The man who developed the most serious presidential aspirations was Salmon P. Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who listened to and actively encouraged the overtures of a small faction of the Republican party which rallied about him at the end of the year 1863.  Pure and disinterested, and devoted with all his energies and powers to the cause of the Union, he was yet singularly ignorant of current public thought, and absolutely incapable of judging men in their true relations He regarded himself as the friend of Mr. Lincoln and made strong protestations to him and to others of this friendship, but he held so poor an opinion of the President’s intellect and character, compared with his own, that he could not believe the people blind enough to prefer the President to himself.  He imagined that he did not covet advancement, and was anxious only for the public good; yet, in the midst of his enormous labors found time to write letters to every part of the country, protesting his indifference to the presidency, but indicating his willingness to accept it, and painting pictures so dark of the chaotic state of affairs in the government, that the irresistible inference was that only he could save the country.  From the beginning Mr. Lincoln had been aware of this quasi-candidacy, which continued all through the winter Indeed, it was impossible to remain unconscious of it, although he discouraged all conversation on the subject, and refused to read letters relating to it.  He had his own opinion of the taste and judgment displayed by Mr. Chase in his criticisms of the President and his colleagues in the cabinet, but he took no note of them.

“I have determined,” he said, “to shut my eyes, so far as possible, to everything of the sort.  Mr. Chase makes a good secretary, and I shall keep him where he is.  If he becomes President, all right.  I hope we may never have a worse man.”

And he went on appointing Mr. Chase’s partizans and adherents to places in the government.  Although his own renomination was a matter in regard to which he refused to talk much, even with intimate friends, he was perfectly aware of the true drift of things.  In capacity of appreciating popular currents Chase was as a child beside him; and he allowed the opposition to himself in his own cabinet to continue, without question or remark, all the more patiently, because he knew how feeble it really was.

The movement in favor of Mr. Chase culminated in the month of February, 1864, in a secret circular signed by Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, and widely circulated through the Union; which criticised Mr. Lincoln’s “tendency toward compromises and temporary expedients”; explained that even if his reelection were desirable, it was practically impossible in the face of the opposition that had developed; and lauded Chase as the statesman best fitted to rescue the country from present perils and guard it against future ills.  Of course copies of this circular soon reached the White House, but Mr. Lincoln refused to look at them, and they accumulated unread in the desk of his secretary.  Finally, it got into print, whereupon Mr. Chase wrote to the President to assure him he had no knowledge of the letter before seeing it in the papers.  To this Mr. Lincoln replied: