Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [370]
Lincoln’s counsel to Frank was echoed in a gentle letter of reprimand to another young man whose intemperate words had made him vulnerable. Captain James Cutts, Jr., had been court-martialed for using “unbecoming language” in addressing a superior officer and for publicly derogating his superior’s accomplishments to the point where a duel almost took place. Young Cutts was the brother of Adele Cutts, Stephen Douglas’s second wife. In remitting the sentence, Lincoln wrote, “You have too much of life yet before you, and have shown too much of promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered.” He tried to impart some of the measured outlook that had served him so well: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
Frank Blair’s battle against Chase in Missouri was carried forward by Monty Blair in Maryland, where a similar struggle over Reconstruction had arisen. Chase again intervened, lending his support to the radical Henry Winter Davis as a candidate for Congress. Davis was a proponent of immediate uncompensated emancipation and rigorous standards for defining eligibility to vote. Monty voiced his opposition at Rockville in early October, flaying the radicals’ program, and arguing that the “ultra-abolitionists” were as despotic as the old slaveocrats. If they succeeded in their draconian measures toward the rebel states, he warned, it would be “fatal to republican institutions.” He excoriated Sumner’s proposition that the rebel states had forfeited their rights to equal participation in the Union by committing suicide by secession. Although Blair’s speech met with approval from his partisan audience, it aroused deep hostility in Congress. Fifty congressmen signed a petition calling on Lincoln to remove Blair from his cabinet.
Once again, Lincoln was forced to balance the interests of contentious factions. Many assumed incorrectly that Blair was speaking for the White House. In fact, Lincoln refused to support Blair’s candidate against Winter Davis, insisting that a Union convention had nominated Davis and it “would be mean to do anything against him.” In the end, the president’s most vital objective for Maryland was realized in the election—a dramatic Republican victory over the Copperheads, ensuring that the former slave state stood firmly behind the Union’s cause. Noah Brooks attended a mass rally in Baltimore to celebrate the triumph of Winter Davis and the entire Republican ticket. As he surveyed the festive banners proclaiming: “Slavery is dead,” he marveled at the thought that not long before, the state “was almost coaxed into open rebellion against the government, in simulated defense of slavery.” The enthusiastic crowd signaled that “a great and momentous revolution” had occurred in the hearts and minds of the people. “Do we dream,” marveled Brooks, “or do we actually hear with our own ears loyal Marylanders making speeches in favor of immediate emancipation and a loyal crowd of Baltimoreans applauding to the echo the most radical utterances.”
Chase was a featured speaker at the celebration, and, according to Brooks, “his simple words of sympathy and cheer for the struggling sons of freedom in Maryland were received with wildest enthusiasm.” The complete triumph of the emancipationists was read as a sharp rebuke to Monty Blair and his “fossil theories.” Chase was elated, telling Greeley that he attached “a great deal of importance” to the occasion, for it suggested “the time is ripe” for a “great unconditional Union Party, with Emancipation as a Cardinal principle”—a party with Salmon Chase, presumably, at its head.
Worried that Lincoln’s adversaries were successfully eclipsing him by appealing