Word: lincolnisms
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...Stanton had humiliated him when they were partners in a law case, referring to him as a "long-armed ape," refusing to deal with him as an equal, deliberately shunning him at a hotel, never even opening the brief he had painstakingly prepared. Yet, when the time came for Lincoln to replace Simon Cameron, his first Secretary of War, he appointed Stanton, believing him to be the best man for the all-important post. He recognized that the very qualities that had brought the hotheaded Stanton to treat him badly--his intensity, his bluntness, his determination to succeed--were precisely...
When Congress voted to censure Cameron for wasteful contracts given out to suppliers in the early days of the war, in which middlemen had made off with scandalous profits for unworkable pistols, for blind horses and for knapsacks that disintegrated in the rain, Lincoln publicly took the blame. He explained that the unfortunate contracts were part and parcel of the emergency situation that faced the government in those first days of the war. If fault was to be found, then he himself and his entire Cabinet "were at least equally responsible." For this, Cameron would be forever grateful. Similarly, colleagues...
Above all, he was quick to concede error. When Grant was moving toward Vicksburg, Lincoln thought he "should go down the river," where he could meet up with General Nathaniel Banks. Instead, Grant decided to turn northward. "I feared it was a mistake," Lincoln acknowledged after Grant's spectacular victory. "I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong." Then, to lessen the censure of another general, Lincoln wrote, "I frequently make mistakes myself, in the many things I am compelled to do hastily...
...Lincoln's Secretary, John Hay, described the mental torture of waiting for an hour with Secretary of State Seward and Lincoln in George McClellan's house for the general to return from a wedding. When McClellan finally did come back, he simply passed the room in which the President was sitting; another half an hour went by before a servant informed Lincoln that McClellan had gone to bed. Young John Hay was enraged. "I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come," he wrote in his diary as he recounted the story of what...
Perhaps the most memorable instance of Lincoln's ability to yield lesser concerns for more important ones related to Grant, whose weakness for alcohol may have contributed to his resignation from the Army in the 1850s. His return to the Army during the war, however, had been marked by a string of great successes before rumors of drinking problems began once again to surface in early 1863. After dispatching an investigator to look into Grant's behavior in the field, Lincoln concluded that Grant's drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan, execute and win battles. When...