Instead of believing that Lincoln's extraordinary experiences in the multifarious West produced a factotum, his revilers asserted that he looked to one minister for financial instructions, to another for military guidance, etc. But it is true that by tradition, as the premier in fact, the secretary of state is supposed to write the first drafts at least of the presidential speeches to foreign ministers, and, as the secretary was Seward, a man of letters preeminently, he had Lincoln's addresses, even to home delegations, fathered upon him.
The President was chatting in his own study when a messenger ran in with a paper, explaining his haste with the words:
"Compliments of the secretary with the speech your excellency is to make to the Swiss minister."
Anybody else would have been abashed by the seeming exposure, but the executive merely cried aloud as if to publish the facts to the auditory:
"Oh, this is a speech Mr. Seward has written for me. I guess I will try it before these gentlemen, and see how it goes." He read it in the burlesque manner with which he parodied circuit preachers in his boyhood and public speakers in his prime, and added at the close:
"There, I like that. It has the merit of originality!"
RIGHTING WRONG HURTS, BUT DOES GOOD.
In May, 1861, all looked with anxiety to the letter by which the United States of America should reply to Great Britain furnishing the Confederated States with its first encouragement, the rights of belligerents. Without them their privateers were useless, as they could have gone into no ports and sold their prizes nowhere. Mr. Seward was in touch with the New England school. It clamored for war with any friend to the revolting States. But Lincoln corrected what was provocative in the original advice to our minister, Adams, at St. James'. The English were no longer held to have issued a proclamation without due grounds in usage or the law of nations. It became by the modification no more a proceeding about which we could warrantably go to war. For instance, the President changed the words "wrongful" into "hurtful." According to Webster, wrongful means unjust, injurious, dishonest; while hurtful implies that the course will cause injury. The original has vanished in that odd but certain way in which state documents disappear when casting odium on public men; they are mayhap "filed away"--in the stove!
STANTON'S SERVICE WAS WORTH HIS SAUCE.
Among the President's minor worries was the assiduity with which his generosity was cultivated by his relatives--not only those by his marriage, but by his father's second marriage. He was like the eldest son of the family to whom all looked for sustenance. There came to the seat of government that Dennis Hanks, his cousin, who stood to reach for boons on the platform of rails which they had cut long ago in cohort. Dennis was seeking the pardon of some "Copperheads"--that is, Southern sympathizers of the North, veiled in their enmity, but dangerous. The secretary of war had pronounced against any leniency toward what were dubbed glaring traitors. All the chief could do--for he bared his head like Lear to let the Stanton tempest blow upon him and so spare others--was to say he would look at the cases the next day. Hanks was muttering.