Select the correct text in the passage. 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.