Diary of Gideon Welles: January 31, 1866

The new shape of affairs shows itself in the social gatherings. At Mrs. Welles's reception to-day, a large number of the denizens of Washington who have not heretofore been visitors and whose sympathies and former associations were with the Rebels called. So many who have been distant and reserved were present as to excite her suspicions, and lead her to ask if I was not conceding too much. These new social friends are evidently aware of existing differences in the Administration. I noticed at the reception at the Executive Mansion last evening the fact that there was a number in attendance as if by preconcert. This I attribute more to the insane folly of the Radicals, who under Thad Stevens are making assaults on the President, than to any encouragement which the President has given to Rebel sympathizers. If professed friends prove false and attack him, he will not be likely to repel such friends as sustain him. I certainly will not.

While at a party at Senator Harris's, Senator Wilson took me one side and inquired if we were to have a break in the party. I told him I saw no necessity for it. The President was honest and sincere in his policy; it has been adopted with care and great deliberation, and I thought intelligently. I knew it to be with right intentions. If any considerable number of our friends were resolved to oppose the President and the policy of the Administration a division would be unavoidable. He could not abandon his convictions to gratify mere factious schemers.

We then got on the subject of the recently published letter of a "conversation between the President and a distinguished Senator," in which there were indications that the President would not go for unlimited negro suffrage in the District. Wilson inquired what course the President would be likely to pursue. I told him I was unable to answer that question, except as he would, from a general knowledge of the President's opinions on fundamental questions. He would be disposed to have the people of the District exercise the same rights in this regard as the people of the States.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 421-2

Diary of Gideon Welles: Thursday, December 21, 1865

Chandler, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, sent me a note this evening, stating that a pardon had been proposed for Pasco, recently convicted, after long struggles and delays, of a series of outrageous frauds and villainies upon the Government. Pasco was master plumber in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, one of a combination of thieves, cheats, and rascals. He was the principal scoundrel of the gang. He acknowledges that he had signed fraudulent certificates; in one instance admits that a party had delivered 20,000 pounds of copper, for which he was paid, when he actually delivered but 16,000; in another instance for 25,000 when only 19,000 was delivered. He received $8200 for the last false certificate, or one third of the swindle, the Government losing or being cheated out of about $26,000 in a single transaction. So of the former. Specifications of eleven distinct cheats similar to these, some of them of larger amounts, besides cases of actual theft, were proven on this fellow. He plead guilty, and was a week or two since sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment. Judge Cadwalader gave light punishment for the alleged reason that Pasco plead guilty and had made restitution when he could not escape conviction and fine. How much he may have cheated and defrauded the Government without detection cannot be known.

I called on the President after receiving Chandler's note and stated the facts. He was a good deal disturbed and seemed unable to express himself. He is evidently surprised, and I apprehend has blindly committed himself for a pardon. He says a large portion of the Pennsylvania delegation applied for the pardon, the district attorney among them, also a portion of the jury.

Senator Harris had quite an interview with me. Our principal chat was on the great question and he expresses himself as concurring in my opinions.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 400-1

Diary of Gideon Welles: Thursday, September 22, 1864

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 manœuvring 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.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 154-5

Diary of Edward Bates: January 13, 1862

To night, I was taken by surprise in hearing that Mr. Cameron sec. of War, has resigned, and goes to Russia, in lieu of Cash: M. Clay ²⁶ — and that Edwin M. Stanton ²⁷ is to take his place. This was a street rumor in the afternoon. At night, I was told by Senator Harris,²⁸ that the nominations had been actually made. Strange — not a hint of all this was heard last friday, at C.[abinet] C.[ouncil] and stranger still, I have not been sent for by the Prest. nor spoken to by any member. The thing, I learn, was much considered saturday and sunday — Hay²⁹ told the ladies at Eames’³⁰ jocosely, that the Cabinet had been sitting en permanence — and Mr. E[ames] himself informed me that Mr. Seward had been with the Prest: the whole of Sunday forenoon.

[Marginal Note.] Upon reflection, it is not strange — When the question is of the retaining or dismissing a member of the cabinet, the Prest. could not well lay the matter before the cabinet — he must do that himself.

There is a rumor in town, that Burnside³¹ has landed to attack Norfolk (proven afterwards, as I expected at the time, false)[.]

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²⁶ Cassius M. Clay, Kentucky abolitionist, editor, politician, had supported Lincoln In 1860 and expected to become secretary of War, but was appointed minister to Russia instead, 1861-1862, 1S63-1869. He was now returning -with a brigadier-generalship to make room for Cameron to be eased out of the Cabinet, but, when he got here, he refused to fight until the Government abolished slavery in the seceded states, and so the next year when Cameron tired of the post, he returned to Russia.

²⁷ Able Pittsburgh lawyer who practiced frequently before the U. S. Supreme Court; anti-slavery Democrat who believed in protection of slavery in the South where It legally existed; Free-Soiler in 1848; attorney-general in Buchanan's Cabinet, 1S60-1861, where he vigorously opposed the plan to abandon Fort Sumter ; bitter critic of Lincoln in 1860-1861; secretary of War, 1862-1868; professed supporter of Lincoln; treacherous enemy of Johnson. Bates shares Welles's distrust of Stanton even under Lincoln.

