marked ability and
fitness for their positions, was in some respects about as ill-assorted
and heterogeneous a body of men as were ever called to serve together as
ministers and advisers of a great government. Its selection was a
surprise to the country. Mr. John Bigelow said it "had the appearance of
being selected from a grab-bag." "Not one of the members," continues Mr.
Bigelow, "was a personal or much of a political friend of Mr. Lincoln;
not one of them had ever had any experience or training in any executive
office, except Welles of Connecticut, if he could be claimed as an
exception because of having served three years in a bureau of the Navy
in Washington. Of military administration, still less of actual war, no
member knew anything by experience. The heads of the two most important
departments, the Secretaries of State and the Treasury, were both
disappointed candidates for the chair occupied by Mr. Lincoln. It was
nothing less than Providential that the President was so happily
constituted as neither to share nor to provoke any of the jealousies or
envies of either of them, and by his absolute freedom from every selfish
impulse gradually compelled them all to look up to him as the one person
in whose singleness of eye they could all and always confide. Not
immediately, but in the course of two or three years, they got into the
habit of turning to him like quarrelling children to their mother to
settle all the questions that temporarily divided them."

These Cabinet ministers were a devoted and patriotic body of men, but
their misconceptions of their respective rights and duties were at first
grotesque. Mr. Seward, a man of far greater administrative experience
than Lincoln, assumed that he, rather than the President, was to be the
master mind of the new administration. "Premier" he at first called
himself. Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, thought the Navy should be a
sort of adjunct to the War Department--an error of which Secretary
Welles of the Navy Department speedily relieved him. These two men were
altogether too unlike to get on well together. The cold and somewhat
stately Welles was repelled by Stanton's impulsiveness and violence,
while Stanton was exasperated by Welles's calmness and lack of
excitability. "Lincoln's ministers had no idea that he towered above
them," says Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., "and no one of them was at all
overawed by him in those days. Presiding over them at the Cabinet,
casuall