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The doors of the White House opened at noon for the traditional New Year’s reception to which the general public was invited. For three hours, Lincoln stood in the Blue Room, “serene and even smiling,” shaking hands with more than a thousand citizens, even though as one reporter later noted, “his eyes were with his thoughts, and they were far away.” Later that afternoon, he was scheduled to sign the Proclamation.
The day before, Lincoln had reconvened the cabinet a third time for a final reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. The version he presented differed in one major respect from the latest draft in September. For months, abolitionists had argued for enlisting blacks in the armed services. Lincoln had hesitated, regarding such a radical step premature and hazardous for his fragile coalition.
Now, however, he decided the time had come. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he told Congress. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” A new clause declaring that the Army would commence with the recruitment of blacks was inserted into the Proclamation, along with a humble closing appeal suggested by Secretary Chase asking “the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
The signing took place in a simple ceremony attended by only a dozen people, including Secretary of State Seward and his son, Fred. As the parchment was placed before the president, Fred Seward recalled, Lincoln “dipped his pen in the ink, and then, holding it a moment above the sheet, seemed to hesitate,” but then began to speak in a forceful manner. “I never, in my life felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” Lincoln said. “If my name ever goes down in history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” His arm was “stiff and numb” from shaking hands, however. “Now, this signature is one that will be closely examined, and if they find my hand trembled, they will say ‘he had some compunctions.’ ” So he waited for several minutes until he took up the pen once more and signed with an “unusually bold, clear, and firm” hand.
Across New England, immense crowds had gathered since early morning at churches, great halls, and theaters to await the news that the president had signed the Proclamation. In Boston’s Tremont Temple and the nearby Music Hall, more than six thousand kept vigil. Orators—including Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—spoke as the day wore on and the suspense escalated. A “visible shadow” fell upon the crowd when it reached 10 p.m. and still no word had arrived. Finally, a man raced through the crowd. “It is coming! It is on the wires!” Douglass recorded the “wild and grand” reaction, the “Joy and gladness,” the “sobs and tears,” and then the singing—“Glory Hallelujah,” “Old John Brown”—that united them until the first light of dawn.
The jubilation of New England in reaction to the Proclamation was not shared in the border states or, for that matter, in much of the North. If marginal victory at Antietam had muted opposition to emancipation, the humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg and the ensuing winter stalemate raised anger to full volume. In his inaugural address, Governor of Kentucky James Robinson recommended that the state legislature reject the Proclamation, warning that “the monstrous doctrine” would unify the South “into one burning mass of inextinguishable hate.” In Indiana and Illinois, heavily Democratic legislatures passed resolutions calling for a compromise peace with the South that would leave slavery intact; if abolitionist New England refused to live in a country that condoned slavery, they argued, then let New England secede. In Congress, “Peace Democrats,” popularly known as Copperheads, capitalizing on the protracted slough of morale, opposed the new conscription laws and even went so far as to openly encourage soldiers to desert. Anecdotal reports from the Army camps suggested that emancipation was having a negative effect upon the soldiers, numbers of whom claimed they had been deceived—they had signed up to fight for the Union, not for the Negro.
Supreme Court justice David Davis, chairman of Lincoln’s nomination drive at Chicago, warned his old friend about “the alarming condition of things.” Only one means remained for “saving the Country,” Davis insisted: Lincoln must “alter the policy of emancipation” and reconstruct the cabinet that had mistakenly supported it. Against such defeatist counsel, Lincoln held firm. He told Davis unconditionally that his policy was “a fixed thing.” When another old friend, Orville Browning, raised the specter that the North would unite behind the Democrats in their “clamor for compromise,” Lincoln predicted that if the Democrats moved toward concessions, “the people would leave them.” Nor was he worried that emancipation would splinter the army. While he conceded that wavering morale had inflamed tensions over emancipation and might lead to desertions, he did not believe “the number would materially affect the army.” On the contrary, those inspired to volunteer as a consequence of emancipation would more than make up for those that left. Lincoln was certain, he told the swarm of doubters, that the timing was right for this repurposing of the war.
Know when to hold back, when to move forward.
From a long way off, Lincoln had seen the inexorable approach of emancipation: “Whoever can wait for it can see it; whoever stands in the way will be run over by it.” Speaking in a similar vein, he said: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Yet if events greater than the president swept him toward emancipation, the timing of the Proclamation was largely a consequence of his choice and his determination.
“It is my conviction that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it,” Lincoln later said. “Just so, as to the subsequent action in reference to enlisting blacks in the Border States. The step, taken sooner, could not, in my judgment, have been carried out. A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!”
Lincoln had carefully marked “this great revolution in public sentiment slowly but surely progressing.” He was a careful listener and monitored the shifting opinions of his cabinet members. He was a shrewd reader, noting the direction of the wind in newspaper editorials, in the tenor of conversations among people in the North, and, most centrally, in the opinion of the troops. Although he had known all along that opposition would be fierce when the Proclamation was activated, he judged that opposition of insufficient strength “to defeat the purpose.” This acute sense of timing, one journalist observed, was the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership: “He always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”
In contrast to the mental turmoil and stressful reflections Lincoln had experienced in the autumn months preceding the Proclamation, once the decision was finally made, a determined stillness descended upon him. For Lincoln, wrestling with thought was no figure of speech; it was an exhaustive mental combat from which he emerged with confidence and clarity. It had been a tortuous ordeal to make up his mind, but he now felt confident that his lengthy decision-making process had yielded the right course and that the country would be ready and willing to follow him.
At a time when the spirits of the people were depleted and war fatigue was widespread, Lincoln had gotten a powerful second wind. Where others saw the apocalyptic demise of the founders’ experiment, he saw the birth of a new freedom. This conviction of progress not only proved a correct reading of the temper of the times but was instrumental in shaping it. Just as the cabinet had cohered prior to the public issuance of the final Proclamation, so, under Lincoln’s leadership, recruitments to the Army picked up, and the Congress, despite Copperhead opposition, passed all the administration’s war-related bills, including financing and conscription. A further test case of the battle for northern support was met in early A
pril when special congressional elections were held in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. In all three states, Republicans and loyal Democrats soundly defeated Copperhead candidates. The Copperheads had “gone too fast and too far” in talking about a compromise peace, exactly as Lincoln had anticipated in the dark days of January.
This stunning election triumph, the New York Times noted, “puts the Administration safely round the cape, and insures it clear seas to the end.” It was not to prove that simple, but a corner had surely been turned. Lincoln had wisely let the reaction against the defeatist sentiments grow, then worked to mobilize a renewed spirit. The story of how he was able to recognize, align, harness, and creatively shape this swelling movement toward the acceptance, incorporation, and empowerment yielded by emancipation provides a demonstration of the rare stuff of transformational leadership.
Combine transactional and transformational leadership.
Among the many variants of leadership, scholars have sought to identify two seemingly antithetical types—transactional, by far the more common, and transformational. Transactional leaders operate pragmatically. They appeal to the self-interest of their followers, using quid pro quos, bargains, trades, and rewards to solicit support and influence the behavior of their followers. Transformational leaders inspire followers to identify with something larger than themselves—the organization, the community, the region, the country—and finally, to the more abstract identification with the ideals of that country. Such leaders call for sacrifice in the pursuit of moral principles and higher goals, validating such altruism by looking beyond the present moment to frame a future worth striving for.
Yet a straightforward application of these two forms of leadership fits Lincoln no better than his pants fit his long legs or his sleeves his gangling arms. For Lincoln, pragmatic, transactional strategies provided the nuts and bolts of principled, transformational leadership. Before the spring elections in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, for example, Lincoln had telegraphed New York’s Republican Party boss, Thurlow Weed, asking him to take the first train to Washington. “Mr. Weed, we are in a tight place,” Lincoln explained over breakfast. “Money for legitimate purposes is needed immediately; but there is no appropriation from which it can be lawfully taken. I don’t know how to raise it so I sent for you.” Before the night had ended, Weed had delivered $15,000 to help finance a secret fund to influence the voters in the three states.
Depending on the group he was trying to persuade, Lincoln could—and often did—advocate emancipation from both transactional and transformative vantage points. In city after city, Lincoln orchestrated mass rallies designed both to invigorate the spirit of loyal Unionists and to quell Copperhead defeatism. For one such rally in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, where Copperhead influence still exerted great force, he composed a lengthy letter to be read to the crowd. “Read it very slowly,” he instructed the reader, his old friend James Conkling. “To be plain,” Lincoln minced no words, “you are dissatisfied with me about the negro.” He then proceeded to enumerate the reasons such dissatisfaction was both ill-placed and inappropriate. “I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently?” he queried, challenging them on a fundamentally pragmatic basis. “I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union.”
After establishing the practical benefits the black troops provided, Lincoln ventured into the transformative core of his message: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motives—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” In the end, this public letter was a skillful primer of the elevation from a practical to a moral purpose to set an inspirational charge that characterizes transformational leadership.
Nowhere was the effect of Abraham Lincoln’s transformational leadership illustrated more sharply than in the changed attitudes of the soldiers toward emancipation. During the first eighteen months of the war, only three out of ten soldiers professed a willingness to risk their lives for emancipation. The majority were fighting solely to preserve the Union. That ratio shifted in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Following Lincoln’s lead, an overwhelming majority of the soldiers came to view emancipation and the restoration of the Union as inseparably linked. How had Lincoln’s leadership set this metamorphosis in motion? How had he transferred his purpose to the soldiers?
Be accessible, easy to approach.
The response of the troops was grounded in the deep trust and loyalty Lincoln had sown among the rank-and-file soldiers from the very beginning of the war. While visiting troops around Washington and on the battlefield, he shared their beans and hardtack. He inspected their sleeping quarters. He asked after their families. He chatted with fellow occupants of the Soldiers’ Home and ministered to Union and Confederate wounded alike. “He cares for us,” one soldier said to another, “he makes us fight but he cares.”
Everywhere he went, he invited soldiers to call upon him if they felt they had been unfairly treated. And indeed, an estimated two thousand soldiers took him at his word, availing themselves of his offer to come to his office, to complain, be entertained, or simply come face-to-face with their commander in chief. This open-door policy, Lincoln explained, is the “link or cord which connects the people with the governing power.” Stories of these encounters quickly circulated among the troops, as did accounts of Lincoln’s clemency, his relentless efforts to find cause to stay the hand of the executioner.
In letters the soldiers wrote home, accounts of Lincoln’s empathy, responsibility, kindness, accessibility, and fatherly compassion for his extended family were common. They spoke of him as “one of their own”; they carried his picture into battle. “What a depth of devotion, sympathy, and reassurance were conveyed through his smile,” a Wisconsin soldier recalled. Again and again they referred to him as Father Abraham, Uncle Abe, or Old Abe. The biblical references and the filial relations connoted a reciprocal emotional charge and a shared vulnerability. The self-same mark of pain and anguish upon his face and demeanor made clear that they endured the war’s toll together and suffered a shared lot. “He looks care worn,” wrote a recruit from Pennsylvania. “I could not help uttering the prayer God bless Abraham Lincoln.” Clearly, the sacrifice Lincoln was asking of the soldiers he had first asked of himself. Another Pennsylvania soldier told his mother he would not be returning home when his term of enlistment was up. “A country that is worth living in time of peace is worth fighting for in time of war so I am yet willing to put up with the hardships of a soldiers life.”
Such was the credibility that Lincoln had established with the soldiers that it was no longer a question of fighting solely for the Union, but rather for the dual purpose of Union and Emancipation. “If he says all Slaves are hereafter Forever Free,” wrote one soldier. “Amen.” Another confessed he had “never been in favor of the abolition of slavery” but was now “ready and willing” to fight for emancipation. A new direction had been set and accepted.
Nothing would drive home the transformative power of the Emancipation Proclamation more powerfully than the recruitment and enlistment of black soldiers. As chief advocate and recruiter of black troops, Frederick Douglass sought to stir young black men in one northern city after another. “You will stand more erect, walk more assured, feel more at ease,” he promised. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship.”
Blacks responded in thunder to the enlistment call, signing up by the tens of thousands. This initial wave of enthusiasm soon receded, however, when the black enrollees learned they would not receive pay equal to
white soldiers; likewise they would neither earn an enlistment bonus nor be eligible to become officers. Feeling he could no longer in good conscience persuade soldiers to enlist, Douglass decided to call directly upon Lincoln. “I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease,” Douglass recalled of their first meeting. As Douglass described how the lack of “fair play” hampered recruitment, Lincoln listened “with earnest attention and with very apparent sympathy.” Although politically expedient at the time, the discriminatory policy, Lincoln now agreed, was wrong. “In the end,” Lincoln promised, black soldiers “shall have the same pay as white soldiers.” Douglass later related he had “never seen a more transparent countenance.” A relationship of trust and decency was formed at that initial meeting which would prove instrumental in the months ahead. “He treated me as a man, he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins!” Douglass later said. “I am satisfied now that he is doing all that circumstances will allow him to do.”
Not only did blacks eventually enlist in record numbers—adding nearly 200,000 troops to the Union war effort—but, according to official testimony, they fought with striking gallantry. “I never saw such fighting as was done by the negro regiment,” General James G. Blunt wrote after one early engagement. “They fought like veterans with a coolness and valor that is unsurpassed.” After the battle at Fort Hudson, a white officer openly confessed: “You have no idea how my prejudices with regard to negro troops have been dispelled by the battle the other day. The brigade of negroes behaved magnificently and fought splendidly; could not have done better.” Even commanders formerly opposed to his Proclamation, Lincoln stressed, now “believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”
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