He loved matching backs with people to see who was taller, particularly with men like Sumner who, like him, were well above six feet. “You never put backs with Sumner, did you?” he asked his guest. “When he was in here, I asked him to measure with me, and do you know he made a little speech about it?” Lincoln’s face glimmered. Unsurprisingly, Sumner didn’t find the idea of matching backs to be funny. “He told me he thought this was a time for uniting our fronts and not our backs before the enemies of our country, or something like that,” Lincoln told his guest.
