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By Root 1623 0

White later called the choice of Cameron a “colossal blunder” within a year he would be replaced by Edwin M. Stanton, also of Pennsylvania. Some of Lincoln’s selections, including his rivals for the 1860 nomination, Seward, Chase, and Bates, had far more experience in national affairs than he, and Lincoln hoped their presence would reassure those who doubted his own administrative abilities. From the outset, Lincoln’s cabinet was marked by political rivalries and personal jealousies. It never really functioned as a unit. As president, Lincoln gave each member wide latitude in running his own department. But when it came to slavery, while from time to time he asked the cabinet’s advice, he would decide on policy himself.37

Until his departure for Washington on February 11, 1861, Lincoln remained in Springfield. To gauge public sentiment and political developments he relied on letters, newspapers, and conversations with a steady stream of visitors. It is not clear if Lincoln fully understood the severity of the crisis before his inauguration. Along with many other Republicans, he overestimated the strength of Unionism in both the seceded and non-seceded slave states and underestimated the willingness of the Deep South to go to war. Republicans had long believed that the mass of white southerners did not share the interests of the Slave Power. They had denigrated threats of secession as a ploy to intimidate the North into granting southern demands. John Bell’s victories in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and near-victories in Maryland and North Carolina, and Douglas’s capture of Missouri, strengthened Republicans’ conviction that the Upper South, at least, was strongly pro-Union. More than once, Lincoln referred to the crisis as “artificial,” suggesting that if “let alone” it would dissipate by itself.

A few days after the election, the Illinois State Journal, whose editorials were widely regarded as reflecting Lincoln’s views, assured its readers that the “conservative majority” of southerners would “put down any batch of traitors” bent on breaking up the Union. Even after states began to secede, Lincoln seems to have believed that if he did nothing to provoke the secessionists, the majority of slave states would remain in the Union and the Lower South would eventually return. Unlike his idol Henry Clay, he did not devote himself to pursuing a compromise that would resolve a national crisis.38

Lincoln received numerous pleas to issue public statements reassuring southerners that he had no intention of interfering with slavery or in other ways abridging their rights under the Constitution. He seemed to bristle at such demands. As he explained to one correspondent, his views were readily available in published speeches but had been persistently misrepresented in the South. He did compose a few lines for a speech Lyman Trumbull delivered at Springfield on November 20, 1860, with Lincoln sitting on the platform. Lincoln’s contribution pledged that his administration would not abridge the constitutional rights of the South, and indicated that talk of secession was the work of a minority. It even welcomed the “military preparation” being undertaken in southern states on the grounds that this would “enable the people” to suppress secessionist “uprisings.” Trumbull, who paraphrased Lincoln’s sentences rather than reading them verbatim, omitted this curious observation. Trumbull added an assurance that Republicans did not favor “negro-equality or amalgamation, with which political demagogues have so often charged them.”39

The speech did not have the desired effect. Not a single newspaper, Lincoln complained, used it to “quiet public anxiety.” “It is a mockery for Lincoln or his friends,” wrote a New Orleans journal, “to say [the South’s] rights will be respected, when we know that their interpretation of our rights is exactly the reverse of our own.” Lincoln resolved to make no further public statements. Rather than doing good, he believed, they “would do positive harm. The secessionists, per se believing they had alarmed me,