Brief Video on Lincoln's Leadership

I had planned a formal mea culpa for my lengthy silence on this blog, but that is beyond my patience tonight. Instead, enjoy this video, courtesy of The Washington Post, in which Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn comments on Abraham Lincoln's search for meaning as the key to his effective leadership as president.

In particular, I like Koehn's opening comments about how Lincoln used the process of writing to carefully develop his ideas and understanding of the situation. Surely leaders may gain information and insight in different ways, but this was one of the central ways Lincoln gained his. Usually his best decisions emerge after he had carefully written about them, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, which Koehn rightly highlights.

Of course, Lincoln's process was not limited to a private act of writing. There is much anecdotal evidence that he liked to bounce ideas off of people as he was mulling them over. Perhaps the best of this is lost to history -- in particular the many private evening conversations he had with William Seward, who fancied himself a powerful prime minister in the early days, but who instead may have become a capable confidant and adviser to Lincoln -- unlike others, he seems to have told few stories about his evening chats with Lincoln in his home.

Book Review: Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words

by Douglas L. Wilson

(Knopf, 2006), hardcover, 352 pages

In the recent resurgence of books about Abraham Lincoln, which rivals the output of the early 1900s in quantity and significance, there have been a number of books about individual Lincoln speeches. Beginning with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills, recent books by Harold Holzer, Gabor Boritt, and Ronald White have focused on the Cooper Union Address, Gettysburg Address (again), and the Second Inaugural Address, respectively. These books, and others like them, show the context within which Lincoln wrote these famous speeches and include an often excellent examination of the meaning of Lincoln's words.

Douglas Wilson goes deeper, though, in his excellent study Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. While he refers to the context and meaning of the Lincoln works that he studies, he focuses on Lincoln's process of deliberately shaping his words. Focusing on writings and speeches of President Lincoln for which there are multiple drafts, Wilson paints a picture of a man who skillfully crafts his public statements through careful writing, editing, and re-writing.

Following an opening chapter on Lincoln's famous "Farewell Address," given as he departed his hometown Springfield for Washington to assume the presidency, where Wilson examines how Lincoln edited his extemporaneous remarks into a more polished speech for publication in newspapers, Wilson digs into several key Lincoln writings, including the famous speeches (First and Second Inaugurals and Gettysburg), key government papers (the Emancipation Proclamation, messages to Congress), and some public letters (notably Lincoln's famous response to Horace Greeley's editorial "The Prayer of Twenty Millions").

Wilson's observation that Lincoln meticulously prepared his words is not original; others have detailed how Lincoln carefully wrote things like the Cooper Union Address or the First Inaugural. In the case of the latter, attention has been paid to how Lincoln incorporated the advice of others who read a draft of his speech, famously Secretary of State-designate William Seward, into his final address. Wilson instead details how Lincoln consistently crafted his words and shows how the process allowed Lincoln to clarify his aims.

The analysis of the July 4, 1861 Message to Congress, in which Lincoln called for a massive increase in military spending to counter the rebellion, exemplifies Wilson's skillful attention to the nuances of Lincoln's drafting. One particularly interesting passage involves Lincoln's use of the word "sugar-coated" to describe the public rationale given by southern leaders supporting secession. The printer thought the word undignified; Wilson shows that it perfectly conveys the thrust of Lincoln's argument against secession.

At the end of this particular chapter, Wilson details some of the reactions to Lincoln's message, including a couple that remark favorably on Lincoln's skill as a writer. With these comments, Wilson begins the overarching and original argument of his book: Lincoln grew to recognize the power of his own words and became more confident and capable using them to shape public opinion and public understanding. Such an hypothesis is perhaps not novel; being a sophisticated reader able to demonstrate a shift in context through written words alone, though, is indeed unique. In the process, Wilson offers satisfying analyses of these selected writings and adds to the understanding of why Lincoln's writing remains so influential, while rather convincingly arguing that Lincoln's greatest attribute as a wartime leader was his disciplined writing.

It is not surprisingly that Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, offers such a sophisticated study, given his previous work with Lincoln. After spending years, with his co-director Rodney Davis, sorting through and editing all of the letters and interviews William Herndon collected about Lincoln's youth from people "who knew him when," Wilson then wrote the best account of Lincoln as a young adult: Honor's Voice, which won the Lincoln Prize in 1999. After spending years overseeing the transcription and annotation of the Library of Congress' collection of Lincoln materials, again with Davis, he wrote this fine volume, which won the Lincoln Prize in 2007.

It is difficult to quibble with Wilson's work. Certainly those without a working knowledge of the timeline of the Lincoln presidency will find it challenging to get their bearings, as Wilson supposes some familiarity with the Lincoln presidency and the issues surrounding the Civil War. However, the writing itself is clear and comprehensible, if not rather beguiling. It is a significant addition to the vast bibliography of Lincoln-related scholarship, particularly relating to Lincoln the writer, Lincoln the orator, and Lincoln the shaper of American memory.

Lincoln Letter Rediscovered

Interesting news from the National Archives, which displayed a 'new' Lincoln letter on Thursday.  Evidently the letter, which might better be described as a mid-19th century inter-office memo, had been removed from a collection of such letters sent to the Department of the Treasury sometime before that collection was obtained by the National Archives in the 1940s.

The letter itself is not particularly interesting, contrary to some of the news reports.  It is valuable, given that it has Lincoln's famous signature, and also because it seems to have been written in Lincoln's hand.  (I've seen no official comment on this fact, and I'm not an expert in handwriting, but the script looks like Lincoln's handwriting to me.  It also looks like it was written in a hurry, larger and messier than Lincoln's polished writings -- like handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address -- but who knows?)

It is a standard piece of Lincoln correspondence, where he directs one of the federal departments to do something.  The Collected Works is filled with such writings, usually brief, and often dealing with personal requests.  This one is a request by Lincoln on behalf of the son-in-law of a former Oregon senator -- who had been removed as the superintendent of the San Francisco mint.  Full text of the letter is available here.  

The AP story gets a director at the Archives to suggest that the letter "is an extremely important key to understanding Lincoln's relationship with Sen. Baker."  However, Lincoln is well-known to have responded to personal requests whenever he could, often for political allies and friends, but sometimes just for people who waited to see him in his office.  It seems pretty routine to me.

Still, a rediscovered letter by Abraham Lincoln is better than a Lincoln writing lost to history.  Correspondence such as this is important to show how Lincoln continued to do the non-war related work of the government in the midst of the virtually all-consuming war.