WASHINGTON

Seward’s Play

APRIL 1

WHEN JUSTICE CAMPBELL RETURNED TO THE STATE DEPARTMENT on Monday, April 1—All Fools’ Day, as it was known then—to discuss Governor Pickens’s telegram about the promised evacuation of Fort Sumter, Secretary Seward wrote out a brief statement for Campbell to bring to the commissioners. “The President,” he wrote, “may desire to supply Fort Sumter, but will not undertake to do so without first giving notice to Governor Pickens.”

The note startled Campbell. “What does this mean?” he asked. “Does the President design to supply Sumter?”

“No, I think not,” Seward replied, despite knowing that concrete plans for a Sumter rescue were underway. “It is a very irksome thing to him to evacuate it. His ears are open to everyone, and they fill his head with schemes for its supply. I do not think that he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”

Campbell relayed the message to the commissioners and told them, mainly on the strength of Seward’s verbal assurances, that he remained confident Fort Sumter would be evacuated.

Commissioner Crawford was skeptical. That same day, he telegraphed General Beauregard in Charleston: “My opinion is that the President has not the courage to execute the order agreed upon in Cabinet for the evacuation of the fort, but that he intends to shift the responsibility upon Major Anderson, by suffering him to be starved out. Would it not be well to aid in this by cutting off all supplies?”

Beauregard promptly relayed this to Confederate War Secretary Walker in Montgomery, with one line appended: “Batteries here ready to open Wednesday or Thursday”—two to three days hence. “What instructions?”

SEWARD, TOO, WAS GROWING frustrated. He still hoped to evacuate Sumter to buy time for the realization of his dream of Union restoration despite the Cabinet’s decision to resupply the fortress. He remained convinced that a deep reservoir of pro-Union sentiment existed in the South and that a period of calm would bring it to the surface. Lincoln, meanwhile, seemed overwhelmed and distracted by the petty responsibilities of establishing his government. In a March 26 letter to Charles Francis Adams, Seward complained that Lincoln had “no conception of his situation.”

But here Seward sensed opportunity. The administration’s disarray seemed to create an avenue for him to step forward and exercise the power he all along presumed himself to wield.

On April 1, he sent Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration” that he had written after consultation with two allies, Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal, and Henry J. Raymond of the New-York Times. Seward’s handwriting was so abysmal that he had his son Frederick copy the memorandum in his own hand. To avoid the prying eyes of intermediaries, Frederick carried it directly to Lincoln.

The text was critical of Lincoln in an insinuative manner. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward began. “This, however, is not culpable, and it has been unavoidable.” He understood that the need to fill patronage positions and secure Senate confirmations had distracted the president from other more serious matters. “But,” Seward wrote, “further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.”

He again urged that Fort Sumter should be surrendered and Fort Pickens retained, and, further, proposed that Lincoln consider engineering a war with France or Spain to distract the nation from the secession crisis.

“But whatever policy we adopt,” he told Lincoln, “there must be an energetic prosecution of it.” He hinted that he, Seward, was the man for the task. “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it,” he wrote, “or Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” As if to ensure that Lincoln did not miss the point, Seward then added, “It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”

Seward fully expected Lincoln to endorse his proposals, according to a witness, New-York Times correspondent James B. Swain—so certain, in fact, that he had arranged in advance for Weed’s Journal and Raymond’s Times to publish the memorandum along with Lincoln’s expected response. The two editors would then launch an aggressive editorial campaign to support Seward’s twin goals of evacuating Sumter and conjuring a pro-Union resurgence in the South, while also emphasizing that he alone could achieve them.

The Times was ready. The paper held open a portion of its front page ordinarily devoted to national news; correspondent Swain waited in Washington to receive Seward’s memorandum and Lincoln’s reply and then telegraph them to New York.

Blinded perhaps by his own sense of self-importance, Seward had misread his employer. What he did not recognize yet was that there was steel in this Illinois lawyer and that it glinted most keenly when adversaries challenged his resolve. “It is a little difficult to imagine what must have been the feelings of a President … on receiving from his principal councilor and anticipated mainstay of his Administration such a series of proposals,” Nicolay and Hay would later write in their biography of Lincoln. Another president might have fired Seward on the spot, but Lincoln certainly understood that Seward was a talented statesman and shrewd politician, and that his sudden departure at this moment would add more confusion to an already chaotic situation.

Lincoln wrote his answer in the form of a letter; what he did with it then is unclear. The letter and its envelope would be found years later among Lincoln’s papers, suggesting that he had never actually sent it to Seward; no copy exists in Seward’s papers. Lincoln may have asked Seward to return it, or decided simply to read it to him in person. That Seward did receive it in some form, however, is beyond question.

The letter revealed with clarity what Lincoln thought of Seward’s memorandum and of his temerity. It was direct and polite, which astonished John Nicolay, who observed later that “had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet.”

Lincoln reiterated his inaugural pledge to hold and possess property belonging to the government and reminded Seward that he, too, had endorsed that policy. Nothing had changed, Lincoln wrote, with the exception that now Seward proposed to abandon Fort Sumter. Lincoln ignored Seward’s idea of starting a war.

The only hint of annoyance in the letter came when he addressed Seward’s comment that someone needed to take America’s helm firmly and energetically in hand.

“I remark that if this must be done,” Lincoln wrote, “I must do it.”

The incident remained private, according to Nicolay and Hay. “So far as is known, the affair never reached the knowledge of any other member of the Cabinet, or even the most intimate of the President’s friends.” The Times and Albany Evening Journal never printed Seward’s memorandum, which would reside among Lincoln’s papers until 1888, when the two secretaries discovered it and published it in the Century Magazine.

On that momentous Monday, April 1, Seward wrote to his wife, who was at their home in Auburn, New York, “Dangers and breakers are before us. I wish you were near enough to share some of my thoughts and feelings, and fears, and trials.”

TWO DAYS AFTER MEETING with Seward, Justice Campbell, a sitting member of the United States Supreme Court, took the extraordinary step of writing directly to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, chief of the rebellion aimed at destroying the Union. Campbell specified that his letter was to be kept “strictly confidential and private.”

“I do not doubt that Sumter will be evacuated shortly, without any effort to supply it,” Campbell told Davis; he noted that no “settled plan” seemed to exist regarding Fort Pickens in Pensacola. With a touching degree of naïveté, he added, “I have no expectation that there will be bad faith in the dealings with me.”

Campbell addressed the lingering question of whether the commissioners should press for a final answer to their demand for a formal meeting with Lincoln. The administration, he wrote, would readily provide an answer but would prefer, he believed, to withhold it. “So far as I can judge, the present desire is to let things remain as they are, without action of any kind.”

This in fact dovetailed perfectly with Confederate President Davis’s own belief that for the time being delay would be beneficial. Even as Campbell wrote this, a letter from Montgomery was en route to the commissioners conveying Davis’s view that the current stalemate enabled the seceded states “to make all the necessary arrangements for the public defense, and the solidifying of their Government, more safely, cheaply, and expeditiously than they could were the attitude of the United States more definite and decided.”

ALL THIS SOTTO VOCE communication between Seward, Justice Campbell, and the Southern commissioners eventually caught the attention of Seward’s fellow cabinet members and prompted Navy Sec. Gideon Welles to remark, “A strange state of things, when the first officer of the cabinet and one of the judges of the highest court were in communication with rebels discussing measures having in view a disruption of the union.”

Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, were more direct: They described the justice as giving “‘aid and comfort’ to the enemies of his Government.” It came as no surprise when the Confederacy eventually named Campbell its assistant secretary of war.