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In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln wrote a scathing letter to his top Union general, who had squandered an opportunity to end the American Civil War. Then Lincoln folded it up and tucked it away in his desk.
He never sent the letter—just one example of how Lincoln’s legendary emotional discipline enabled him to rise above mundane arguments and focus on a larger mission.
In this episode, Harvard Business School professor and historian Nancy Koehn analyzes Lincoln’s leadership both before and during America’s greatest crisis.
Using Lincoln as a model, you’ll learn how to communicate values to those you lead. You’ll also learn how emotional self-control can impact your day-to-day leadership, as well as your long-term legacy.
This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in March 2020. Here it is.
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Adi Ignatius. This is “Real Leaders,” a special series examining the lives of some of the world’s most compelling and effective leaders, past and present, and the lessons they offer today. In our first two episodes we profiled the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and then writer and environmentalist Rachel Carson. This week, Abraham Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”
NANCY KOEHN: “The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land will yet swell the course of the Union when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”
NANCY KOEHN: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
ADI IGNATIUS: The words of Abraham Lincoln have endured. He gave those three iconic speeches in the prelude to the Civil War and during the war itself. At that time Lincoln was struggling to lead the U.S. through its greatest crisis, and he was widely hated. Now, of course, he’s revered as the leader who saved the Nation. Today we’ll explore Lincoln’s life and how he made himself into such an effective and enduring leader. I’m Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of Harvard Business Review. And I’m here with Nancy Koehn, the great historian at Harvard Business School, who has researched Lincoln’s life and work. Hello, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hello, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: Nancy, thank you for reading those speeches. We had them printed out for you, but it looked like you were actually reciting most of those from memory.
NANCY KOEHN: I have learned most of Lincoln’s most famous speeches from memory, mostly on long dog walks with my spaniels. And it’s been just a wonderful thing for me. It’s like a library I carry around in my head that I can refer to.
ADI IGNATIUS: S,o you can assume that these speeches were part of his efforts at political persuasion. Is that accurate? Is that fair? Or, was there more going on than that?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln used the English language as a really critical tool of his leadership. He was using it to inform people. He was using it to help people understand the larger frame of the moment, what was at stake. He was using it to help inspire people, particularly in moments like the Second Inaugural at the end of the war and the Gettysburg Address, in the middle at the critical moment in the war. He was using it to help lead.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, I find rereading Lincoln’s speeches, it’s like reading Shakespeare. You’re reading a play and you’re suddenly, “Oh my god, that’s where that amazing line came from.” And there are so many, you know: “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” “the better angels of our nature,” “four score and seven years…” I mean all these things. And at the same time he had a blue streak. I mean he —
NANCY KOEHN: — He was a master storyteller. He could tell very funny, very dirty, very bawdy jokes. He went high and he went low.
ADI IGNATIUS: Is there a Lincoln joke you’ve got in your back pocket?
NANCY KOEHN: When Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas for the Senate seat from Illinois, they were outside of Galesburg, Illinois, at a college and a huge windstorm came up and they had to move the dais over to the edge of a building. So, to get to the dais, he and Douglas had to clamber through a window onto the platform and Lincoln clambered through and said, “Well, now I can say I’ve been through college.”
ADI IGNATIUS: What I also like from the Lincoln-Douglas debate is when Douglas made one of his arguments, and Lincoln said Douglas’s argument, and I’m going to read this: “was as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” That’s pretty good.
NANCY KOEHN: That is really good, and I can’t believe you picked that out because it’s one of my favorite Lincoln quotes.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let’s do some quick context setting. Lincoln was born into fairly modest circumstances, suffered some tough blows as a child including the death of his mother. How did these early experiences shape his values and create the resilience that we would see throughout his life?
