Abraham Lincoln & the Tools of Influence

Abraham Lincoln & The Tools of Influence Selected excerpts from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005) Background: Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. He came from relative obscurity to win the nomination for the 1860 Republican party over three far more illustrious candidates. He was elected in 1860, facing not only the secession of southern states but a northern electorate deeply fractured between radicals and conservatives. In 1863 he ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation. He always insisted, while many would have settled for less, on the complete restoration of the union, requiring an unambiguous military victory and southern surrender. Re-elected in 1864, he was assassinated in April 1865, less than one week after the end of the war. He is considered by many scholars to be the best president in United States history. As Goodwin’s title suggests, Lincoln was a master coalition builder. Even a Confederate newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, noted this quality: “[Lincoln] has called around him in counsel the ablest and most earnest mean of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought and found it” (p.701). But Lincoln’s political ability extended far beyond coalitions. He was such an adroit politician, and governed in such demanding times, that we can readily use him to illustrate all 12 influence tactics comprising the Leverage Inventory. Below we present the 12 influence tactics, organized into four groups – Persuasion (Ethos, Logos & Pathos), Relationships: Negotiation (Allocentrism, Exchange & Might), Relationships: Structure (Networks, Coalitions & Team-building) and Meta-Tools (Intentionality, Situation Awareness & Agency). We illustrate each tactic with examples from Lincoln’s words or behavior. While he drew successfully on the full range of strategies, even he had tendencies and relative strengths. Because he was so multiple in his use of influence tactics, he clearly relied on all three broader strategies – soft power, hard power and smart power. We do not break his actions down into these strategies here, but you might ask you yourself where you see examples of each as you read these excerpts. He was such a well- loved man, personally and professionally, he clearly had significant soft power. And, as Commander in Chief of the Union army, doggedly insisting on a full southern surrender, he clearly used significant hard power. But his greatest asset may well have been his smart power, as time and time again he seemed to understand circumstances better than those around him, allowing him to outmaneuver his many challengers. Page 2 SECTION I. PERSUASION. These are the three elements of rhetoric – ethos, logos and pathos. It is what people first notice, and often remember, but is only the veneer atop many potential layers of influence tactics (discussed below). While it often receives disproportionate attention, it does matter. And in more than just formal presentations. ETHOS: The character of the speaker. It is largely about credibility, but credibility from a variety of sources, including moral character, disinterest, expertise and similarity to the audience. Ethos is the most often neglected element of rhetoric. It is multi-faceted, and hence especially difficult to capture in a short survey. But there is little question it was a major source of influence for Lincoln. Ethos seems one of the reasons Lincoln was so under-estimated before people knew him and so highly respected afterwards. No lawyer on the circuit was better loved than Lincoln, a fellow lawyer recalled. “He arrogated to himself no superiority over anyone – not even the most obscure member of the bar…. He was remarkably gentle with young lawyers…. No young lawyer ever practised in the courts with Mr. Lincoln who did not in all his after life have a regard for him akin to personal affection.” (p.150) [Lincon’s many unexpected achievements in his first three years of office] had been accomplished, [American minister to Britain, Charles Francis] Adams acknowledged, with a remnant tinge of condescension, not because Lincoln possessed “any superior genius” but because he, “from the beginning to the end, impressed upon the people the conviction of his honesty and fidelity to one great purpose.” (p.595) This is not to say he was not ambitious. Far from it. Finally, Lincoln’s profound and elevated sense of ambition – “an ambition,” [historian Dan] Fehrenbacher observes, “notably free of pettiness, malice, and overindulgence,” shared little common ground with Chase’s blatant obsession with office, Seward’s tendency toward opportunism, or the ambivalent ambition that led Bates to withdraw from public office. Though Lincoln desired success as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause. (p.256) His character was revealed even in triumph. Here, in the field, as reports came in about Grant’s successes in the final battles of the war. When [Lincoln’s wife] Mary’s party arrived at noon on April 6, Lincoln brought them into the drawing room of the River Queen and relayed the latest bulletins, all positive, from [General Ulysses] Grant. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously changed,” Senator Harlan noted. “He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been Prof. Cade Massey Wharton 2012 Page 3 attained.” Nonetheless, the marquis marveled, “it was impossible to detect in him the slightest feeling of pride, much less of vanity.” [emphasis added] LOGOS: The logic of the argument itself. As a skilled debater this was fundamental for Lincoln, likely taken for granted. Yet still important, as seen in the following example. Speaking in Springfield, Lincoln attacked the decision in characteristic fashion, not by castigating the Court but by meticulously exposing flaws of logic. The Chief Justice, Lincoln said, “insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.” Yet in at least five states, black voters acted on the ratification of the Constitution and were among the “We the People” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. The founders, he acknowledged, did not “declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” But they did declare all men “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ … They meant simply to declare the right, so the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” (p. 190) PATHOS: Emotional resonance with the audience. Lincoln was famous for his stories and humor. Pathos was clearly one of his “go to” tools. Here he is describing his approach. Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could do no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slave-owner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” (p.168) [emphasis added] Here’s Goodwin commentary, including a nice example. His remarkable array of gifts as historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic. The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by analogy – “because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!” Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining – in a word, communicating an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of moral persuasion. (p.166) And finally Bates, standing in for the many who initially were taken aback at Lincoln’s rhetoric. By the end of his tenure as Attorney General, Bates had formed a more spacious understanding of the president’s unique leadership style. While troubled at the start by Lincoln’s “never-failing fund of anecdote,” he had come to realize that storytelling played a central role in the President’s mind Prof. Cade Massey Wharton 2012 Page 4 is such,” Bates remarked, “that his thought habitually takes on this form of illustration, by which the point he wishes to enforce is invariably brought home with a strength and clearness impossible in hours of abstract argument. (p.675) SECTION II. RELATIONSHIPS: NEGOTIATION. Allocentrism, Exchange and Might are the foundations of dyadic negotiation. ALLOCENTRISM: Orientation toward others’ perspectives (as opposed to an ego-centric orientation toward the self). Highly related to empathy and perspective-taking. Though Lincoln’s empathy…would prove an enormous asset

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