War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Stanton’s impatience isn’t just bureaucratic grumbling; it’s a compressed portrait of a government at war with itself. In a single line, Root stages the classic Civil War clash between the machinery of discipline and the politics of mercy. Stanton, Lincoln’s hard-edged Secretary of War, represents the grim logic of an army: deterrence works when punishment is predictable, and “ought to be shot” is the language of institutional necessity, not personal cruelty. Lincoln, by contrast, keeps puncturing that necessity with a steady drip of pardons, insisting that the state’s power includes the power to relent.

Root’s phrasing does sly work. “Used to get out of patience” reads almost domestically, as if the fate of deserters and court-martialed soldiers were a household squabble. That tonal understatement is the point: it normalizes how relentlessly the war demanded blood while making Lincoln’s mercy feel almost stubbornly ordinary. The subtext is political theology: what kind of moral authority can a wartime leader claim if he governs only through fear?

Context sharpens the intent. Lincoln was famously attentive to petitions for clemency, especially in cases of desertion, often weighing youth, panic, and circumstance against the army’s need for order. Stanton’s exasperation speaks for commanders who believed leniency invited collapse. Root, a lawyer and later a statesman, is also signaling something about executive power: Lincoln’s greatness wasn’t only strategy or speeches, but a willingness to absorb elite irritation to keep the republic from becoming what it fought.

The line lands because it frames mercy not as sentiment, but as a contested instrument of rule. Lincoln’s pardons are governance by exception, a deliberate refusal to let war make cruelty automatic.