NANCY KOEHN: The death of his mother is just an incredibly traumatic event for him. They were living in Indiana. His father goes back to Kentucky to find a wife, and the two kids are left alone. He and his sister just kind of fend for themselves. They’re eating nuts. They’re trying to kill squirrels. That’s an important moment because he has to somehow figure out, “How do I keep going?” He doesn’t turn inward and into victimhood. He doesn’t say, “I’m going to let this get the better of me.” He finds a way to move forward, and that’s really a huge part the story of a lot of Lincoln’s life. I mean he failed so many more times than he succeeded. He suffered so much disappointment. And I just really believe that all those experiences, including the bouts with depression, were moments in which he developed muscles of resilience and grit that were critical to his ability to hold the line during the Civil War and continue to lead and really almost insurmountable circumstances.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, Lincoln made his career as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He and his partner tried something like 4,000 cases which, I mean that’s really the essence of who he was as a professional. Then Lincoln was tempted by political office. What’s interesting to me is he lost a lot of elections, including a lot of critical ones. It’s easy in hindsight to say, “OK, those loses motivated him.” But my question, I guess for you, is what’s going on in Lincoln’s head? Those victories, those losses, his constant return to the political battle after these losses. What’s going on here?
NANCY KOEHN: So, he loses a number of really critical elections. He loses his first election for State Legislature when he was a young man in his early 20s. He loses a party battle in Central Illinois to get nominated for Congress. Eventually he would get to Congress for a term of two years in the 1840s, in which he will do anything but distinguish himself and he will come back depressed and sure that his political fortunes have fallen, which they had. He will then try and run for Senate a couple of times and get nowhere and lose the nominating battle. At each of these points, he’s discouraged. It’s not that the losses motivated him. It’s quite the opposite. He gets depressed. He says at one point, “I don’t expect anyone to ever remember me for anything.” And I think each loss and the corresponding time in the canyon of self-flagellation and depression — it’s both, in his case. Not all depression is self-flagellating, but his is. Gives him time to think and refine himself and he was always a great student of “what could I do better next time?” He was self-aware and he was a fabulous steward of his self-awareness to make himself better.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, Lincoln has this amazing reservoir of resilience and capacity for growth and self-improvement. Where does this drive come from?
NANCY KOEHN: One of the most interesting aspects of Lincoln’s making as a leader, and it’s a lesson of leadership as well, is Lincoln’s ability to teach himself all along his life’s journey. He has less than a year of formal schooling. And yet, he is constantly involved in a series of surgical strike, self-teaching adventures, or self-teaching missions. When he’s young it’s about reading and writing and arithmetic. When he gets to New Salem, which is the first place he goes after he leaves his father’s home, a small village outside of Springfield which is becoming the capital of Illinois, he teaches himself surveying to earn a living. He teaches himself geometry because he thinks it will help him think and reason better. He teaches himself the law. He teaches himself how to do public speaking by reading Shakespeare and reciting passages of Shakespeare out loud. He teaches himself the laws of debate because he joins the New Salem Debating Society. He keeps taking these issues or these aspects that he thinks will help him do something and teaches himself that. And that’s a lesson of leadership. So, when you don’t know something and you believe it’s critical to your mission, or critical to the next place you need to reach on your journey, you can teach yourself those things.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think one of the reasons people like reading about Lincoln so much is it’s partly his greatness and partly just the story, but partly the humanity. To what extent does depression define Abraham Lincoln?
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln was a person and he is no more easily defined by one aspect of our particular preoccupations than he is by anything else. He was a very complicated person, like most of us. But depression was very important particularly in his young adult life because he didn’t just sort of slip into a dark place. I mean his early depressions, people were so worried about him, friends were so worried, that they’d take his razors away. They’d go on vigils watching him.
ADI IGNATIUS: The treatment then was, I was reading, was —
NANCY KOEHN: Leeches.
ADI IGNATIUS: Leeches, mustard —
NANCY KOEHN: Mustard. Plasters, yup —
ADI IGNATIUS: And cold baths –-
NANCY KOEHN: And cold baths. When he was President his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton his second Secretary of War, with whom he formed a very close working relationship and Stanton thought of Lincoln as a good friend, was worried about Lincoln’s kind of self-image at certain moments, when he grew dark. He was like, “We gotta keep the President safe. We can’t risk that he’s going to jump into the Potomac or do something harmful.” That was a real conversation at a couple of junctures. Not a lot and not for very long. So, this was real. I think what’s important about it is not that it defines Lincoln in some sense more than any other particular aspect, it’s how he used it. A reporter who’s written about this, a journalist, Joshua Shenk, who’s written about this in a book called Lincoln’s Melancholy, I think makes a very good case. I agree with it completely. That because of his own experience and particularly the suffering, he develops great powers of empathy. And I think that’s exactly right. He was a sensitive person to begin with, always — as a young boy, as a young adult, as President. But he then develops a sense of empathy that we can see, say in these last paragraph of the Second Inaugural [speech] – “with malice towards none, with charity toward all.” And that becomes very, very important — not only in connecting people, not only in reaching out to individuals, but also in his political life of trying to influence others. That was, I think, very much related to his depression.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, Lincoln’s big opening politically came in 1858 when he was running against Stephen Douglas for Senator in Illinois. They had a series of debates where Lincoln became a national figure, and he was essentially arguing against slavery, I think more forcefully than he had. But I want to sort of talk about Lincoln and slavery now because his views evolved over time, they were nuanced, they were complicated. Help us understand Lincoln’s views on African-Americans and slavery.
