That was the most lurid personal incident in Lincoln’s
life. It taught him an invaluable lesson in the art of dealing
with people. Never again did he write an insulting
letter. Never again did he ridicule anyone. And from that
time on, he almost never criticized anybody for anything.
Time after time, during the Civil War, Lincoln put a
new general at the head of the Army of the Potomac, and
each one in turn – McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker,
Meade – blundered tragically and drove Lincoln to pacing
the floor in despair. Half the nation savagely condemned
these incompetent generals, but Lincoln, “with
malice toward none, with charity for all,” held his peace.
One of his favorite quotations was “Judge not, that ye be
not judged.”
And when Mrs. Lincoln and others spoke harshly of
the southern people, Lincoln replied: “Don’t criticize
them; they are just what we would be under similar
circumstances.”
Yet if any man ever had occasion to criticize, surely it
was Lincoln. Let’s take just one illustration:
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought during the first
three days of July 1863. During the night of July 4, Lee
began to retreat southward while storm clouds deluged
the country with rain. When Lee reached the Potomac
with his defeated army, he found a swollen, impassable
river in front of him, and a victorious Union Army behind
him. Lee was in a trap. He couldn’t escape. Lincoln
saw that. Here was a golden, heaven-sent opportunity-
the opportunity to capture Lee’s army and end the war
immediately. So, with a surge of high hope, Lincoln ordered
Meade not to call a council of war but to attack
Lee immediately. Lincoln telegraphed his orders and
then sent a special messenger to Meade demanding immediate
action.
And what did General Meade do? He did the very
opposite of what he was told to do. He called a council
of war in direct violation of Lincoln’s orders. He hesitated.
He procrastinated. He telegraphed all manner of
excuses. He refused point-blank to attack Lee. Finally
the waters receded and Lee escaped over the Potomac
with his forces.
Lincoln was furious, “ What does this mean?” Lincoln
cried to his son Robert. “Great God! What does this
mean? We had them within our grasp, and had only to
stretch forth our hands and they were ours; yet nothing
that I could say or do could make the army move. Under
the circumstances, almost any general could have defeated
Lee. If I had gone up there, I could have whipped
him myself.”
In bitter disappointment, Lincoln sat down and wrote
Meade this letter. And remember, at this period of his
life Lincoln was extremely conservative and restrained
in his phraseology. So this letter coming from Lincoln in
1863 was tantamount to the severest rebuke.
My dear General,
I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune
involved in Lee’s escape. He was within our easy
grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection
With our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is,
the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not
safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so
south of the river, when you can take with you very few-
no more than two-thirds of the force you then had in hand?
It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that
you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone,
and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.
What do you suppose Meade did when he read the
letter?
Meade never saw that letter. Lincoln never mailed it.
It was found among his papers after his death.
My guess is – and this is only a guess – that after writing
that letter, Lincoln looked out of the window and
said to himself, “Just a minute. Maybe I ought not to be
so hasty. It is easy enough for me to sit here in the quiet
of the White House and order Meade to attack; but if I
had been up at Gettysburg, and if I had seen as much
blood as Meade has seen during the last week, and if my
ears had been pierced with the screams and shrieks of
the wounded and dying, maybe I wouldn’t be so anxious
to attack either. If I had Meade’s timid temperament,
perhaps I would have done just what he had done. Anyhow,
it is water under the bridge now. If I send this
letter, it will relieve my feelings, but it will make Meade
try to justify himself. It will make him condemn me. It
will arouse hard feelings, impair all his further usefulness
as a commander, and perhaps force him to resign
from the army.”
So, as I have already said, Lincoln put the letter aside,
for he had learned by bitter experience that sharp criticisms
and rebukes almost invariably end in futility.
Theodore Roosevelt said that when he, as President,
was confronted with a perplexing problem, he used to
lean back and look up at a large painting of Lincoln
which hung above his desk in the White House and ask
himself, “What would Lincoln do if he were in my
shoes? How would he solve this problem?”
The next time we are tempted to admonish somebody,
/let’s pull a five-dollar bill out of our pocket, look at Lincoln’s
picture on the bill, and ask. “How would Lincoln
handle this problem if he had it?”
Mark Twain lost his temper occasionally and wrote
letters that turned the Paper brown. For example, he
once wrote to a man who had aroused his ire: “The thing
for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I
will see that you get it.” On another occasion he wrote
to an editor about a proofreader’s attempts to “improve
my spelling and punctuation.” He ordered: “Set the
matter according to my copy hereafter and see that the
proofreader retains his suggestions in the mush of his
decayed brain.”
The writing of these stinging letters made Mark Twain
feel better. They allowed him to blow off steam, and the
letters didn’t do any real harm, because Mark’s wife
secretly lifted them out of the mail. They were never
sent.
Do you know someone you would like to change and
regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in
favor of it, But why not begin on yourself? From a purely
selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than
trying to improve others – yes, and a lot less dangerous.
“Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s
roof,” said Confucius, “when your own doorstep is unclean.”
When I was still young and trying hard to impress
people, I wrote a foolish letter to Richard Harding
Davis, an author who once loomed large on the literary
horizon of America. I was preparing a magazine article
about authors, and I asked Davis to tell me about his
method of work. A few weeks earlier, I had received a
letter from someone with this notation at the bottom:
“Dictated but not read.” I was quite impressed. I felt
that the writer must be very big and busy and important.
I wasn’t the slightest bit busy, but I was eager to make
an impression on Richard Harding Davis, so I ended my
short note with the words: “Dictated but not read.”
He never troubled to answer the letter. He simply
returned it to me with this scribbled across the bottom:
“Your bad manners are exceeded only by your bad manners.”
True, I had blundered, and perhaps I deserved
this rebuke. But, being human, I resented it. I resented
it so sharply that when I read of the death of Richard
Harding Davis ten years later, the one thought that still
persisted in my mind – I am ashamed to admit – was the
hurt he had given me.
If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow
that may rankle across the decades and endure until
death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism-
no matter how certain we are that it is justified.
When dealing with people, let us remember we are
not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with
creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices
and motivated by pride and vanity.
Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy,
one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature,
to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism
drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.
Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so
diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was
made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his
success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, ” . . and
speak all the good I know of everybody.”
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and
most fools do.
But it takes character and self-control to be under-standing
and forgiving.
“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by
the way he treats little men.”
Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent per-former
at air shows, was returning to his home in Los
Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in
the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet
in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering
he managed to land the plane, but it was
badly damaged although nobody was hurt.
Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to
inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the
World War II propeller plane he had been flying had
been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline.
Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic
who had serviced his airplane. The young man
was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed
down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused
the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused
the loss of three lives as well.
You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate