Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Scandalous Secretary of War by Paul Kahan (review)

Overshadowed by the later service of Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's first secretary of war, Simon Cameron, is usually reduced to an oft-repeated phrase that speaks to his unscrupulousness: "I do not think he would steal a red hot stove" (p. 145). In fact, concedes biographer Paul Kahan, "Cameron's brief tenure as secretary of war has made his name shorthand for profiteering, graft, and corruption" (p. 213). However, Kahan's new biography, Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Scandalous Secretary of War, offers "an attempt to get past Cameron's reputation" (p. 1). "The point," Kahan goes on to explain, "is not to defend Cameron's actions, many of which will strike modern readers as unprincipled, unscrupulous, and corrupt. Instead, Amiable Scoundrel's goal is merely to put Cameron's actions into a larger historical context" (p. 4). While it seems Kahan sets a puzzlingly high bar for himself, Cameron proves to be surprisingly easy company, and Kahan draws forth a fascinating portrait from hundreds of sources.

Cameron's earliest years read as a Benjamin Franklin—esque story; he arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a poor but ambitious eighteen-year-old who apprenticed himself to a political newspaper. "[D]emocratization, which was far along in Pennsylvania during the 1820s, created the ideal conditions for Cameron's rise to influence," Kahan writes, "and the rewards—patronage jobs and lucrative government contracts—were plentiful" (p. 8). Kahan explains Cameron's rise within the larger political context. Cameron began as an advocate of President John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, but a "palpable chill" fell over the relationship, and Cameron "began moving into the Jacksonian orbit" (pp. 19, 18). His relationship with the Jacksonians had a similar rise and fall, as did his relationship with James Polk and with fellow Pennsylvanian and onetime confidant James Buchanan. As Cameron's Democratic Party leaned more and more toward southern interests and away from the pro-business interests of Pennsylvania, Cameron switched allegiances to the Know-Nothing Party. Later, he saw the nascent Republican Party as a better fit.

In case after case, Kahan shows Cameron's remarkable ability to ride the political tides to his personal advantage. Controversy and scandal often swirled around the Pennsylvania native, getting more and more tempestuous the higher Cameron rose, yet Kahan reveals Cameron's shrewd ability to survive the storms. "[My] usual course has been to fight through my difficulties, and in so doing, I have generally succeeded," Cameron believed (p. 91). Kahan lays out these fights in an easy-to-follow fashion, explaining byzantine political maneuvers and motivations in incisive, well-organized prose. For a story that often depends on the guile of its characters, Kahan's writing is straightforward and clear.

Following Cameron's infamous, short-lived stint as secretary of war, he usually drops from the historical record, hardly even meriting a footnote in most accounts, even though he later served as U.S. minister to Russia. Yet Kahan recounts Cameron's amazing political rehabilitation in those years—enough so that the disgraced former cabinet member became an important political operative for Lincoln during the 1864 election. In the years after the war, Cameron's political reascension continued—so typical of him—and he rebuilt a political machine that cemented his legacy in Pennsylvania politics for decades to come. Nearly a third of Kahan's book covers this forgotten but fascinating chapter of Cameron's substantial career.

Kahan's biography successfully shows Cameron as amiable and a scoundrel—but most important, as a man of his highly troubled time. Amiable Scoundrel lifts Cameron out of the historical footnotes and gives him the worthy biography we might never have known he deserved.