The issue of national sovereignty of the United States over the states is “indistinct, simple, and inflexible. … It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1864

“If Lincoln had been a failure, he would have lived a longer life.” — James McPherson on John Wilkes Booth’s promise to “put him through” while listening to a victory speech from Lincoln on April 11, 1865

***

“Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” is the second book I have read by James McPherson, the other being the invaluable “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.”

"Tried by War"

Unlike other Lincoln biographies, which typically focus on his stance and political efforts to abolish slavery, his assassination, his humble upbringings and other topics, few, as McPherson points out, have delved specifically into Lincoln’s role as commander in chief. He was in the War Department, for instance, sending off messages and commands to his generals in the field almost more than he was anywhere else in his four-year tenure. He was the only commander in chief whose entire presidency up to that point was bookended by war. He guided the nation through the most perilous and bloody era it has ever known. This book tackles the challenges Lincoln faced in dealing with his often-slow-moving generals (i.e. McClellan, Hooker and Rosecrans), riots in New York, black troops in the military and the long effort to defeat Lee and capture Richmond, Atlanta, Vicksburg and other Confederate strongholds.

The book depicts a president intricately involved with the movements of his troops on the battlefield. Lincoln was not a military scientist, so he studiously took up the task of self-learning strategy and often dictated to his generals how he wanted Lee’s and other armies to be pursued and quelled. Unfortunately for Lincoln, McClellan and numerous generals in succession often languished in the field, constantly asking for more troops and supplies before they could proceed, all the while, Lincoln goading them to get moving. One of the most disappointing failures of McClellan was his dilly-dallying in letting Lee escape in the Shenandoah Valley campaign.

Eventually in 1864, Lincoln found some leaders who were not opposed to taking decisive action. They were Grant, Sherman and Sheridan. Grant oversaw one turning-point victory at Vicksburg and eventually pushed Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to Richmond, the Confederate capital. Sherman, with an apprehensive Lincoln waiting for updates, cut through the Confederate lines and tore all the way to Savannah (the famous “March to the Sea”) and back up through South Carolina, while Sheridan won a series of victories in the Shenandoah Valley and eventually defeated Early’s army at Cedar Creek. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse would follow on April 9, 1865, six days before Booth would keep his promise.

One of the turning points of the war, in my mind, came in the summer of 1862 when generals and Lincoln himself realized that the campaigns could no longer remain light, with the goal, as a lieutenant in the Tenth Massachusetts put it, “seems to be to hurt as few of our enemies as possible.” Halleck, previously in favor of engaging in some kind of civilized war, however paradoxical that sounds, turned an about-face that summer. His words thunder through the ages and represent a grittier strategy of war.

After being named general in chief, one of his first edicts was to

take up all active (rebel) sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use … It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of the war.

This was one of the seminal statements of the entire war. “Take their property” means that he was commanding his troops to take their slaves, and perhaps other less valuable items, for the Union’s own use. Slaves, as McPherson notes, were the Confederacy’s “principal form of property.” This got to the heart of why the war was being fought in the first place and announced a new level of hard-nosed strategy that persisted through the remainder of the war. More than even Vicksburg, this change in policy, since it led to the eventually conscription of black troops and turning the South’s special form of property against the Confederacy, might have been the most decisive in the Union’s success.

In carrying out his duties as commander in chief, in the suspension of habeas corpus, in arresting legislators in Maryland, in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation itself, the question is still open today whether Lincoln overstepped his constitutional bounds. But as McPherson notes, no war thereafter, not even the war on terrorism, has threatened to destroy the United States more than the Civil War. Lincoln may have taken some liberties as president, but would the Union have survived if he had not? The preservation of the Union, after all, was his stated goal. He later added another goal: the destruction of the peculiar institution. Sadly, the federal government probably didn’t do enough in the reconstruction years following the war.

As McPherson concludes:

Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws of World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed. And the problem of Reconstruction after the Civil War was not that the federal government exercised too much power but that it did not exercise enough.

While McPherson didn’t quite deliver the poetry that drips from nearly every page of “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the writing in “Tried by War” is straightforward and lucid and delivers important details about Lincoln’s role as, not only the president, but the head of the Union army. Plus, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the subject. Lincoln was far from removed the workings of his army. Given the times, he was about as hands-on — sometimes visiting the army in person — as a president could have been without picking up a Spencer rifle and fighting himself.

Rating: