinforce the yard before Sumter fell, but Lincoln had resisted any action that would provoke Virginia. This decision would seriously compromise the Union’s naval strength. By the time Welles received orders to send troops to Norfolk, it was too late. The Confederates had secured control of the Navy Yard. The calamitous news, Charles Francis Adams recorded in his diary, sent him into a state of “extreme uneasiness” about the future of the Union. “We the children of the third and fourth generations are doomed to pay the penalties of the compromises made by the first.”
The secretary of state argued that if they sent “accounts of the killed and wounded,” they “would only influence public sentiment, and be an obstacle in the path of reconciliation.” The issue became moot when reporters learned that secessionists had cut all the telegraph wires in Baltimore and demolished all the railroad bridges surrounding the city. Washington was isolated from all communication with the North.
Villard noted, “it was as though the government of a great nation had been suddenly removed to an island in mid-ocean in a state of entire isolation.” Anxious citizens crowded the train station every day, hopeful to greet an influx of the Northern troops needed to protect the vulnerable city.
For days, the rioting in Baltimore continued. Fears multiplied that the Maryland legislature, which had convened in Annapolis, was intending to vote for secession. The cabinet debated whether the president should bring in the army “to arrest, or disperse the members of that body.” Lincoln decided that “it would not be justifiable.” It was a wise determination, for in the end, though secessionist mobs continued to disrupt the peace of Maryland for weeks, the state never joined the Confederacy, and eventually became, as Lincoln predicted, “the first of the redeemed.”
Receiving word that the mobs intended to destroy the train tracks between Annapolis and Philadelphia in order to prevent the long-awaited troops from reaching the beleaguered capital, Lincoln made a controversial decision. If resistance along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia made it “necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety,” Lincoln authorized General Scott to do so. In Lincoln’s words, General Scott could “arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety.” Seward later claimed that he had urged a wavering Lincoln to take this step, convincing him that “perdition was the sure penalty of further hesitation.”
Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief executive, he was responsible for ensuring “that the laws be faithfully executed.” An insurrection “in nearly one-third of the States” had subverted the “whole of the laws…are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” His logic was unanswerable, but as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” Welles seemed to understand the complex balancing act, correctly predicting to his wife that the “government will, doubtless, be stronger after the conflict is over than it ever has been, and there will be less liberty.”
Furthermore, he knew they would argue about the purpose of the war. Frances, unlike her husband, had already decided that the principal goal was to end slavery. She recognized that the war might last years and entail “immense sacrifice of human life,” but the eradication of slavery justified it all. “The true, strong, glorious North is at last fairly roused,” she wrote her husband, “the enthusiasm of the people—high & low rich & poor…all enlisted at last in the cause of human rights. No concession from the South now will avail to stem the torrent.—No compromise will be made with slavery of black or white. God has heard the prayer of the oppressed and a fearful retribution awaits the oppressors.”
Bates wanted a limited war so as “to disturb as little as possible the accustomed occupations of the people,” including Southern slaveholding. Blair agreed, counseling Lincoln that it would be a “fatal error” if the contest became “one between the whole people of the South and the people of the North.”
To Lincoln’s mind, the battle to save the Union contained an even larger purpose than ending slavery, which was after all sanctioned by the very Constitution he was sworn to uphold. “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle,” he told Hay in early May, “is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
The philosopher John Stuart Mill shared Lincoln’s spacious understanding of the sectional crisis, predicting that a Southern victory “would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilized world.” From the opposite point of view, a member of the British nobility expressed the hope that with “the dissolution of the Union,” men would “live to see an aristocracy established in America.”
“scattered over the desks chairs and galleries some loafing, many writing letters, slowly and with plough hardened hands.”
“他们散布在桌椅和走廊上，有些人无所事事，许多人在写信，动作缓慢，手上布满耕耘的痕迹。”
As a proper young lady, Julia was appalled by some of the boys’ antics. She refused to join in when she found the four of them sitting on the president, attempting to pin him to the floor. She was embarrassed when they interrupted cabinet meetings to invite members and the president to attend one of their theatrical performances in the attic. Though Lincoln himself never seemed to mind, taking great pleasure in their fun, Julia felt she was responsible for curbing their youthful exuberance. Sometimes Willie would help to restore order. He was, Julia wrote, “the most lovable boy” she had ever known, “bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.” More often he would simply retreat to his mother’s room, where he loved to read poetry and write verses.
Despite Julia’s great affection for Mary, she was stunned by the first lady’s overbearing need to get “what she wanted when she wanted it,” regardless of how others might be hurt or inconvenienced.
Few recognized the insecurity behind Mary’s outlandish behavior, the terrible needs behind the ostentation and apparent abrasiveness.
Driven by the need to prove herself to society, Mary Lincoln became obsessed with recasting her own image and renovating that of her new home, the White House. Unattended for years, the White House had come to look like “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” Elizabeth Grimsley was stunned to find that “the family apartments were in a deplorably shabby condition as to furniture, (which looked as if it has been brought in by the first President).” The public rooms, too, were in poor shape, with threadbare, tobacco-stained rugs, torn curtains, and broken chairs.
The sorry condition of the White House provided the energetic Mary with a worthy ambition. She would restore the people’s home to its former elegance as a symbol of her husband’s strength and the Union’s power. In another era, this ambition might have been applauded, but in the midst of a civil war, it was regarded as frivolous.
,—all for a principle, it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army.
It was only a matter of days before Sprague called on Kate. Unlike earlier tentative suitors, intimidated perhaps by Kate’s beauty and brains, Sprague moved confidently to establish a place in her heart, becoming “the first, the only man,” she said afterward, “that had found a lodgment there.” Years later, writing to Kate, Sprague vividly recalled their earlier courtship days. “Do you remember the hesitating kiss I stole, and the glowing, blushing face that responded to the touch. I well remember it all. The step forward from the Cleveland meeting, and the enhanced poetical sensation, for it was poetry, if there ever is such in life.”
For Kate, who acknowledged that she was “accustomed to command and be obeyed, to wish and be anticipated,” Sprague’s cocksure attitude must have presented a welcome challenge. In the weeks that followed, the young couple saw each other frequently. By summer’s end, Nettie Chase told Kate that she liked Sprague “very much” and hoped the two would marry. Nettie’s hopes were put on hold, however, as the war continued to escalate, changing the course of countless lives throughout the fractured nation.
Nicolay confessed that he had been “quite unable to keep the tears out of my eyes” whenever he thought of Ellsworth. After the funeral, Mary was presented with the bloodied flag for which Ellsworth had given his life; but the horrified first lady, not wanting to be reminded of the sad event, quickly had it packed away.
All his life, he had taken care not to send letters written in anger.
他一生都很注意，从不在生气时写信。
In that event, Britain would forever lose “the sympathies and the affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”
Seward was slowly but inevitably coming to appreciate Lincoln’s remarkable abilities. “It is due to the President to say, that his magnanimity is almost superhuman,” he told his wife in mid-May. “His confidence and sympathy increase every day.” As Lincoln began to trust his own abilities, Seward became more confident in him.
He committed himself “to his chief,” Nicolay and Hay observed, “not only without reserve, but with a sincere and devoted personal attachment.”
Seward’s mortification at not having received his party’s nomination in 1860 never fully abated, but he no longer felt compelled to belittle Lincoln to ease his pain. He settled into his position as secretary of state, and his optimistic and gregarious nature reasserted itself.
I was certainly not in a place to be envied.
Lincoln later explained that with “so large a number of disloyal persons” infiltrating every department, the government could not rely on official agents to manage contracts for manufacturing the weapons and supplies necessary to maintain a fighting force.
A “right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world, than ten times the men, and ten times the money,” he assured Congress. For “this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes….
“This is essentially a People’s contest,” the president asserted. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” As evidence of the capacity of free institutions to better the “condition” of the people, “beyond any example in the world,” he cited the regiments of the Union Army, in which “there is scarcely one, from which could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.”
Northern newspapers generally praised the message, though some failed to appreciate the rigor of Lincoln’s appeal and the clear grace of his language. “In spite of obvious faults in style,” the New York Times correspondent conceded, “I venture to say it will add to the popularity of the Rail-splitter. It is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and straightforward man; and its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of illustration will cause it to be read with peculiar pleasure by the masses of the people.”
More important, the Congress responded with alacrity. Its members authorized more money and an even larger mobilization of troops than the president had requested. In addition, they provided retroactive authority for nearly all of Lincoln’s executive actions taken before they convened, remaining silent only on his suspension of habeas corpus.
Meanwhile, the events of the war itself began to reshape the old order in ways few realized.
With the stunning reversal and rout at Bull Run, however, Northern delusions of easy triumph dissolved. “It is pretty evident now that we have underrated the strength, the resources and the temper of the enemy,” the Times conceded. “And we have been blind, moreover, to the extraordinary nature of the country over which the contest is to be waged,—and to its wonderful facilities for defence.” Yet the harrowing lessons of Bull Run generated a perverse confidence that the North could “take comfort” in already knowing the worst that could happen. It was unimaginable in the anxious chaos following the first major battle of the Civil War that far worse was yet to come.

14 “I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed”: Fall 1861

passing officer recalled the poignant scene: “Mr. Lincoln sat on the ground leaning against a tree; Colonel Baker was lying prone on the ground his head supported by his clasped hands. The trees and the lawns were gorgeous in purple and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God’s tabernacle.” Not far away, ten-year-old Willie “was tossing the fallen leaves about in childish grace and abandon.” When the time came for Baker to take his leave, he shook Lincoln’s hand and then took Willie into his arms and kissed him.
Lincoln put Chittenden’s mind at ease, assuring him that “Scott’s life is as valuable to him as that of any person in the land. You remember the remark of a Scotchman about the head of a nobleman who was decapitated. ‘It was a small matter of a head, but it was valuable to him, poor fellow, for it was the only one he had.’”
Frances took an immediate liking to the president, whom she described as “a plain unassuming farmer—not awkward or ungainly,” who talked with equal ease about “the war & the crops.” Fanny was captivated. “I liked him very much,” she recorded in her diary. She was especially delighted when the president showed her the kittens her father had given to Willie and Tad and told her that “they climb all over him.”
In a letter to her sister, she wistfully confessed that Henry was never “more pleased with a home—it accommodates itself marvelously to his tastes & habits—such as they are at this day.” She praised Fred and Anna, who were so “gifted in making their surroundings…tasteful & attractive.”
an active want of discipline
but at this moment, his faith was shaken “to the very foundations.”
No time is to be lost, & no mans feelings should be consulted
Yet Lincoln still “yielded to delay,” Bates angrily confided in his diary, holding Seward responsible when the president hesitated a few days longer. “The President still hangs in painful and mortyfying doubt,” Bates wrote. “And if we persist in this sort of impotent indecision, we are very likely to share his fate—and, worse than all, deserve it.”
He recalled a ferocious bulldog in his hometown. While neighbors convinced themselves that they had nothing to fear, one wise man observed: “I know the bulldog will not bite. You know he will not bite, but does the bulldog know he will not bite?”
Seward composed an ingenious response, arguing that while Captain Wilkes had acted lawfully in searching the Trent, the legality of seizing contraband prisoners should have been decided by an American Prize Court. He recognized, he wrote, that he appeared to be taking “the British side” of the dispute “against my own country,” but he was “really defending and maintaining, not an exclusively British interest, but an old, honored, and cherished American cause.” The principle of referring such disputes to a legal tribunal, he reminded Britain, had been established nearly six decades earlier by Secretary of State James Madison when Britain had seized contraband from American ships in similar fashion. To “deny the justice” of the present British claim would be to “reverse and forever abandon” the very rationale upon which the United States had proudly stood in those earlier disputes. Therefore, in defense of “principles confessedly American,” the government would “cheerfully” free the prisoners and turn them over to Lord Lyons.
In the end, the public greeted the dispatch with relief, not anger. Compared to the prospect of fighting both a civil war and a foreign war at the same time, the release of the two prisoners seemed inconsequential. “The general acquiescence in this concession is a good sign,” George Templeton Strong observed. “It looks like willingness to pass over affronts that touch the democracy in its tenderest point for the sake of concentrating all our national energies on the trampling out of domestic treason.”
“Presidents and Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments,” he wrote, “but fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture, who combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.”
The historian George Bancroft reported favorably to his wife about a visit with the first lady, who was able with equal charm to discuss her plans for the “elegant fitting up of Mr. Lincoln’s room” and to “discourse eloquently” on a recent military review. Bancroft “came home entranced.” Mary “is better in manners and in spirit than we have generally heard: is friendly and not in the least arrogant.”
“It is better to lose a mortified finger of the right hand at once,” the New York Times declared, “than to cherish it till the arm is full of disease, and the whole system threatened with dissolution.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”

15 “My Boy Is Gone”: Winter 1862

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.”
“to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.”
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.”
Both Lincoln and Stanton seemed to have put the past behind them, however, leaving Harding “the most embarrassed of the three.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
The “violet-eyed” Kate Chase was singled out, as usual. “She wore a dress of mauve-colored silk, without ornament,” one reporter wrote admiringly. “On her small, classically-shaped head a simple wreath of minute white flowers mingled with the blond waves of her sunny hair, which was arranged in a Grecian knot behind.”
At midnight, the crowd began to move toward the closed dining room. During a slight delay occasioned by a steward who had temporarily misplaced the key, someone exclaimed, “I am in favor of a forward movement,” and everyone laughed, including General McClellan.
Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that God had struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family’s exalted status. “I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else,” she acknowledged. She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that God must have “foresaken” her in taking away “so lovely a child.”
Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they “offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy.”
该运动的一位学者观察到，无论他们使用什么方法，他们“提供了有形的证据，表明地球上最难以逾越的障碍，即死亡的障碍，可以通过同情的力量来超越。”
Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie’s death better than his wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died, and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room and gave way to his terrible grief. “That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”
“That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”
Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the war.

16 “He Was Simply Out-Generaled”: Spring 1862

The bottom is out of the tub
The “Quaker gun” affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the wrath of radicals. “We shall be the scorn of the world,” Senator Fessenden wrote his wife. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position…. And yet the President will keep him in command.” The embarrassing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for “we went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.” Echoing Fessenden’s dismay, the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan’s resignation. When Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one of the committee members growled, “Anybody.” Lincoln’s reply was swift. “Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
The post of general in chief was not filled, leaving Lincoln and Stanton to determine overall strategy. McClellan later recalled that he “learned through the public newspapers that [he] was displaced.” Claiming that “no one in authority had ever expressed to [him] the slightest disapprobation,” he was infuriated.
Still, McClellan persisted in his baffling inaction. He notified Stanton that “the enemy batteries are stronger” than anticipated. Stanton was livid: “You were sent on purpose to take strong batteries,” he reminded McClellan. Later that day, Lincoln telegraphed the general, warning that further delay would only allow the enemy to summon reinforcements from other theaters. “It is indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” Lincoln advised his commander on April 9. “The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now…. But you must act.”
Two more weeks passed without any sign of movement. “Do not misunderstand the apparent inaction here,” McClellan wired Lincoln; “not a day, not an hour has been lost, works have been constructed that may almost be called gigantic—roads built through swamps & difficult ravines, material brought up, batteries built.”
In another letter to his wife, he rationalized his continuing delay with the dubious contention that the more troops the enemy gathered in Yorktown, “the more decisive the results will be.”
Though he tried to claim the rebel retreat as a great bloodless victory, the public was unconvinced, and the question remained: why had he kept idle for a month? Had he moved on Yorktown with his greater numbers, he could have done serious damage to the rebel army. In the meantime, just as Lincoln had forewarned, the long delay had allowed the rebels to bring additional forces from various theaters into the peninsula, where, under General Johnston’s command, they prepared for a counteroffensive.
Her intermittent romance with the Rhode Island–based Sprague did not diminish her signal commitment to her father, whose household she managed with matchless style.
“Diplomats and statesmen felt it an honor to be her guests, and men of letters found that they needed their keenest wits to be her match in conversation,” one reporter noted. “Her drawing-room was a salon, and it has been paralleled only in the ante-revolutionary days of the French monarchy, when women ruled the empire of the Bourbons.”
Over time, the Chase home increasingly became a forum for critics of the Lincoln administration. In the relaxed atmosphere of Kate’s private dinner parties, William Fessenden could freely condemn Lincoln’s reluctance to confront the emancipation question. The members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War could censure General McClellan more harshly than public statement would safely allow. Over coffee and dessert in the parlor, the women could spread disdainful gossip about Mary Lincoln. Kate clearly understood the role that “parlor politics” could play in cementing alliances and consolidating power in furtherance of her father’s irrepressible political ambitions. She was determined to create nothing less than a “rival court” to the White House that could help catapult Chase to the presidency. In the spring of 1862, she reigned supreme.
Lincoln’s reply to Chase was swift and blunt: “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me.”
General Viele marveled how Lincoln was always the center of the circle gathered on the quarterdeck, keeping everyone engrossed for hours as he recited passages from Shakespeare, “page after page of Browning and whole cantos of Byron.” Talking much of the day, he interspersed stories and anecdotes from his “inexhaustible stock.” Many, as usual, were directly applicable to a point made in conversation, but some were simply jokes that set Lincoln laughing louder than all the combined listeners.
Not surprisingly, McClellan refused to credit the president for the return of Norfolk to the Union. “Norfolk is in our possession,” he flatly declared to his wife; “the result of my movements.”
“At night,” Fred Seward observed, “the long lines of lights on the shore, the shipping and bustle in the river made it almost impossible to believe we were not in the harbor of Philadelphia or New York.”
Yet now that McClellan stood to have his demands met, he told Lincoln that he wouldn’t receive McDowell’s men unless it was clear that he would have absolute authority over them. McClellan considered McDowell a radical on the issue of slavery and despised him personally, calling him an “animal” in a letter to his wife. Lincoln assured McClellan by telegraph that he was in command.
Lincoln was drawn to the poet’s vision of a lasting greatness, of deeds that would resound throughout history. Because of such achievements in life, both Greece, in which “there is no prouder grave,” and the mother “who gave thee birth,” can speak “of thy doom without a sigh”:
McClellan’s catalogue of gripes and concerns was endless. There were bridges to be built, bad roads, regiments to be reorganized. When Lincoln eventually ordered McDowell to reinforce him, the general continued to protest that “if I cannot fully control all his [McDowell’s] troops I want none of them, but would prefer to fight the battle with what I have and let others be responsible for the results.” Finally, he confided in his wife, “utmost prudence” was essential. “I must not unnecessarily risk my life—for the fate of my army depends upon me & they all know it.”
McClellan’s chronic delays allowed General Lee to take the initiative once again. During the last week in June, the Confederates launched a brutal attack on Union forces that became known as the Seven Days Battles.
He would carry on without the reinforcements he had repeatedly requested, but, he continued, if his “great inferiority in numbers” caused “a disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest where it belongs.” Irked, Lincoln replied that McClellan’s talk of responsibility “pains me very much. I give you all I can…while you continue, ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would.”

17 “We Are in the Depths”: Summer 1862

Even the normally stoical John Nicolay confided to his fiancée, Therena, that “the past has been a very blue week…. I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began.”
“If I should let a shade of this popular despondency fall upon a dispatch, or even rest upon my own countenance,” he realized, “there would be black despair throughout the whole country.”
He begged her for letters detailing daily life at home—the flowers in bloom and the hatching of eggs—anything but war and defeat.
“They are the only letters which come to me, free from excitement…. Write to me then cheerfully, as you are wont to do, of boys and girls and dogs and horses, and birds that sing, and stars that shine and never weep, and be blessed for all your days, for thus helping to sustain a spirit.”
In addition to commonplace matters, he provided her with confidential military intelligence about the Peninsula Campaign, delineating the flow of the Chickahominy and the position of the various divisions so she could visualize the course of the battle.
He was pleased, as well, with the quality of her letters, which finally seemed to meet his exacting standards. “All your letters have come and all have been good—some very good.”

18 “My Word Is Out”: Fall 1862

In the Western theater, Pope had demonstrated the aggression McClellan lacked.
“What is the stake?” Seward wrote Frances. “They say that it is nothing less than this capital; and, as many think, the cause also.”
While soldiers on both sides waited for the fighting to begin, a comet appeared in the northern sky. Lincoln, so familiar with Shakespeare, doubtless recalled Calpurnia’s ominous warning to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen/The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
“A pleasant little dinner,” Hay recorded, “and a pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.”
Chase predicted that “it would prove a national calamity,” while Stanton, recognizing that the protest was a dead letter, returned to the War Department “in the condition of a drooping leaf.” The episode produced an estrangement between Stanton and Lincoln that persisted for weeks.
“In great contests,” he wrote in a fragment found among his pages, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party,” and that God had willed “that it shall not end yet.”
“What is the use of growing old?” he asked. “You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.”
Moreover, unlike his colleagues in the cabinet, Seward did not question that Lincoln possessed the prudence, wisdom, and magnanimity needed to carry the country “safely through the sea of revolution.”
Seward’s ability to empathize with Lincoln’s unenviable position must have afforded Lincoln some real measure of comfort. Unlike Stanton and Chase, Seward clearly understood that a president had to work with the tools at his disposal. At this moment, McClellan was one of those tools.
While Lincoln rarely acknowledged the influence of faith or religious beliefs, “there were occasions when, uncertain how to proceed,” remarked Gideon Welles, “he had in this way submitted the disposal of the subject to a Higher Power, and abided by what seemed the Supreme Will.”
Sharing McClellan’s quarters for meals and occupying the adjoining tent at night, Lincoln quietly but candidly prompted his general to discard his “over-cautiousness” and plan for future movement. While McClellan conceded in a letter to his wife that Lincoln “was very affable” and “very kind personally,” he rightly suspected that the “real purpose of his visit is to push me into a premature advance into Virginia.”
“Our war on rebellion languishes,” a frustrated George Templeton Strong wrote on October 23. “McClellan’s repose is doubtless majestic, but if a couchant lion postpone his spring too long, people will begin wondering whether he is not a stuffed specimen after all.”
Lincoln’s choice of Burnside proved unfortunate. Though he was charismatic, honest, and industrious, he lacked the intelligence and confidence to lead a great army. He was said to possess “ten times as much heart as he has head.”
Even as he did the “awful arithmetic” of the relative losses, Lincoln realized, as he told William Stoddard, “that if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone.”
Hesitant to publicly attack Lincoln in the midst of war, they focused their fury on the man they considered the malevolent power behind the throne—William Henry Seward. For months, Chase had claimed “there was a back stairs & malign influence which controlled the President, and overruled all the decisions of the cabinet,” a hardly veiled reference to Seward.
他们一致认为，如果不对政府进行大刀阔斧的改革，“国家就会毁灭，事业就会失败”。他们不愿在战争期间公开攻击林肯，于是把怒火集中到一个他们认为是幕后操纵者的邪恶力量——威廉·亨利·西沃德身上。几个月来，蔡斯一直声称“有一股邪恶的影响力控制着总统，凌驾于内阁的所有决定之上”，这显然是指西沃德。
Masking his anguish, Seward told Lincoln that “it would be a relief to be freed from official cares.” Lincoln replied: “Ah, yes, Governor, that will do very well for you, but I am like the starling in [Laurence] Sterne’s story, ‘I can’t get out.’”
Lincoln straightaway understood that he was the true target of the radicals’ wrath. “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them,” he told Browning two days later. He described the chatter setting forth Seward’s controlling influence over him as “a lie, an absurd lie,” that one “could not impose upon a child.” Seward was the one man in the cabinet Lincoln trusted completely, the only one who fully appreciated his unusual strengths as a leader, and the only one he could call an intimate friend.
Senator John Sherman of Ohio expressed doubt that any change in the cabinet would have an effect, since Lincoln “had neither dignity, order, nor firmness.”
The next day, Welles paid an early call on the president. He said that he had “pondered the events” of the previous night and concluded that it would be a grievous mistake for Lincoln to accept Seward’s resignation. The senators’ presumption in their criticisms of Seward, “real or imaginary,” was “inappropriate and wrong.” In order to “maintain the rights and independence of the Executive,” Lincoln must reject the senator’s attempts to interfere with internal cabinet matters. Welles hoped that Seward would not press Lincoln to accept his resignation. Delighted by these comments, Lincoln asked Welles to talk with Seward.
Chase gave Welles a “perplexed” look, suggesting he was not pleased that his colleague was a witness to this upsetting encounter. At this point, Stanton also offered to submit his resignation. “I don’t want yours,” Lincoln immediately replied. Then, indicating Chase’s letter, he added, “This…is all I want—this relieves me—my way is clear—the trouble is ended. I will detain neither of you longer.”

