Despite her finagling, Mary found herself in trouble shortly before the New Year when more bills arrived with no money left in the account. She had no recourse but to tell her husband what had happened and to beg him to ask for an additional appropriation. To bolster her case, she asked Benjamin French, the new Commissioner of Public Buildings, to speak with her husband. French caught up with the president shortly after he returned home from a memorial service in the Senate for Edward Baker. The juxtaposition between the moving eulogies for his old friend and the unpleasant topic of decorating bills provoked in Lincoln an unusual display of anger.
The president was “inexorable,” French recalled; “he said it would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets, & he swore he would never approve the bills for flub dubs for that damned old house!” Moreover, Lincoln angrily pointed out, the place was “furnished well enough when they came—better than any house they had ever lived in—& rather than put his name to such a bill he would pay it out of his own pocket!”
French was nonetheless determined to aid Mary’s cause. He liked her “better and better the more I see of her,” he admitted, “and think she is an admirable woman. She bears herself, in every particular, like a lady and, say what they may about her, I will defend her.” He succeeded in convincing a friendly congressman to hide a deficiency appropriation in a complex list of military appropriations. The crisis was resolved, at least temporarily, until Mary’s continued spending produced another round of bills.
Mary was not alone in her worries about money. In the fall of 1861, Kate spent several weeks in Philadelphia and New York on a mission to purchase new furnishings for her father’s mansion. Merchants gladly extended lines of credit for Kate as they had for Mary, creating great anxiety in her father’s mind. “I need hardly caution you to avoid extravagance, as it is going to be hard work to make both ends meet here; and if any circumstances should compel me to resign before long my expences shall have far exceeded my income. It does seem a little hard that one who has so much & such important work to do as I have had for the past twelve years should all the time have to pay such a large part of his own expences.”
The sense of injustice Chase felt in having to bear the burdens of public life lured him into a questionable relationship with a wealthy Philadelphia banker, Jay Cooke, who had been granted a lucrative contract from the Treasury Department for the sale of government bonds. Perceiving both Chase’s financial strain and his aggrieved pride, Cooke began to send valuable gifts to the Chase household, including an elegant open carriage for Kate and a set of bookcases for the parlor. As the relationship warmed, Chase borrowed money from Cooke, and eventually, Cooke took it upon himself to set up his own investment account for Chase. “I will take great pains to lay aside occasionally some choice ‘tid bits’ managing the investments for you and not bothering your head with them.” If all went well, Cooke hoped, the profit earned would make up “the deficiency” between Chase’s salary and his expenses, “for it is a shame that you should go ‘behind hand’ working as you do.” In the smooth Philadelphia banker, the Chases had found what Mary Lincoln unsuccessfully sought—a reliable source to fund the high cost of being a leader of society in wartime Washington.
BY THE END OF 1861, Lincoln realized that he had made a serious mistake in placing Simon Cameron at the head of the War Department. For many decades, Cameron had maintained his power base in Pennsylvania through the skillful use of patronage to reward loyalists and punish opponents. Unfortunately, the expertise of a wily political boss proved inadequate to the tremendous administrative challenge of leading the War Department in the midst of a civil war. A central system of civilian command was essential to construct a machine capable of providing strategy, supplies, logistics, and training for an army that had grown from 16,000 in March to 670,000 in December. Careful record keeping was indispensable when contracts worth millions had to be negotiated for rifles, cannons, horses, uniforms, food, and blankets.
As Lincoln confided to Nicolay, Cameron was “incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.” His primitive filing system consisted mainly of scribbled notes. According to Ohio congressman Albert Riddle, when Cameron was asked about the progress of a particular matter, “he would look about, find a scrap of paper, borrow your pencil, make a note, put the paper in one pocket of his trousers and your pencil in the other.”
The war was less than two months old when detailed accusations of corruption and inefficiency in the War Department began to surface in newspapers. In July, the Congress appointed a committee to investigate charges that middlemen had made off with scandalous profits on contracts for unworkable pistols and carbines, blind horses, and knapsacks that disintegrated when it rained. Though Cameron was not charged with pocketing the money himself, several of his political cronies had grown rich, vast public funds had been wasted, and the lives of Union soldiers had been jeopardized. As the charges multiplied, Republican newspapers began to call for his resignation, lest the entire administration become tainted by the scandal. “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.”
Determined to protect his position, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself with the increasingly powerful radical Republicans in Congress, led by Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner, Ohio’s Ben Wade, Indiana’s George Julian, and Maine’s William Fessenden. Though known as a conservative on the issue of slavery, Cameron began by degrees to embrace the radicals’ contention that the central purpose of the war was to bring the institution of human bondage to an end. While he had allied himself initially with Seward, Cameron turned increasingly to Chase, the single cabinet member at the time not only in favor of allowing fugitive slaves to stay within Union lines but also of enlisting and arming them. “We agreed,” Chase later recalled, “that the necessity of arming them was inevitable; but we were alone in that opinion.”
Acting without Lincoln’s approval, Cameron publicly endorsed the position of an army colonel who had sanctioned seizing slaves and using them for military service as one step in a more general policy of deploying “extremist measures against the rebels, even to their absolute ruin.” In cabinet sessions and at private dinners, he instigated heated arguments with Bates, Blair, and Smith, who fiercely assailed his position. Cameron maintained that black soldiers would add an essential weapon in the quest for victory. Blair claimed that Cameron was riding the “nigger hobby” for his own political advantage.
The situation came to a head in early December. Each department customarily presented an annual report to the president as he prepared his own yearly message. While drafting the War Department report, the war secretary resolved to officially advocate arming slaves who came into Union lines. Well aware that he would ignite controversy, Cameron read his draft to a series of friends, most of whom urged him to keep silent on the contentious issue.
