These Cabinet ministers were a devoted and patriotic body of men, but their misconceptions of their respective rights and duties were at first grotesque. Mr. Seward, a man of far greater administrative experience than Lincoln, assumed that he, rather than the President, was to be the master mind of the new administration. "Premier" he at first called himself. Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, thought the Navy should be a sort of adjunct to the War Department--an error of which Secretary Welles of the Navy Department speedily relieved him. These two men were altogether too unlike to get on well together. The cold and somewhat stately Welles was repelled by Stanton's impulsiveness and violence, while Stanton was exasperated by Welles's calmness and lack of excitability. "Lincoln's ministers had no idea that he towered above them," says Mr. John T. Morse, Jr., "and no one of them was at all overawed by him in those days. Presiding over them at the Cabinet, casually meeting them, chatting with them or lounging as was his habit in Stanton's room, Lincoln seemed only officially superior to them. One of them had expected to be President, and another meant to be; a third dared to be insolent and unruly; it seemed to be only by a chance of politics that these men stood to him as junior partners to a senior, or like a board of directors to the president of a corporation." The unfriendly feeling existing between members of the Cabinet comes out in many entries in Welles's Diary. "Pressing, assuming, violent, impatient, intriguing, harsh, and arbitrary," are examples of the terms in which Stanton is spoken of by Welles His contempt for the Committee on the Conduct of the War is expressed in no less stinging words. The members of this committee "are most of them narrow and prejudiced partisans, mischievous busybodies, and a discredit to Congress. Mean and contemptible partisanship colors all their acts." It is amusing to note that while Secretary Welles was thus outspoken in his criticisms of others, he himself did not escape calumny. One critic (Thurlow Weed, who, it may be remembered, had objected to Welles's appointment to a Cabinet position when Lincoln suggested it to him in their consultation at Springfield before the inauguration) declared that "It is worse than a fault, it is a crime, to keep that old imbecile at the head of the Navy Department." And another critic expressed the uncomplimentary opinion that "If Lincoln would send old Welles back to Hartford, it would be better for the Navy and for the country."