Part 51 (1/2)

Lincoln greeted Fessenden warmly and listened politely for a few minutes as the senator suggested a few names for the vacant Treasury post. Smiling, Lincoln finally interrupted and told Fessenden there was no need to continue. He had found his man, and the nomination of Fessenden was already en route to the Senate. ”You must withdraw it, I cannot accept,” Fessenden cried out, jumping to his feet. He explained that his health was not good, and he was certain that the pressures of the new job would kill him. ”If you decline,” Lincoln said, ”you must do it in open day: for I shall not recall the nomination.” Fessenden left with a promise that he would think on it further, though his acceptance was doubtful.

Returning to the Senate, Fessenden discovered that his colleagues had unanimously approved his nomination. Encircled by the warmth of their good wishes and congratulations, he began to waver. ”Telegrams came pouring in from all quarters,” he later recalled, insisting that he accept for the good of the nation, that he was an inspired choice for the critical post. It was both the most rewarding and ”the most miserable” day of his life, for he still feared that the duties of the post would be his death. ”Very well,” the always blunt Stanton told him, ”you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.”

As he was driven to the White House the next morning, however, Fessenden carried with him a letter declining the nomination. It took all of the president's persuasive powers to change his mind. ”He said the crisis was such as demanded any sacrifice, even life itself,” Fessenden recalled, ”that Providence had never deserted him or the country, and that his choice of me was a special proof that Providence would not desert him. All this and more.” In the end, Fessenden felt he ”could not decline but at the risk of danger to the country.”

Fessenden's appointment received universal praise. ”He is a man of undoubted financial ability, and of unsurpa.s.sed personal integrity,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, reflecting the sentiment of many Northern papers. Radicals felt he was one of their own, while conservatives applauded his intelligence and experience. ”He is honest,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband, ”& as Mrs Jeff [Davis] once said the ablest of all the Republican Senators.” The business world, long familiar with his work on the Senate Finance Committee, breathed a sigh of relief. ”I am the most popular man in my country,” Fessenden wryly noted several days after his acceptance.

”So my official life closes,” Chase recorded in his diary on the last day of June. Sadness pervades the entry, written when the oppressive heat of Was.h.i.+ngton was such, observed Bates, that ”even the trees in the streets are wilting.” Chase believed he had ”laid broad foundations” to secure financial support for the troops, but he knew the job was still unfinished. From this point on, he would not have any real influence.

If Chase had hoped his resignation would produce consternation and regret among his cabinet colleagues, he was disappointed. On the night his departure was announced, Blair and Bates called on Welles to talk over the startling event. While they were all surprised, none was sorry to see him go. ”I look upon it as a blessing,” Welles said. On numerous occasions Welles had confided doubts about Chase's character to his diary, observing that he lacked ”the courage and candor to admit his errors,” and that ”his jokes are always clumsy-he is dest.i.tute of wit.” Bates greeted Chase's retirement with ”a vague feeling of relief from a burden, and a hope of better things,” observing that Chase's relations with his fellow cabinet ministers had long since failed ”to be cordial.” And Monty Blair, whose family regarded Chase as a mortal enemy, was thrilled. Old Man Blair happily informed Frank that Chase had ”dropped off at last like a rotten pear unexpectedly to himself & every body else.” Seward, unlike his other colleagues, expressed no personal pleasure in Chase's demise. He simply informed Frances of his relief that the ”Cabinet crisis” did not engender a ”severe shock” in the country. He traced the origin of the present upheaval back to ”the first day of the Administration,” when, against his advice, Lincoln had created his compound cabinet.

As Chase prepared to leave Was.h.i.+ngton, he noted sadly that Stanton, ”warm & cordial as ever,” was the only former colleague who came to see him ”-no other Head of Dept. has called on me since my resignation.” If Chase believed the powerful war secretary might feel the slightest compulsion to resign his own place in solidarity with his old friend, however, he was mistaken.

In his misery, Chase searched for reasons why Lincoln had so abruptly accepted his resignation. His answers betray an unwillingness to take the slightest responsibility for his own missteps. ”I can see but one reason,” he wrote, ”that I am too earnest, too antislavery, &, say, too radical to make him willing to have me connected with the Admn., just as my opinion that he is not earnest enough; not antislavery enough; not radical enough,-but goes naturally with those hostile to me.” As his melancholy deepened, he generated another explanation that displayed the obtuseness that had always proved his undoing as a politician. ”The root of the matter,” he told his friend Whitelaw Reid, ”was a difficulty of temperament. The truth is that I have never been able to make a joke out of this war.”

To Kate, who remained at the Sprague mansion in Narragansett through the summer, he confessed that he was ”oppressed” by anxiety. ”You know how much I have endured rather than run counter to those friends who have insisted that I should remain in my place.” He should have resigned earlier, he told her, right after Frank Blair's attack. Then he might have departed while heroically defending the radicals against the conservatives, but now ”I am reproached with having left my post in the hour of danger.” And though ”the crus.h.i.+ng load is off my shoulders,” there is the regret that ”I cannot finish what I began.”

Chase's gloom was mirrored by the distress of his daughter, whose marriage to William Sprague was in trouble. Kate had seemed to hold ”the balance of power” throughout the courts.h.i.+p, yet William now believed he had a right to control his high-spirited wife. Though he had made her responsible for redecorating his several multimillion-dollar households, he angrily rebuked her in private and in public for exorbitant spending. ”Can it be,” she later lamented in her diary, ”that he would keep this hateful thought of my dependence ever before me, forcing me to believe that every dollar given or expended upon his home is begrudged?” She worried that, ”reared in a pinched, prejudiced narrow atmosphere,” with the thought of the ”insatiable Moloch-money” always before him, he had vested in it ”all the power when after all it is only a tributary.... My father was, in comparison with my husband, a poor man, but he felt himself rich when he was enabled to bestow a benefit upon the needy or a pleasure upon those he loved & a treasure laid up in his home was money well invested.”

Though she was proud of her new husband's ”worldly success” as both a senator and businessman, she had hoped to be a partner in all his endeavors, as she had been with her father. She ”would gladly follow all his interests with sympathy & encouragement,” she wrote, ”but I cannot make them mine for his effort would seem to be to show me that I have no part in them.” In fact, he rebuffed her when she tried to talk of business or politics, complaining in public that she had ”different ideas & ways of life, from his own.”

Most hurtful of all, Sprague had started drinking again. He would lash out at her when drunk, provoking bitter arguments that would take days to resolve. Kate could not restrain herself from replying to his insults with ”harsh and cruel words” of her own. When sober, Sprague would vow reform, pledging ”to fill & occupy his place, in the home circle he has created...as well as the position he has secured for himself in the world.” These resolves were short-lived, and Kate began to fear that he did not seriously contemplate a worthy future, that his only thought was ”to slip through these obligations in life” with the least effort possible. ”G.o.d forgive me,” she later confessed, ”that I had so often wished that I had found in my husband a man of more intellectual resources, even with far less material wealth.”

Though she acknowledged occasionally loathing her husband, she also believed that ”few men were loved” as much as she loved him. Perhaps she, too, was at fault. ”My hopes were too high,” she confessed. ”Proud, pa.s.sionate and intolerant, I had never learned to submit.” Chase witnessed a fight between the young couple at Narragansett but mistakenly interpreted the problem as a simple ”misunderstanding” that time and patience would make right. His hopes seemed justified a few weeks later when he learned that Kate was pregnant with her first child.

THE GOODWILL ENGENDERED among congressional radicals by Lincoln's appointment of Fessenden was swiftly eroded by his refusal to sign the punitive Reconstruction bill that pa.s.sed the Congress in the final hours of July 2, 1864, before it adjourned for the summer. Sponsored by Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis, the bill laid down a rigid formula for bringing the seceded states back into the Union. The process differed in significant ways from the more lenient plan Lincoln had announced the previous December. Lincoln had proposed to rehabilitate individual states as quickly as possible, hoping their return would deflate Southern morale and thereby shorten the war. The Wade-Davis bill, in contrast, postponed any attempts at Reconstruction until all fighting had ceased. It required that a majority of a state's citizens, not simply 10 percent, take an oath of allegiance to the Const.i.tution before the process could begin. In addition, suffrage would be denied to all those who had held civil or military office in the Confederacy and who could not prove they had borne arms involuntarily. Finally, the bill imposed emanc.i.p.ation by congressional fiat where Lincoln believed that such a step overstepped const.i.tutional authority and instead proposed a const.i.tutional amendment to ensure that slavery could never return.

Rather than veto the bill outright, Lincoln exercised a little-known provision called the pocket veto, according to which unsigned bills still on the president's desk when Congress adjourns do not become law. In a written proclamation, he explained that while he would not protest if any individual state adopted the plan outlined in the bill, he did not think it wise to require every state to adhere to a single, inflexible system. Talking with Noah Brooks, he likened the Wade-Davis bill to the infamous bed designed by the tyrant Procrustes. ”If the captive was too short to fill the bedstead, he was stretched by main force until he was long enough; and if he was too long, he was chopped off to fit the bedstead.”

Lincoln understood that he would be politically damaged if the radicals ”choose to make a point upon this.” Nevertheless, he told John Hay, ”I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.” He would rely on this conviction in the days ahead when Wade and Davis published a bitter manifesto against him. He was not surprised by their anger at the suppression of their bill, but he was stung by their vitriolic tone and their suggestion that his veto had been prompted by cra.s.s electoral concerns. ”To be wounded in the house of one's friends,” he told Brooks, ”is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man,” the same sentiment he had expressed when he lost his first Senate race in 1855. Now personal sorrow was compounded by the realization that radical opposition might divide the Republican Party, undoing the unity he had struggled to maintain through the turbulent years of his presidency.

