Which detail best supports the writer's idea that "statesmanship is not an abstract skill, but a contextual one"?
adapted from Lincoln the Great
by Wilfred W. McClay
Which brings us to the question of Lincoln's halfway measures, whose fuller context we need to remember. He rose to prominence as a politician
who was antislavery but also anti-abolitionist. The strategy he preferred
would have contained the spread of slavery, then gradually eliminated it-as
opposed to overturning the institution in
one grand liberatory gesture. Such a position perhaps seems incoherent now, and it [Lincoln's strategy)
failed in the end, since the South concluded that it could not trust
President Lincoln, who received not a single electoral vote from the South, to
protect its "peculiar institution." But it was a position predicated on
Lincoln's belief that the maintenance of the Union was the key to all other political
goods.
We find it harder to swallow Lincoln's frank disbelief in racial equality and his support for African colonization schemes. That such positions were
common, even mildly progressive, in his day does not count for much with us.
But what should count for us is the fact that, in the maelstrom of war,
Lincoln overcame his disinclinations? to see that the
Union could only be preserved if it sought to achieve something greater than its own survival.
Statesmanship is not an abstract
skill, but a contextual one, highly specific to the circumstances it finds. It is irresistible to wonder what kind of leader
Lincoln would have been had there been no secession attempt after his
election, or had he lived to be a postwar president. That the question is
almost impossible to answer intelligently, though, tells us a great deal. Lincoln
was above all a war president. Like it or not, that condition of history
defined him. He was not elected to be such a president. He might have been
no more effective in peacetime than Andrew Johnson was. And he
might well have found out, as Winston Churchill or George H. W. Bush later
did, that voters prefer very different kinds of leaders in times of peace
and war. We will never know. In any event, such was not to be his destiny.