A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [201]
One of Seward’s few remaining friends on Capitol Hill had sneaked out of the Republican meeting to warn him of the impending coup. His immediate reaction was to resign first in order to deny his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him humiliated.58 By the time Lord Lyons heard about the senators’ attack, their delegation had already met with a clearly distressed Lincoln on December 18 and presented their demands for Seward’s removal and a reorganization of the cabinet.59 Lincoln had been able to parry their claim that the cabinet was divided, but he had no answer to Sumner’s accusation that Seward was sending “offensive dispatches which the President could not have seen, or assented to.”60 To buy time, he invited them to resume the discussion the following day.
Lyons still regarded Sumner as a reliable ally in Anglo-American controversies, but he thought the Republican Party as a whole combined an unhealthy mix of zealotry and ignorance that made them unpredictable. “We may have to be ready for squalls,” he wrote to Lord Russell on the nineteenth. That evening, Lincoln received the Republican delegation for the second time. But he had a surprise for the plotters. He had invited the cabinet—with the exception of Seward—to hear their allegation that the secretary of state had usurped its powers. It was an awkward moment for Chase, who, even more than Sumner, had been the prime mover behind the attempted coup. He panicked over whether to portray himself as loyal to Lincoln, which would mean denying the senators’ allegations that the cabinet was disgruntled, or to throw in his lot with the delegation and support its claims. He lost his nerve and pretended to be surprised that there were rumors against Seward. His cowardice abashed several of the senators, but not Charles Sumner, who angrily repeated his previous complaints about Seward’s record. Still, when confronted with testimonials that the cabinet was united behind Lincoln, the majority of delegation felt too embarrassed to insist on Seward’s removal. The meeting adjourned at one in the morning with nothing actually decided.
Lyons thought that the outcome would depend on whom Lincoln could least afford to lose; “a quarrel with the Republican Members of the Senate is a very serious thing for him.” As two more days slipped by without any definite news, Lyons pondered a future without his erstwhile nemesis: “I shall be sorry if it ends in the removal of Mr. Seward,” he wrote a little ruefully on Monday, December 22. “We are much more likely to have a man less disposed to keep the peace.… I should hardly have said this two years ago.”61 But that afternoon he paid a visit to the State Department, and to his relief he found Seward back at his desk, behaving as if nothing had happened. Over the weekend, just as Seward had started to accept the coup against him, and Lincoln had begun to rationalize to himself why his chief ally in the cabinet had to be sacrificed to placate the radicals, Chase had become frightened that Seward’s friends and supporters would take their revenge on him. To save himself, he offered his resignation in the hope that this would clear him of any imputation of harboring ambitions for the presidency. Lincoln realized that Chase had lost his nerve. In a deliberate show of authority, the president rejected his resignation, replied that both secretaries were indispensable, and declared all discussion about a cabinet reorganization at an end. The senators’ protest had achieved precisely the opposite effect of what they had intended. But it was obvious, Lyons wrote to Lord Russell on December 26, that “Mr. Seward was plainly not in a position to make any concessions at all to neutrals.”62 He would not dare risk his remaining political capital on helping Britain to obtain cotton,