his secretaries as “sitting on his shoulders”—­he would slide far down into his chair and stick up both slippers so high above his head that they could rest with ease upon his mantelpiece.(5) No wonder that his enemies made unlimited fun.  And they professed to believe that there was an issue here.  When the elegant McClellan was moving heaven and earth, as he fancied, to get the army out of its shirt-sleeves, the President’s manner was a cause of endless irritation.  Still more serious was the effect of his manner on many men who agreed with him otherwise.  Such a high-minded leader as Governor Andrew of Massachusetts never got over the feeling that Lincoln was a rowdy.  How could a rowdy be the salvation of the country?  In the dark days of 1864, when a rebellion against his leadership was attempted, this merely accidental side of him was an element of danger.  The barrier it had created between himself and the more formal types, made it hard for the men who finally saved him to overcome their prejudice and nail his colors to the mast.  Andrew’s biographer shows himself a shrewd observer when he insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln.  They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster.  And this idea was not confined to any one locality.  Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this view.  It was the view of Washington in 1848 when Washington had failed to see the real Lincoln through his surface peculiarities.  It was again the view of Washington when Lincoln returned to it.

Furthermore, his free way of talking, the broad stories he continued to tell, were made counts in his indictment.  One of the bequests of Puritanism in America is the ideal, at least, of extreme scrupulousness in talk.  To many sincere men Lincoln’s choice of fables was often a deadly offense.  Charles Francis Adams never got over the shock of their first interview.  Lincoln clenched a point with a broad story.  Many professional politicians who had no objection to such talk in itself, glared and sneered when the President used it—­because forsooth, it might estrange a vote.

Then, too, Lincoln had none of the social finesse that might have adapted his manner to various classes.  He was always incorrigibly the democrat pure and simple.  He would have laughed uproariously over that undergraduate humor, the joy of a famous American University, supposedly strong on Democracy: 

     “Where God speaks to Jones, in the very same tones,
     That he uses to Hadley and Dwight.”

Though Lincoln’s queer aplomb, his good-humored familiarity on first acquaintance, delighted most of his visitors, it offended many.  It was lacking in tact.  Often it was a clumsy attempt to be jovial too soon, as when he addressed Greeley by the name of “Horace” almost on first sight.  His devices for putting men on the familiar footing lacked originality.  The frequency with which he called upon a tall visitor to measure up against him reveals the poverty of his social invention.  He applied this device with equal thoughtlessness to the stately Sumner, who protested, and to a nobody who grinned and was delighted.