The vice presidency “ought to be abolished,” he told his friend Leonard Wood. “The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Lincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican party — including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.

We are now parents. The love for our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. Edwin Stanton to his wife.