 Lincoln. I did a book about Abraham Lincoln some years ago, focusing on Lincoln's management of the Navy. Now a lot of people know of Abraham Lincoln as a war manager, the most terrible war in American history, and a terrible burden to anyone who sits in the presidential chair. But very few people have talked about him as a manager of the naval war. So that's what I wanted to do. And I want to use that as a vehicle to explore leadership in general, and particularly his. And one of the things I do as a collateral duty is I sit on a committee that rates the presidents historically over the years. And in every year since we've been doing this, which is more than 30, there are three people who always congregate at the top of that list. Can you tell me who they are? This guy is one. The other two? Say it again? George Washington is always on the list and FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. They change places once in a while, but it's almost always those three. And usually with this guy at the top. So what I want to do is talk a little bit about the characteristics that explain that. What was it about Abraham Lincoln that gave him the skill, the temperament to be the man who was considered to be the greatest American president? Because after all, he had very little experience. He had no executive experience. His only political activity was a single term as a congressman in the 1840s. And other than that, he'd never been governor, never been senator. So what was it about him? What characteristics did he have to make him successful? This is my favorite photograph of him. This was taken in 1863. It's only two weeks away from the Gettysburg Dress, probably his most famous public speech. And already you can see he's 53 years old, by the way, and he looks, I don't know, older. But when he became president, he had very little to go on in terms of what were his responsibilities as commander-in-chief. There's almost nothing in the Constitution to help him out. Article one, section one says, the president is the commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy. Period. But it doesn't say what that means. The infrastructure was tiny. The Navy itself was relatively tiny. So Lincoln kind of had to make it up as he went along. And I think the fact that he was able to do that so successfully tells us a lot about him. I'm going to talk about three episodes in his presidency in dealing with the Navy, each of which I think will illuminate a particular aspect of his character, personality, and leadership style. And the first of those took place relatively early in the war, and it concerned this man, who was Charles Wilkes, not a household name, then or now. Charles Wilkes was most famous, perhaps, for being the commanding officer of what was known as the Great United States Exploring Expedition from 1838 to 1842. These were times, the first couple of decades of the 19th century, when navies for a change were not at war with one another and looking, I suppose, for something to do in an age of scientific exploration. Remember, this is the age of Darwin on the Beagle. Congress authorized funds for an American Scientific Exploring Expedition, and they offered it to all the senior captains in the Navy at the time, saying, you're going to be gone for about three or four years, sailing all the way around the world, picking up, you know, fossils and birds and flora and fauna, and one by one all the senior captains turned it down. For some reason they just didn't think that sounded like something they wanted to do, but Lieutenant Charles Wilkes said, sure, I'll take that on, I'll do that. The difficulty was that Charles Wilkes was kind of a martinet as a commander. There were nearly incipient mutinies on several of the ships he commanded. There are five ships altogether on this expedition. You know, in town, how they sell these t-shirts that say the floggings will continue until morale improves. I think that came from his command, tenure, that that idea was born. Well, it was more or less a successful tour in other respects. They did bring back thousands of scientific examples, rocks, plants, animals, stuffed, and living, which formed the core exhibit at what became the Smithsonian Institution. He's also the individual who discovered that Antarctica is in fact a continent, and if you look on the atlas when you get home, you'll find that about a third of the coastline of Antarctica is still called Wilkesland, which he modestly named for himself. But the reason he intersected with Abraham Lincoln is that early in the war, Charles Wilkes, because of his, I think, poor management style, had been relegated to the sidelines of the Navy. When the war began in 1861, for example, he was chairman of the Lighthouse Board, but during a war, the Navy needed all of its officers. He was recalled to active service and given command of the USS San Jacinto, named for the battle in Texas that took place in the 1830s. And his assignment