Rightly or wrongly the new President and his chief advisers in
Washington decided that, before they could administer the
Government, they must make sure of a government to administer,
and that this chance depended on the action of Virginia. The
whole ascendancy of the winter wavered between the effort of the
cotton States to drag Virginia out, and the effort of the new
President to keep Virginia in. Governor Seward representing the
Administration in the Senate took the lead; Mr. Adams took the
lead in the House; and as far as a private secretary knew, the
party united on its tactics. In offering concessions to the
border States, they had to run the risk, or incur the certainty,
of dividing their own party, and they took this risk with open
eyes. As Seward himself, in his gruff way, said at dinner, after
Mr. Adams and he had made their speeches: "If there's no
secession now, you and I are ruined."
They won their game; this was their affair and the affair of
the historians who tell their story; their private secretaries
had nothing to do with it except to follow their orders. On that
side a secretary learned nothing and had nothing to learn. The
sudden arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington on February 23, and
the language of his inaugural address, were the final term of the
winter's tactics, and closed the private secretary's interest in
the matter forever.
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