A Republican from the Bluegrass State acknowledged that Lincoln was “worthy & eminently honest” but feared that those qualities were not enough: “We need a man with an iron will & inflexible purpose.” After spending several weeks in New York and Washington, this Kentuckian reported that there “is a painful state of feeling pervading all classes.” The administration’s delay in attacking the Confederates “has become intolerable. Something must be done or every thing will be lost & that speedily. If the Govt is not in earnest let us know it & quit. If it is then let it go to work. … If there is a single person that has not lost all confidence in the powers that be I have yet to find him.” Lincoln’s former ally in the antislavery Whig ranks, Truman Smith, admired his “unspotted rectitude & great goodness of heart” but insisted that “in such a crisis rectitude & goodness are poor substitutes for that spirit & determination which Genl. Jackson was accustomed to manifest.” People in Wisconsin, according to a Republican editor there, believed “that the President and Cabinet,—as a whole,—are not equal to the occasion.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
(echo:: @ ⌗)