in command of that was to go to Norfolk and join up with a squadron being prepared for an expedition against the South. But to a man like Charles Wilkes, orders were suggestions, you know, advisory, and he thought he had a better idea because he had learned, as had most of the country, that the Confederacy had appointed two men named Mason and Slidel, Charles Murray Mason and John Slidel, I think I've got them here too, there they are, to be the Confederate ambassadors to Britain and France. And they had embarked on a ship and escaped out through the blockade and made their way to Cuba. And from Cuba, then they booked passage, as regular passengers, on board a British mail packet, the HMS Trent, that was going to carry them to Europe where they would begin their diplomatic tours as representatives of Confederacy. And Charles Wilkes decided it would be a great feather in his cap if he captured these guys. So he set out for Cuba, orders notwithstanding, and positioned himself in a narrow piece of channel known as the Bahama Narrows so he could pick off the HMS Trent when it came by. And that's exactly what he did. And this is supposedly, it's a newspaper illustration showing the San Jacinto, Wilkes' steamer here, and the Trent flying because you see the British flag. And the Trent is not just a passenger ship, it's a mail packet of Her Majesty's government, which gives it a certain status. It's not quite a Royal Navy ship, but the next thing to it. So stopping such a vessel on the high seas and sending a boarding party, which you see here approaching the starboard side, on board, ordering the captain of the Trent to muster the crew so he can find these guys Mason and Slidel. Well, of course, the British captain says, I'll do no such thing. And how dare you stop my ship on the high seas? Who do you think you are? But Mason and Slidel knew this was an opportunity. They stepped forward and said, we are the Confederate ambassadors. What are you going to do about it? And they said, well, come along with us. You're under arrest. No, no, you'll have to carry us off. So sure enough, a group of Marines came, grabbed them by the arm, carried them to the side, down into a longboat, and Wilts brought them back to the United States. Well, this is hugely popular at home. Northern cities had parades and celebrations. He serenaded at his home, on Lafayette Square, right around the corner from the White House, incidentally. So he's a national hero. But it's a problem for Lincoln because he has violated international law. He has stopped a British ship on the high seas, taken passengers off that ship. You know, we went to war with Britain in 1812 for doing something much like this. So now Lincoln finds himself, oh my God, what has this guy done to me? If I say, how dare you, Charles Wilkes, bad, bad, bad, return those men immediately to Britain, his popularity, Lincoln's popularity plummets because Wilkes is now a national hero. If on the other end, he says, congratulations, Captain Wilkes, here's a medal, he might have to fight a war against Britain. And he's already got his hands full fighting a war against the Confederacy. There's no good out here. So what does Abraham Lincoln do? And here's the answer. Here's our first peek into the character and style of Lincoln's leadership. Here's what he does. Nothing. Sometimes that's not a bad option. Lincoln knew that the enthusiasm of the population that exalted Charles Wilkes for his illegal act would fade. That would dissipate over time. And he didn't know yet how the British were going to react. It would take several weeks for news of this to reach London for them to talk about it, and then for it to come back in on subterranean Atlantic cable had been laid in 1858, but it broke in 1859. So the only communication back and forth across the Atlantic in 1861 was by ship. So this gives him a window of kind of wait and see. And that's exactly what he did. And sure enough, the enthusiasm for Wilkes began to wane a little bit, no more parades, no more serenades. Other news begin to supplant it on the newspaper. But when the news came from Britain, in their reaction to this act, it's pretty draconian. The British cabinet said we demand an apology. We demand an indemnity. You must return Mason and Slidel and bring them, turn them over to the Royal Navy. You must admit that you were wrong. And you must do this immediately or we will recall our ambassador. Now in the 19th century, recalling your ambassador with tantamount to saying breaking diplomatic relations as a first step toward war is theory stuff. So Lincoln calls his cabinet together and said, okay, guys, we have to figure this out. We have to find a way out of this mess. We clearly can't kowtow to the British who are still despised by a majority of Americans in 1861, 62. But on the other hand, if we take a hard stand, we might end up at war. So Lincoln and his Secretary of State, who was William Henry Seward, I love this photograph of