Political magnanimity can be as effective as it's attractive

Imagine that you’re lost in a dark wood at night. You come into a clearing in which there are a pink Elephant, an honest politician and Boris Johnson. Who should you ask for directions?

The answer is, of course, Boris Johnson. He may be an inveterate liar, but the other two are figments of the imagination.

My favourite politician of all time, and any country, is ‘Honest Abe’, Abraham Lincoln.

He was mostly pretty honest, though that didn’t stop him resorting to downright skulduggery where he deemed it necessary. Have you seen the film Lincoln? If not, you should make a point of watching it.

Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens
thundering in the House of Representatives

At one point, Thaddeus Stevens, played with tremendous verve by Tommy Lee Jones, talks about the campaign to pass the thirteenth amendment, the one that bans slavery, as the means to ensure that “the Constitution's first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition”.

He later describes it as “the greatest measure of the nineteenth century, passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”.

That pretty well sums things up: Lincoln, the purest man in America, got the amendment passed by bribery, pressure, bullying, basically any tactics necessary. But it was perhaps his finest achievement.

Dishonesty, it seems, is sometimes highly effective.

“Honest Abe” may not have been any more honest than he needed to be. What he certainly was, on the other hand, was generous. Or perhaps the right word is magnanimous. And, interestingly, it served him well that he had that rare quality.

In 1854, he stood for the US Senate. At the time, Senators weren’t elected by popular vote but by the legislatures of the individual states. Lincoln seemed well-placed in his home state of Illinois and, indeed, on the second ballot he received 47 votes out of the 51 he needed to win. His Democratic opponent had 48 and five votes went to an anti-slavery Democrat named Lyman Trumbull, whose campaign manager was a certain Norman Judd.

Seven ballots later, Lincoln realised he would never get Trumbull’s votes. The only way to stop a mainstream Democrat victory was for him to throw his 47 to the man who had five, eccentric though that might seem. He decided to do just that, and Trumbull was elected.

It’s sometimes hard to remember just how obscure Lincoln was before he became President. In 1854, his only role in national politics had been a single term in the House of Representatives. Most of the time, he was a ‘prairie lawyer’, ‘riding circuit’ around Illinois. This meant travelling with a judge and a pack of lawyers to deliver justice in all the little towns of an as yet lightly populated state.

He was good at the work, and popular, but this kind of work was never going to win him any kind of national stature.

It came as a welcome surprise to be invited, soon after the Trumbull debacle, to join a team of lawyers in a major patent infringement case, the so-called ‘reaper case’. The trial was slated to be held in Chicago, so the defence team wanted a local, Illinois lawyer to join them and Lincoln was chosen.

That was a break for him. The other side was led by a former Attorney General, a man against whom it would be a real challenge to measure himself.

Then the trial was transferred to Cincinnati, Ohio. Which meant that the team could call on the man they’d wanted to use in the first place, a successful lawyer called Edwin Stanton. No one, however, told Lincoln he’d been dropped. He kept working on the case and built up a powerful brief to deliver in court.

When he showed up in Cincinnati, however, Edwin Stanton asked one of the other lawyers, “why did you bring that damned long-armed ape here?” They never spent an evening with him, although he stayed for the whole of the trial, watching the arguments in court. Stanton didn’t even look at the papers Lincoln had prepared.

At the end of the trial, when asked what he was going to do next, Lincoln said he was heading home “to study law”. He explained that he was fine for ‘rough-and-tumble’ cases:

… but these college-trained men are coming West. They have all the advantages of a life-long training in the law… Soon they will be in Illinois… and when they appear I will be ready.

He received a cheque for his part in the case but sent it back on the basis that he’d made no contribution. However, his fee had been agreed in advance, so the cheque was returned to him. This time he cashed it.

Abraham Lincoln, outstanding President

These stories only receive their full meaning when we look at their sequels.

In 1860, Lincoln ran for the presidency. The decision to hold the Republican Party nominating convention in Chicago, on Lincoln’s home turf, was key to his success, as was the excellent organisation of the campaign on the ground. In both of these, a vital role was played by – Norman Judd. The man for whose candidate, Lyman Trumbull, Lincoln had made way in 1854.

Then, in 1862, Lincoln was looking for a new Secretary of War for his Cabinet. Numerous candidates were proposed, but the one he chose was – Edwin Stanton. The man who’d referred to him seven years earlier as a “long-armed ape”.

Stanton was excellent in the role. He was also by Lincoln’s bed as the murdered President died.