At this point, Cameron recalled, “I sought out another counsellor,—one of broad views, great courage, and of tremendous earnestness. It was Edwin Stanton.” Cameron had called on Stanton during the summer and fall for legal advice on various contracts. This matter, however, was more delicate. Stanton “read the report carefully,” according to Cameron, and “gave it his unequivocal and hearty support.” In fact, he suggested his own provocative logic, which served to strengthen the argument for arming slaves: “It is clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves when it may become necessary,” the addition read, “as it is to take gunpowder from the enemy.”
It remains unclear whether Stanton offered his deliberately incendiary advice to encourage the war secretary openly to defy Lincoln, hoping that if Cameron were dismissed, he, Stanton, might be called upon to replace him. Perhaps he was “an abolitionist at heart,” simply w
aiting for the right moment to reveal his honest convictions. He had, after all, given his boyhood pledge to his father that he would fight slavery until the end of his life, and had expressed similar sentiments to Chase in the bloom of their friendship in Ohio. More significant, Charles Sumner considered Stanton “my personal friend,” who “goes as far [as] I do in directing the war against Slavery.” Yet when Stanton talked with fellow Democrats during this same period of time, including McClellan and his former cabinet colleague Jeremiah Black, he expressed decidedly more conservative views on the issue of slavery. Whatever Stanton’s purpose, his approval emboldened Cameron, who sent out advance copies of his report to a number of newspapers before submitting it to the president.
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.
Lincoln informed Cameron of his action at the next cabinet meeting, emphasizing, as he had with Frémont, that any decision regarding the future of slavery rested with the president, not with a subordinate official. Although Cameron immediately conceded and agreed to delete the vetoed language, he complained that his excised recommendation was no different from the suggestion Welles had made in his annual report. “This was the moment that Welles dreaded most,” his biographer observed. Like the secretary of war, the secretary of the navy had felt compelled to make some provision for fugitive slaves who “have sought our ships for refuge and protection.” In such cases, Welles declared, the slaves “should be cared for and employed” by either the navy or the army (depending on which branch had greater need), and “if no employment could be found for them in the public service, they should be allowed to proceed freely and peaceably, without restraint, to seek a livelihood.”
Certain that he, too, would be commanded to revise his report, Welles resolved that he would resign before doing so. But to his bewilderment, Lincoln allowed the navy report to be printed without change. Shrewdly, Lincoln had recognized at once the political difference between the two situations: the army occupied territory in the border states, while the navy did not. Allowing blacks to find employment on naval ships or in surrounding harbors on the coast was fundamentally different from providing weapons to blacks in the slave states of Kentucky or Missouri, whose continued loyalty was critical to the Union. Lincoln still believed that such a step would drive the loyal citizens of these states into the Confederacy.
In fact, the president had developed his own policy for the increasing numbers of fugitive slaves who had come into Union lines. As members of Congress gathered on Capitol Hill for the opening of the winter session, he outlined his ideas in his annual message. He recognized, he wrote, that under the Confiscation Act, when Union armies secured territory where slaves had been used by their masters “for insurrectionary purposes,” the legal rights of the slaveholders were “forfeited”; slaves “thus liberated” had to be “provided for in some way.” He was hopeful that some of the loyal border states might soon “pass similar enactments.” If such actions were taken, Lincoln recommended that the Congress compensate the states for each freed slave.
Lincoln still believed that both classes of freed slaves should be colonized on a purely voluntary basis, “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them. It might be well to consider, too,—whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization.”
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.
Abolitionists condemned Lincoln’s message. “Away with the unstatesmanlike scheme of Colonization, thrust so unfortunately into the face of the nation at this juncture!” the abolitionist Worthington G. Snethen wrote Chase. “Let the sword make a nation of four millions of black men free, and let them be free, as free as the white 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.”
Since the beginning of the war, Douglass had avowed that nothing would terrify the South like the vision of thousands of former slaves wielding weapons on behalf of the Union Army. “One black regiment alone would be, in such a war, the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color in this case would be more terrible than powder and balls.” Predicting that a “lenient war” would be “a lengthy war and therefore the worst kind of war,” Douglass contended that the survival of the nation depended upon enlisting the “slaves and free colored people” into the army. In a speech in Philadelphia, he proclaimed: “We are striking the guilty rebels with our soft, white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man, which we keep chained behind us. We have been catching slaves, instead of arming them…. We pay more attention to the advice of the half-rebel State of Kentucky, than to any suggestion coming from the loyal North.”
While the radical press criticized Lincoln’s message, moderate and conservative Republicans lauded his tact. “It appeals to the judgment,—the solid convictions of the people, rather than their resentments or their impatient hopes and aspirations,” the New York Times concluded, and as “the moderate men compose nine-tenths of the population of the country, the message will doubtless meet with popularity.” 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.”
> CHAPTER 15
“MY BOY IS GONE”
THE LINCOLNS HOSTED the traditional New Year’s Day reception to mark the advent of 1862. The day was “unusually beautiful,” the New York Times reported, “the sky being clear and bright, and the air soft and balmy, more like May than January.” Frances Seward, who had joined her husband for the holidays, found the festive atmosphere reassuring. “For the first time since we have been here,” she told her sister, “the carriages are rolling along the streets as they used to do in old times.” Bates, too, was braced by the glorious day. “All the world was out,” he noted. Thousands of citizens streamed into the White House when the gates were opened at noon. The Marine Band played as members of the public shook hands with the president and first lady. They mingled with Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, foreign ministers, military officers, and cabinet officials. At long last, Fanny met the first lady, whom she described as “a compact little woman with a full round face,” wearing “a black silk, or brocade, with purple clusters in it—and some appropriate velvet head arrangement.”
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.”