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“attached little or no importance” to a campaign into eastern Tennessee. A light snow over an earlier crust of sleet covered the ground, and the rutted side streets were frozen. Lincoln did much of his best thinking while walking, and since he resisted all efforts to surround him with bodyguards, he almost certainly made this trip alone or nearly alone. Dressed in his black cloak and hat, stark against the whiteness of the lawn, the president cut a distinctive figure. “When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side,” his law partner William Herndon once wrote. “He put the whole foot flat on the ground at once, not landing on the heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, and hence there was no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory—catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating.”
    McClellan was still weak from his illness, but after his meeting with Lincoln the general again took up his pen, this time to write a spine-stiffener to his old friend Buell. “The political consequences of the delay … will be much more serious than you seem to anticipate,” McClellan warned. He had his own reasons for wanting Buell to be more aggressive: if Buell could get far enough into Tennessee to cut the South’s main east–west railroad, then McClellan could launch his campaign in Virginia without worrying about Rebel reinforcements pouring in from the west. Nevertheless, the young general’s explicit support of Lincoln’s efforts might have been a sign that he was awakening to political reality himself.
    Yet when it came to his own conduct and his own command, McClellan was as uncooperative as ever. Despite Lincoln’s encouragement on New Year’s Day, by January 6 the general still had not met with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. When the cabinet convened that day for a discussion with the committee, the radicals from Congress were angrier than before. Ben Wade and the others pressed Lincoln to fire McClellan. They were sure that the general’s Democratic, antiabolition views were the root cause of his army’s failure to do anything more assertive than dig trenches around Washington and march in parades. “A great deal of discussion took place,” Treasury Secretary Chase noted mildly in his diary. Chase, in fact, was one of the most active participants, and he clearly had an agenda of his own.
    Lincoln’s cabinet was, in the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin, “a team of rivals,” comprising Lincoln’s vanquished political opponents and leading members of the opposition Democratic Party. It was the embodiment of the clashing fragments of the Union and, like the Union itself, was easily distracted from the crisis of the moment by the chafing of past disputes and by scheming over future rivalries. Others in the cabinet tried to suppress their political ambitions, but Salmon Chase did not. Even while serving in 1862 as one of Lincoln’s most important advisers, Chase was obviously angling to run for the presidency in 1864. “He has got the presidential maggot in his head and it will wriggle there as long as it is warm,” Lincoln observed. Playing the dual role of key official and leading rival kept Chase quite busy. In fact, he was starting to worry that service to Lincoln was a dead weight dragging him down. “He would rather be on the bench of the Supreme Court, or in the Senate,” a confidant reported. “He begins to fear that to reach the presidency, with Seward’s opposition and all the contingencies and very great dangers of managing the finances during this very great crisis, is rather a ‘hard road to travel.’”
    An errand Chase ran on that morning of January 6, before the cabinet meeting, provides a vivid example of his conflicted circumstances. He had been working furiously for months to patch up the government’s dire fiscal