Lincoln, the unknown by Tom Clancy
In a frenzy of grief Mrs. Lincoln called in a so-called spiritualist who masqueraded under the title of "Lord Colchester." This unmitigated impostor was exposed later and ordered out of town under a threat of imprisonment. But Mrs. Lincoln, in her distress, received "Lord Colchester" in the White House; and there, in a darkened room, she was persuaded that the scratching on the wainscoting, the tapping on the wall, and the rapping of the table, were loving messages from her lost boy.
She wept as she received them.
Lincoln, prostrate with grief, sank into a listless despair. He could hardly discharge his public duties. Letters, telegrams lay on his desk unanswered. His physician feared that he might never rally, that he might succumb entirely to his desolation.
The President would sometimes sit and read aloud for hours, with only his secretary or his aide for an audience. Generally it was Shakspere he read. One day he was reading "King John" to his aide, and when he came to the passage in which Constance bewails her lost boy, Lincoln closed the book, and repeated these words from memorv:
And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again.
"Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend," the President asked, "and feel that you were holding sweet communion with him, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality? I often dream of my boy Willie like that." And dropping his head on the table, Lincoln sobbed aloud.
W
hen Lincoln turned to his Cabinet, he found there the same quarrels and jealousy that existed in the army.
Seward, Secretary of State, regarded himself as the "Premier," snubbed the rest of the Cabinet, meddled in their affairs, and aroused deep resentment.
Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, despised Seward; detested General McClellan; hated Stanton, Secretary of War; and loathed Blair, the Postmaster-General.
Blair, in turn, went around "kicking over beehives," as Lincoln put it, and boasting that when he "went in for a fight" he "went in for a funeral." He denounced Seward as "an unprincipled liar," and refused to have any dealings with him whatever; and as for Stanton and Chase, he wouldn't condescend even to speak to those scoundrels—not even at a Cabinet meeting.
Blair went in for so many fights that finally he went in for his own funeral—as far as politics were concerned. The hatred that he aroused was so fiery and widespread that Lincoln had to ask him to resign.
There was hatred everywhere in the Cabinet.
The Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin, wouldn't speak to Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy; and Welles, topped with an elaborate wig and decorated with a vast growth of white whiskers, kept a diary, and from almost every page of it, he "hurls the shafts of his ridicule and contempt" at well-nigh all his colleagues.
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Welles especially detested Grant, Seward, and Stanton.
And as for the violent, insolent Stanton, he was the most prodigious hater of all. He despised Chase, Welles, Blair, Mrs. Lincoln, and apparently almost every one else in creation.
"He cared nothing for the feeling of others," wrote Grant, "and it gave him more pleasure to refuse a request than to grant it."
Sherman's hatred for the man was so fierce that he humiliated Stanton on a reviewing-stand before a vast audience, and rejoiced about it ten years later as he wrote his Memoirs.
"As I approached Mr. Stanton," says Sherman, "he offered me his hand, but I declined it publicly, and the fact was universally noticed."
Few men who ever lived have been more savagely detested than Stanton.
Almost every man in the Cabinet considered himself superior to Lincoln.
After all, who was this crude, awkward, story-telling Westerner they were supposed to serve under?
A political accident, a "dark horse" that had got in by chance and crowded them out.
Bates, the Attorney-General, had entertained high hopes of being nominated for President, himself, in 1860; and he wrote in his diary that the Republicans made a "fatal blunder" in nominating Lincoln, a man who "lacks will and purpose," and "has not the power to command."
Chase, too, had hoped to be nominated instead of Lincoln; and, to the end of his life, he regarded Lincoln with "a sort of benevolent contempt."
Seward also was bitter and resentful. "Disappointment? You speak to me of disappointment," he once exclaimed to a friend as he paced the floor, "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!
"You speak to me of disappointment!"
Seward knew that if it hadn't been for Horace Greeley, he himself would have been President. He knew how to run things, he had had twenty years of experience in handling the vast affairs of state.
But what had Lincoln ever run? Nothing except a log-cabin
grocery store in New Salem, and he had "run that in the ground."
Oh, yes, and he had had a post-office once, which he carried around in his hat.
That was the extent of the executive experience of this "prairie politician."
And now here he sat, blundering and confused, in the White House, letting things drift, doing nothing, while the country was on a greased chute headed straight for disaster.
Seward believed—and thousands of others believed—that he had been made Secretary of State in order to rule the nation, that Lincoln was to be a mere figurehead. People called Seward the Prime Minister. He liked it. He believed that the salvation of the United States rested with him and him alone.
"I will try," he said when accepting his appointment, "to save freedom and my country."
Before Lincoln had been in office five weeks Seward sent him a memorandum that was presumptuous. Amazing. It was more than that. It was positively insulting. Never before in the history of the nation had a Cabinet member sent such an impudent, arrogant document to a President.
