Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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extremes. When John Brown was executed, he told Northerners that since Brown had acted lawlessly, they had no right to object to his punishment. But he told Southerners that if they should try to destroy the Union, "it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with."

A Magnificent Challenge. Above all, his was the individuality and the solitude of leadership. His task was defined by the late Benjamin P. Thomas, author of the best one-volume biography of Lincoln: "To hold together in wartime a party made up of abolitionists and Negro-haters, high-and low-tariff men, hard-and soft-money men, former Whigs and erstwhile Democrats, Maine law prohibitionists and German beer-drinkers, Know-Nothings and immigrants." He had no administrative experience, and surrounded himself in his Cabinet with former political rivals, strong and able men widely considered his betters, and it seemed as if they would crush him. But he knew how to play them off against one another.

His military experience consisted of a captaincy in the Black Hawk War, in which he admitted never having seen any "live, fighting Indians." And yet he proved himself a sound strategist, against the enemy as well as against his own generals. He suffered through the hesitations of dilatory George McClellan, complaining bitterly that sending him reinforcements was like shoving fleas across a barnyard—so few of them seemed to get there. Later, he tried Joe Hooker. There had been rumors that a clique, including Hooker, wanted to set up a military dictatorship. Lincoln flung him a magnificent challenge: "Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." He made mistakes. He was vilified both for being too soft and for being too hard. He was called a tyrant for suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning dissidents. He had one answer. "I expect to maintain this contest until successful," he said, "or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsake me."

Large & Small. Beyond the triumphs of his leadership, he retained a special genius—not of strategy, not even of politics—the genius of being a person. The legendary, the charismatic Lincoln grew out of a cluttered office where he sat with only two secretaries, writing most of his own letters in longhand and receiving an endless stream of callers and favor seek ers; out of the hundreds of scrawled pardons for deserters ("Let this woman have her son out of Old Capital Prison"). The effect of it all was in no way diminished by the fact that there was also a method to his mercy—too many executions would cut down enlistments.

He was the gaunt figure walking alone at night to the War Department telegraph office to read late dispatches or wandering about the White House in his short nightshirt ("setting out behind," said Hay, "like the tailfeathers of an enormous ostrich") to read a funny story to his secretaries. He was the man who, after Lee's surrender, could scribble a note to Secretary of War Stanton: "Tad wants some flags. Can he be accommodated?" And he was the man who had recurring gloomy dreams in which he saw his own body laid out in the East Room, but who refused bodyguards.

And so, out