He was now the target for a besieging army of politicians clamoring for “spoils” in the shape of promises of preferment.  It was a miserable and disgraceful assault which profoundly offended him.(3) To his mind this was not the same thing as the simple-hearted personal politics of his younger days—­friends standing together and helping one another along—­but a gross and monstrous rapacity.  It was the first chill shadow that followed the election day.

There were difficult intrigues over the Cabinet.  Promises made by his managers at Chicago were presented for redemption.  Rival candidates bidding for his favor, tried to cut each other’s throats.  For example, there was the intrigue of the War Department.  The Lincoln managers had promised a Cabinet appointment to Pennsylvania; the followers of Simon Cameron were a power; it had been necessary to win them over in order to nominate Lincoln; they insisted that their leader was now entitled to the Pennsylvania seat in the Cabinet; but there was an anti-Cameron faction almost as potent in Pennsylvania as the Cameron faction.  Both sent their agents to Springfield to lay siege to Lincoln.  In this duel, the Cameron forces won the first round.  Lincoln offered him the Secretaryship.  Subsequently, his enemies made so good a case that Lincoln was convinced of the unwisdom of his decision and withdrew the offer.  But Cameron had not kept the offer confidential.  The withdrawal would discredit him politically and put a trump card into the hands of his enemies.  A long dispute followed.  Not until Lincoln had reached Washington, immediately before the inauguration, was the dispute ended, the withdrawal withdrawn, and Cameron appointed.(4)

It was a dreary winter for the President-elect.  It was also a brand-new experience.  For the first time he was a dispenser of favor on a grand scale.  Innumerable men showed their meanest side, either to advance themselves or to injure others.  As the weeks passed and the spectacle grew in shamelessness, his friends became more and more conscious of his peculiar melancholy.  The elation of the campaign subsided into a deep unhappiness over the vanity of this world.  Other phases of the shadowy side of his character also asserted themselves.  Conspicuous was a certain trend in his thinking that was part of Herndon’s warrant for calling him a fatalist.  Lincoln’s mysticism very early had taken a turn toward predestination, coupled with a belief in dreams.(5) He did not in any way believe in magic; he never had any faith in divinations, in the occult, in any secret mode of alluring the unseen powers to take one’s side.  Nevertheless, he made no bones about being superstitious.  And he thought that coming events cast their shadows before, that something, at least, of the future was sometimes revealed through dreams.  “Nature,” he would say, “is the workshop of the Almighty, and we form but links in the chain of intellectual and material life."(6) Byron’s