19 “Fire in the Rear”: Winter–Spring 1863

“his blessed old pump handle working steadily” to ensure that his “People’s Levee” would be a success.
Seward and Fred soon joined him, carrying the corrected proclamation in a large portfolio. Not wishing to delay any longer, Lincoln commenced the signing. As the parchment was unrolled before him, he “took a pen, dipped it in ink, moved his hand to the place for the signature,” but then, his hand trembling, he stopped and put the pen down.
“I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” he said. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” His arm was “stiff and numb” from shaking hands for three hours, however. “If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation,” Lincoln said, “all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’” So the president waited a moment and then took up the pen once more, “slowly and carefully” writing his name. “The signature proved to be unusually bold, clear, and firm, even for him,” Fred Seward recalled, “and a laugh followed, at his apprehensions.” The secretary of state added his own name and carried it back to the State Department, where the great seal of the United States was affixed before copies were sent out to the press.
“Has Lincoln played false to humanity?” he wondered.
“the thought of the millions upon millions of human beings whose happiness was to be affected & freedom secured by the words of President Lincoln, was almost overwhelming…. I wish you & the President could have enjoyed it with us, here.”
The signed proclamation rendered words unnecessary. While its immediate effects were limited, since it applied only to enslaved blacks behind rebel lines, the Emancipation Proclamation changed forever the relationship of the national government to slavery.
“Slavery from this hour ceases to be a political power in the country…such a righteous revolution as it inaugurates never goes backward.”
“Strange phenomenon in the world’s history,” he wrote, “when a second-rate Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch memorable in all future ages.”
“世界历史上的一个奇怪现象，”他写道，“一个二流的伊利诺伊州律师成了说出这些话的工具，这些话将形成所有未来时代都铭记不灭的时代。”
When Joshua Speed next came to visit, Lincoln reminded his old friend of the suicidal depression he had suffered two decades earlier, and of his disclosure that he would gladly die but that he “had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” Now, indicating his Emancipation Proclamation, he declared: “I believe that in this measure…my fondest hopes will be realized.”
All his life, Lincoln had exhibited an exceptionally sensitive grasp of the limits set by public opinion. As a politician, he had an intuitive sense of when to hold fast, when to wait, and when to lead.
In the Senate, Willard Saulsbury of Delaware took to the floor to prevent a vote sustaining the administration on the suspension of habeas corpus. He could hardly keep his footing during a liquor-fueled harangue, while he inveighed against the president “in language fit only for a drunken fishwife,” calling him “an imbecile” and claiming that he was “the weakest man ever placed in a high office.” Called to order by Vice President Hamlin, he refused to take his seat. When the sergeant at arms approached to take Saulsbury into custody, he pulled out his revolver. “Damn you,” he said, pointing the pistol at the sergeant’s head, “if you touch me I’ll shoot you dead.” The wild scene continued for some time before Saulsbury was removed from the Senate floor.
Patiently, Lincoln weathered criticisms from Browning and a host of others. He listened carefully when David Davis, who, more than anyone, had helped engineer his victory at the Chicago convention and whom he had recently appointed to the Supreme Court, warned him about “the alarming condition of things.” Yet when Davis told Lincoln to alter his policy of emancipation “as the only means of saving the Country,” Lincoln told him it was “a fixed thing.” And when Browning raised the specter that “the democrats would soon begin to clamor for compromise,” Lincoln replied that if they moved toward concessions, “the people would leave them.” Through the worst days of discord and division, Lincoln never lost his confidence that he understood the will and desires of the people.
“The resources, advantages, and powers of the American people are very great,” he wrote the workingmen of London when they congratulated him on emancipation, “and they have, consequently, succeeded to equally great responsibilities. It seems to have devolved upon them to test whether a government, established on the principles of human freedom, can be maintained.”
Fanny told of an intimate evening in their parlor when Lincoln engaged the entire family with an amusing tale about young women during the War of 1812 who made belts with engraved mottoes to give their lovers departing for battle. When one young girl suggested “Liberty or Death!,” her soldier protested that the phrase was “rather strong.” Couldn’t she make it “Liberty or be crippled” instead?
Like Lincoln, Seward usually possessed a profound self-assurance that enabled him to withstand an endless, savage barrage of criticism.
What left the deeper impression upon his listeners, however, was Seward’s unconditional love for Lincoln, whom he praised “without limitation” as “the best and wisest man he [had] ever known.”
Hay recorded one occasion, “a little after midnight,” when Lincoln, with amused gusto, read a portion of Hood, “utterly unconscious that he with his short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at. What a man it is! Occupied all day with matters of vast moment…he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhommie & good fellow ship that he gets out of bed & perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that we may share with him the fun of one of poor Hoods queer little conceits.”
French, in turn, marveled at the “affable and pleasant” demeanor the first lady regularly displayed in public. “The skeleton,” he noted, “is always kept out of sight.”
CHASE, UNLIKE LINCOLN, was never able to forgo his statesmanlike persona and simply enjoy conversations and lighter amusements. He was inclined to let things fester, brooding over perceived slights and restlessly calculating the effect of every incident on his own standing.
When the bills passed and the new greenbacks were ready for distribution, he momentarily basked in the knowledge that the Treasury was full for the first time since the war began. He was also pleased by the fact that his own handsome face would appear in the left-hand corner of every dollar bill. He had deliberately chosen to place his picture on the ubiquitous one-dollar bill rather than a bill of a higher denomination, knowing that his image would thus reach the greatest number of people.
Though “the storm would pass away as quickly as it came,” and though Stanton would quickly make amends to victims of his ill humor, the employees in the War Department, while respecting Stanton greatly, never loved him as Lincoln’s aides loved their president.
Such gestures on Lincoln’s part repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into lasting animosity.
The story is told of an army colonel who rode out to the Soldiers’ Home, hopeful of securing Lincoln’s aid in recovering the body of his wife, who had died in a steamboat accident. His brief period of relaxation interrupted, Lincoln listened to the colonel’s tale but offered no help. “Am I to have no rest? Is there no hour or spot when or where I may escape this constant call? Why do you follow me out here with such business as this?” The disheartened colonel returned to his hotel in Washington. The following morning, Lincoln appeared at his door. “I was a brute last night,” Lincoln said, offering to help the colonel in any way possible.
Discouraged by the lack of progress in the war, Schurz had blamed Lincoln’s misguided appointment of Democrats “whose hearts” were not fully “in the struggle” to top positions in the field. Lincoln had responded testily, telling Schurz that he obviously wanted men with “heart in it.”
The question was “who is to be the judge of hearts, or of ‘heart in it?’ If I must discard my own judgment, and take yours, I must also take that of others; and by the time I should reject all I should be advised to reject, I should have none left, Republicans or others—not even yourself.”
Schurz, at the army camp in Centreville, Virginia, where he led the Third Division of the 11th Corps, detected in Lincoln’s long reply “an undertone of impatience, of irritation, unusual with him.” Though he had been encouraged by the president to correspond freely, he feared that his letter had transgressed.
As the days went by, the weariness that had marked Mary’s face upon arrival began to fade, and “the change seemed pleasant to her.” Brooks reported badinage between husband and wife occasioned by a photograph of a Confederate officer with an inscription on the back: “A rebellious rebel.” Mary suggested that this meant he “was a rebel against the rebel government.” Lincoln smiled, countering that perhaps the officer “wanted everybody to know that he was not only a rebel, but a rebel of rebels—‘a double-dyed-in-the-wool sort of rebel.’”
After one review, someone remarked that the regulars could be easily distinguished from the volunteers, for “the former stood rigidly in their places without moving their heads an inch as he rode by, while the latter almost invariably turned their heads to get a glimpse of him.” Quick to defend the volunteers, Lincoln replied, “I don’t care how much my soldiers turn their heads, if they don’t turn their backs.”
And so one personal struggle succeeded another, complicating the president’s job, absorbing his energies.
Had he committed all his troops, as Lincoln had directed him to do, the course of the battle might have been different. By immediately assuming a defensive stance, however, Hooker gave the initiative to Lee and never regained his footing. An injury sustained on the battlefield further dulled Hooker’s perceptions. Though his subordinates wanted to press the battle, he issued the order to retreat.
Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’”
The news traveled fast. The president informed Senator Sumner, who rushed to tell Welles. “Lost, lost, all is lost!” Sumner exclaimed, lifting both hands as he entered the navy secretary’s office. Welles went to the War Department, where Seward was with Stanton. “I asked Stanton if he knew where Hooker was. He answered curtly, No. I looked at him sharply, and I have no doubt with some incredulity, for he, after a moment’s pause, said he is on this side of the river, but I know not where.” As the afternoon wore on and endless casualty lists began streaming in, Stanton could no longer hide his despair. “This is the darkest day of the war,” he lamented. At the Willard Hotel, Brooks observed, secessionists suddenly “sprang to new life and animation and with smiling faces and ill-suppressed joy” moved openly through the gloomy crowds.
Once again, Lincoln found some redemption in the resolute determination of his troops.

20 “The Tycoon Is in Fine Whack”: Summer 1863

Senator Trumbull warned Browning that if such arbitrary arrests continued, “the civil tribunals will be completely subordinated to the military, and the government overthrown.”
A friend of Seward cautioned him that “by a large and honest portion of the community,” the arrest was considered an “invasion of a great principle—the right of free speech,” and that it might well precipitate civil war within the loyal states. Seward agreed. Indeed, in a moment of rare accord, every member of the cabinet united in opposition to the Vallandigham arrest.
There, it was playfully remarked, his Copperhead body could go “where his heart already was.” The New York Times recorded “general satisfaction” at the solution, which “so happily meets the difficulties of the case—avoiding the possibility of making him a martyr, and yet effectually destroying his power for evil.”
Meanwhile, Stanton revoked Burnside’s suspension of the Chicago Times and informed local officials that they were not to suppress newspapers.
Asked months later by a radical to “suppress the infamous ‘Chicago Times,’” Lincoln told her, “I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.”
After he dealt with Vallandigham, Lincoln’s next priority was to comfort Burnside. Upon hearing that the entire cabinet had opposed his action, the general had offered to resign. Lincoln not only refused the resignation but insisted that while “the cabinet regretted the necessity” of the arrest, once it was done, “all were for seeing you through with it.”
He went on to say that Vallandigham was not arrested for his criticism of the administration but “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.”
Pointing out that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death,” Lincoln posed a question that was soon echoed by supporters everywhere: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.”
In fact, Lincoln took every step to ensure that his words would shape public opinion. Printed in a great variety of formats, the letter eventually reached an astonishing 10 million people in their homes and workplaces, on isolated farms and in the cities. And as the American people absorbed the logic of Lincoln’s argument, popular sentiment began to shift.
More strongly than Chase, Blair decried the lack of more formal meetings, attributing the cabinet’s failings to the machinations of Seward and Stanton. They had also been responsible, he believed, for Lincoln’s unwillingness to replace Halleck, whom Blair despised, and restore McClellan. In Blair’s mind, both Seward and Chase were “scheming for the succession. Stanton would cut the President’s throat if he could.” Blair’s hatred for Stanton was so virulent that he refused to set foot in the War Department, the primary source of military information. Talking with Welles one evening at the depot, Blair admitted that Lincoln’s behavior puzzled him. “Strange, strange,” he exclaimed, “that the President who has sterling ability should give himself over so completely to Stanton and Seward.”
Certainly, Lincoln was not oblivious to the infighting of his colleagues. He remained firmly convinced, however, that so long as each continued to do his own job well, no changes need be made. Moreover, he had no desire for contentious cabinet discussions on tactical matters, preferring to rely on the trusted counsel of Seward and Stanton. Still, he understood the resentment this provoked in neglected members of his administration; and through many small acts of generosity, he managed to keep the respect and affection of his disgruntled colleagues.
WHILE WORKING TO SUSTAIN the spirits of his cabinet, Lincoln also tried to soothe the incessant bickering and occasional resentment among his generals. Learning that William Rosecrans, headquartered in Nashville, had taken umbrage at a note he had sent, Lincoln replied at once. “In no case have I intended to censure you, or to question your ability,” he wrote. “I frequently make mistakes myself, in the many things I am compelled to do hastily.”
Lincoln’s patience had its limits, however. When Major General Robert H. Milroy railed about “the blind unreasoning hatred” of Halleck that he claimed had supposedly led to his suspension from command, Lincoln was unyielding. “I have scarcely seen anything from you at any time, that did not contain imputations against your superiors,” Lincoln replied. “You have constantly urged the idea that you were persecuted because you did not come from West-Point, and you repeat it in these letters. This, my dear general, is I fear, the rock on which you have split.”
Likewise, when Rosecrans grumbled that his request for a predated commission to secure a higher rank had been denied, Lincoln was unsympathetic: “Truth to speak, I do not appreciate this matter of rank on paper, as you officers do. The world will not forget that you fought the battle of ‘Stone River’ and it will never care a fig whether you rank Gen. Grant on paper, or he so, ranks you.”
Grant assured Banks that he “would gladly serve under him as his superior in rank or simply cooperate with him for the benefit of the common cause if he should prefer that course.”
In a misguided effort to stop peddlers from illegally profiteering in cotton in areas penetrated by Union armies, Grant had issued an order expelling “the Jews, as a class,” from his department. The discriminatory order, which contained no provision for individual hearings or trials, forced all Jewish people to depart within twenty-four hours, leaving horses, carriages, and other valuables behind.
Lincoln replied quickly: “And this protection they shall have at once.” He took his pen and wrote a note to Halleck, ordering immediate cancellation of the order. Halleck reluctantly complied after assuring Grant that “the President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order; but, as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had already heard similar complaints. After dispatching investigators to look into General Grant’s behavior, however, they had concluded that his drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan, execute, and win battles. A memorable story circulated that when a delegation brought further rumors of Grant’s drinking to the president, Lincoln declared that if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant used, he would promptly distribute it to the rest of his generals!
Lincoln’s primary concern was that Hooker would again be “outgeneraled” by Lee. His worry escalated in the last weeks of June when he “observed in Hooker the same failings that were witnessed in McClellan after the Battle of Antietam. A want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.”
Senator Chandler would “never forget the painful anxiety of those few days when the fate of the nation seemed to hang in the balance; nor the restless solicitude of Mr. Lincoln, as he paced up and down the room, reading dispatches, soliloquizing, and often stopping to trace the map which hung on the wall.” Sketched on the map were the generals and places that would later be engraved in history: James Longstreet and George Pickett, Winfield Hancock and Joshua Chamberlain, Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge.
Lincoln expressed his joyful appreciation to Grant in a remarkable letter. “I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country,” he began. He conceded that while he had approved most of the general’s maneuvers during the long struggle, he had harbored misgivings over Grant’s decision to turn “Northward East of the Big Black” instead of joining General Banks. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”
a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.
“As to personal injury,” she told her husband, “I fear more for the poor colored people than for others—They cannot protect themselves and few persons are willing to assist them.”
As they went through the cases, Hay marveled “at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier.”
Although “officers only see the force of military discipline,” he explained, he tried to comprehend it from the vantage of individual soldiers—a picket so exhausted that “sleep steals upon him unawares,” a family man who overstayed his leave, a young boy “overcome by a physical fear greater than his will.”
Only “where meanness or cruelty were shown” did he exhibit no clemency.
“The garments cling to the skin,” one resident observed, “shirt collars are laid low; moisture oozes from every object, standing in clammy exudation upon iron, marble, wood, and human flesh; the air is pervaded with a faint odor as of withered bouquets and dead mint juleps, and the warm steam of a home washing day is over everything.”
“I want to show you how to make calico from cotton,” he told Kate. “You are a statesman’s daughter, will doubtless be a statesman’s wife, and who if not you, should know how things are done, not how only they are undone or destroyed.”
Recognizing “the delicate link which has so long united father & daughter,” Sprague wisely decided to “respect and honor” their relationship. “I am not afraid that the tenacious affection of a daughter will detract from that she owes to one she accepts for her life companion,” he wrote Kate. “I am not so silly as not to see & feel that it is a surer garuantee of a more permanent and enduring love.” While he bristled at the discovery that Kate allowed her father to read all of Sprague’s letters to her, he was gratified by the praise his writing drew from the ever critical Chase.
Chase assured Sprague that the “manly affection breathed in them satisfied me that I had not given my daughter to one [who] did not fully appreciate her, or to whom she could not give the full wealth of her affections.”
Both Seward and Lincoln agreed that “one fundamental principle of politics is to be always on the side of your country in a war. It kills any party to oppose a war.” As, indeed, Lincoln knew from his own experience in opposing the Mexican War.
Lincoln was left in relative solitude. “The White House,” Stoddard noted, “is deserted, save by our faithful and untiring Chief Magistrate, who, alone of all our public men, is always at his post.” Notwithstanding, Stoddard observed, “he looks less careworn and emaciated than in the spring, as if, living only for his country, he found his own vigor keeping pace with the returning health of the nation.”

