Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [230]
Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief executive, he was responsible for ensuring “that the laws be faithfully executed.” An insurrection “in nearly one-third of the States” had subverted the “whole of the laws…are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” His logic was unanswerable, but as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” Welles seemed to understand the complex balancing act, correctly predicting to his wife that the “government will, doubtless, be stronger after the conflict is over than it ever has been, and there will be less liberty.”
Finally, after a week of mounting uneasiness, the Seventh Regiment of New York arrived in Washington. The New York Times reported that the “steps and balconies of the hotels, the windows of the private houses, the doorways of the stores, and even the roofs of many houses were crowded with men, women and children, shouting, and waving handkerchiefs and flags.” In the days that followed, more regiments arrived. Mary and her friends watched the regimental parades from a window in the mansion. The presence of the troops considerably lightened Lincoln’s mood. He blithely told John Hay that in addition to assuring the safety of the capital, he would eventually “go down to Charleston and pay her the little debt we are owing her.” Hay was so happy to hear these words that he “felt like letting off an Illinois yell.”
Frances Seward was greatly relieved when she received a letter from her husband confirming that more than eight thousand troops were in Washington. He did not, however, grant her request to join him there. His daughter-in-law, Anna, had almost completed decorating their new house on Lafayette Square. The carpets were down, and hundreds of books already lined the library shelves. They would move in at the end of April. Unlike Frances, Anna loved the bustle of Seward’s life. “For six or eight nights we had visitors at all hours,” she cheerfully reported. Perhaps Seward, anticipating the trials such a hectic environment would cause his wife, deemed it better for her to stay in their tranquil house in Auburn.
Furthermore, he knew they would argue about the purpose of the war. Frances, unlike her husband, had already decided that the principal goal was to end slavery. She recognized that the war might last years and entail “immense sacrifice of human life,” but the eradication of slavery justified it all. “The true, strong, glorious North is at last fairly roused,” she wrote her husband, “the enthusiasm of the people—high & low rich & poor…all enlisted at last in the cause of human rights. No concession from the South now will avail to stem the torrent.—No compromise will be made with slavery of black or white. God has heard the prayer of the oppressed and a fearful retribution awaits the oppressors.”
In her all-embracing vision of the war, Frances stood at this point in opposition not only to her husband but to most of the cabinet and a substantial majority of Northerners. Still certain it would be a quick war with an easy reconciliation, Seward told a friend, “there would be no serious fighting after all; the South would collapse and everything be serenely adjusted.” Bates wanted a limited war so as “to disturb as little as possible the accustomed occupations of the people,” including Southern slaveholding. Blair agreed, counseling Lincoln that it would be a “fatal error” if the contest became “one between the whole people of the South and the people of the North.”
To Lincoln’s mind, the battle to save the Union contained an even larger purpose