Lincoln, the unknown

156 • LINCOLN THE UNKNOWNwaters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelmingthe land. I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushedand torn to pieces. Without him, I should be destroyed."Occasionally, however, the President "put his foot down,"as he called it; and then—look out. If "Old Mars" said thenthat he wouldn't do a thing, Lincoln would reply very quietly:"I reckon, Mr. Secretary, you'll have to do it."And done it was.On one occasion he wrote an order saying: "Without an ifor an and or but, let Colonel Elliott W. Rice be made Brigadier-General in the United States army—Abraham Lincoln."On another occasion he wrote Stanton to appoint a certainman "regardless of whether he knows the color of Julius Caesar'shair or not."In the end Stanton and Seward and most of those who beganby reviling and scorning Abraham Lincoln learned to reverehim.When Lincoln lay dying in a rooming-house across the streetfrom Ford's Theater, the iron Stanton, who had once denouncedhim as "a painful imbecile," said, "There lies the most perfectruler of men the world has ever seen."John Hay, one of Lincoln's secretaries, has graphically describedLincoln's manner of working in the White House:He was extremely unmethodical. It was a four years'struggle on Nicolay's part and mine to get him to adoptsome systematic rules. He would break through every regulationas fast as it was made. Anything that kept the peoplethemselves away from him, he disapproved, although theynearly annoyed the life out of him by unreasonable complaintsand requests.He wrote very few letters, and did not read one in fifty thathe received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice,but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed,without reading them, the letters I wrote in his name.He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself—notmore.When the President had any rather delicate matter tomanage at a distance from Washington, he rarely wrotebut sent Nicolay or me.He went to bed ordinarily from ten to eleven o'clock . .