Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

many scraps of notes or memoranda. In writing a careful letter, he first wrote it himself, then corrected it, and then rewrote the corrected version himself.49

That same inexperience made many of the old Republican hands look at him askance, as a quirk in an electoral process that ought to have elected a Seward, a Chase, or a Douglas instead. Elihu Washburne, meeting Lincoln on the railroad platform when the president-elect arrived in Washington on February 23, 1861, could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns… than the President of the United States.” Fully as much as George McClellan, Republican senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio dismissed “Old Abe” as a “fool,” and curtly declined an invitation to a White House ball in February 1862 with the acid question, “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war?” Newspaper editors foamed angrily over Lincoln’s election, asking, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” The historian George Bancroft burst out, in a letter to his wife, “We suffer for want of an organizing mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.”50

Although Lincoln was elected president as a Republican, he still carried over into the Republican Party many of the political principles of the old Whigs, and chief among those principles was the Whiggish suspicion of putting too much power into the hands of the national president. The Whigs, wrote John Pendleton Kennedy, “fearing this administrative arm, and believeing [sic] that the safety of free institutions is best secured by watching and restraining the Executive, disdain to seek its favor by any act of adulation or by any relaxation of their distrust,” and “naturally put great faith in the National Legislature.” Lincoln, of course, wanted to act the Whiggish part. In his first major political speech in Springfield in 1838, Lincoln had warned his hearers against the emergence of a “towering genius” who would disdain the “beaten path” of republican institutions and erect a despotism on the ruins of “the temple of liberty,” and it was plain that Lincoln had Democrats such as Jackson in view. After his own election as president, Lincoln insisted in consistently Whiggish terms that he intended to take a backseat to Congress in running the country. “My political education strongly inclines me against a very free use of… the Executive, to control the legislation of the country,” Lincoln declared in 1861. “As a rule, I think it better that congress should originate, as well as perfect its measures, without external bias.”51

However, a civil war changed all normal expectations, and Lincoln reserved to himself exactly how to construe that “use” of the Executive. What deceived political spectators about Lincoln was his preference for moving indirectly, relying on private embassies performed by staffers or old Illinois friends such as Leonard Swett. Even before arriving in Washington, Lincoln sent Swett ahead to map the political landscape, and Swett dutifully reported back, “From all I can learn of the Town I think by the time you had been here a week you would either be bored to death or in a condition in which you never could sensibly determine any thing.” Swett “tried by all means in my power, to induce” one politician “to adopt the course you requested”; another proposal couldn’t even be discussed by letter and “any decisive measures” would have to wait “until I arrive for I think I have important considerations to present to you.” Other old friends were converted into listening posts to gauge public opinion, particularly in Kentucky, where long-time friend Joshua Speed’s ears were close to the political wires. Lincoln’s private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, were sent on missions to Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, as well as up to Capitol Hill whenever any business in Congress was pending. “When the President had any rather delicate matter to manage at a distance,” recalled Hay, “he … sent Nicolay or me.” In critical cases, Lincoln called senators to the White House for some presidential talking-to.52

The wise heads in the Senate criticized Lincoln’s “back-kitchen way of doing this business.” So did the wise heads in the cabinet, since Lincoln hardly ever involved his cabinet secretaries in policy-making decisions, except to confirm a conclusion he had already reached. Though he gave his cabinet secretaries wide enough room to use their own talents in managing those responsibilities, it was plain that Lincoln regarded them as little more than clerks, rather than partners in the great business of managing the war. This was not, of course, what his cabinet had expected: from Jefferson’s day forward, cabinet secretaries had been growing in power and independence, to the point where under Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war—a figure no less than Jefferson Davis—had been regarded as a greater power in the administration than Pierce himself.53

The discretion cabinet secretaries had in making patronage appointments (in these days before a professional civil service) was “enormous, so enormous that when not discreetly dispensed, it tears a party to pieces.” That was a development Lincoln stopped cold in its tracks. Salmon Chase was indignant to discover that, in his role as secretary of the Treasury, Lincoln regarded him as no more than an extension of the presidential will. “We… are called members of the Cabinet,” Chase raged in disappointment, “but are in reality only separate heads of departments, meeting now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost, not for grave consultation on matters concerning the salvation of the country.” But it gave no end of amusement to John Hay, who wrote in 1863 that Lincoln “sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady & equally firm.”54

Lincoln might not have been able to deal so independently had he not enjoyed substantial Republican majorities in both the 37th Congress (elected with him in 1860) and the