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Lincoln's Secretary, John Hay, described the mental torture of waiting for an hour with Secretary of State Seward and Lincoln in George McClellan's house for the general to return from a wedding. When McClellan finally did come back, he simply passed the room in which the President was sitting; another half an hour went by before a servant informed Lincoln that McClellan had gone to bed. Young John Hay was enraged. "I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come," he wrote in his diary as he recounted the story of what he considered an inexcusable "insolence of epaulettes." To Hay's surprise, Lincoln "seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity." Another story is told of the time when a Congressman had received Lincoln's authorization for something to be carried out by the War Department. When War Secretary Stanton refused to honor the order, the disappointed petitioner returned to Lincoln, telling him that Stanton had not only countermanded the order but had called the President a damn fool for issuing it. "Did Stanton say I was a damn fool?" Lincoln asked. "He did, sir, and repeated it." At which point, the President remarked, "If Stanton said I was a damn fool, then I must be one, for he is nearly always right and generally says what he means. I will step over and see him."
Perhaps the most memorable instance of Lincoln's ability to yield lesser concerns for more important ones related to Grant, whose weakness for alcohol may have contributed to his resignation from the Army in the 1850s. His return to the Army during the war, however, had been marked by a string of great successes before rumors of drinking problems began once again to surface in early 1863. After dispatching an investigator to look into Grant's behavior in the field, Lincoln concluded that Grant's drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan, execute and win battles. When a delegation brought further complaints about Grant's drinking to the President, he told them that if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant used, he would distribute it at once to the rest of his generals.
SELF-CONTROL
When angry at someone, Lincoln would occasionally write a hot letter, but then would invariably put it aside until he had cooled down, at which point he no longer needed to send it. Lincoln had rarely been more "dejected and discouraged," as Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles observed, than when he learned that General George Meade had allowed Robert E. Lee's army to escape after Gettysburg. In a frank letter to Meade, Lincoln acknowledged that he was "distressed immeasureably" by "the magnitude of the misfortune ... He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely." But Lincoln delayed sending it, knowing the great pain it would cause the general, until his emotions settled down. And when they did, he placed the letter in an envelope on which he wrote, "To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed."