Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book on Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is another in a long line of tributes to the astute management of affairs demonstrated by the 16th president, this time focusing on the way he handled the competing egos and ambitions of his secretary of state (William Henry Seward), his secretary of the treasury (Salmon P. Chase) and his attorney general (Edward Bates).
This was, by any account, no mean feat, largely because it was a coalition Cabinet. Lincoln pulled together, writes Goodwin, "a mixture of former Whigs and Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners," harnessed them to the winning of the Civil War, and through it all managed to remain "the head of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the history of the country."
Team of Rivals makes for great reading from a talented storyteller who has had to labor with more than the usual care to redeem herself from the charges of plagiarism and sloppy note-taking that have descended on her previous presidential books on the Kennedys and the Roosevelts. But Team of Rivals does raise a few interesting questions beyond the scope of Goodwin's narrative that continue to be important for American politics. Among these are: What is the president's Cabinet? How should it be selected? How should it be managed by the president? How do we evaluate its success (or lack thereof)? And lastly, should Lincoln's making and maintenance of his Cabinet be a model for others?
Lincoln did so much else right, how could he offer less than the perfect example in this sphere, as well?
Well, maybe.
The central problem in knowing how to measure a presidential Cabinet is that we lack an official yardstick. The Constitution makes no provision for a council of presidential advisers, apart from a vague provision in Article II, section 2, that "he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices." Exactly what those "executive Departments" were or what the responsibilities of a "principal Officer" might be were never specified.
It was George Washington who set the precedent of designating the most important office chiefs — state, treasury, war, and the attorney general — as a "Cabinet," along the lines of a British parliamentary ministry. And the men whom Washington selected as those department chiefs — Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph — helped build that image further by functioning not only as presidential confidants but as the president's chief policy spokesmen.
Any Cabinet that featured Jefferson and Hamilton would set the bar for all subsequent Cabinets extremely high. But several of them actually managed to live up to it. Jefferson's Cabinet included James Madison as secretary of state and the multitalented Albert Gallatin as secretary of the treasury, and, by the 1820s, the state department had been headed by such a distinguished succession of secretaries — James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay — that each administration's selection of a new secretary of state was viewed as the designation of that president's heir apparent.
The presidency of Andrew Jackson marked a sudden downturn in the prestige of the Cabinet. Jackson had lost the presidential election of 1824 as a result of what he denounced as a "corrupt bargain" between Adams and Clay that saw Clay throw his support to Adams in return for Clay's nomination as state department chief. In 1828, Jackson won a resounding victory in the presidential election and decided to put the Cabinet — and the hopes of any ambitious aspirants to Cabinet office — firmly under his thumb.
Roger B. Taney, whom Jackson appointed attorney general and then secretary of the treasury, faithfully carried out Jackson's political destruction of the Bank of the United States; his secretary of war, John Eaton, was rumored to have won the job because of Jackson's fancy for his wife, the flirtatious Peggy Eaton.
By the time Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the Cabinet had grown in size, but not in stature. Under James Buchanan's presidency, the Cabinet now included a secretary of the interior (first introduced in 1849), a secretary of the Navy (the creation of John Adams' presidency in 1798) and a postmaster general (who was elevated to Cabinet rank in 1829). But apart from the two terms as secretary of state served by "godlike" Daniel Webster under Benjamin Harrison and Millard Fillmore, and Jefferson Davis' term as secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, the Cabinet became the graveyard of presidential cronyism.
Buchanan's most significant rival within his own Democratic Party, Stephen A. Douglas, was rigorously excluded from the Cabinet, and Douglas' nomination of William Richardson (a Douglas lieutenant) for a Cabinet seat was ignored. No wonder even a Buchanan loyalist like Indiana Sen. Jesse Bright could sniff in disgust, "There is no respectable office in the United States that I would rather not take than a Cabinet place."
The sorry decline in the stature of the Cabinet makes Lincoln's appointments all the more remarkable, and for two reasons. First, he clearly selected individuals of uncommon ability to fill the senior Cabinet posts. William Henry Seward had been in national politics as a New York senator and governor since the 1840s and was one of the most widely respected political figures in the North. Salmon Chase was the brains of American anti-slavery politics, having served as Ohio's governor and senator. Montgomery Blair, who got the nod as postmaster general, was a member of the most powerful political family in the republic, and had served as a member of the slave Dred Scott's defense team in Scott's unsuccessful bid for freedom before the Supreme Court in 1857.
