Free Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle Page B

of a professional soldier to understand that when the president and the general in chief were both instructing him to send an expedition southward, he ought to launch some boats and march some troops. McClellan’s letter to Buell, meanwhile, had reached Louisville and made a similar impression there.
    But Lincoln didn’t know that the ice was beginning to break, so he kept chipping away.
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    January 11 was a fine Saturday, warm and pleasant. The Taft boys were visiting; though the president’s sons were notorious for barging in on their father as he held cabinet meetings or pondered state papers, today Willie, Tad, and their two friends thundered up the stairs and clambered out onto the roof, where they put the finishing touches on the quarterdeck of an imaginary warship. Pretending to be sailors in a fleet commanded by Commodore Abraham Lincoln, the four boys took turns scanning the Potomac and its yonder shore through a spyglass, alert for signs of enemy activity.
    Thus protected, the president worked at his desk. He had at last found his way out from under the Cameron problem, and now he crafted an artful pair of letters to his secretary of war. One letter fired the man, and the other tried to make him feel good about it.
    The U.S. ambassador to Russia, a flamboyant abolitionist named Cassius Marcellus Clay, had asked to return from St. Petersburg to lead troops into battle. The prospect of General Clay excited few people other than the man himself, for he was impulsive and emotional, notorious for brawling and dueling. But the opening in Russia created a suitable post for a former secretary of war. Lincoln’s first letter to Cameron, written for public consumption, briskly informed him that he would be nominated for the Russian mission two days hence. This letter would show the public that the president was serious about cleaning up the War Department. But Lincoln knew that Cameron would read the official letter as “a dismissal, and, therefore, discourteous,” according to Salmon Chase, and the president understood that an offended Cameron was a dangerous Cameron. So he wrote a second, longer letter, which he marked private. In this one, Lincoln nursed Cameron’s wounded pride, assuring the ousted secretary of his esteem and friendship. This deft bit of diplomacy was successful: Cameron resigned without public complaint.
    Lincoln’s dismissal of Cameron went smoothly because he had found another Pennsylvanian to fill the post. But his outgoing and incoming secretaries of war shared little besides their home state; substituting Edwin M. Stanton for Simon Cameron was like replacing a butter knife with a buzz saw. Warned that the energetic, headstrong lawyer might “run away with the whole concern,” Lincoln countered with a story of a preacher whose sermons were so passionate that folks had to put bricks in the preacher’s pockets to keep him from flying away. “I may have to do that with Stanton,” he said, “but if I do, bricks in his pocket will be better than bricks in his hat.”
    Yet Stanton was not an obvious choice. At a time when congressional Republicans were complaining about Democrats in key positions, Stanton was one more Democrat, and he was tainted by his service as attorney general in the do-nothing administration of the previous president, James Buchanan. Lincoln’s adviser Montgomery Blair warned darkly that Stanton was not to be trusted. And the president’s own experience of Stanton would have seemed to rule out any hope of an appointment. Years earlier, Lincoln had been retained as one of several lawyers helping to defend a manufacturer of reaping machines against the powerful McCormick Company in a patent dispute. Stanton was the star of the manufacturer’s defense team, and he had gone to great lengths to humiliate Lincoln when the case finally went to trial. Calling him “that damned long armed Ape,” Stanton refused to seat Lincoln at counsel’s table, or even to