However, if in his life-time Gideon Welles lacked the gift for individual prominence that with some of his contemporaries seemed to be the main object of life, the publication of his remarkable "Diary" has, long after his death, immortalized him. In this journal we have both a revelation of personal character that is illuminating and a historic document that is invaluable.
It is fortunate for us that when Gideon Welles sat down to his diary all restraint and repression disappeared. His clarity of vision, his firmness in his belief of what was just and right, his devotion to duty, his singular ability to estimate men and to portray character—all this gives even a casual reader a very clear conception of what manner of man he himself was. As for others, the figures that live forever in these pages are real people, wrestling in their various characteristic ways with portentous problems, the solutions of which we now look back upon as historic matters long since worked out, but which in many instances presented very different aspects at the time from those which now are obvious to us. It is remarkable how the judgment of posterity as to individuals has confirmed Welles's contemporary estimate.
To cite these portraits in detail would be to give a catalogue of the prominent characters of the day. At once the greatest and, to the modern reader the most interesting, is that of Abraham Lincoln. His personality does not appear complete and finished in any one description, but is a composite of comment, conversation and action recounted from time to time in the pages covering the period that elapsed before his death. Thus we see the gradual growing appreciation of his character from that early day when Welles noted that "much had been said and was then uttered by partisans of the incompetency of Mr. Lincoln and his unfitness," to that later cloudy morning when, by the bed on which the murdered President had to be laid diagonally because of his great height, Welles "witnessed the wasting life of the good and great man who was expiring before me." Any reader of the diary who is also familiar with the latest study of the war President—that by Lord Charnwood—and who has read or seen Drinkwater's "Lincoln," is instantly aware of the value of this journal to the historian and the dramatist.
Perhaps the ability to depict personality is the most conspicuous trait of Gideon Welles as a writer. In this respect he adds to his ability to gauge character the expressive qualities of the literary artist. While his estimates of men are startlingly frank and definite, he is always fair, even toward those whom he disliked. Even in those biting, incisive phrases relating to his bête noir, Senator John P. Hale, there is something of the inevitable, impersonal condemnation of a court.
The suggestions of a certain reserve in public must not be interpreted as implying any hesitation to express the diarist's convictions when he considered that the occasion called for them. Far otherwise. Read, for example, the careful recitals of those deliberate, overwhelming, sledgehammer conversational blows the secretary inflicted on the head of Senator Hale when the opportunity at last came of loosing long pent-up emotions. The senator must have emerged from that interview a stunned, if wiser, man.
And very early in their mutual official connection the Secretary of State discovered that Mr. Welles, and only Mr. Welles, was going to run the Navy Department. When Seward attempted to interfere surreptitiously with the naval expedition to relieve Sumter he found himself in a great deal of trouble, the net result of which may be summarized in the following quotation from the diary:
"On our way thither [to see the President] Mr. Seward remarked that, old as he was, he had learned a lesson from this affair, and that was, he had better attend to his own business and confine his labors to his own department. To this I cordially assented."
The return of the Secretary to Hartford brought many memories of old times—days, when as editor of the "Hartford Times" he had worked for Jackson's election, later days when, slavery being injected as a moral issue into politics, he had abandoned the democratic creed and adopted the republican. Then there were the years when he had served as postmaster, as member of the general assembly, as state comptroller—and, again, that searching period when for the sake of his convictions he was willing to face sure defeat as republican candidate for governor. For eight years he had served as a member of the republican national committee and he was chairman of his state delegation to the convention that nominated for the presidency the man who was to be afterward his chief and his staunch friend—Abraham Lincoln. We have Lincoln's own word for it, as reported verbatim in the diary, that there was no wire-pulling in connection with Gideon Welles's appointment. The fact that he was a New England man may have had something to do with it, but the real consideration was his record.
It was a life full of service for his country and of devotion to the faith that was in him, that the old man looked back upon in the closing years.