PART  II

LINCOLN    AT   THE    CAPITAL

LINCOLN'S  task,  as  President,  required  not  only
all  of  his  keen  brain  and  responsive  heart,  but
all  of  his  rugged  endurance.  That  fine  stock  of  health,
won  by  out-door  training,  would  be  needed  as  a  brace
for  the  long  strain  of  the  long  days.  As  Emerson
said,  '  Here  was  place  for  no  holiday  magistrate,  no
fair-weather  sailor;  the  new  pilot  was  hurried  to  the
helm  in  a  tornado."  His  story  is  the  story  not  only  of
the  whole  Civil  War  — "  four  years  of  battle  days '
—  but  the  story  of  a  man  besieged  on  every  side  with
numberless  personal  demands,  and,  at  the  same  time,
the  story  of  a  man  who  kept  himself  so  simply  a  man,
aside  from  his  Presidential  office,  that  history  leaves
us  a  hundred  memories  of  good  times  spent  with  Tad,
and  of  acts  of  tenderness  to  the  "  privates '  in  the
army.
For  convenience,  let  us  take  the  liberty  of  compress-
ing the  events,  sayings,  and  writings  of  several  days
into  one,  and  so  follow  the  President's  mind  in  its
rapidly  changing  problems.  In  reality  the  incidents
here  given  were  scattered  over  perhaps  six  or  seven
months ;  but  they  were  all  true.  This  imaginary  day

403


404          MORE  THAN  CONQUERORS

will  not  be  a  Tuesday  or  Friday,  which  were  Cabinet
days,  nor  a  Saturday,  when  he  sometimes  held  public
receptions.  But,  more  common  than  any  of  those,  it
will  be  what  Lincoln  called  "  A  MIGHTY  HARD  DAY."
Many  days  were  equally  kaleidoscopic,  and  many  days,
with  him,  were  eighteen  hours  long.