²⁸ Supra, Jan. 4, 1862, note 11.

²⁹ John M. Hay: poet; journalist; private secretary to the President; later, ambassador to Great Britain, 1897-1898; secretary of State, 1898-1905; historian of Lincoln.

³⁰ Charles Eames: international lawyer; commissioner to Hawaii, 1849; editor of the Nashville Union, in 1850, and the Washington Union, 1850-1854 ; minister resident to Venezuela, 1854-1857; at this time (1861-1867) counsel for the Navy Department and the captors in prize cases and for the Treasury Department in cotton cases.

³¹ Supra, Nov. 29, 1861, note 97.

SOURCE: Howard K. Beale, Editor, The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859-1866, p. 226-7

Diary of John Hay: Monday, December 23, 1863

I took to the Senate to-day the nomination of Schofield as Major General. The President had previously spoken to some of the Senators about it. He is anxious that Schofield should be confirmed so as to arrange this Missouri matter promptly. I told Sherman, Wilson, Harris and Doolittle. Senator Foote also agreed to do all he could to put the matter properly through. But on the nomination being read in Executive Session, Howard of Michigan objected to its consideration and it was postponed. Sherman and Doolittle tell me it will certainly go through when it is regularly taken up.

Lane came up to the President about it, and told him this. Lane is very anxious to have the Kansas part of the plan at once carried out.

Morgan says that Gratz Brown gave to Sumner to present to the Senate the radical protest against Schoflied’s confirmation, and that Sumner presented it to-day. The President sent for Sumner, but he was not at his lodgings.

The President is very much disappointed at Brown. After three interviews with him he understood that Brown would not oppose the confirmation. It is rather a mean dodge to get Sumner to do it in his stead

The President to-night had a dream: — He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said: — “He is a very common-looking man.” The President replied: — “The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.”

SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 141-3; Michael Burlingame, Editor, Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, p. 139-43.

Major-General George G. Meade to Margaretta Sergeant Meade, March 4, 1865

Headquarters Army Of The Potomac, March 4, 1865.

To-day's Chronicle has part of the opinion of the court of inquiry, which I suppose will be published in the Philadelphia papers. It has made quite a sensation in the army, as it censures Burnside, Willcox, Ferrero and a Colonel Bliss. But few persons understand the allusion in the last sentence.

Senator Harris told me that, after I was confirmed, he received a letter from Burnside, saying he was glad of it, and that I deserved it. I told Senator Harris I had no personal feeling against Burnside, and no desire to injure him.

Deserters still continue to come in, there being seventy-five yesterday, forty with arms. There are, however, no indications of an immediate evacuation either of Petersburg or Richmond, and the great fight may yet be fought out in this vicinity. There is nothing new in the camp, except you may tell George¹ the Third Infantry has reported, and is doing guard duty at headquarters in place of the “red legs.”

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¹ Son of General Meade.

SOURCE: George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Vol. 2, p. 266

Major-General George G. Meade to Margaretta Sergeant Mead, February 14, 1864 – 7 p.m.

Willard's Hotel, Sunday, February 14, 1864—7 P. M.

I felt very badly at leaving you, but I tried to reconcile myself to what was inevitable and could not be helped. We had a very pleasant journey to this place. Mr. Cram and Colonel Bache joined us at the depot, and at Wilmington I found General Hartsuff and Colonel Sackett on the train and took them into the car. Mr. Felton, the president of the company, was at the cars and was very civil. When we crossed the Susquehanna an elegant cold collation with champagne was set out, of which we all freely partook. On arriving here we took tea, and soon afterwards, about nine o'clock, I went to bed. The next day I spent all the day at the Department and White House. The Secretary was, as he always is, very civil and ready to accede to all my suggestions. He gratified me very much by saying that there was no officer in command who had to so great a degree the implicit confidence of all parties as myself; but he said there were several officers in my army that did not have the confidence of the country, and that I was injuring myself by retaining them. I told him I did not know who they were, but that if he was aware of this fact, I thought it was his duty to retire them, and I should not object; and I suppose the result will be a pretty general sweeping out. While with the Secretary, Mr. Usher, Secretary of the Interior, came in and invited me to his house at seven o'clock. Supposing it to be an evening party, where I could show myself and slip out, I accepted; but on going there I found it to be a regular dinner party. Senators Collamore, Wilson, Wilkeson and Powell, together with Judges Holt and Law, and the ladies of the family, constituted the party. All received and treated me with great distinction and civility, and about 10 P. M. I got home, and, after a talk with Cram, went to bed, a little tired. I had intended to go down to the army this morning, but received last night a note from the Secretary, saying he wanted to see me to-day; so I had to spend some four or five hours at the Department, and the rest of the day have remained quietly in the house with Cram.

Mr. Harding with Mrs. Harding are here, also Cortlandt Parker. I have not seen our friends the Harrises, except the Senator.

SOURCE: George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Vol. 2, p. 164-5