Leonard Swett, of Chicago, whose counsels were doubtless among the most
welcome to Lincoln, in summing up Lincoln’s character, said:
“From the commencement of his life to its close I have sometimes doubted
whether he ever asked anybody’s advice about anything. He would listen
to everybody; he would hear everybody; but he rarely, if ever, asked for
opinions.
“As a politician and as President he arrived at all his conclusions from
his own reflections, and when his conclusions were once formed he never
doubted but what they were right.
“One great public mistake of his (Lincoln’s) character, as generally
received and acquiesced in, is that he is considered by the people of
this country as a frank, guileless, and unsophisticated man. There never
was a greater mistake.
“Beneath a smooth surface of candor and apparent declaration of all
his thoughts and feelings he exercised the most exalted tact and wisest
discrimination. He handled and moved men remotely as we do pieces upon a
chess-board.
“He retained through life all the friends he ever had, and he made the
wrath of his enemies to praise him. This was not by cunning or intrigue
in the low acceptation of the term, but by far-seeing reason and
discernment. He always told only enough of his plans and purposes to
induce the belief that he had communicated all; yet he reserved enough
to have communicated nothing.”