Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [456]
Many others, however, recognized the historic weight of the address. “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote to his father in London. “The inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of this war.” The London Spectator, previously critical of Lincoln, agreed with young Adams, judging the address as “by far the noblest which any American President has yet uttered to an American Congress.”
Praise for the speech mingled with praise for Lincoln himself. The Spectator suggested that it was “divine inspiration, or providence” that brought the Republican Convention in 1860 to choose Lincoln the “village lawyer” over Seward. Congressman Isaac Arnold overheard a conversation between a celebrated minister and an unidentified New York statesman, whom one historian suggests was likely William Henry Seward himself. “The President’s inaugural is the finest state paper in all history,” the minister declared. “Yes,” the New Yorker answered, “and as Washington’s name grows brighter with time, so it will be with Lincoln’s. A century from to-day that inaugural will be read as one of the most sublime utterances ever spoken by man. Washington is the great man of the era of the Revolution. So will Lincoln be of this, but Lincoln will reach the higher position in history.”
Perhaps the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s 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 has 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.” Were he not a “blackguard” and “an unscrupulous knave in the end,” the Mercury concluded, “he would undoubtedly command our respect as a ruler…. We turn our eyes to Richmond, and the contrast is appalling, sickening to the heart.”
The editors of the Mercury would have been even more astonished if they had an inkling of the truth recognized by those closer to Lincoln: his political genius was not simply his ability to gather the best men of the country around him, but to impress upon them his own purpose, perception, and resolution at every juncture. With respect to Lincoln’s cabinet, Charles Dana observed, “it was always plain that he was the master and they were the subordinates. They constantly had to yield to his will, and if he ever yielded to them it was because they convinced him that the course they advised was judicious and appropriate.”
CHAPTER 26
THE FINAL WEEKS
AS LINCOLN BEGAN his second term, “he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man,” John Hay observed, “from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased.”
Four years of relentless strain had touched Lincoln’s spirit and his countenance. The aged, wearied face in the life-mask cast by Clark Mills in the spring of 1865 barely resembled the mold Leonard Volk had taken five years earlier. In 1860, noted John Hay, “the large mobile mouth is ready to speak, to shout, or laugh; the bold, curved nose is broad and substantial, with spreading nostrils; it is a face full of life, of energy, of vivid aspiration.” The second life-mask, with its lined brow and cavernous cheeks, has “a look as of one on whom sorrow and care had done their worst…the whole expression is of unspeakable sadness and all-sufficing