But more significant than the professional standing of these appointees, their place in the Republican Party's political pecking order created the greatest surprise. Seward had been the Republicans' unquestioned front-runner before the 1860 Republican convention; Chase had not been very far behind him, and even Attorney General Bates had been more seriously considered by the pundits for the Republican presidential nomination than Abraham Lincoln. By contrast, Lincoln had been a dark-horse nominee. He had a modest national profile, but no executive experience at the federal or state level, and no congressional experience since his solitary and resultless term in the House of Representatives from 1847 through 1849.
That Lincoln would at once invite Chase, Seward and Bates into the Cabinet, and then Monty Blair, ran the risk of looking weak. Having robbed them of their rightful place, Lincoln seemed to be almost apologetically offering them substitute spots where they could fall at once to undermining and subverting his presidency. And, to a certain extent, that is exactly what Seward and Chase did.
Seward at first saw Lincoln as a figurehead candidate, a "little Illinois lawyer" who needed the services of someone like himself to function as the power behind the throne, and Chase's itch for the presidency grew so offensive that by 1864 he was encouraging his allies in the Senate in a dump-Lincoln campaign — while still serving in Lincoln's Cabinet. Bates' ambitions never ran so far as to actually challenge the president he was supposed to serve, but even he could not help sneering at Lincoln.
Anyone looking over Lincoln's shoulder in 1861 would have decided that filling his Cabinet with the very men who were his greatest rivals, and who held him in the greatest contempt, was an act of political folly that bordered on the suicidal.
And it would have been, except that, like so many others, Bates and Chase and Seward had greatly underestimated the Illinoisan. When Seward blandly suggested that Lincoln let him, as secretary of state, devise the administration's foreign policy, Lincoln firmly rapped him on the wrist — if there was a foreign policy to make, Lincoln replied, "I must do it" — and he overruled Seward's overconfident assurances to the Confederates that Fort Sumter would be evacuated without a fight.
Lincoln handed Chase a program of national financial reorganization that cut straight against the grain of Chase's personal notions of national economic policy, and forced him to implement it. And when Chase tried to use disgruntlement
in the Republican Senate caucus to engineer the downfall of Seward in December 1862, Lincoln shrewdly turned the tables on Chase and exposed his back-stairs gossip as a tissue of political lies. By 1863, Lincoln's personal junior secretary, John M. Hay, could chuckle at Lincoln's "tyrannous authority" over the Cabinet. "The trash you read every day about wrangles in the Cabinet about measures of state policy looks very silly from an inside view," Hay wrote. "Abraham Rex is the central figure continually. I wish you could see as I do, that he is devilish near an autocrat in this Administration."
Bending figures like Chase, Seward and Bates to his will is the supreme achievement that Goodwin lauds in Lincoln. But it is an achievement that leaves dangling two major issues in the history of the presidential Cabinet. First, there is the question of whether Lincoln may actually have over-controlled his Cabinet. Chase was notorious for wailing that Lincoln treated the Cabinet as "only separate heads of departments," as though they were "heads of factories supplying shoes or clothing ... meeting now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost." But Lincoln was well-known for being an overachieving workaholic, and Chase was seconded in his complaint by no one less than Lincoln himself. When Lincoln's old judicial friend, David Davis, "asked him once about his Cabinet," Lincoln replied that "he never Consulted his Cabinet." This certainly dampened any efforts by Cabinet members to make political hay out of their positions, but it also may have severely cramped the real application of their ingenuity to the war's problems.
The other issue is what, exactly, these restraints left for Cabinet members to do in the Lincoln Administration. We know that Blair and Chase, presiding over the postal network and the customs agencies, controlled a vast skein of patronage appointments that made them even more powerful than their immediate responsibilities as Cabinet secretaries did. But neither Goodwin nor Burton Hendrick (the other major commentator on Lincoln's Cabinet in his dramatic 1946 opus, Lincoln's War Cabinet) give us very much of a feel for the day-to-day routine and responsibilities of the state or treasury departments. And that is a serious weakness, since the Civil War called forth a substantial increase in the size of the federal bureaucracy and the importance of the Cabinet secretaries. Team of Rivals is largely about Lincoln's personal relationships with his fractious Cabinet, not their relationships to each other or to their departments.
But even with those questions unanswered, Goodwin still has shone a light on Lincoln as a Cabinetmaker that marks him as a shrewd and intelligent manager, even if a somewhat overbearing one, and possessed of enough humility to admit that even his greatest political rivals had gifts the nation needed.
There is not enough here to say whether Lincoln was as good a Cabinetmaker as he was a politician.
But humility and intelligence are good lessons for any president to learn, and great ones to learn from Abraham Lincoln.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President, which won the Lincoln Prize in 2000.
llinois Issues, February 2006
