With these momentous affairs on hand, Lincoln needed freedom from trivial and personal matters, if ever a President needed it; yet one who reads the documents of the period would infer that his entire time was spent in appointing postmasters. There was no escape for him. The office-seekers had seized Washington, and were making the White House their headquarters.

"There were days," says William O. Stoddard, “when the throng of eager applicants for office filled the broad staircase to its lower steps; the corridors of the first floor; the famous East room; the private parlors; while anxious groups and individuals paraded up and down the outer porch, the walks, and the avenue."

They even attacked Lincoln on the street. One day as his carriage rolled up the avenue, a man stopped it and attempted to present his application and credentials. "No, no," said Mr. Lincoln indignantly, "I won't open shop in the street."

This raid had begun in Springfield with the election. As Mr. Lincoln had been elected without bargains on his part, he did not propose to consider minor appointments until actually inaugurated.

"I have made up my mind," he said to a visitor a few days after his election, "not to be badgered about these places. I have promised nothing high or low, and will not. By-andby, when I call somebody to me in the character of an adviser, we will examine the claims to the most responsible posts and decide what shall be done. As for the rest, I shall have enough to do without reading recommendations for country postmasters."

All of the hundreds who had been put off in the winter, now reappeared in Washington. Now, Lincoln had clear notions of the use of the appointing power. One side should not gobble up everything, he declared; but in the pressure of

applications, it gave him the greatest difficulty to prevent this "gobbling up." Another rule he had adopted was not to appoint over the heads of his advisers. He preferred to win their consent to an appointment by tact rather than to make it by his own power. A case in point is disclosed in a letter he wrote to General Scott, in June, in which he said:

Doubtless you begin to understand how disagreeable it is for me to do a thing arbitrarily when it is unsatisfactory to others associated with me.

I very much wish to appoint Colonel Meigs Quartermaster-General, and yet General Cameron does not quite consent. I have come to know Colonel Meigs quite well for a short acquaintance, and, so far as I am capable of judging, I do not know one who combines the qualities of masculine intellect, learning, and experience of the right sort, and physical power of labor and endurance, so well as he.

I know he has great confidence in you, always sustaining, so far as I have observed, your opinions against any differing ones.

You will lay me under one more obligation if you can and will use your influence to remove General Cameron's objection. I scarcely need tell you I have nothing personal in this, having never seen or heard of Colonel Meigs until about the end of last March.

But that he could appoint arbitrarily is certain from the following letter:

You must make a job of it, and provide a place for the bearer of this, Elias Wampole. Make a job of it with the collector and have it done. You can do it for me, and you must.

In spite of the terrible pressure brought to bear upon him by the place-hunters; in spite of the frequent dissatisfaction his appointments gave, and the abuse the disappointed heaped upon him, he rarely lost his patience, rarely was anything but

kind. His sense of humor aided him wonderfully in this particular. The incongruity of a man in his position, and with the very life of the country at stake, pausing to appoint postmasters, struck him forcibly. "What is the matter, Mr. Lincoln," said a friend one day, when he saw him looking particularly grave and dispirited. "Has anything gone wrong at the front?"

"No," said the President, with a tired smile. "It isn't the war; it's the post-office at Brownsville, Missouri."

The "Public Man" relates in his " Diary" the end of an interview he and a friend had with the President on March 7:

"He walked into the corridor with us; and, as he bade us good-by and thanked for what he had told him, he again brightened up for a moment and asked him in an abrupt kind of way, laying his hand as he spoke with a queer but not uncivil familiarity on his shoulder, 'You haven't such a thing as a postmaster in your pocket, have you?' stared at him in astonishment, and I thought a little in alarm, as if he suspected a sudden attack of insanity; then Mr. Lincoln went on: You see it seems to me kind of unnatural that you shouldn't have at least a postmaster in your pocket. Everybody I've seen for days past has had foreign ministers, and collectors, and all kinds, and I thought you couldn't have got in here without having at least a postmaster get into your pocket!"

The "strange bed-fellows" politics was constantly making always amused him. One day a man turned up who had letters of recommendation from the most prominent pair of enemies in the Republican party, Horace Greeley and Thurlow Weed. The President immediately did what he could for him:

Mr. Adams is magnificently recommended; but the great point in his favor is that Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley join in recommending him I suppose the like never

happened before, and never will again; so that it is now or never. What say you?

A less obvious perplexity than the office-seekers for Mr. Lincoln at this period, though a no less real one, was the attitude of his Secretary of State-his cheerful assumption that he, not Mr. Lincoln, was the final authority of the administration.

Mr. Seward had been for years the leader of the Republican party. His defeat in the Chicago Convention of 1860 had been a terrible blow to a large number of people, though Seward himself had taken it nobly. "The Republican party was not made for Mr. Seward," he told his friends, "but Mr. Seward for the Republican party," and he went heartily into the campaign. But he believed, as many Republicans did, that Lincoln was unfit for the presidency, and that some one of his associates would be obliged to assume leadership. When Mr. Seward accepted the Secretaryship of State, he evidently did it with the idea that he was to be the Providence of the administration. "It is inevitable," he wrote to his wife on December 28th, the very day he wrote to Mr. Lincoln of his acceptance. "I will try to save freedom and my country." A week later he wrote home, "I have assumed a sort of dictatorship for defense, and am laboring night and day with the cities and States. My hope, rather my confidence, is unabated." And again, on January 18th; "It seems to me if I am absent only eight days, this administration, the Congress, and the District would fall into consternation and despair. I am the only hopeful, calm, conciliatory person here."

When Lincoln arrived in Washington and asked Seward to read the inaugural address, the latter gave it the closest attention, modifying it to fit his own policy, and in defense of the changes he made, he wrote to the President-elect: Only the soothing words which I have spoken have saved

us and carried us along thus far. Every loyal man, and indeed every disloyal man, in the South will tell you this."

He began his duties as Secretary of State with the same confidence in his call to be the real, if not the apparent, head of affairs. When the question of relieving Sumter came up, he believed that it was he who was managing the matter. "I wish I could tell you something of the political troubles of the country," he wrote home," but I cannot find the time. They are enough to tax the wisdom of the wisest. Fort Sumter is in danger. Relief of it practically impossible. The commissioners from the Southern Confederacy are here. These cares fall chiefly on me."

According to Mr. Welles, Secretary of the Navy, confidence and mutual frankness on public affairs and matters pertaining to the government, particularly on what related to present and threatened disturbances, existed among all the members [of the cabinet], with the exception of Mr. Seward, who had, or affected, a certain mysterious knowledge which he was not prepared to impart." Mr. Welles asserts that Mr. Seward carried so far his assumption of the cares" of Sumter and other questions as to meddle in the duties of his associates in the cabinet. He opposed regular cabinet meetings, and at first had his way. After Tuesdays and Fridays were set as cabinet days, he contended that it was not necessary that a member should come to the meetings unless especially summoned by Mr. Lincoln or himself.

If Mr. Seward had been less self-confident, he would have seen before the end of March that Mr. Lincoln had a mind of his own, and with it a quiet way of following its decisions. Others had seen this. For instance, he had had his own way about who should go into the cabinet. "There can be no doubt of it any longer," wrote the " Public Ma in his "Diary" on March 2, "this man from Illinois is no