1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [94]
The last phrase of Chase’s argument was key. The administration must contrive to make the Sumter expedition seem not some covert raid, but a routine, peaceable delivery of supplies as would be made to any federal garrison. Indeed, Captain Fox, with his background delivering mail rather than cannonballs, was the perfect man to lead it.
Now Secretary Seward, who had dominated the Republicans’ response to the crisis ever since the November election, suddenly found himself left in the intolerable, impossible position of advocating what had become a minority view. This threatened not only to unravel all the webs of statecraft he had woven over the past five months but also to discredit all the public and private assurances he had given. Even worse: to make a mockery of his assumption—shared by many others—that he would be president in all but name.
On Easter Sunday, March 31, as a last-ditch effort to resurrect his hopes, Seward sat down and composed an extraordinary memo to Lincoln. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” he lectured the commander-in-chief. Any aggressive act against the South by the federal government, he wrote, would confirm the public’s belief, in both the loyal and rebel states, that the current national conflict was one “upon Slavery, or about Slavery.” Keeping the garrison at Sumter would seem like the bellicose act of a hard-line abolitionist regime. Instead, the president must continue to buy time, until the slavery issue could be buried once and for all. The crisis must be framed as a question simply of “Union or Disunion.” The best way to reunite the nation, Seward advised, was to declare war not against the South but against Spain and France, forming a grand North American and Central American alliance that would drive European colonizers permanently out of the hemisphere. (Maybe while they were at it, he ruminated, they should attack the British and the Russians, too.) No doubt Seward’s sources in the White House had informed him of the president’s sudden and mysterious illness, raising hopes that an even more astonishing proposal would be accepted, perhaps even welcomed: Seward suggested that perhaps Lincoln was not feeling up to the job of orchestrating all this complicated policy, in which case he, as secretary of state, might be willing to step in—modestly and reluctantly, of course—and take the administration’s helm.60
As Seward put the finishing touches on his memo, he was so pleased with its contents, and so confident of its success, that he sent an urgent message summoning his friend Henry J. Raymond, editor-in-chief of The New York Times, to Washington. Raymond arrived after midnight, ready to telegraph the scoop that Seward had been named premier of the new administration. First thing the next morning, Seward’s son Frederick hand delivered the memo to the White House, while Raymond stood by, with his editors in New York holding the front page open in expectation of the breaking news.61
Lincoln’s terse, stinging reply arrived within hours. In fact, he informed Seward, his administration did have a policy—it just happened not to be the one advocated by the secretary of state. Whatever needed to be done, he said, “I must do it,” though of course he would always be glad to seek his cabinet members’ advice. The president signed his letter—surely not without irony?—“Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln.”62
The telegram Raymond sent