Lincoln Job Letter

[jbarry]

Thanks for posting, Steve. The letter's recipient, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles mentions there is no job opening. His well-known diary indicates he was not predisposed to have hired Lincoln's friend in any place. Under President Johnson, Welles wrote on July 26, 1867:

"The President again asked me what I thought of put
ting Fred Douglass at the head of the Freedmen's Bu
reau, instead of Howard. I said if he proposed to appoint
negroes to any office, that perhaps would be as appropriate
as any. Howard is a very good sort of man, but loose in
taking and appropriating public property, and so intensely
Radical that I wished him removed, and an overturn in
the management of the Bureau.

But I was not prepared to appoint or recommend to be
appointed to so responsible a position a person because
he is a negro or a mulatto. Mr. Sumner and others have
expressed a hope that negroes would fill public and trusted
positions, but I cannot. They may succeed, under their
despotic and oppressive laws, in getting a few negroes
into Congress, but there would , in all probability, be a
sequence to this partisan negro philanthropy which would
be calamitous to the poor negroes themselves."
(Vol 3, p. 142-43.)