As the Civil War seesawed and the Union scored one of its rare early successes, a man met a somber-looking Lincoln at the White House.  Trying to cheer the president up, he suggested that the president should be pleased by the latest news from the battle front.  Lincoln agreed but then sighed that "nothing touches the tired spot." And he should have had a tired spot.  Abraham Lincoln's administration had to deal with the Civil War and its raft of incompetent Union generals; Indian uprisings; an ongoing monetary crisis of epic proportions; and a dozen major foreign issues, including the Trent Affair, which almost brought us to war with Great Britain, all the while being harried by ankle-biting matters like the individual approval of postmaster appointments in towns nobody ever heard of.  Finally, there were major political distractions, like a secretary of war who, in Lincoln's words, "would steal everything except a hot stove";...(Read Full Article)