Well, for one thing, he was a grand reality.  They, relatively, were shadows.  The wind of destiny for him was the convictions arising out of his own soul; for them it was vox populi.  The genuineness of Lincoln, his spiritual reality, had been perceived early by a class of men whom your true politician seldom understands.  The Intellectuals—­“them literary fellers,” in the famous words of an American Senator—­were quick to see that the President was an extraordinary man; they were not long in concluding that he was a genius.  The subtlest intellect of the time, Hawthorne, all of whose prejudices were enlisted against him, said in the Atlantic of July, 1863:  “He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character.  As to his integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never deceived he has a flexible mind capable of much expansion.”  And this when Trumbull chafed in spirit because the President was too “weak” for his part and Wade railed at him as a despot.  As far back as 1860, Lowell, destined to become one of his ablest defenders, had said that Lincoln had “proved both his ability and his integrity; he . . . had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”  To be sure, there were some Intellectuals who could not see straight nor think clear.  The world would have more confidence in the caliber of Bryant had he been able to rank himself in the Lincoln following.  But the greater part of the best intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley’s words, “My respect for the character of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of Washington:  “None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face.  One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."(2)

Lincoln’s popular strength lay in a combination of the Intellectuals and the plain people against the politicians.  He reached the masses in three ways:  through his general receptions which any one might attend; through the open-door policy of his office, to which all the world was permitted access; through his visits to the army.  Many thousand men and women, in one or another of these ways, met the President face to face, often in the high susceptibility of intense woe, and carried away an impression which was immediately circulated among all their acquaintances.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the grotesque miscellany of the stream of people flowing ever in and out of the President’s open doors.  Patriots eager to serve their country but who could find no place in the conventional requirements of the War Office; sharpers who wanted to inveigle him into the traps of profiteers; widows with all their sons in service, pleading for one to be exempted; other parents struggling with the red tape that kept