Study Notes: November 2012

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Team of Rivals

"'Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.'" (Lincoln) (732)

"'Go home my friends, and read attentively the tenth verse of the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs!' The verse reads as follows: 'Accuse not a servant to his master, lest he curse thee, and then be found guilty.'" (672)

Team of Rivals

"'A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.'" (Lincoln) (665)

Team of Rivals

"As the election grew close, Lincoln told a visitor: 'I would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.'" (664)

Team of Rivals

"'I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,' he said. 'I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child as...'" (653)

Team of Rivals

"Chittenden concluded that his extraordinary want of vindictiveness toward someone who had caused him such grief proved that Lincoln 'must move upon a higher plane and be influenced by loftier motives than any man' he had ever known. Yet while Lincoln did indeed possess unusual magnanimity, he was also a shrewd politician." (635)

Friday, November 2, 2012

Team of Rivals

"'Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command,' he began. 'All that was known of him was that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his availability, - that is, because he had no history.'" (James Russell Lowell) (595-596)

Team of Rivals

"All this has been accomplished, Adams acknowledged, with a remnant tinge of condescension, not because Lincoln possess 'any superior genius' but because he, 'from the beginning to the end, impressed upon the people the conviction of his honesty and fidelity to one great purpose.'" (595)

Team of Rivals

"The next week, Lincoln related a peculiarly pleasant dream. He was at a party, he told Hay, and overheard one of the guests say of him, 'He is a very common-looking man.' In the dream, he relished his reply: 'The Lord prefers Common-looking people that is the reason he makes so many of them' His dreamed response still amused him as he recalled it the next day." (593)

Team of Rivals

"'... But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here...'" (Lincoln) (586)

Team of Rivals

"Although the president listened to the opinions of many, he took pride in arriving at his own decisions in his own way." (587)

Team of Rivals

"'...Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.'" (Lincoln) (570)

Team of Rivals

"But he recognized it was safer to keep Chase as a dubious ally within the administration rather that to cut him loose to mount a full-blown campaign. Meanwhile, so long as Chase remained in the cabinet, Lincoln insisted on treated him with respect and dignity." (566)

Team of Rivals

"'No two men were ever more utterly and irreconcilably unlike,' Stanton's private secretary, A.E. Johnson, observed. 'The secretiveness which Lincoln wholly lacked, Stanton had in marked degree; the charity which Stanton could not feel, coursed from every pore in Lincoln. Lincoln was for giving a wayward subordinate seventy times seven chances to repair his errors; Stanton was for either forcing him to obey or cutting off his head without more ado. Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of gravest peril; Stanton would lash himself into a fury over the same condition of things. Stanton would take hardships with a groan; Lincoln would find a funny story to fit them. Stanton was all dignity and sternness, Lincoln all simplicity and good nature... yet no two men ever did or could work better in harness. They supplemented each other's nature, and they fully recognized the fact that they were a necessity to each other.'" (Charles Benjamin) (560)

Team of Rivals

"The story is told of an army colonel who rode out to the Soldiers' Home, hopeful of securing Lincoln's aid in recovering the body of his wife, who had died in a steamboat accident. His brief period of relaxation interrupted, Lincoln listened to the colonel's tale but offered no help. 'Am I to have no rest? Is there no hour or spot when or where I may escape this constant call? Why do you follow me out here with such business as this?' The disheartened colonel returned to his hotel in Washington. The following morning, Lincoln appeared at his door. 'I was a brute last night,' Lincoln said, offering to help the colonel in any way possible." (512)

Team of Rivals

"Seward was the one man in the cabinet Lincoln trusted completely, the only one who fully appreciated his unusual strengths as a leader, the only one he could call an intimate friend." (488)

Team of Rivals

"Called upon to speak, Lincoln replied cheerfully that 'if I were as I have been most of my life, I might perhaps, talk amusing to you for half an hour,' but as president, 'every word is so closely noted' that he must avoid any 'trivial' remarks." (484)

Team of Rivals

"The president made clear he was not seeking 'advice about the main matter,' for he had already considered their views before reaching his decision; but he would welcome any suggestions on language." (482)

Team of Rivals

"... If the colored people instead of having been stolen and forcibly brought to the United States had come as free immigrants, like the German and the Irish, never thought of as suitable objects of property, they never would have become the objects of aversion and bitter persecution." (Frederick Douglass) (470)

Team of Rivals

"How pathetic, the Liberator noted, that the president of a country 'sufficiently capacious to contain the present population of the globe,' a nation that 'proudly boasts of being the refuge of the oppressed of all nations,' should consider exiling 'the entire colored population... to a distant shore.'" (469-470)

Team of Rivals

"He understood that one of the principal stumbling blocks in the way of emancipation was the pervasive fear shared by whites in both the North and the South that the two races could never coexist peacefully in a free society." (Lincoln) (469)

