these ministers
began by thinking that Lincoln had the least ability among them.
Seward and Welles presently learnt better. Stanton's exclamation
at Lincoln's death speaks for itself "Now he belongs to the ages!"
But Chase never believed that Lincoln could even be his equal.
Chase and the Treasury were a thorn in the side of the Government;
Chase because it was his nature, the Treasury because its notes fell
to thirty-nine cents in the dollar during the summer of '64. Welles,
hard-working and upright, was guided by an expert assistant. Stanton,
equally upright and equally hardworking, made many mistakes. And
yet, when all is said and done, Stanton was a really able patriot
who worked his hardest for what seemed to him the best.

Such were the four chief men in that Cabinet with which Lincoln
carried out his Union policy and over which he towered in what
became transcendent statesmanship--the head, the heart, the genius
of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept
it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the
currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds
were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his
own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward
the one sure haven for the Ship of State.

But Lincoln was more than the principal civilian war statesman: he
was the constitutional Commander-in-Chief of all the Union forces,
afloat and ashore. He was responsible not only for raising, supplying,
and controlling them, but for their actual command by men who, in
the eyes of the law, were simply his own lieutenants. The problem
of exercising civil control without practicing civilian interference,
always and everywhere hard, and especially hard in a civil war,
was particularly hard in his case, in view of public opinion, the
press, his own war policy, and the composition of his Cabinet.
His solution was by no means perfect; but the wonder is that he
reached it so well in spite of such perverting factors. He began
with the mere armed mob that fought the First Bull Run beset with
interference. He ended with Farragut, Grant, and Sherman, combined
in one great scheme of strategy that included Mobile, Virginia,
and the lower South, and that, while under full civil control,
was mostly free from interference with its naval and military
work--except at the fussy hands of Stanton.

The fundamental difference between civil control, w