Seward, by the way, I have no idea why he chose to be photographed in profile. That was a personal decision, obviously. His secretaries, by the way, had a nickname for him. They called him the Great McCaw. Make of that what you will. Seward and Lincoln together came up with an idea. Here's the way they worked it out. They said, okay, we're going to say to the British, thank you for admitting that we are right. Because in 1812, when you were taking men off our ships, you defended that as something you were allowed to do, and we went toward a prevent it. But now that you agree that taking men off other ships is illegal and unwarranted, and you admit that we are right, we congratulate you on coming around to our way of viewing things. So of course we'll return Mason and Slidel. Oh, okay, I guess so. It's not exactly an apology, but it worked. Mason and Slidel were turned over to the Royal Navy. They were delivered up to Canada and from Canada that took passage over to Britain and France where they carried on their various efforts to get Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy, unsuccessfully, of course. But Lincoln survived the moment, which is the key. So that's one example of Lincoln's style. Let me talk about another one. This is another American naval officer. This is John Rogers. Rogers is a very famous naval family you may know, almost as famous as the Perrys here in Newport. John Rogers and his father, who was the John Rogers command of the fleet in the War of 1812, and he had a brother Christopher Raymond Perry Rogers, also very well known. But John Rogers had spent most of his life as a naval officer from the age of about 15 on. And he was a lieutenant when the war broke out, because not much promotions in peacetime. But here comes a war, great expansion of the Navy. He's promoted immediately becomes a commander and then a captain and he's thinking, oh boy, I'm going to get command of a ship. Heck, I could get command of a fleet. This is going to be amazing. Here comes my career now at last. I'll rival my famous father for heroics. And he got his orders and perhaps with trembling hands, opened them up and read that you were hereby ordered to report to Cincinnati, Ohio. Not the orders he was looking for. It turned out, of course, in the Civil Wars, most of you who followed the Civil War at all may know that the rivers, the Western rivers, particularly the Mississippi, of course, but also the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Ohio and other tributaries of the Mississippi were vital means of transportation and therefore battle sites in the war and the army out west needed gun power on the rivers to sustain their mobility, to sustain their supply chain and so forth. And so that was what Rogers was ordered to do. Now the difficulty here is that there wasn't a standing military, excuse me, naval force on the rivers. You wouldn't have thought it necessary in peacetime. But now it is. So there's a lot of creativity that gets involved here and one of the kinds of vessels that Rogers decided was extremely useful in this campaign on the Western rivers or something called a this is always hard for me to say so bear with me here. A mortar boat. It's not a motor boat. There's no motor on it. It's a mortar boat. It's a raft with a 13 inch mortar on it fired a shell about the size of a basketball little bigger actually in a high arcing trajectory with a fuse on it that would land and explode. I mean you could fire it around the bend of a river over a mountaintop up to three miles in range. It's a very useful weapon. The problem is that in the 19th century in particular during the Civil War, the army and the navy were utterly separate. I mean, even more than they are on the first Saturday in December these days. There was a secretary of war who supervised the army and a secretary of the Navy both sitting on the cabinet together as co equals and they hardly ever spoke to each other. Certainly the serving forces hardly ever spoke to each other. So the problem is who's responsible for this? Rogers said well we need this thing. It's important. We've got to have it. But they're not ships. I mean look at that. That is not a ship. So I think the army should pay these guys. It's army canineers. It's an army piece of ordinance. So the army should pay for them and maintain them and supervise them. And the army said no, no, no, no, no, they float. It's not ours. It's yours. You do it. And if you trace the chain of command up from these guys right here up, it goes to their officers and then their theater commanders and then their secretaries of war in the Navy and then the president of the United States. There was no individual below the president who had simultaneous command over both the army and the Navy. Made it very difficult to have joint operations. And here's the first time it comes up. This is early in 1862. And Lincoln says okay let's figure this out. Let's see it's an army weapon so the army will