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

In his ninety years Simon Cameron made a lot of money, cut innumerable political deals, helped many people, lent and lost thousands of dollars, won and lost elections, and earned an indelible reputation as a consummate wire-puller. Almost from the beginning of his public life he was tainted by the aura of corruption, though the corruption was never proved. A long-serving US senator from Pennsylvania, he is best known as an incompetent and possibly corrupt secretary of war in Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet. In this first comprehensive biography of Cameron in half a century, Paul Kahan describes a glad-hander who by dint of craftiness and persistence gained access to power at the highest levels and held a series of significant posts in business and government. For all the good information provided in this compact, accessible work, and its subject's impressive resumé, it remains unclear at the end what Cameron's substantive accomplishment entailed beyond voting in the US Senate for the Fifteenth Amendment (giving former slaves the right to vote) and helping Mary Todd Lincoln secure a federal pension.

Simon Cameron's early life fit the classic tale of the country nobody who by dint of his pluck, charm, and innate talent turned himself into a somebody. Born in rural Maytown (Lancaster County), Pennsylvania, in 1799, Cameron had to make his own way. His father, an unsuccessful businessman, died when Simon was young and he and his siblings were dispersed among foster parents. Apprenticed by age seventeen to a printer, he spent the next several years working in different printing jobs, and in his twenties ran newspapers in various Pennsylvania locations, gaining valuable experience and making the most of networking opportunities, particularly in the political world. By the late 1820s he was serving as right-hand man to James Buchanan, then a rising political star. Although he marched in lockstep with Buchanan for many years, Cameron would gradually fall out with him, making a surprising and apparently sincere turnabout on the slavery question in the 1850s.

Kahan evokes the nexus of press, politics, and enterprise in Jacksonian America, turf that his subject found congenial. Cameron missed few opportunities to invest in promising businesses, including canals, banks, and railroads. He seems to have had a Midas touch when it came to investments, undoubtedly grounded in his ability to influence legislation that served his interests. Politics was always Cameron's primary vocation, indeed, his passion. By his thirties he was widely recognized as a canny and formidable Democratic operative in politics-drenched Pennsylvania, enjoying connections to such national notables as Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Obtaining and distributing patronage was his major concern for half a century, and he was exceptionally adept in that realm.

In both politics and collateral enterprises Cameron often elided or tested ethical boundaries, as exemplified by his work as a commissioner settling claims for and against the Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin, an appointment gained through credit he had earned working to install Van Buren as Jackson's successor in the White House. Misfeasance allegations against Cameron in the Winnebago claims cases were never proven, though the smell of corruption lingered. Kahan is satisfied that the best we can say is "not proved" about this and later claims that Cameron bribed, or had his agents bribe, individual legislators to vote Cameron's way on particular matters or to support him in elective offices he sought.

Kahan is more assertive, discussing Cameron's ill-starred tenure as secretary of war from 1861 to 1862. Insofar as there is any "revisionist" tint to this genial book, it lies in Kahan's argument that Cameron was fired as secretary of war less for his managerial deficiencies (which Kahan acknowledges) or corruption (which was never directly connected to him) than for getting crosswise with Abraham Lincoln on the matter of war aims. Cameron, Kahan says, was in sync with abolitionists...