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some means found its way into my pocket,” Stanton had written Chase the previous winter. “Let me add that, ‘if you love me like I love you no knife can cut our love in two.’” A year later, Stanton would ask Chase to stand as godfather to his newborn child. Nevertheless, the balance of power between the two men had shifted. Stanton was now a happily married man with four children. The overworked secretary of war no longer begrudged the lack of time Chase was able to spend with him. On the contrary, it was Chase who now had to pay court to Stanton. Deprived of access to vital military decisions, Chase was forced to rely on the war secretary for the latest intelligence. Stanton had once yearned to spend entire evenings in Chase’s study; now Chase was lucky to obtain a private conversation with his old friend when he joined the crowd that gathered in the telegraph office at the end of the working day.

“It is painful for one to be so near the springs of action and yet unable to touch them,” Chase admitted to an acquaintance. “It is almost like the nightmare in oppressiveness, and worse because there is no illusion. I can only counsel; and that without any certainty of being understood, or, if understood, of being able to obtain concurrence, or, even after concurrence, action.”

Chase’s frustration with his position was alleviated only by his dreams of future glory, by his dogged hope that he, rather than Lincoln, would be the Republican nominee in 1864. In an era when single-term presidencies were the rule, he believed that if he could outflank Lincoln on Reconstruction—an issue most dear to radical Republicans—he could capture the nomination. The recent victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had created an illusion in the North that the end of the war was at hand. Questions of how the rebel states should be brought back into the Union began to dominate discussions in the halls of Congress, at dinner parties, in newspaper editorials, and in the smoke-filled bar of the Willard Hotel.

The issue divided the Republican Party. Radicals insisted that only those who had never displayed even indirect support for the Confederacy should be allowed to vote in the redeemed states. Lawyers and teachers who had not been staunch Unionists should not be allowed to resume their professions. Slavery should be immediately abolished without compensation, and newly freed blacks should be allowed to vote in some cases. Conservative Republicans preferred compensated emancipation and a lenient definition of who should gain suffrage. They argued that in every Southern state, a silent majority of non-slaveholders had been dragged into secession by the wealthy plantation owners. It would be unjust to exclude them in the new order so long as they would take an oath to uphold both the Union and emancipation.

It was assumed in political circles that Lincoln would be the “standard-bearer for the Conservatives,” while Chase would be “the champion of the Radicals.” The state elections in the fall would presumably serve as the opening round of the presidential race. It was expected that Chase would aggressively promote the candidacies of fellow radicals, who, in turn, would be indebted to him the following year. While Chase’s desire for the presidency was no less worthy a pursuit than Lincoln’s, Noah Brooks observed, Chase’s decision to pursue that ambition from within the president’s cabinet rather than resign his seat and openly proclaim his campaign struck many as disingenuous.

Chase’s strategy was to approach potential supporters without expressly acknowledging that he would run. Late at night in his study, he wrote hundreds of letters to local officials, congressional leaders, generals, and journalists, citing the failures of the Lincoln administration. “I should fear nothing,” he wrote the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, “if we had An Administration in the first sense of the word guided by a bold, resolute, farseeing, & active mind, guided by an honest, earnest heart. But this we have not. Oh! for energy & economy in the management of the War.”

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