to one of these he ventured an explanation, but added this significant language:

"I have made this explanation to you as a friend, but I wish no explanation made to our enemies. What they want is a squabble and a fuss, and that they can have if we explain and they cannot have it if we don't." The night of his election his ability to lead the people was evidenced by two facts occurring in Springfield. 1. He had decided that night at the telegraph-office upon his Cabinet substantially as finally constituted.

2. In a little speech he made to his neighbors who came to the Lincoln home to express their enthusiasm, he said:

"In all our rejoicing let us neither express nor cherish any hard feeling toward any citizen who has differed from us. Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are members of a common country and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling."

Here in these few words to his friends and neighbors was outshadowed not only Lincoln leadership, but the one great issue of his administration, to which all other issues must subordinate themselves, and that was: We are "all members of a common country." Therefore, the slogan must be "The Union-it must be preserved."

CHAPTER XXI

LINCOLN THE LEADER
(CONTINUED)

LINCOLN was, after all, a minority President. The slavery men had been confounded by divisions among them. Thereby Lincoln had saved the election; could he now save the Union? Here was the occasion and opportunity for leadership of the highest quality, and I have always felt that Lincoln's greatness in this behalf has never been fully appreciated.

We have read much and heard much about his subduing Seward, his patient handling of Chase, and his diplomatic dealing with Stanton, whom he finally brought to love him as much as Stanton could love any man.

But Lincoln's greatness appeared not merely in dealing with individual man. It was the handling of men in the mass; in short, in the moulding and managing of public opinion.

It will be remembered that in his debate with Douglas touching the importance of public opinion, he said: "In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed."

Of the total vote cast for the presidency, the electoral vote in and of itself is exceedingly misleading. That

vote stood: Lincoln 180 votes, Douglas 12, Breckenridge 72, and Bell 39. But the popular vote really, after all, indexed public sentiment. That vote stood as follows: Lincoln 1,858,000, Douglas 1,366,000, Breckenridge 848,000, and Bell 591,000. The total popular vote was 4,663,000, of which Lincoln's vote was a bare forty per cent. Even in the States north of Mason and Dixon's line Lincoln was barely a majority candidate. Something had to be done at once to unify public sentiment in the North. The votes for Douglas and Bell were so numerous that substantial representation must be given to those leaders in the new administration in order to keep their followers loyal to the great cause of the Union.

His Cabinet chosen by himself, was as follows:

For secretary of state, William H. Seward, of New York; for secretary of treasury, Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio; for secretary of war, Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania; for attorney-general, Edward Bates, of Missouri; for secretary of interior, Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana; for secretary of navy, Gideon Welles, of Connecticut; for postmaster-general, Montgomery Blair, of Maryland.

No such political Cabinet had ever been chosen in this country or any other. The majority of the members had been rival candidates for the presidency in the convention that nominated Lincoln. Four of them had been former Democrats, three of them former Whigs. Some of Lincoln's Republican friends remonstrated with him against a Republican President having a Democratic Cabinet. Lincoln replied, half in jest, but more than half in wisdom, that he would ofttimes sit in the Cabinet, and that would make it stand four to four.

Not a big man in the Cabinet but believed himself bigger than the President and bigger than all the other big men in the Cabinet. If such thing were possible, each Cabinet officer distrusted the others much more than each distrusted the President. Yet each member of that Cabinet in a peculiar way represented in large measure a substantial fraction of public opinion, especially public opinion from a personal or partisan standpoint.

Lincoln's paramount object in the construction of this Cabinet was to unify public sentiment of the North so as to be able effectually to meet the united public sentiment of the South in the great crisis confronting him.

In the selection of a Cabinet two plans were open to the new President: The first, to surround himself with men of inferior loyalty who would fawn upon and flatter him and act merely as his faithful subordinates, or: second, with an official family made up of the biggest and most representative leaders of all political parties and elements from all the various sections of the country, even at the risk of eclipsing or menacing his ability to lead in such a company of distinguished men. He chose the latter.

It is fair to presume that no other President would have chosen such a Cabinet, and no other President could have managed such a Cabinet so as to get out of it the efficiency that Lincoln did get out of it.

Now comes the play for place and power. Volumes have been written upon Lincoln's mastery over his Cabinet ministers, and I take pleasure in referring to Rothschild on "Lincoln, Master of Men," dealing largely with his Cabinet ministers and generals. Only a brief review of his relations with his Cabinet will be given here.

Seward was the most keenly and conscientiously disappointed candidate at the Chicago Convention. His long experience in public life, twice governor of New York, twice senator, a distinguished leader of his party, gave him the lead in that convention. To his great surprise he was defeated, and at first he and his friends took that defeat very bitterly. Outwardly he seemed magnanimous by taking an active part in the national campaign in behalf of Lincoln and Hamlin, but his inward disappointment and humiliation strikingly appear in his personal letters to his wife. In one of these letters he described himself as "a leader deposed by my own party in the hour of organization for decisive battle."

This was no doubt his conscientious attitude. He honestly believed that not only was he the first and only fit man for that distinguished honor, but that Abraham Lincoln, the nominee, was wholly unfit for that distinguished honor.

Early after the election Lincoln invited him to become his secretary of state in the new administration. Seward took three weeks to answer. He accepted but with such a haughty and lordly air that the Presidentelect was greatly pained.

Later, on the Saturday before the inauguration, he withdrew that acceptance. Lincoln took time to meet this unexpected withdrawal, and on the following Monday morning addressed a brief note to Seward, in which, among other things, he said:

"It is the subject of the most painful solicitude with me; and I feel constrained to beg that you will countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply enlisted in the same direction. Please consider and answer by 9 o'clock A. M. to-morrow."