Team of Rivals

"She was determined to create nothing less than a 'rival court' to the White House that could help catapult Chase to the presidency. In the spring of 1862, she reigned supreme." (435)

Team of Rivals

"Over coffee and dessert in the parlor, the women could spread disdainful gossip about Mary Lincoln." (435)

Team of Rivals

"'First to Mrs. Seward's' columnist Cara Kasson reported, where Anna Seward officiated in the absence of Frances. A black doorman delivered their card to yet another servant, 'who places it in the silver-card receiver, at the same moment ushering us in (names clearly pronounced),k to the presence of Mrs. Seward.' Greetings were exchanged and refreshments served, before proceeding to the next reception at Mrs. Caleb Smith's. There they found 'an elegantly set table, salads and all good things.' After visiting Mrs. Welles, who always entertained 'in her friendly manner,' the ladies would 'take a glass of wine at Mrs. Blair's, admire the queenly dignity of Mrs. Bates, and then drive on to pay our respects to Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Stanton.'" (434)

Team of Rivals

"She was 'more of a professional beauty than had at that time ever been seen in American,' noted Mary Adams French, the wife of the famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, 'with a beauty and a regal carriage which we called 'queenly,' but which no real queen ever has.'" (Kate Chase) (433)

Team of Rivals

"'... there is one thing I must say to you, as we don't know each other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.'

Lincoln replied, 'That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing: When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won't have any chance to resign your commission.'"

(General Benjamin Butler & Lincoln) (369)

Team of Rivals

"Indeed, Chase would never cease to underestimate Lincoln, nor to resent the fact that he had lost the presidency to a man he considered his inferior." (365)

Teams of Rivals

"Seward was slowly but inevitably coming to appreciate Lincoln's remarkable abilities. 'It is due to the President to say, that his magnanimity is almost superhuman...'" (364)

Teams of Rivals

"All his life, he had taken care not to send letters written in anger." (Lincoln) (363)

Team of Rivals

"Lincoln then directly addressed the point of the meeting. 'I have done with you,' he said, 'what I would not perhaps have ventured to do with any other man in the country - sent for you to ask whether you will accepted the appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, being exactly prepared to offer it to you.'" (Lincoln to Chase) (291)

Team of Rivals

"For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly denounced Brown's violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie, later conceded that 'for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell, Phillips, Whittier, and Longfellow,' it was impossible not to sympathize with 'the truly good old man who was about to die for others.' She and her friends built a small fort in the conservatory and 'raised a flag on which was painted... defiantly 'Freedom forever; slavery never.'' When friends warned Chase that such open support of Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that 'a great wrong' could not be righted 'in the way poor old John Brown had attempted to do.' The little fort was dismantled." (228)

Team of Rivals

"'Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance.'" (Lincoln to Speed) (180-181)

Team of Rivals

"Lincoln told Joshua Speed, 'I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.'" (164)

Team of Rivals

"'It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect,' Lincoln argued, 'that human perfection is possible.'" (on George Washington) (152)

Team of Rivals

"Had his marriage been happier, Lincoln's friends believed, he would have been satisfied as a country lawyer. Had he married 'a woman of more angelic temperament,' Springfield lawyer Milton Hay speculated, 'he doubtless, would have remained at home more and been less inclined to mingle with people outside.'" (132)

Team of Rivals

"A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: 'no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.'" (122)

Team of Rivals

"'[Humor] can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.'" (unknown) (103)

Team of Rivals

"Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. 'Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,' writes George Valliant. (103)

Team of Rivals

"Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had 'done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.'" (Joshua Speed) (99-100)

Team of Rivals

"In Lincoln's time, this combination of symptoms - feelings of hopelessness and listlessness, thoughts of death and suicide - was called hypochondriasis ('the hypo') or 'the vapours.' Its source was thought to be in the hypochondria, the portion of the abdomen which was then considered the seat of emotions, containing the liver, gallbladder, and spleen. Treatment for the liver and digestive system was recommended." (99)

Team of Rivals

"'I shall be very lonesome without you,' Lincoln told Speed. 'How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.'" (98)

Team of Rivals

"They accused him of plotting 'to overthrow republican institutions' by undoing the separation of church and state." (83)

Team of Rivals

"In particular, he proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy, poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with opportunities in advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public schools funds to support parochial schools where children could receive instruction from members of their own faith." (83)

Team of Rivals

"'... I part without anger, but without affection.'" (76) (Seward on Tracy)

Team of Rivals

"When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. 'I'm afraid there isn't,' he replied sorrowfully." (Lincoln on the death of Ann) (56)

Team of Rivals

"With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember. 'When he came across a passage that Struck him,' his stepmother recalled, 'he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,' and 'when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.' The once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used." (Lincoln) (52)