"We are at the end of a month's administration," Seward began, "and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign." Then with a calm assumption of superior wisdom, he proceeded to criticize this ex-grocery, store keeper from New Salem and inform him how the Government ought to be run.
He ended by brazenly suggesting that from now on Lincoln ought to sit in the background where he belonged, and let the suave Seward assume control and prevent the country from going to hell.
One of Seward's suggestions was so wild and erratic as to stun Lincoln. Seward didn't like the way France and Spain had been carrying on lately in Mexico. So he proposed to call them to account. Yes, and Great Britain and Russia, too. And if "satisfactory explanations are not received"—what do you suppose he intended to do?
Declare war. Yes. One war wasn't enough for this statesman. He was going to have a nice little assortment of wars going full blast at the same time.
He did prepare an arrogant note which he proposed sending to England—a note bristling with warnings, threats, and insults.
If Lincoln hadn't deleted the worst passages and toned the others down, it might have caused war.
Seward took a pinch of snuff and declared that he would love to see a European power interfere in favor of South Carolina, for then the North would "pitch into that power," and all the Southern States would help fight the foreign foe.
And it very nearly became necessary to fight England. A Northern gunboat held up a British mail-steamer on the high seas, took off two Confederate commissioners destined for England and France, and lodged them behind prison bars in Boston.
England began preparing for war, shipped thousands of troops across the Atlantic, landed them in Canada, and was ready to attack the North.
Although Lincoln admitted it was "the bitterest pill he had ever swallowed," nevertheless he had to surrender the Confederate commissioners and apologize.
Lincoln was utterly astounded by some of Seward's wild ideas. From the outset Lincoln had keenly realized that he, himself, was inexperienc
All Washington was talking about Seward's running the administration. It touched Mrs. Lincoln's pride, and aroused her boiling wrath. With fire in her eye, she urged her humble husband to assert himself.
"I may not rule myself," Lincoln assured her, "but certainly Seward shall not. The only ruler I have is my conscience and my God and these men will have to learn that yet."
The time came when all of them did.
Salmon P. Chase was the Chesterfield of the Cabinet: strikingly handsome, six feet two inches tall, looking the part of a man born to rule, cultured, a classical scholar, master of three languages, and father of one of the most charming and popular hostesses in Washington society. Frankly, he was shocked to see a man in the White House who didn't know how to order a dinner.
Chase was pious, very pious: he attended church three times on Sunday, quoted the Psalms in his bathtub, and put the motto "In God We Trust" on our national coins. Reading his
Bible and a book of sermons every night before retiring, he was utterly unable to comprehend a President who took to bed with him a volume of Artemus Ward or Petroleum Nasby.
Lincoln's flair for humor, at almost all times and under nearly all circumstances, irritated and annoyed Chase.
One day an old crony of Lincoln's from Illinois called at the White House. The doorkeeper, looking him over with a critical eye, announced that the President couldn't be seen, that a Cabinet meeting was in session.
"That don't make no difference," the caller protested. "You just tell Abe that Orlando Kellogg is here and wants to tell him the story of the stuttering justice. He'll see me."
Lincoln ordered him shown in at once, and greeted him with a fervent handshake. Turning to the Cabinet, the President said:
"Gentlemen: This is my old friend, Orlando Kellogg, and he wants to tell us the story of the stuttering justice. It is a very good story, so let's lay all business aside now."
So grave statesmen and the affairs of the nation waited while Orlando told his yarn and Lincoln had his loud guffaw.
Chase was disgusted. He feared for the future of the nation. He complained that Lincoln "was making a joke out of the war," that he was hurrying the country on to "the abyss of bankruptcy and ruin."
Chase was as jealous as a member of a high-school sorority. He had expected to be made Secretary of State. Why hadn't he? Why had he been snubbed? Why had the post of honor gone to the haughty Seward? Why had he been made a mere Secretary of the Treasury? He was bitter and resentful.
He had to play third fiddle now. Yes, but he would show them; 1864 was coming. There would be another election then, and he was determined to occupy the White House himself after that. He thought of little else now. He threw his whole heart and soul into what Lincoln called "Chase's mad hunt for the Presidency."
To Lincoln's face, he pretended to be his friend. But the moment he was out of sight and out of hearing, Chase was the President's ceaseless, bitter, and sneaking foe. Lincoln was frequently compelled to make decisions that offended influential people. When he did, Chase hurried to the disgruntled victim, sympathized with him, assured him that he was right, whipped up his resentment toward Lincoln, and persuaded him that if
Salmon P. Chase had been running things he would have been treated fairly.
"Chase is like the blue-bottle fly," said Lincoln; "he lays his eggs in every rotten place he can find."
