Last week I talked about George Washington, and it only seems fair that Abraham Lincoln should also get his due. A masterful story teller with a legendary sense of humor, Lincoln, despite probably being depressed a great deal of the time, easily enters our imagination. Like Washington, he stands out as a great leader who carried our nation through the greatest test since its founding. Although the country had just survived the searing experience of an awful civil war, characterized by horrendous casualties and intense partisanship, by the time he was assassinated, Lincoln had forged a strong new definition of the union and had finally brought about the abolition of slavery, an achievement of such magnitude it’s hard to measure.
Several qualities define Lincoln’s leadership: integrity, compassion, resoluteness, self-confidence, and single-mindedness along with unparalleled political skills.
Lincoln’s life story is the stuff of myth: the self-educated, self-made man who rose from a log cabin on the frontier to President of the United States by dint of hard work, a commitment to self-improvement, and common sense. While not entirely true, the general outlines are. Lincoln married well and developed a successful law practice doing what today we would call corporate law, much of it for railroads. A convivial person and effective communicator, he began his political career as a Whig in the Illinois legislature and then served one term in Congress in the 1840s. Having joined the newly created Republican Party, he ran for the Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Though he lost, the positions he outlined on slavery during debates with Douglas gained him national attention. He somewhat unexpectedly received the Republican nomination for President in 1860, defeating the favored Senator William Seward of New York. His victory in the presidential election caused the southern states to secede from the Union. By the time he took office in March of 1861, the sectional tensions that had been intensifying over the previous decades had reached a full-blown crisis. Lincoln was determined to prevent the dissolution of the Union, and against tremendous odds; he achieved that goal before falling to John Wilkes Booth’s bullets only weeks after being inaugurated for his second term and days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
Like many great leaders, Lincoln consciously brought his enemies close and took advantage of having a variety of points of view among his advisors, traits that require a strong sense of self. He put together a cabinet consisting of prominent figures in the Republican Party, including Seward as Secretary of State (as an aside, consider this interesting historical parallel: a relatively obscure and inexperienced candidate from Illinois wins a Presidential election and appoints his well-known, primary rival for the nomination, a Senator from New York, as his Secretary of State), Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, and Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy. All these men considered themselves Lincoln’s superiors, all had had presidential aspirations of their own, and all angled to take advantage of what they perceived as Lincoln’s ineptitude to exercise their own power. However, he masterfully balanced them against one another, neutralizing them all, and eventually winning their begrudging respect.
Lincoln forged his political career in the heated controversy over slavery that dominated mid-19th century American politics. While the containment and eventual termination of slavery remained important to him, he believed that his oath to support the Constitution demanded that he devote his full energies to preserving the Union. He pursued this goal relentlessly and to the exclusion of all else, beginning with his first inaugural address when he asserted that “the union of these states is perpetual.” He maintained the position to the end, when he refused any terms from the Confederacy except unconditional surrender. While, according to historian James McPherson, most Republican leaders—including Seward, Chase, and Horace Greeley, the influential publisher of the New York Tribune—acted like “foxes”, pursuing a variety of goals simultaneously, Lincoln was a “hedgehog.” He pursued one and only one goal, and this determined his success. McPherson asserts, “If [Seward or Greeley] had been at the helm instead of Lincoln, it is quite likely that the United States would have foundered on the rocks of disunion.”[i]
Like Washington, Lincoln was a man of great moral integrity. This quality played out in numerous ways, small and large. The historian Paul Johnson describes an incident when Lincoln came to confer with Seward, shortly after he had broken his arm and jaw in a carriage accident. As Johnson points out, Lincoln could easily have skipped the conversation on account of Seward’s injury, and given Seward’s condescending attitude towards Lincoln, that might have been an appealing option. Instead, Lincoln lay down on the bed with Seward so they would be at eye level together they discussed the immediate issues facing the government. Johnson says of Lincoln, “He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might have been avoided.”[ii]
Lincoln’s integrity governed his view of his obligation to preserve the Union, and for his commitment to that goal we owe him a great debt. However, his morality also informed his views on slavery, and it was this issue that originally defined him as a politician. A great deal has been written about the early Republicans’ views on slavery. While, like all political parties, the members did not hold monolithic positions, they did share a belief that slavery should not extend into the territories. The motivation for this position varied from those who didn’t want free labor to have to compete with slave labor to those who were morally opposed to slavery. Lincoln, while not an Abolitionist, fell firmly into the camp of moral opposition to slavery. He told a Chicago audience in 1857, “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.”[iii] As was typical of the vast majority of whites of his day, he didn’t necessarily believe that blacks and whites were equal. However, he did believe they deserved equal opportunity. Also in 1857, he declared, “. . . in [a black woman’s] natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”[iv]
While he generally advocated a gradual eradication of slavery and, as we have noted, made the preservation of the Union he sole objective, Lincoln ultimately maneuvered the war aims to end slavery. The Union war effort undermined slavery in a number of ways, including the fact that slaves regularly escaped behind Union lines where they were welcomed and put to work. By the end of the war almost 200,000 blacks, mostly ex-slaves, served as soldiers. Lincoln did not always support these measures initially, usually for political reasons—he was always trying to balance between the conservatives and the Radicals—but in every instance he eventually came around. Of course, his most famous effort in this regard was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Since this document only freed the slaves in states in rebellion, it is often noted that, in fact, it freed no slaves. However, McPherson argues that this criticism misses the point of the Emancipation Proclamation which he asserts “announced a revolutionary new war aim—the overthrow of slavery by force of arms if and when the Union armies conquered the South.”[v] Now the North fought to preserve a Union that would fully realize the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln went on to support a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery which was ratified in February 1865. The “peculiar institution” had finally met its end.
Lincoln was single-minded, but he was not doctrinaire. He was also very compassionate. He suffered deeply at the loss of life and the devastating wounds received by so many young men. A person of moderation, he did not seek revenge. He often infuriated his critics by not taking stronger stands, but in the long run he was probably more successful for his generous hand. There was, for example, the famous case of the Ohio man who was arrested for making a speech denouncing the war; rather than imprisoning him, Lincoln had him banished to the Confederacy. He was pleased that Grant offered Lee’s troops clemency, sending them home with their weapons and horses. And most importantly, his proposal for Reconstruction allowed the former Confederates to rehabilitate themselves by doing little more than take an oath of loyalty. Unfortunately, after Lincoln’s assassination, the Radical Republicans succeeded in imposing their much harsher brand of Reconstruction. Had Lincoln lived to oversee Reconstruction, the rebuilding of the Union would have proceeded as he hoped in his Second Inaugural Address, “with Malice towards none, with charity for all” and his leniency would have helped “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Our post-Civil War history might have evolved quite differently under the leadership of such a compassionate, skillful, focused, and morally grounded man.
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