This was the Dreyfus case of the Civil War.  Stone was never tried and never vindicated.  He was eventually released upon parole and after many tantalizing disappointments permitted to rejoin the army.  What gives the event significance is its evidence of the power, at that moment, of the Committee, and of the relative weakness of the President.  Lincoln’s eagerness to protect condemned soldiers survives in many anecdotes.  Hay confides to his diary that he was sometimes “amused at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would justify” clemency.  And yet, when Stanton informed him of the arrest of Stone, he gloomily acquiesced.  “I hope you have good reasons for it,” he said.  Later he admitted that he knew very little about the case.  But he did not order Stone’s release.

Lincoln had his own form of ruthlessness.  The selfless man, by dealing with others in the same extraordinary way in which he deals with himself, may easily under the pressure of extreme conditions become impersonal in his thinking upon duty.  The morality of such a state of mind is a question for the philosopher.  The historian must content himself with pointing out the only condition that redeems it—­if anything redeems it The leader who thinks impersonally about others and personally about himself-what need among civilized people to characterize him?  Borgia, Louis XIV, Napoleon.  If we are ever to pardon impersonal thinking it is only in the cases of men who begin by effacing themselves.  The Lincoln who accepted Stanton as a Cabinet officer, who was always more or less overshadowed by the belief that in saving the government he was himself to perish, is explicable, at least, when individual men became for him, as at times they did, impersonal factors in a terrible dream.

There are other considerations in the attempt to give a moral value to his failure to interfere in behalf of Stone.  The first four months of 1862 are not only his feeblest period as a ruler, the period when he was barely able to hold his own, but also the period when he was least definite as a personality, when his courage and his vitality seemed ebbing tides.  Again, his spirit was in eclipse.  Singularly enough, this was the darkness before the dawn.  June of 1862 saw the emergence, with a suddenness difficult to explain, of the historic Lincoln.  But in January of that year he was facing downward into the mystery of his last eclipse.  All the dark places of his heredity must be searched for clues to this strange experience.  There are moments, especially under strain of a personal bereavement that fell upon him in February, when his will seemed scarcely a reality; when, as a directing force he may be said momentarily to have vanished; when he is hardly more than a ghost among his advisers.  The far-off existence of weak old Thomas cast its parting shadow across his son’s career.