The six members of President-elect Lincoln’s cabinet in 1860 had not a yes-man among them. That cabinet was made up of three defeated rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 [William Sward as Secretary of State, Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury and Edwin Bates as Attorney General] and three Democrats [Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy, Montgomery Blair as Postmaster General and, eventually, Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War.] Clearly, each man had reason[s] aplenty to look down on and/or be antagonistic to the new President, especially in that age of knee-jerk spite.
As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes, “Every member of this administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln. Their presence in the cabinet might have threatened to eclipse the obscure prairie lawyer from Springfield.”
Admittedly, it was a balanced cabinet, more or less accurately representing the soon-to-be-bloody divisions that were poised to swamp the ship of state in a titanic Civil War. It was also, pound for pound, arguably the most talented cabinet in American Presidential history. But along with the talent were six egos the size of barns. In short, cabinet meetings stretching to the dim distant horizon seemed doomed to fight the war in miniature at their twice-weekly meetings.
And what of that obscure prairie lawyer from Springfield? Lincoln was warned about his cabinet choices at the very outset: “They’ll eat you up!” Remarkably, Lincoln just laughed. “They’re as likely to eat each other up,” he countered.
What he seems NOT to have said – here or at any other of the many perilous points in his remarkable career – is anything remotely like, “Maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.”
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