NANCY KOEHN: Lincoln’s position on slavery, which evolved throughout his life, was all the way to the time he won the White House, including his first Inaugural, was what today we would consider tepid at best and immoral at worse because his public position was we can’t interfere with the law of the United States which says that slavery is legal in these places, and it should not be enlarged to other places. It should not be made legal in new territories that become States. It should not be expanded, but we cannot legally abolish it. That is the position Lincoln made his name on. That is the position the Republican Party was born on. Not that we’re going to eliminate slavery, but we’re going to restrict its territorial enlargement because we don’t believe it’s right and we can’t allow it to expand. And it’s protected in the Constitution.
ADI IGNATIUS: Lincoln also said things about Blacks that really identified Blacks as inferior to Whites.
NANCY KOEHN: I think Lincoln probably thought African-Americans, I think his views changed, but I think for most of Lincoln’s life he had no reason to think differently than most White Americans that he was exposed to, which were African-Americans were inferior. And he says at one point, “I would never marry an African-American woman and just because I don’t want slavery to expand doesn’t mean I think Blacks and Whites should intermarry.” So again, from our sensibilities today, this seems egregious. But it wouldn’t have seemed similarly egregious if we parachuted back into political debates of people that had office or had reasonable chances of assuming elected office locally at the state level or the national level, in America in the 1850s. Now, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, lots of other folks, Charles Sumner, the Senator from Massachusetts, were saying something very different and much more radical – that African-Americans are exactly equal in all ways to White Americans and we can’t possibly tolerate the morally reprehensible practice of enslaving Americans by other Americans.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, for all the nuance and equivocation on Lincoln’s part, by the time he’s elected President in 1860, the slave-holding South views that as a sign that the economy that is built on slave owning.
NANCY KOEHN: The social structure.
ADI IGNATIUS: The social structure that is built on slave owning, suddenly is a great risk.
NANCY KOEHN: Absolutely.
ADI IGNATIUS: And boom. What happens?
NANCY KOEHN: As soon as he’s elected President, states start seceding from the Union, saying we’re not playing on this tennis court anymore. We’re out.
ADI IGNATIUS: Coming up after the break, the American Civil War begins. We’ll analyze Lincoln’s leadership during that momentous political crisis.
ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome back to “Real Leaders,” a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Adi Ignatius with Nancy Koehn. Hello again, Nancy.
NANCY KOEHN: Hey, there.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, the Civil War begins in April of 1961. No one at that time could imagine that this will continue for another four Aprils. So, talk about what’s happening broadly and, in particularly for Lincoln, as the war starts.
NANCY KOEHN: Really quickly it’s clear that this war’s not going to be over anytime soon, and the casualty counts start growing. But you can chart the process of Lincoln’s growing capacity to think, to see the big picture, to consult lots and lots of people — not unlike JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then make his decisions with that kind of consultative material.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, let’s break down a little bit. So, Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War — to what extent does that look like other presidential crisis we’ve seen, like, say, JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis?
NANCY KOEHN: So, one of the really important aspects that both John Kennedy and Lincoln shared in the moments of crisis leadership was what today we would call forbearance or emotional discipline. Even though my emotions and a lot of influence around me says I need to do something right now. So, what Kennedy does is to just slow everything down and say, “Wait a minute. Let’s not get too hot under the collar because if we do that, we’ll lose control of events and the repercussions of that are not fully well understand and they may be very, very dangerous.”
ADI IGNATIUS: So, what about Lincoln? Did he manage similarly to maintain his patience and self-control as he is conducting the Civil War?
