Lincoln, the unknown

LINCOLN THE UNKNOWN • 153then performed one of the most beautiful and magnanimous actsof his career. He conferred upon Chase one of the highest honorsa President of the United States can bestow: he made himChief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.Chase, however, was a docile kitten in comparison with thestormy Stanton. Short, heavy-set, with the build of a bull,Stanton had something of that animal's fierceness and ferocity.All his life he had been rash and erratic. His father, a physician,hung a human skeleton in the barn where the boy played,hoping that he too would become a doctor. The young Stantonlectured to his playmates about the skeleton, Moses, hell fire,and the flood; and then went off to Columbus, Ohio, and becamea clerk in a book-store. He boarded in a private family,and one morning shortly after he left the house, the daughter ofthe family fell ill with cholera, and was dead and in her gravewhen Stanton came home for supper that night.He refused to believe it.Fearing that she had been buried alive, he hurried to thecemetery, found a spade, and worked furiously for hours, diggingup her body.Years later, driven to despair by the death of his own daughter,Lucy, he had her body exhumed after she had been buriedthirteen months, and kept her corpse in his bedroom for morethan a year.When Mrs. Stanton died, he put her nightcap and nightgownbeside him in bed each night and wept over them.He was a strange man. Some people said that he was halfcrazy.Lincoln and Stanton had first met during the trial of a patentcase in which they, together with George Harding of Philadelphia,had been retained as counsel for the defendant. Lincolnhad studied the case minutely, had prepared with extraordinarycare and industry, and wanted to speak. But Stantonand Harding were ashamed of him; they brushed him aside withcontempt, humiliated him, and refused to let him say a wordat the trial.Lincoln gave them a copy of his speech, but they were sureit was "trash" and didn't bother to look at it.They wouldn't walk with Lincoln to and from the courthouse;they wouldn't invite him to their rooms; they wouldn't