For months Lincoln knew all of this; but with a magnanimous disregard of his own rights, he said:
"Chase is a very able man, but on the subject of the Presidency, I think he is a little insane. He has not behaved very well lately, and people say to me, 'Now is the time to crush him out.' Well, I'm not in favor of crushing anybody out. If there is anything that a man can do and do it well, I say, let him do it. So I am determined, so long as he does his duty as head of the Treasury Department, to shut my eyes to his attack of the White House fever."
But the situation grew steadily worse. When things didn't go Chase's way, he sent in his resignation. He did this five times, and Lincoln went to him and praised him and persuaded him to resume his duties. But finally even the long-suffering Lincoln had enough of it. There had now developed such ill feeling between them that it was unpleasant for them to meet each other. So the next time, the President took Chase at his word and accepted his resignation.
Chase was amazed. His bluff had been called.
The Senate Committee on Finance hurried to the White House in a body. They protested. Chase's going would be a misfortune, a calamity. Lincoln listened, and let them talk themselves out. He then related his painful experiences with Chase; said that Chase always wanted to rule, and resented his (Lincoln's) authority.
"He is either determined to annoy me," said Lincoln, "or that I shall pat him on the shoulder and coax him to stay. I don't think I ought to do it. I will take him at his word. His usefulness as a Cabinet officer is at an end. I will no longer continue the association. I am willing, if necessary, to resign the office of President. I would rather go back to a farm in Illinois and earn my bread with a plow and an ox than to endure any longer the state I have been in."
But what was Lincoln's estimate of the man who had humiliated and insulted him? "Of all the great men I have ever known, Chase is equal to about one and a half of the best of them."
Despite all the ill feeling that had been stirred up, Lincoln
then performed one of the most beautiful and magnanimous acts of his career. He conferred upon Chase one of the highest honors a President of the United States can bestow: he made him Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Chase, however, was a docile kitten in comparison with the stormy Stanton. Short, heavy-set, with the build of a bull, Stanton had something of that animal's fierceness and ferocity.
All his life he had been rash and erratic. His father, a physician, hung a human skeleton in the barn where the boy played, hoping that he too would become a doctor. The young Stanton lectured to his playmates about the skeleton, Moses, hell fire, and the flood; and then went off to Columbus, Ohio, and became a clerk in a book-store. He boarded in a private family, and one morning shortly after he left the house, the daughter of the family fell ill with cholera, and was dead and in her grave when Stanton came home for supper that night.
He refused to believe it.
Fearing that she had been buried alive, he hurried to the cemetery, found a spade, and worked furiously for hours, digging up her body.
Years later, driven to despair by the death of his own daughter, Lucy, he had her body exhumed after she had been buried thirteen months, and kept her corpse in his bedroom for more than a year.
When Mrs. Stanton died, he put her nightcap and nightgown beside him in bed each night and wept over them.
He was a strange man. Some people said that he was half crazy.
Lincoln and Stanton had first met during the trial of a patent case in which they, together with George Harding of Philadelphia, had been retained as counsel for the defendant. Lincoln had studied the case minutely, had prepared with extraordinary care and industry, and wanted to speak. But Stanton and Harding were ashamed of him; they brushed him aside with contempt, humiliated him, and refused to let him say a word at the trial.
Lincoln gave them a copy of his speech, but they were sure it was "trash" and didn't bother to look at it.
They wouldn't walk with Lincoln to and from the courthouse; they wouldn't invite him to their rooms; they wouldn't
even sit at a table and eat with him. They treated him as a social outcast.
Stanton said—and Lincoln heard him say it:
"I will not associate with such a damned, gawky, long-armed ape as that. If I can't have a man who is a gentleman in appearance with me in the case, I will abandon it."
"I have never before been so brutall
When Lincoln became President, Stanton's contempt and disgust for him deepened and increased. He called him "a painful imbecile," declared that he was utterly incapable of running the Government, and that he ought to be ousted by a military dictator. Stanton repeatedly remarked that Du Chaillu was a fool to run off to Africa, looking for a gorilla, when the original gorilla was, at that moment, sitting in the White House scratching himself.
In his letters to Buchanan, Stanton abused the President in language so violent that it can't be put into print.
After Lincoln had been in office ten months, a national scandal reverberated throughout the land. The Government was being robbed! Millions lost! Profiteers! Dishonest war contracts! And so on.
In addition to that, Lincoln and Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, differed sharply on the question of arming slaves.
Lincoln asked Cameron to resign. He must have a new man to run the War Department. Lincoln knew that the future of the nation might depend upon his choice. He also knew precisely the man he needed. So Lincoln said to a friend:
"I have made up my mind to sit down on all my pride—it may be a portion of my self-respect—and appoint Stanton Secretary of War."
That proved to be one of the wisest appointments Lincoln" ever made.
Stanton stood at his desk in the war-office, a regular tornado in trousers, surrounded by clerks trembling like Eastern slaves before their pasha. Working day and night, refusing to go home, eating and sleeping in the war-office, he was filled with wrath and indignation by the loafing, swaggering, incompetent officers that infested the army.