Stanton’s biographers sometimes strain for tolerance. Autocratic, duplicitous, and humorless, Stanton had initially scorned Abraham Lincoln, the funniest—at least intentionally—president the United States ever had, as a man of little consequence and less ability, and he always remained surer of himself than he was of Lincoln. Ulysses Grant, who disliked Stanton, “acknowledged his great ability” and also his “natural disposition to assume all power and control in all matters that he had anything whatever to do with.”
