It will be useful to compare the leadership styles of two wartime American presidents of the nineteenth century.  James Madison was president during the War of 1812, while Abraham Lincoln occupied the office of chief executive during the American Civil War.  The first of these must be counted a failure as a wartime commander-in-chief, while the second was able to prosecute his nation’s most terrible conflict to a successful conclusion.  What qualities enabled one to emerge triumphant, and the other to suffer the indignity of failure, we will now examine.