Page:Life of Abraham Lincoln - Bowers - 1922.djvu/49

 Rh days later, he made no reference at all to this affair because he knew when to be silent as well as when to explain.

Evidence of the true greatness and the forgiveness of the President and that he put the cause far above any personal consideration is in the fact of his appointing Edwin M. Stanton Secretary of War, to succeed Cameron to whom he had given the post as Minister to Russia. Stanton was a Democrat, a friend of McClellan, and had never ceased to speak of Lincoln with that gross abuse with which he had greeted Lincoln the lawyer in the McCormick case at Cincinnati in 1859. But with all Stanton's injustice to Lincoln—his revilings and his insults—he accepted the cabinet place when Lincoln offered it to him. But if Stanton was truculent, a tyrant and a bully—infinitely more important—he was honest and strong in office and broke the ring of grafters who had been robbing the government, and did his work heroically. That was what the President wished. And Stanton soon learned as others learned that Lincoln was master of every situation. Lincoln's friends opposed the appointment of Stanton and reminded the President of how crudely Stanton had treated him at Cincinnati, but the President had no thought for himself or his own future. He was concerned only to get the men who could best serve the great cause.

Lincoln's peculiar fitness for the tremendous tribulations of the Presidency at that time is further proved by his experiences with the recalcitrant McClellan. The General had been