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“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 2/3’s 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.” - Abraham Lincoln

At the height of the Civil War, US President Abraham Lincoln was disappointed with his Union Army’s Major General George Gordon Meade. He had not conquered General Robert E. Lee as expected. In a letter to Meade he verbally lashed out to his general. And what was Meade’s response?

There was none. Lincoln had never sent the letter. The letter was only found amongst Lincoln’s other papers when he died. Why didn’t he send it? Dale Carnegie explains that “he had come to grips with a critical spirit and determined to defeat it.” “He got his anger off, he let off his steam and then he thought better of humiliating the general, who had, after all, turned back Robert E. Lee,” explains historian Harold Holzer.

Lincoln wrote what he called a “hot letter.” He “put it aside until his emotions cooled down and then wrote: ‘Never sent. Never signed,’” explained Doris Kearns Goodwin once. This helped him to think twice about what he wrote. It channeled his anger and frustrations productively.

And if he did lose his temper, “or one of their [the other person’s] feelings would be hurt, he’d be able to write a letter saying, if I hurt you in any way I did not mean to do so,” explains Goodwin. Forgive me for things that I might do hastily, he would say.

As I was returning from Boston to Cambridge yesterday from a meeting in the afternoon, I was thinking about Lincoln’s idea of the “hot letter.” I was frustrated and angry. But I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I didn’t write about it. And then I sent that “hot email.”

The way Lincoln exercised self-control was through finding his secretary or his pen. The sheer process of writing or talking to someone helped him to distinguish between what should be said and what should be left unsaid.

Granted, in the age of electronic communication, it is much harder to resist sending that “hot email.” Sending an email is only a click away. But because it is so easy, we should be more prudent.

What the art of the unsent email allows you to do is two things. You purify and purge your hot emotions. And it helps you to clearly think through the situation. And you don’t have to write necessarily. Usually what is needed is someone neutral that can ground your thoughts.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory… will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” - Abraham Lincoln Next time you are angry or upset at someone, think twice. Find a pen or secretary. And if you don’t have a secretary (yet), find someone else you can trust.