NANCY KOEHN: With Lincoln, he learned this in his adult life. I’m not exactly sure when. But we see it in his presidency at lots and lots of junctures. The most striking one, or the most telling one is one that happens right around the Battle of Gettysburg, which occurs in the first three days of July 1863 in this Pennsylvania town. And it’s this crucial battle, so they knew it was crucial. Lee — Robert E. Lee, who led the Army of Northern Virginia, the biggest Confederate fighting force — had invaded the North. On the opposing side, in this small town in Pennsylvania, is George Meade, who’s the commander of the largest Northern fighting force, the Army of the Potomac. The two armies duke it out over two and a half extraordinary days of fighting. Lee loses, turns his army around, and immediately begins moving his men and a wagon train of Confederate wounded that was 17 miles long back South, heading South. Meade makes a critical decision that afternoon and confirms it the next day — that he’s not going to pursue Lee. So, the Northern General decides, “My soldiers are too exhausted. We can’t have another big military clash right now.” And Lincoln gets this news from Meade and he is absolutely enraged. He thinks that if Meade can pursue and squash Lee’s army the war will effectively be over — and there was good reason to think that. But [Lincoln is] furious. And he begins to write a letter. All of us can just imagine how we feel when we get a particular piece of news and we need to react by getting on our computer, or our phone and start tapping out a text or an email in response. And Lincoln starts writing this letter saying things like, “Your decision not to pursue General Lee’s army has extended the war immeasurably. Thousands more will die. You have made a huge mistake and I am immeasurably distressed and disappointed.” And then, here’s the kicker. He folds the letter up. He puts it in an envelope and he writes on the envelope: “To George Meade, from Abraham Lincoln, July 5th, 1863. Never signed, never sent.” And he puts in in a cubbyhole in his desk, where it’s found after he died. And that’s Lincoln. Lincoln used that power to discipline himself to think ahead, to just take a breath and let his emotions cool over and over and over again. And it’s such an important lesson for our time.
ADI IGNATIUS: Alright, but for a long time, and especially around the Battle of Gettysburg, the War is not going very well for Lincoln.
NANCY KOEHN: Right. This is being photographed for the first time in history. It’s being talked about. The casualty counts are telegraphed. The carnage and the outrage and the incredible criticism coming at Lincoln because the North can’t win, seemed to move the pendulum of military advantage decidedly to its own side, is extraordinary. The pressures on him.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, this one is fair to say Lincoln is proving to be an unsuccessful President, unsuccessful war leader.
NANCY KOEHN: Unsuccessful decision maker. Unsuccessful politician. I mean it’s not really until the summer of 1864 at the beginning of August that it looks like the Union will truly win the war. Because that happens Lincoln is constantly under a barrage of attack, not to mention all these other pressures he’s dealing with. I mean he is, during his presidency, the most hated person in American history. No question. Hated by friends, hated by foes, hated by everyone in the South — hated by every White person in the South.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, all right. Let’s look for a lesson here. I mean this is leading a country, in this case. But leading an enterprise in an extended, dark, often hopeless seeming moment. How do you prevail? How do you continue? How do you lead in a situation like that?
NANCY KOEHN: So, it’s like a great change leader in an organization — where you’re not just trying to make the changes, restructure the business, reorganize your workforce, transform your organization while keeping it alive. You’ve also got to tell people what you’re doing and why because if you don’t do that, no one will keep fighting because it’s just too hard. No one will keep changing. The Gettysburg Address is the greatest change leadership speech ever given in English.
ADI IGNATIUS: How so?
