Then he put his head in both his hands, looked down at the table, and said, “No man ought to wish to be President of the United States!”
Still holding his head in his hands, he said to me, “Young man, do not take a political office unless you are compelled to; there are times when it is heart-crushing!”
He said he had thought how many a mother and father had lost their children in the war—just boys.
“And I am so anxious about my Tad, I cannot help but think how they must feel. If Tad had died—”
He grew very sad; for a few minutes his face was gloomy, and it seemed as though half a sob was coming up in his throat.
Lincoln was not one of those men who go to the extremes of grief or the extremes of joy; but other people have told me, as I myself now saw, that when there came to him that seizure of deep sadness he had to fight himself for a few minutes to overcome it. This impressed me that day very deeply. Breaking off abruptly from what he had been talking about—war and Artemus Ward—and speaking suddenly of Tad, he had dropped down in that dejected position, and for a few minutes looked so sad I thought something awful must suddenly have come to his mind. But it seemed, after all, to be only the fear that Tad, who was not very well, might die. Who can say what vistas of thought that idea may have opened.
Chapter V: What Made Him Laugh
To many persons it seemed incongruous that there should be any thought, motive, or taste in common between Abraham Lincoln and the droll Artemus Ward. Indeed, the great biographers of Lincoln have either ignored the existence of Ward or have referred to him very sparingly. Yet no visitor at the White House seemed more welcome than Ward during Lincoln’s administration. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, and Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, were said to disapprove of Ward’s frequent visits, and it was whispered to Mrs. Ames, correspondent of the Independent, that Lincoln hinted to Ward that it might be best to time his visits so as to occur when Mrs. Lincoln was not at home. But it was a matter of common gossip in “Newspaper Row” that there was a strong and true friendship between the care-burdened President and the fun-making showman, whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne.