When the American Civil War began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln was far less prepared for the task of commander in chief than his Southern adversary. Jefferson Davis had graduated from West Point, served in the regular army for seven years, commanded a regiment that fought intrepidly at Buena Vista in the Mexican War, and compiled a record as an outstanding secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration from 1853 to 1857. Lincoln’s only military experience had come twenty-nine years earlier, when he was captain of a militia unit that saw no action in the Black Hawk War. During Lincoln’s one term in Congress, he made a speech in 1848 mocking his military career. “Did you know I am a military hero?” he said. “I fought, bled, and came away” after “charges upon the wild onions” and “a good many bloody struggles with the Musquetoes.”1
When he called state militias into federal service on April 15, 1861, to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” Lincoln therefore faced a steep learning curve as commander in chief. He went at the task diligently. His experience as a largely self-taught lawyer with a keen analytical mind who had mastered Euclidean geometry for mental exercise enabled him to learn on the job. He read and absorbed works on military history and strategy; he observed the successes and failures of his own and the enemy’s military commanders and drew apt conclusions; he made mistakes and learned from them; he applied his large quotient of common sense to slice through the obfuscations and excuses of military subordinates. By 1862 his grasp of strategy and operations was firm enough almost to justify the overstated but not entirely wrong conclusion of the historian T. Harry Williams in 1952: “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.”2 This assertion was incorrect in one respect: Lincoln was not a “natural strategist”; he had to work hard to achieve a grasp of strategy.
Williams belonged to a generation of historians who recognized that Lincoln’s role as commander in chief was central to his place in history. The sixteenth president has been (so far) the only one whose presidency was wholly bounded by war. On the day Lincoln took office, the first document placed on his desk was a letter from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, informing him that the garrison there must be withdrawn or resupplied at the risk of war. Lincoln chose to take that risk. Four years later he was assassinated five days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox but while several other Confederate armies were still in the field.
During those four years Lincoln spent more time in the War Department telegraph office than anywhere else except the White House or his summer residence at the Soldiers’ Home. Military matters required more of his time and energy than anything else. He rarely left Washington except to visit the Army of the Potomac at the front, as he did eleven times for a total of forty-two days with the army. As T. Harry Williams and other historians who were writing during the era from the 1920s to the 1950s understood, not only Lincoln’s success or failure as president but also the very survival of the United States depended on how he performed his duties as a military leader.3
Since the 1960s, however, military history has fallen out of fashion among professional academic historians. Social history in its various forms that focus on themes of race, class, ethnicity, and gender has replaced political, diplomatic, and especially military history as a leading historiographical category. This change affected scholarship about Lincoln. One of the best reference works on Lincoln, Mark E. Neely’s The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (1982), devoted less than 5 percent of its space to military matters. Of the seventeen collected essays on Lincoln published in 1987 by the late Don E. Fehrenbacher, one of the foremost Lincoln scholars of his time, not one dealt with the president as a military leader. On the 175th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 1984, Gettysburg College hosted a conference on recent Lincoln scholarship. There were three sessions on psychobiography, two on the assassination, two on Lincoln’s image in photographs and popular prints, one each on his economic ideas, religion, humor, Indian policy, and slavery. But there were no sessions on Lincoln as commander in chief—a remarkable irony, given the site of the conference. In 1994 the historian Merrill Peterson published his splendid study Lincoln in American Memory, highlighting 130 years of the sixteenth president’s image in American historiography and popular culture. There are chapters on Lincoln and the South, religion, politics, Reconstruction, civil rights, and several other themes, but no chapters on Lincoln and the army.4
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.”5 “All else” included many of the questions and developments that social historians consider important: the fate of slavery; the definition of freedom; the destruction of the Old South’s socioeconomic system and the triumph of entrepreneurial free-labor capitalism as the national norm; a new definition of American nationalism; the origins of a new system of race relations; the very survival of the United States in a manner that laid the foundations for the nation’s emergence as a world power.
