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 light by Nicolay and Hay, and is one of their
most valuable contributions to the history of those days. In that paper
Seward actually told the President that at the end of a month's