Note 57 — Chapter XXI

"I repeat that his was one of the most uneven, eccentric, and heterogeneous characters, probably, that ever played a part in the great drama of history; and it was for that reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood; that he was on the one hand described as a mere humorist—a sort of Artemus Ward or Mark Twain—that it was thought that by some irony of fate a low comedian had got into the Presidential chair by mistake and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration, while this modern Nero fiddled upon its ruins; or that, on the other hand, he should have been thus sketched by as high authority as Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'He is the true history of the American people to his time. Step by step he walks beside them, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent, an entirely public man, Father of his Country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing through his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.'" Whitney: Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p. 147.

"One of the most obvious of Mr. Lincoln's peculiarities was his dissimilitude of qualities, or inequality of conduct, his dignity of deportment and action, interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity; his high aspiration and achievement, and his descent into the most primitive vales of listlessness, and the most ridiculous buffoonery. He combined the consideration of the movement of armies or grave questions of international concern, with Nasby's feeble jokes or Dan Rice's clownish tricks. In the chief drawer of his cabinet table, all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions lacking only his final signature, applications for pardons from death penalties, laws awaiting executive action, and orders, which, when issued, would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations.... Hence it was that superficial persons, who expected great achievements to be set in a mise en scéne, and to be ushered in with a prologue, could not understand or appreciate that this wonderful man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship, or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force, and a genius in administration." Whitney: Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, pp. 147-48-49.