George W. Smith

Dr. George Williamson Smith, although his later career was distinguished by the presidency of Trinity College during eleven years and by a long previous service as rector in various important New York churches, had an older fund of experience which stretched back to what the present generation describes as long past history. There were no “dollar-a-day men” in the Civil War, but Dr. Smith, though even then ordained as deacon, volunteered in 1861 as an extra clerk in the Navy Department. He often used to tell of Lincoln’s visits, when the war president would “sit on the edge of the desk, swinging his long legs as he read ‘dispatches from the sea-front,’” and punctuating these telegraphed reports with the opposite anecdote which any incident called up in Lincoln’s humorous mind.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1926 Century Association Yearbook