Leadership transitions are rarely easy, but they are particularly difficult when an organization is struggling, its culture is dysfunctional, tensions are high, and there is little coordination or cooperation with the exiting leaders.
Now imagine that type of transition when the stakes are far greater than in any business venture – when lives are literally on the line and the fate of an entire nation rests with the new leader’s decisions.
Such was the case when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency.
Erik Larson tells the story of that leadership transition in The Demons of Unrest, a nearly 600-page account of the months between Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, by Confederate troops the following April.
It’s a long but enjoyable read, and I learned a great deal about the factors that led to the start of the Civil War. For instance, I left with a much greater understanding of the strategic importance of Fort Sumter, which sits at the mouth of the deepwater Charleston Harbor.
South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, but Union troops occupied the unfinished fort and refused to leave. Whoever controlled the fort, controlled one of the most important harbors on southeastern coast. And it was here, shortly after Lincoln was sworn in as president, that the first shots of the war rang out.
As the book’s summary notes, this chapter in American history was “a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals.”
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Part of that involved the poor handoff in leadership from the James Buchanan administration. By the time Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union, the troops at Fort Sumter were nearly out of food, and Buchanan had done little to ease the political tensions or to prepare the rest of the military for a fight with the South.
With the nation coming apart at its seams, Lincoln put together a cabinet full of strong-willed egos who often didn’t agree with each other. That would serve him well over the long haul, but it made for a rocky beginning.
Add to that the challenges of communicating with soldiers on an island fort at a time when telegraphs and mail were easily intercepted (sorry, no cell service in the 1860s!), and there was little Lincoln could do to prevent the impending spark that started the war.
In fact, I’d say that’s one of the most important takeaways for modern leaders: There might not always be anything you can do to prevent a disaster.
The stark moral differences between the people in the South and those in the North, the South’s financial dependency on cotton and, therefore, the labor it needed to produce it, and the volatile and unpredictable circumstances during the presidential transition combined to make the Civil War inevitable.
Lincoln looked back on those five months and said the challenges were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
He and the nation did survive them, but at a terrible long-term cost – more than 750,000 deaths and scars that remain to this day.
So, what can we learn about leadership from a war that was inevitable?
Well, for starters, we can still learn from the mistakes. If something could have been done better, it should have been done better, right? And we don’t want to repeat mistakes others have made.
But here’s perhaps the greater lesson: As leaders, we’re called to do the morally right thing to the best of our ability at every turn, because that’s really all we can ever do. And if disaster still comes? We do the next right thing. Then the next and the next. Because remember this: the Civil War didn’t end with the bombardment of Fort Sumter. That was only the beginning.
