Lincoln: Eloquence, Subtlety and Wit Quiz

Answer: The Todds

Mary Todd's family, prominent in Kentucky before the war and in fact close to Lincoln's idol, Henry Clay, had aristocratic pretensions, and the Great Emancipator was constantly burdened by his wife's unending succession of spending sprees, snobberies, jealousies and snits. As with many things in Lincoln's life, humor helped him to persevere.

Answer: "Chase is about one and a half times bigger than any other man I know"

Chase, an Ohioan, was an abolitionist who missed no opportunity to take a poke at Lincoln even as he worked in the Cabinet with him. A huge, impressive-looking man, he was an egomaniac who considered Lincoln a much inferior mortal. Lincoln knew his prey when he uttered these highly ambiguous sentiments; Chase of course took them for a compliment. From the detail that we do know about Lincoln it appears that the great man's tongue was lodged firmly in his cheek when he so spoke of Chase.

Answer: If McClellan "did not want to use the army", Lincoln would like to "borrow it"

McClellan, who would later run against Lincoln (unsuccessfully, of course) was a continual thorn in Lincoln's side; he overestimated enemy strength and was the soul of hesitancy. Lincoln noted that McClellan had "the slows" and referred to him as a "stationary engine", but in truth his treatment of the vainglorious McClellan was quite lenient. McClellan gets some credit for holding his own at Antietam (Sharpsburg), but he had the CSA battle plans ahead of time and many have criticized him for letting Lee escape from that legendary and bloody battlefield.

Answer: James K. Polk

The war in question here was of course not the Civil War but the Mexican, which the US basically forced upon its Southern neighbors during the muscle-flexing phase of Manifest Destiny. Lincoln knew that Polk had gotten us into this war on the most implausible grounds, and scented out the land-grab the thing turned out to be, but his Whig sallies against a relatively popular Democratic administration did him no good.

Answer: "What (have) the horses of your army done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?"

Lincoln shortly therafter dumped the vexing McClellan in favor of Burnside, who was ineffective at Fredericksburg. Although Robert E.
Lee would later speak highly of McClellan's skills on the battlefield, his colossal insolence toward Lincoln (he once entered his house while Lincoln was waiting for him, and went to sleep without having spoken to the president) was unforgivable and counterproductive. Had Andrew Jackson been running the country then, it is possible that McClellan would have ended his career dangling from a rope.

Answer: Grant

Talebearers suggested to Lincoln that Grant was "a poor drunken imbecile" who had actually been in his cups even at the Donelson triumph, but Lincoln confirmed that Grant had been drunk at neither Shiloh nor Donelson and wisely stood by Grant. See, e.g., Carl Sandburg's famous "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years."

Answer: "Fighting Joe" Hooker

According to Sandburg, Hooker initially took umbrage, but after finishing the letter, said "That is just such a letter as a father might write to his son. It is a beautiful letter, and although I think he was harder than on me than I deserved, I will say that I love the man who wrote it." The image of Lincoln as a disappointed but still loving father is one that recurs throughout the literature; see especially Michael Burlingame's "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln."

Answer: "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea"

Much could be written (and has) about the significance of the Mississippi River in the American consciousness; indeed, it figures as a central theme in what is almost inarguably the Great American Novel, "Huckleberry Finn". As a practical matter, Vicksburg and Port Hudson gave the Union dominance over an important waterway, but Lincoln apparently saw a deeper significance to these victories, and his moving and unusual phrasing suggests that the reconquest of the great river touched something elemental in him.

Answer: "the mystic chords of memory... will yet swell the chorus of the Union."

"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Answer: as akin to a "son who was lame or had some other physical infirmity."

Sandburg again (p.365). Noah Brooks told Hooker that Lincoln had said that he "regarded Hooker very much as a father might a son who was lame, or who had some other physical infirmity. His love for his son would be even intensified by the reflection that the lad could never be a strong and successful man." Brooks noted that "the tears stood in Hooker's eyes as he heard this curious characterization of himself."