Lincoln and the Civil War

10. Reelection

91 c h a p t e r t e n R eelection Congressman Henry Winter Davis and other Radicals vowed to defeat Lincoln for reelection. At first they had been attracted to the potential candidacy of Salmon P. Chase, who had long been scheming to win the Republican presidential nomination. Chase’s head, Lincoln remarked, was “full of Presidential maggots,” and while the president was “trying to keep the maggot out of his brain,” he was “much amused” at the treasury secretary’s “mad hunt after the Presidency.”1 Informed that Chase often criticized him behind his back, Lincoln replied that such criticism did not bother him, for the secretary was “on the whole, a pretty good fellow and a very able man” whose “only trouble is that he has ‘the White House fever.’”2 Therefore, Lincoln said, he “shut his eyes to all these performances.” If Chase ever became president, Lincoln said it would be “all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.” Lincoln thought Chase’s ambition resembled “a horsefly on the neck of a ploughhorse—which kept him lively about his work.”3 Lincoln’s willingness to tolerate Chase’s machinations was yet another example of his preternatural magnanimity. In February 1864, the president ignored Chase’s backers who issued public calls for the Republican party to dump Lincoln in favor of their hero. When Chase disingenuously insisted that he had nothing to do with such pronouncements, Lincoln replied that he had not read the documents and that he wished the secretary to remain in the cabinet.4 The president explained to another cabinet member that he believed 92 | reelection Chase’s denial, “for he thought it impossible for him (Mr. Chase) to have done such a thing.”5 “I do not meddle in these matters,” Lincoln insisted. “If any man thinks my present position desirable to occupy, he is welcome to try it, as far as I am concerned.”6 Impressed by Lincoln’s superhuman forbearance , U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Davis remarked that the president “is a wise man, & he won[’]t quarrel with Chase. I w[oul]d dismiss him [from] the cabinet, if it killed me. He pursues the wiser course.”7 Another Supreme Court Justice, Noah H. Swayne, believed that if Lincoln “were not the self denigrating & most magnanimous man that he is there would be an explosion.”8 An explosion did come, however, in June when Chase submitted his resignation. The secretary had bullied Lincoln with resignation threats on earlier occasions, and the president had backed down every time. Finally, Lincoln’s almost infinite patience was exhausted. He told John Hay, “Mr. Chase has resigned and I have accepted his resignation. I thought I could not stand it any longer.”9 Lincoln was clearly tired of Chase’s attempts to dominate the administration . When the governor of Ohio volunteered to facilitate a reconciliation, Lincoln replied, “This is the third time he has thrown this [resignation] at me, and I do not think I am called to continue to beg him to take it back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.”10 Moreover, the president did not like Chase personally, though he admired the secretary’s ability and commitment to emancipation . (Lincoln disliked some other Radicals, less because of their politics than because of their style. While he shared their strong antislavery views and their desire to see the war prosecuted vigorously , Lincoln objected to what he called “the self-righteousness of the Abolitionists” and “the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.”)11 Hay thought that the rupture was caused by Chase’s voracious appetite for deference, even from the president: it was Lincoln’s “intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority” that Chase “could never forgive.”12 Hay’s analysis is only partly true. Lincoln was not “intellectually arrogant,” but beneath his self-abnegating reelection | 93 persona, he had a deep-rooted sense of self that gave him dignity, strength, and confidence. Many foes of slavery found Chase objectionable because, as General Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio remarked, he was “cold, selfish, and unscrupulous.” Hayes believed that “political intrigue, love of power, and a selfish and boundless ambition were the striking features of his life and character.”13 A Philadelphia abolitionist deemed Chase “[b]ig-brained, cold-hearted, selfish, suspicious and parsimonious.”14 Hay was right when he insisted that...