LINCOLN'S VIGIL.

THE DEFEAT OF CHANCELLORSVILLE.

BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD,

PRIVATE SECRETARY TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

THEY seem far away and almost unreal, as if they had never been, those long, overheated years with Lincoln in the White House. Very few remain of the men whose names and faces are associated in memory with the events of that time. Yet it often seems strange, unnatural, to find that the people met and talked with in every-day life, all of them who are of less than middle age, are but vaguely informed concerning those events and the actors in them. Probably most of these must, indeed, be forgotten, they were so many and there is so much else that this generation must needs study and always assume to know.

One tall figure, however, still stands forth, distinctly visible always, as if it belonged to the present as much as to the past and would march along forever, keeping step, shoulder to shoulder, with the continuous history of the Republic.

Lincoln cannot be forgotten. He is even better and better understood by thinking men. But there seems to be floating around, in the minds of many, something of

the idea so curiously presented by one of the dead President's old Illinois neighbors:

“Linkin?" said the prairie man; "oh yes, I knowed him. Knowed his folks, too. They was torn-down poor. He wasn't much up to the War; that was what made him. Tell ye what, they wouldn't let on so much 'bout him now, 'f he hadn't been killed. That helped him, powerful. People kind o' sympathized with him, know. It made him pop'lar. He saved suthin' w'ile he was President, but I don't reckon he left much proppity. Oh yes, I knowed Linkin."

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In strong contrast with this crude scepticism is the marvellous keenness of the general popular instinct which then recognized, accepted, trusted and sustained its Godappointed leader. That he was of God's appointment must be apparent to any man whose creed contains a confession of a living God, mindful of human affairs.

It may be noted, without any surprise whatever, that many intelligent persons who had associated with Lincoln in his earlier years were never, to the end, able to see anything but what may be called their first mental photographs of him, badly taken, on defective negatives. These were at best but surface pictures and contained only something of the man as he was seen before, say, the year 1858. One of his oldest, most intimate professional associates and latest biographers, for instance, was hardly acquainted with him at all; for he did not even see him after 1860.

During long years prior to the War, the actual growth of so deep and strong a nature was necessarily hidden, even from himself; and when its disclosure came, through trial after trial, there was something of surprise attaching to each successive manifestation of capacity. His

slow and somewhat ponderous inability to hesitate; his apparently overconfident readiness to accept responsibilities; his forward stride to grapple unflinchingly with unknown, untellable difficulties, were only the unexpected expressions of his silent consciousness of power. This subtle, unformulated assertion of the strength that was in him was itself a serious offence, often, to men who thought they knew him, but did not, and to others who could not believe it possible for any man to do the things which he undertook and accomplished.

One remarkable feature of his development, or of its expression, was the suddenness with which, in 1861, he ceased to be a party man, or merely the head of a party, and became the man of the nation. It was true that his party itself underwent a change, welding in with the great mass of American patriotism, but its after relations with him contained little or no mere partisanship. It was once said of a President elect: "Well, he was big enough for so small a State as ours [his own]; but I'm thinking he'll show kind o' thin when you come to spread him out over the whole country." The thin spot in

Lincoln's spreading out has not yet been discovered. When he went to Washington, in 1861, and the first great army from the North and West poured in around him, with their haversacks crammed with recommendations for appointment to office, there was yet another large tribe who were sorely astonished and disappointed. They had known him years and years, had heard him tell stories and try law cases, or they had even higher claims upon him, and they wondered at the heartless ingratitude with which he ignored them in making his appointments. They never forgave him; for they could not and would not understand that to him the public

service was first, and personal relations not so much second as simply somewhere else. He did not even make his own father a brigadier nor invite Dennis Hanks to a seat in his Cabinet.

Lincoln's work as President and, to a certain extent, as General-in-Chief in charge of the military operations which were already not only inevitable but actually progressing, began even before his election. It is no exaggeration to say that thenceforward his toil did not cease until the end. When not asleep he was at his task.

The White House then, the Executive Mansion as it is otherwise described, was much simpler and narrower in its official staff and management than it is now. Part of it was a family residence, but all the rest, including the reception rooms, was merely a workshop. There were a few days, truly, in the spring of 1861, while Washington City was a frontier post, almost cut off from the North, that the great East Room was a camp, perhaps a fort, garrisoned at night by a regiment of office seekers who had provided themselves with rifles and were prepared to defend the citadel of their prospects for appointment.

It was a remarkably silent workshop, considering how much was going on there. The very air seemed heavy with the pressure of the times, centring toward that place. There was only now and then a day bright enough to send any great amount of sunshine into the house, especially upstairs. It was not so much that coming events cast their shadows before, although they may have done so, as that the shadows, the ghosts, if you will, of all sorts of events, past, present and to come, trooped in and flitted around the halls and lurked in the

ers of the rooms. The greater part of them came

over from the War Office, westward, in company with messengers carrying telegraphic dispatches. Troops of them used to follow Stanton or Halleck right into Lincoln's rooms. Seward, too, was sometimes a gloomy messenger; but he was always diplomatically cheerful about it, and nobody could tell by his face but what he was bringing good news. The President could receive any kind of tidings with less variation of face or manner than any other man, and there was a reason for it. He never seemed to hear anything with reference to itself, but solely with a quick forward grasping for the consequences, for what must be done next. The announcement of a defeat or disaster did not bring to him the blow only, but rather the consideration of the counterstroke. When the cannon ball struck Charles the Twelfth in the head, it did not kill him so quickly that his sword was not half drawn before he fell.

Lincoln's characteristic as a worker was his persistency, his tirelessness; and for this he was endowed with rare toughness of bodily and mental fibre. There was not a weak spot in his whole animal organism, and his brain was thoroughly healthy; his White House life, therefore, was a continual stepping from one duty to another. There was also what to a host of men was a provoking way of stepping over or across unessential things, with an instinctive perception of their lack of value. Some things that he stepped over seemed vastly important to those who had them in hand, but at the same time he discovered real importances where others failed to see them.

He had vast capacity for work, and also the exceedingly valuable faculty of putting work upon others. He could load, up to their limit or beyond it, his Cabinet