into being. The quotas assigned the States led to endless disputes between the governors and the War Department; the drafts caused riots; an inferior kind of soldier was obtained by drafting, and deserters increased. Lincoln shirked none of these new cares. He was determined that the efficiency of the war engine should be kept up, and nobody in the Government studied more closely how this was to be done, or insisted more vigorously on the full execution of the law. In assigning the quotas to the different States, certain credits were made of men who had enlisted previously. Many disputes arose over the credits and assignments, some of them most perplexing. Ultimately most of these reached the President. The draft bore heavily on districts where the percentage of death among the first volunteers had been large, and often urgent pleas were made to the President to release a city or county from the quota assigned. The late Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago "Tribune," once told me how he and certain leading citizens of Chicago went to Lincoln to ask that the quota of Cook County be reduced.

"In 1864, when the call for extra troops came, Chicago revolted," said Mr. Medill. "She had already sent 22,000 men up to that time, and was drained. When the new call came, there were no young men to go-no aliens except what were bought. The citizens held a mass meeting, and appointed three persons, of whom I was one, to go to Washington and ask Stanton to give Cook County a new enrollment. I begged off; but the committee insisted, so I went. On reaching Washington, we went to Stanton with our statement. He refused entirely to give us the desired aid. Then we went to Lincoln. I cannot do it,' he said, but I will go with you to Stanton and hear the arguments of both sides.' So we all went over to the War Department together. Stanton and General Frye were there, and they, of course, contended that the quota should not be changed. The argument went on for some time, and finally was referred to Lin

coln, who had been sitting silently listening. I shall never forget how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face.

"Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness,' after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home, and raise your 6,000 extra men. And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your' Tribune' have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.'

"I couldn't say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn't have an answer. We all got up and went out, and when the door closed, one of my colleagues said: 'Well, gentlemen, the old man is right. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Let us never say anything about this, but go home and raise the men.' And we did-6,000 men-making 28,000 in the war from a city of 156,000. But there might have been crape on every door almost in Chicago, for every family had lost a son or a husband. I lost two brothers. It was hard for the mothers."*

Severe as Lincoln could be with any disposition to shirk what he considered a just and necessary demand, strenuously as he insisted that the ranks must be kept full, he never came to regard the army as a mere machine, never forgot the individual men who made it up. Indeed, he was the one man

These notes were made immediately after an interview given me by Mr. Medill in June, 1895. They were to be corrected before publication, but Mr. Medill's death occurred before they were in type, so that the account was never seen by him.

in the Government who, from first to last, was big enough to use both his head and his heart. From the outset, he was the personal friend of every soldier he sent to the front, and somehow every man seemed to know it. No doubt, it was on Lincoln's visits to the camps around Washington, in the early days of the war, that the body of the soldiers got this idea. They never forgot his friendly hand-clasp, his hearty "God bless you," his remonstrance against the youth of some fifteen-year-old boy masquerading as twenty, his jocular remarks about the height of some soldier towering above his own six feet four. When, later, he visited the Army of the Potomac on the Rappahannock and at Antietam, these impressions of his interest in the personal welfare of the soldiers were renewed. He walked down the long lines of tents or huts, noting the attempts at decoration, the housekeeping conveniences, replying by smiles and nods and sometimes with words to the greetings, rough and hearty, which he received. He inquired into every phase of camp life, and the men knew it, and said to one another, "He cares for us; he makes us fight, but he cares."

Reports of scores of cases where he interfered personally to secure some favor or right for a soldier found their way to the army and gave solid foundation to this impression that he was the soldier's friend. From the time of the arrival of the first troops in Washington, in April, 1861, the town was full of men, all of them wanting to see the President. At first they were gay and curious merely, their requests trivial; but later, when the army had settled down to steady fighting, and Bull Run and the Peninsula and Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville had cut and scarred and aged it, the soldiers who haunted Washington were changed. They stumped about on crutches. They sat pale and thin in the parks, empty sleeves pinned to their breasts; they came to the White House begging for furloughs to see