21 “I Feel Trouble in the Air”: Summer–Fall 1863

Nothing, he assured them, would more clearly legitimize their call for equal citizenship: “You will stand more erect, walk more assured, feel more at ease, and be less liable to insult than you ever were before. He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country—and have that claim respected.”
He blamed Lincoln for not speaking out against the Confederate ordinance. “What has Mr. Lincoln to say about this slavery and murder? What has he said?—Not one word. In the hearing of the nation he is as silent as an oyster on the whole subject.” The time for patience with the president had come and gone, he argued. Until he “shall interpose his power to prevent these atrocious assassinations of negro soldiers, the civilized world will hold him equally with Jefferson Davis responsible for them.”
Lincoln’s failure to speak out and protect the Union’s black soldiers convinced Douglass that he could no longer persuade men to enlist in good conscience. “When I plead for recruits, I want to do it with my heart, without qualification,” he explained to Major Stearns. “I cannot do that now. The impression settles upon me that colored men have much overrated the enlightenment, justice and generosity of our rulers at Washington.”
The Confederate ordinance represented “a relapse into barbarism” that required action on the part of the Union. “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor.”
The order was “well-written,” the antagonistic Count Gurowski conceded, “but like all Mr. Lincoln’s acts it is done almost too late, only when the poor President was so cornered by events, that shifting and escape became impossible.” Douglass agreed but acknowledged that the president, “being a man of action,” might have been waiting “for a case in which he should be required to act.”
Having never visited the nation’s capital, Douglass experienced an inexpressible “tumult of feeling” when he entered the White House. “I could not know what kind of a reception would be accorded me. I might be told to go home and mind my business…. Or I might be refused an interview altogether.”
He could tell “at a glance the justice of the popular estimate of the President[’s] qualities expressed in the prefix ‘honest’ to the name of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglass laid before the president the discriminatory measures that were frustrating his recruiting efforts. “Mr. Lincoln listened with earnest attention and with very apparent sympathy,” he recalled. “Upon my ceasing to speak [he] proceeded with an earnestness and fluency of which I had not suspected him.” Lincoln first recognized the indisputable justice of the demand for equal pay. When Congress passed the bill for black soldiers, he explained, it “seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers,” but he promised that “in the end they shall have the same pay as white soldiers.” As for the absence of black officers, Lincoln assured Douglass that “he would sign any commission to colored soldiers whom his Secretary of War should commend to him.”
“such was the state of public popular prejudice that an outcry would have been raised against the measure. It would be said—Ah! we thought it would come to this. White men were to be killed for negroes.”
The War Department followed up with an offer of a $100-a-month salary plus subsistence and transportation, but the commission was not included. Douglass declined: “I knew too much of camp life and the value of shoulder straps in the army to go into the service without some visible mark of my rank.”
Douglass and Lincoln had established a relationship that would prove important for both men in the weeks and months ahead. In subsequent speeches, Douglass frequently commented on his gracious reception at the White House. “Perhaps you may like to know how the President of the United States received a black man at the White House,” he would say. “I will tell you how he received me—just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.” As the crowd erupted into “great applause,” he continued, “I tell you I felt big there!”
Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had created a deceptive feeling that peace was close at hand.
When a petitioner tried to solicit his help in securing property for a Memphis woman whose husband was in the Confederate Army, the president uncharacteristically replied that he had “neither the means nor time” to consider the request and that “the impropriety of bringing such cases to me, is obvious to any one.”
“Disclaiming the arts of the diplomatist, the cunning of the politician, and the graces of rhetoric, he comes straight to the points he wants to discuss,” praised the New York Daily Tribune.
“The most consummate rhetorician never used language more pat to the purpose,” the New York Times declared, “and still there is not a word in the letter not familiar to the plainest plowman.” While “felicity of speech” was usually linked to “high culture,” the Times continued, Lincoln, “in his own independent, and perhaps we might say very peculiar, way,” exhibits a “felicity of speech far surpassing” stylistic preference. He possesses a far more valuable “felicity of thought,” which “invariably gets at the needed truth of the time,” hitting “the very nail of all others which needs driving.”
He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the trained logicians of all schools.”
Bates was back from Missouri in time to celebrate his seventieth birthday, grateful that his long life had “been crowned with many blessings, and, comparatively few crosses.”
Finally, he stood up and said: “I can complete it in seven days.”
“Good!” Stanton exclaimed, turning contemptuously to Halleck. “I told you so! I knew it could be done! Forty days! Forty days indeed, when the life of the nation is at stake!” He then addressed McCallum: “Go ahead; begin now.” At this point, Lincoln interrupted. “I have not yet given my consent,” he reminded the secretary of war. “Colonel McCallum, are you sure about this?” Lincoln asked. “There must be no mistake.” When McCallum said he would “pledge [his] life to accomplish it inside of seven days,” Lincoln was satisfied. “Mr. Secretary, you are the captain. Give the necessary orders and I will approve them.”
“It was an extraordinary feat of logistics,” James McPherson writes, “the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.”
“The country does not know how much it owes Edwin M. Stanton for that nights work.”
It was this indomitable drive that Lincoln had sought when he put aside any resentment at the humiliation Stanton had inflicted years earlier in Cincinnati. The bluntness and single-minded intensity behind Stanton’s brusque dismissal of Lincoln at that first acquaintance were the qualities the president valued in his secretary of war—whom he would affectionately call his “Mars.”
Those who observed the improbable pair in the little room adjoining the telegraph office noted the “esteem and affection” that characterized their relationship.
“No two men were ever more utterly and irreconcilably unlike,” Stanton’s private secretary, A. E. Johnson, observed. “The secretiveness which Lincoln wholly lacked, Stanton had in marked degree; the charity which Stanton could not feel, coursed from every pore in Lincoln. Lincoln was for giving a wayward subordinate seventy times seven chances to repair his errors; Stanton was for either forcing him to obey or cutting off his head without more ado. Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril; Stanton would lash himself into a fury over the same condition of things. Stanton would take hardships with a groan; Lincoln would find a funny story to fit them. Stanton was all dignity and sternness, Lincoln all simplicity and good nature…yet no two men ever did or could work better in harness. They supplemented each other’s nature, and they fully recognized the fact that they were a necessity to each other.”
Johnson believed that “in dealing with the public, Lincoln’s heart was greater than his head, while Stanton’s head was greater than his heart.” The antithetical styles are typified in the story of a congressman who had received Lincoln’s authorization for the War Department’s aid in a project. When Stanton refused to honor the order, the disappointed petitioner returned to Lincoln, telling him that Stanton had not only countermanded the order but had called the president a damned fool for issuing it. “Did Stanton say I was a d——d fool?” Lincoln asked. “He did, sir,” the congressman replied, “and repeated it.” Smiling, the president remarked: “If Stanton said I was a d——d fool, then I must be one, for he is nearly always right, and generally says what he means. I will step over and see him.”
The mossy marbles rest 长满青苔的大理石休息了 On lips that he has prest 在他亲吻过的嘴唇上，长满了青苔。 In their bloom, 在它们盛开的花朵中， And the names he loved to hear 还有那些他最爱听的名字 Have been carved for many a year 已经雕刻了许多年 On the tomb. 在墓上。
Yet, beyond sharing a romantic and philosophical preoccupation with death, the commander in chief and the secretary of war shared the harrowing knowledge that their choices resulted in sending hundreds of thousands of young men to their graves. Stanton’s Quaker background made the strain particularly unbearable. As a young man, he had written a passionate essay decrying society’s exaltation of war. “Why is it,” he asked, that military generals “are praised and honored instead of being punished as malefactors?” After all, the work of war is “the making of widows and orphans—the plundering of towns and villages—the exterminating & spoiling of all, making the earth a slaughterhouse.” Though governments might argue war’s necessity to achieve certain objectives, “how much better might they accomplish their ends by some other means? But if generals are useful so are butchers, and who will say that because a butcher is useful he should be honored?”
Three decades after writing this, Stanton found himself responsible for an army of more than 2 million men. “There could be no greater madness,” he reasoned, “than for a man to encounter what I do for anything less than motives that overleap time and look forward to eternity.” Lincoln, too, found the horrific scope of the burden hard to fathom. “Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?”
Like Stanton, the president tried to console himself that the Civil War, however terrible, represented a divine will at work in human affairs.
“If I had had my way,” he reportedly said during the meeting, “this war would never have been commenced; if I had been allowed my way this war would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it.”
“On principle, and faith, opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war.”
Stanton had once yearned to spend entire evenings in Chase’s study; now Chase was lucky to obtain a private conversation with his old friend when he joined the crowd that gathered in the telegraph office at the end of the working day.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
“Some of them he said, were not as bad as he supposed.”
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.
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.
As a friendly audience roared its approval, Blair accused Chase of using his cabinet post to create a political machine designed to unseat Lincoln in the next election. In sum, the treasury secretary was a traitor and blackguard indistinguishable from Jefferson Davis himself.
The Liberator criticized his vindictive language, observing that “his style of address does him no honor, and will not advance the ideas of public policy which he advocates.” Even his sister, Elizabeth, remarked that he could “not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of his resentment.”
Otherwise, he would “serve both the country and himself more profitably” by returning to the military, where his recent promotion to corps commander proved that he was “rising in military skill and usefulness.”
He tried to impart some of the measured outlook that had served him so well: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
他试图传达一些对他大有裨益的审慎态度：“凡是决心最大限度地发挥自己潜能的人，是无法腾出时间来参与个人争斗的。更不用说，他无法承担所有后果，包括败坏自己的脾气和失去自制力。把更大的事情让给别人，尽管你对这些事情拥有同等的权利；把较小的事情也让给别人，尽管这些事情显然是属于你的。最好把你的路让给一条狗，而不是在争夺权利时被它咬伤。即使杀死那条狗，也无法治愈被咬伤的伤口。”
Lincoln, too, could see the “time coming” for a constitutional amendment, and then whoever “stands in its way, will be run over by it”; but the country was not yet ready.
Moreover, he objected, “I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don’t like to begin now.”
林肯也认为，现在是进行宪法修正案的“时候”，那时谁“站在它的道路上，就会被它碾过”；但是这个国家还没有准备好。
此外，他还反对，“我从来没有做过一项官方行动，以促进我自己的个人利益，我现在也不喜欢这样做。”
Herein, Swett concluded, lay the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership. “It was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical results.”
John Forney of the Washington Daily Chronicle observed the same intuitive judgment and timing, arguing that Lincoln was “the most truly progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”

22 “Still in Wild Water”: Fall 1863

“STILL IN WILD WATER”
Chase indicated his gratitude for this “most unexpected welcome,” and proceeded to give a speech that ostensibly praised the president as a man who “is honestly and earnestly doing his best,” even though the war was not being prosecuted “so fast as it ought.” With a different leader, he hinted, “some mistakes might have been avoided—some misfortunes averted.”
蔡斯对这种“最出乎意料的欢迎”表示感谢，并发表了一篇演讲，表面上赞扬了总统，说他“诚心诚意地竭尽全力”，尽管战争进行得“不像它应该的那样快”。他暗示，如果有不同的领导人，“一些错误是可以避免的——一些不幸是可以避免的”。
At each stop in his swing through Ohio, Chase encountered huge crowds of supporters. “I come not to speak, but to vote,” he insisted, before launching into a series of self-promoting speeches laced with subtle denigration of Lincoln.
With slavery and Reconstruction as his themes, he once again covertly criticized the president. He acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation was “the great feature of the war,” without which “we could not achieve success,” but hastened to add that “it would have been even more right, had it been earlier, and without exceptions.”
在俄亥俄州巡回演讲的每一站，蔡斯都遇到了成群结队的支持者。他坚称：“我不是来演讲的，而是来投票的。”随后，他发表了一系列自我夸大的演讲，其中夹杂着对林肯的微妙贬低。
Lincoln understood Chase’s thirst for the presidency. “No man knows what that gnawing is till he has had it,” he said. Should Chase become president, he told Hay, “all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.”
Chase ought to have focused solely on his cabinet position, Bates observed, but “it is of the nature of ambition to grow prurient, and run off with its victim.” Like Bates, Welles believed that Chase’s presidential aspirations had “warped” his judgment, leading him to divisively exploit the Reconstruction issue to consolidate the radical wing of the party behind him.
贝茨评论说，蔡斯本应只关注自己的内阁职位，但“野心的本质就是变得多疑，带着它的牺牲品逃之夭夭。”和贝茨一样，韦尔斯认为，蔡斯的总统抱负已经“扭曲”了他的判断力，使他以分裂的方式利用重建问题来巩固自己身后党派的激进派。
In one of their fireside conversations, Seward assured Lincoln that his own hopes for the presidency were “all past and ended.” He desired only that Lincoln be his “own successor,” for when the rebels “find the people reaffirming their decision to have you President, I think the rebellion will collapse.”
“The object of this election,” he said, “is the object of the war. It is to make Abraham Lincoln President de facto” in the South as he is in the North. “There can be no peace and quiet, until Abraham Lincoln is President of the whole United States.” Then, arousing the wrath of radicals, Seward extended his hand to the South, saying, “I am willing that the prodigal son shall return. The doors, as far as I am concerned, shall always be open to him.”
“这次选举的目标是战争的目标，”他说，“是为了让亚伯拉罕·林肯在南方成为事实上的总统，就像他在北方一样。”“除非亚伯拉罕·林肯成为整个美国的总统，否则就不可能有和平与宁静。”接着，西沃德激起了激进派的愤怒，他向南方伸出了手，说：“我愿意让浪子回头。只要我愿意，大门将永远向他敞开。”
The spectacle offered a brief respite from the endless sorrows of the war—the casualty reports, the scenes of suffering in the hospitals, the rumors of impending military engagements.
Over the years, as the Cinderella match would culminate in tragedy and poverty for Kate, journalists and historians have subjected Kate’s feelings for Sprague to considerable analysis. Many have speculated that her decision to marry “was a coldly calculated plan to secure the Sprague millions,” thereby to advance the “two great passions in her life—her father and politics.”
It was said that “in her eyes all other men sank into insignificance when compared with her father,” and that no one else had “even the remotest hold upon her affections.” Her marriage to Sprague would relieve her father from further financial worries and provide abundant means for an all-out presidential campaign in 1864.
Even journalists at the time noted that outside of his fortune, Sprague possessed few attractive qualities. Having left school early for the cotton mill, he was “wholly innocent of even an approximate understanding of the arts or sciences, polite or vulgar literature.” Furthermore, he was “small, thin and unprepossessing in appearance.” Still, if he was not physically attractive, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, “pecuniarily, he is—several millions.” And, as Gideon Welles recorded in his diary, “Miss Kate has talents and ambition sufficient for both.”
As Mary later said, she refused to “bow in reverence” to the twin “Gods, Chase & daughter.”
When the vows were completed, “Chase was the first to kiss the newly made wife.”
He insisted to Sprague that nothing could be “so uncertain as the political future of any man: and especially as the future which must be determined by popular preferences founded quite as much on sentiment as on reason.”
He came to the door to thank them, but said he would make no remarks for the simple reason that “I have no speech to make. In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things.” His reluctance elicited the snide comment from a member of the audience: “If you can help it.” Lincoln’s swift rejoinder delighted the crowd. “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”
“Seldom has a man talked so long and said so little,” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Age. “He gave us plenty of words, but no heart…. He talked like a historian, or an encyclopaedist, or an essayist, but not like an orator.”
Twenty months before the Emancipation Proclamation, the president had told Hay that “the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” predicting that “if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.” Now tens of thousands had died in pursuit of that purpose. At Gettysburg, he would express that same conviction in far more concise and eloquent terms.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
LINCOLN RETURNED FROM GETTYSBURG to find a vexing letter from Zachariah Chandler, the radical Michigan senator who had made a fortune in dry goods and real estate before entering politics. Chandler had been a thorn in Lincoln’s side, constantly criticizing his conduct of the war, his reliance on overly cautious, conservative generals, and his tardiness on emancipation. “Your president is unstable as water,” Chandler had warned Trumbull the previous September. “For God & country’s sake, send someone to stay with [him] who will controll & hold him.”
Lincoln’s impatience with Chandler may have been aggravated by the fact that he was coming down with a mild case of smallpox. The illness would last for several weeks and fray his self-restraint, yet it left his humor intact. “Yes, it is a bad disease, but it has its advantages,” he told some visitors. “For the first time since I have been in office, I have something now to give to everybody that calls.”
The pause in his frenetic life proved helpful as he laid out his own views on the knotty problem of Reconstruction, which he considered “the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship.”
“Often the boundaries separating people of opposing loyalties,” the historian John Shaffer writes, “were nothing more than the property line between two farms, or a table over which members of the same family argued and ultimately chose sides.”
That night, as Mary and Emilie dined alone, they carefully avoided mention of the war, which “comes between us,” Emilie acknowledged, “like a barrier of granite closing our lips.” They talked instead of old times and of old friends. Emilie marveled at Mary’s “fine tact,” which allowed her to “so quickly turn a dangerous subject into other channels.”
“Excuse me, General Sickles,” Lincoln replied, “my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”
“I am prepared to see him sink rapidly and die soon.”
“Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command,” he began. “All that was known of him was that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his availability,—that is, because he had no history.”
For many months, Lowell observed, the untried president seemed too hesitant—on military engagements, on emancipation, on recruiting black troops. Increasingly, it was becoming evident that this Abraham Lincoln was “a character of marked individuality and capacity for affairs.”
In a democratic nation, Lowell added, “where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the best genius for statesmanship.”
Lincoln had demonstrated a perfectly calibrated touch for public sentiment and impeccable timing in his introduction of new measures. While some thought he had delayed his decision on emancipation too long, he undoubtedly had a “sure-footed understanding” of the American people. Similarly, when the first black regiments were formed, many feared that “something terrible” would happen, “but the earth stood firm.”
“Mr. Lincoln’s perilous task has been to carry a rather shackly raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity,” concluded Lowell, “and the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that.”

23 “There’s a Man in It!” : Winter–Spring 1864

At noon, when the gates opened to the general public, eight thousand people streamed in—“a human kaleidescope, constantly changing,” of “diplomats and dragoons, exquisites from the Atlantic cities and hardy backwoodsmen, contented contractors and shoddy swindlers, ingenious patentees and persevering petitioners.”
Lincoln considered his meetings with the general public his “public-opinion baths.” They “serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung,” he told a visitor, “and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect, as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty.”
There is a lull in political discussions; and people are inclined to eat, drink, and be merry. The newspapers can furnish nothing more interesting to their readers, than accounts of parties, balls and theaters, like so many Court Journals. Questions of etiquette are debated with gravity. People talk of ‘society,’ who never before knew or cared about it.
Indeed, by early 1864, Chase’s presidential ambitions were widely known and frequently discussed in political circles. Mary’s anger toward Chase grew “very bitter,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled: she “warned Mr. Lincoln not to trust him,” but Lincoln continued to insist that Chase was “a patriot.”
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.”
LINCOLN’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.”
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.”
俄亥俄州将起到很大的作用，因为“如果俄亥俄州对任何其他人表示偏爱，我不会允许我的名字被使用”。蔡斯认为，如果一切顺利，他将与总统进行一场激烈的斗争，因为，令人遗憾的是，这位草原律师根本无法胜任这项工作。“如果他的热情和良好的判断力再加上坚强的意志和有力的行动，他几乎无可挑剔。但事实是，我认为，如果他再次当选，他第一任期的结束将比第二任期的结束更光荣。”
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.
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.
Still, Lincoln restrained his anger and carefully gauged his response, taking a dispassionate view of the situation.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
人民对林肯的健全判断力和诚实目的的信任，就像是一种真正的本能。没有什么能战胜它或严重削弱它。这种吸引和保持公众信心的力量只源于罕见的品质组合。在美国历史上，很少有公众人物拥有与亚伯拉罕·林肯同等程度的品质。”《哈泼斯周刊》也同意这一点。在一篇支持总统连任的社论中，它声称“从我国历史上的所有杰出人物中，没有一个人能像林肯先生那样准确地理解公众的心思。
《哈珀斯》杂志的编辑评论道，在逐步走向解放的过程中，林肯明白，在民主国家，“他走的每一步都必须让广大民众觉得明智。”因此，他明智地废除了弗雷蒙特和亨特过早发布的宣言，一直等到“儿子、兄弟和朋友的鲜血洗清了一千双盲目的眼睛”。就连林肯的批评者古罗夫斯基伯爵也不情愿地承认，总统深得民心。“群众被林肯显而易见的单纯和善良、他的笨拙、粗俗的笑话所迷惑，在人们看来，这个伟大的变色龙是真诚和诚实的。”
A few days later, Chase withdrew his presidential bid. In a public letter to an influential state senator in Ohio, he reminded his fellow Ohioans that he had determined to withdraw from the race if he did not gain the support of his home state. With the legislature’s support of Lincoln, “it becomes my duty therefore,—and I count it more a privilege than a duty,—to ask that no further consideration be given to my name.”
Attorney General Bates suggested a less patriotic explanation: “It proves only that the present prospects of Mr. Lincoln are too good to be openly resisted.”
LINCOLN’S ABILITY TO RETAIN his emotional balance in such difficult situations was rooted in an acute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel anxiety in constructive ways. In the most difficult moments of his presidency, nothing provided Lincoln greater respite and renewal than to immerse himself in a play at either Grover’s or Ford’s. Leonard Grover estimated that Lincoln had visited his theater “more than a hundred times” during his four years as president.
At a performance of Henry IV: Part One, Stoddard noted how thoroughly Lincoln enjoyed himself. “He has forgotten the war. He has forgotten Congress. He is out of politics. He is living in Prince Hal’s time.”
It is not surprising that the theater offered ideal refreshment for a man who regularly employed storytelling to ease tensions. The theater held all the elements of a perfect escape. Enthralled by the live drama, the costumes and scenery, the stagecraft, and the rhetorical extravagances, he was transported into a realm far from the troubling events that filled the rest of his waking hours.
An embarrassed Hackett apologized to Lincoln, who urged him to have “no uneasiness on the subject.” He was not “shocked by the newspaper comments,” for all his life he had “endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice.”
Lincoln was eager to know why certain scenes were left out of productions. He was fascinated by the different ways that classic lines could be delivered. He lifted his “well-thumbed volume” of Shakespeare from the shelf, reading aloud some passages, repeating others from memory.
林肯急于知道为什么某些场景没有被搬上舞台。他对经典台词的不同表达方式着迷。他从书架上拿起“翻旧了的莎士比亚”，大声朗读一些段落，然后从记忆中重复其他段落。
No other cabinet member went to the theater as regularly as Lincoln and Seward. Chase and Bates considered it a foolish waste of time, perhaps even a “Satanic diversion,” while Stanton came only once to Grover’s playhouse, with the sole intention of buttonholing Lincoln about some pressing matter. Seated with Lincoln in his box, Grover had been startled when Stanton arrived a half hour late, sidled up to Lincoln, and engaged him in a long conversation. Lincoln listened attentively but kept his eyes on the stage. Frustrated, Stanton “grasped Mr. Lincoln by the lapel of his coat, slowly pulled him round face to face, and continued the conversation. Mr. Lincoln responded to this brusque act with all the smiling geniality that one might bestow on a similar act from a favorite child, but soon again turned his eyes to the stage.” Finally, Stanton despaired utterly of conducting his business. He “arose, said good night, and withdrew.”
Everything Grant did during his four-day stay in Washington, from his unheralded entrance to his early departure, “was done exactly right,” the historian William McFeely concludes. “He was consummately modest and quietly confident; the image held for the rest of his political career—and beyond, into history.”
Aware that communications would be sporadic once Lieutenant General Grant launched his assault on Lee, Lincoln wrote him a letter that Hay described as “full of kindness & dignity at once.” He conveyed his “entire satisfaction with what you have done,” and promised that “if there is anything wanting which is within my power to give,” it would be provided. Grant graciously replied that he had thus far “been astonished at the readiness with which every thing asked for has been yielded.” The final line of Grant’s letter illustrated the profound difference between his character and McClellan’s. “Should my success be less than I desire, and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you.”
Between anxious hours at the War Department awaiting news from the front, Lincoln made time to get to the theater, attend a public lecture on Gettysburg, and see an opera. “People may think strange of it,” he explained, “but I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”
Schuyler Colfax came to visit one Sunday during the Battle of the Wilderness. “I saw [Lincoln] walk up and down the Executive Chamber, his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom; and as he looked up, I thought his face the saddest one I had ever seen.” But, Colfax added, “he quickly recovered,” and suddenly spoke of Grant with such confidence that “hope beamed on his face.” An hour later, greeting a delegation of congressional visitors, he managed to tell “story after story,” which hid “his saddened heart from their keen and anxious scrutiny.”
Addressing a packed audience the day before his scheduled departure for Sherman’s army, he began by calmly summarizing the report’s findings. His self-control swiftly vanished, however, as he turned his anger on Chase. “These dogs have been set on me by their master, and since I have whipped them back into their kennel I mean to hold their master responsible for this outrage and not the curs who have been set upon me.” Speaker Colfax admonished Blair to stick to the committee report, but Blair’s supporters insisted that he be allowed to continue. He accused Chase of corruption, treachery against Lincoln, lack of patriotism, and sordid ambition for the presidency.
“Anger is the poorest of counselors,” she conceded, “& revenge is suicide.”
“Chase is deficient in magnanimity and generosity. The Blairs have both, but they have strong resentments. Warfare with them is open, bold and unsparing. With Chase it is silent, persistent, but regulated with discretion.”
Determining that Riddle had not, Lincoln read aloud the lines where he concurred with Chase that neither of them should be “held responsible for what our respective friends may do without our instigation or countenance.”
He explained that while he had great respect for Frank Blair, he “was annoyed and mortified by the speech.” He had, in fact, warned Blair against “pursuing a personal warfare.” As soon as he heard of Blair’s rant, Lincoln knew that “another beehive was kicked over” and considered canceling “the orders restoring him to the army and assigning him to command.” After assessing how much General Sherman valued Frank’s services, however, he had decided to let the orders stand.
Hearing that the attendance was a mere four hundred of the expected thousands, he was reminded of a passage in the Bible. Opening his Bible to I Samuel 22:2, he read aloud: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.”
When Brooks observed that his “renomination was an absolute certainty,” Lincoln “cheerfully conceded that point without any false modesty.”
Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party—including the impracticables, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.”
Nothing better indicated the nation’s transformation since the Chicago convention four years earlier than the tumultuous applause that greeted the third resolution of the platform: “Resolved, That as Slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength, of this Rebellion…[we] demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.” While upholding the president’s proclamation, which “aimed a death-blow at this gigantic evil,” the resolution continued: “we are in favor, furthermore,” of a constitutional amendment to “forever prohibit the existence of slavery” in the United States.
“Well,” said Lincoln, “I feel very much like the man who said he didn’t want to die particularly, but if he had got to die, that was precisely the disease he would like to die of.”

24 “Atlanta Is Ours”: Summer–Fall 1864

UNION HOPES FOR imminent victory faded as the spring of 1864 gave way to summer. “Our troops have suffered much and accomplished but little,” Gideon Welles recorded in his diary on June 20. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all.”
For the Sewards, whose youngest son, William, nearly lost his life at Cold Harbor, there were many sleepless nights. “I cannot yet bring myself to the contemplation of your death or of your suffering as others have done,” Frances Seward told Will, though she considered that he was “fighting for a holy cause” in a “righteous” conflict, unlike the Mexican War, which she had vigorously opposed when her older son, Augustus, had been in the army.
Bates feared for his twenty-one-year-old son, Coalter, who was with General Meade and the Army of the Potomac, and Welles was pained “beyond what I can describe” when his eighteen-year-old son, Thomas, departed “with boyish pride and enthusiasm” to join General Grant. “It was uncertain whether we should ever meet again,” he recorded in his diary, “and if we do he may be mutilated, and a ruined man.”
Nonetheless, he reminded his listeners, “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.” The force of his words and the unshakable determination they embodied instantly uplifted and emboldened his audience.
The navy secretary failed to understand the importance of these trips to Lincoln, who needed the contact with the troops to lift his own spirits so that he, in turn, could better buoy the spirits of those around him.
The young aide-de-camp observed what so many others had seen before, that Lincoln “did not tell a story merely for the sake of the anecdote, but to point a moral or clench a fact.”
The sight of a newly patented artillery trace led to the recitation of a line from a poem: “Sorrow had fled, but left her traces there.”
Acutely aware of his own emotional needs, Lincoln had chosen exactly the right time to review the troops, for his conversations with Grant and his interactions with the soldiers sustained and inspired him during the troubling days ahead.
“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”
A Democratic journalist with ties to New York society, Field was serving as third assistant secretary of the treasury, a post Chase had designed especially to compensate Field for the access he had provided Chase to the inner circles of New York literary and social life.
“The difficulty,” wrote Lincoln, “does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.” Lincoln went on to explain the criticism he had faced in the previous months over treasury appointments in New York, and noted that to disregard Morgan’s judgment in this instance might trigger “open revolt.”
Lincoln quickly perceived that Chase was essentially saying: “You have been acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, & ask me to stay & agree that I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for it, I will go.” This presumption the president could not and would not countenance. He took his pen from his mouth and began to write.
“Your resignation of the office of Secretary of the Treasury,” he tersely opened, “is accepted. Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.”
Early the next morning, Lincoln called John Hay into his office and asked him to deliver the news of Chase’s resignation to the Senate as soon as it convened, along with his recommendation of former Ohio governor David Tod as his successor. “It is a big fish,” he said. “I thought I could not stand it any longer.” Though worried that the president was making a costly mistake, the loyal Hay proceeded to the Capitol, reaching the Senate just as the chaplain recited the opening prayer.
Still ignorant of the president’s letter, Chase went about his daily business, anticipating Lincoln’s penitent request for him to continue his duties. Perhaps Lincoln would personally visit his office, put his arm around him, and again tell him how much he was needed. After breakfast, Chase went to his office, where he received word that Senator Fessenden of Maine wanted to see him immediately at the Capitol. Riding in his carriage, he surmised that the chairman of the Finance Committee wanted to discuss the various financial bills currently before him. In the midst of his conversation with Fessenden, a messenger arrived to tell the senator of David Tod’s nomination. “Have you resigned?” the distraught Fessenden asked. “I am called to the Senate & told that the President has sent in the nomination of your successor.” Stunned, Chase explained that he had indeed sent in his resignation, but did not know that it had been accepted.
Returning at once to the department, Chase found the letter from Lincoln. Reaching the part where Lincoln spoke of “mutual embarrassment” in their relations, Chase was dumbfounded. “I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him,” he recorded in his diary that night, “but what he had found from me I could not imagine, unless it has been created by my unwillingness to have offices distributed by spoils or benefits with more regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques and individuals, than to fitness of selection.” Blinded by self-righteousness and donning what Nicolay and Hay termed “his full armor of noble sentiments,” Chase refused to see that in choosing the inexperienced Field, he, not the president, was filling an office on the basis of faction rather than fitness.
Moreover, though he agreed that “Mr. Chase had a full right to indulge in his ambition to be President,” he suggested that the indiscretions of Chase’s friends had so complicated matters that the two of them “disliked to meet each other” in person. In fact, in recent weeks, Chase had declined to attend most of the regular cabinet meetings. The situation had become “unendurable,” Lincoln concluded, this most recent controversy being simply “the last straw.” Though the committee left dissatisfied, they at least departed with a true picture of the long history behind the final break.
此外，尽管他同意“蔡斯先生完全有权利沉湎于他当总统的野心”，但他暗示，蔡斯朋友的轻率行为使问题变得如此复杂，以至于他们两人“不喜欢见面”。事实上，最近几周，大通银行拒绝出席大多数常规内阁会议。林肯总结道，局势已经变得“无法忍受”，最近的这场争论简直就是“最后一根稻草”。虽然委员会不满意地离开了，但他们至少带着最终决裂背后的漫长历史的真实画面离开了。
“I will tell you,” Lincoln said, “how it is with Chase. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to fall into a bad habit. Chase has fallen into two bad habits…. He thinks he has become indispensable to the country…. He also thinks he ought to be President; he has no doubt whatever about that.”
Chittenden concluded that this extraordinary want of vindictiveness toward someone who had caused him such grief proved that Lincoln “must move upon a higher plane and be influenced by loftier motives than any man” he had ever known. Yet while Lincoln did indeed possess unusual magnanimity, he was also a shrewd politician.
When Hooper relayed these comments to his friend, Chase was moved, suggesting that “had any such expressions of good will” been tendered before his resignation, he might have acted differently. Unfortunately, it was too late.
First,” he told Hay the next morning, “he knows the ropes thoroughly: as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance he knows as much of this special subject as Mr. Chase. 2nd he is a man possessing a national reputation and the confidence of the country. 3d He is a radical—without the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.”
“If you decline,” Lincoln said, “you must do it in open day: for I shall not recall the nomination.” Fessenden left with a promise that he would think on it further, though his acceptance was doubtful.
Returning to the Senate, Fessenden discovered that his colleagues had unanimously approved his nomination. Encircled by the warmth of their good wishes and congratulations, he began to waver. “Telegrams came pouring in from all quarters,” he later recalled, insisting that he accept for the good of the nation, that he was an inspired choice for the critical post. It was both the most rewarding and “the most miserable” day of his life, for he still feared that the duties of the post would be his death. “Very well,” the always blunt Stanton told him, “you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.”
“So my official life closes,” Chase recorded in his diary on the last day of June. Sadness pervades the entry, written when the oppressive heat of Washington was such, observed Bates, that “even the trees in the streets are wilting.” Chase believed he had “laid broad foundations” to secure financial support for the troops, but he knew the job was still unfinished. From this point on, he would not have any real influence.
If Chase had hoped his resignation would produce consternation and regret among his cabinet colleagues, he was disappointed. On the night his departure was announced, Blair and Bates called on Welles to talk over the startling event. While they were all surprised, none was sorry to see him go. “I look upon it as a blessing,” Welles said. On numerous occasions Welles had confided doubts about Chase’s character to his diary, observing that he lacked “the courage and candor to admit his errors,” and that “his jokes are always clumsy—he is destitute of wit.” Bates greeted Chase’s retirement with “a vague feeling of relief from a burden, and a hope of better things,” observing that Chase’s relations with his fellow cabinet ministers had long since failed “to be cordial.” And Monty Blair, whose family regarded Chase as a mortal enemy, was thrilled. Old Man Blair happily informed Frank that Chase had “dropped off at last like a rotten pear unexpectedly to himself & every body else.” Seward, unlike his other colleagues, expressed no personal pleasure in Chase’s demise. He simply informed Frances of his relief that the “Cabinet crisis” did not engender a “severe shock” in the country. He traced the origin of the present upheaval back to “the first day of the Administration,” when, against his advice, Lincoln had created his compound cabinet.
As his melancholy deepened, he generated another explanation that displayed the obtuseness that had always proved his undoing as a politician. “The root of the matter,” he told his friend Whitelaw Reid, “was a difficulty of temperament. The truth is that I have never been able to make a joke out of this war.”
When sober, Sprague would vow reform, pledging “to fill & occupy his place, in the home circle he has created…as well as the position he has secured for himself in the world.” These resolves were short-lived, and Kate began to fear that he did not seriously contemplate a worthy future, that his only thought was “to slip through these obligations in life” with the least effort possible.
“I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” he told Thaddeus Stevens and Simon Cameron that August. “I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years administration endorsed; and besides I honestly believe that I can better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new man could possibly do. I want to finish this job of putting down the rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country.”
“I am a War Democrat,” Robinson began. “I have sustained your Administration…. It was alleged that because I and my friends sustained the Emancipation measure, we had become abolitionized. We replied that we regarded the freeing of the negroes as sound war policy, in that the depriving the South of its laborers weakened the strength of the Rebellion. That was a good argument, and was accepted by a great many men who would have listened to no other. It was solid ground on which we could stand, and still maintain our position as Democrats.”
He was not writing “for the purpose of finding fault…but with the hope that you may suggest some interpretation of it, as well as make it tenable ground on which we War Democrats may stand.”
“我支持了你们的政府。据说，由于我和我的朋友支持解放措施，我们已经被废除了。我们回答说，我们认为解放黑人是合理的战争政策，因为剥夺南方的劳动力削弱了叛乱的力量。这是一个很好的论点，许多人都接受了，他们不愿听别人的话。这是一个坚实的基础，我们可以站在这个基础上，并且仍然保持我们作为民主党人的地位。”
This was not “personal vanity, or ambition,” but rather a firm belief that the Democrats’ strategy of mollifying the South with a promise to renounce abolition as a condition for peace would “result in the dismemberment of the Union.”
” If the promise of freedom were rescinded, these men would rightly give up their arms. “
Those who accused him of “carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition” must understand that “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever…. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it.”
“As I heard a vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his mind grew in stature like his body, & that I stood in the presence of the great guiding intellect of the age.”
The Raymond letter, like the reply to Robinson, was placed in an envelope and “slept undisturbed” for over two decades until unearthed by Nicolay and Hay when writing their biography of Lincoln.
“one difficulty no sooner passes away than another arises.”
Stanton provided additional reassurance to the beleaguered president. The relationship among Lincoln, Seward, and Stanton had strengthened over the years. Welles observed that “the two S’s” had developed “an understanding” enabling them to act in concert supporting the president. Though Stanton lacked the genial temperament that won both Lincoln and Seward countless friends, he believed passionately in both the Union and the soldiers who were risking their lives to support it. Though he regularly argued with Lincoln over minor matters and peremptorily dismissed favor seekers from his office, the sight of a disabled soldier would command his immediate attention. In the mind of this brilliant, irascible man, there could be no peace without submission by the South.
Stanton found it incomprehensible that “when the safety of the Republic was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests.” Stanton never would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining Lincoln’s spirits in difficult times.
The president guessed he would lose both New York and Pennsylvania, which meant his best hope was to squeak through by a total of only 3 electoral votes: 117 to 114. If these calculations were correct, he lamented, “the moral effect of his triumph would be broken and his power to prosecute the war and make peace would be greatly impaired.”
Lincoln thought differently. He trusted the bond he had developed with his soldiers during his many trips to the front. After every defeat, he had joined them, riding slowly along their lines, boosting their spirits.
Stanton followed up, making certain that furloughs were liberally granted wherever possible. “All the power and influence of the War Department…was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln,” Charles Dana later asserted. When Thurlow Weed alerted the White House that among the sailors “on Gun Boats along the Mississippi,” there were “several thousand” New Yorkers ready to vote if the government could provide a steamer to reach them and gather their ballots, Lincoln asked Welles to put a navy boat “at the disposal of the New York commission to gather votes.”
As the election drew close, Lincoln told a visitor: “I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.” It is likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment. The election would tell which man had won the hearts and minds of the more than 850,000 men who were fighting for the Union. 在选举临近之际，林肯对一位来访者说：“我宁愿在有士兵支持的情况下被打败，也不愿在没有士兵支持的情况下当选。”麦克莱伦很可能和林肯有同感。选举将告诉谁赢得了超过850,000为联邦而战的人的心。
“You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I,” Lincoln said. “A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”
Many of these soldiers still admired McClellan but could not countenance the defeatist Democratic platform or the fact that the Confederacy was obviously hoping the young Napoleon would win. But there was something else, something Democrats had failed to understand. Over the years, Lincoln had inspired an almost mystical devotion among his troops.
“To them he really was ‘Father Abraham,’ with all that the term implied.” By supporting Lincoln, the soldiers understood that they were voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president they loved and the cause that he embodied.

