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He refused to bear grudges or pay people back for previous hurts. While his colleagues tended to let things fester and brooded over perceived slights, he argued that "no man resolved to make the most of himself has time to waste on personal contention." So rare in a politician, this attitude allowed him to form friendships and alliances with those who had previously opposed him. In the 1850s, Edwin Stanton had humiliated him when they were partners in a law case, referring to him as a "long-armed ape," refusing to deal with him as an equal, deliberately shunning him at a hotel, never even opening the brief he had painstakingly prepared. Yet, when the time came for Lincoln to replace Simon Cameron, his first Secretary of War, he appointed Stanton, believing him to be the best man for the all-important post. He recognized that the very qualities that had brought the hotheaded Stanton to treat him badly--his intensity, his bluntness, his determination to succeed--were precisely the qualities he needed in his War Secretary.
GENEROSITY OF SPIRIT
When Congress voted to censure Cameron for wasteful contracts given out to suppliers in the early days of the war, in which middlemen had made off with scandalous profits for unworkable pistols, for blind horses and for knapsacks that disintegrated in the rain, Lincoln publicly took the blame. He explained that the unfortunate contracts were part and parcel of the emergency situation that faced the government in those first days of the war. If fault was to be found, then he himself and his entire Cabinet "were at least equally responsible." For this, Cameron would be forever grateful. Similarly, colleagues of Lincoln were grateful when he shared credit for successes. When General Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, arrived in the nation's capital in March 1864 to take command of all the Union armies, he was greeted as a conquering hero at a White House reception. Standing to the side, Lincoln willingly ceded the place of honor he normally occupied, fully aware, as few other ambitious politicians would have been, that "the path to ambition" was wide enough, as an observer phrased it, for the two of them "to walk it abreast."
Above all, he was quick to concede error. When Grant was moving toward Vicksburg, Lincoln thought he "should go down the river," where he could meet up with General Nathaniel Banks. Instead, Grant decided to turn northward. "I feared it was a mistake," Lincoln acknowledged after Grant's spectacular victory. "I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong." Then, to lessen the censure of another general, Lincoln wrote, "I frequently make mistakes myself, in the many things I am compelled to do hastily."
PERSPECTIVE