CHAPTER XXV.

ELECTED PRESIDENT.

The Great Canvass of 1860-The Critical Election-Southern Threats of Civil War-Office-seekers Early-A Wise Decision-Cabinet-makingPreparing for the Trouble to Come-A Nation Without a Ruler.

DURING the political canvass which followed the Chicago Convention Mr. Lincoln remained at Springfield. It was a matter of manifest propriety that he should maintain as much reserve as was consistent with his customary frankness. He continued to meet all men freely and avoided none who desired to see or speak with him.

Those few short months were a time of feverish and hourly increasing excitement to the entire people, and most of all to the man whom the clearest-minded politicians, North and South, himself included, knew they were about to elect as their Chief Magistrate. He passed the dense and burdened days, therefore, as an intense student of all the present symptoms and probable results of that fierce fermentation.

The collision he had foreseen and prophesied twenty years before was at hand. The crisis he had more publicly formulated in his Bloomington speech was hourly drawing nearer. Hundreds of Southern orators and writers plainly declared that the election of Lincoln would precipitate the struggle he had foretold. They were the exponents of a feeling more deep and more willful than careless observers knew or would believe. Their real meaning was that they would regard such an election as their justification for themselves precipitating the struggle. It was more a threat than a warning.

Great pains were taken, by enemies as well as friends, to

keep Mr. Lincoln well advised of these hostile utterances and of all known preparations for such action as would fulfill threats. Enough of such preparation showed itself, almost publicly, to indicate its extent. Even the methods of its veiled and secret operations were from time to time suggested. For none of this treasonable agitation, or its consequences, could Mr. Lincoln hold himself in any manner responsible. It forced upon his mind, however, the necessity he was under of speedily establishing his own relations to public affairs and to the future of the country.

The popular vote was given on the 6th of November, with a result which showed that if the adversaries of the Republican party could have united upon any one candidate they would have elected him; but the same was also true of each of the four parties. The Lincoln electoral tickets received an aggregate of 1,857,610 votes; those of Mr. Douglas, 1,291,574; those of Mr. Bell, 646,124; those of Mr. Breckinridge, 850,082. The popular majority against Mr. Lincoln, if it could have been so counted, was 930,170; but would, by a like reckoning, have been much larger against either of the others.

When the Electoral Colleges of the several States came together and performed their official duties, Mr. Lincoln received 180 votes; Mr. Breckinridge, 72; Mr. Bell, 30; Mr. Douglas, 12. That, however, was but the formal declaration of a result which was already known to the whole country.

Hardly was the popular vote counted, on the 6th of November, before the current of office-seekers and other political pilgrims to Springfield swelled rapidly to a sort of flood, and an important part of Mr. Lincoln's Presidential powers and perplexities at once demanded his attention.

It was popularly taken for granted, at the first, that the incumbents of all federal offices would presently be removed and that their places would be filled by new men, selected from the victorious party. Mr. Lincoln had been thinking of this. He understood the situation and the strength it brought

to him. No other President ever had at his disposal more than a fraction of the appointing power, for good or evil, which would be his. He could hardly have had a vision, however, of the multitudinous offices afterwards to be created and added.

Here was, therefore, the opportunity for an exhibition of broad and courageous statesmanship. He plainly saw that the administration soon to fall into his hands would need all the support it could by any means obtain. He saw that he could not assume the position of the paymaster of a greedy party if he would long remain the ruler of a nation. It was not many days before he was reported, and truly, to have declared his intention of appointing to official positions Democrats as well as Republicans, and of retaining faithful and capable public servants wherever possible. There was a groan of dismay and wrath among the office-seekers, but subsequent developments proved that the President-elect was prepared to stand firmly by his wise and just decision.

As a sort of corollary of this, it was also made to be understood that Mr. Lincoln regarded the federal appointments at his disposal as in the nature of a public trust, and not at all as his private property or to be apportioned among his friends, relatives, or personal adherents. There was to be little advantage to any man in the fact that he had known Mr. Lincoln for many years; or had exchanged small favors with him; or employed him in law-business; or said "Good-morning" to him, daily.

This was terribly unexpected, and there were some hundreds who could never afterwards see that he had not been ungrateful, they could hardly say for what. Not a few declared him unmindful of his most sacred obligations-to themselves.

The great mass of tax-payers and other citizens, for whose uses the offices were created and their duties performed, were all the better satisfied. At the same time, the sting of defeat rankled less dangerously in the hearts of some hundreds of

thousands of people, whose good will was essential to the stability of what was, to all intents and purposes, a new govern

ment.

It was from the first manifest that Mr. Lincoln would have peculiar difficulty in the formation of his Cabinet. He was busy with that duty even before election-day. He would gladly have obtained the services of some well-known representative of the declared Union-loving element at the South, but no such man could be found. There was not one of sufficient prominence who loved the Union well enough to help an Abolition President to preserve it. Every day that came brought with it something to render the search more hopeless. It was therefore necessary to confine the selections made at first to the narrow circle of the chiefs of the Republican party. A majority of the Cabinet, when at last it was completed, were men who had received votes as candidates for nomination in the Chicago Convention. The man who called them around him had risen above all jealousies, all rivalries, all selfish considerations. The settlement of this important matter was not finished until after Mr. Lincoln's arrival in Washington, but enough had been done to assure him of the active co-operation of the strong men of his own political faith.

Perceiving how rapid was and would be the unification of the elements with which the nation was to struggle for its life, it was the part of a sound and wise statesmanship to consolidate, with all possible speed, the power which was to meet the now inevitable shock of battle. The difficulties of Mr. Lincoln's position at that time have been but little understood. The majority of those who have written about them have strangely taken it for granted that he was in a manner ignorant of the course of events. They have regarded him as being as much taken by surprise by each successive development as might be any private citizen who puzzled over the news brought to him, correctly or incorrectly, by his favorite newspaper.

On the contrary, Mr. Lincoln's preparatory education from childhood, supplemented now through a thousand channels of information, public and private, placed him beyond and above the possibility of a surprise.

There was an absorbing problem constantly before him now, and his every act and word had to be weighed with reference to the danger of an adverse, because premature, solution. It was, simply stated, whether the surely coming storm could be delayed until the new government should be placed in possession of the national capital, and that also with the nominal acquiescence of the government which was passing away; for four months had yet to elapse between November of the election and March of the inauguration, and in four months what might not happen! Considering what the former government had been in its nature, plans, purposes, and subserviencies, the best interests of the whole country were served by the fact that for the time being there was no President at Washington, and that the Disunion leaders were acting for themselves upon that well-understood hypothesis. Mr. Buchanan, the nominal President, weak, vacillating, out of date, groped blindly around among the jarring factions of his kaleidoscopic Cabinet, while its traitors and perjured conspirators were begging their more hot-headed confederates in the cotton States not to spoil their vile work for them by over-haste. At the same time, the loyal members of the same remarkable junto of "constitutional advisers" were struggling manfully to keep in hand something in the outward semblance of a "Union" to hand over to the man whom the people had selected to take the control of it. How nearly they came Mr. Lincoln, from day

to an utter failure was well known to to day. The gloom deepened around him and within him, until his best friends could but see the shadows on his face, the circles under his eyes, the intensity of the sadness in which he had been called to make his dwelling-place. He himself was aware of this external effect and saw a danger in it. Lest it