The Life of Lyman Trumbull Part 15

There have been delegation after delegation from Pennsylvania, hundreds of letters and the cry is Cameron, Cameron. Besides, you know I have already fixed on Chase, Seward, and Bates, my compet.i.tors at the convention. The Pennsylvania people say if you leave out Cameron you disgrace him. Is there not something in that?" I said, "Cameron cannot be trusted. He has the reputation of being a tricky and corrupt politician." "I know, I know," said Lincoln; "but can I get along if that State should oppose my administration?" He was very much distressed.

We told him he would greatly regret his appointment. Our interview ended in a protest on the part of Judd and myself against the appointment.

January 7, Trumbull wrote to Lincoln advising him to give a Cabinet appointment to some person who could stand in a nearer and more confidential relation to him than that which grew out of political affinity, adding that he (Lincoln) knew whether Judd was the kind of man who would meet such requirements, and enclosing a written recommendation of Judd for such a position, signed by himself and Senators Grimes, Chandler, Wade, Wilkinson, Durkee, Harlan, and Doolittle. These, he said, were the only persons to whom the paper had been shown and the only ones aware of its existence.

Let it be said in pa.s.sing that this was bad advice. Any man going into the Cabinet as a more confidential friend of the President than the others would have had all the others for his enemies.

January 10, William Jayne and Ebenezer Peck (both members of the state legislature) expressed the opinion that Judd would be appointed.

Evidently the Trumbull letter and enclosure had, for the time being, produced the intended effect. Jayne said that Davis and Yates were opposed to Judd, but that Butler and Judge Logan favored him.

February 17, Judd wrote from Buffalo, New York, where he was accompanying Lincoln on his journey to Was.h.i.+ngton, saying that he believed the Treasury would be offered again to Chase, and if so he must accept, although it might cause another "irrepressible conflict." He said nothing about his own prospects.[49]

Evidently Lincoln had not yet decided to take Cameron into the Cabinet, but after he arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton the influence of Seward and Weed, which Dr. Ray had prefigured in a letter to Trumbull, prevailed upon him to do so. This was the opinion of Montgomery Blair, a high-minded man and an acute observer, expressed to Gideon Welles in these words:

Cameron had got into the War Department by the contrivance and cunning of Seward who used him and other corruptionists as he pleased with the a.s.sistance of Thurlow Weed; that Seward had tried to get Cameron into the Treasury, but was unable to quite accomplish that, and, after a hard underground quarrel against Chase, it ended in the loss of Cameron, who went over to Chase and left Seward.[50]

When Cameron and Smith were appointed, the Berlin Mission was given to Judd, as a salve to his wound. Gustave Koerner had been "slated" in the newspapers for the Berlin Mission, although he had not applied for it. A telegram had been sent out from Springfield to the effect that that place had been reserved for him, and he erroneously supposed that it had been done with Lincoln's consent. It had been published far and wide in America and Europe without contradiction. Koerner's friends on both sides of the water had written congratulatory letters to him, and everybody seemed to think that the thing was done, and wisely done. Some of his clients had notified him that, having observed in the newspapers that he was going abroad for a few years, they had engaged other counsel to attend to their law business. At this very time Koerner was laboring for Judd's appointment as member of the Cabinet.

The same telegram that announced failure in this attempt announced that Judd had been designated as Minister to Prussia and had accepted.

Koerner felt humiliated, and he now applied for some other foreign mission which might be awarded to the German element of the party--preferably that of Switzerland; but it was now too late. The other places had all been spoken for. At a later period he was appointed Minister to Spain.

On the 9th of January, 1861, Trumbull was reelected Senator of the United States by the legislature of Illinois, by 54 votes against 46 for S. S. Marshall (Democrat). His nomination in the Republican caucus was without opposition.

At the beginning of the special session of Congress called by President Lincoln for July 4, 1861, Trumbull was appointed by his fellow Senators Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, which place he occupied during the succeeding twelve years.