supply the gun and the munitions and the supplies. They float though so the Navy will get a steamship and the men can be housed on that steamship when they're not busy taking care of the mortars. So you take charge of that and you take charge. This is the president of the United States. He even had a lieutenant specifically designated to be the go between for all these guys. So from the White House by telegraph he's coordinating who's in charge of what in the middle of the Mississippi River. There was no existing protocol for doing it. So Lincoln said I'll do it. Let's be practical about it. Let's just be pragmatic. We won't worry about the details of this or that or the other thing. We'll just make it happen. And that's another element of Lincoln's leadership. The gun boats by the way turned out to be pretty pretty used. Whoops. Whoops. What happened here? In the middle. There it is. This is this is island number 10 in the Mississippi River. The Tennessee line is right here. It actually divides two states in half. So the island number 10 is simply the 10th island down in numbered sequence from the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. And the Confederates had fortified it. The union came down by river and their original idea was well we'll land here on the coast and we'll march over land to get it. But all of this you see here this is swamp and this real foot lake here goes for miles. You cannot get around this corner no matter how far you go. Well what will we do then? How can we attack this? These are the mortar boats. These little dots right here. And they could fire over the top of that bend in the curve and pummel island number 10. Eventually the the union Navy ran past island number 10, picked up a force here, went down the river, landed here and attacked from the rear. And that turned out to work. So Lincoln's management of the mortar boat problem helped to capture island number 10, opened the Mississippi River and led to the campaign for Vicksburg. Absent Lincoln might not have happened at all. The Army Navy would still be quarreling over who's going to feed those guys. All right. This is my favorite. This third example is my favorite when it really shows you I think a lot about how Lincoln was willing to insert himself into circumstances where he could make a difference. This is a pretty busy little map. Let me work it out for you. What's going on? Is Washington D.C. up here? The Union Capitol. Here's Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate Capitol. And the Union General George McClellan had decided that rather than go down overland like this and try to cross all these rivers against offensive forces, he would put his army on ships and go down the Potomac River all the way down to here, land at Hampton, Hampton Roads, and move toward Richmond that way. Well, OK. It's not a bad idea in concept. But the problem was McClellan's not the guy to carry it out. Some of you who have studied the Civil War know that McClellan was not exactly champing at the bit to come to grips with the enemy. He was a little slow in undertaking some of these operations. And it was so slow that Lincoln decided I'm going to go down there and take a look. A little encouragement. Do what I can. So he comes down by boat, got out into the Chesapeake Bay. Immediately he got seasick. By the way, which is something I very much identify with. Poor Abraham Lincoln came down, but he landed here at Hampton Roads and woke up the next morning and he's on one of these big ships and he goes up on the deck still slightly green. And the captain of the ship, Louis Goldsboro, who's actually in command of the whole squadron says, Mr. President, let me give you a kind of tour of the area here. I'll show you what we're looking at. Here's Hampton Roads. And here they are on these ships looking around. And he says over here, this is Fortress Monroe. This is ours. We got we own this one. This is where we landed the troops. Here's where McClellan's army is bivouacked. Over here at the tip of Newport News Point, this is where the Merrimack, which the Union called as CSS Virginia, the big ironclad that the Confederates had built, had come out and sunk two ships, the Cumberland and the Congress. And over here, he said, these are Confederate batteries down here on the point. And Lincoln said, excuse me, Captain, could I ask you a question about this? Yes, Mr. President. Of course you can. He said, those, those batteries down there, the Confederate batteries on Sewell's Point, are they within the range of your guns? Well, yes, Mr. President, they are. Have you shot at them? Well, no, we haven't because you see they would shoot back. And it's generally not a good idea for ships that can sink to get into an engagement with a fort that can't. And Lincoln said, well, you might try that. Let's see how this works out. So Lincoln went out to the rip wraps, this little fort here, originally called Fort Calhoun, now renamed Fort Wolf for