Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Reliant above all on Seward and Stanton, Lincoln was aware of the jealousy engendered by the specter of favoritism. Accordingly, he found exclusive time for each individual team member: whether flagging down Welles on the pathway leading from the White House to the Navy Department, suddenly dropping in at Chase’s stately mansion, dining with the entire Blair clan, or inviting Bates and Smith along to converse with him on late afternoon carriage rides.

  “Every one likes a compliment,” Lincoln observed; everyone needs praise for the work they are doing. Frequently, he penned handwritten notes to his colleagues, extending his gratitude for their actions. He publicly acknowledged that Seward’s suggestion to await a military victory before issuing the Proclamation was an original and useful contribution. When he had to issue an order to Welles, he assured his “Neptune” that it was not his intention to insinuate “that you have been remiss in the performance of the arduous and responsible duties of your Department, which I take pleasure in affirming had, in your hands, been conducted with admirable success.” When compelled to remove one of Chase’s appointees, he understood that the prickly Chase might well be resentful. Not wanting the situation to deteriorate, he called on Chase that evening. Placing his long arms on Chase’s shoulders, he patiently explained why the decision was necessary. Though the ambitious Chase often chafed under Lincoln’s authority, he acknowledged “the President has always treated me with such personal kindness and has always manifested such fairness and integrity of purpose, that I have not found myself free to throw up my trust . . . so I still work on.”

  Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.

  Lincoln never selected members of his team “by his like, or dislike of them,” his old friend Leonard Swett observed. “If a man had maligned him, or been guilty of personal ill-treatment and abuse, and was the fittest man for the place, he would put him in his Cabinet just as soon as he would his friend.” Guided by the “principle of forgiveness,” Lincoln insisted he did not care if someone has done wrong in the past; “it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.”

  Lincoln’s adherence to this rule opened the door to Edwin Stanton’s appointment as secretary of war, despite a troubled early history between the two men. They had first crossed paths on a major patent case in Cincinnati. Stanton, a brilliant and hard-driving lawyer, had already earned a national reputation; Lincoln was an emerging figure only in Illinois. One look at Lincoln—hair askew, shirt stained, coat sleeves and trousers too short to fit his long arms and legs—and Stanton turned to his partner, George Harding: “Why did you bring that d—d long armed Ape here . . . he does not know anything and can do you no good.” And with that, Stanton dismissed the prairie lawyer. He never opened the brief Lincoln had laboriously prepared, never consulted him, nor even spoke a word with him.

  Out of that humiliation, however, came a powerful self-scrutiny on Lincoln’s part, a savage desire to improve himself. He remained in the courtroom the entire week, intently studying Stanton’s legal performance. He had never “seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared.” Stanton’s partner recalled that while Lincoln never forgot the sting of that episode, “when convinced that the interest of the nation would be best served by bringing Stanton into his cabinet, he suppressed his personal resentment, as not many men would have done, and made the appointment.”

  “No two men were ever more utterly and irreconcilably unlike,” Stanton’s private secretary observed. Where Lincoln would give “a wayward subordinate,” such as McClellan, too many chances “to repair his errors,” Stanton “was for forcing him to obey or cutting off his head.” Where Lincoln was compassionate, patient, and transparent, Stanton was blunt, intense, and secretive. “They supplemented each other’s nature, and they fully recognized that they were a necessity to each other.” Before the end of their partnership, Stanton not only revered Lincoln; he loved him.

  Set a standard of mutual respect and dignity; control anger.

  When angry at a colleague, Lincoln would fling off what he called a “hot” letter, releasing all his pent wrath. He would then put the letter aside until he cooled down and could attend the matter with a clearer eye. When Lincoln’s papers were opened at the turn of the twentieth century, historians discovered a raft of such letters, with Lincoln’s notation underneath; “never sent and never signed.” Such forbearance set an example for the team. One evening, Lincoln listened as Stanton worked himself into a fury against one of the generals. “I would like to tell him what I think of him,” Stanton stormed. “Why don’t you,” suggested Lincoln. “Write it all down.” When Stanton finished the letter, he returned and read it to the president. “Capital,” Lincoln said. “Now, Stanton, what are you going to do about it?” “Why, send it of course!” “I wouldn’t,” said the president. “Throw it in the waste-paper basket.” “But it took me two days to write.” “Yes, yes and it did you ever so much good. You feel better now. That is all that is necessary. Just throw it in the basket.” And after some additional grumbling, Stanton did just that.

  Not only would Lincoln hold back until his own anger subsided and counsel others to do likewise, he would readily forgive intemperate public attacks on himself. When an unflattering letter Blair had written about Lincoln in the early days of the war unexpectedly surfaced in the press months later, the embarrassed Blair carried the letter to the White House and offered to resign. Lincoln told him he had no intention of reading it, nor any desire to exact retribution. “Forget it,” he said, “& never mention or think of it again.”

