CHAPTER XVIII

Lincoln and his Cabinet—­An Odd Assortment of Officials—­Misconceptions of Rights and Duties—­Frictions and Misunderstandings—­The Early Cabinet Meetings—­Informal Conversational Affairs—­Queer Attitude toward the War—­Regarded as a Political Affair—­Proximity to Washington a Hindrance to Military Success—­Disturbances in the Cabinet—­A Senate Committee Demands Seward’s Removal from the Cabinet—­Lincoln’s Mastery of the Situation—­Harmony Restored—­Stanton becomes War Secretary—­Sketch of a Remarkable Man—­Next to Lincoln, the Master-mind of the Cabinet—­Lincoln the Dominant Power.

President Lincoln’s Cabinet, while containing men of marked ability and fitness for their positions, was in some respects about as ill-assorted and heterogeneous a body of men as were ever called to serve together as ministers and advisers of a great government.  Its selection was a surprise to the country.  Mr. John Bigelow said it “had the appearance of being selected from a grab-bag.”  “Not one of the members,” continues Mr. Bigelow, “was a personal or much of a political friend of Mr. Lincoln; not one of them had ever had any experience or training in any executive office, except Welles of Connecticut, if he could be claimed as an exception because of having served three years in a bureau of the Navy in Washington.  Of military administration, still less of actual war, no member knew anything by experience.  The heads of the two most important departments, the Secretaries of State and the Treasury, were both disappointed candidates for the chair occupied by Mr. Lincoln.  It was nothing less than Providential that the President was so happily constituted as neither to share nor to provoke any of the jealousies or envies of either of them, and by his absolute freedom from every selfish impulse gradually compelled them all to look up to him as the one person in whose singleness of eye they could all and always confide.  Not immediately, but in the course of two or three years, they got into the habit of turning to him like quarrelling children to their mother to settle all the questions that temporarily divided them.”

These Cabinet ministers were a devoted and patriotic body of men, but their misconceptions of their respective rights and duties were at first grotesque.  Mr. Seward, a man of far greater administrative experience than Lincoln, assumed that he, rather than the President, was to be the master mind of the new administration.  “Premier” he at first called himself.  Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, thought the Navy should be a sort of adjunct to the War Department—­an error of which Secretary Welles of the Navy Department speedily relieved him.  These two men were altogether too unlike to get on well together.  The cold and somewhat stately Welles was repelled by Stanton’s impulsiveness and violence, while Stanton was exasperated by Welles’s calmness and lack of excitability.