Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [195]
These dramatic events created what Seward called “a feverish excitement” in Washington. No one felt more apprehensive than the newest member of Buchanan’s cabinet, Edwin Stanton. Thoroughly loyal to the Union, excitable and suspicious by nature, he became convinced that secessionists planned to seize the nation’s capital and prevent Lincoln’s inauguration. From his position inside the government, Stanton feared that “every department in Washington then contained numerous traitors and spies.” He discovered that the army had been deployed in far-flung places and that treasonous officers had shifted arms and guns from arsenals in the North to various places in the South. If Maryland and Virginia could be provoked into secession, Stanton believed secessionists would be in a position to take Washington. With the essentially defenseless capital captured, they would possess “the symbols of government, the seals and the treaties—the treasuries & the apparent right to control the army & the navy.” Stanton was driven to distraction when President Buchanan could not “be made to believe, the existence of this danger,” and would not credit the treasonous plot, which, Stanton feared, would include an attempt to assassinate Lincoln before his inauguration.
At this juncture, his co-biographers report, Stanton “came to a momentous decision: he decided to throw party fealty and cabinet secrecy to the winds and to work behind the President’s back.” With the White House paralyzed and the Democratic Party at loggerheads, he determined that “Congress and its Republican leaders were the last hope for a strong policy, the last place for him to turn.” Stanton knew that becoming an informer violated his oath of office, but concluded that his oath to support the Constitution was paramount.
Seeking the most powerful conduit for his information, Stanton chose Seward. Knowing they could not openly communicate, fearful that secessionists lurking on every corner would report the meetings in newspapers, Stanton prevailed on Peter Watson—the same Watson who had initially interviewed Lincoln for the Reaper trial—to act as his middleman. Almost every evening, Watson would call on Seward at his home to deliver oral and written messages from Stanton. Watson would then return to Stanton with Seward’s responses. “The question what either of us could or ought to do at the time for the public welfare was discussed and settled,” Seward later recalled.
The first meeting between Seward and Watson likely took place on December 29, prompting the flurry of private letters that Seward penned late that night. “At length I have gotten a position in which I can see what is going on in the Councils of the President,” Seward wrote Lincoln. “It pains me to learn that things are even worse than is understood…. A plot is forming to seize the Capitol on or before the 4th of March…. Believe that I know what I write. In point of fact the responsibilities of your administration must begin before the time arrives. I therefore renew the suggestion of your coming here earlier than you otherwise would…. I trust that by this time you will be able to know your correspondent without his signature, which for prudence is omitted.” That same evening, Seward confided in Frances that “treason is all around and amongst us,” and warned Weed, whose presence in Washington he would welcome, that a plot to seize the government had “abettors near the President.”
Seward assumed that Stanton was communicating with him alone. In fact, the cunning Stanton secretly spread word of the danger to several other Republicans, including Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Congressman Henry Dawes. “By early disclosure,” Dawes later wrote, Stanton was able to thwart some of the attempts by treasonous officers