Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [367]
That Chase was disconcerted by Lincoln’s warmth is evident in a letter he wrote to James Watson Webb, the former editor who was now the American minister to Brazil. After criticizing Lincoln’s “disjointed method of administration” and admitting that he had “been often tempted to retire,” Chase acknowledged that “the President has always treated me with such personal kindness and has always manifested such fairness and integrity of purpose, that I have not found myself free to throw up my trust…. So I still work on.”
Lincoln told a worried Hay that he had “all along clearly seen [Chase’s] plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he [sees] that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim that he has been hardly dealt by and that he (C.) would have arranged it very differently. It was so with Gen. Fremont—with Genl. Hunter when I annulled his hasty proclamation—with Gen. Butler when he was recalled from New Orleans.” Recognizing the truth of Lincoln’s words, Hay speculated that “Chase would try to make capital out of this Rosecrans business,” though Lincoln had simply relieved the general from command of the Department of the Tennessee at Grant’s request. Lincoln drolly replied: “I suppose he will, like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.”
In late September, as the rift within Missouri’s Republican Party threatened to erupt into open warfare, Chase continued his divisive plotting. Lincoln sought to keep radicals and conservatives united against the rebels. Chase aligned himself with the radicals. The struggle centered on Reconstruction. Since the Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to the loyal border states, the people of Missouri were left to determine the fate of slavery independently in their state. The conservatives, led by Frank Blair and Bates’s brother-in-law Governor Hamilton Gamble, were in favor of a gradual emancipation that provided protection to slaveholders during a transitional period. Radical leaders such as B. Gratz Brown, Charles Drake, and Henry Blow favored changes in the state constitution that would immediately extinguish slavery.
So flammable had the dispute become that Governor Gamble worried the radicals intended to overthrow the elected state government. For their part, the radicals had come to believe that General John M. Schofield, the military commander of Missouri whom Lincoln had put in place as a neutral figure, had become a conservative partisan. He was accused of abusing his authority by arresting leading radicals and suppressing radical papers under the guise of military necessity.
On September 30, a delegation of radicals led by Charles Drake journeyed to Washington to demand Schofield’s removal. The night before the scheduled meeting, Lincoln talked with Hay about the tense situation. He acknowledged Hay’s argument that “the Radicals would carry the State and it would be well not to alienate them.” Moreover, he believed that “these Radical men have in them the stuff which must save the state and on which we must mainly rely.” They would never abandon the cause of emancipation, “while the Conservatives, in casting about for votes to carry through their plans, are tempted to affiliate with those whose record is not clear.” If he had to choose, Lincoln told his aide, “if one side must be crushed out & the other cherished,” he would “side with the Radicals.” On another occasion, he had expressed this affinity more strongly, stating that “they are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally.” While they might be “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with…their faces are set Zionwards.”
Nevertheless,