7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7called upon the state governors for troops and proclaimed
a blockade of the Southern ports.
As a war leader, he employed the style that had served
him as a politician. He preferred to react to problems and
to the circumstances that others had created rather than
to originate policies and lay out long-range designs. It was
not that he was unprincipled; rather, he was a practical
man, mentally nimble and fl exible. If one action or deci-
sion proved unsatisfactory in practice, he was willing to
experiment with another. From 1861 to 1864 Lincoln
struggled to fi nd a leader for the Union army, passing
through a succession of generals before giving command
of all of the federal armies to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who
Election poster of the Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin campaign of
1860, lithograph. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.