or in his mood all this while is his amazing humility. He seems to
have forgotten his own existence. As a person with likes and dislikes,
with personal hopes and fears, he has vanished. He is but an afflicted
and perplexed mind, struggling desperately to save his country. A
selfless man, he may be truly called through months of torment which
made him over from a theoretical to a practical statesman. He entered
this period a literary man who had been elevated almost by accident to
the position of a leader in politics. After many blunders, after doubt,
hesitation and pain, he came forth from this stern ordeal a powerful man
of action.

The impression which he made on the country at the opening of this
period was unfortunate. The very power that had hitherto been the making
of him--the literary power, revealing to men in wonderfully convincing
form the ideas which they felt within them but could not utter--this had
deserted him. Explain the psychology of it any way you will, there is
the fact! The speeches Lincoln made on the way to Washington during the
latter part of February were appallingly unlike himself. His mind had
suddenly fallen dumb. He had nothing to say. The gloom, the desolation
that had penetrated his soul, somehow, for the moment, made him
commonplace. When he talked--as convention required him to do at all his
stopping places--his words were but faint echoes of the great
political exponent he once had been. His utterances were fatuous; mere
exhortations to the country not to worry. "There is no crisis but an
artificial one," he said.(1) And the country stood aghast! Amazement,
bewilderment, indignation, was the course of the reaction in many minds
of his own party. Their verdict was expressed in the angry language of
Samuel Bowles, "Lincoln is a Simple Susan."(2)

In private talk, Lincoln admitted that he was "more troubled about the
outlook than he thought it discreet to show." This remark was made to a
"Public Man," whose diary has been published but whose identity is still
secret. Though keenly alert for any touch of weakness or absurdity in
the new President, calling him "the most ill-favored son of Adam I ever
saw," the Public Man found him "crafty and sensible." In conversation,
the old Lincoln, the matchless phrase-maker, could still express
himself. At New York he was told of a wild scheme that was on foot to
separate the city from the North, form a city state such as Hamburg then
was, and set up