Historian outlines Lincoln's on-the-job training amid Civil War

Lincoln faced his greatest challenge in learning to be 'commander in chief'

By Dan Danbom, Special to the Rocky

Published October 9, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Above, President Abraham Lincoln; below, Gen. George McClellan

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By all rights, Abraham Lincoln should have failed to preserve the Union.

He had to figure out how the war would begin, how it would be conducted, and how it would end. He had to deal with political enemies in the North and military enemies in the South. With little military experience himself ("his only military experience was his combat with mosquitoes in 1832"), Lincoln was up against Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate, distinguished military officer, and former Secretary of War.

He had to persuade skeptical (and racist) Northerners that freeing the slaves was in their best interests, and that the war was about more than making whites fight to free Negroes who would then move north and take their jobs. And he had to deal with a group of generals who were disloyal, incompetent, and sometimes both.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson's excellent examination of what Lincoln was up against and how he overcame all those obstacles covers an aspect of Lincoln's presidency that McPherson believes hasn't received the attention it deserves. Lincoln defined what "commander in chief" meant, then put it into practice. Remarkably, this military novice set out to learn by the seat of his pants what he needed to know to work with and ultimately manage the Union generals. He taught himself through a "cram course on strategy" that proved to be a decisive element in his overall presidency.

Key to this success was Lincoln's grasp of what is called "concentration in time." He recognized that Union forces had to operate around the perimeter of the Confederate states, even though that gave the Confederates the advantage of being able to shift troops from inactive to active fronts at will. This disadvantage could be overcome only if the Union employed its greater numbers to attack on two or more fronts at once - achieving "concentration in time" versus the Confederates' "concentration in space."

Getting his generals to act on the concept - and to get it into their heads that their objective was to destroy the Confederate army instead of taking the Confederate capital - was as hard a battle as Lincoln fought. No president ever suffered from a worse bunch of flawed generals.

No one better exemplified the Union's military liabilities than General George McClellan, a preening, back-stabbing egomaniac who was good at training troops and abysmal at using them. At the Battle of Gaines Mill, for example, 25,000 Confederates attacked and routed his army of 70,000.

"I was attacked by greatly superior numbers in all directions," McClellan explained in a telegram, and lost the battle because " . . . my force was too small." Adding churlishness to ineptitude, McClellan continued: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons. . . . You have done your best to sacrifice this army."

So shocked was the War Department telegraph office that they deleted those remarks from the copies forwarded to Lincoln, whom McClellan privately referred to as "gorilla."

Another in a long sequence of unsuccessful generals, Joseph Hooker blamed the Lincoln administration for a failed campaign and suggested that what the country needed was "a dictator."

Responding to Hooker's comment, Lincoln wrote, "Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."

McPherson shows how Lincoln proficiently managed four other functions of being commander in chief in addition to military strategy: policy, national strategy, operations and tactics.

The foundation for all those functions was the principle that war is politics. His generals, not understanding that principle, bristled at Lincoln's involvement in military matters. They resisted, for example, Lincoln's encouragement of "hard war" that showed no gentlemanly treatment of the South and its residents, and his eventual emancipation of the slaves, which was as much about taking resources from the South as it was about giving freedom to the slaves.

Lincoln kept Britain and France from joining the war on the side of the South, kept antiwar Copperheads from derailing the war effort, and kept his cabinet from imploding over personality and policy differences. He was, in short, a masterly politician and would not have succeeded were he not.

What also comes through in Tried by War is what Lincoln was made of. He made mistakes, but he learned from them. He knew how to shape public opinion and when to ignore it. He was humble yet assertive. He was patient without being paralyzed. He put his own success second to the success of others. He had thick skin, and no trace of vindictiveness, selfishness, or hubris. He could absorb complex concepts, then turn around and communicate them in ways that the average person would instantly understand.

So much has been written about Lincoln that none of this comes as a surprise. But McPherson notes that in this "vast literature," the amount of attention paid to Lincoln's role as commander in chief has been wanting. McPherson writes: "Perhaps it is time to recognize the truth expressed by Lincoln himself in his second inaugural address, when the Civil War had been raging for almost four years: On 'the progress of our arms . . . all else chiefly depends.' "

Being commander in chief was Lincoln's greatest challenge, and only by mastering it was the rest of his legacy possible. McPherson has combined readable writing with a vast knowledge of the war and the man who directed it, bringing us a new appreciation of our most remarkable president.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief

* By James M. McPherson. Penguin, 384 pages, $35.

* Grade: A

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