Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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William Henry Seward, Lincoln's cigar-chewing Secretary of State, was capable of trying to run the President and also capable of realizing he couldn't. Seward had tried to stave off war. "Night and day he had conferred and negotiated, become weary and rusty, vulgar and profane beyond his old habits, worn and frazzled as a castoff garment." He had a theory that war between the States could be stopped by getting a war started with some foreign power (Lincoln's observation on this later was "One war at a time"). On April 1 he sent...
...ablest and most subtle statesmen in history. Step by step, chapter & verse, Carl Sandburg sets him forth as indeed the merciful, mystic and benign being of the monuments, but as also-and with profound consistency-a hard, circumspect, far-seeing politician and manager of men. Lincoln's speeches and writings were the work of a remarkably pure human intellect, always questioning, circumscribing the area in which he could be positive, saying once: "In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." His difficulties as they...
...Lincoln was up against a Congress in which at one time there were just three Representatives defending him. During the bitterest weeks of the war his own family came under suspicion of treason. One of the most awesome scenes in the book is that of the secret meeting which the Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War held early in 1863 to consider this rumor. A member told...
...committee room door came in with a half-frightened expression on his face. Before he had opportunity to make explanation, we understood . . . and were ourselves almost overwhelmed with astonishment. For at the foot of the Committee table, standing solitary, his hat in his hand, his form towering, Abraham Lincoln stood." What the Committee member got was "above all an indescribable sense of his [Lincoln's] complete isolation...
...Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States," said the caller slowly, "appear of my own volition before this Committee of the Senate to say that I, of my own knowledge, know that it is untrue that any of my family hold treasonable communication with the enemy." He went away. Speechless, the Committee adjourned...