Seward’s playful remarks about his colleagues reflected the improved atmosphere in the cabinet now that Chase and Blair were gone. Both men had symbolized the animosity between radicals and conservatives in the country at large; their clashing emotions had long reverberated through the cabinet. The periodic jealousy Welles felt over the superior access Seward and Stanton enjoyed with the president had been intensified a hundredfold so long as Blair was there to fuel the flames. Likewise, when Stanton was angry with Lincoln over pardons or appointments, Chase had eagerly lent an approving ear to his complaints. Never initiated into this contentious drama, Fessenden and Dennison brought cooperation and amity to the cabinet. Strife abated, and Welles even acknowledged that his relations with Seward had grown more “amicable” and that Stanton was sounding more reasonable and less radical regarding Reconstruction.
Rumormongers had speculated that Lincoln would now want to replace his entire cabinet. It was positively asserted that Seward would give way to Charles Francis Adams, that General Butler would replace Stanton, and that Welles and Bates had outlived their usefulness. It was surmised that Lincoln would prefer more controllable colleagues. The busy, hypothetical cabinetmakers did not understand that Lincoln had no wish to disturb the rhythm of his relationships with his colleagues, which, to his mind, worked exceedingly well.
Lincoln’s friendship with Seward had deepened with each passing year. “His confidence in Seward is great,” observed Welles that autumn. Seward “spends more or less of every day with the President.” On subjects “of the gravest importance,” Seward was the president’s “only confidant and adviser.” Whenever Lincoln bounced an idea off Seward, he received straightforward advice. When a plan to foster Union sentiment in the South through confidential government purchase of a controlling share in a number of failing Southern newspapers was presented to Lincoln, he turned to Seward for advice. “It seems to me very judicious and wise,” Seward responded. It would provide a forum for Union men to help sway the opinion of fellow Southerners. If government funds were not readily available, he suggested that Thurlow Weed “might find money by contribution.”
Though some still considered the talkative New Yorker the “power behind the throne,” Seward had long since understood that Lincoln was the master. “There is but one vote in the Cabinet,” asserted Seward, “and that is cast by the President.” Two days after the election, Seward told a crowd of supporters, “Henceforth all men will come to see him, as you and I have seen him…. Abraham Lincoln will take his place with Washington and Franklin, and Jefferson, and Adams, and Jackson, among the benefactors of the country and of the human race.”
Lincoln’s partnership with his volatile secretary of war, though not as intimate and leisurely, was equally effective. Stanton was only fifty in the fall of 1864, but he “looked older,” his clerk Benjamin recalled, “by reason of the abundant tinging of his originally brown hair and beard with iron-gray.” The war had taken a toll on his constitution, already weakened by the lifelong struggle with asthma that caused periodic “fits of strangulation.” The illness that kept him in bed on election eve lasted for nearly three weeks. For a time it seemed he would not rally. His doctor begged him to take a leave of absence from his post. “Barnes,” Stanton replied, “keep me alive till this rebellion is over, and then I will take a rest…a long one, perhaps.” 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.
By late November, Stanton was back working fifteen-hour days at his stand-up desk, directing his subordinates with a steely determination. The complex relationship between the president and his secretary of war was not easy to comprehend. At times it seemed as if Stanton controlled the president; at other times it was clear that Lincoln was the dominant force in dictating policy. In fact, there was an unwritten code between the two powerful men: “Each could veto the other’s acts, but Lincoln was to rule when he felt it necessary.”
Lincoln used his veto over Stanton sparingly, as two of his congressional friends learned to their dismay. Having obtained the president’s assent to a military appointment for one of their constituents, they carried the endorsed application to Stanton. Stanton flatly refused to consider it. “The position is of high importance,” Stanton explained. “I have in mind a man of suitable experience and capacity to fill it.” When informed that Lincoln wanted this man, Stanton bellowed, “I do not care what the President wants; the country wants the very best it can get. I am serving the country…regardless of individuals.”
