Early in Lincoln’s first term, Watt continued to attract unfavorable attention. John F. Potter, chairman of the House Select Committee investigating the loyalty of government employees, informed the president in September 1861 of damning testimony about Watt’s pro-Confederate sympathies. Two independent witnesses confirmed that the gardener, shortly after the first battle of Bull Run, had proclaimed that the South could not be defeated and that the Union army consisted of human trash. Mary Lincoln, who was “determined that he should be retained,” vehemently denied those allegations, much to Potter’s annoyance. The congressman forwarded the documents about Watt to the president, who did not dismiss the gardener. Instead, according to Charles A. Dana, Mary Lincoln accosted Cameron and “after a good deal of bullying on her part & resistance on his, actually gets him appointed a lieutenant in the army with orders to report for duty not to the colonel of his regiment, but to the President.” When Potter’s committee issued its report in January, it expressed “surprise that, in the face of such testimony, a man clearly disloyal, instead of being instantly removed, should have been elevated to a higher and more responsible position.” Lincoln had committed a “blunder,” said the National Anti-Slavery Standard, for during “such times as these, no man against whom a respectable suspicion can lie should be kept in place under the government.” The journalist D. W. Bartlett explained that Lincoln “clings to the men around him. Not even the menials about the White House, some of whom have been proven before Potter’s investigation committee to be guilty of indulging secession sentiments, have been dismissed, because Mr. Lincoln good-naturedly says he can’t believe them to be guilty.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
(echo:: @ ⌗)