ter part of the best intelligence of the North
could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character
of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men
of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him
often in the streets of Washington: "None of the artists or pictures
have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face.
One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is
needed."(2)

Lincoln's popular strength lay in a combination of the Intellectuals and
the plain people against the politicians. He reached the masses in three
ways: through his general receptions which any one might attend; through
the open-door policy of his office, to which all the world was permitted
access; through his visits to the army. Many thousand men and women, in
one or another of these ways, met the President face to face, often in
the high susceptibility of intense woe, and carried away an impression
which was immediately circulated among all their acquaintances.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the grotesque miscellany of the
stream of people flowing ever in and out of the President's open doors.
Patriots eager to serve their country but who could find no place in
the conventional requirements of the War Office; sharpers who wanted to
inveigle him into the traps of profiteers; widows with all their sons in
service, pleading for one to be exempted; other parents struggling with
the red tape that kept them from sons in hospitals; luxurious frauds
prating of their loyalty for the sake of property exemptions; inventors
with every imaginable strange device; politicians seeking to cajole
him; politicians bluntly threatening him; cashiered officers demanding
justice; men with grievances of a myriad sorts; nameless statesmen who
sought to teach him his duty; clergymen in large numbers, generally
with the same purpose; deputations from churches, societies, political
organizations, commissions, trades unions, with every sort of message
from flattery to denunciation; and best of all, simple, confiding people
who wanted only to say, "We trust you--God bless you!"

There was a method in this madness of accessibility. Its deepest
inspiration, to be sure, was kindness. In reply to a protest that he
would wear himself out listening to thousands of requests most of which
could not be granted, he replied with one of those smiles in which there
was so much sadne