s marked your course with regard to myself."(7) That
he was not perfunctory, that his great chief had acquired over him an
ascendency which was superior to any strain, was demonstrated a few days
later in New York. On the twenty-seventh, Cooper Institute was filled
with an enthusiastic Lincoln meeting. Blair was a speaker. He was
received with loud cheers and took occasion to touch upon his relations
with the President. "I retired," said he, "on the recommendation of my
own father. My father has passed that period of life when its honors or
its rewards, or its glories have any charm for him. He looks backward
only, and forward only, to the grandeur of this nation and the happiness
of this great people who have grown up under the prosperous condition of
the Union; and he would not permit a son of his to stand in the way of
the glorious and patriotic President who leads us on to success and to
the final triumph that is in store for us."(8)

It was characteristic of this ultimate Lincoln that he offered no
explanations, even in terminating the career of a minister; that he
gave no confidences. Gently inexorable, he imposed his will in
apparent unconsciousness that it might be questioned. Along with his
overmastering kindness, he had something of the objectivity of a natural
force. It was the mood attained by a few extraordinary men who have
reached a point where, without becoming egoists, they no longer
distinguish between themselves and circumstance; the mood of those
creative artists who have lost themselves, in the strange way which the
dreamers have, who have also found themselves.

Even in the new fascination of the probable turn of the tide, Lincoln
did not waver in his fixed purpose to give all his best energies, and
the country's best energies, to the war. In October, there was a new
panic over the draft. Cameron implored him to suspend it in Pennsylvania
until after the presidential election. An Ohio committee went to
Washington with the same request. Why should not the arguments that had
prevailed with him, or were supposed to have prevailed with him, for the
removal of a minister, prevail also in the way of a brief flagging of
military preparation? But Lincoln would not look upon the two cases in
the same spirit. "What is the Presidency worth to me," he asked the Ohio
committee, "if I have no country ?"(9)

From the active campaign he held himself aloof. He made no political
speeches. He wrote no political let