Tried by War

On July 27, 1848, a tall, rawboned Whig congressman from Illinois rose in the House of Representatives to challenge the Mexican War policies of President James K. Polk. An opponent of what he considered an unjust war, Abraham Lincoln mocked his own meager record as a militia captain who saw no action in the Black Hawk War of 1832. “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know I am a military hero?” said Lincoln. “Yes, sir . . . I fought, bled, and came away” after “charges upon the wild onions” and “a good many struggles with the musketoes.”

Lincoln might not have indulged his famous sense of humor in this fashion if he had known that thirteen years later he would be- come commander in chief of the U.S. Army in a war that turned out to be forty-seven times more lethal for American soldiers than the Mexican War. On his way to Washington in February 1861 as president- elect of a broken nation, Lincoln spoke in a far more serious manner. He looked back on another war, which had given birth to the nation that now seemed in danger of perishing from the earth. In a speech to the New Jersey legislature in Trenton, Lincoln recalled the story of George Washington and his tiny army, which crossed the ice-choked
 
Delaware River in a driving sleet storm on Christmas night in 1776 to attack the Hessian garrison in Trenton. “There must have been some- thing more than common that those men struggled for,” said the president-elect. “Something even more than National Indepen- dence . . . something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world for all time to come. I am exceedingly anxious that the Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be per- petuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.”

Lincoln faced a steep learning curve as commander in chief in the war that began less than two months after that speech at Trenton. He was also painfully aware that his adversary, Jefferson Davis, was much better prepared for that daunting task. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Davis had fought courageously as a colonel of a Mississippi regiment in the Mexican War and had served as an excellent secretary of war from 1853 to 1857—while Lincoln’s only military experience was his combat with mosquitoes in 1832. Lincoln possessed a keen analytical mind, however, and a fierce de- termination to master any subject to which he applied himself. This determination went back to his childhood. “Among my earliest recol- lections,” Lincoln told an acquaintance in 1860, “I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.” Lincoln recalled “going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my fa- ther, and spending the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep . . . when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me.”

Later in life Lincoln mastered Euclidean geometry on his own for mental exercise. As a largely self-taught lawyer, he honed this quality of mind. He was not a quick study but a thorough one. “I am never easy,” he said, “when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it North, and bounded it South, and bounded it East, and bounded it West.”


Several contemporaries testified to the slow but tenacious qualities of Lincoln’s mind. The mercurial editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, noted that Lincoln’s intellect worked “not quickly nor brilliantly, but exhaustively.” Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon sometimes expressed impatience with Lincoln’s deliberate manner of researching or arguing a case. But Herndon conceded that his partner “not only went to the root of the question, but dug up the root, and separated and analyzed every fibre of it.”4 Lincoln also fo- cused intently on the central issue in a legal case and refused to be distracted by secondary questions. Another fellow lawyer noted that Lincoln would concede nonessential points to an opponent in the courtroom, lulling him into a sense of complacency. But “by giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case . . . the whole case hanging on the seventh. Any man who took Lincoln
for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”

As commander in chief Lincoln sought to master the intricacies of military strategy in the same way he had tried to penetrate the mean- ing of mysterious adult conversations when he was a boy. His private secretary John Hay, who lived in the White House, often heard the president walking back and forth in his bedroom at midnight as he di- gested books on military strategy. “He gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation,” Hay later wrote. “He read a large number of strategical works. He pored over the reports from the vari- ous departments and districts of the field of war. He held long confer- ences with eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge and the keen intelligence of his questions.” Some of those generals, like Lincoln’s courtroom adversaries, eventually found themselves on their backs in a ditch. By 1862 Lincoln’s grasp of military strategy and operations was firm enough almost to justify the assertion of the historian T. Harry Williams: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.”


This encomium is misleading in one respect: Lincoln was not a “natural strategist.” He worked hard to master this subject, just as he had done to become a lawyer. He had to learn the functions of com- mander in chief on the job. The Constitution and the course of Amer- ican history before 1861 did not offer much guidance. Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution states simply: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” But the Constitution nowhere defines the pow- ers of the president as commander in chief. In Federalist No. 69, Al- exander Hamilton tried to reassure opponents of the Constitution, who feared executive tyranny, that the commander-in-chief power “would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military forces, as first General and Admiral” of the nation.
Hamilton’s phrase “supreme command and direction” seems quite forceful, but it lacks specificity. Nor did the precedents created by Presidents James Madison and James K. Polk in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War provide Lincoln with much guidance in a far greater conflict that combined the most dangerous aspects of an internal war and a war against another nation. In a case growing out of the Mexi- can War, the Supreme Court ruled that the president as commander in chief was authorized to employ the army and navy “in the manner he may deem most effectual to harass and conquer and subdue the enemy.” But the Court did not define “most effectual” and seemed to

 
limit the president’s power by stating that it must be confined to “purely military matters.”7
The vagueness of these definitions and precedents meant that Lin- coln would have to establish most of the powers of commander in chief for himself. He proved to be a more hands-on commander in chief than any other president. He performed or oversaw five war- time functions in this capacity, in diminishing order of personal in- volvement: policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations, and tactics. Neither Lincoln nor anyone else defined these functions in a systematic way during the Civil War. If they had, their definitions might have looked something like the following: Policy refers to war aims—the political goals of the nation in time of war. National strat- egy refers to mobilization of the political, economic, diplomatic, and psychological as well as military resources of the nation to achieve these war aims. Military strategy concerns plans for the employment of armed forces to win the war and fulfill the goals of policy. Opera- tions concerns the management and movements of armies in particu- lar campaigns to carry out the purposes of military strategy. Tactics refers to the formations and handling of an army in actual battle.

