Sublime

At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persis

In his history of the Emancipation Proclamation, Allen C. Guelzo suggests that “the gift of coup d’oeil” allowed Lincoln to “take in the whole of a situation at once and know almost automatically how to proceed.”

As president-elect he recruited a cabinet of frustrated first lovers or, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called it, a “team of rivals.” They included his major competitors at Chicago—the indignantly disappointed Seward as secretary of state, the transparently ambitious Salmon P. Chase of Ohio as treasury secretary, the corrupt but politic

Lincoln’s goal, in each of these instances, was to balance law against military necessity, in the expectation that the passage of time and the success of his armies would stabilize the equilibria. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he wrote in 1864. “I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet, I have never understood tha

At West Point he had been noted as a gamecock, anxious to use his spurs.

Walker soon became disgusted by Frémont’s self-promoting histrionics and rank cowardice in the field – a combination he found particularly loathsome. They