During the first week of July, rumors spread that a rebel force of undetermined strength was moving north through the Shenandoah Valley toward Was.h.i.+ngton. The rumors alarmed Elizabeth Blair, who feared that the Confederate troops would come through Silver Spring, Maryland, exposing both her parents' home and that of her brother Monty to direct danger. She cautioned her father, but his mind was elsewhere. For weeks he and Monty had been planning a hunting and fis.h.i.+ng trip to the Pennsylvania mountains, and he was eager to get started. In a letter to Frank on July 4, the seventy-three-year-old Blair happily antic.i.p.ated the two-week vacation. Two grandsons were coming along; their grandfather hoped ”to give them a taste for woodcraft and to amuse & invigorate them.” Meanwhile, the womenfolk were heading to Cape May. ”Your mother & I enjoy our young progeny's happiness as our own,” Blair told his son, ”& look on it as a prolongation of our enjoyment of the earth, through a remote future.”

Elizabeth's admonitions concerned Monty at first, but after the War Department erroneously told him that the Confederate force had been stopped at Harpers Ferry, he and his father set off for the Pennsylvania countryside. Unable to prevent their departure, Elizabeth tried to convince her mother to remove the silver and other valuables to their city home before leaving for Cape May. Eliza Blair refused, telling her daughter ”she would not have the house pulled to pieces.”

Elizabeth Blair's fears proved justified. Grant's decision to move south of Richmond and attack Petersburg from the rear had inspired Lee to send General Jubal Early and fifteen thousand troops north, hoping to catch Was.h.i.+ngton unawares. If a panic like that which prevailed at the time of Bull Run could be induced, Grant might have to withdraw some of his troops from Virginia. For several weeks, Early's movements remained undetected, and on July 5 he crossed the Potomac into Maryland. At this point, only miscellaneous troops under the command of General Lew Wallace, later to become famous as the author of Ben Hur, barred the path to the nation's capital. Wallace understood that with only half as many men as Early, he could not push the enemy back, but hoped he might hinder Early's progress while Was.h.i.+ngton prepared itself for attack.

The two sides met at Monocacy River on July 9. Young Will Seward, a colonel now, partic.i.p.ated in the fierce engagement. ”The battle lasted most of the day,” he proudly recalled years later, ”and every inch of the ground was hotly contested, until our men were finally overwhelmed by superior numbers.” During the fighting, Will's horse was shot from under him, hurling the young colonel to the ground and breaking his leg. Encircled by rebels when he fell, Will was a.s.sumed to have been captured.

Secretary Seward spent a tense night at the War Department waiting for news of his son. He had just returned home after midnight when Stanton appeared with a discouraging report from General Wallace that Will had been wounded and taken prisoner. ”None of us slept much the rest of the night,” Fred Seward recalled, and in the morning, ”it was arranged that Augustus should go over in the first train to Baltimore to make inquiries.” At 3 p.m., Augustus telegraphed more hopeful news. Though Will's injury was confirmed, he had not been captured. ”G.o.d be praised for the safety of our boy,” Frances exclaimed. ”With the help of one of his men,” Will somehow ”reached a piece of woods; where mounting a mule, and using his pocket-handkerchief for a bridle, he succeeded, after a painful ride of many miles during the night, in rejoining the forces.”

The routing of the Federals at Monocacy gave Early an un.o.bstructed path to Was.h.i.+ngton. As the rebel troops ranged through the countryside, they destroyed railroad tracks, stores, mills, and houses, much as the Union men under David Hunter had done in Virginia. Reaching Silver Spring, they came upon Monty's Falkland mansion. Blair's carpenter reported that the troops had immediately ”commenced the work of wholesale destruction, battering the doors, robbing all the bookcases, breaking or carrying off all the chinaware, and ransacking the house from top to bottom.” The next night, they torched the house, leaving only a ”blackened ruin.”

At the nearby home of Monty's father, the patriarch, the soldiers scattered papers, doc.u.ments, and books. They rummaged through the wine cellar and the bedrooms, littering the lawn with furniture and clothing. Elizabeth Blair was told that ”one man dressed in Betty's riding habit, pants & all-another in Fathers red velvet wrapper.” Still others donned a.s.sorted coats and uniforms, dancing with ”great frolic” on the lawn.

The ”perfect saturnalia” that Elizabeth decried was brought to an immediate halt when Generals Jubal Early and John Breckinridge arrived. Cursing the marauding soldiers, Breckinridge made them return stolen items. He retrieved the scattered papers and doc.u.ments and sent them away for safekeeping. He asked Early to station a guard on the grounds to preserve the trees, grapery, shrubs, horses, and crops.

When Early inquired why he would ”fret about one house when we have lost so much by this proceeding,” Breckinridge replied that ”this place is the only one I felt was a home to me on this side of the Mts.” He explained that some years earlier, during a difficult period in his life, the old gentleman had taken him in, providing a ”place of refuge & of rest.” A neighbor told Blair Senior that Breckinridge ”made more fuss” about preserving the house and its possessions ”than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.”

When the older Blairs eventually returned home, they found a note on the mantel: ”a confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house.... Especially we regret that Ladies property has been disturbed.” In this manner, Elizabeth marveled, ”bread cast upon the waters came back to us.”