As to Chase’s candidacy, Lincoln once said, according to Nicolay: “I have determined to shut my eyes as far as possible to everything of the sort. Mr. Chase makes a good secretary and I shall keep him where he is.” Then with characteristic magnanimity, he added: “If Chase becomes President, all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.” But as Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote in December, 1863:
I presume it is true that Mr. Chase’s friends are making for his nomination, but it is all lost labor; Old Abe has the inside track so completely that he will be nominated by acclamation when the convention meets.
A reference here to the activities of Chase’s brilliant daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, in the Tilden and Hayes contest many years later, may be pardoned. It is well known that through her potent influence the contest was finally decided in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, and against Samuel J. Tilden. This influence, it has been said, was used in a spirit of revenge against Mr. Tilden for defeating her father for the Democratic nomination in 1868. Col. A. K. McClure agrees with me in this, as will be shown by the following quotation from his book, Our Presidents and How We Make Them:
The Democratic National Convention met in New York on the 4th of July, 1868. There was a strong sentiment among the delegates favorable to the nomination of a liberal Republican for President, but Chief Justice Chase, who was an old-time Democrat and who had won a very large measure of Democratic confidence by his ruling in the impeachment case of President Johnson, was a favorite with a very powerful circle of friends who had quietly, but very thoroughly, as they believed, organized to have him nominated by a spontaneous tidal wave after a protracted deadlock between the leading candidates. Chase would have been nominated at the time Seymour was chosen, and in like manner, had it not been for the carefully laid plan of Samuel J. Tilden to prevent the success of Chase. Tilden was a master leader, subtle as he was able, and he thoroughly organized the plan to nominate Seymour, not so much that he desired Seymour, but because he was implacable in his hostility to Chase.
It was well known by Chase and his friends that Tilden crucified Chase in the Democratic convention of 1868, and this act of Tilden’s had an impressive sequel eight years later when the election of Tilden hung in the balance in the Senate, and when Kate Chase Sprague, the accomplished daughter of Chase, decided the battle against Tilden.
While Charles Sumner was openly for Lincoln, he privately criticized him, even after the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation which had freed the slaves of the South.
I have always believed that Lincoln did not consult with Sumner as to that message, and that that was the cause of his ill-feeling. Thaddeus Stevens, the great Free Soil representative of Pennsylvania, was dissatisfied because the President was unwilling to confiscate all the property of the secessionists and to inflict other punishments upon them: he was openly hostile to Lincoln.
For the following hitherto unpublished letter, from Horace Greeley to Mark Howard, a prominent Connecticut Republican, I am indebted to the latter’s daughter, Mrs. Graves. It throws an interesting light upon the fears and uncertainties of the period, and indicates Greeley’s lack of confidence in Lincoln as the strong man of the nation. The letter is dated ten months before the second election, and Greeley’s opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s renomination became the more undisguised and intense as time went on.
Office of the Tribune.
New York, Jan. 10, 1864.
Dear Sir,—I mean to keep the Presidency in the background until we see whether we cannot close up the war. I am terribly afraid of letting the war run into the next Presidential term; I fear it will prove disastrous to go to the ballot-boxes with the war still pending. Let us have peace first, then we can see into the future.