25 “A Sacred Effort”: Winter 1864–1865

Acknowledging that the recent canvass had been marred by “undesirable strife,” he nonetheless felt it had “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”
In a letter to Chase written shortly after Lincoln’s reelection, he acknowledged that his health could be restored only by “absolute rest and relief from labor and care,” though nothing could keep him from his post until he had brought the soldiers home in peace.
Lincoln’s liberal use of his pardoning power created the greatest tension between the two men. Stanton felt compelled to protect military discipline by exacting proper punishment for desertions or derelictions of duty, while Lincoln looked for any “good excuse for saving a man’s life.” When he found one, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name will make him and his family and his friends.”
Stanton would not allow himself such leniency. A clerk recalled finding Stanton one night in his office, “the mother, wife, and children of a soldier who had been condemned to be shot as a deserter, on their knees before him pleading for the life of their loved one. He listened standing, in cold and austere silence, and at the end of their heart-breaking sobs and prayers answered briefly that the man must die. The crushed and despairing little family left and Mr. Stanton turned, apparently unmoved, and walked into his private room.” The clerk thought Stanton an unfeeling tyrant, until he discovered him moments later, “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty; God help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” On such occasions, when Stanton felt he could not afford to set a precedent, he must have been secretly relieved that the president had the ultimate authority.
Moreover, Lincoln recognized that Welles had accomplished a Herculean task—he had built a navy almost from scratch, utterly revamping a department initially paralyzed by subversion and strife.
A shrewd judge of character, Welles had assembled an excellent team, including his dynamic assistant secretary, Gustavus Vasa Fox, and the industrious commandant of the Navy Yard, John Dahlgren.
Though Bates never fully escaped from the racial prejudices formed in his early years—he continued to believe until the end of his life that emancipation should be accompanied by colonization—his ideas had evolved to the point where he supported some very progressive measures. When asked in 1864 to deliver a legal opinion on the controversial question of the unequal pay scale for black soldiers, he declared “unhesitatingly” that “persons of color” who were performing in the field the same duties as their white counterparts should receive “the same pay, bounty, and clothing.”
The citizenship issue had arisen when a commercial schooner plying the coastal trade was detained because its captain was a black man. The Dred Scott decision had declared that blacks were not citizens, and naval law required one to be a citizen to command a ship flying the American flag. When the question was put to him, Bates carefully researched definitions of citizenship dating back to Greek and Roman times. After much consideration, he concluded that place of birth, not color of skin, determined citizenship. The Dred Scott decision was wrong; free blacks were citizens of the United States.
Bates’s decision did not cover the status of slaves, nor did it suggest that citizenship implied the right of suffrage or the right to sit on juries. Nonetheless, as a local Washington paper noted at the time of his resignation: “Though esteemed by many as more conservative than the majority of his countrymen at the present day, Mr. Bates has given opinions involving the rights of the colored race which have been quite abreast with the times, and which will henceforth stand as landmarks of constitutional interpretation.”
Nonetheless, by the end of his tenure as Attorney General, Bates had formed a more spacious understanding of the president’s unique leadership style. While troubled at the start by Lincoln’s “never-failing fund of anecdote,” he had come to realize that storytelling played a central role in the president’s ability to communicate with the public. “The character of the President’s mind is such,” Bates remarked, “that his thought habitually takes on this form of illustration, by which the point he wishes to enforce is invariably brought home with a strength and clearness impossible in hours of abstract argument.
“Mr. Lincoln,” Bates told Francis Carpenter, “comes very near being a perfect man, according to my ideal of manhood. He lacks but one thing…the element of will. I have sometimes told him, for instance, that he was unfit to be intrusted with the pardoning power. Why, if a man comes to him with a touching story, his judgment is almost certain to be affected by it. Should the applicant be a woman, a wife, a mother, or a sister,—in nine cases out of ten, her tears, if nothing else, are sure to prevail.”
To those unfamiliar with the Louisville lawyer, Lincoln explained that Speed was “a man I know well, though not so well as I know 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.” Lincoln’s ease in referring to his sleeping arrangement with Joshua Speed is further evidence that theirs was not a sexual relationship. Had it been, historian David Donald suggests, the president would not have spoken of it “so freely and publicly.”
“Of Mr. Chase’s ability and of his soundness on the general issues of the war there is, of course, no question,” he told Chase’s friend Henry Wilson. “I have only one doubt about his appointment. 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 uneasy and neglect the place in his strife and intrigue to make himself President. If I were sure that he would go on the bench and give up his aspirations and do nothing but make himself a great judge, I would not hesitate a moment.”
When supporters of other candidates reminded the president of Chase’s myriad intrigues against him, Lincoln responded, “Now, I know meaner things about Governor Chase than any of those men can tell me,” but “we have stood together 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.”
“I have sometimes feared,” she admitted to a friend, “that the deep waters, through which we have passed would overwhelm me.” In the absence of her gentle son, “The World, has lost so much, of its charm. My position, requires my presence, where my heart is so far from being.”
During his stay, Mrs. Saxton noted, “the Titan War Secretary was replaced by the genial companion, the man of letters, the lover of nature—the real Stanton.” For a few hours, Stanton allowed himself the distraction and the levity he had often decried in Lincoln.
Stanton had journeyed south to confer with Sherman, concerned by reports of the general’s hostile behavior toward the black refugees who were arriving by the thousands into his lines. It was said that Sherman opposed their employment as soldiers, drove them from his camp even when they were starving, and manifested toward them “an almost criminal dislike.” Sherman countered that the movement of his military columns was hindered “by the crowds of helpless negroes that flock after our armies…clogging my roads, and eating up our substance.” Military success, he felt, had to take precedence over treatment of the Negroes.
History will embalm them in great honor.
Seated with President Davis in the library of the Confederate White House, Blair conceded his proposal “might be the dreams of an old man,” but he was confident of Davis’s “practical good sense” and “utmost frankness.”
“It was night when we arrived,” Alexander Stephens later recalled. “There was nothing in [Grant’s] appearance or surroundings which indicated his official rank. There were neither guards nor aids about him…. I was instantly struck with the great simplicity and perfect naturalness of his manners, and the entire absence of everything like affectation, show, or even the usual military air or mien of men in his position. He was plainly attired, sitting in a log-cabin, busily writing on a small table, by a Kerosene lamp…. His conversation was easy and fluent, without the least effort or restraint.”
Fessenden declared “that the only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.”

