In Forged in Crisis, Nancy Koehn focuses on five quite different leaders who exemplify the power of courage in turbulent times: Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson.

These are among her most thoughtful comments about Lincoln:

“The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago. But we, it seems, are not finished with the man who led the country through it. Not by a long shot. At atgine qhwn public faith in political officials has all but disappeared, we would do well to take careful stocl of Lincoln’s leadership during a particularly perilous efa. His was not a story of superhuman heroism. Lincoln’s journey was one of learning by doing, ongoing commitment to bettering himself, keen intelligence to equally acute emotional awareness, and the moral seriousness into which he grew as he attained immense power. It was also an all-too-human path marked by setbacks, derailments, and disappointments.

“Abraham Lincoln was made an effective leader — first from the inside out and then from the outside in — as he developed and changed throughout his life. That is, as president, he refused to ignore the larger consequences of his actions on men and women who had little or no agency, that he saw beyond the immediate moment and owned the responsibility of affecting a vast future, and that he rejected an ethical callousness about the choices he made are demonstrations of leadership that we yearn for today. ‘For anyone trying to understand America’s past or shape its future,’ as [historian Don] Fehrenbacher has noted, Lincoln ‘is a force to bed reckoned with.’ May all who aspire to lead with worth and dignity learn from the life and leadership of Abraham Lincoln.”

From Chapter Twenty-Two, Pages 199-200:

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Nancy Koehn (born 1959) is an author and a business historian at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is the James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, and was a Visiting Scholar during 2011–2013. She is also a member of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in the Economics Department. Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times was published by Scribner (2017).

I also highly recommend Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, published by American Political Biography Press (2002) and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, published by Simon & Schuster (1995).