Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [315]
THE TRAIN OF RECRIMINATIONS that followed the Fredericksburg defeat led to a crisis for the administration that left Lincoln “more depressed,” he said, “than by any event of [his] life.” Radical Republicans on Capitol Hill began to insist that unless a more vigorous prosecution of the war were adopted, conservative demands for a compromise peace would multiply and the Union would be restored with slavery intact. The midterm elections, they argued, demonstrated growing public dissatisfaction with current tactics—the writing, clearly, was on the wall.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 16, all the Republican senators caucused in the high-ceilinged Senate reception room, hoping to devise a unified response to the disastrous situation. Without sweeping changes in the administration, they agreed, “the country was ruined and the cause was lost.” Hesitant to publicly attack Lincoln in the midst of war, they focused their fury on the man they considered the malevolent power behind the throne—William Henry Seward. For months, Chase had claimed “there was a back stairs & malign influence which controlled the President, and overruled all the decisions of the cabinet,” a hardly veiled reference to Seward. In private letters that had quickly become public knowledge, Chase had repeatedly griped about Lincoln’s failure to consult the cabinet “on matters concerning the salvation of the country,” intimating that his own councils would have averted the misfortunes now facing the country and the party.
In Republican circles, word spread that Seward was a “paralizing influence on the army and the President.” He was rumored to be the “President de facto,” responsible for the long delay in dismissing McClellan that led to stagnation and loss on the battlefield. Seward was said to have hindered Lincoln’s intention to make the war a crusade for emancipation, and was deemed responsible for the resurgence of the conservatives in the midterm elections. In sum, Seward’s insidious presence “kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.”
In the minds of the majority of the Republicans gathered together in the reception room that December afternoon, these rumors had congealed into facts. As one senator after another rose to speak of Seward’s “controlling influence upon the mind of the President,” Ben Wade suggested that they “should go in a body and demand of the President the dismissal of Mr Seward.” Duty dictated that they exercise their constitutional power, as William Fessenden professed, to demand “that measures should be taken to make the Cabinet a unity and to remove from it any one who did not coincide heartily with our views in relation to the war.” As the rhetoric grew more heated, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa introduced a resolution proclaiming “a want of confidence in the Secretary of State” and concluding that “he ought to be removed from the Cabinet.”
Fessenden asked for a vote, which clearly indicated that an overwhelming majority of the thirty-one senators were in favor. Seward’s friend New York senator Preston King objected that the resolution was not only “hasty and unwise” but also “unjust to Mr. Seward, as it was predicated on mere rumors.” Several others agreed. Orville Browning argued that he “had no evidence the charges were true,” and therefore could not vote for the resolution. Moreover, this “was not the proper course of proceeding” and would likely provoke a “war between Congress and the President, and the