By Monday morning, as Chase left for Columbus, Lincoln had reached a tentative solution. He would not offer Cameron the Treasury but would hold open the possibility of another post. “It seems to me not only highly proper, but a necessity,” he confided in Trumbull that day, “that Gov. Chase shall take [the Treasury]. His ability, firmness, and purity of character, produce the propriety.” As for the necessity, his name alone would reconcile the merchant class in New York who had long opposed Seward. “But then comes the danger that the protectionists of Pennsylvania will be dissatisfied; and, to clear this difficulty, Gen. C. must be brought to co-operate.” The solution was to persuade him to take the lesser position of the War Department.
Moving carefully, Lincoln wrote a conciliatory letter to Cameron, admitting that his first letter was written “under great anxiety,” and begging him to understand that he “intended no offence.” He promised that if he made a cabinet appointment for Pennsylvania before he arrived in the capital, he would not do so without talking to Cameron, “and giving all the weight to your views and wishes which I consistently can.”
Uncertain about Lincoln’s complex plans, Chase left Springfield with some ambivalence. Although he had to admit that his conversations with Lincoln “were entirely free & unreserved,” he had not been given the firm offer he coveted, even as he claimed a preference to remain in the Senate. On the train back to Ohio, he penned notes urging several friends to visit Lincoln and support his case. “What is done must be done quickly & done judiciously,” he told Hiram Barney, “with the concurrence of our best men & by a deputation to Springfield.”
Chase’s friends appealed to Lincoln, but the trouble occasioned by his impulsive letter to Cameron had convinced Lincoln to make no more official offers until he reached Washington in late February. Uncertainty left Chase increasingly agitated. “I think that in allowing my name to be under consideration… and to be tossed about in men’s mouths and in the press as that of a competitor for a seat which I don’t want, I have done all that any friends can reasonably ask of me,” he wrote Elizabeth Pike. “And it is my purpose by a note to Mr. Lincoln within the present week to put my veto on any further consideration of it. If he had thought fit to tender me the Treasury Department with the same considerate respect which was manifested toward Mr. Seward and Mr. Bates I might have felt under a pretty strong obligation to defer to the judgment of friends and accept it.” In the end, Chase never did send a note requesting Lincoln to withdraw his name from further cabinet consideration. 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. On December 20, 1860, the same day that Lincoln met with Thurlow Weed, South Carolina held a state convention in the wake of the Republican victory and passed an ordinance to secede from the Union. The vote was unanimous. Throughout the Deep South, such “a snowballing process” began that over the next six weeks, six additional states followed suit—Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas.
For Southern radicals, a correspondent for the Charleston Courier observed, Lincoln’s victory opened the door to the goal “desired by all true hearted Southerners, viz: a Southern Confederacy.” The night after the election, the citizens of Charleston had turned out in droves for a torchlight parade featuring an effigy of Lincoln, with a placard in its hand reading: “Abe Lincoln, First President Northern Confederacy.” Two slaves hoisted the figure to a scaffold, where it was set afire and “speedily consumed amid the cheers of the multitude.”
As the various secession ordinances made clear, the election of a “Black Republican” was merely the final injury in a long list of grievances against the North. These documents cited attempts to exclude slaveholders from the new territories; failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; continued agitation of the slavery question that held Southerners up to contempt and mockery; and the fear of insurrection provoked by the John Brown raid.
Though Southern newspapers had long threatened that secession would follow fast upon a Lincoln victory, the rapidity and vehemence of the secession movement took many in the North, including President Buchanan, by surprise. The bachelor president was attending a young friend’s wedding reception when he heard news of South Carolina’s secession. A sudden disturbance heralded the entrance of South Carolina congressman Lawrence Keitt. Flourishing his state’s session ordinance over his head, he shouted: “Thank God! Oh, thank God!…I feel like a boy let out from school.” When Buchanan absorbed the news, he “looked stunned, fell back, and grasped the arms of his chair.” No longer able to enjoy the festivities, he left immediately.
