Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/378

 370 Southern Historical Socifli/ / t aj>ers.

Yet none rate Chase higher than Nicolay and Hay do for talent, character and patriotism.

McClure's Lincoln, etc. (page 150, et seq.), says: " Stanton had been in open and malignant opposition to the Administration only a few months before." This was in January, 1862. "Stanton [page 155, et seq. ,] often spoke of and to public men, military and civil, with a withering sneer. I have heard him scores of times thus speak of Lincoln, and several times thus speak to Lincoln." * * * "After Stanton' s retirement from the Buchanan Cabinet, when Lincoln was inaugurated, he maintained the closest confidential relations with Buchanan, and wrote him many letters expressing the utmost con- tempt for Lincoln." * * * These letters, given to the public in Curtis' Life of Buchanan, speak freely (see Hapgood's Lincoln, page 254,) of "the painful imbecility of Lincoln, the venality and corruption which ran riot in the government," and McClure goes on: "It is an open secret that Stanton advised the revolutionary over- throw of the Lincoln government, to be replaced by General Mc- Clellan as military dictator. " * * * " These letters published by Curtis, bad as they are, are not the worst letters written by Stanton to Buchanan. Some of them were so violent in their expression against Lincoln * * * that they have been charitably withheld from the public." Whitney, in his On Circuit with Lincoln (page 424), tells of these suppressed letters. See, too, his pages 422 to 424, et seq. , and Ben Perley Poore, in Reminiscences of Lincoln (page 223), and Kasson, in Reminiscences of Lincoln (page 384), all in confirmation of Stanton' s estimate and treatment of Lincoln. Hapgood's Abraham Lincoln refers (page 164) to Stanton's "brutal absence of decent personal feeling" towards Lincoln, and tells of Stanton's insulting behavior when they met five years earlier, of which meeting Stanton said that he "had met him at the bar, and found him a low, cunning clown." (See Ben Perley Poore, in Reminiscences of Lincoln, page 223. ) Miss Ida Tarbell, in McClure' s Magazine for March, 1899, tells the story of this earliest manifesta- tion of Stanton's contempt for Lincoln.

McClure's Lincoln, etc. (page 123, et seq.), says: "Lincoln's de- sire for a renomination was the one thing ever apparent in his mind during the third year of his administration," and he draws a pitiful picture (pages 113 to 115) of Lincoln as he saw him, in fits of abject depression during a considerable time after his second nomination, when he and all the leaders of the Republican party thought his de- feat inevitable. Don Piatt depicts {Reminiscences of Lincoln, page