Dec., 1862.

CHAP. XII. he had gone back to the Cabinet his suggestion that both would better retire was no longer practicable. After a Sunday passed in very serious consideration, he resolved to withdraw his resignation. He was unable, even then, to imitate the brevity of Mr. Seward's note. He sent to the President his note of the 20th inclosed in another, in which he said that reflection had not much, if at all, changed his original impression, but that it had led him to the conclusion that he ought in this matter to conform his action to the President's judgment. He would therefore resume his post as Secretary of the Treasury, ready, however, to retire at any moment if, in the President's judgment, the success of the Administration might be in the slightest degree promoted thereby.

The untrained diplomatist of Illinois had thus met and conjured away, with unsurpassed courage and skill, one of the severest crises that ever threatened the integrity of his Administration. He had to meet it absolutely unaided: from the nature of the case he could take no advice from those who were nearest him in the Government. By his bold and original expedient of confronting the Senators with the Cabinet, and having them discuss their mutual misunderstandings under his own eye, he cleared up many dangerous misconceptions, and, as usually happens when both parties are men of intelligence and good-will, brought about a friendlier and more considerate feeling between his Government and the Republican leaders than had ever before existed. By placing Mr. Chase in such an attitude that his resignation became necessary to his own sense of dignity he made himself absolute

master of the situation; by treating the resignations CHAP. XII. and the return to the Cabinet of both ministers as one and the same transaction he saved for the nation the invaluable services of both, and preserved his own position of entire impartiality between the two wings of the Union party.

The results of this achievement were not merely temporary. From that hour there was a certain loosening of the hitherto close alliance between Mr. Chase and the Republican opposition to the President, while a kind of comradeship, born of their joint sortie and reëntrance into the Government, gave thereafter a greater semblance of cordiality to the relations between the Secretaries of State and of the Treasury. But above all, the incident left the President seated more firmly than ever in the saddle. When the Cabinet had retired, and the President remained with the resignation of Mr. Chase in his hands, he said to a friend who entered soon after, in one of those graphic metaphors so often suggested to him by the memories of his pioneer childhood, and which revealed his careless greatness perhaps more clearly than his most labored official utterances, "Now I can ride; I have got a pumpkin in each end of my bag."

Nearly a year later he said in a conversation relating to this matter: "I do not see how it could have been done better. I am sure it was right. If I had yielded to that storm and dismissed Seward the thing would all have slumped over one way, and we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my hands, and I put it through."

Senator

Ira Harris

of

New York.

J. H., Diary.

CHAP. XII.

Though the opposition to Mr. Seward did not immediately come to an end,' it never exhibited such vitality again, and its later manifestations were treated far more cavalierly by Mr. Lincoln. He had even before this dismissed one very respectable committee from New York who had called to express an unfavorable opinion of the premier, by saying, with unwonted harshness, that they would "Life of S. be willing to see the country ruined if they could turn out Seward; and after this incident he never again allowed the Secretary of State to be attacked with impunity in his presence.

Warden,

P. Chase,"

p. 468.

1 There was a long and heated "Tribune" and the "Times," in discussion between Mr. Greeley regard to the culpability of the and Mr. Raymond, in the columns Secretary of State in the matter of their respective journals, the of his dispatches.

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