Photograph by Davis and Eikemeyer
This powerful and poetic head of Lincoln, by Gutzon Borglum, which deeply impressed the emancipator’s living son, has been presented to Congress by Eugene Meyer, Jr., of New York
Presently the New Yorkers, who had rebuilt the tracks and bridges from Annapolis on, marched into Washington, and within a week Lincoln had seventeen thousand soldiers in the city.
It was this terror of losing Washington that persuaded Lincoln to withdraw McDowell’s forty thousand men from McClellan when his army was within sight of Richmond.
XIII
Lincoln’s tenderness of heart was one of his striking traits. The story of his life is full of touching incidents showing his pity for all living things in distress. As a boy he protected frogs and turtles from torture; as a frontiersman he returned young birds to their nests, and once rode back on his tracks over the prairie and dismounted to help a pig stuck in the mud; as President his habit of pardoning soldiers condemned to death excited the wrath of his generals. His heart melted at the sight of tears. It was hard for him to withstand a tale of woe. The shedding of blood stirred horror and grief in him.
This extreme sensitiveness would have been an element of almost fatal weakness in the man upon whom events had so suddenly thrust the command of a great war, particularly a war between his own countrymen, but for the fact that reason and devotion to justice were the anchors of his nature.
He could not be moved on a clear question of principle by either friendship, enmity or compassion.
He appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, in place of the discredited Simon Cameron, in spite of the fact that Stanton had treated him contemptuously in a law case on which they were engaged together, and had described him as a “long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent.”