Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [300]
This was, Welles clearly recognized, “a new departure for the President, for until this time, in all our previous interviews…he had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government with the subject.” The normally talkative Seward said merely that the “subject involved consequences so vast and momentous that he should wish to bestow on it mature reflection before giving a decisive answer,” though he was inclined to think it “justifiable.”
So the matter rested until Monday morning, July 21, when messengers were dispatched across Washington with notices of a special cabinet meeting to be held at 10 a.m. “It has been so long since any consultation has been held that it struck me as a novelty,” Chase wrote in his diary. Earlier that day, Chase had shared breakfast in his home with Count Gurowski, whose acute frustration with Lincoln’s hesitancy regarding emancipation had been evident for many months. In Gurowski’s mind, Seward was the primary obstacle to progress, while Chase represented the best hope for spurring Lincoln forward. An inveterate gossip, Gurowski related to Chase the story of Seward’s comments on Cromwell and the Congress, which, he claimed, had been received with marked disapproval by the diplomats in attendance.
When the cabinet convened, all members save the postmaster general were in attendance. Montgomery Blair was in Maryland, where he had recently built an elegant country estate, Falkland, in Silver Spring near his parents’ estate. For this special meeting, the cabinet was summoned to the second-floor library rather than the president’s official office. There, surrounded by the curved bookshelves that Mary had recently filled with splendidly bound sets of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the president began with an admission that he was “profoundly concerned at the present aspect of affairs, and had determined to take some definitive steps in respect to military action and slavery.” The members listened as Lincoln read several orders he was contemplating. One would authorize Union generals in Confederate territory to appropriate any property necessary to sustain themselves in the field; another would sanction the payment of wages to blacks brought into the army’s employ. Taken together, these orders signaled a more vigorous prosecution of the war. When the discussion moved to address the possible arming of those blacks in the army’s employ, Stanton and Chase were in favor. Lincoln, Chase recorded, was “not prepared to decide the question.”
When the preliminary discussions had run long, the president scheduled another cabinet session the following day, July 22, to reveal his primary purpose in calling the meeting. This second session was likely held in Lincoln’s office, as depicted in Francis Carpenter’s famous painting, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. There, surrounded by evidence of the ever-expanding war, with battlefield maps everywhere—rolled in standing racks, placed in folios on the floor, and reclining up against the walls—the conversation from the previous day continued.
The desultory talk abruptly ended when Lincoln took the floor and announced he had called them together in order to read the preliminary draft of an emancipation proclamation. He understood the “differences in the Cabinet on the slavery question” and welcomed their suggestions after they heard what he had to say; but he wanted them to know that he “had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice.”