relatively obvious reasons, Calhoun being a secessionist and watched while the Union fleet attacks Sewell's Point and pretty much wiped it out. Good, that's great. So Lincoln says, well, that's terrific. Well, now I have another idea, Captain. Oh, good. Yes, Mr. President, what is it? He says, well, I have an idea. Maybe you could land some troops now that you've suppressed these batteries, land some troops here and they could march over land and you could capture Norfolk. And once you capture Norfolk, you see the Merrimack will no longer have a base and we'll get control of their ironclad. Yeah, that could work, Mr. President. The problem is, let's see, what is the problem? The problem is that there's really not a good landing beach anywhere nearby. And we've never practiced amphibious landings. This would be an entirely new protocol. It's not in my book here. So, and Lincoln says, well, thank you. I appreciate that very much. So he got in a rowboat, did our friend, President Lincoln, and said, let me go see if I can find a beach. So here he is negotiating. The President of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury. This is Trump and Mnuchin in a rowboat negotiating the coast of Virginia. And they get about to hear Ocean View, which is where a bunch of Navy housing is located today. And there's a very nice sloping landing beach there, unprotected. And Lincoln comes back and tells Goldsboro, guess what? I found a landing beach. Oh, good. Well, we'll look into that. We'll form a committee. We'll write a plan. Lincoln said, how about tomorrow morning, four o'clock? And they did. They gathered up these troops. They used boats that Lincoln had suggested, the old canal boats from the wonderfully named Dismal Swamp Canal. And those boats crossed Hampton Roads, landed in Ocean View, and the troops went ashore. Lincoln watched from offshore. There are a couple of anecdotal elements that he went ashore with them. That turns out not to be true. But you know who did? The Secretary of the Treasury. Steve Mnuchin went ashore. Not likely. But Sam and P. Chase did. And when he got to shore, he noticed that the Army folks were kind of milling around. There didn't seem to be very much organization. Well, the general had warned them that we have no protocol for this sort of thing. And Seward went up to the commanding general. He said, General, why aren't your troops starting out on the road? I mean, we have an opportunity in front of us here. And he said, well, here's the problem. The protocol is that the regiments must proceed in accordance with the seniority of the commanding officer of each regiment. And we don't know the date of rank for all of the colonels, so we don't know in which order to go. To which Seward, not Seward, this is Chase, replied, General, let me make this relatively simple. In the name of the President of the United States, I order you to march immediately to Norfolk. Well, okay, we'll do it. So here they go down this road. And they got here to Tunner's Creek in this little bridge right there. And on the other side of the bridge was a, not a wagon, but, you know, with a little canopy over the top, a carriage. And out of the carriage steps an elderly gentleman who begins to give a speech. It's the mayor of Norfolk with the key to the city. Oh, this is going to be fairly easy after all. He's actually stalling. He's buying time so the Confederates can evacuate Norfolk with all that they can get away with and set fire to the Merrimack, which blew up. And then the army continued down and captured Norfolk with Lincoln watching. None of this would have happened had Lincoln not been there to oversee it, to suggest it, to prod it, to push it to its conclusion. So when you ever wonder in the monitor versus the Merrimack, it wasn't the monitor that defeated the Merrimack. Who did? Abraham Lincoln did. On his way back, by the way, there was on board the ship that Lincoln was occupying a reporter from the Washington Star newspaper who wrote out a column about how Lincoln had done all this and he actually showed it to the president, the president insisted that you take my name out of that. I did not do this. The soldiers and sailors who drove the ships and landed the men and marched to Norfolk, they did that. Talk about them. Take my name out of that article. Because he didn't want it to be about him. There's no ego investment in his management of this campaign. Yeah, we'll get to that. So what are the elements of Lincoln's leadership? I'm going to suggest there are four, three of which I've talked about, one of which I'll suggest in a minute. One is patience. Lincoln knew you don't have to respond immediately. You don't have to have a knee-jerk reaction to everything that happened. Sometimes you can wait out a problem. If you have more patience than your opponent, if you have more patience than the circumstances would generally allow, you can become master of the situation without having to confront it