Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [434]
Lincoln’s friendship with Seward had deepened with each passing year. “His confidence in Seward is great,” observed Welles that autumn. Seward “spends more or less of every day with the President.” On subjects “of the gravest importance,” Seward was the president’s “only confidant and adviser.” Whenever Lincoln bounced an idea off Seward, he received straightforward advice. When a plan to foster Union sentiment in the South through confidential government purchase of a controlling share in a number of failing Southern newspapers was presented to Lincoln, he turned to Seward for advice. “It seems to me very judicious and wise,” Seward responded. It would provide a forum for Union men to help sway the opinion of fellow Southerners. If government funds were not readily available, he suggested that Thurlow Weed “might find money by contribution.”
Though some still considered the talkative New Yorker the “power behind the throne,” Seward had long since understood that Lincoln was the master. “There is but one vote in the Cabinet,” asserted Seward, “and that is cast by the President.” Two days after the election, Seward told a crowd of supporters, “Henceforth all men will come to see him, as you and I have seen him…. Abraham Lincoln will take his place with Washington and Franklin, and Jefferson, and Adams, and Jackson, among the benefactors of the country and of the human race.”
Lincoln’s partnership with his volatile secretary of war, though not as intimate and leisurely, was equally effective. Stanton was only fifty in the fall of 1864, but he “looked older,” his clerk Benjamin recalled, “by reason of the abundant tinging of his originally brown hair and beard with iron-gray.” The war had taken a toll on his constitution, already weakened by the lifelong struggle with asthma that caused periodic “fits of strangulation.” The illness that kept him in bed on election eve lasted for nearly three weeks. For a time it seemed he would not rally. His doctor begged him to take a leave of absence from his post. “Barnes,” Stanton replied, “keep me alive till this rebellion is over, and then I will take a rest…a long one, perhaps.” In a letter to Chase written shortly after Lincoln’s reelection, he acknowledged that his health could be restored only by “absolute rest and relief from labor and care,” though nothing could keep him from his post until he had brought the soldiers home in peace.
By late November, Stanton was back working fifteen-hour days at his stand-up desk, directing his subordinates with a steely determination. The complex relationship between the president and his secretary of war was not easy to comprehend. At times it seemed as if Stanton controlled the president; at other times it was clear that Lincoln was the dominant force in dictating policy. In fact, there was an unwritten code between the two powerful men: “Each could veto the other’s acts, but Lincoln was to rule when he felt it necessary.”
Lincoln used his veto over Stanton sparingly, as two of his congressional friends learned to their dismay. Having obtained the president’s assent to a military appointment for one of their constituents, they carried the endorsed application to Stanton. Stanton flatly refused to consider it. “The position is of high importance,” Stanton explained. “I have in mind a man of suitable experience and capacity to fill it.” When informed that Lincoln wanted this man, Stanton bellowed, “I do not care what the President wants; the country wants the very best it can get. I am serving the country…regardless of individuals.”
The two congressmen walked back to the White House, assuming the president would override his secretary, but Lincoln refused: “Gentlemen,