“The curled darling of Washington society, the perfumed graduates of West Point, who had never seen a squadron set in the field, conducted the examination to ascertain if Dick was fit to be an officer in the regular army. They asked him questions as to engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and ordnance, of harbor warfare, of field campaigns, and all such stuff. Not a single question could Dick answer. ‘What is an echelon?’ was asked. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Dick; ‘I never saw one.’ ‘What is an abbattis?’ was the next question? Dick answered: ‘You’ve got me again. We haven’t got ’em in the West.’ ‘Well, what is a hollow square?’ continued his tormentors. ‘Don’t know,’ said Dick sorrowfully; ‘I never heard of one.’ ‘Well,’ finally said a young snip in eye-glasses, ‘what would you do in command of a company if the cavalry should charge on you?’ They had at last got down to Dick’s comprehension, and he answered with a resolute face and a flashing eye, ‘I’d give them Jesse, that’s what I’d do, and I’d make a hollow square in every mother’s son of them.’ A few more technical questions were asked, but poor Dick was not able to answer them, and the examination closed.
“The report was duly sent to the Secretary of War, who submitted it to Mr. Lincoln, saying that evidently Dick would not do for an officer. Mr. Lincoln, when through with the report, and found that Dick had not answered a single question, but he came to where Dick said what he would do if attacked by cavalry, and then he did what sensible Abe Lincoln did in all such matters, he threw the report on his table and made a little memorandum in pencil ordering the Secretary of War to appoint Dick Gower a lieutenant in the regular army. Dick achieved distinction afterward, and was everywhere known in the army as a man without fear, who never made a mistake.”
A correspondent of the Boston Traveller furnishes a humorous story told by President Lincoln, to show the embarrassment which he felt as to the disposal of Jefferson Davis:
“A gentleman told me a story recently which well illustrates Lincoln’s immense fund of anecdotes. Said he: ‘Just after Jeff Davis had been captured I called over at the White House to see President Lincoln. I was ushered in, and asked him: “Well, Mr. President, what are you going to do with Jeff Davis?” Lincoln looked at me for a moment, and then said, in his peculiar, humorous way: “That reminds me of a story. A boy ’way out West caught a coon and tamed it to a considerable extent, but the animal created such mischief about the house that his mother ordered him to take it away and not to come home until he could return without his pet. The boy went down-town with the coon, secured with a strong piece of twine, and in about an hour he was found sitting on the edge of the curbstone, holding the coon with one hand and crying as though his heart would break. A big-hearted gentleman, who was passing, stopped and kindly inquired: ‘Say, little boy, what is the matter?’ The boy wiped a tear from his eye with his sleeve, and in an injured tone, howled: ‘Matter! Ask me what’s the matter! You see that coon there? Well, I don’t know what to do with the darn thing. I can’t sell it, I can’t kill it, and ma won’t let me take it home.’ That,” continued Lincoln, “is precisely my case. I am like the boy with the coon. I can’t sell him, I can’t kill him, and I can’t take him home!” ’ ”
I have already remarked that Mr. Lincoln was superstitious. He seemed to be deeply impressed by dreams, and claimed to be notified in this way of the approach of important events.
“On the Friday of his death he called his Cabinet together at noon, and he seemed dispirited. He said: ‘I wish I could hear from Sherman.’ General Grant, who was present, said: ‘You will hear well from Sherman.’ He said: ‘I don’t know. I have had a dream, the same that I had before the battles of Bull Run, of Chancellorsville, and of Swan River. It has,’ he said, ‘always boded disaster.’ It made a great impression on all of the Cabinet and on General Grant. Mr. Lincoln had been remonstrated with for going about unattended, but he said: ‘What is the use of precautions? If they want to kill me they will kill me.’ He was killed, but history will place him next to Washington in the list of beloved Presidents. The skill displayed by him in managing Chase, Stanton, Sumner, Fessenden, Wade, Seward, and other candidates for the Presidency, was wonderful, and when there was any hitch he was reminded of a story, illustrating the situation. His stories were, in short, ‘parables.’ ”—Boston Budget.
Even in the hour of victory he was thoughtful, not jubilant.
“When General Weitzel escorted President Lincoln and his companions through the Capitol at Richmond the day after the occupation, in April, 1865, they reached what the rebels called the Cabinet room of the great President of the Southern Confederacy. General Weitzel said: ‘This, Mr. President, is the chair which has been so long occupied by President Davis.’ He pulled it from the table and motioned the President to sit down. Mr. Lincoln’s face took an extra look of care and melancholy. The narrator says ‘he looked at it a moment and slowly approached and wearily sat down. It was an hour of exultation with the soldiers; we felt that the war was ended, and we knew that all over the North bells were pealing, cannon booming, and the people were delirious with joy over the prospect of peace. I expected to see the President manifest some spirit of triumph as he sat in the seat so long occupied by the rebel Government; but his great head fell into his broad hand and a sigh that seemed to come from the soul of a nation, escaped his lips and saddened every man present. His mind seemed to be travelling back through the dark years of the war, and he was counting the cost in treasure, life, and blood that made it possible for him to sit there. As he rose without a word and left the room slowly and sadly, tears involuntarily came to the eyes of every man present, and we soldiers realized that we had not done all the suffering nor made all the sacrifices.’ ”
Where Abraham Lincoln obtained some of his anti-slavery ideas may be learned from a recent article in the Century, by Leonard W. Bacon, who describes the effects of his father’s writings upon this subject on the mind of the future President:
“ ‘These essays’—from the preface to which I have just quoted—had been written at divers times from 1833 onward, and were collected, in 1846, into a volume which has had a history. It is a book of exact definitions, just discriminations, lucid and tenacious arguments; and it deals with certain obstinate and elusive sophistries in an effective way. It is not to be wondered at that when it fell into the hands of a young Western lawyer, Abraham Lincoln,—whose characteristic was ‘not to be content with an idea until he could bound it north, east, south, and west,’—it should prove to be a book exactly after his mind. It was to him not only a study on slavery, but a model in the rhetoric of debate. It is not difficult to trace the influence of it in that great stump-debate with Douglas, in which Lincoln’s main strength lay in his cautious wisdom in declining to take the extreme positions into which his wily antagonist tried to provoke or entice him. When, many years after the little book had been forgotten by the public, and after slavery had fallen before the President’s proclamation, it appeared from Lincoln’s own declaration to Dr. Joseph P. Thompson that he owed to that book his definite, reasonable, and irrefragable views on the slavery question, my father felt to sing the Nunc dimittis.”