Lincoln disappointed some by failing to offer confidence-inspiring rhetoric. The following day an Illinoisan told him: “you ought to take a stronger stand. The nation expects you to. You are looked up to with confidence. Rouse the soul of the people.” Others praised Lincoln’s impromptu speech extravagantly. Whitelaw Reid called it “remarkable, alike for the courageous assumption of unpopular responsibility, and for the characteristic honesty with which he refrained from boastful promises and stirring declarations that the war should now soon be ended.” Reid could think of “no more striking scene” in “all the history of the Republic.” Rhetorically he asked: “Was ever the ruler of a great people, in a moment when his personal popularity was so flatteringly brought home to him by his people, known voluntarily to assume, without special necessity therefor, such popular odium as the President honestly sought to transfer from the Secretary [of War] to himself?” Reporters noted that the crowd “was delighted with the manly manner in which the President assumed the whole responsibility in the Stanton-McClellan imbroglio.” The Providence Journal lauded the president’s “straightforward manliness and homely common sense,” and Erastus Brooks, a partisan Democratic journalist, wrote that by such “frank confessions, which are often more generous to others than just to himself, the President draws friends around him, and makes many friends of those, who have been warm opponents of his policy, principles and his election.” Lincoln’s profound magnanimity would continue to win him respect and affection.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