  Shield colleagues from blame.

  Time and again, Welles marveled, Lincoln “declared that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them.” His refusal to let a subordinate take the blame for his decisions was never better illustrated than by his public defense of Stanton after McClellan attributed the Peninsula disaster to the War Department’s failure to send sufficient troops. A vicious public assault upon Stanton ensued, with subsequent calls for his resignation. To create a dramatic backdrop that would garner extensive newspaper coverage, Lincoln issued an order to close down all the government departments at one o’clock so everyone might attend a massive Union rally on the Capitol steps. There, after the firing of cannon and patriotic music from the Marine Band, Lincoln directly countered McClellan’s charge. He insisted that every possible soldier available had been sent to reinforce the general. “The Secretary of War is not to blame for not giving what he had none to give.” Then, as the applause mounted, Lincoln continued: “I believe [Stanton] is a brave and able man, and I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take upon myself what has been charged on the Secretary of War.” Lincoln’s spirited defense of his beleaguered secretary skillfully extinguished the campaign against Stanton.

  In the end, it was Lincoln’s character—his consistent sensitivity, patience, prudence, and empathy—that inspired and transformed every member of his official family. In this paradigm of team leadership, greatness was grounded in goodness.

  And yet, beneath Lincoln’s tenderness and kindness, he was without question the most complex, ambitious, willful, and implacable leader of them all. They could trumpet self-serving ambitions, they could criticize Lincoln, mock him, irritate him, infuriate him, exacerbate the pressure upon him; everything would be tolerated so long as they pursued their jobs with passion and skill, so long as they were headed in the direction he had defined for them and presented a united front when it counted most, as it surely did on September 22, 1862, when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

  The hundred days between the Proclamation’s publication in September and its activation on the first of January 1863 would provide a critical test of the fragile unity Lincoln had created within his cabinet. How did Lincoln weather this peculiarly distressing time?

  Maintain perspective in the face of both accolades and abuse.

  Writing to Lincoln three days after the publication of the Proclamation, V
ice President Hannibal Hamlin confidently predicted that it would be “enthusiastically approved and sustained” and “stand as the great act of the age.” Lincoln was more realistic and skeptical about the immediate response. “While commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish,” he answered Hamlin, “the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory.”

  An “ill wind” of discontent surrounded the voters as they headed to the polls for the midterm elections. “Our war on rebellion languishes,” New York diarist George Templeton Strong lamented. Grandiosely satisfied with his performance at Antietam, McClellan had failed to pursue the retreating rebels and allowed Lee to cross the Potomac into Virginia. When McClellan let it be known that he would not fight for “such an accursed doctrine” as the Emancipation Proclamation, his persistent refusal to move the Army forward verged on outright insubordination.

  A frustrated public blamed the administration for failure to prosecute the war more vigorously. This perception, together with conservative resentment against the Proclamation, combined to produce withering electoral results for Republicans, just as Montgomery Blair had predicted. “We have lost almost everything,” Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay wrote. In Congress, the number of conservative Democrats opposed to emancipation doubled, leaving Republicans with a razor-thin majority. State legislatures in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York turned heavily Democratic.

  Asked how he felt about the Republican losses, Lincoln joked to burn off the gloom: “Somewhat like that boy in Kentucky, who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.”

  Find ways to cope with pressure, maintain balance, replenish energy.

  “Most uncheerful were the so-called holidays of that season,” journalist Noah Brooks wrote. “The city was filled with wounded and dying men; and multitudes of people from the North, seeking lost, missing, and wounded relatives, crowded the hotels.” Following the midterm elections, Lincoln had finally removed McClellan from command after destructive procrastination. “I began to fear he was playing false,” Lincoln said, “that he did not want to hurt the enemy.” To replace McClellan, he chose Ambrose Burnside, known as “a fighting general,” thus swinging to a temperament opposite McClellan’s. Burnside’s headlong spirit proved calamitous. In the middle of December, against Lincoln’s counsel, he led the Army of the Potomac into the trap of “a slaughter pen” at Fredericksburg, leaving thirteen thousand Union soldiers dead or wounded.

  A blizzard of recrimination beset the president from all sides. Rumors spread that the humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg would prompt England and France to side with the Confederacy, that the entire cabinet would resign, that Lincoln himself would give way to Hannibal Hamlin. The unremitting march of death and national mourning aroused fears that the war would come to a dishonorable, catastrophic conclusion, that the South would remain independent and slavery would remain intact. In this welter of worry and fear, Lincoln was tormented most of all by the appalling deaths of his soldiers, the brave men “endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their lives the future happiness and prosperity of this country.” He acknowledged he was “more depressed” that terrible winter than at any time in his life, a harrowing statement given the vicissitudes of that life. “If there is a worse place than Hell,” he concluded, “I am in it.”

