Senator Morgan spent
last evening at my house. Our conversation was chiefly on public affairs, but
there was not that unreserved and cordial intimacy which we have sometimes had.
No allusion was made to the national convention, which was unnatural and could
not have been, had there been our old and friendly sympathy.
I censured strongly,
perhaps harshly, the proposed Constitutional changes and the method of getting
them through Congress by caucuses, excluding the Democratic minority and one
third of the States, etc. He attempted no defense or justification. Trumbull,
he tells me, has introduced another of his revolutionary bills to deprive the
President of his Constitutional right of removing from office. This subject,
like most measures in each house, was passed through a caucus crucible. M. says
he refused to give it his sanction, and so did one other.
I have no doubt
Morgan feels a little uncomfortable in the existing state of things, and I fancy
he is conscious he has committed a mistake. There are strange men in position
in New York. The Weed school is a bad one. Raymond is a specimen. A man of
considerable talent, but of little consistency of principle. I have so said to
the President more than once, and I think he understands R., yet Seward is in
with him, directs his movements by Weed's help, and has influenced the
President in R.'s favor to some extent. No man has more injured the cause of
the President in Congress or more strengthened the Radicals than Raymond, the
pronounced organ of the Administration, but only the confidant of Seward. He
has by his fickle, versatile changes, attempting to go with the President but
always deserting him, and always clinging to party, deterred [some] by his example,
others by his ridiculous somersaults. No one follows him.
SOURCE: Gideon
Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and
Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, pp. 549-50
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