Abraham Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation before his cabinet, including Salmon P. Chase, second from left, and William Seward, foreground right, December 29, 1862.
As the summer silly season was ending, The New York Times published an op-ed portentously signed Anonymous.
For a week the article was the talk of the thumb-sucking class. In shielding the author’s identity, had the Times embraced best journalistic practices? (The paper acknowledged that doing so was a “rare step.”) Should a worried insider making incendiary charges not instead quit, and put his or her reputation behind those charges? (Advocacy dies in darkness.) Most tantalizing, who was Anonymous? Long odds were on Vice President Mike Pence, since Anonymous deployed the term lodestar—a guiding light, usually Polaris, the North Star—which Pence uncorks from time to time. However, most pundits looked for someone on the inner circle’s outer rim: a third-level person in a cabinet department, or a National Security Council aide.
Anonymous clearly got one thing wrong. Other American presidents have faced senior insiders working diligently to frustrate their bosses’ agendas and inclinations. Sometimes that resistance has resided at the hub of the inner circle—cabinet secretaries.
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson’s partner and protégé, was elected president in 1808, fourth to win the office, with a smashing two-thirds of the electoral vote. Everybody in the first Republican party having pulled together to put Madison over the top, everybody wanted a reward. Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland, a Capitol Hill powerhouse, wanted his younger brother Robert promoted from secretary of the Navy, his job in the Jefferson administration, to secretary of state. Madison wanted State to go to Albert Gallatin, the most talented man in the party after himself and Jefferson. In the end, the president bowed to political reality and tapped the junior Smith.
As a sop, the moon not being available, Madison offered to make Smith minister to Russia. How about Britain, Smith dickered, or the Supreme Court? Madison stood firm. Refusing the proffered Russian holiday, Smith quit and published an attack on his ex-boss. Glad to see Smith go, Madison installed fellow Virginian James Monroe at State.
Cameron at War; and Edward Bates as attorney general.
Seward and Bates were loyal and devoted. Cameron was loyal, but incompetent and crooked—less than a year later Lincoln canned him, offering to send him to Russia; unlike Smith, Cameron went. Lincoln’s most problematic secretary was Chase, an Ohioan who was smart, capable, and out for himself. Chase, like Smith, disagreed with his president about policy. In the 1840s Chase had belonged to the radical Liberty and Free-Soil parties—an antislavery résumé that made him a natural to ally with Radical Republicans unhappy at Lincoln’s cautious approach to emancipation. However, Chase’s main beef with Lincoln was that he wanted Lincoln’s job. Seward, Bates, and Cameron, all in their 60s, had let their White House dreams go. Chase, 53 when Lincoln took office, still yearned. He also had a campaign manager at home: beautiful daughter Kate. “Wherever she appeared,” an observer wrote, “people dropped back in order to watch her.” Chase needed a charm boost; he was proud, shy, and terrible at telling jokes.
In 1864, with the war stalled and Radical Republicans still grumbling, Chase struck at Lincoln. In his 10,000 Treasury employees and 2,500 war bond salesmen, Chase had a ready-made political machine. That February Senator Charles Pomeroy (R-Kansas) wrote a letter, approved by Chase, that was sent to hundreds of Republicans touting Chase as “a statesman of rare ability.” The Pomeroy Circular, naively marked “Private,” immediately made the papers. Its only effect was to cause a surge of support for the president, even in Ohio. Chagrined, the malcontent offered more than once to quit. Lincoln kept him on until midsummer, when Chase proposed to resign once too often—and Lincoln accepted. He ensured Chase’s support through the election by dangling an offer to make him chief justice, replacing the late Roger Taney, a prize the president did not confer formally until December.
Cabinet secretaries are often big men in their own right, and the presidency is the biggest prize in politics. The real mystery is why more principled, ambitious men don’t make resistance their lodestar.