Some claim Stanton said, “now he belongs to angels.” Fairly trite, in my view.

Others claim his words were “now he belongs to the ages”.

The latter is my preferred version. It seems to do justice to an outstanding statesman. A man made all the greater for his magnanimity, an even more precious quality than honesty.

And, in Lincoln’s case, a highly effective one.

Corbyn, leadership – and Lincoln

The British Labour Party’s tearing itself apart in a contest to choose a new leader, Owen Smith – or possibly to re-elect the existing one, Jeremy Corbyn. 

For many, the dispute is about principle or policy, but in reality it’s about something far more fundamental. It’s about leadership itself, which is hard to define, but easy to spot when we see it. And one historical figure has shown it far more powerfully than any other.

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, he started as far from the front-runner.

That position belonged to William Seward, who’d taken a strong position against slavery, the most controversial issue in the United States at the time. Another candidate, Salmon Chase of Ohio, had been even more strongly outspoken, and had the backing of the abolitionists within the party. The Republican Party was, however, new and had been formed by disparate, sometimes incompatible trends; the conservative faction, inclined to preserve the Republic’s traditions, even at the cost of retaining slavery, had its in Edward Bates, from the slave state of Missouri.

The most powerful expression of leadership

Despite his personal abhorrence of the institution, Lincoln’s position on slavery was that it had to be tolerated where it was already established, but it should not, on any account, ever be allowed to extend into any of the new territories of the still expanding United States.

Lincoln was initially in poor second place to Seward. But the latter, as well as enthusiastic supporters, had also made numerous enemies within the Republican Party. As supporters of other candidates switched, Lincoln closed the gap, overtaking him and winning the nomination on the third ballot.

At a time when it was regarded as inappropriate for candidates to campaign on their own behalf, Lincoln had to depend on others to canvass for him. In what is an extraordinary tribute to his generosity, no one campaigned more extensively than Seward. He started with a nine-state tour, addressing huge rallies; he ended with an intense campaign in his own state of New York, without which Lincoln might have been denied his victory.

If Lincoln wasn’t campaigning, that didn’t mean he was uninvolved. From his home in Springfield, he directed operations throughout the country, gave newspaper interviews and decided the content of the campaign. He kept himself astonishingly well-informed, as one visitor discovered to his consternation. Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the tale in her highly readable book, Team of Rivals: “I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.”

On campaign content, his view was that he would say nothing more than he had already published. But he was careful about the messages others were communicating. In another passage, Goodwin tells us:

John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid – that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward [at a public meeting], Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed… In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.

A brilliantly-run campaign, to which Lincoln was able to recruit even his most powerful recent foe, with judicious use of silence or at least moderation on the key issue of the day, won Lincoln the presidency.

One of his first official actions was to form a Cabinet. As Secretary of State, the most senior position, he appointed William Seward. As Secretary of the Treasury, the second, he chose Salmon Chase and as Attorney General, Edward Bates. So all three his rivals for the Republican nomination were in his Cabinet.

The other four posts in the then seven-strong government went to Democrats. Not just rivals, but opponents of his party. With just one change, the appointment of Edwin Stanton, also a Democrat, as Secretary of War, Lincoln had the team that would help him win the Civil War for the Union – one of the most effective Cabinets the US has seen.

As the nation descended into civil war, Lincoln’s discretion on slavery proved invaluable once more. It was instrumental in keeping four slave states in the Union, and out of the Confederacy. And that was crucial to victory.

What about the question of slavery itself?

In January 1865, just months before he was murdered, Lincoln engineered the passage by Congress of the 13th Amendment banning slavery from the US for ever. Something he could never have done without winning the presidency and then the Civil War, by then all but over.

The lesson for us?

The road to political success is often a tortuous one. It takes a great deal of ingenuity, even deviousness, to follow it. It’s not enough to grab a megaphone and keep blaring out the message, however principled it may be, or even right. Sometimes, a little silence is far more effective.

You also have to use the political structures in which you live to bring in the changes you know are needed. Lincoln built a cabinet that maximised support for his government; he worked with Congress to build majorities for the measures he knew had to be passed; and because he handled the issue with care, he exorcised the great bane, slavery, that had poisoned his country at its roots since its foundation.

It’s too much to ask that Labour today finds itself a leader of the calibre of a Lincoln. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we set that kind of leadership as a benchmark to aspire to. And, sadly, our present leader, unable to win the support even of his own parliamentary colleagues, falls far below that standard.