Lincoln's autocrat

[kerry]

I read it and thought it jumped to too many negative conclusions about Stanton's motivations, but there were so many people who didn't like Stanton that it's easy to put together a negative picture going through the recollections. And so many of the events were so complicated that they can be spun in different ways. He was certainly an interesting person. I recently did a bunch of newspaper research about the assassination, and no one mentions Stanton saying Lincoln belonged to the ages. There are some very detailed accounts, and they all say there was silence and then Gurley was asked to say a prayer by Stanton and was barely able to do so. That definitely seems like an embellishment added later. The first mention I see of it is in Hay and Nicolay's biography, in 1890.