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the wishes of five New England governors by declaring that the administration would collapse without the secretary of state. The statement was debatable, since Seward’s power had shrunk considerably since the heady days in December 1860 when he boasted to his wife that the future of the government rested on his shoulders.51 Seward had successfully forged a close relationship with Lincoln as his second in command and confidant, but his relations with the rest of the cabinet had actually worsened during the past two years. The other members resented the way Seward had managed to insinuate himself into Lincoln’s inner circle. They disliked arriving at cabinet meetings and finding him already there, or, when they left, watching him stay behind for a private “chat.” Gideon Welles’s diary was peppered with fulminations against Seward and his wish “to direct, to be the Premier, the real Executive.”52 The treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, whose views on emancipation were far more radical than Seward’s, loathed him so heartily that he seized every opportunity to undermine the secretary of state. He repeatedly used the phrase “back-stairs influence” when referring to Seward, until it took on a life of its own and became a universal cry.

Charles Sumner had been hoping for some time that Seward would make a mistake that would finish him permanently. He believed that such a moment had come after the publication in early December of the State Department’s diplomatic correspondence for the first half of 1862. By now the State Department was overseeing 480 consulates, commercial agencies, and consular agencies abroad, and the literature Seward offered to the public was extensive. The British section contained letters from Charles Francis Adams that the minister had never imagined would become public. Benjamin Moran arrived at the legation on December 22 to find Adams mortified to the point of tears after the London press gleefully published some of the juicier anti-British dispatches, which included his complaints about The Times “and the sympathies of the higher classes,” whom Adams accused of “longing to see the political power of the United States permanently impaired.”53

Seward’s decision to publish every letter was “almost amounting to insanity,” Moran declared savagely. “Mr. Adams thinks his usefulness at this post is destroyed.… At one time during the day I thought he seriously contemplated resigning, and I told him he could not be spared—that it was his duty to remain.… This he agreed to … but that he would be more guarded in his future Dispatches to Mr. Seward.” Where, Adams wondered, was Seward’s sense of tact or diplomacy? “I scarcely imagine it wise in diplomatic life to show your hand in the midst of the game.”54 Now that the whole country knew that he accused the aristocracy of wishing “to see the Union shattered,” Adams doubted if polite society would ever receive him again.15.3

Sumner was interested in only one letter—a dispatch sent to Adams on July 5, 1862, in which Seward betrayed his contempt for the hard-line abolitionists and their universal emancipation agenda.15.4 This, Sumner believed, would be sufficient to ruin Seward in the eyes of the radical wing of the Republican Party. All he needed was an event or catalyst to mobilize his fellow senators—which had been provided by the disaster at Fredericksburg.

On the evening of December 16, the thirty-two Republican senators gathered for a meeting in the Senate reception room to discuss their response to the defeat. Lincoln did not escape censure, but the general feeling in the chamber was that the president’s mistakes were—as Chase repeatedly charged—the direct result of Seward’s baleful influence. Ironically, Seward’s deliberate attempt to foster an aura of power and mystique about himself, which William Howard Russell had noticed in 1861, now told against him. By the end of the meeting, all but four of the senators had agreed that Lincoln should be confronted about Seward. In Sumner’s view, the secretary of state’s own words had damned him by revealing his lack