• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6636 0

of speech” was usually linked to “high culture,” the Times continued, Lincoln, “in his own independent, and perhaps we might say very peculiar, way,” exhibits a “felicity of speech far surpassing” stylistic preference. He possesses a far more valuable “felicity of thought,” which “invariably gets at the needed truth of the time,” hitting “the very nail of all others which needs driving.” The Philadelphia Inquirer had regarded Lincoln’s unconventional habit of writing public letters with skepticism, but granted that his recent letters, including this one, “have dispelled the doubt. If he is as felicitous in the future, we hope he will continue to write.”

“His last letter is a great thing,” Hay told Nicolay a few days later. “Some hideously bad rhetoric—some indecorums that are infamous—yet the whole letter takes its solid place in history, as a great utterance of a great man. The whole Cabinet could not have tinkered up a letter which could have been compared with it. He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the trained logicians of all schools.”

In its fulsome praise of the letter to Conkling, the New York Times also commended a long line of Lincoln’s writings, including his inaugural, the letters to McClellan made public by the congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, and his published letters to Greeley and Corning, which revealed “the same fitness to the occasion, and the same effectiveness in its own direction.” Taken together, these remarkable documents had made Lincoln “the most popular man in the Republic. All the denunciations and all the arts of demagogues are perfectly powerless to wean the people from their faith in him.”

“I know the people want him,” Hay wrote to Nicolay, looking forward to the next election. “There is no mistaking that fact. But politicians are strong yet & he is not their ‘kind of a cat.’ I hope God wont see fit to scourge us for our sins by any one of the two or three most prominent candidates on the ground.”

BY THE MIDDLE of September 1863, all the members of Lincoln’s cabinet had returned from their summer sojourns. Seward came back invigorated by his trip through the lake region with the diplomatic corps. Bates was back from Missouri in time to celebrate his seventieth birthday, grateful that his long life had “been crowned with many blessings, and, comparatively few crosses.” He noted with pride that, as a public figure, he had achieved a reputation “for knowledge and probity, quite as good as I deserve.” Stanton, too, had enjoyed a much-needed vacation with his family in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Chase, in characteristic fashion, had allowed himself scant respite from work, leaving his daughters at the seashore and then peevishly awaiting their return. Welles was gratified to return from his ten-day visit to the Navy Yards, noting in his diary that all his colleagues seemed “glad to see me,—none more so than the President, who cordially and earnestly greeted me. I have been less absent than any other member and was therefore perhaps more missed.” Lincoln himself still enjoyed leisurely nights at the Soldiers’ Home and looked forward to Mary’s homecoming from the Green Mountains.

Grim news from Tennessee deflated the genial, relaxed mood of the president and his cabinet. After the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln and Stanton had hoped that General Rosecrans, with the Army of the Cumberland, could deliver the “finishing blow to the rebellion.” He was positioned to push the enemy from Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee, with an eye to advancing on Georgia. However, after Rosecrans delivered “a great and bloodless victory at Chattanooga” as the enemy fled from the city before advancing troops, the Confederates regrouped and “unexpectedly appeared in force, on the south bank of [the] Chicamauga.” A furious battle commenced on Saturday, September 19. Within thirty-six hours, the telegrams from the field indicated a stunning Confederate victory. “Chicamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run,” Dana wired Stanton. Union casualties