The issue of slavery and its abolition offers a striking illustration of this point. Much recent writing about the wartime emancipation of hundreds of thousands of slaves has viewed this process mainly through the lens of social history, “history from the bottom up.” Of their own volition many slaves escaped from their masters and won freedom by coming into Union lines. But this process could not have occurred if there had been no Union lines to which they could escape. And in most cases it was the military lines that came to the slaves, not vice versa, as Northern armies penetrated deeper into the South. It was the commander in chief of these armies who oversaw these events and who made the crucial decisions to convert a strategy of liberating slaves to weaken the Confederacy into a policy of abolishing slavery as a war aim second in importance only to preserving the Union. Freedom quite literally came from the barrel of a gun. The story of how this happened cannot be fully understood without at least some attention to military history.
As commander in chief in time of war a president performs or oversees five functions in diminishing order of direct activity: 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 this: Policy refers to war aims, the political goals of the nation in time of war. National strategy 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 refers to plans for the employment of armed forces to win military victories that will further the political goals. Operations refers to the actual organization, logistics, and movements of armies in particular campaigns to carry out the purposes of military strategy. Tactics refers to the formations and fighting of an army in actual battle.
As president of the nation and leader of his party as well as commander in chief, Lincoln was principally responsible for shaping and defining national 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 he explained that “the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”6 Secession “is the essence of anarchy,” 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. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln offered his most eloquent statement of policy: The war was a test of whether the nation conceived in 1776 “might live” or would “perish from the earth.” This issue of national 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.”7
The next level of Lincoln’s duty as commander in chief was to mobilize the means to achieve that policy by winning the war. The president, of course, shared with Congress and key cabinet members the tasks of raising, organizing, and sustaining an army and navy, preventing foreign intervention in the conflict, and maintaining public support for the war. But no matter how much this national strategy required maximum effort at all levels of government and society, the ultimate responsibility was the president’s in his dual roles as head of government and commander in chief. And this responsibility was as much a political as a military one, especially in a civil war whose origins lay in a political conflict and was precipitated by political decisions. Although Lincoln never read Carl von Clausewitz’s famous treatise On War (Vom Kriege), his actions were a consummate expression of Clausewitz’s central argument: “The political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching 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.”8
Some professional military men tended to think of war as “something autonomous” and deplored the intrusion of political considerations into military matters. Take the notable example of “political generals.” Lincoln appointed numerous prominent politicians with little or no military training or experience to the rank of brigadier or major general. Some of them received these appointments so early in the war that they subsequently outranked professional, West Point–educated officers. Lincoln also commissioned important ethnic leaders as generals with little regard to their military merits. Some of these political and ethnic generals proved to be incompetent on the battlefield. “It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as [Nathaniel] Banks, [Benjamin] Butler, [John] McClernand, and Lew Wallace,” sighed the thoroughgoing professional Henry W. Halleck in 1864, “but it seems impossible to prevent it.”9
Historians who likewise deplore the abundance of political generals sometimes cite an anecdote to mock the process. One day in 1862, so the story goes, Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton were going over a list of colonels for promotion to brigadier general. Coming to the name of Alexander Schimmelfennig, the president said that “there has got to be something done unquestionably in the interest of the Dutch, and to that end I want Schimmelfennig appointed.” Stanton protested that there were better qualified German Americans. “No matter about that,” said Lincoln, “his name will make up for any difference there may be.”10
General Schimmelfennig is remembered today mainly for hiding three days in a woodshed next to a pigpen to escape capture at Gettysburg. Other political generals are also remembered more for their military defeats or supposed blunders than for any positive achievements: Nathaniel Banks for the Red River campaign and other defeats; John C. Frémont for the mess he made of affairs in Missouri and western Virginia; Daniel Sickles for endangering the Army of the Potomac and losing his leg by moving out to the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg; Benjamin Butler for alleged corruption in New Orleans and for botching the first attack on Fort Fisher; and so on.
Often forgotten are the excellent military records of some political generals like John A. Logan and Francis P. Blair Jr. (among others). And some West Pointers, notably Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, might have languished in obscurity if it had not been for the initial sponsorship of Grant by Congressman Elihu Washburne and of Sherman by his brother John, a U.S. senator.
Even if all political generals, or generals in whose appointments politics played a part, turned out to have mediocre military records, however, the process would have had a positive impact on national strategy. The main purpose of commissioning prominent political and ethnic leaders was to mobilize their constituencies for the war effort. The U.S. Army on the eve of the war consisted of approximately 16,400 men. By April 1862, when the war was a year old, the volunteer Union army consisted of 637,000 men. This mass mobilization of volunteers could not have taken place without an enormous effort by local and state politicians as well as by prominent ethnic leaders. In New York City, for example, the Tammany Democrat Daniel Sickles raised a brigade and earned a commission as brigadier general, the Irish-born Thomas Meagher helped raise the famous Irish Brigade, and the German American leader Carl Schurz helped raise several German regiments and eventually became a major general. Northern state governors, nearly all Republicans, played an essential part in raising and organizing regiments and claimed brigadier generalships for their political allies in return. At the same time, Lincoln needed the allegiance of prominent Democrats like John McClernand and John Logan in southern Illinois, for example, where support for the war was questionable. These two men “have labored night and day to instruct their fellow citizens in the true nature of the contest,” acknowledged the Republican Chicago Tribune in September 1861, “and to organize their aroused feelings into effective military strength. They have succeeded nobly.”11 Both eventually became major generals. And of course, prominent Republicans could not be ignored. Lincoln’s party supplied most of the energy and manpower for the war effort. John C. Frémont, who had been the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856, and Nathaniel P. Banks, former Speaker of the House and governor of Massachusetts, were made major generals early in the war.
By the war’s second year, the need for politically motivated commissions to cement allegiances and to reward support had declined. Performance in action became the principal determinant for promotion, though politics could never be completely absent from the process. With Lincoln’s approval, the War Department issued General Order No. 111 in August 1862, stipulating that “hereafter no appointments of major generals or brigadier generals will be given except to officers of the regular army for meritorious and distinguished service during the war, or to volunteer officers who, by some successful achievement in the field shall have displayed the military abilities required for the duties of a general officer.” This order was sometimes honored in the breach. Schimmelfennig, for example, was promoted to brigadier general in November 1862, while Carl Schurz and Julius Stahel were promoted to major general in January 1863—all in the name of rewarding “our sincere friends” in the German American community, as Lincoln put it.12
Nevertheless, General Order No. 111 did herald the advent of a more professional criterion for promotion in the Union army. The national strategy of mobilizing political support for the war through military patronage had served its purpose. “The political generals’ reputation for battlefield defeats is certainly accurate for many in this group,” writes a recent historian of the subject, “but this orthodox caricature neglects their vital contribution in rallying support for the war and convincing the people to join the mass citizen army as volunteers.” Lincoln would have agreed.13
Some of the higher-ranking political generals helped shape military strategy and thus straddled the boundary between national and military strategy. Another important issue that began as a question of national strategy eventually crossed the boundary to become policy as well. That was the issue of slavery and emancipation. During the war’s first year, one of Lincoln’s top priorities was to keep border-state unionists and northern antiabolitionist Democrats in his war coalition. He feared, with good reason, that the balance in three border slave states might tip to the Confederacy if his administration took a premature step toward emancipation. When General Frémont issued a military order freeing the slaves of Confederate supporters in Missouri, Lincoln revoked it in order to quell an outcry from the border states and northern Democrats. To sustain Frémont’s order, Lincoln believed, “would alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky. … I think that to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”14
During the next nine months, however, the thrust of national strategy shifted away from conciliating the border states and antiemancipation Democrats. The antislavery Republican constituency grew louder and more demanding. The argument that the Slave Power had brought on the war and that restoration of the Union with slavery still in it would only sow the seeds of another war became more insistent. The evidence that slave labor sustained the Confederate economy and the logistics of Confederate armies grew stronger. Counteroffensives by Southern armies in the summer of 1862 wiped out many of the Union gains of the winter and spring. Many Northerners, including Lincoln, became convinced that bolder steps were necessary. To win a war over an enemy fighting for and sustained by slavery, the North must strike at slavery.
In July 1862 Lincoln therefore decided on a major change in national strategy. Instead of deferring to the border states and Northern Democrats, he would activate the dynamism of the Northern antislavery majority that had elected him and mobilize the potential of black manpower by issuing a proclamation of freedom for slaves in rebellious states. “Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted,” Lincoln told members of his cabinet, according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who have their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us. … We [want] the army to strike more vigorous blows. The administration must set the army an example and strike at the heart of the rebellion.”15
After a two-month wait for a Union military victory to give an emancipation edict credibility as a positive war measure instead of as a desperate appeal for a slave uprising, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam. It warned that on January 1, 1863, the president would invoke his war powers as commander in chief to seize enemy property (slaves) by proclaiming emancipation in all states or parts of states in rebellion. January 1 came, the rebellion still raged, and Lincoln issued his historic proclamation.
