Encounters
''vitiate'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜_encounter｜ENC｜20260904120411-02-•
One day in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stole time from his busy schedule to pen some wise paternal advice to a young Union captain who had been squabbling with his superiors. Quoting from Hamlet, the president wrote that a father’s admonition to his son—“Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee”—was good counsel “and yet not the best.” Instead, Lincoln enjoined the captain: “Quarrel not at all.” The reasons Lincoln gave were practical: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.” Born into emotional and economic poverty, Lincoln early on “resolved to make the most of himself” and did so, adhering to those precepts.
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original
''vitiate'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜_encounter｜ENC｜20260904161329-46-•
Meanwhile, Seward drafted his own response to the British government, which Lincoln promised to examine carefully in order to make sure that it contained no offensive language like that in the secretary’s May dispatch to Charles Francis Adams. Seward endorsed the release of Mason and Slidell, even though he maintained that those men were in fact contraband of war. Wilkes had acted without instructions, Seward explained, and though justified in seizing the Confederate emissaries, the captain should have taken the Trent to a prize court for adjudication. Such a step would have been in keeping with the traditional American view of neutral rights, a view that the British had earlier rejected, leading to the War of 1812. But because he voluntarily let the Trent sail away, Wilkes vitiated America’s case for holding Mason and Slidell. Seward gratuitously added that if the survival of the Union had hung in the balance, the prisoners would not have been yielded, and that he was glad the British were finally agreeing with the American position on impressment.
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
Link to original