Early Early Adopter

Question: What President single-handedly invented ...

1. Centralized electronic command and control
2. Government electronic control of war news
3. The concept of calming down before you send an electronic message

Hint: He was also the only President to be awarded a patent.

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The line between a great President and a mediocre or even failed President is very thin. Early in the summer of 1864, Lincoln had few illusions that he was going to win re-election. Careful politicking and some fortuitous turns on the battlefield – Sheridan achieving control of the strategic Shenandoah Valley, for example, and Sherman’s capture of Atlanta – made the difference. But if any one great thing had gone wrong and the election gone to the Democrats, President McClellan would have negotiated a peace deal with the C.S.A. Would slavery exist today? No, but the road to freedom would have been even more painful and much longer, with much further yet to go. Lincoln would probably have retired to an obscure life as legal counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad, remembered forever as the man who presided over the breakup of the Union.

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Lincoln was the first war President with access to the telegraph. In the Mexican War (1848), the telegraph was not a significant tool. General Scott had near total autonomy while in the field. Not so Lincoln’s generals. By late 1862, frustrated with General McClellan’s apparent inability to achieve much of anything, Lincoln took to monitoring the telegraph for any and all war news, and increasingly added his own questions and suggestions to the war traffic. By war’s end he had long established a personal link over the wires to every commander of general rank. He was the first national leader in time of war to have a simultaneous view of every theater. Without any historical precedents or prior experience to guide him, Abraham Lincoln, during a time of war and national crisis, essentially created the model for centralized command and control as it is understood today.

The Associated Press or AP was established in New York in 1846 to consolidate news sources. In time they developed wire services through which they could sell news to papers across the country. The Civil War brought a thirst for news that led to countless reporters embedded with military units and a terrific bottleneck at the telegraph office. In 1862, Congress authorized the War Department taking possession of all American telegraph lines. Censorship followed, and access to the coveted wires was predicated on telling the stories as Lincoln wanted them told, as opposed to fresh off the battlefield, unvetted, unrestrained. The AP was given preferential access and made the government’s preferred voice. Government spin on war news was from then on the established reality.

A huge volume of letters and telegrams and other documents written by President Lincoln remain. Among these are quite a few written in a heat of frustration, perhaps even anger, at this general or that’s apparent inability or unwillingness to do the job before him. But Lincoln was a man of strong personal relating abilities. He always preferred to handle difficult matters face to face. Letters and telegrams were always a last resort. They were also too often the only resort. A significant number of the more passionate telegrams, written in the President’s hand, were never sent. He wrote them, but then put them in a drawer. After giving himself time to ponder, the telegram might then remain unsent, being a bit too hasty and perhaps not likely to achieve the desired effect. Thus with no history to guide him, Abraham Lincoln pioneered the good habit of calming down and reviewing a message before hitting the Send button. Despite a century and a half of experience with electronic communication, people in our society too often fail this one courtesy.

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The magnetic telegraph was an example of what we now call a disruptive technology, and Lincoln what we call an early adopter. It changed the way people lived. Modern examples of disruptive technologies include the automobile, the personal computer, and the cell phone. Change is most swiftly forced by crisis. The Civil War was the ultimate crisis. It is part of Abraham Lincoln’s peculiar genius that he was able to adapt to a new technology and find new uses for it, in order to perform a job that very likely, not too many years earlier, would have been completely impossible.

Reference: Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails