Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, elected president in November 1860, spent the four years between his inauguration and his assassination holding contradictions that should have shattered any leader: a constitutional federation against secession, a Republican Party against its own factions, a cabinet of men who had run against him for the nomination (Seward, Chase, Bates), an industrializing economy against an enslaving one, a Christian moral framework against the political economy of slavery. He wrote his own speeches; he read his own dispatches; he commuted death sentences for deserters; he signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure and the Thirteenth Amendment as a national settlement; he was elected to a second term in 1864 against opponents who said the war could not be won. The Strategist signature is the integration of short-term operational pressure and long-term mission tension within a single decision frame, and Lincoln did this under the most expensive conditions any American president has faced. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals describes the pattern: he chose subordinates who would disagree with him, and he listened. He was murdered five days after Appomattox.