thunder”: Pennsylvania announced 44 votes for Lincoln, boosting his total to 181, only 3½ votes behind Seward’s new total of 1841/2.

To reach his goal of becoming everyone’s second choice, Lincoln was careful not to disparage any other candidate. Nor was it in his nature to do so.

As Stanton came to know and understand Lincoln, his initial disdain turned to admiration. When George Harding, his old partner in the Reaper trial, assumed that Stanton was the author of the “remarkable passages” in one of Lincoln’s messages, Stanton set him straight. “Lincoln wrote it—every word of it; and he is capable of more than that, Harding,

Though Bates initially viewed Lincoln as a well-meaning but incompetent administrator, he eventually concluded that the president was an unmatched leader, “very near being a perfect man.”

Lincoln’s barren childhood, his lack of schooling, his relationships with male friends, his complicated marriage, the nature of his ambition, and his ruminations about death can be analyzed more clearly when he is placed side by side with his three contemporaries.

Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all.

When ardent Republicans heard Lincoln speak, they knew that if their beloved Seward could not win, they had in the eloquent orator from Illinois a man of considerable capacity whom they could trust, one who would hold fast on the central issue that had forged the party—the fight against extending slavery into the territories. Though Lincoln had ent

“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

“Now he belongs to the ages.”