1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [75]
Americans were also fast steadily losing faith in the man they had elected president. Newspapers ridiculed Lincoln’s undignified entry into Washington; cartoons showed him skulking off the train wrapped in an old blanket or even a woman’s shawl and bonnet. The future president had arrived “like a thief in the night,” sniffed a German diplomat. Even Mary Lincoln, it was said, went around telling everyone—discreetly, she thought—that her husband should never have compromised his honor to placate his cowardly bodyguards.90
Among the few who offered Lincoln any sympathy was Frederick Douglass, who noted, not so helpfully, the uncanny similarity between how the president-elect had reached the capital and how a fugitive slave would reach the North: “by the underground railroad … not during the sunlight, but crawling and dodging.”91
The impression of cowardice fed expectations that Lincoln would prove to be simply another Buchanan: a puppet whose strings would be pulled by more decisive men in his party. Two days after his arrival, a journalist watched him tour the Capitol arm in arm with Senator Seward, his recently announced choice for secretary of state. So much shorter was the beak-nosed New Yorker than the lanky Illinoisan that he looked “very much like a dwarf waiting upon a giant” as he escorted Lincoln to their carriage. And yet, the reporter assured his readers, “Seward holds the Administration in the hollow of his hand.”
Ever cryptic and calculating—the “wise macaw,” Henry Adams, who knew Seward well, called him—the Republican sachem had spent the entire winter assiduously devising his own schemes to resolve the national crisis, barely taking into account the man who would soon occupy the White House. Seward, as Adams’s brother Charles later recalled, “thought Lincoln a clown, a clod, and planned to steer him by … indirection, subtle maneuvering, astute wriggling and plotting, crooked paths.” One of the senator’s ideas was to provoke a war with England or France: if New York were attacked, he reasoned, “all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population for the rescue.” Failing this, Seward advised, the federal government should simply refrain from doing anything that might enrage Southerners still further—allowing cooler heads to prevail below the Mason-Dixon Line. In any event, he concluded, “the negro question must be dropped,” and the sooner the better.92
A new actor had stepped into the Washington limelight, too: an Ohioan with his own plan for banishing the Negro question. The beefy, genial Congressman Thomas Corwin was known fondly back home as “Tom Corwin the wagon boy,” from when he’d been a supply train driver for General William Henry Harrison’s campaign against the Indians in 1813. Even more widely, he was called “the king of the stump.” During General Harrison’s other famous campaign, when Old Tippecanoe led the Whigs to victory in 1840, Corwin boasted of having delivered more than a hundred tub-thumping orations to “at least seven hundred thousand people, men, women, children, dogs, negroes & Democrats inclusive.” Though now nominally a Republican, the Kentucky-born Corwin had even less use for Negroes and abolitionists than he did for dogs and Democrats. When a voter once asked him to commit to a clear position on slavery, he wisely “wrought out an elaborated nothing, a fogbank of words, as a reply.”93
Now, though, Corwin had come up with a few words about slavery that he believed might just save the Union. And quite uncharacteristically, they