Meeting Mr. Lincoln


William O. Stoddard, one of President Lincoln’s secretaries, noted that if President Lincoln “met a governor, a general, a foreign diplomat, a visitor of especial distinction, it was out of his power to look upon the great personage before him as other or more or less than a human being like himself or any other man so to be met and spoken to.”1 But Stoddard also noted that the President possessed the assurance of his role as the country’s “revolutionary dictator.” Stoddard wrote that Mr. Lincoln “was ready and willing to use all ‘powers given him by his unwritten commission to “See to it that the Commonwealth suffers no harm.’2 That applied to members of Congress and generals in the army. Stoddard described his management of army commanders “as a persistent effort by him to put each man, as nearly as might be, in the place for which he was best fitted and wherein he could perform the most effective service. If, having appointed any man to an especial duty, he found him insufficient for it, he was quite willing to transfer him to another.”3

“One great public mistake” about President Lincoln’s character, “is that he is considered by the people of this country as a frank, guileless, and unsophisticated man. There never was a greater mistake,” reported Illinois politician Leonard Swett, a long-time legal colleague. “Beneath a smooth surface of candor and apparent declaration of all his thoughts and feelings he exercised the most exalted tact and wisest discrimination. He handled and moved men remotely as we do pieces upon a chess-board. ‘He retained through life all the friends he ever had, and he made the wrath of his enemies to praise him. This was not by cunning or intrigue in the low acceptations of the term, but by far-seeing reason and discernment. He always told only enough of his plans and purposes to induce the belief that he had communicated all; yet he reserved enough to have communicated nothing.”4



Another journalist who observed Mr. Lincoln at close hand, Noah Brooks wrote: “Nothing displeased him more than any attempt — and some fools did attempt it — at unseemly or undignified familiarity, for his nature was genuinely dignified and manly. Towards all who held appointments in his in his household he was to the last degree kind, considerate, and even indulgent; but nothing could be further out of the way than to suppose that his kindness of heart degenerated into what is vulgarly called ‘good nature.’ He was at times, when overworked or weary, even petulant — so much so as to be difficult of access; was always singularly fim in the assertion of his own fixed views or will, and if just cause of anger aroused him, his anger was apt to be hot and lasting. He never did forgive a man whom he believed to have deceived him; of all men he hated and despised a liar. his manner at receptions, and other occasions of ceremony of social or official formality, was that of a man who performs an irksome but unavoidable duty, though he was never lacking in cordial hospitality.”7



  2. Stoddard, Abraham Lincoln: The Man and the War President, p. 329.
  3. Stoddard, Abraham Lincoln: The Man and the War President, p. 416.
  4. Alexander K. McClure, Yarns and Stories, p. 272-273.
  5. Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War, p.155.
  6. Carl Schurz, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, pp. 308-309. (from Letter to Theodore Petrasch, October 12, 1864.)
  7. Michael Burlingame, editor, Noah Brooks, Inside the White House in War Times, p. 150.
  8. Victoria Radford, editor, Meeting Mr. Lincoln, p. 59-60. (from John M. Bullock, “President Lincoln’s Visiting Card,” Century magazine, February 1889.)