The President tells
me that Dennison did not intend to leave, — that his purpose was to maintain
his party relations but conform to the Administration in his action. He did not
want nor expect his resignation would be accepted. These were the President's
impressions. He looked upon it as a refined partyism to which he would give no
attention. Speed, he says, thought to be very short, and he, therefore, did not
reply to Speed's note resigning, but considered it a fact in conformity with
the terms of the note.
The authentic
published proceedings of the Radical leaders are disgraceful to the Members who
were present and took part. It shows their incapacity as statesmen and their
unfitness as legislators. Raymond publishes the statement, the injunction of
secrecy having been removed. He also prints a letter in his paper, the New York Times,
disclosing the revolutionary feeling of the leading Radicals, who are, in fact,
conspirators.
Montgomery Blair is
possessed of the sentiment that another civil war is pending and that the
Radical leaders design and are preparing for it. I am unwilling to believe that
a majority of Congress is prepared for such a step, but the majority is weak in
intellect, easily led into rashness and error by the few designing leaders, who
move and control the party machinery. There is no individuality and very little
statesmanship or wise legislation, and as little in the Senate. The war on the
President and on the Constitution, as well as on the whole of the people South,
except the negroes, is revolutionary.
The President, while
he has a sound and patriotic heart, has erred in not making himself and his
office felt as a power. He should long since have manifested his determination
to maintain and exercise his executive rights, in fact should in the first
month of the session, and as soon as the spirit and hostility of the Radical
leaders was apparent, have drawn the lines and made his own position known and
felt. I so said to him on more than one occasion. But the influence and counsel
of Seward, who deals in vacillating expedients, have been disastrous. He has
striven to keep alive and strengthen the party organization, which is opposed
to the President, and thus given power to the Radicals, who are conspiring
against him. The President's friends have, as a result, been proscribed and his
opponents favored by his own Administration. In this way Congress, where the
Administration had or might have a majority, has become consolidated against
the President. Those Members who were kindly disposed have been disciplined and
drawn away from him by this trimming New York management. His mind is tardy in
its movements, though honest and firm, and required stimulating and urging
onward at the very time when Seward was exerting himself to suppress and hold
back any decisive action in order to secure a party ascendancy in New York
under Thurlow Weed. Stanton, of course, operated with Seward to prevent
Executive action, for he was in all his feelings with the extreme Radicals,
though contriving to so far keep in with the President as to retain his place.
SOURCE: Gideon
Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and
Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, pp. 555-6