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.”
As panic began to affect the stock market and the business community in the North, Lincoln reluctantly agreed to insert an authorized passage in a speech Trumbull was scheduled to make in Chicago. 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.”
Just as Lincoln had predicted, however, the speech had no positive impact. “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.”
Although increasingly infuriated by Southern misrepresentations of his positions, Lincoln confined expression of his anger to private letters. Upon hearing from the New York Times’s Henry Raymond that one of his correspondents, a wealthy Mississippi gentleman named William Smedes, had justified the state’s “blaze of passion” for secession on the grounds that Lincoln was “pledged to the ultimate extinction of slavery, holds the black man to be the equal of the white, & stigmatizes our whole people as immoral & unchristian,” Lincoln issued a blistering reply
. As evidence, Smedes had cited an “infamous” speech Lincoln had purportedly given on the occasion when Chase was presented with his silver pitcher by the free blacks of Cincinnati. For such a speech, Smedes proclaimed, he would “regard death by a stroke of lightning to Mr. Lincoln as but a just punishment from an offended deity.”
“What a very mad-man your correspondent, Smedes is,” Lincoln replied, countering that he “was never in a meeting of negroes in [his] life; and never saw a pitcher presented by anybody to anybody.” Moreover, he went on, “Mr. Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinctincton of slavery; does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly as Mr. S. states it; and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.”
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.
WHILE OUTRAGED BY the South’s willful distortions of his positions, Lincoln was far more troubled by the growing rancor splitting his own party. Conciliators believed that with the proper compromises, the eight remaining slaveholding states could be kept in the Union, hoping that without expansion, the secession movement would ultimately die out. Hard-liners, meanwhile, ranged from those who thought compromise would only embolden the South to extremists who believed that military force alone would bring the South back to the Union fold. As president-elect, Lincoln had to balance two emerging poles of the Republican Party, a task made all the more difficult by the over 700 miles that separated Springfield from Washington.
Yet, almost unnoticed, Lincoln managed through a series of complex and subtle maneuvers to keep the Republican Party intact through the “Great Secession Winter.” Whatever conciliatory measures he might consider, Lincoln was adamant, he told Trumbull, that there must be “no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again…. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” If the door were opened to slavery in any of the new territories, Lincoln feared that the South would eventually try to annex Cuba or invade Mexico, thereby restarting the long struggle.
Though Lincoln remained inflexible on the territorial question, he was willing, he told Seward, to compromise on “fugitive slaves, District of Columbia, slave trade among the slave states, and whatever springs of necessity from the fact that the institution is amongst us.” Knowing that two parallel committees in the House and Senate were set to address the sectional crisis, Lincoln relayed a confidential message to Seward that he had drafted three short resolutions. He instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield. The first resolved that “the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.” The second would amend the Fugitive Slave Law “by granting a jury trial to the fugitive.” The third recommended that all state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed.
Seward agreed to introduce Lincoln’s resolutions without revealing their source, though he was of the opinion that they would do nothing to stop the secession movement. The best option, he told Lincoln, was to focus on keeping the border states in the Union, though he feared “nothing could certainly restrain them” short of adopting the series of proposals authored by Kentucky’s John Crittenden. The Crittenden Compromise, among other provisions, offered to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thereby initiating the very extension of slavery into the territories Lincoln had pledged to prevent.
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. Still, Seward retained his characteristic optimism, assuring Lincoln that with the passage of time, “sedition will be growing weaker and Loyalty stronger.”
Events soon eclipsed the slender hope that time would bring about a peaceful solution to the sectional crisis. There were three federal forts in South Carolina: Fort Moultrie, under the command of Major Robert Anderson; Fort Sumter; and Castle Pinckney. South Carolina announced that all three were in its domain and that three commissioners of the new “republic” had been named to negotiate the matter with the Buchanan administration. “From the first,” John Nicolay reported, it was apparent that “the Carolinians intended somehow to get possession of these fortifications, as it was the only means by which they could make any serious resistance to the federal government.”
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!” Straightaway, he sent a message to General Scott through his friend Congressman Washburne, to be prepared at the time of the inauguration “to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require.”
In fact, the ever-vacillating Buchanan had not decided to surrender the forts. The issue produced an open rift in his already compromised cabinet. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb of Georgia had resigned and departed for his native state, but several secessionists remained, “vying…for Buchanan’s ear” with staunch Unionists Secretary of State Jeremiah Black and Postmaster General Joseph Holt. In the midst of the cabinet crisis, Black prevailed on Buchanan to offer the attorney generalship to his good friend Edwin Stanton, who was still practicing law in Washington. Black also pressured Stanton to accept the post, adding a third ally to bolster Buchanan’s will. While Buchanan waffled over the proper course of action, Anderson preempted his decision on the night of December 26, 1860, by deciding to move his troops from Fort Moultrie to the less vulnerable Fort Sumter. The next day, South Carolina took possession of the abandoned Fort Moultrie as well as Castle Pinckney.
Under the influence of Black, Holt, and Stanton, Buchanan agreed to send reinforcements to Anderson at Sumter. In early January, the same day that Lincoln met with Chase in Springfield, an unarmed merchant vessel, the Star of the West, headed for Charleston Harbor equipped with men and supplies. The mission failed when the weaponless vessel was fired upon by shore batteries. The Star of the West turned back immediately and headed north.
These dramatic events created what Seward called “a feverish excitement” in Washington. No one felt more apprehensive than the newest member of Buchanan’s cabinet, Edwin Stanton. Thoroughly loyal to the Union, excitable and suspicious by nature, he became convinced that secessionists planned to seize the nation’s capital and prevent Lincoln’s inauguration. From his position inside the government, Stanton feared that “every department in Washington then contained numerous traitors and spies.” He discovered that the army had been deployed in far-flung places and that treasonous officers had shifted arms and guns from arsenals in the North to various places in the South. If Maryland and Virginia could be provoked into secession, Stanton believed secessionists would be in a position to take Washington. With the essentially defenseless capital captured, they would possess “the symbols of government, the seals and the treaties—the treasuries & the apparent right to control the army & the navy.” 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.
At this juncture, his co-biographers report, Stanton “came to a momentous dec
ision: he decided to throw party fealty and cabinet secrecy to the winds and to work behind the President’s back.” With the White House paralyzed and the Democratic Party at loggerheads, he determined that “Congress and its Republican leaders were the last hope for a strong policy, the last place for him to turn.” Stanton knew that becoming an informer violated his oath of office, but concluded that his oath to support the Constitution was paramount.
Seeking the most powerful conduit for his information, Stanton chose Seward. Knowing they could not openly communicate, fearful that secessionists lurking on every corner would report the meetings in newspapers, Stanton prevailed on Peter Watson—the same Watson who had initially interviewed Lincoln for the Reaper trial—to act as his middleman. Almost every evening, Watson would call on Seward at his home to deliver oral and written messages from Stanton. Watson would then return to Stanton with Seward’s responses. “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 first meeting between Seward and Watson likely took place on December 29, prompting the flurry of private letters that Seward penned late that night. “At length I have gotten a position in which I can see what is going on in the Councils of the President,” Seward wrote Lincoln. “It pains me to learn that things are even worse than is understood…. A plot is forming to seize the Capitol on or before the 4th of March…. Believe that I know what I write. In point of fact the responsibilities of your administration must begin before the time arrives. I therefore renew the suggestion of your coming here earlier than you otherwise would…. I trust that by this time you will be able to know your correspondent without his signature, which for prudence is omitted.” That same evening, Seward confided in Frances that “treason is all around and amongst us,” and warned Weed, whose presence in Washington he would welcome, that a plot to seize the government had “abettors near the President.”