directly. He avoided war with Great Britain. He avoided alienating Charles Wilkes, a temporary popular hero, by being patient. It's a rare, I'm going to say gift, but characteristic, particularly I think among politicians, but Lincoln had it and used it more than once. This is one of many examples. He was obviously very patient with McClellan. Many argue that he was too patient with McClellan. That'd be that as it may. Another characteristic I'm going to suggest was his pragmatism. When confronted with the question of who has authority, authorization over the gun boats and the mortar vessels in the Mississippi River, he didn't say the Army does or the Navy does. He said, I can do this. You know, we'll do this part and this part and we'll work it out. And those protocols gradually worked their way into the relationship between the Army and the Navy, so that later at places like Vicksburg and Charleston, the Army and the Navy could and did work together, because Lincoln had shown them how you could do this. There's a pragmatic, responsible, non-flashy ways of getting this done. The third one is, of course, not only his willingness to step in and the pragmatism he demonstrated in coordinating the activities in and around Hampton Roads, but also his insistence that that wasn't about him. Right? His avoidance of making this a personal event. He's not ego-driven. And then the fourth one that I haven't mentioned yet, but I will now, is a sense of humor. You know, Lincoln's rather dry and often ribald, a sense of humor, drove his foes crazy. They couldn't stand it. But it was a tool too. You know, people would come into his office and in those days you just walked into the White House and said, I want to see the President. Oh, he's over there. And they would come in and they always had something to ask for. I need this or you should do that or how come you haven't done this? And Lincoln would listen and he would nod to thank him very much for coming. And he would say, you know what? That reminds me of a story. And then he'd tell the story. And he'd laugh at his own jokes. He'd double over and slap his knees and stand up. Well, of course, then the visitor did too. And he'd throw his arms around the visitor and they'd walk out chuckling and Lincoln closed the door and the fellow would be halfway down the hall and say, hey, wait a minute, what was the answer? All of his jokes had a point. They weren't just jokes because when people came in with problems it really did remind him of a story. And that reminds me of a story. One that Lincoln told more than once. This involved a time when Lincoln was writing circuit in Illinois. He was a lawyer, country lawyer, as his foes called him, out in Illinois. And he and Judge Douglas, who we always call Judge Douglas, Stephen Douglas, who of course became his opponent in two Senate races and a presidential race, were nevertheless friends and used to travel together. They'd go to a town, set up a local, and everybody would bring their accumulated court cases. And the judge would preside, Douglas would preside. And Lincoln and the other lawyers who traveled in a group would kind of flip a coin. Whose offense, whose defense, and they would take charge. And this was a case where Lincoln had to defend someone from a, it almost doesn't matter, an event. Because his opposing attorney got up in front of that six man jury and said, gentlemen of the jury, you absolutely must find this person guilty because of the facts. The facts are, he had motive. The fact is he had opportunity. The fact is that somebody saw him. The fact and so on. Tick, tick, tick, tick, sat down. Pretty effective. And Lincoln got up unfolding himself from a seat walking up in front of him. And of course Lincoln had this kind of Kentucky patois that I'll try not to emulate too much, but you have to imagine a little twang in this. He says, well now facts are certainly important things, especially in a case like this. But you know facts, facts have a life of their own and that reminds me of a story. Seems there was this farmer out and then of course he'd make it some local community where it took place and he had to get in his hay crop. And as you all know you have to hire extra hands to do that because it's a big job. So so he hired a handyman, a local man fella to come help him get in the crop and and he had a teenage daughter and a younger son and they were all working like crazy and the farmer happened to be in the house when his little boy came running in and he said, pa, pa, we got terrible trouble. And he said, what is it son? What's the matter? And he said, well it's Sis and the handyman. They're out in the barn and Sis, she's got her dress pulled up like this and the handyman, he has his pants pulled down like this. Pa, they're fixing to pee on our hay. To which Lincoln said, which suggests that you may have all the facts and still come to the wrong conclusion. And he won the case. Thank you. I look forward to your questions.