Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 155–162
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Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
James M. McPherson. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. $35.00. 384 pp.
Authors are delighted when word gets out that a world leader is reading one of their books – and if it’s a leader as popular as Barack Obama, well, that is about as good as it gets. So sales of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s rather good book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, got quite a fillip from the news that the new inhabitant of the White House was reading her study of how President Lincoln coped with a wildly divergent and strong-minded cabinet. Journalists began drawing parallels, which proved that they really did not know much about the Civil War. Current US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a sober, tough bureaucrat, but quintessentially a man of the system; Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, on the other hand, was a brilliant, volcanically irascible man who had been spectacularly rude to Lincoln in earlier days. Hillary Clinton is a thoroughly trounced presidential candidate who has submitted meekly to White House control; William Seward, US Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869, was a wily governor and dominant force in the Republican Party who thought he should be, in effect, Lincoln’s prime minister, and said so; and there are no parallels to Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury who never stopped scheming to undermine Lincoln, let alone the combative Blair family (including Postmaster General Montgomery Blair) or Gideon Welles, the grouchy Connecticut Yankee (and Democrat) who built the Union Navy out of a handful of outmoded sailing ships, or implacable titans of the Congress like Thaddeus Stevens. As for journalists, bloggers of any political stripe have little on newspaperman Horace Greeley as a thorn in the government’s flesh.
‘We had a steadfast rule’, recalled Joseph Alsop, a columnist who, with his brother Stewart, dominated the Washington scene through much of the 1950s and 1960s, ‘that when American politicians began bracketing themselves with Abraham Lincoln it was always well to send for a psychiatrist’.
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It would be lèse-majesté in today’s Washington to suggest anything of the kind about Barack Obama, but the sober truth is that in Lincoln’s league he is not. His abilities quite aside, he faces nothing like Lincoln’s problems. Even Franklin Roosevelt’s challenges pale by comparison with those of the melancholy man from Illinois, who willed a hideous conflict rather than let the Union be destroyed, and who, in the succeeding four years, led a divided nation in its bitterest – and by far most costly – war, a war that brought the United States close to dissolution on more than one occasion. He did this while managing a team of rivals, some of whom viewed him, initially, with contempt, and all the while suffering the bitter grief of losing a beloved son to disease and numerous friends to battle, and managing a marriage with a woman whose sanity was not entirely secure.
The Civil War is a topic unto itself in American history, to an extent that intrigues, amazes or appalls foreigners. We carefully preserve, tend and...
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Eliot A. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in War (Free Press, 2002). From 2007 to 2009 he served as Counselor of the Department of State.
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