Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle

Author:David Von Drehle [Drehle, David Von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-11-30T12:27:00+00:00

9

AUGUST

Frequently that summer, a man arrived at the White House whose role in the Civil War was little known at the time and has long since been nearly forgotten. But it mattered enough in those dark months for Lincoln to welcome the man and close the door—always close the door. The president was seen in every mood and variety of transaction in 1862: laughing, crying, raging, despairing, seasick, poetic, calculating, robust, exhausted, pleading, commanding. But these closed-door meetings went unseen and unrecorded because, like the magician who hides the workings of his art, Lincoln preferred to obscure the machinations behind his political victories. His rise from washed-up congressman and frontier lawyer to head of the Republican Party in six short years was a masterpiece of apparent levitation. The work that went into it—the letter writing, the anonymous editorials, the cultivation of powerful men and influential writers, the occasional cunning trick—as much as possible, he kept all these hidden.

Lincoln’s visitor was James M. Edmunds, a wealthy lumberyard owner from Michigan and the principal builder of that state’s Republican Party. One observer wrote that Edmunds was “said to be one of the best informed and most capable politicians in the country” and among “the shrewdest of long, hawk-nosed, twinkle-eyed, sharp, smiling old men.” He bore a passing resemblance to Lincoln—the same high forehead, narrow face, and deep-set eyes capable of flashing from merriment to sorrow in a moment—and, like Lincoln, he was a master organizer. In 1855, when Edmunds was elected chairman of the state Republicans, every member of the Michigan congressional delegation was a Democrat. By 1860, Edmunds’s party had captured all six seats. As president, Lincoln chose Edmunds for one of the most politically sensitive jobs in Washington, a job he himself had once dreamed of holding: he named Edmunds commissioner of the General Land Office, a nerve center of patronage and favor trading and feathering of nests. Edmunds, in other words, applied the grease that kept the cogs of government humming.

In most respects during that difficult summer, the president was feeling his way forward one day at a time. As one senator recalled, “Lincoln used to tell us that when he got up in the morning it was his purpose and endeavor to do the very best he could and knew how for that day—not being able to foresee, or devise or determine … what was best to be done for the morrow.” His meetings with Edmunds were an exception to that rule. The two men were looking ahead to autumn, when Americans would go to the polls for the first time since the war began. Given the sharp drop in Northern morale, Lincoln expected the Democrats to do well, and he needed to prepare for that likelihood. So how could he offset, at least partly, the effect of an opposition victory?

From those meetings with Edmunds came a plan for a new organization, one that seemed to be above politics and independent of the two rival parties. Its purpose was to maintain support for the original, bipartisan cause of the North: saving the Union.

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