Perhaps one reason is that while he had a remarkable gift of common sense, he lacked a sense of humor and the sense of proportion that accompanies it. His diary, it is quite true, is at times what one would call humorous reading, but the humor is either unconscious or partakes of sarcasm. He took life pretty seriously--and indeed he had occasion to do so.
Then one infers another characteristic which is so difficult to define and in its way so subtle that one hesitates to be dogmatic about it. Yet reading between the lines of the diary, which is one of the frankest human documents in the world, one reader at least gains the impression that the author, perhaps realizing the innate tendency, which the diary shows, to pronounce judgment, felt before the world the necessity of putting a curb upon this propensity. In public he never seems to have asserted himself in the Rooseveltian manner. He had decided opinions of his own and was altogether an independent, fearless person, but he appears to have been one of the rather reticent members of the cabinet. A friend tells him on one occasion that he should have been more forward in expressing his views and the diary has many references to times when he judged silence the better course--as very likely it was--for with him silence never went so far as to constitute consent to anything he disapproved. Far more single-minded and straightforward than some of the other cabinet ministers, he apparently lacked the art, which many men of smaller caliber possessed, of getting his personality in a large way before the country.
One feels that here was a capable and high-minded public servant, with many qualities which in another personality would have produced a great leader of men. But there was always this reticence. Was it possibly the inheritance of a New England ancestry?
However, if in his life-time Gideon Welles lacked the gift for individual prominence that with some of his contemporaries seemed to be the main object of life, the publication of his remarkable "Diary" has, long after his death, immortalized him. In this journal we have both a revelation of personal character that is illuminating and a historic document that is invaluable.