he still kept "going around
peddling his griefs in private ears and sowing dissatisfaction against
Lincoln." So in spite of Lincoln's pregnant remark on this subject
that he "did not believe in keeping any man under," nobody supposed
that Lincoln would appoint him. Sumner and Congressman Alley of
Massachusetts had indeed gone to Lincoln to urge the appointment. "We
found, to our dismay," Alley relates, "that the President had heard of
the bitter criticisms of Mr. Chase upon himself and his Administration.
Mr. Lincoln urged many of Chase's defects, to discover, as we
afterwards learned, how his objection could be answered. We were both
discouraged and made up our minds that the President did not mean to
appoint Mr. Chase. It really seemed too much to expect of poor human
nature." One morning Alley again saw the President. "I have something
to tell you that will make you happy," said Lincoln. "I have just sent
Mr. Chase word that he is to be appointed Chief Justice, and you are
the first man I have told of it." Alley said something natural about
Lincoln's magnanimity, but was told in reply what the only real
difficulty had been. Lincoln from his "convictions of duty to the
Republican party and the country" had always meant to appoint Chase,
subject to one doubt which he had revolved in his mind till he had
settled it. This doubt was simply whether Chase, beset as he was by a
craving for the Presidency which he could never obtain, would ever
really turn his attention with a will to becoming the great Chief
Justice that Lincoln thought he could be. Lincoln's occasional
failures of tact had sometimes a noble side to them; he even thought
now of writing to Chase and telling him with simple seriousness where
he felt his temptation lay, and he with difficulty came to see that
this attempt at brotherly frankness would be misconstrued by a
suspicious and jealous man. Charles Sumner, Chase's advocate on this
occasion, was all this time the most weighty and the most pronounced of
those Radicals who were beginning to press for unrestricted negro
suffrage in the South and in general for a hard and inelastic scheme of
"reconstruction," which they would have imposed on the conquered South
without an attempt to conciliate the feeling of the vanquished or to
invite their co-operation in building up the new order. He was thus
the chief opponent of that more tentative, but as is now seen, more
liberal and more practical policy