Lessons from Lincoln’s leadership at the close of the Civil War

The past few years have not been easy for the totemic figures of American history, caught in the crossfire of our culture wars. Even Abraham Lincoln, who routinely wins reelection as our greatest president in the polls historians like to give each other, has been buffeted by these winds. In 2020, a Lincoln statue was torn down by an angry mob in Portland, Ore.; another was removed, more decorously, in Boston. The fate of other statues, including the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park, remains up in the air.

So it is reassuring to read a bracing defense of Lincoln’s leadership. John Avlon’s “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace” does two things at once. It offers a close reading of Lincoln’s final weeks in office, with the Civil War winding down and huge questions still unresolved about the terms of surrender, the rights of newly liberated African Americans and the Reconstruction to follow.

The book also serves as a kind of leadership primer, a growing subcategory of presidential biography, and explains how Lincoln’s lessons were absorbed by later generations of presidents and policymakers.

Avlon succeeds admirably in the first task. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani (whom he identifies, without saying his name, as “the mayor of New York”) and a CNN commentator, Avlon has a sure sense of pacing and pays close attention to one of the most consequential periods of Lincoln’s presidency, from the glorious second inaugural address to the shattering end of April 14, 1865.

Lincoln guided the ship of state brilliantly in these critical weeks (for a time, the ship of state was no metaphor - as the final battle for Richmond was raging, Lincoln was close by, living on a naval vessel). As Avlon shows, he pursued two complementary goals with great effectiveness. His military policy was to crush

Robert E. Lee’s army and force an unconditional surrender, so that the war would end cleanly. But his political policy was to work quickly toward normalization, with the rebellious states readmitted under generous terms and most former Confederates forgiven. Perceptively, Avlon sees this as part of Lincoln’s natural need for “symmetry” - he would often announce two very different policies at the same time as he moved, crablike, toward the twin goals of reunion and emancipation (a goal that was far clearer at the end of the war than the beginning).

That strategy was not always popular in the North, but Lincoln stayed with it doggedly, and it paid off. Day by day, Avlon shows the life draining from the Confederacy and Lincoln’s rising joy that the Union would endure. But we also feel a vivid sense of danger, as Lincoln wanders into Richmond too soon, while the fires are still burning (his bodyguard saw a man with a rifle in a second-story window, aiming at him). In scene after scene, he seems to court disaster with a cavalier disregard for his safety courageous, yes, but arguably a poor form of leadership, given what followed. The dread only deepens as Lincoln returns to his capital, while quoting scenes from “Macbeth” that portend assassination.