What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context of Leadership

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
7 p.m. at the Modlin Center for the Arts
Presented by Edward L. Ayers

Abraham Lincoln’s leadership can only be understood by grasping the challenges he faced. Those challenges included not only the Confederacy and its army but also a starkly divided northern electorate and public opinion. Lincoln had to win a war at home as well as one against a more obvious enemy.

Thought to be the first modern president for a host of reasons, Lincoln faced conflicts, mistakes, miscalculations, and competing values everywhere he turned. He invented a concept of presidential war powers that the Supreme Court later rebuked. Against a complicated political backdrop, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, citing it as a military, not a moral, necessity. He conducted a balancing act between abolitionists and border-state moderates, between radicals and conservatives, and struggled with a parade of generals over military strategy.

As scholar James MacGregor Burns pointed out in his seminal book, Leadership: “Wars, depression, domestic unrest, [and] great moral issues … have posed the most urgent questions of value and purpose for pragmatic politicians, however much they have sought to evade them.”

Lincoln could not evade the realities of his time, and we understand his leadership by examining how he faced them.