The two congressmen walked back to the White House, assuming the president would override his secretary, but Lincoln refused: “Gentlemen, it is my duty to submit. I cannot add to Mr. Stanton’s troubles. His position is one of the most difficult in the world. Thousands in the army blame him because they are not promoted and other thousands out of the army blame him because they are not appointed. The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending. He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him I should be destroyed. He performs his task superhumanly. Now do not mind this matter, for Mr. Stanton is right and I cannot wrongly interfere with him.”
At the same time, Lincoln expected Stanton to be aware of the special burdens he faced as president. For weeks, Lincoln wrote Stanton, he had been pressed by relatives of “prisoners of war in our custody, whose homes are within our lines, and who wish…to take the oath and be discharged.” He believed that “taking the oath” was an act of honor, that “none of them will again go to the rebellion,” though he acknowledged that “the rebellion again coming to them, a considerable per centage of them, probably not a majority, would rejoin it.” With “a cautious discrimination,” however, “the number so discharged would not be large enough to do any considerable mischief.” Moreover, looking forward to the day when the two sides would once again be united, he thought the government “should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.” With all these considerations in mind, it would provide “relief from an intolerable pressure” if he could have Stanton’s “cheerful assent to the discharge of those names I may send, which I will only do with circumspection.” Stanton replied the following day: “Your order for the discharge of any prisoners of war, will be cheerfully & promptly obeyed.”
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.
When Stanton thought he was right
, however, he tenaciously pursued his purpose. When a group of Pennsylvania politicians received the president’s assent for discharging some prisoners of war in their district who were willing to take the oath and join the Union army fighting Indians in the West, Stanton flatly refused to execute the order. The order specified that the discharged prisoners would receive a bounty and be credited against Pennsylvania’s draft quota, thus reducing the number of troops required of the Keystone State. “Mr. President, I cannot do it,” he asserted. “The order is an improper one, and I cannot execute it.” Lincoln was equally firm in his reply: “Mr. Secretary, it will have to be done.” And so it was.
When the order was publicized, a storm of criticism descended upon Stanton. To give a bounty to soldiers who were already in government custody seemed wasteful and wrong, as did counting the discharged prisoners against the quota that Pennsylvania, like every other state, was required to supply. Lincoln learned that Grant, too, was unhappy and blamed Stanton. “I send this,” Lincoln promptly wrote Grant, “to do justice to the Secretary of War.” He then explained that he had responded to the idea “upon pressing application…and the thing went so far before it came to the knowledge of the Secretary of War that in my judgment it could not be abandoned without greater evil than would follow it’s going through. I did not know, at the time, that you had protested against that class of thing being done; and I now say that while this particular job must be completed, no other of the sort, will be authorized, without an understanding with you, if at all. The Secretary of War is wholly free of any part in this blunder.”
In this instance, Stanton was transparently blameless, but Lincoln protected his volatile secretary even when criticism was justified, when “his firmness degenerated, at times, into sheer obstinacy; his enthusiasm, into intolerance; his strength of will, into arrogance.” Even the equitable George Templeton Strong acknowledged that it was “hard to vote for sustaining an Administration of which Stanton is a member. He is a ruffian.”
Implacable and abrasive as Stanton could be, his scrupulous honesty, energy, and determination were invaluable to Lincoln. When one caller complained bitterly about Stanton’s bearish style, Lincoln stopped him cold: “Go home my friend, and read attentively the tenth verse of the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs!” The verse reads as follows: “Accuse not a servant to his master, lest he curse thee, and then be found guilty.” When people speculated about cabinet changes after his reelection, Lincoln made it clear that Stanton would not be leaving. “Folks come up here and tell me that there are a great many men in the country who have all Stanton’s excellent qualities without his defects,” he commented. “All I have to say is, I have n’t met ’em! I don’t know ’em!”