NANCY KOEHN: So, what’s he doing in those 200, depending on which draft, 200 and 74 words. He’s framing the stakes of the change and he’s convincing people why it’s worth to doing. So, the first paragraph is, who are we and where did we come from and why do we exist? The second paragraph is just a brilliant kind of movement of the camera, the narrative camera, to say now we are engaged — we’re engaged in a great civil war and we’re testing whether we really believe that and we can continue to exist based on that. Then he takes the lens and he clicks it down closer to the ground and he says, we’ve met on a great battlefield, to dedicate a portion of the field for the men who died fighting for that. We’re doing that because it’s fitting and proper, but the most important thing is not that we consecrate this land — they’ve already done that. The most important thing is that we try to understand what this struggle has been about. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. So, these men died. They died for a big deal. It’s an important deal. It’s who we are. And by the way, even though they died, it is up to us to commit ourselves to continue that fight because it’s so important. That’s what that critical fourth paragraph really is. That this nation, we commit ourselves, we dedicate ourselves to the proposition that these men will not have died in vain and that this nation under God will have a new birth of freedom. He doesn’t say we’ll return to where we were. He doesn’t say, we’ll rediscover the power of the original proposition. He says, “This nation under God will have a new birth of freedom.” And that democracy, government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish. So, he’s framing the stakes. He’s saying this is terrible this change process, but we have to, in spite of the obstacles, in spite of the tradeoffs, we all have to carry on.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, he’s basically changing the definition of the struggle, what’s at stake. In hindsight it seems brilliant. There’s no guarantee that anyone is going to be listening and is going to allow the debate to be reframed because of his oratorical skills.
NANCY KOEHN: Well Lincoln was a master calculator, politically. He’s always calculating, calculating, calculating. He would never have made that speech if he didn’t think the political capital was growing and viable in the North. He has enough capital to say, this war is about slavery, and we’re going to end slavery. So, that was incredibly important. It was incredibly important. The war stopped being a war solely to save the Union on the basis in which it entered the war with the territorial, with the legal —
ADI IGNATIUS: With the South, North —
NANCY KOEHN: With the South, North, and the legalization of slavery in certain places. And now became a war to fundamentally change the terms of the American experiment and to restore what Lincoln believed to be its true defining principle, as codified in the Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal and all men are free.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, it meant compromise was probably impossible, or —
NANCY KOEHN: It meant that there could never be a brokered peace. Slavery would be over and the war would be over, or the Southerners would win and they would have their own country.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, that’s an interesting question about leadership because there were also articulate voices saying, “Too many people are dying.” The final total I think was 600,000 killed. Insane number and people saying, “We have to stop the fighting.” And in essence Lincoln had come up with this position that was tactical, that was principled — but was sort of absolute. What does that say about leadership? I mean you could say he won so it was a good thing. But you could say he also kind of limited his flexibility at that point.
NANCY KOEHN: He certainly did. He thought that’s where the nation had arrived — that it was that stark. And by the way lots and lots of other people did it on both sides of the issue. So, there were people in 1863, lots of folks in the North that thought we got to end the bloodshed. But there were just as many people and, I think perhaps more, who thought this war’s got to be about more than saving the Union. It’s got to be about transforming the Union and ending the moral cancer, which was a common term for slavery.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, when thinking about the deepest leadership lessons we can all draw from Lincoln, part of it is holding firm. But part of it seems in his life is that he evolved. He evolved as a thinker, as a human, as a leader, as a tactician. We don’t all do that.
NANCY KOEHN: But we all have the opportunity to do it. It’s given to us by our free will. A powerful leadership lesson from Lincoln is how he moves from “my life is about Abraham Lincoln’s political career” to “Abraham Lincoln is about saving and transforming the nation.” That’s why his death is so truly tragic because if he had lived — a man who saw the big picture, who himself had been transformed and chastened and irrevocably changed in the experience of leading the nation through the Civil War — I think he was absolutely trying to knit the nation together with “malice toward none, with charity for all.” These words don’t come from just a skilled wordsmith, just a man who became a master of rhetoric. They come from a person whose soul had been truly tormented and transformed in the extraordinary crucible of what he experienced at the center of the perfect storm.
ADI IGNATIUS: Next time on “Real Leaders,” Nancy Koehn and I will be talking about Oprah Winfrey. She’s not just a tremendously successful businesswoman, she’s probably one of the most influential people on the planet. And Nancy, you actually know her.
NANCY KOEHN: Yes. I met her by surprise when she paid an unexpected visit to my class many years ago — the first time I taught the Harvard Business School case that I’d written about her. My students, and many students who heard about it from outside my classroom, who just poured into the classroom to see her, were incredibly impressed with her — her warmth, her intelligence, and a piece of the extraordinary story of her life.
HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn – in conversation with HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius on HBR IdeaCast. Koehn is the author of the book, Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders.
We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.
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This episode was produced by Curt Nickisch, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Rob Eckhardt, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Nicole Smith, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
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