Emancipation thus became a crucial part of the North’s national strategy as an attempt to convert a Confederate resource to Union advantage. But this step opened up a potential inconsistency between national strategy and policy. The Emancipation Proclamation might free many slaves if Northern armies could conquer the states to which it applied. But what about slaves in the states to which it did not apply? What force would the Proclamation have once the war was over? Could the North fight a war using the strategy of emancipation to restore a Union in which slavery still existed and to uphold a Constitution that still sanctioned bondage? During the last two years of the war the abolition of slavery evolved from a means of winning the war to a war aim—from national strategy to national policy. Lincoln was reelected in 1864 on a platform calling for “unconditional surrender” of the Confederacy and a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery everywhere and forever.16
Lincoln’s shift from a national strategy of opposing the recruitment of black soldiers to one of vigorous support for that action lagged a few months behind his similar shift on emancipation. The idea of putting arms in the hands of black men provoked even greater hostility among Democrats and border-state Unionists than emancipation itself. In August 1862 Lincoln told delegates from Indiana who offered to raise two black regiments that “the nation could not afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis” and that “to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets from the loyal border States against us that were for us.”17
Three weeks later, however, the president quietly authorized the War Department to begin organizing black regiments on the South Carolina Sea Islands. The Emancipation Proclamation openly endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers and sailors. And by March 1863 Lincoln told his military governor of occupied Tennessee that “the colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest.”18
This prediction proved overoptimistic. But in August 1863, after black regiments had proved their worth at Fort Wagner and elsewhere, Lincoln told opponents of their employment that these soldiers had already made a contribution to the “great consummation” of Union victory. A year later, with more than a hundred thousand black men under arms, Lincoln considered their role to be essential. Without those soldiers, he said, “we can not longer maintain the contest … & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.”19
Lincoln’s dominant role in determining policy and national strategy is scarcely surprising. But he also took a more active, hands-on part in shaping military strategy than presidents have done in most other wars. This was not necessarily by choice. Lincoln’s lack of military training inclined him at first to defer to General in Chief Winfield Scott. But Scott’s age, poor health, and lack of energy placed a greater burden on the president than he had anticipated. Lincoln was also disillusioned by Scott’s advice in March 1861 to yield both Forts Sumter and Pickens and by the seemingly passive strategy of the Anaconda Plan. Scott’s successor, General George B. McClellan, proved to be an even greater disappointment to Lincoln. Henry W. Halleck did not measure up to expectations as Lincoln’s third general in chief. Neither did field commanders Don Carlos Buell, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and William S. Rosecrans. When Ulysses S. Grant became general in chief in March 1864, Lincoln told him (according to Grant’s memoirs) that “he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them: but that procrastination on the part of commanders” had compelled him to take a more active part.20 Grant’s account does not ring entirely true. By that time Lincoln had a pretty definite idea how campaigns should be conducted. But it is certain that “procrastination,” especially by McClellan and Buell, caused Lincoln to become in effect his own general in chief as well as commander in chief during key campaigns.
