Criticism of the administration grew ever more strident. Most congressional Republicans disagreed with Ohio Representative John A. Bingham’s contention that “Congress ought to act & not find fault with the President.” Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler groused that Lincoln was “timid vacillating & inefficient.” In early January, Congressman Henry L. Dawes told his wife that the “times are exceedingly dark and gloomy—I have never seen a time when they were so much so. Confidence in everybody is shaken to the very foundation—The credit of the Country is ruined—its arms impotent, its Cabinet incompetent, its servants rotten, its ruin inevitable. … The Govt. can’t survive sixty days of such a life as it is now living. Oh that such a Cause should be crucified to an unholy alliance between trifling indifference, utter incompetence and reeking corruption.” Ben Wade denounced the “blundering, cowardly, and inefficient” administration and sneered that one “could not inspire Old Abe, Seward, Chase, or Bates, with courage, decision and enterprise, with a galvanic battery.” Kansas Congressman Martin F. Conway called Lincoln and Seward “undoubtedly pro-slavery.” The president, in Conway’s view, was “a poor affair,” just “an old Kentucky Whig” who “knows no country as his own but Kentucky, and yet he would sell this for a small price.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