As president and leader of his party as well as commander in chief, Lincoln was principally responsible for shaping and defining policy. From first to last that policy was preservation of the United States as one nation, indivisible, and as a republic based on majority rule. In May 1861 Lincoln explained that “the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular gov- ernment is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the majority have the right to break up the gov- ernment whenever they choose.” Secession “is the essence of anar- chy,” said Lincoln on another occasion, for if one state may secede at will, so may any other until there is no government and no nation.8 In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln offered his most eloquent statement
 
of policy: The war was a test whether the nation conceived in 1776 “might live” or would “perish from the earth.” The question of na- tional sovereignty over a union of all the states was nonnegotiable. No compromise between a sovereign United States and a separately sovereign Confederate States was possible. This issue “is distinct, simple, and inflexible,” said Lincoln in 1864. “It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”

Lincoln’s frequent statements of this policy were themselves distinct and inflexible. And policy was closely tied to national strategy. Indeed, in a civil war whose origins lay in a political conflict over the future of slavery and a political decision by certain states to secede, policy could never be separated from national strategy. The president shared with Congress and key cabinet members the tasks of raising, organizing, and sustaining an army and navy, preventing foreign in- tervention in the conflict, and maintaining public support for the war—all of which depended on the public’s support of the purpose for which the war was fought. And neither policy nor national strategy could be separated from military strategy. Although Lincoln never read Carl von Clausewitz’s famous treatise On War (Vom Kriege), his actions were a consummate expression of Clausewitz’s central argu- ment: “The political objective is the goal, war is the means of reach- ing it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.  Therefore, it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.”

Some professional army officers did in fact tend to think of war as “something autonomous” and deplored the intrusion of politics into military matters. Soon after he came to Washington as general- in-chief in August 1862, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck began com- plaining (privately) about “political wire-pulling in military appointments I have done everything in my power here to separate military appointments and commands from politics, but really
the task is hopeless.” If the “incompetent and corrupt politicians,” he told another general, “would only follow the example of their ances- tors, enter a herd of swine, run down some steep bank and drown themselves in the sea, there would be some hope of saving the country.”


But Lincoln could never ignore the political context in which deci- sions about military strategy were made. Like French premier Georges Clemenceau a half century later, he knew that war was too important to be left to the generals. In a highly politicized and democratic society where the mobilization of a volunteer army was channeled through state governments, political considerations inevitably shaped the scope and timing of military strategy and even of operations. As leader of the party that controlled Congress and most state govern- ments, Lincoln as commander in chief constantly had to juggle the complex interplay of policy, national strategy, and military strategy.

The slavery issue provides an example of this interplay. The goal of preserving the Union united the Northern people, including border-state Unionists. The issue of slavery and emancipation di- vided them. To maintain maximum support for the war, Lincoln initially insisted that it was a war solely for preservation of the Union and not a war against slavery. This policy required both a national and a military strategy of leaving slavery alone. But the slaves refused to cooperate. They confronted the administration with the problem of what to do with the thousands of “contrabands” who came within Union lines. As it became increasingly clear that slave labor sustained the Confederate economy and the logistics of Confederate armies, Northern opinion moved toward the idea of making it a war against slavery. By 1862 a national and military strategy that targeted enemy resources—including slavery—emerged as a key weapon in the Union arsenal. With the Emancipation Proclamation and the Repub- lican commitment to a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, the policy of a war for Union and freedom came into harmony with the national and military strategies of striking against the vital Con- federate resource of slave labor. Lincoln’s skillful management of this contentious process was a crucial part of his war leadership.

In the realm of military strategy and operations, Lincoln initially deferred to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. But Scott’s advanced age, poor health, and lack of energy made it clear that he could not run this war. His successor, Gen. George B. McClellan, proved an even greater disap- pointment to Lincoln. Nor did Gens. Henry W. Halleck, Don Carlos Buell, John Pope, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph Hooker, or William
S. Rosecrans measure up to initial expectations. Their shortcomings compelled Lincoln to become in effect his own general-in-chief as well as commander in chief during key campaigns. Lincoln some- times even became involved in operations planning and offered astute suggestions to which his generals should perhaps have paid more heed.

Even after Ulysses S. Grant became general-in-chief in March 1864, Lincoln maintained a significant degree of strategic oversight— especially concerning events in the Shenandoah Valley during the late summer of 1864. The president did not become directly involved at the tactical level—though he was sorely tempted to do so when Gen. George G. Meade hesitated to attack Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, trapped with its back to the Potomac River after Gettysburg. At all levels of policy, strategy, and operations, however, Lincoln was a hands-on commander in chief who persisted through a terrible ordeal of defeats and disappointments to final triumph—and tragedy—at the end. Here is that story.