This extreme sensitiveness would have been an element of almost fatal weakness in the man upon whom events had so suddenly thrust the command of a great war, particularly a war between his own countrymen, but for the fact that reason and devotion to justice were the anchors of his nature. He could not be moved on a clear question of principle by either friendship, enmity or compassion. He appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, in place of the discredited Simon Cameron, in spite of the fact that Stanton had treated him contemptuously in a law case on which they were engaged together, and had described him as a “long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent.” He raised George B. McClellan to command the army, notwithstanding the circumstance that McClellan, as vice-president of the Illinois Central Railway, had once deeply wounded him by declining to pay his lawyer’s bill; and that, in 1858, while the Illinois Central refused Lincoln the most common courtesy, McClellan was accompanying his rival, Douglas, in a private car and special train. It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation. His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything. Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet. McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving the Confederate troops out of West Virginia. The life of the nation was more important than party lines. Besides, Stanton and McClellan had the confidence of the Democrats, and it was essential, not only that the whole North should be held together, but that the loyal Democrats in the wavering border States should feel that there was no sectional or party prejudice in the government. Stanton tried to bully Lincoln and called him “the original gorilla,” and McClellan treated him with disdainful indifference. Neither could exhaust his patience. He mastered his lion-headed Secretary of War by gentle persistence. He endured McClellan’s months of inactivity after the Army of the Potomac had grown into a fighting force of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand magnificently trained men, and when the government was being openly sneered at for its hesitation to give battle. Great-hearted, patient Lincoln! He even consented to sit uncomplainingly in the waiting room of McClellan’s residence while the arrogant young general talked to others. “I will hold McClellan’s stirrup if he will only bring success,” he said. But, in the end, he wrote the orders which forced McClellan’s army against Richmond; and when Frémont, in the West, ignored the President’s orders to fight, Lincoln promptly removed him from command. To the newly assembled Congress he said: