02 February 2009
Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief
Lincoln takes command of Union forces
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).
By: Peter Cozzens
Peter Cozzens is a foreign service officer and a leading military historian. He is the award-winning author of 16 books on the U.S. Civil War and the Indian Wars of the American West.
One day toward the end of the Civil War, a high-ranking military visitor to the White House told President Lincoln that two of his fellow generals had been captured while visiting lady friends outside their camps.
Along with them, several hundred horses and mules had been swept up.
Lincoln replied: “I don’t care so much for brigadiers; I can make them. But horses and mules cost money.”
That jest had a bitter undertone, borne of Lincoln’s long frustration with mediocre generals and the burden of having had to run the war effort almost single-handedly for three years.
The American Civil War was the first modern total war — a conflict waged not only between armies, as had long been the tradition in Western warfare, but also between societies, their economic resources, and their very ways of life.
Abraham Lincoln had entered the presidency with no military training or experience except as a militia captain in a minor Indian war three decades earlier. The standing army Lincoln inherited in March 1861 numbered just 16,000 men who were dispersed in small garrisons from the Atlantic Coast to California. Lincoln had no modern military command system on which to rely for advice or to communicate his instructions effectively to field commanders. Not only was there no general staff when war broke out a month later, but only two regular army generals had ever commanded units larger than a brigade — one was so corpulent that he could not walk across a room without exhausting himself; the other so senile that he needed help putting on his hat. Subordinate officers knew little of the higher art of war because the United States Military Academy taught engineering, mathematics, and horsemanship at the expense of strategy.
The Union army’s swift wartime expansion did not solve this leadership crisis. In less than a year, the northern army swelled to 600,000 men, and by the war’s end it had climbed to a million. Regular army captains became generals overnight. In order to unify the North and rally its large European immigrant population, Lincoln was compelled to appoint volunteer generals from civilian life. Most “earned” their stars because of their political influence or their standing among their ethnic community (Germans and Irish in particular), rather than for any military potential they might possess.
The crisis extended to the nation’s political leadership. Lincoln lacked the support of a united cabinet. While later presidents possessed the luxury of appointing talented but usually pliant subordinates, then-existing custom and political reality required that Lincoln fill his cabinet with willful politicians of national prominence. Among them were Secretary of State William H. Seward, whom Lincoln had defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in a stunning upset; Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, a founder of the Republican Party who fancied himself a future president; and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Democrat who had bested Lincoln in a major court case when both were lawyers. In the early months of the conflict, these men all considered themselves intellectually superior to Lincoln, equally if not more capable of steering the ship of state through the treacherous waters of civil war.
A Challenge From the Incompetents
Despite these liabilities, by the power of his mind and force of character Lincoln became a brilliant strategist, with a better grasp on the nature and objectives of civil war than any of the long line of generals who commanded Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant not excepted. From the start, Lincoln recognized the value of the North’s overwhelming naval power, and he employed it relentlessly to choke the Confederacy, closing southern ports to prevent the export of its only commodity of international value — cotton — and to prevent the import of badly needed arms and other war supplies from Europe. He also understood the importance of seizing the Mississippi River to cut the South in half, as well as the need to maintain pressure on the whole strategic line of the Confederacy, something his generals proved singularly incapable of doing until General Grant assumed the role of general-in-chief in February 1864. To Lincoln’s constant frustration, his generals consistently failed fully to press the North’s large advantages in manpower and industrial capacity.
Lincoln knew there could be no half measures, that the issues of national union and emancipation could be settled only in such a way that they could never be reopened. This required both the total destruction of the Confederate army and of the capacity of the South to wage war.
As the war dragged on, Lincoln rid the army of scores of incompetent political generals at great risk to his reelection. He asked only for commanders who would fight, and he willingly discarded his strategic judgments when he thought he had found an able general. But all too often he instead encountered inaction, delay, and excuses. He relieved the most popular commander of the first year and a half of the war — Major General George B. McClellan, a man fiercely idolized by his men — because he suffered from what Lincoln termed “the slows.” He showed similar, and proper, impatience with generals who were too timid to follow up battlefield victories decisively. Unfortunately for the North, every army commander in the war’s first three years displayed this shortcoming.
Lincoln also faced an internal challenge to his commander-in-chief authority. Today, of course, the principle of absolute civilian control over the military is universally accepted. It had not been when Lincoln took office. Since the nation’s founding it had been acceptable for army commanders to pass judgment on political questions — a brand of insubordination that was comparatively harmless during the war with Mexico, but that could threaten the fabric of the nation in a struggle for national survival as did the Civil War.
When Lincoln relieved McClellan of command, a number of McClellan’s subordinate generals in the Army of the Potomac discussed abandoning the battle against the Confederacy and instead marching on Washington to unseat the president. As late as April 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker, the commander of that critical army, advocated replacing the presidency with a military dictatorship. Lincoln responded in a measured but firm manner. After he was removed from command for losing the battle of Chancellorsville against an enemy whom he had outnumbered more than two to one, Hooker recognized how restrained had been the president’s reaction to Hooker’s political blustering and how prudent had been Lincoln’s counsel in military matters. Tearfully he told fellow generals that Lincoln had treated him as a caring father would an errant son.
A Shift in Sentiment
By the time of the 1864 presidential campaign, the common soldiers also had come to recognize the greatness of Lincoln’s strategic leadership. Their votes went overwhelmingly to Lincoln, ensuring his victory over George B. McClellan. After being sacked by Lincoln, the former general had emerged as the president’s Democratic opponent and, as a proponent of sectional reconciliation, the most prominent challenger to his political vision.
The significance of this shift in military sentiment from McClellan to Lincoln cannot be overstated. Lincoln had at last found his fighting general, Ulysses S. Grant, a rough-hewn commander who shared his chief’s determination to press the North’s real advantages in manpower and resources. The Army of the Potomac had suffered nearly 55,000 casualties during the first month and a half of Grant’s tenure as general-in-chief. Decisive victories in the Shenandoah Valley and the capture of Atlanta, Georgia, fruits of Lincoln’s vision of relentless pressure on the entire military front, offered hope for ultimate victory.
But the South showed no signs of surrendering. Grant’s superior generalship and Lincoln’s policy of simultaneous offensives were being sorely tested in a bitter and stalemated siege of General Robert E. Lee’s army at Petersburg, Virginia. In the Western Theater (as the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River was called), a weakened but still formidable Confederate army roamed, and west of the Mississippi, a large and virtually untested enemy force held Louisiana and Texas. Lincoln’s 1864 electoral triumph thus represented a national consensus to wage the war to its finish.
Politically secure as a second-term president, Lincoln persisted with the same firmness of purpose he had shown during an unpopular first term. His appointment of the dependable Grant as general-in-chief had eased much of the daily pressure on Lincoln, who found he could safely yield to Grant the day-to-day management of the war. But even Grant faced hard questions from Lincoln when the president doubted the wisdom of his decisions.
Road to Reunion
In the first week of April 1865, final victory was at last in sight. After smashing much of what remained of Lee’s once seemingly unbeatable Army of Northern Virginia, Major General Philip H. Sheridan telegraphed Grant: “If the thing be pressed I think Lee will surrender.”
Grant passed Sheridan’s dispatch to Lincoln. The president told Grant: “Let the thing be pressed.” It was Lincoln’s last important order, and like most of his orders a good one. Three days after writing it, Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. The United States had lost its greatest war president and a great natural strategist. But more than any other factor, his strategic vision and firmness of purpose had won the Civil War and started the nation on the road to reunion.
