impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than make a bull-run at him right
in front. But on the whole I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely
human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief
have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man that it would have been practical to have put in his
place.Walt Whitman, looking at the President from a height in Broadway, noted `his perfect
composure and coolness-his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe
hat pushed back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam'd and wrinkled yet canny-looking
face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as
he stood observing the people.' Whitman thought 'four sorts of genius’ would be needed for ‘the
complete lining of the Man's future portrait'-'the eyes and brains and finger-touch of Plutarch and
Aeschylus and Michelangelo, assisted by Rabelais.'
There is a famous photograph of Lincoln, taken at this time, visiting the HQ of the Army of
the Potomac, standing with some of his generals outside their tents. These officers were mostly
tall for their times but Lincoln towers above them to a striking degree. It was as if he were of a
different kind of humanity: not a master-race, but a higher race. There were many great men in
Lincoln's day-Tolstoy, Gladstone, Bismarck, Newman, Dickens, for example-and indeed master
spirits in his own America-Lee, Sherman, Grant, to name only three of the fighting men-yet
Lincoln seems to have been of a different order of moral stature, and of intellectual heroism. He
was a strong man, and like most men quietly confident of their strength, without vanity or self-
consciousness-and also tender. Towards the end of the war, Lincoln went to see Seward, his
Secretary of State, a man with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like.
Seward had somehow contrived to break both his arm and his jaw in a carriage accident. Lincoln
found him not only bedridden but quite unable to move his head. Without a moment's hesitation,
the President stretched out at full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face
near Seward's, and they held an urgent, whispered consultation on the next steps the
administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off
to sleep. Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting
him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might be
avoided. Of how many other great men can that be said?
Lincoln was well aware of the sufferings of those in the North who actively participated in the
struggle. They haunted him. He read to his entourage that terrible passage from Macbeth in
which the King tells of his torments of mind:
we will eat our meat in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams,
That shake us nightly; better be with the dead
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.
One man who was also well aware of the suffering was Whitman. Too old to fight, he watched
his younger brother George, a cabinet maker, enlist for a 100-day stint which turned into four
years, during which time he participated in twenty-one major engagements, saw most of his
comrades killed, and spent five months in a horrific Confederate prison. Some 26,000 Union
soldiers died in these dreadful stockades, and so great was the Union anger at conditions in them,
especially at Andersonville, that its commandant, Major Henry Wirz, was the only Southerner to