McClellan enjoyed showing off his army at reviews, which Lincoln gladly attended, even when the temperature in Washington reached 100 degrees, causing many troops to pass out. At one review, as the multinational Thirty-ninth New York regiment, known as the “Garibaldi Guards,” marched by the platform on which the president and other dignitaries stood, each soldier removed from his hatband a small bouquet or a sprig of evergreen, which they tossed toward Lincoln, creating “a perfect shower of leaves and flowers.” Nicolay reported that this gesture “was unexpected and therefore strikingly novel and poetical.” Another observer, Samuel F. Du Pont, wrote his wife that his initial impression of the president was “that he was the ugliest man I had seen, for one looking so young. This wore off and he has a certain poise and air which are not unpleasant—if he had lived in the East, he might have been graceful.” Some soldiers, however, complained that Lincoln’s demeanor at reviews was too informal, that he talked with colleagues instead of paying full attention to the passing troops. A journalist who observed him shake hands with members of a New York regiment wrote that “I have seen nearly all of our great men, from Jackson down, go through the ‘pump-handle movement,’ but there certainly never was a man who could do it with the celerity and abandon of President Lincoln. He goes it with both hands, and hand over hand, very much as a sailor would climb a rope. What is to the satisfaction of all is, that he gives a good honest, hearty shake, as if he meant it.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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