t, for the glorification of political
intrigue--these same men followed him doubtfully, with bad grace,
willing to shift to some other leader whenever he might arise. The clue
to their distrust was Seward's amusement at the furious. Could a man
who laughed when you preached on the beauty of the hewing of Agag, could
such a man be sincere? And that Seward in some respects was not sincere,
history generally admits. He loved to poke fun at his opponents by
appearing to sneer at himself, by ridiculing the idea that he was ever
serious. His scale of political values was different from that of most
of his followers. Nineteen times out of twenty, he would treat what they
termed "principles" as mere political counters, as legitimate subjects
of bargain. If by any deal he could trade off any or all of these
nineteen in order to secure the twentieth, which for him was the only
vital one, he never scrupled to do so. Against a lurid background of
political ferocity, this amused, ironic figure came to be rated by the
extremists, both in his own and in the enemy camp as Mephistopheles.

No quality could have endeared him more certainly to Lincoln than the
very one which the bigots misunderstood. From his earliest youth Lincoln
had been governed by this same quality. With his non-censorious mind,
which accepted so much of life as he found it, which was forever
stripping principles of their accretions, what could be more inevitable
than his warming to the one great man at Washington who like him held
that such a point of view was the only rational one. Seward's ironic
peacefulness in the midst of the storm gained in luster because all
about him raged a tempest of ferocity, mitigated, at least so far as the
distracted President could see, only by self-interest or pacifism.

As Lincoln came into office, he could see and hear many signs of a
rising fierceness of sectional hatred. His secretary records with
disgust a proposal to conquer the Gulf States, expel their white
population, and reduce the region to a gigantic state preserve, where
negroes should grow cotton under national supervision.(1) "We of the
North," said Senator Baker of Oregon, "are a majority of the Union, and
we will govern our Union in our own way."(2) At the other extreme was
the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists. Part of Lincoln's abiding
quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling. Their
peculiar form of introspection had injected into po