Who is this?

[David Lockmiller]

Thank you, Roger. I recall the story from the Carpenter book.

Such unhelpful advice made to President Lincoln continued throughout the Civil War.

For example:

Republican insider Thurlow Weed told Lincoln in mid-August 1864 that “his re-election was an impossibility.”

Republican party chairman Henry J. Raymond expressed much the same sentiment to Lincoln on Aug. 22, [1864] urging him to consider sending a commission to meet with Confederate President Jefferson Davis to offer peace terms “on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,” leaving the question of slavery to be resolved later.

Quotation from the Wikipedia entry:

During the run-up to the 1864 United States presidential election, Abraham Lincoln compared himself to "Blondin on the tightrope, with all that was valuable to America in the wheelbarrow he was pushing before him." A political cartoon in Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun took up this quotation on 1 September 1864 depicting Lincoln on a tightrope, pushing a wheelbarrow and carrying two men on his back—Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and War Secretary Edwin Stanton