Senator Harris called on me. He is jubilant over Sheridan's success, but much disturbed by the miserable intrigues of Weed and Seward in the city of New York. Says he has told the President frankly of his error, that he has only given a little vitality to Weed, whose influence has dwindled to nothing, and would have entirely perished but for the help which the President has given him. This he is aware has been effected through Seward, who is a part of Weed. The removal of Andrews as Naval Officer, the appointment of Wakeman to his place, causing Wakeman to leave the post-office, into which they have thrust Kelly, an old fiddler for Seward in other years, is a Weed operation. Seward carried it out.
Blair tells me that Weed is manÅ“uvring for a change of Cabinet, and Morgan so writes me. He has for that reason, B. says, set his curs and hounds barking at my heels and is trying to prejudice the President against me. Not unlikely, but I can go into no counter-intrigues. If the President were to surrender himself into such hands, which I do not believe, — he would be unworthy his position. He has yielded more than his own good sense would have prompted him already. For several months there has been a pretended difference between Seward and Weed; for a much longer period there has been an ostensible hostility between Weed and Sim Draper. I have never for a moment believed in the reality of these differences; but I am apprehensive the President is in a measure, or to some extent, deceived by them. He gives himself — too much, I sometimes think — into the keeping of Seward, who is not always truthful, not sensitively scrupulous, but a schemer, while Weed, his second part, and of vastly more vigor of mind, is reckless and direct, persistent and tortuous, avaricious of late, and always corrupt. We have never been intimate. I do not respect him, and he well knows it. Yet I have never treated him with disrespect, nor given him cause of enmity, except by avoiding intimacy and by declining to yield to improper schemes of himself and his friends. On one occasion, at an early period of the Administration, Mr. Seward volunteered to say that he always acted in concert with Weed, that “Seward's Weed and Weed's Seward.” If, as Blair supposes, Weed is operating against me, Seward probably is also, and yet I have seen no evidence of it, - certainly none recently.
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