Lincoln: Practical greatness

Die when I may, I would like it to be said of me that I always pulled up a weed and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Abraham Lincoln

No president ever faced greater challenges than Lincoln when he came into office in 1861.

No democracy had ever waged war on such a scale. No nation had ever before waged a modern war where mass armies, mass production, mass media, and machine transport came into play. Lincoln, unlike his opponent Jefferson Davis, had no military education, possessed little military experience, and had never held a policy-making position in Washington.

And yet, it was the ignorant neophyte Lincoln who guided his nation to victory.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

While Lincoln never lost sight of his goal of victory and reunion, he also stayed true to his chosen epitaph. The War President did not fail to plant flowers.

Lincoln asked for and got what Adam and Clay would have envied: internal improvements, including a railroad to the Pacific, the cheap sale for settlement of western public lands, subsidized state universities, a protective tariff, a centralized banking system, and even, while the war lasted, a federal income tax.

John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy

Gertrude Himmelfarb summed up Lord Acton's approach to writing history-- “Acton had the highest ideals and the most modest of expectations.” That assessment could just as readily apply to Lincoln and his statecraft. He lacked Napoleon's megalomania which eventually drove the Emperor into Russia and disaster. Nor did he have Wilson's unbending self-righteousness which turned potential allies into real enemies.

Lincoln: "Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong." Speech at Peoria, Illinois (October 16, 1854),

When Lincoln found Grant he found a kindred spirit and the fate of the Confederacy was sealed.

 

Grant seems a very modern man, with the problem-solving approach of a practical engineer. He can be imagined in charge of developing an oilfield; or sorting out a loss-making major industry. That cannot be said of Lee any more than of Washington or Wellington.

Correlli Barnett and The Lord Dannatt, Leadership in War: From Lincoln to Churchill