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A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet. Gideon Welles
Читать онлайн.Название A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780819574985
Автор произведения Gideon Welles
Жанр История
Издательство Ingram
Some diary entries appearing here, such as those about the Emancipation Proclamation, the attempt by Senate Republicans to force Lincoln to reorganize his cabinet in December 1862, and the scene at the Petersen house as Lincoln lay dying, have often been cited by historians (though rarely reproduced in full). Many of the lesser-known passages are included for what they reveal about important historical figures and events; others offer interesting sidelights on the war or illuminate Welles’s personal qualities.
Welles recorded numerous comments about Lincoln, whom he liked and respected, but of whom he could also be critical, as is evident in multiple excerpts. Lincoln likewise held Welles in high regard, valued his advice, and apparently enjoyed his company, except on those occasions when he rushed to the White House in high dudgeon over some issue. The Welles-Lincoln relationship was strengthened because Welles’s wife, Mary, was among Mary Todd Lincoln’s few close female friends in Washington. One bond between them was that they both lost a child in 1862. Mary Welles helped nurse the dangerously ill Tad Lincoln when his mother was prostrate with grief over the death of his older brother Willie in February. Nine months later Mary’s youngest child, Hubert, died at age four – the sixth of the Welles children to die in childhood or adolescence. She also rose from a sick bed to attend Mrs. Lincoln following Lincoln’s assassination.7
The diary is studded with Welles’s usually shrewd, often caustic, sometimes unfair characterizations of his cabinet colleagues, senior army and navy officers, and other prominent public figures. Many such passages are found in the ensuing pages.
The book also contains excerpts about numerous other subjects. Among them are a scheme to colonize freed slaves in Central America; the debate over whether Lincoln should authorize the use of privateers against blockade-runners and Confederate commerce raiders; Welles’s disagreements with Secretary of State William Henry Seward – and sometimes with Lincoln – about enforcement of the blockade; the adverse impact of conscription on navy recruitment of able-bodied seamen; various Connecticut-related matters in which Welles perforce became involved; his resistance to attempts to politicize hiring and firing at the navy yards; and his periodic musings about the war’s causes, course, and probable consequences.
Welles was born in 1802 into a relatively prosperous family, the fourth of five sons of Samuel and Anne Hale Welles.8 The family traced its lineage to Thomas Welles, an early settler of Hartford and the fourth man to serve as governor of Connecticut colony. Samuel was successively a farmer, merchant, exporter of agricultural products to the British West Indies, and money lender. He was also active politically. At a time when the Federalist Party dominated Connecticut politics, he enthusiastically supported Thomas Jefferson. Glastonbury voters elected him first selectman and later sent him to the state legislature. He also represented the town at the convention in 1818 that framed Connecticut’s first constitution.9
Gideon Welles was educated at the local district school, the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut, and the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Norwich, Vermont. As a young man he lacked direction. He twice began the study of law, but each time abandoned it essentially out of boredom. He helped his father with his investment and mortgage business; and a paternal loan enabled him to try his hand at wholesale merchandising. In 1823 and 1824 he published, under a pen name, five vignettes in the New York Mirror and Ladies Literary Gazette. But after this initial success, a series of rejection letters from the Mirror and other publications ended his hopes for a literary career.
In 1825, during his second try at mastering the law, Welles finally discovered the dual vocation to which he would devote most of his adult life: journalism and politics. These occupations were closely linked in the 19th Century, when most newspapers were party organs and editors were well-represented among party leaders at the local, state, and national levels.
Welles began writing for the Hartford Times in 1825 and assumed editorial direction of the paper the following year. He quickly distinguished himself as an outspoken champion of Andrew Jackson’s presidential candidacy. Over the next several years, he concentrated on making the nascent Democratic Party an effective vote-getting organization and the Times its leading editorial voice in the state. Although Jackson lost Connecticut in both 1828 and 1832, the party steadily gained strength, partly because of Welles’s efforts. In 1836, Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s hand-picked successor, carried the state. And in 1835, 1836, and 1837, the Democrats elected the governor and won majorities in the state legislature.10 This enabled them to enact several reforms Welles advocated, including a mechanic’s lien law, the end of imprisonment for debt, and the nation’s first general incorporation law. As an exponent of the egalitarian strain of Jacksonian Democracy, Welles supported the latter measure out of a conviction that if the state intended to continue issuing corporate charters, it should make them generally available, not grant them only to the wealthy, politically well-connected few.
Welles continued to play a major leadership role in the state party well into the 1840s. Although he turned the editorship of the Times over to Alfred E. Burr in 1837, he still wrote many of its editorials. He also crafted many of the party’s annual campaign platforms, influenced the distribution of federal patronage in the state, maintained extensive correspondence with prominent Democrats in other states, and traveled to Washington periodically to talk strategy with other party leaders. From 1836 to early 1841 he was Hartford’s postmaster, a plum patronage appointment. In 1846, President Polk named him to head the Navy Department’s Bureau of Provisions and Clothing, a post he held until June 1849, when President Zachary Taylor replaced him with a fellow Whig.
In the later 1840s, Welles’s influence declined as other ambitious – and in his view unprincipled – men moved to take over the state party. The issue of slavery’s expansion into the western territories deeply divided Connecticut Democrats, as it did Democrats throughout the free states. Welles personally favored the Wilmot Proviso, which, if enacted, would have barred the institution from the vast area the United States acquired from Mexico at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1848. As a patronage appointee in the Polk administration, however, Welles had to be very circumspect about the Proviso, which was anathema to the president.
Welles’s enemies in the state party – foremost among them Isaac Toucey – were eager not to offend their southern Democratic brethren.11 Thus they rejected the Wilmot Proviso in favor of the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which left it to the settlers of each territory to decide whether to permit slavery. Welles was sure popular sovereignty would lead to the institution’s spread.
In 1848, some Connecticut Democrats bolted to the new Free-Soil Party, which was committed to confining slavery within its existing geographic boundaries. Although sympathetic to the Free-Soilers, Welles did not join them, lest he jeopardize his job in the Navy Department.12 The bolt further weakened his position within the state Democratic Party, since many of the bolters had been his allies in the struggle for control of it.
Returning home from his three years in Washington, Welles signaled his dissatisfaction with the conservatives now dominating the party in Connecticut by identifying himself as an “independent Democrat” whose politics, he liked to think, were determined by principles and conscience, not party bosses or political expediency. He hoped President Franklin Pierce, the dark horse candidate the Democratic national convention nominated in 1852 after 49 contentious ballots, would move the party in a free-soil direction. But Pierce soon proved to be a “doughface” – a northern man with southern principles who faithfully did the bidding of the party’s slave-state wing.13
Welles’s already tenuous party loyalty was further weakened by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act repealed the ban on slavery above 36º 30’ of north latitude in the Louisiana Purchase, a ban adopted as part of the Missouri Compromise 34 years earlier. Sponsored by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and backed by President Pierce at the insistence of southern Democrats, the act was widely seen in the North as betraying