Nor did Lincoln consider dismissing his “Neptune,” Gideon Welles. Reserved by nature, Welles did not enjoy the easy camaraderie with Lincoln that Seward did. The discreet New Englander looked askance at the curious pleasure both Lincoln and Seward took in talking with “the little newsmongers” and hearing “all the political gossip.” And he was often vexed by the odd intimacy between Lincoln and Stanton. Unlike Chase, however, he confined his complaints to his diary and remained totally loyal to the president whose natural sagacity he greatly admired.
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. Even the normally critical Times of London was forced to concede the extraordinary growth of the American navy under the leadership of Gideon Welles. When Welles took office, there were only 76 vessels flying the American flag; four years later, there were 671. The number of seamen had increased from 7,600 to 51,000. In the span of only four years, the American navy had become “a first class power.”
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. Welles had opposed the blockade but, once overruled, had enforced it with determination and skill. He had fought Lincoln on the admission of West Virginia as a state and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, but he had never publicly vented his objections.
With Seward, Stanton, and Welles secure in their cabinet places, the resignation of Edward Bates provided the only opening for change in the immediate aftermath of the election. The seventy-one-year-old Bates had contemplated resigning the previous spring, after suffering through a winter of chronic illness. In May, his son Barton had pleaded with him to return to St. Louis. “The situation of affairs is such that you are not required to sacrifice your health and comfort for any good which you may possibly do,” urged Barton. “As to pecuniary matters, I know well that you have but little to fall back on…for the present at least make your home at my house & Julian’s, going from one to the other as suits your convenience…. You’ve done your share of work anyhow, & it is time the youngsters were working for you. If you had nothing at all, Julian and I could continue to take good care of you and Ma and the girls; & you know that we would do it as cheerfully as you ever worked for us, and we would greatly prefer to do it rather than you should be wearing yourself out as now with labor and cares unsuited to your age.”
The prospect of going home to children and grandchildren was attractive, especially to Julia Bates, whose wishes remained paramount with her husband after forty-one years of marriage. On their anniversary in late May, Bates happily noted that “our mutual affection is as warm, and our mutual confidence far stronger, than in the first week of marriage. This is god’s blessing.”
However, during the dark period that preceded the fall of Atlanta, when Bates believed “the fate of the nation hung, in doubt & gloom,” he did not feel he could leave his post. Nor did he wish to depart until Lincoln’s reelection was assured. “Now, on the contrary,” he wrote to Lincoln on November 24, 1864, “the affairs of the Government display a brighter aspect; and to you, as head & leader of the Government all the honor & good fortune that we hoped for, has come. And it seems to me, under these altered circumstances, that the time has come, when I may, without dereliction of duty, ask leave to retire to private life.”
Bates went on to express his profound gratitude to Lincoln “not only for your good opinion which led to my appointment, but also for your uniform & unvarying courtesy & kindness during the whole time in which we have been associated in the public service. The memory of that kindness & personal favor, I shall bear with me into private life, and hope to retain in my heart, as long as I live.”
Bates had served his president and his country faithfully. In his first months as Attorney General, though he had been uncomfortable confronting Justice Taney on the issue of arbitrary arrests, he had composed an elaborate opinion justifying Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. When McClellan had refused to divulge his plans in early 1862, Bates had urged Lincoln to assume control of his commanders, advising him that the authority of the presidency stood above that of his generals, even on military matters. When the president read his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet in July 1862, Bates had been one of the first to speak favorably. 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.”
Abolitionists applauded this opinion along with an earlier one declaring blacks to be citizens of the United States. 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 blac
ks 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.”
From their first acquaintance, the relationship between Bates and Lincoln had been marked by warmth and cordiality. On occasion, Bates’s diary reveals frustration with Lincoln’s loose management style, which left the administration with “no system—no unity—no accountability—no subordination.” He believed Lincoln relied too heavily on Seward and Stanton. He could not fathom why the disloyal Chase had been kept in place for so long or why General Butler was not fired when complaints arose about his arbitrary arrests in Norfolk. In fact, Bates confided in his diary, his “chief fear” was “the President’s easy good nature.”
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.