Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [278]
A grateful Monty Blair immediately came to Lincoln’s defense regarding the Frémont appointment. Although he had not been consulted about the decision and realized his family would consider it a blatant affront to Frank, he told his father that he understood Lincoln’s need to arrest “the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time,” and for that reason, he thought “very well of it.” The conservative New York Times agreed, approving Frémont’s appointment as a necessary “concession to this craving for unity” and “the value of united counsels.” In his conduct of the war, the Times observed, Lincoln believed “tenaciously” in the “necessity of perfect unity of popular opinion and action” in the North.
More than any other cabinet member, Seward appreciated Lincoln’s peerless skill in balancing factions both within his administration and in the country at large. While radicals considered Seward a conservative influence on the president, in truth, he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle position between the two extremes—the radical Republicans, who believed that freeing the slaves should be the primary goal of the war, and the conservative Democrats, who resisted any change in the status of the slaves and fought solely for the restoration of the Union. “Somebody must be in a position to mollify and moderate,” Seward told Weed. “That is the task of the P. and the S. of S.” In another letter to his old friend, Seward expressed great confidence in Lincoln. “The President is wise and practical,” he wrote. His trust in Lincoln was complete, inspiring faith in the eventual success of the Union cause.
From the outside, however, Seward was viewed by radicals as a malevolent influence on Lincoln. Count Gurowski despaired at Seward’s supposed ties with McClellan, Blair, and their allies in the conservative press. “Oh! Mr. Seward, Mr. Seward,” he queried, “why is your name to be recorded among the most ardent supporters of [McClellan’s] strategy?” In fact, already by the middle of March, Seward had lost his early faith in McClellan and wondered why Lincoln did not strip him of command. In a private conversation with a friend, Seward scorned McClellan’s inflated estimates of enemy strength, suggesting that the Union troops from New York State alone probably outnumbered all the Confederate forces in northern Virginia! Nonetheless, he refrained from airing his doubts in public.
In the wake of the “Quaker gun” affair, Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had also eroded. While acknowledging that the general was a great “engineer,” Lincoln noted drolly that “he seems to have a special talent for developing a ‘stationary’ engine.” The more he studied the general, he confided to Browning, the more he realized that when “the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.” For this reason, Lincoln had “given him peremptory orders to move.” Finally, twenty-four hours before Lincoln’s deadline, McClellan’s massive army of nearly a quarter of a million men left the base camps around Washington and headed toward the Potomac, where more than four hundred ships had gathered to carry them to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Parading to the refrains of regimental bands, with rifles on their shoulders and new equipment on their backs, the high-spirited, well-disciplined troops presented a sight, one diarist noted, such as “the eye of man has seldom