d and
never vindicated. He was eventually released upon parole and after many
tantalizing disappointments permitted to rejoin the army. What gives the
event significance is its evidence of the power, at that moment, of
the Committee, and of the relative weakness of the President. Lincoln's
eagerness to protect condemned soldiers survives in many anecdotes. Hay
confides to his diary that he was sometimes "amused at the eagerness
with which the President caught at any fact which would justify"
clemency. And yet, when Stanton informed him of the arrest of Stone,
he gloomily acquiesced. "I hope you have good reasons for it," he said.
Later he admitted that he knew very little about the case. But he did
not order Stone's release.

Lincoln had his own form of ruthlessness. The selfless man, by dealing
with others in the same extraordinary way in which he deals with
himself, may easily under the pressure of extreme conditions become
impersonal in his thinking upon duty. The morality of such a state
of mind is a question for the philosopher. The historian must content
himself with pointing out the only condition that redeems it--if
anything redeems it The leader who thinks impersonally about others
and personally about himself-what need among civilized people to
characterize him? Borgia, Louis XIV, Napoleon. If we are ever to pardon
impersonal thinking it is only in the cases of men who begin by effacing
themselves. The Lincoln who accepted Stanton as a Cabinet officer, who
was always more or less overshadowed by the belief that in saving the
government he was himself to perish, is explicable, at least, when
individual men became for him, as at times they did, impersonal factors
in a terrible dream.

There are other considerations in the attempt to give a moral value to
his failure to interfere in behalf of Stone. The first four months of
1862 are not only his feeblest period as a ruler, the period when he
was barely able to hold his own, but also the period when he was least
definite as a personality, when his courage and his vitality seemed
ebbing tides. Again, his spirit was in eclipse. Singularly enough, this
was the darkness before the dawn. June of 1862 saw the emergence, with a
suddenness difficult to explain, of the historic Lincoln. But in
January of that year he was facing downward into the mystery of his last
eclipse. All the dark places of his heredity must be searched for clues
to this strange experience. There a