26 The Final Weeks: Spring 1865

He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased.
He had learned from early mistakes, transcended the jealousy of rivals, and his insight into men and events had deepened with each passing year.
Settling into his daily routine after the inauguration, Lincoln was determined to avoid the thousands of office seekers who again descended “like Egyptian locusts” upon Washington. “The bare thought of going through again what I did the first year here, would crush me,” he confessed.
“I think now that I will not remove a single man, except for delinquency,” he told New Hampshire senator Clark. “To remove a man is very easy,” he commented to another visitor, “but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.”
With two classes of office seekers, however, he was prepared to take a personal interest—artists and disabled veterans. He expressed to Seward his hope that consul positions could be offered to “facilitate artists a little [in] their profession,” mentioning in particular a poet and a sculptor he wished to help.
He had come to believe by 1863 that “the hand of God” had put the prairie lawyer in the White House. If the “patent leather kid glove set” did not yet appreciate this giant of a man, it was because they “know no more of him than an owl does of a comet, blazing into his blinking eyes.”
Like his mother, Tad Lincoln possessed “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though [his] heart would break.”
Though Tad never developed a love of books, and “felt he could not waste time in learning to spell,” he had a clever, intuitive mind and was a good judge of character. “He treated flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness and contempt,” marveled Hay, “but he often espoused the cause of some poor widow or tattered soldier, whom he found waiting in the ante-rooms.” His enterprising nature and natural shrewdness would augur well for him once his schooling was completed. With all his heart, Lincoln loved his “little sprite.”
Lincoln told Barnes “he wanted no luxuries but only plain, simple food and ordinary comfort—that what was good for me would be good enough for him.” Barnes returned to the Navy Yard to supervise the changes.
That evening Mary continued her harangue at dinner, manifestly aggrieving her husband, whose attitude toward her, marveled Captain Barnes, “was always that of the most affectionate solicitude, so marked, so gentle and unaffected that no one could see them together without being impressed by it.” Knowing his wife would awake the next morning humiliated by such a public display of temper, Lincoln had no desire to exacerbate the situation.
The talk darkened as Sherman and Grant agreed that “one more bloody battle was likely to occur before the close of the war.” They believed Lee’s only option now was to retreat to the Carolinas. There, joining forces with Johnston, he would stage a desperate attack against either Sherman or Grant. “Must more blood be shed?” Lincoln asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” That was not in their hands, the generals explained. All would depend upon the actions taken by Robert E. Lee.
Regarding Jefferson Davis and his top political leaders, Lincoln privately wished they could somehow “escape the country,” though he could not say this in public. “As usual,” Sherman recalled, “he illustrated his meaning by a story: ‘A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a friend, he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, [the man] accepted. In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy-bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so “unbeknown” to him, he would not object.’” Sherman grasped the point immediately. “Mr. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, ‘unbeknown’ to him.”
A Herald reporter noted that many “wept as children” while “men embraced and kissed each other upon the streets; friends who had been estranged for years shook hands and renewed their vows of friendship.”
The evening’s joy was diminished only by the anxiety Stanton and Seward shared for Lincoln’s safety. Earlier that day, Seward had talked with James Speed about his fear that “if there were to be assassinations, now was the time.” With the fall of Richmond, Seward told Speed, “the Southern people would feel as though the world had come to an end.”
At such moments, history suggested, desperate men might be prompted to take desperate action, and “the President, being the most marked man on the Federal side, was the most liable to attack.”
He had tried to keep Lincoln from going to Petersburg, asking him “to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequence of any disaster to yourself,” and pointing out that while generals must run such risks “in the line of their duty,” political leaders were not “in the same condition.”
“Here we were in a solitary boat,” Admiral Porter remembered, “after having set out with a number of vessels flying flags at every mast-head, hoping to enter the conquered capital in a manner befitting the rank of the President of the United States.” Lincoln was not disturbed in the slightest. The situation reminded him, he cheerfully noted, of a man who had approached him seeking a high position as a consulate minister: “Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.”
No sooner had the presidential party reached the landing than Lincoln was surrounded by a small group of black laborers shouting, “Bress de Lord!…dere is de great Messiah!…Glory, Hallelujah!” First one and then several others fell on their knees. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln said, his voice full of emotion, “that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The men stood up, joined hands, and began to sing a hymn. The streets, which had been “entirely deserted,” became “suddenly alive” with crowds of black people “tumbling and shouting, from over the hills and from the water-side.”
To all present, it seemed “a supreme moment,” but Lincoln betrayed no sense of exaltation or triumph. His first words, softly spoken, were simply to ask for a glass of water. The water was promptly supplied, along with a bottle of whiskey.
Riding through the city that afternoon in an open carriage, the president and his entourage found the Confederate statehouse “in dreadful disorder, signs of a sudden and unexpected flight; members’ tables were upset, bales of Confederate scrip were lying about the floor, and many official documents of some value were scattered about.”
When she was finally allowed to see him, “he was so disfigured by bruises…that he had scarcely a trace of resemblance to himself.”
Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.”
Lincoln visited injured soldiers at City Point, moving “from one bed to another,” the marquis recalled, “saying a friendly word to each wounded man, or at least giving him a handshake.” At one bed, he held the hand of a twenty-four-year-old captain who had been cited for bravery. “The dying man half-opened his eyes; a faint smile passed over his lips. It was then that his pulse ceased beating.” Lincoln remained among the wounded for five hours and returned to the steamer depleted. “There has been war enough,” he said when the marquis inquired about troubles with France over Mexico, “during my second term there will be no more fighting.”
Lincoln’s ominous selection prompted James Speed to deliver Seward’s warning about the increased threat upon his life. “He stopped me at once,” Speed recalled, “saying, he had rather be dead than to live in continual dread.” Moreover, he considered it essential “that the people know I come among them without fear.”
Years later, Chambrun remained intrigued by Lincoln’s temperament. On first impression, he “left with you with a sort of impression of vague and deep sadness.” Yet he “was quite humorous,” often telling hilarious stories and laughing uproariously. “But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes, and all his features would at once bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear.”
Lincoln’s bodyguard, William Crook, believed he understood something of the shifting moods that mystified the French aristocrat. He had observed that Lincoln seemed to absorb the horrors of the war into himself. In the course of the two-week trip, Crook had witnessed Lincoln’s “agony when the thunder of the cannon told him that men were being cut down like grass.” He had seen the anguish on the president’s face when he came within “sight of the poor, torn bodies of the dead and dying on the field of Petersburg.” He discerned his “painful sympathy with the forlorn rebel prisoners,” and his profound distress at “the revelation of the devastation of a noble people in ruined Richmond.” In each instance, Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him—the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.
patient and uncomplaining.
“You are back from Richmond?” Seward queried in a halting, scarcely audible voice. “Yes,” Lincoln replied, “and I think we are near the end, at last.” To continue the conversation more intimately, Lincoln stretched out on the bed. Supporting his head with his hand, Lincoln lay side by side with Seward, as they had done at the time of their first meeting in Massachusetts many years before.
When Fanny came in to sit down, Lincoln somehow managed to unfold his long arm and bring it “around the foot of the bed, to shake hands in his cordial way.” He related the details of his trip to Richmond, where he had “worked as hard” at the task of shaking seven thousand hands as he had when he sawed wood, “& seemed,” Fanny thought, “much satisfied at the labor.”
BOTH GRANT AND LEE had acquitted themselves admirably at the courtly surrender ceremony that afternoon at the Appomattox Court House. “One general, magnanimous in victory,” historian Jay Winik writes, “the other, gracious and equally dignified in defeat.”
As the distinguished silver-haired general dressed for the historic meeting, his biographer writes, he “put on his handsomest sword and his sash of deep, red silk.” Thinking it likely he would be imprisoned before day’s end, he told General William Pendleton, “I must make my best appearance.” He need not have worried, for Grant was determined to follow Lincoln’s lenient guidelines. The terms of surrender allowed Confederate officers, after relinquishing their arms and artillery, “to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authority,” on the condition that they never “take up arms” against the Union “until properly exchanged.”
As Grant continued to work out the terms, he later recalled, “the thought occurred to me that the officers had their own private horses and effects, which were important to them, but of no value to us; also that it would be an unnecessary humiliation to call upon them to deliver their side arms.” He therefore added a provision allowing officers to take their sidearms, as well as their private horses and baggage. This permission, Lee observed, “would have a happy effect upon his army.” Before the two men parted, Lee mentioned that “his army was in a very bad condition for want of food.” Grant responded immediately, promising to send rations for twenty-five thousand men.
Curiously, Lincoln had recently experienced a dream that carried ominous intimations. “There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me,” Lincoln purportedly told Ward Lamon. “Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping…. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along…. Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’”
“Don’t you see how it will turn out?” Lincoln comforted Lamon. “In this dream, it was not me but some other fellow that was killed…. Well, let it go. I think the Lord in His own goodtime and way will work this out all right. God knows what is best.”
Stanton insisted that “any effort to reorganize the Government should be under Federal authority solely, treating the rebel organizations and government as absolutely null and void.”
Lincoln told Grant not to worry. He predicted that the tidings would come soon, “for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War.” Welles asked him to describe the dream. Turning toward him, Lincoln said it involved the navy secretary’s “element, the water—that he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.”
The complexities of reestablishing law and order in the Southern states dominated the conversation.
Just as Brutus had been honored for slaying the tyrant Julius Caesar, Booth believed he would be exalted for killing an even “greater tyrant.” Assassinating Lincoln would not be enough. “Booth knew,” his biographer observes, “that in the end, the Brutus conspiracy was foiled by Marc Antony, whose famous oration made outlaws of the assassins and a martyr of Caesar.” William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Mark Antony, must not live. Finally, to throw the entire North into disarray, the vice president must die as well. The triple assassinations were set for 10:15 p.m.
At 10:15, he was supposed to ring the bell of Suite 68, enter the room by force, find his target, and murder him. When first informed that the original plan to kidnap the president had shifted to a triple assassination, he had balked. “I won’t do it,” he had insisted. “I enlisted to abduct the President of the United States, not to kill.”
During the performance, the White House footman delivered a message to the president. At about twelve minutes after ten, the impeccably dressed John Wilkes Booth presented his calling card to the footman and gained admittance to the box. Once inside, he raised his pistol, pointed it at the back of the president’s head, and fired.
His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so much vitality” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.
An eyewitness recalled that the audience was “enjoying the spectacle of Aladdin” when the theater manager came forward, “as pale as a ghost.” A look of “mortal agony” contorted his face as he announced to the stunned audience that the president had been shot at Ford’s Theatre. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed, Tad was seen running “like a young deer, shrieking in agony.”
Despite his brave attempts to console others, he was sometimes “entirely overcome” and “would retire into the hall and give vent to most heartrending lamentations.” Almost no one was able to contain his grief that night, for as one witness observed, “there was not a soul present that did not love the president.”
At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. Stanton’s concise tribute from his deathbed still echoes. “Now he belongs to the ages.”
In Johnson’s suite, he encountered his old enemies Montgomery Blair and his father. He took Old Man Blair’s hand and “with tearful eyes said ‘Mr. Blair I hope that from this day there will cease all anger & bitterness between us.’” The old gentleman responded with equal warmth and kindness.
Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,” Elizabeth Blair remarked to her husband in a letter later that day. “Their grief is as honest as that of any one of our side.” An editorial in the Richmond Whig expressed similar sentiments, observing that with Lincoln’s death, “the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has descended.”
News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. “He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.
“The history of governments,” John Hay later observed, “affords few instances of an official connection hallowed by a friendship so absolute and sincere as that which existed between these two magnanimous spirits. Lincoln had snatched away from Seward at Chicago the prize of a laborious life-time, when it seemed within his grasp. Yet Seward was the first man named in his Cabinet and the first who acknowledged his personal preeminence…. From the beginning of the Administration to that dark and terrible hour when they were both struck down by the hand of murderous treason, there was no shadow of jealousy or doubt ever disturbed their mutual confidence and regard.”
“You see in these armies,” Stanton predicted, “the foundation of our Republic—our future railway managers, congressmen, bank presidents, senators, manufacturers, judges, governors, and diplomats; yes, and not less than half a dozen presidents.”
spoken with fervor of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were by then mostly gone, the fabled scenes of their great struggle for American independence growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” In that war, “nearly every adult male had been a participant,” he said, “in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother,” until “a living history was to be found in every family.” Such he had said was no longer true for his generation.
They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer than one counsellor.”
The poet Walt Whitman felt much the same. “I have more than once fancied to myself,” Whitman wrote in 1888, “the time when the present century has closed, and a new one open’d, and the men and deeds of that contest have become somewhat vague and mythical.” He fancied that at some commemoration of those earlier days, an “ancient soldier” would sit surrounded by a group of young men whose eyes and “eager questions” would betray their sense of wonder. “What! have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touch’d his hand?” Though conceding that the future might decide differently about the prairie president, Whitman had no trouble speaking for his own generation: “Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”
“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”
“EVERY MAN IS SAID to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter to the people of Sangamon County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state legislature. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
“With malice toward none; with charity for all”

Epilogue

Six weeks afterward, convinced that she had taken on the afflictions of her loved ones through “vicarious suffering,” she collapsed and died.
When she died two months short of her twenty-second birthday, Seward was inconsolable. “Truly it may be said,” the Washington Republican noted, “that the assassin’s blows passed by the father and son and fell fatally on the mother and daughter.”
When his daughter-in-law Jenny asked if he had any deathbed advice to impart, he said simply: “Love one another.” Thurlow Weed, who served as a pallbearer, wept openly as the body of his oldest friend was lowered into the grave.
Stanton’s remaining days in the cabinet were acrimonious. His sympathy with the congressional radicals on Reconstruction brought him into open conflict with the president, who asked for his resignation. Refusing to honor Johnson’s request even after he was handed a removal order, Stanton “barricaded himself” in his office for weeks, taking his meals in the department and sleeping on his couch. He argued that his dismissal violated the Tenure of Office Act, recently passed by congressional radicals over the president’s veto, which required Senate consent for the removal of any cabinet officer. Johnson’s disregard for the Tenure of Office Act became one of the articles of impeachment lodged against him in 1868. When the impeachment failed by one vote in the Senate, Stanton finally submitted his resignation.
His physical condition weakened by a heart attack and a stroke, Chase fell into depression, confiding to a friend that he was “too much of an invalid to be more than a cipher. Sometimes I feel as if I were dead.”

Collected by Fang Wang