asury. The shock of this defeat led the New York Senator to
decline entering the Cabinet. "Circumstances which have occurred since
I expressed my willingness to accept the office of secretary of
state," he wrote, on March 2, "seem to me to render it my duty to ask
leave to withdraw that consent."[718]

[Footnote 717: "Seward and his friends were greatly offended at the
action of Curtin at Chicago. I was chairman of the Lincoln state
committee and fighting the pivotal struggle of the national battle,
but not one dollar of assistance came from New York, and my letters to
Thurlow Weed and to Governor Morgan, chairman of the national
committee, were unanswered. Seward largely aided the appointment of a
Cabinet officer in Pennsylvania, who was the most conspicuous of
Curtin's foes, and on Curtin's visit to Seward as secretary of state,
he gave him such a frigid reception that he never thereafter called at
that department."--Alex. K. McClure, _Recollections of Half a
Century_, p. 220.]

[Footnote 718: Nicolay and Hay, _Abraham Lincoln_, Vol. 3, p. 370.]

The reception of the unexpected note sent a shiver through Lincoln's
stalwart form. This was the man of men with whom for weeks he had
confidentially conferred, and upon whose judgment and information he
had absolutely relied and acted, "I cannot afford to let Seward take
the first trick," he said to his secretary,[719] after pondering the
matter during Sunday, and on Monday morning, while the inauguration
procession was forming, he penned a reply. "Your note," he said, "is
the subject of the most painful solicitude with me; and I feel
constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The
public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal
feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction. Please consider
and answer by nine o'clock a.m. to-morrow." That night, after the
day's pageant and the evening's reception had ended, the President and
Seward talked long and confidentially, resulting in the latter's
withdrawal of his letter and his nomination and confirmation as
secretary of state. "The President is determined that he will have a
compound Cabinet," Seward wrote his wife, a few days after the unhappy
incident; "and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent. I was at
one time on the point of refusing--nay, I did refuse, for a time, to
hazard myself in the experiment. But a distracted country appeared
before me, and I withdrew from that posi