It's possible that I am the last person in 'merica to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's mammoth biography of Lincoln. And no, I didn't see the movie either. I think I first heard of the book years ago at some industry conference where a CEO (Rich Kinder if memory serves) suggested that it made for a good lesson in leadership. This is actually a pretty good summary of what the book depicts. While it's enormously sympathetic to Lincoln, it manages to avoid becoming a hagiography because Goodwin convincingly shows us just what exactly made Lincoln so great. He was, in short, an extraordinary leader. Today this term has been debased through its appropriation by a parade of petulant tyrants. Many now lauded for their visionary leadership are nothing more than stopped watches who, inevitably, find themselves in perfect alignment with the public or media or market fashion clock. They only know how to get their own, uniquely correct way. Lincoln was a leader in the profound sense of someone who draws more from the people around him than they are capable of on their own. Someone who enables cooperation amongst a group that would have been unable to cooperate without a leader. Most fundamentally, a leader is not someone who unilaterally steers the ship (for this we have Dear Leader) but someone who enables the ship to both move and be steered. This is real power, a power that creates capability.
The biography shows us Lincoln's leadership primarily through the way he handled the other candidates for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination. Lincoln was able to secure the nomination simply because he had fewer enemies that any of the other candidates at the nomination convention. He was everyone's second choice, the candidate of compromise. Initially dismissed as a lucky country bumpkin by his opponents Seward, Chase, Cameron, and Bates, Lincoln was able to overcome both their disappointment at losing to someone they considered inferior, as well as their infighting with one another that threatened to rupture the new and fragile Republican party. He did this by naming all of them to important positions in his Cabinet, which then became an important force for holding the North together throughout the Civil War. According to Goodwin's Lincoln's political genius lay in this talent for getting rivals to cooperate as a part of a team, in this case, rivals even to their leader. It's an inspiring story of what true leadership can accomplish when the focus is less on the leader than the team.
The other thing that was particularly interesting about the book was the way that it depicts Lincoln leading public opinion on the meaning of the war. This reveals a somewhat different sense of leadership that it closer to "shepherding along". While Lincoln had definite principals he remained true to throughout his political career, as a politician, he was also careful never to get too far out in front of public opinion on an issue. This resulted in a shifting justification for the war on the part of the North. At first, it was more of a "police action" aimed at restoring the Constitutional Union as it stood before the illegal Southern secession. As the war progressed, however, the justification slid gradually in a more moral direction. The Emancipation Proclamation serves as a sort of hinge between the original, narrow, desire to return the South to the Union with slavery intact (though with the prospect of its expansion eliminated) and the later ratification of the thirteenth amendment that abolished the "Southern Way of Life" forever. This change of heart was of course made possible by the war itself. The North needed the help of black soldiers and the South was using their slave labor force to build fortifications. What Unionist wouldn't have support the emancipation of Confederate slaves under those circumstances. Lincoln never liked slavery. And some of his best friends were even black, as the saying goes. But his stance was never that of visionary abolitionist pursuing a moral crusade. At least at the beginning of the war, this would never have unified and mobilized the North to fight for the Union. So part of his larger political genius lay in staying just one step ahead of public opinion. A leader never, it seems, operates in a vacuum.
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