THE PRESIDENT’S INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
Other Presidents have entered upon their high office with a certain modesty and distrust. Washington in his Inaugural Address declared his “anxieties,” also his sense of “the magnitude and difficulty of the trust,” “awakening a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications.”[114] Jefferson, in his famous Inaugural, so replete with political wisdom, after declaring his “sincere consciousness that the task is above his talents,” says: “I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire, … and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.”[115]
Our soldier, absolutely untried in civil life, entirely a new man, entering upon the sublimest duties, before which Washington and Jefferson had shrunk, said in his Inaugural: “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear.”[116] Great predecessors, with ample preparation for the responsibilities, had shrunk back with fear. He had none. Either he did not see the responsibilities, or the Cæsar began to stir in his bosom.
SELECTION OF HIS CABINET.
Next after the Inaugural Address, his first official act was the selection of his Cabinet; and here the general disappointment was equalled by the general wonder. As the President was little known except from the victories which had commended him, it was not then seen how completely characteristic was this initial act. Looking back upon it, we recognize the pretension by which all tradition, usage, and propriety were discarded, by which the just expectations of the party that had elected him were set at nought, and the safeguards of constitutional government were subordinated to the personal pretensions of One Man. In this Cabinet were persons having small relations with the Republican Party and little position in the country, some absolutely without claims from public service, and some actually disqualified by the gifts they had made to the President. Such was the political phenomenon presented for the first time in American history, while reported sayings of the President showed the simplicity with which he acted. To a committee he described his Cabinet as his “family,” with which no stranger could be allowed to interfere, and to a member of Congress he announced that he selected his Cabinet “to please himself and nobody else,”—being good rules unquestionably for the organization of a household and the choice of domestics, to which the Cabinet seem to have been likened. This personal government flowered in the Navy Department, where a gift-bearing Greek was suddenly changed to a Secretary. No less a personage than the grand old Admiral, the brave, yet modest Farragut, was reported as asking, on the fifth of March, the very day when the Cabinet was announced, in unaffected ignorance, “Do you know anything of Borie?” And yet this unconspicuous citizen, bearer of gifts to the President, was constituted the naval superior of that historic character. If others were less obscure, the Cabinet as a unit was none the less notable as the creature of Presidential will, where Chance vied with Favoritism as arbiter.
All this is so strange, when we consider the true idea of a Cabinet. Though not named in the Constitution, yet by virtue of unbroken usage among us, and in harmony with constitutional governments everywhere, the Cabinet has become a constitutional body, hardly less than if expressly established by the Constitution itself. Its members, besides being the heads of great departments, are the counsellors of the President, with the duty to advise him of all matters within the sphere of his office, being nothing less than the great catalogue in the Preamble of the Constitution, beginning with duty to the Union, and ending with the duty to secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Besides undoubted fitness for these exalted responsibilities, as head of a department and as counsellor, a member should have such acknowledged position in the country that his presence inspires confidence and gives strength to the Administration. How little these things were regarded by the President need not be said.
Unquestionably the President has a discretion in the appointment of his Cabinet; but it is a constitutional discretion, regulated by regard for the interests of the country and not by mere personal will, by statesmanship and not by favoritism. A Cabinet is a national institution and not a Presidential perquisite,—unless our President is allowed to copy the example of Imperial France. In all constitutional governments, the Cabinet is selected on public reasons, and with a single eye to the public service; it is not in any respect the “family” of the sovereign, nor is it “to please himself and nobody else.” English monarchs have often accepted statesmen personally disagreeable, when they had become representatives of the prevailing party,—as when George the Third, the most obstinate of rulers, accepted Fox, and George the Fourth, as prejudiced as his father was obstinate, accepted Canning, each bringing to the service commanding faculties. It is related that the Duke of Wellington, with military frankness, encountered the personal objections of the King in the latter case, by saying: “Your Majesty is the sovereign of England, with duties to your people far above any to yourself; and these duties render it imperative that you should at this time employ the abilities of Mr. Canning.”[117] By such instances in a constitutional government is the Cabinet fixed as a constitutional and not a personal body. It is only by some extraordinary hallucination that the President of a Republic dedicated to Constitutional Liberty can imagine himself invested with a transforming prerogative above that of any English sovereign, by which his counsellors are changed from public officers to personal attendants, and a great constitutional body, in which all citizens have a common interest, is made a perquisite of the President.
APPROPRIATION OF THE OFFICES.
Marked among the spectacles which followed, and kindred in character with the appropriation of the Cabinet as individual property, was the appropriation of the offices of the country, to which I refer in this place even at the expense of repetition. Obscure and undeserving relations, marriage connections, personal retainers, army associates, friends of unknown fame and notable only as personal friends or friends of his relations, evidently absorbed the Presidential mind during those months of obdurate reticence when a generous people supposed the Cabinet to be the all-absorbing thought. Judging by the facts, it would seem as if the chief and most spontaneous thought was how to exploit the appointing power to his own personal behoof. At this period the New York Custom-House presented itself to the imagination, and a letter was written consigning a military dependant to the generosity of the Collector. You know the rest. Dr. Johnson, acting as executor in selling the distillery of Mr. Thrale, said: “We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”[118] If the President did not use the sounding phrase of the great English moralist, it is evident that his military dependant felt in that letter all the “potentiality” advertised in the earlier case, and acted accordingly.