Nothing Touches the Tired Spot

American Thinker ^ | October 15, 2016 | Richard F. Miniter

[Kaslin]

As the Civil War seesawed and the Union scored one of its rare early successes, a man met a somber-looking Lincoln at the White House. Trying to cheer the president up, he suggested that the president should be pleased by the latest news from the battle front. Lincoln agreed but then sighed that "nothing touches the tired spot."

And he should have had a tired spot. Abraham Lincoln's administration had to deal with the Civil War and its raft of incompetent Union generals; Indian uprisings; an ongoing monetary crisis of epic proportions; and a dozen major foreign issues, including the Trent Affair, which almost brought us to war with Great Britain, all the while being harried by ankle-biting matters like the individual approval of postmaster appointments in towns nobody ever heard of. Finally, there were major political distractions, like a secretary of war who, in Lincoln's words, "would steal everything except a hot stove"; another Cabinet secretary who sometimes acted as though he had been elected president; and yet another who called Lincoln "the original gorilla" in public.

And to manage the ongoing catastrophes of his time as well as the often obnoxious members of his own administration, Lincoln had but two full-time assistants: John Nicolay and John Hay – young men so overworked that they sometimes slept on the couch in Lincoln's office. We should remember that so much of the secretarial work these men performed, such as copying important documents by hand, wouldn't be necessary in today's world. Nor, for that matter, would be the constant running back and forth to the Army telegraph office because there were no telephones.

[spokeshave]

The anvil on which the country was formed.

[Svartalfiar]

The grandfather of FDR and his New Deal

[Pelham]

The first income tax. Closing down critical newspapers. Jailing political opponents without trial.