David Bromwich, who lectured on Lincoln's legacy last week in Colorado, responds to a post by Phil Weiss on Lincoln's failed 1849 effort to get a presidential appointment, commissioner of the Land Office:
Why do people grasp at dirty straws on the subject of Lincoln for the sake of
making him "more human?" A dubious undertaking; and not well rewarded in this
instance. The insinuation of official political chasteness, accompanied by a
deceptive economy-of-truth in his correspondence over the appointment to the
Land Office under President Taylor, can only be achieved by stringing together
several inferential jumps.
First, the article to which you give a link, by Thomas F. Schwartz in the
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Society, on Butterfield, Lincoln, and Illinois
Whiggery, contains this apparently unobjectionable passage: "Lincoln knew
Butterfield both as an accomplished attorney and fellow Whig." But that is not
quite right. In his letter to Josiah M. Lucas of April 25, 1849, Lincoln
writes; "As to Butterfield, he is my personal friend, and is qualified to do
the duties of the office; but of the quite one hundred Illinoisians, equally
well qualified, I do not know one with less claims to it." He means (if you are
used to Lincoln's understatement): Butterfield is technically qualified and he,
Lincoln, being his friend, must speak less ill of him than an impartial judge
would do; but even so, he is compelled to say that Butterfield is no more than
technically qualified; and he implies that, for both general intelligence and
probity, Butterfield would not be close to the top of anyone's list. Lincoln in
fact seems to have thought him the reverse of "accomplished."
In a subsequent letter, to William B. Preston on May 16, Lincoln casts some
doubt on Butterfield's likely honesty by saying that he "is well qualified,
and, I suppose, would be faithful in office." Lincoln was a deliberate, dry and
logical writer of exact prose who took care with every word. The words, "I
suppose," stand out because they were meant to. In this second letter, he goes
on to remind Preston that when loyalty mattered, around the nomination of
General Taylor, the same Butterfield had shown conspicuous disloyalty and
heaped ridicule on the very idea of Zachary Taylor as a candidate.
Lincoln's next letter on the subject, to Duff Green on May 18, takes a
stronger line. Of Butterfield's impending appointment he now says: "This ought
not to be." The office is Illinois's only "crumb of patronage" and it will be
wasted on such a man. He concludes by asking whether Green cannot somehow "get
the ear of Gen. Taylor" and set things right. A fourth letter, to Joseph
Gillespie on May 19, is written in the just the same key, but it is more
urgent: "Not a moment's time is to be lost." A fifth, to Elisha Embree on May
25, goes a step further. It is now clear that Lincoln sees the appointment of
Butterfield as a disaster for the Illinois Whigs; and he asks Embree to write
to General Taylor and request that either Lincoln, or the man Lincoln
recommends, will receive the appointment as Commissioner of the General
Land-Office. To Josiah B. Herrick on June 3 he writes again saying that there
is not a moment to lose and that he himself will gladly be named in preference
to Butterfield.
A letter to Thomas Ewing, on June 22, looks back on the confusion created by
Lincoln's urgency and his stratagem, and requests that an impression of selfish
and unfriendly conduct which his friend Cyrus Edwards has taken from rumor and
partial evidence, be corrected by giving Edwards to understand that, in the
end, Lincoln withheld his own name for Edwards's benefit. Finally comes the
last letter in this sequence, another to Thomas Ewing, on October 13, 1849.
Here Lincoln writes to dispel the rumor "that there was a clique in Springfield
determined to prevent Butterfield's confirmation; and, that Lincoln would give a
thousand dollars to have it done." In short, he utterly disclaims knowledge of
such a clique; and he adds that he does not believe it existed without his
knowledge.
That ought to be enough. But, from the fact that he does not disclaim the
offer of a bribe, you conclude that Lincoln may have been concealing a bribe he
did, in fact, offer ad hoc, without the assistance of any clique. Look again at
the grammar of the sentence and you will see how wire-drawn this theory is. The
charge of instigating the corrupt actions of a clique governs everything that is
said about the bribe. If there was no clique, there was no party to issue the
bait for corrupt proceeding.
You have tried to outwit Lincoln as a lawyer; does not Lincoln's defense
speak for itself? The true moral of this episode seems to be the surprising
prevalence in the mind of Lincoln of the sentiment of party loyalty. As Mark
Neely observes, in a sentence quoted by Schwartz, the Butterfield affair
"strengthened Lincoln's realization that patronage must go to the party
faithful to keep the party from falling apart." And we may know, by other
evidence–most of all, the House Divided speech and the Lincoln-Douglas
debates–that Lincoln recognized that party and principle could go hand in
hand; just as "bipartisanship" and a thoroughly slack inattention to principle
may go hand in hand. If there is a complex message in Lincoln's career for
President Obama to take notice of, this may be a substantial part of it.
For the rest, why seek to rob yourself of a hero when the hero is genuine?
This seems a fallacy on which too much of our human-interest journalism and
human-interest history writing ultimately rests. Better, surely, to appreciate
Lincoln by taking the pains to know exactly what it is we are appreciating. We
may then come to admire his "coolness, forecast, and capacity" (to borrow words
he applied to Jefferson) even more than his well-founded respect for the close
relationship between party loyalty, consistency of opinion, and conscience.
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