Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [189]
The following evening, Seward sent a note to Charles Francis Adams, asking him to call in the morning. With a tone of sorrow in his voice, Seward told Adams he had imagined that when Lincoln offered him the premier position in the cabinet, he “would have consulted him upon the selection of the colleagues with whom he was to act”; but Weed had returned from Springfield empty-handed. He had hoped Adams would be awarded the Treasury, but the likely choice of Welles would fill New England’s quota, closing the door on Adams. “This was not such a Cabinet,” Seward confided to Adams, “as he had hoped to see, and it placed him in great embarrassment what to do. If he declined, could he assign the true reasons for it, which was the want of support in it? If he accepted, what a task he had before him!” Adams replied that “in this moment of great difficulty and danger, there was no alternative for him but acceptance.” This is probably what Seward wanted to hear all along, after he had expressed his distress at not being able to bring his friend Adams along.
The next day, Seward wrote to Lincoln that “after due reflection and with much self distrust,” he had “concluded; that if I should be nominated to the Senate…it would be my duty to accept.” That evening, he wrote to his wife, “I have advised Mr. L. that I will not decline. It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.” Frances was not surprised by her husband’s acceptance. Though she wanted him to close the curtain on his political career and come home to his family in Auburn, when huge worshipful crowds met his whirlwind summer tour for Lincoln, she had foreseen that his driving ambition would never be satisfied in tranquil Auburn. Nor was she surprised by his grandiose claim that he would try to save freedom and his country. She often saw her man with a clearer eye than he saw himself.
WITH ACCEPTANCES from Seward and Bates in hand, Lincoln turned his attention to his third rival, Salmon Chase. Knowing that Chase would never accept a subordinate position, Lincoln had slated him for the Treasury Department. As soon as he received Seward’s written acceptance, he wrote to Chase: “In these troublous times, I would [much] like a conference with you. Please visit me here at once.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.
But Lincoln’s plans for Chase were temporarily waylaid by intense pressure for the appointment of Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as secretary of the treasury. Exactly what promises Swett and Davis had made to Cameron’s men at the convention for their switch to Lincoln on the second ballot went unrecorded. We know from Swett’s letter to Lincoln, however, that he had given his word to the Cameron men that “they should be placed upon the same footing as if originally they had been your friends.” The lobbying for Cameron began days after Lincoln’s election with a deluge of letters “from very strong and unexpected quarters.” Lincoln had understood from the start the importance of satisfying Pennsylvania. Initially, he had hoped Pennsylvania would accept New Jersey’s William Dayton, who, like Cameron, was a staunch protectionist. As testimonials to Cameron poured in, however, Lincoln dispatched Swett to Harrisburg to invite Cameron to Springfield.
“The unexpected arrival of [Cameron] was somewhat of a stunner,” Henry Villard confessed, “not only to your correspondent but to a majority of the political schemers and intriguants in Springfield.” Considering Lincoln’s “well known rigid adherence to honesty,” it seemed impossible to Villard that Honest Abe would besmirch his cabinet with someone of Cameron’s unsavory reputation. For years, charges of bribery and bad dealings with the Winnebago Indians had sullied Cameron’s name. However compromised his reputation, the campaign on the Pennsylvanian’s behalf was organized