Simon
Cameron
was born in Maytown, Pennsylvania on 8th March, 1799. After a brief
schooling Cameron became a newspaper editor and a successful businessman.
This included investments in canals, railroads and the iron industry.
Cameron was active in politics, being a member of the Whig
Party before joining the Democratic
Party. He was elected to the Senate in 1845. Later he joined the
Know Nothing Party in 1855 before finally
entering the Republican Party. This
constant switching of parties gave Cameron a reputation as a political
opportunist.
In 1860 Cameron was one of those nominated to become the presidential
candidate of the Republican Party.
However, at the National Convention, when it was clear that Cameron
could not win, he gave his full support to Abraham
Lincoln. He was rewarded by being appointed as Secretary of War.
This job became more important on the outbreak of the American
Civil War.
In January, 1862, Edwin M. Stanton,
his legal adviser, helped Cameron write his yearly report. He personally
wrote the section that called for freed slaves to be armed and used
against the Confederate Army. President
Abraham Lincoln was opposed to this policy
and ordered Cameron to remove the offending passage. When he refused
he was removed from office. Lincoln, who was unaware of Stanton's
role in the report, appointed him as his new Secretary of War.
Cameron now became America's representative in Russia. Cameron returned
to the Senate in 1867 and in 1872 served as chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee. Simon Cameron, who resigned his seat in the Senate
in 1877 in order to help his son replace him, died in Donegal Springs,
26th June, 1889.
(1)
Henry
Villard was a reporter of the New
York Tribune
during the American Civil War.
Cameron
was the typical American politician with a well-defined purpose in
all he said and did. He also held himself a little too freely at the
disposal of newspapers men, to whom he was by far the most cordial
and talkative of all the secretaries. He made them feel at once as
though they had met an old acquaintance and friend. He was certainly
the cleverest political manager in the Cabinet, and, though unquestionably
as ambitious as any member of it, he never was guilty of the indiscretions
which the political records of Seward and Chase reveal. He had a very
shrewd way of tempting journalists by implications and insinuations
into publishing things about others that he wished to have said without
becoming responsible for them.
(2) Section of the report written by Edwin
M. Stanton
that led to Simon
Cameron
losing his job as secretary of war (January,
1862)
Those
who make war against the Government justly forfeit all rights of property
and, as the labour and service of their slaves constitute the chief
property of the rebels of their slaves constitute the chief property
of the rebels, such property should share the common fate of war.
It is as clearly the right of this Government to arm slaves when it
may became necessary as it is to use gunpowder or guns taken from
the enemy.
(3) Gideon Welles,
diary entry (January, 1862)
There
was reluctance on the part of the president to remove Mr. Cameron
and only a conviction of its absolute necessity and the unauthorized
assumption of executive power in his Annual Report would have led
the President to take the step.
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