Kind-hearted? Mr. Lincoln kind-hearted?
I don’t believe a man ever lived who’d rather seen everybody happy and peaceable than Abraham Lincoln. He never could stand it to have people sufferin’ or not gettin’ what they wanted. Time and time again I’ve seen him go taggin’ up street here in this town after some youngster that was blubberin’ because he couldn’t have what wa’n’t good for him. Seemed as if he couldn’t rest till that child was smilin’ again. You can go all over Springfield and talk to the people who was boys and girls when he lived here and every blamed one will tell you something he did for ’em. Everybody’s friend, that’s what he was. Jest as natural for him to be that way as ’twas for him to eat or drink.
Yes, I suppose bein’ like that did make the war harder on him. But he had horse sense as well as a big heart, Mr. Lincoln had. He knew you couldn’t have war without somebody gettin’ hurt. He expected sufferin’, but he knew ’twas his business not to have any more than was necessary and to take care of what come. And them was two things that wa’n’t done like they ought to ’a’ been. That was what worried him.
Seemed as if hardly anybody at the start had any idea of how important ’twas to take good care of the boys and keep ’em from gettin’ sick or if they did get sick to cure ’em. I remember Leonard Swett was in here one day ’long back in ’61 and he says; “Billy, Mr. Lincoln knows more about how the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac cook flapjacks than you do about puttin’ up quinine. There ain’t a blamed thing they do in that army that he ain’t interested in. I went down to camp with him one day and I never see an old hunter in the woods quicker to spot a rabbit’s track than he was every little kink about the housekeepin’. When we got back to town he just sat and talked and talked about the way the soldiers was livin’, seemed to know all about ’em everyways: where they was short of shoes, where the rations were poor, where they had camp-fever worst; told me how hardtack was made, what a good thing quinine and onions are to have handy,—best cure for diarrhea, sore feet, homesickness, everything. I never heard anything like it.”
Seemed to bother Swett a little that Mr. Lincoln took so much interest in all them little things, but I said: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Swett, Mr. Lincoln’s got the right idee. An army that don’t have its belly and feet taken care of ain’t goin’ to do much fightin’, and Mr. Lincoln’s got sense enough to know it. He knows diarrhea’s a blamed sight more dangerous to the Army of the Potomac than Stonewall Jackson. Trouble so far has been, in my judgment, that the people that ought to have been seein’ to what the soldiers was eatin’ and drinkin’ and whether their beds was dry and their bowels movin’, was spendin’ their time polishin’ their buttons and shinin’ their boots for parade.”
“What I don’t see,” says Swett, “is how he learned all the things he knows. They ain’t the kind of things you’d naturally think a president of the United States would be interestin’ himself in.”
There ’twas,—same old fool notion that a president ought to sit inside somewhere and think about the Constitution. I used to be that way—always saw a president lookin’ like that old picture of Thomas Jefferson up there settin’ beside a parlor table holdin’ a roll of parchment in his hand, and Leonard Swett was like me a little in spite of his bein’ educated.
Learned it! Think of Leonard Swett askin’ that with all his chances of bein’ with Mr. Lincoln! Learned it just as he had everything by bein’ so dead interested. He’d learned it if he hadn’t been president at all, if he’d just been loafin’ around Washington doin’ nuthin’. Greatest hand to take notice of things. I tell you he’d made a great war correspondent. Things he’d ’a’ seen! And the way he’d ’a’ told ’em! I can just see him now pumpin’ everybody that had been to the front. Great man to make you talk, Mr. Lincoln was. I’ve heard him say himself that most of the education he had he’d got from people who thought they was learnin’ from him.