“I like Gurley,” said President Lincoln of his pastor, Dr. Phineas D. Gurley. “He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that through the week, and when I go to church, I like to hear the gospel.”1 During 1861, wrote historian David Rankin Barbee “pleasant official, if not pastoral, relations had been established between the President and Doctor Gurley, for we find the former consulting the latter about the appointment of chaplains in the army – a very sore trial with Mr. Lincoln – and twice in the month of October, 1861, Doctor Gurley wrote the Executive about this delicate matter. He thought the best of ministers were none too good for the soldiers, especially the sick and wounded. In one of these letters, he called attention to the two hundred casualties in the hospitals of Alexandria, with ‘no minister of the Gospel to visit them and minister to their wants.'”2