Government Current on Accounts

May 12, 1863

After a cabinet meeting at the White House, Attorney General Edward Bates writes in his diary: “On leaving C.C. the P. M. G. staid behind. And I [have] notice[d] the same thing, several times lately. He seeks as often as possible, to be alone with the President.

“Coming for C.C. – Mr. Chase remarked to me ‘There is not an unpaid requisition in my Department.’

“That is an extraordinary state of things: the Treasury, it seems, for the first time during the war – is full.”

President Lincoln writes New York Governor Horatio Seymour, a Democrat with whom he is trying to get along, about the offer of services of Dr. John Swinburne: “Dr. Swinburne and Mr. Gillett are here having been refused, as they say, by the War Department, permission to go to the Army of the Potomac. They now appeal to me, saying you wish them to go. I suppose they have been excluded by a rule which experience has induced the Department to deem proper; still they shall have leave to go, if you say you desire it. Please answer.”