INTRODUCTION
with unlikely people, often people who began by contempt or semi-contempt of him. There was the town bully of his youth, whom he soundly thrashed for trying a foul in a wresting match, and who rose from the dust to proclaim Lincoln the best man who ever broke into camp; thirty years later there was his own Secretary of State, with his self-complacent assumption of the President's unfitness for leadership and of his own call to direct the nation, put gently but firmly in his place and soon frankly and nobly declaring, "He's the best of us all."
He had many pass-keys—wrath, magnanimity, shrewdness, patience, clarity of judgment, humor, resolve; and in the end, one or the other or all together opened every closed door, and he sat down at home with men of the most divergent view and experience: the bully, the scholarly, the cunning, the pious, the
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