The first duty he was called to perform was to announce the death of his colleague, Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas had placed himself at Lincoln's service in all efforts to uphold the Const.i.tution and enforce the laws against the disunionists. He returned from Was.h.i.+ngton early in April and got in touch with his const.i.tuents, ready to act promptly as events might turn out. It turned out that the Confederates struck the first blow in the Civil War by bombarding Fort Sumter. This was the signal for Douglas's last and greatest political and oratorical effort. The state legislature, then in session, invited him to address them on the present crisis, and he responded on the 25th of April in a speech which made Illinois solid for the Union. The writer was one of the listeners to that speech and he cannot conceive that any orator of ancient or modern times could have surpa.s.sed it. Douglas seized upon his hearers with a kind of t.i.tanic grasp and held them captive, enthralled, spellbound for an immortal hour. He was the only man who could have saved southern Illinois from the danger of an internecine war. The southern counties followed him now as faithfully and as unanimously as they had followed him in previous years, and sent their sons into the field to fight for the Union as numerously and bravely as those of any other section of the state or of the country. Douglas had only a few more days to live. He was now forty-eight years of age, but if he had survived forty-eight more he could never have surpa.s.sed that eloquence or exceeded that service to the nation, for he never could have found another like occasion for the use of his astounding powers.

He died at Chicago, June 3, 1861. Trumbull's eulogy was solemn, sincere, pathetic, and impressive--a model of good taste in every way. He retracted nothing, but, ignoring past differences, he gave an abounding and heartfelt tribute of praise to the dead statesman for his matchless service to his country in the hour of her greatest need. He concluded with these words:

On the 17th day of June last, all that remained of our departed brother was interred near the city of Chicago, on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, whose pure waters, often lashed into fury by contending elements, are a fitting memento of the stormy and boisterous political tumults through which the great popular orator so often pa.s.sed. There the people, whose idol he was, will erect a monument to his memory; and there, in the soil of the state which so long without interruption, and never to a greater extent than at the moment of his death, gave him her confidence, let his remains repose so long as free government shall last and the Const.i.tution he loved so well endure.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] _Life of Lincoln_, by Herndon-Weik, 2d edition, III, 172, 181.

[46] David Davis's habit of coercing Lincoln was once complained of by Lincoln himself, as related in a letter (now in the possession of Jesse W. Weik) of Henry C. Whitney to Wm. H. Herndon. Whitney says:

"On March 5, 1861, I saw Lincoln and requested him to appoint Jim Somers of Champaign to a small clerks.h.i.+p. Lincoln was very impatient and said abruptly: 'There is Davis, with that way of making a man do a thing whether he wants to or not, who has forced me to appoint Archy Williams judge in Kansas right off and John Jones to a place in the State Department; and I have got a bushel of despatches from Kansas wanting to know if I'm going to fill up all the offices from Illinois.'"

[47] _Diary of Gideon Welles_, II, 390.

[48] Vol. II, p. 114.

[49] Fogg of New Hamps.h.i.+re says: "Mrs. Lincoln has the credit of excluding Judd, of Chicago, from the Cabinet,"--which is not unlikely.

_Diary of Gideon Welles._

[50] _Diary of Gideon Welles_, I, 126.

CHAPTER IX

FORT SUMTER

Mrs. Trumbull did not accompany her husband to Was.h.i.+ngton at the special session of Congress July 4, 1861. A few letters written to her by him have been preserved. One of these revives the memory of an affair which caused intense indignation throughout the loyal states.

On the day when it was decided in Cabinet meeting to send supplies to Major Anderson in Fort Sumter, a newspaper correspondent named Harvey, a native of South Carolina, sent a telegram to Governor Pickens at Charleston notifying him of the fact. Harvey was the only newspaper man in Was.h.i.+ngton who had the news. He did not put his own name on the telegram, but signed it "A Friend." He was afterward appointed, at Secretary Seward's instance, as Minister to Portugal, although he was so obscure in the political world that the other Was.h.i.+ngton correspondents had to unearth and identify him to the public. It was said that he had once been the editor of the Philadelphia _North American_. After he had departed for his mission, there had been a seizure of telegrams by the Government and this anonymous one to Governor Pickens was found. The receiving-clerk testified that it had been sent by Harvey. The Republicans in Congress, and especially the Senators who had voted to confirm him, were boiling with indignation. A committee of the latter was appointed to call upon the President and request him to recall Harvey. A letter of Trumbull to his wife (July 14) says:

The Republicans in caucus appointed a committee to express to him their want of confidence in Harvey, Minister to Portugal.

Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward informed the committee that they were aware of the worst dispatch to Governor Pickens before he left the country, but not before he received the appointment, and they did not think from their conversation with Harvey that he had any criminal intent, and requested the committee to report the facts to the caucus, Mr. Lincoln saying that he would like to know whether Senators were as dissatisfied when they came to know all the facts. The caucus will meet to-morrow and I do not believe will be satisfied with the explanation.

The inside history of this telegram was made public long afterward.

Shortly before Seward took office as Secretary of State there came to Was.h.i.+ngton City three commissioners from Montgomery, Alabama, whose purpose was to negotiate terms of peaceful separation of the Confederate States of America from the United States, or to report to their own Government the refusal of the latter to enter into such negotiation.

These men were Martin J. Crawford, John Forsyth, and A. B. Roman. They arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton on the 27th of February, four days after Lincoln's arrival and one week before his inauguration. They did not make their errand known until after the inauguration. They then communicated with Seward, by an intermediary, the nature of their mission, and the latter replied verbally that it was the intention of the new Administration to settle the dispute in an amicable manner. On the 15th of March, Seward a.s.sured the Confederate envoys that Sumter would be evacuated before a letter from them could reach Montgomery--that is, within five days. The negotiations were protracted till a decision had been reached, contrary to Seward's desires and promises, to send a fleet with provisions to relieve the garrison at Fort Sumter. Then Seward gave this fact to Harvey, knowing that he would transmit it to Governor Pickens and that the probable effect would be to defeat the scheme of relieving the garrison. This he evidently desired. He had already secretly detached the steamer Powhatan, an indispensable part of the Sumter fleet, and sent it on a useless expedition to Pensacola Harbor.

Gideon Welles's account of the Harvey affair is as follows:

Soon after President Lincoln had formed the resolution to attempt the relief of Sumter, and whilst it was yet a secret, a young man connected with the telegraph office in Was.h.i.+ngton, with whom I was acquainted, a native of the same town with myself, brought to me successively two telegrams conveying to the rebel authorities information of the purposes and decisions of the Administration. One of these telegrams was from Mr.

Harvey, a newspaper correspondent, who was soon after, and with a full knowledge of his having communicated to the rebels the movements of the Government, appointed Minister to Lisbon. I had, on receiving these copies, handed them to the President.

Mr. Blair, who had also obtained a copy of one, perhaps both, of these telegrams from another source, likewise informed him of the treachery. The subject was once or twice alluded to in Cabinet without eliciting any action, and when the nomination of Mr. Harvey to the Portuguese Mission was announced--a nomination made without the knowledge of any member of the Cabinet but the Secretary of State and made at his special request--there was general disapprobation except by the President (who avoided the expression of any opinion) and by Mr. Seward. The latter defended and justified the selection, which he admitted was recommended by himself, but the President was silent in regard to it.[51]

Trumbull says in his letter that Lincoln and Seward told the committee that they did not know that Harvey had sent the dispatch before he received the appointment. Welles says that both of them knew it beforehand, and that it was a matter of Cabinet discussion in which Lincoln, however, took no part. How are we to explain this contradiction? It was impossible for Lincoln to utter an untruth, but if we may credit Gideon Welles, _pa.s.sim_, it was not impossible for Seward to do so and for Lincoln to remain silent while he did so, as he remained silent while the Cabinet were discussing the appointment of Harvey. If Seward, at the meeting of which Trumbull wrote, in this private letter to his wife, took the lead in the conversation, as was his habit, and said that there was no knowledge of Harvey's telegram to Governor Pickens until after Harvey had been appointed as minister, and Lincoln said nothing to the contrary, he would naturally have a.s.sumed that Seward spoke for both.

There is reason to believe that Seward had previously prevailed upon the President to agree to surrender Fort Sumter, as a means of preventing the secession of Virginia. Evidence of this fact is supplied by the following entry in the diary of John Hay, under date October 22, 1861:

At Seward's to-night the President talked about Secession, Compromise, and other such. He spoke of a Committee of Southern pseudo-unionists coming to him before inauguration for guarantees, etc. _He promised to evacuate Sumter if they would break up their Convention without any row, or nonsense._ They demurred. Subsequently he renewed proposition to Summers, but without any result. The President was most anxious to prevent bloodshed.[52]

Hay here speaks of two offers made by Lincoln to evacuate Sumter, one before his inauguration and one after. Both were made on condition that a certain convention should be adjourned. This was the convention of Virginia, which had been called to consider the question of secession.

It had met in Richmond on the 18th of February, while Lincoln was _en route_ for Was.h.i.+ngton. As Lincoln arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton on the 23d of February, the first offer must have been made in the interval between that day and the 4th of March.

The History of Nicolay and Hay does not mention the first offer. It speaks of the second one as a matter about which the facts are in dispute, the disputants being John Minor Botts and J. B. Baldwin. Botts was an ex-member of Congress from Virginia and a strong Union man.

Baldwin was a member of the Virginia Convention and a Union man. He had come to Was.h.i.+ngton in response to an invitation which Lincoln had sent, on or about the 20th of March, to George W. Summers, who was likewise a member of the convention. Summers was not able to come at the time when the invitation reached him, and he deputed Baldwin to go in his place.

After the war ended, Botts wrote a book ent.i.tled "The Great Rebellion,"

in which he gave the following account of an interview he had had with President Lincoln on Sunday, April 7, 1861 (two days after Baldwin had had his interview):

About this time Mr. Lincoln sent a messenger to Richmond, inviting a distinguished member of the Union party to come immediately to Was.h.i.+ngton, and if he could not come himself, to send some other prominent Union man, as he wanted to see him on business of the first importance. The gentleman thus addressed, Mr. Summers, did not go, but sent another, Mr. J. B. Baldwin, who had distinguished himself by his zeal in the Union cause during the session of the convention; but this gentleman was slow in getting to Was.h.i.+ngton, and did not reach there for something like a week after the time he was expected. He reached Was.h.i.+ngton on Friday, the 5th of April, and, on calling on Mr. Lincoln, the following conversation in substance took place, as I learned from Mr. Lincoln himself. After expressing some regret that he had not come sooner, Mr. Lincoln said, "My object in desiring the presence of Mr. Summers, or some other influential and leading member of the Union party in your convention, was to submit a proposition by which I think the peace of the country can be preserved; but I fear you are almost too late. However, I will make it yet.

"This afternoon," he said, "a fleet is to sail from the harbor of New York for Charleston; your convention has been in session for nearly two months, and you have done nothing but hold and shake the rod over my head. You have just taken a vote, by which it appears you have a majority of two to one against secession. Now, so great is my desire to preserve the peace of the country, and to save the border states to the Union, that if you gentlemen of the Union party will adjourn without pa.s.sing an ordinance of secession, I will telegraph at once to New York, arrest the sailing of the fleet, and take the responsibility of EVACUATING FORT SUMTER!"

The proposition was declined. On the following Sunday night I was with Mr. Lincoln, and the greater part of the time alone, when Mr. Lincoln related the above facts to me. I inquired, "Well, Mr. Lincoln, what reply did Mr. Baldwin make?" "Oh,"

said he, throwing up his hands, "he wouldn't listen to it at all; scarcely treated me with civility; asked me what I meant by an adjournment; was it an adjournment _sine die_?" "Of course," said Mr. Lincoln, "I don't want you to adjourn, and, after I have evacuated the fort, meet again to adopt an ordinance of secession." I then said, "Mr. Lincoln, will you authorize _me_ to make that proposition? For I will start to-morrow morning, and have a meeting of the Union men to-morrow night, who, I have no doubt, will gladly accept it."

To which he replied, "It's too late, now; the fleet sailed on Friday evening."

In 1866, the Reconstruction Committee of Congress got an inkling of this interview between Lincoln and Baldwin, called Baldwin as a witness, and questioned him about it. He testified that he had an interview with the President at the date mentioned, but denied that Lincoln had offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia Convention would adjourn _sine die_. Thereupon Botts collected and published a ma.s.s of collateral evidence to show that Baldwin had testified falsely.

Botts says in his book that he had confirmatory letters from Governor Peirpoint, General Millson, of Virginia, Dr. Stone, of Was.h.i.+ngton, Hon.

Garrett Davis (Senator from Kentucky), Robert A. Gray, of Rockingham (brother-in-law to Baldwin), Campbell Tarr, of Wheeling, and three others, to whom Lincoln made the statement regarding his interview with Baldwin, in almost the same language in which he made it to Botts himself. Botts quotes from two letters written to him by John F. Lewis in 1866, in which the latter says that Baldwin acknowledged to him (Lewis) that Lincoln did offer to evacuate Fort Sumter on the condition named. There are persons now living to whom Lewis made the same statement, verbally.