Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [191]
After this long weekend meeting, Lincoln considered Chase’s inclusion in the cabinet essential. But what of Cameron, who had refused to withdraw from consideration? Early that Sunday morning, Lincoln walked over to the Chenery House, where Gustave Koerner was still in bed. Lincoln rounded up Judd and returned to Koerner’s room. Speaking in an agitated voice, Lincoln said: “I am in a quandary. Pennsylvania is entitled to a cabinet office.” He had received “hundreds of letters, and the cry is ‘Cameron, Cameron!’…The Pennsylvania people say: ‘If you leave out Cameron you disgrace him.’” Nonetheless, he had his mind “already fixed on Chase, Seward and Bates, my competitors at the convention.” Koerner and Judd expressed themselves strongly against Cameron but were unable to solve Lincoln’s dilemma.
By Monday morning, as Chase left for Columbus, Lincoln had reached a tentative solution. He would not offer Cameron the Treasury but would hold open the possibility of another post. “It seems to me not only highly proper, but a necessity,” he confided in Trumbull that day, “that Gov. Chase shall take [the Treasury]. His ability, firmness, and purity of character, produce the propriety.” As for the necessity, his name alone would reconcile the merchant class in New York who had long opposed Seward. “But then comes the danger that the protectionists of Pennsylvania will be dissatisfied; and, to clear this difficulty, Gen. C. must be brought to co-operate.” The solution was to persuade him to take the lesser position of the War Department.
Moving carefully, Lincoln wrote a conciliatory letter to Cameron, admitting that his first letter was written “under great anxiety,” and begging him to understand that he “intended no offence.” He promised that if he made a cabinet appointment for Pennsylvania before he arrived in the capital, he would not do so without talking to Cameron, “and giving all the weight to your views and wishes which I consistently can.”
Uncertain about Lincoln’s complex plans, Chase left Springfield with some ambivalence. Although he had to admit that his conversations with Lincoln “were entirely free & unreserved,” he had not been given the firm offer he coveted, even as he claimed a preference to remain in the Senate. On the train back to Ohio, he penned notes urging several friends to visit Lincoln and support his case. “What is done must be done quickly & done judiciously,” he told Hiram Barney, “with the concurrence of our best men & by a deputation to Springfield.”
Chase’s friends appealed to Lincoln, but the trouble occasioned by his impulsive letter to Cameron had convinced Lincoln to make no more official offers until he reached Washington in late February. Uncertainty left Chase increasingly agitated. “I think that in allowing my name to be under consideration… and to be tossed about in men’s mouths and in the press as that of a competitor for a seat which I don’t want, I have done all that any friends can reasonably ask of me,” he wrote Elizabeth Pike. “And it is my purpose by a note to Mr. Lincoln within the present week to put my veto on any further consideration of it. If he had thought fit to tender me the Treasury Department with the same considerate respect which was manifested toward Mr. Seward and Mr. Bates I might have felt under a pretty strong obligation to defer to the judgment of friends and accept it.” In the end, Chase never did send a note requesting Lincoln to withdraw his name from further cabinet consideration. His desire for position and glory, as Lincoln shrewdly guessed, would allow Lincoln alone to determine the time and place of his appointment.
WHILE LINCOLN WAS PREOCCUPIED with the construction of his official family, the country was tearing itself apart. On December 20, 1860, the same day that Lincoln met with Thurlow Weed, South Carolina held a state convention in the wake of the Republican victory and passed an ordinance to secede from the Union. The vote was unanimous. Throughout the Deep South, such “a snowballing process” began that over the next six weeks, six additional