had
promised a Cabinet appointment to Pennsylvania; the followers of Simon
Cameron were a power; it had been necessary to win them over in order
to nominate Lincoln; they insisted that their leader was now entitled
to the Pennsylvania seat in the Cabinet; but there was an anti-Cameron
faction almost as potent in Pennsylvania as the Cameron faction. Both
sent their agents to Springfield to lay siege to Lincoln. In this
duel, the Cameron forces won the first round. Lincoln offered him
the Secretaryship. Subsequently, his enemies made so good a case that
Lincoln was convinced of the unwisdom of his decision and withdrew the
offer. But Cameron had not kept the offer confidential. The withdrawal
would discredit him politically and put a trump card into the hands
of his enemies. A long dispute followed. Not until Lincoln had reached
Washington, immediately before the inauguration, was the dispute ended,
the withdrawal withdrawn, and Cameron appointed.(4)

It was a dreary winter for the President-elect. It was also a brand-new
experience. For the first time he was a dispenser of favor on a grand
scale. Innumerable men showed their meanest side, either to advance
themselves or to injure others. As the weeks passed and the spectacle
grew in shamelessness, his friends became more and more conscious of his
peculiar melancholy. The elation of the campaign subsided into a deep
unhappiness over the vanity of this world. Other phases of the shadowy
side of his character also asserted themselves. Conspicuous was a
certain trend in his thinking that was part of Herndon's warrant for
calling him a fatalist. Lincoln's mysticism very early had taken a turn
toward predestination, coupled with a belief in dreams.(5) He did not in
any way believe in magic; he never had any faith in divinations, in the
occult, in any secret mode of alluring the unseen powers to take one's
side. Nevertheless, he made no bones about being superstitious. And he
thought that coming events cast their shadows before, that something, at
least, of the future was sometimes revealed through dreams. "Nature,"
he would say, "is the workshop of the Almighty, and we form but links in
the chain of intellectual and material life."(6) Byron's Dream was one
of his favorite poems. He pondered those ancient, historical tales which
make free use of portents. There was a fascination for him in the story
of Caracalla--how his murder of Geta was foretold, how he was upbraided
by the