s asked what he was doing and got the reply, "O nothing
much--just making a few Generals." And once when a message bearer
gravely told him that the enemy had captured a couple of Generals and
some mules, he replied, "What a pity to lose all those mules."

Bull Run had made the people more cautious about crying "on to
Richmond," and so all Washington took holidays and enjoyed going out to
see McClellan's grand army manoeuvres--all except the President for whom
there was to be no more joy--no more holidays. To a sympathetic friend
he replied, "I want not sympathy for myself but success for our cause."

Again the wisdom of the President was tested and proved in the case of
Mason and Slidell, the Confederate commissioners to Great Britain, whom
a Federal warship had taken from a British mail packet. A British
ultimatum demanded immediate restitution and apology, while public
sentiment at home demanded that they be retained; but the President
averted trouble with England by sending the commissioners on their way.

In the President's message to Congress, some days later, he made no
reference at all to this affair because he knew when to be silent as
well as when to explain.

Evidence of the true greatness and the forgiveness of the President and
that he put the cause far above any personal consideration is in the
fact of his appointing Edwin M. Stanton Secretary of War, to succeed
Cameron to whom he had given the post as Minister to Russia. Stanton was
a Democrat, a friend of McClellan, and had never ceased to speak of
Lincoln with that gross abuse with which he had greeted Lincoln the
lawyer in the McCormick case at Cincinnati in 1859. But with all
Stanton's injustice to Lincoln--his revilings and his insults--he
accepted the cabinet place when Lincoln offered it to him. But if
Stanton was truculent, a tyrant and a bully--infinitely more
important--he was honest and strong in office and broke the ring of
grafters who had been robbing the government, and did his work
heroically. That was what the President wished. And Stanton soon learned
as others learned that Lincoln was master of every situation. Lincoln's
friends opposed the appointment of Stanton and reminded the President of
how crudely Stanton had treated him at Cincinnati, but the President had
no thought for himself or his own future. He was concerned only to get
the men who could best serve the great cause.

Lincoln's peculiar fitness for the tremendous tribulat