st to
him. In selecting his cabinet, which he did substantially before he left
Springfield for Washington, he thought it wise to call to his assistance
the strong men of his party, especially those who had given evidence of
the support they commanded as his competitors in the Chicago convention.
In them he found at the same time representatives of the
different shades of opinion within the party, and of the different
elements--former Whigs and former Democrats--from which the party had
recruited itself. This was sound policy under the circumstances. It
might indeed have been foreseen that among the members of a cabinet so
composed, troublesome disagreements and rivalries would break out. But
it was better for the President to have these strong and ambitious
men near him as his co-operators than to have them as his critics in
Congress, where their differences might have been composed in a common
opposition to him. As members of his cabinet he could hope to control
them, and to keep them busily employed in the service of a common
purpose, if he had the strength to do so. Whether he did possess this
strength was soon tested by a singularly rude trial.

There can be no doubt that the foremost members of his cabinet, Seward
and Chase, the most eminent Republican statesmen, had felt themselves
wronged by their party when in its national convention it preferred
to them for the Presidency a man whom, not unnaturally, they thought
greatly their inferior in ability and experience as well as in service.
The soreness of that disappointment was intensified when they saw this
Western man in the White House, with so much of rustic manner and speech
as still clung to him, meeting his fellow-citizens, high and low, on a
footing of equality, with the simplicity of his good nature unburdened
by any conventional dignity of deportment, and dealing with the great
business of state in an easy-going, unmethodical, and apparently
somewhat irreverent way. They did not understand such a man. Especially
Seward, who, as Secretary of State, considered himself next to the
Chief Executive, and who quickly accustomed himself to giving orders and
making arrangements upon his own motion, thought it necessary that he
should rescue the direction of public affairs from hands so unskilled,
and take full charge of them himself. At the end of the first month of
the administration he submitted a "memorandum" to President Lincoln,
which has been first brought to