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916 pages, Paperback
First published October 25, 2005
Salmon Portland Chase, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.
Six years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had – like the father of Hannibal against Rome – made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”
William Henry Seward's mode of intricate analysis produced a characteristically complex reaction to the proclamation. After the others had spoken, he expressed his worry that the proclamation might provoke a racial war in the South so disruptive to cotton that the ruling classes in England and France would intervene to protect their economic interests. As secretary of state, Seward was particularly sensitive to the threat of European intervention. Curiously, despite his greater access to intelligence from abroad, Seward failed to grasp what Lincoln intuitively understood: that once the Union truly committed itself to emancipation, the masses in Europe, who regarded slavery as an evil demanding eradication, would not be easily maneuvered into supporting the South.
“But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock...His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
Edwin Stanton – a bitter rival contemptuous of Lincoln when they were both involved in a famous court case. He called Lincoln a long armed ape, but was subsequently recruited by a magnanimous Lincoln to be Secretary of War and grew to love the President.
Salmon Chase – one of the founders of the new Republican Party who felt he was owed the nomination that Lincoln ultimately won, later did laudable work as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary.
William Seward – a senator and later governor of New York, was certain he was going to win the nomination in 1860. After Lincoln offered him the Secretary of State post, Seward figured on seizing power by essentially running his own government within the cabinet only to discover Lincoln’s skill at bringing different factions together. In Seward’s capacity as the anti-yes man, he became Lincoln’s best ally and friend.
Edward Bates – a senior presence within the party who was coaxed into running against Lincoln in the primaries. After losing that battle he reluctantly took the job as Attorney General for the good of the troubled nation. He initially thought of Lincoln as an incompetent bureaucrat, but ultimately concluded that he was “very near being a ‘perfect man.’”
"why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchmen, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country--- bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness ... but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when it's light beams directly on us.”
. . . native peoples are central to the nation’s history. As late as 1750—some 150 years after Britain established Jamestown and fully 250 years after Europeans first set foot in the continent—they constituted a majority of the population in North America, a fact not adequately reflected in textbooks. Even a century later, in 1850, they still retained formal possession of much of the western half of the continent.
—Claudio Saunt, associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. From his book West of the Revolution (2014) [excerpted in the link]
Everything Grant did during his four-day stay in Washington, from his unheralded entrance to his early departure, “was done exactly right,” the historian William McFeely concludes. “He was consummately modest and quietly confident; the image held for the rest of his political career—and beyond, into history.”
A visitor to the White House at this time told Lincoln that “nothing could defeat him but Grant’s capture of Richmond, to be followed by [the general’s] nomination at Chicago�� — where the Democratic Convention was scheduled to take place later that summer. “Well,” said Lincoln, “I feel very much like the man who said he didn’t want to die particularly but if he had got to die, that was precisely the disease he would like to die of.”
Edward Everett delivered a memorized speech for two hours “Seldom has a man talked so long and said so little.”
When Lincoln finished, “the assemblage stood motionless and silent,”
The extreme brevity of the address together with its abrupt close had so astonished the hearers that they stood transfixed. Had not Lincoln turned and moved toward his chair, the audience would very likely have remained voiceless for several moments more. Finally there came applause,” Lincoln may have initially interpreted the audience’s surprise as disapproval. As soon as he finished, he turned to Ward Lamon. “Lamon, that speech won’t scour! It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.” Edward Everett knew better, and expressed his wonder and respect the following day. “I should be glad,” he wrote Lincoln, “if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Perhaps the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’ leadership appeared in the extreme secessionist paper the Charleston Mercury. “He has called around him in counsel,” the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it. … Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department.”
“The President was inclined to be kind and magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”