Chapter 2
The Presidency
Abraham Lincoln was elected to preside over a federal government puny by design. The American system had been created as the political expression of a people who had fled the tyrants of Europe. Within memory of citizens still alive in Lincoln’s time, the Founding Fathers had bent to the task of framing a government that would make impossible a home-grown version of the hated English monarchy. The resulting Constitution gave only a few specific powers to the central government, reserving all others to the states. The new central government’s domestic functions were kept to a short list: it would provide internal improvements, it would set and collect customs duties, it would survey and sell the public lands in the West, and it would distribute the mails.
Besides being few, the powers granted the central government were weak. They were not “police” powers—they did not impose limitations on the behavior of citizens. Instead, Federal powers were carefully framed as “patronage” powers—they distributed grants of money, land, and jobs on a case-by-case basis. By this scheme, the framers allowed the infant central government to buy loyalty that would provide stability, and, just as important, avoid having to confront tough, divisive social issues that could tear it apart. The people of the new nation understood the Washington government to be a weak sister to the state governments. This was as it should be, they reckoned: state officials—closer to the people and thus wiser, safer, and more efficient—should retain control over the long and important list of powers which regulated the health, safety, and morals of the community.
America didn’t need a strong central government. It had no powerful neighbors, no old society in need of reform, no needy millions to feed and educate. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America had achieved renown as the mighty mite of global wealth, and European correspondents were clogging the decks of Atlantic steamers to observe first-hand what, even into the Lincoln administration, was still called the American “democratic experiment.” Edward Dicey, reporting for the British Spectator, wrote:
Life, hitherto, has flowed very easily for the American people. The country is so large, that there is room for all and to spare; the battle of life is not an arduous one, compared to what it is in older countries. The morbid dread of poverty, which is the curse of English middle-class existence, is almost unknown in the New World. If the worst comes to the worst, and an American is ruined, the world lies open to him, and in a new state he can start afresh, with as fair prospects as when he set out in life.
It is little wonder that in such a land of plenty, any strong government action was resented as “interference,” and the country developed what Atlantic Monthly editor James Lowell called “a happy-go-lucky style of getting along.”
The government in Washington, then, was not supposed to do a great deal—and in the years before Lincoln, it didn’t. The people’s faith was in unfettered individualism. With their revolutionary-era belief in the evils of strong rule reinforced by spectacular success, Americans in 1860 lived under the weakest government in the world. Thomas Carlyle called America “the most favored of all lands that have no government.” Even the few powers granted to the central government were exercised little. Tariffs were low. There was no national bank. There were few subsidies for internal improvements or state credit—the roaring engines of travel and transport were stoked by the muscle of private capital. Only Native Americans felt the Washington government’s authority. The only time the central government touched the average citizen’s life was when the mailman came. The government’s work was so insignificant that U.S. congressmen commonly resigned their offices to run for election in the state legislatures, where the real issues were being argued.
Lack of respect for the feeble federal power was peaking as Lincoln took office, but the tradition of defying the national government was as old as the nation. On his first presidential trip to Boston in 1789, George Washington sat in a hotel room for two days fighting a battle of wills with Massachusetts governor John Hancock over who should call on whom. Since then, there had been a number of organized attempts to challenge the Washington government, by Northern as well as Southern states: Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, Virginia’s and Kentucky’s opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, the threat of secession in New England at the Hartford Convention in 1814, South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification in 1833, and Northern personal liberty laws which flouted the federal Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s.
Moreover, when Lincoln took office in 1861, he was twice removed from the focus of power. Not only was government power centered in the states rather than in Washington, but Washington power was centered in Congress rather than in the Presidency. During Lincoln’s run for office, abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips mocked the power of the President, asking, “Did you ever see on Broadway a black figure grinding chocolate in the windows? He seems to turn the wheel, but in truth the wheel turns him.” Lincoln lived in the golden age of legislature, where the President’s task was to carry out the policies of the lawmakers who dispensed wisdom from beneath the alabaster dome of the Capitol. In Lincoln’s century, all political parties, whatever else they proclaimed, adhered to one common principle: they all argued against a strong presidency. The times were dominated by those who believed the presidency was, in Patrick Henry’s warning, an “awful squint toward the monarchy.”
Americans focused their political interest on Congress through the entire first century of the nation’s existence. In an era when the President almost never spoke in public once he had delivered his inaugural address, the real titans of the young nation’s political arena—“The Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, the “Godlike Daniel” Webster, “The Champion of States’ Rights” John C. Calhoun, “The Little Giant” Stephen A. Douglas—battled regularly beneath packed galleries in the chambers of the House and Senate. Every two years, newspaper readers nationwide followed the candidates for Speaker of the House almost as closely as they did presidential candidates, trying to discern which way the legislative winds were blowing. The President was not so much a force as a symbol: the nation’s first citizen, the ceremonial head of state, receiver of distinguished visitors, signer of bills. As presidential observer Theodore Lowi put it: “In the nineteenth century, chief executives were chief of very little and executive of even less.”
It is hard for us, in a time when the President is referred to routinely as “the most powerful man in the world,” to imagine the presidency as the handmaiden to Congress as it existed in Lincoln’s time. The intervening growth in the power and prestige of the Oval Office—the creation of a Presidency that has since overcome the caution of the Founders and put Congress in its shadow—has obscured the low expectations for it in Lincoln’s century.
The role of the Washington government has been transformed since Lincoln by the astounding growth of the nation beyond what the Founders could foresee. Sweeping social changes and the rise of an industrial economy brought problems on a scale unimaginable in revolutionary times. Whereas in 1860 Americans still resented the national government for its “interference,” they later turned more and more to the presidency as the only institution adequate to battle emergencies that came at ever-increasing speeds.
The result—government by a large professional bureaucracy, with the President at its head—has become known as the “institutional presidency,” and marks a constitutional era entirely different from the congressional heyday in which Lincoln was elected. In the modern era, with scores of administrative agencies responsible only to the President, there has developed the exclusively modern notion that the President is the government.
It is difficult to remember that, compared to today’s mighty ship of state, Lincoln steered a tiny skiff. Suffering from nearly three quarters of a century of penny-pinching, the apparatus that Lincoln worked in 1861 had grown little since George Washington’s time. The central government did little more for its citizens in 1860 than it had done in 1800. Washington had established six executive departments; Lincoln inherited seven—the additional Interior Department had been carved out of the Treasury in 1849. All the departments were inadequately staffed, with overworked clerks toiling at low salaries in cramped quarters. The State Department of the 1850s, for example, handled foreign affairs with a staff of eighteen men.
At Lincoln’s election, with the population of the United States at slightly more than 30 million, there were a mere 20,000 civilian federal employees, with another 16,000 soldiers on the payroll. By contrast, at the beginning of the 21st century, to serve a population ten times the 1860 population, the federal government now requires almost three million employees to run it—150 times the Lincoln-era figure—with another three million on the military payroll.
The change in the size of government is also reflected in the budget. The Federal budget Lincoln inherited in 1861 was sixty-three million dollars—or about one billion in today’s dollars. A modern president flexes a Federal budget in the trillions.
The figure that speaks loudest about the public appreciation of the size of the President’s job, however, and where we can best see the relative weakness of the presidency as Lincoln inherited it, is the size of the White House budget appropriated by Congress. In the first decade of the 21st century, the modern White House staff approaches 6,000 employees, in 125 offices, with an annual budget estimated at $730 million. In 1861, the White House staff consisted of a solitary secretary.
Until shortly before Lincoln arrived, in fact, there had been no budget at all for a staff for the president, commensurate with the people’s low appraisal of the demands of his job. In those days, the people assumed that the president’s seven cabinet members would provide him with all the information and advice he needed. For his daily business the Chief Executive was on his own. If he wanted to hire assistance, he usually paid sons or nephews out of his own salary. Only in 1857 was the post of “President’s Private Secretary” established by Congress, at a salary of $2,500 per year. In addition, $1,200 was set aside for a steward to take charge of the White House, and $900 for a part-time messenger. There were still no adequate provisions for expenses. The yearly stationery budget, for example, had remained at $250 since the days of John Adams.
Lincoln’s secretary, 28-year-old John G. Nicolay, who met Lincoln while working as clerk to the Illinois secretary of state, managed to wangle a second presidential assistant—his friend John Hay, a 22-year-old poet—by having him put on the payroll as a clerk in the Department of the Interior and detailed for special service at the White House. For much of Lincoln’s tenure, these two stayed within the government budget by sleeping in a corner room on the second floor of the White House, across the hall from the Executive Offices.
Lack of an adequate staff had already tripped Lincoln on his unprotected approach to the capital and caused his pratfall into Washington. It had not occurred to President Buchanan to loan the President-elect a guard, nor were there any national police, nor anybody in the government whose job it was to see him from Springfield to Washington safely. Lincoln was shielded only by a few friends. If he had been attacked anywhere on the way, it would have been up to local police to investigate the crime and catch the guilty ones. A local court would have had the responsibility of trying, sentencing, and jailing them.
Any trappings of power—even so much as a bodyguard—were repulsive to Americans in 1860. They were still distrustful of their creation, the presidency. They did not seek great men. They knew the history of democracy in the world had been an unbroken series of failures. From Aristotle on, political philosophers agreed that democracy was unstable, and disintegrated into anarchy, then finally to despotism. The Roman republic had its Caesar. The brief republic of the Commonwealth of England had its Cromwell. The French Revolution had its Reign of Terror, and finally its Napoleon. As a fresh reminder, Louis Napoleon had overthrown the flimsy Second Republic of France as recently as 1852. Because early Americans were so acutely aware of the vulnerability of republics to conspiracies and plots, Americans in Lincoln’s time had a strong distrust of men of genius. It was feared their talents would drive them to break free of the constraints of law by which ordinary men were bound.
The American habit of distrust was well marked. After his visit in 1842, novelist Charles Dickens wrote:
One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it … as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.
“You carry,” says the stranger, “this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life. By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates … who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice. It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments. … Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed. … Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?”
The answer is invariably the same: “There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.”
If it was great men Americans feared, by the mid-nineteenth century Americans were getting exactly what they wanted.