Perhaps he should have played an even more assertive role. In early December 1861, after McClellan had been commander of the Army of the Potomac for more than four months and had done little with it except to conduct drills and reviews, Lincoln drew on his reading and discussions of military strategy to propose a campaign against Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s army, occupying the Manassas-Centreville sector twenty-five miles from Washington. Under Lincoln’s plan, part of the Army of the Potomac would feign a frontal attack while the rest would use the Occoquan Valley to move up on the flank and rear of the enemy, cut its rail communications, and catch it in a pincers.21
It was a good plan; indeed, it was precisely what Johnston most feared. McClellan rejected it in favor of his proposal for a deeper flanking movement all the way south to Urbana on the Rappahannock River. Lincoln posed a series of questions to McClellan, asking him why his distant-flanking strategy was better than his, Lincoln’s, short-flanking plan. Three sound premises underlay Lincoln’s questions: First, the enemy army, not Richmond, should be the objective; second, Lincoln’s plan would enable the Army of the Potomac to operate near its own base (Alexandria), while McClellan’s plan, even if successful, would draw the enemy back toward its base (Richmond) and lengthen the Union supply line; and third, “does not your plan involve a greatly larger expenditure of time … than mine?”22
McClellan brushed off Lincoln’s questions and proceeded with his own plan, bolstered by an 8–4 vote of his division commanders in favor of it, which caused Lincoln reluctantly to acquiesce. Johnston then threw a monkey wrench into McClellan’s Urbana strategy by withdrawing from Manassas to the south bank of the Rappahannock—in large part to escape the kind of maneuver Lincoln had proposed. McClellan now shifted his campaign all the way to the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Instead of attacking the line near Yorktown, held by fewer than seventeen thousand Confederates in early April, with his own army, then numbering seventy thousand, McClellan settled down for a siege that gave Johnston time to bring his whole army down to the Peninsula. An exasperated Lincoln telegraphed McClellan on April 6: “I think you better break the enemies’ line from York-town to Warwick River, at once. They will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.” McClellan’s only response was to comment petulantly in a letter to his wife that “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come & do it himself.”23
Three days later Lincoln wrote McClellan a letter reiterating what was becoming a hallmark of his strategic thinking, the importance of time. “By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you—that is, he will gain faster, by fortifications and re-inforcements, than you can by re-inforcements alone.”24 Lincoln’s point was exactly right. McClellan’s repeated delays yielded the initiative time and again to Johnston and later to Robert E. Lee, and ruined McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign.
In his April 9 letter to the general, Lincoln enunciated another major theme of his military strategy: The war could be won only by fighting the enemy rather than by endless maneuvers and sieges to occupy places. “Once more,” wrote Lincoln, “let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same, or equal intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.” Lincoln assured McClellan that “I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you. … But you must act.”25
The general who acquired the nickname of Tardy George never learned that lesson. The same was true of several other generals who did not live up to Lincoln’s expectations. They seemed to be paralyzed by responsibility for the lives of their men as well as the fate of their army and nation. This intimidating responsibility made them risk-averse. Afraid of a failure that might lose everything, they chose the safe course of doing as little as possible. This risk-averse behavior especially characterized commanders of the Army of the Potomac, who operated in the glare of media publicity with the government in Washington looking over their shoulders. In contrast, officers like Ulysses S. Grant, George H. Thomas, and Philip H. Sheridan got their start in the Western theater, hundreds of miles distant, where they worked their way up from command of a regiment or brigade step by step to larger responsibilities away from media attention. They were able to grow into these responsibilities and to learn the necessity of taking risks without the fear of failure that unnerved McClellan.
General William T. Sherman was something of an exception that proved the rule. Thrust into command of the entire Department of the Cumberland in October 1861, he broke down under the pressure and had to be relieved. He started over again as the officer in charge of a supply base at Cairo, Illinois, under Grant, and then found himself as a division commander at Shiloh, which became the solid bottom rung for his successful climb up the ladder of command. In 1864 Sherman persuaded Grant and an initially reluctant Lincoln to let him take the greatest risk of all, to cut loose from his base and march through the enemy heartland 285 miles from Atlanta to the sea. This spectacular feat evoked from Lincoln praise for the risk-taking characteristics he wanted in a general: “When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went farther than to acquiesce.”26
In October 1862, after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln had prodded McClellan to pursue and attack the retreating Confederates more aggressively by offering the same “nothing risked, nothing gained” advice. “I say ‘try,’ ” the commander in chief told McClellan; “if we never try, we shall never succeed.” But the general did not try. Lincoln finally gave up on him and removed McClellan from command. He could no longer “bore with an auger too dull to take hold,” he told one of McClellan’s supporters.27
Meanwhile Lincoln’s frustration with the lack of activity in the Kentucky-Tennessee theater had elicited from him an expression of another important strategic concept. Generals Halleck and Buell commanded in the two Western theaters separated by the Cumberland River. Lincoln urged them to cooperate in a joint campaign against the Confederate army defending a line from eastern Kentucky to the Mississippi River. Both responded in early January 1862 that they were not yet ready. On the back of a copy of a letter from Halleck, explaining why he could not move against the Confederate defenses at Columbus, Kentucky, Lincoln wrote: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”28
Lincoln was provoked by Halleck’s pedantic explanation of why he and Buell could not cooperate. “To operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail,” wrote Halleck. “It is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.” By this time Lincoln had read some of those authorities (including Halleck) and was prepared to challenge the general’s reasoning. “I state my general idea of the war,” he wrote to both Halleck and Buell, “that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way to making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can be only done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”29
Lincoln clearly expressed here what military theorists define as “concentration in time” to counter the Confederacy’s advantage of interior lines that enabled Southern forces to concentrate in space. The geography of the war required the North to operate generally on exterior lines while the Confederacy could use interior lines to shift troops to the point of danger. By advancing on two or more fronts simultaneously, Union forces could neutralize this advantage, as Lincoln understood but Halleck and Buell seemed unable to grasp.
Not until Grant became general in chief in 1864 did Lincoln have a commander in place who carried out this strategy. In his final report on the 1864–65 campaigns that won the war, Grant noted that prior to these operations, Union armies in different theaters had “acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together.” Employing concentration in time, Grant ordered five separate Union armies to operate from exterior lines against as many smaller Confederate armies to prevent any of them from reinforcing another. Lincoln was impressed. He told his private secretary John Hay that Grant’s plans reminded him of his own “suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell & Halleck et al to move at once upon the enemy’s whole line so as to bring into action to our advantage our great superiority in numbers.”30
Grant’s strategy of attacking the enemy wherever he found them also carried out Lincoln’s strategy of trying to cripple the enemy army as far from Richmond (or any other base) as possible rather than maneuver to occupy or capture places. From February to June 1862, Union forces had enjoyed remarkable success in capturing Confederate territory and cities along the southern Atlantic coast and in Tennessee and the lower Mississippi Valley, including the cities of Norfolk, Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. But Confederate counteroffensives in the summer recaptured much of this territory (though not these cities). Clearly, the conquest and occupation of places would not win the war so long as enemy armies remained capable of reconquering them.
Lincoln viewed these Confederate offensives more as an opportunity than a threat. When the Army of Northern Virginia began to move north in the campaign that led to Gettysburg, General Hooker proposed to cut in behind them and attack Richmond. Lincoln rejected the idea. “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point,” he wired Hooker on June 10, 1863. “If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your [supply] lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when opportunity offers.” A week later, as the enemy was entering Pennsylvania, Lincoln told Hooker that this invasion “gives you back the chance that I thought McClellan lost last fall” to cripple Lee’s army far from its base.31
Hooker’s complaints and bickering with Halleck finally caused Lincoln to replace Hooker with George Gordon Meade, who punished but did not destroy Lee at Gettysburg. When the rising Potomac trapped Lee in Maryland, Lincoln urged Meade to close in for the kill. If Meade could “complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far,” said Lincoln, “by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.”32
Lincoln was distressed by Meade’s congratulatory order to his army after Gettysburg, which closed by saying that the country now “looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” “Great God!” cried Lincoln. “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan,” who had proclaimed a great victory when the enemy retreated across the river after Antietam. “Will our Generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.” That, after all, was the point of the war.33
When word came that Lee had escaped across the Potomac, Lincoln was both angry and depressed. He wrote to Meade: “My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes [mainly the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson with their thirty-six thousand defenders], have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. … Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”34
Having gotten these feelings off his chest, Lincoln filed the letter away unsent. But he never changed his mind. And two months later, when the Army of the Potomac was maneuvering and skirmishing again over the devastated land between Washington and Richmond, the president declared that “to attempt to fight the enemy back to his intrenchments in Richmond … is an idea I have been trying to repudiate for quite a year. … I have constantly desired the Army of the Potomac, to make Lee’s army, and not Richmond, its objective point. If our army can not fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of intrenched lines into a fortified city.”35
Five times in the war Lincoln tried to get his field commanders to trap enemy armies that were raiding or invading northward by cutting in south of them and blocking their routes of retreat: during Stonewall Jackson’s drive north through the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862; Lee’s invasion of Maryland in September 1862; Braxton Bragg’s and Edmund Kirby Smith’s invasion of Kentucky in the same month; Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in the Gettysburg campaign; and Jubal Early’s raid to the outskirts of Washington in July 1864. Each time his generals failed him, and in most cases they soon found themselves relieved of command: John C. Frémont and James Shields after failing to intercept Jackson; McClellan after letting Lee get away; Buell after Bragg and Kirby Smith got safely back to Tennessee; and David Hunter after Early’s raid. Meade retained his command despite Lincoln’s disappointment but played second fiddle to Grant in the war’s last year.
In all of these cases the slowness of Union armies trying to intercept or pursue the enemy played a key part in their failures. Lincoln expressed repeated frustration with the inability of his armies to march as light and fast as Confederate armies. Much better supplied than the enemy, Union forces were actually slowed down by the abundance of their logistics. Most Union commanders never learned the lesson pronounced by Confederate General Richard Ewell that “the road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.”36
Lincoln’s efforts to get his commanders to move faster with fewer supplies brought him into active participation at the operational level of his armies. In May 1862 he directed General Irvin McDowell to “put all possible energy and speed into the effort” to trap Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. “It is, for you, a question of legs. Put in all the speed you can. I have told Frémont as much, and directed him to drive at them as fast as possible.”37 Jackson’s troops marched twice as fast as those of Frémont and of McDowell’s lead division under Shields, and the Confederates slipped through the trap with just hours to spare.
Lincoln was disgusted with the excuses offered by Frémont for not moving faster. The same pattern of excuses from Buell during his pursuit of Bragg after the Battle of Perryville and from McClellan after Antietam deepened his disgust. Lincoln told Buell that he could “not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and our generals.”38 Lincoln probably did not fully appreciate the logistical difficulties of moving large bodies of troops, especially in enemy territory. On the other hand, the president did comprehend the reality expressed by the Army of the Potomac’s quartermaster in response to McClellan’s incessant requests for more supplies before he could advance after Antietam, that “an army will never move if it waits until all the different commanders report that they are ready and want no more supplies.” Lincoln told another general in November 1862 that “this expanding, and piling up of impedimenta, has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned. … You would be better off … for not having a thousand wagons, doing nothing but hauling forage to feed the animals that draw them, and taking at least two thousand men to care for the wagons and animals, who might otherwise be two thousand good soldiers.”39
With Grant and Sherman, Lincoln finally had generals in top commands who followed Ewell’s dictum about the road to glory and who were willing to demand of their soldiers—and of themselves—the same exertions and sacrifices that Confederate commanders required of their men. After the Vicksburg campaign Lincoln said of General Grant, whose rapid mobility and absence of a cumbersome supply line were a key to its success, that “Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war!” Perhaps one of the reasons for Lincoln’s praise was a tongue-in-cheek report from Elihu Washburne, who traveled with Grant for part of the campaign. “I am afraid Grant will have to be reproved for want of style,” Washburne wrote to Lincoln on May 1, 1863. “On this whole march for five days he has had neither a horse nor an orderly or servant, a blanket or overcoat or clean shirt, or even a sword. … His entire baggage consists of a toothbrush.”40 To Lincoln, the contrast with the headquarters pomp or bloated logistics of a Frémont or McClellan could not have been greater.
Lincoln had opinions about battlefield tactics, but he rarely made suggestions to his field commanders for that level of operations. One exception, however, occurred in the second week of May 1862. Upset by McClellan’s month-long siege of Yorktown without any apparent result, Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase sailed down to Hampton Roads on May 5 to discover that the Confederates had evacuated Yorktown before McClellan could open with his siege artillery.
Norfolk remained in enemy hands, however, and the feared CSS Virginia (former Merrimack) was still docked there. On May 7 Lincoln took direct operational control of a drive to capture Norfolk and to push a gunboat fleet up the James River. The president ordered General John Wool, commander at Fort Monroe, to land troops on the south bank of Hampton Roads. Lincoln even personally carried out a reconnaissance to select the best landing place. On May 9 the Confederates evacuated Norfolk before the Northern soldiers could get there. Two days later the Virginia’s crew blew her up to prevent her capture. An officer on the USS Monitor wrote that “it is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did—he seems to have infused new life into everything.” Nothing was happening, he said, until Lincoln began “stirring up dry bones.” Chase rarely found opportunities to praise Lincoln, but on this occasion he wrote to his daughter: “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President; for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the ‘Merrimac’ as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. … The whole coast is now virtually ours.”41
Chase exaggerated, for the Confederates would have had to abandon Norfolk anyway to avoid being cut off when Johnston’s army retreated up the north side of the James River. But Chase’s words can perhaps be applied to Lincoln’s performance as commander in chief in the war as a whole. He enunciated a clear national policy, and through trial and error evolved national and military strategies to achieve it. The nation did not perish from the earth but experienced a new birth of freedom.