  What strategies did Lincoln use to keep some kind of balance? How did he maintain sufficient stability to weather this long winter of discontent? The forms that such relief takes are as varied as the persons seeking it.

  When Lincoln was under appalling duress, nothing provided greater respite and renewal than a visit to the theater. During his four years as president, he went to the theater more than a hundred times. When the gas lights dimmed, and the actors took the stage, Lincoln was able to surrender his mind “into other channels of thought.” At a performance of Henry IV Part 1, a seatmate noted, “He has forgotten the war. He has forgotten Congress. He is out of politics. He is living in Prince Hal’s time.” He understood that people might think his frequent theatergoing “strange, but I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”

  Nonetheless, theatergoing was not pure escapism. For though he sorely needed diversion and distraction, Lincoln was drawn to the darkest of Shakespeare’s plays—Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet—not simply as a way out but as a way in, a way to decipher the problems confronting him. It was the philosophic depth in Shakespeare that resonated most meaningfully to the tortured leader in the midst of civil war. “It matters not to me whether Shakespeare be well or ill acted,” Lincoln once said, “with him the thought suffices.”

  There remained times, however, when the burden of nightmarish days and the loneliness of his position made sleep a fugitive. Such nights, Lincoln would rise from his bed, clad in nightshirt and slippers, his well-thumbed edition of Shakespeare in his hand, and rouse John Hay from the small White House bedroom his young aide shared with John Nicolay. Still able to summon a shadow of his gifts as performer, raconteur, and mimic, Lincoln would read aloud favorite comic passages from Shakespeare. His appreciation of tragedy was matched by his appreciation of silliness, anecdote, burlesque. The narrow seam between tragedy and comedy afforded Lincoln what he called his “literary recreation.” When engaged in a comic tale, his laugh, the artist Carpenter noted, resembled the “neigh of a wild horse.” A friend observed that Lincoln’s laugh served as a “life preserver” for him. Hay recalled that only when “my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice would he stop & sent me to bed.” Recitation was Lincoln’s way of sharing in a common humanity during an uncommon, inhumanly isolating time.

  Amid the isolation of ultimate responsibility—when people were dying day after day as a consequence of his directives—Lincoln found a way to lighten his grief through the use of his pardoning power. While both his war secretary and his military officers insisted that death sentences for soldiers who ran away from battle or fell asleep on picket duty were essential to maintaining military discipline, Lincoln, on the contrary, looked “for any good excuse for saving a man’s life.” As he studied each petition, he tried to comprehend the soldier’s perspective—the night-flight desertion of a homesick teen, a young boy “overcome by a physical fear greater than his will”; a picket so exhausted that “sleep steals upon him unawares.” When he grasped a reason to reduce the sentence, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name will make him and his family and his friends.” Momentarily, he had diverted his thoughts away from the bitterness of ubiquitous death to the jubilation of a rescued life.

  Keep your word.

  As the first of January 1863 drew near, the public displayed a “general air of doubt” as to whether the president would follow through on his September pledge to activate his Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day. Critics predicted that its enactment would foment race wars in the South, cause Union officers to resign their commands, and prompt 100,000 men to lay down their arms. The prospect of emancipation threatened to fracture the brittle coalition that had held Republicans and Union Democrats together. “Will Lincoln’s backbone carry him through?” wondered a skeptical George Templeton Strong. “Nobody knows.”

  Those who knew Abraham Lincoln best would not have posed the question. All through his life, the honor and weight of his word had been ballast to his character, the “chief gem” of his pride. The breach of honor involved in his severed engagement to Mary Todd had contributed to a life-threatening depression, as had his spectacular failure to deliver on his pledge to bring Illinois an economic boom through public works. Restoration of confidence in his ability to make good on his promises and resolves had been central to his healing and the resurrection of his career. Ever since, as a family man, friend, lawyer, and politician, he had reflected carefully before setting forth his opini
ons and making promises. That he would hold firm to the September pledge he had made to himself and his Maker to issue the proclamation was never in question. “My word is out,” Lincoln told a Massachusetts congressman, “and I can’t take it back.”

  Though the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had been unsparingly critical of Lincoln’s delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he fathomed Lincoln’s character and the durability of his word better than most. “Abraham Lincoln may be slow,” he wrote, “but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature.” To answer those who asked if Lincoln would reconsider, Douglass gave an emphatic no. “Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward,” he insisted. “If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.”