Lincoln’s Generals

This book of essays edited by Professor Gabor Boritt seeks to analyze the relationships between Abraham Lincoln and five of his top generals. As Professor Boritt tells us, “This book takes a hard look at the interaction of five leading generals with their Civil War commander-in-chief. The choice of the five lieutenants no doubt colors its findings. Surely, future students will look at others, too, as well as the five here.” [p. xv]

The five essays are, “Lincoln and McClellan,” by Stephen Sears, “Wilderness and the Cult of Manliness: Hooker, Lincoln, and Defeat,” by Professor Mark Neely, “Unfinished Work: Lincoln, Meade, and Gettysburg,” by Professor Boritt, “Lincoln and Sherman,” by Professor Michael Fellman, and “Grant, Lincoln, and Unconditional Surrender” by Professor John Y. Simon.

The Sears essay contains no surprises. It’s the typical Stephen Sears view of McClellan as an always wrong moral coward who is always on the verge of committing treason against the United States for his own overblown ego and had to be pushed into action by Lincoln, who naturally would have been three times the general Little Mac was. To tell you the truth, Sears’s view of McClellan is pretty old about now. Read Ethan Rafuse’s book, McClellan’s War.

Professor Neely’s essay on Major General Joseph Hooker is much better. It gives us a good analysis of Hooker, of Lincoln, and includes a good analysis of the military situation. We read, for example, “The selection of Joseph Hooker was consistent with Lincoln’s customary method of exercising his powers as commander-in-chief (he took the duties seriously and fairly literally), and the general was as good a risk as any. Another way to appreciate the difficulty in choosing generals is to compare Lincoln’s performance with that of other contemporary heads of state. Even where military institutions were more structured than in the United States, the choices always proved problematic. British experience in the same era was so dismal that one military historian concluded that ‘whatever other aptitudes Victorians may have possessed, military proficiency was clearly lacking.’ Great Britain in the Crimean War, some five years before the American Civil War, produced command decisions that were and still are a byword and symbol of military folly: ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ conjures up the very image of military unreasonableness. The British were especially handicapped by the system of having officers purchase their commissions. The French fared better in the Crimea–and that is why the Americans in the Civil War wore kepi hats and formed Zouave regiments in imitation of them–but Napoleon III’s best command decision was not to go into the field himself. He was thinking about it, but advisers dissuaded him for fear there would be a revolution at home if he left the country for the faraway Crimea. The British did not want him to go either. Five years after the American Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III was more under the influence of the empress, his wife Eugénie, and she wanted him to take command in the field. He did, and the result was the squandering of what was widely regarded as the finest army on earth. As for the victors in that war, so famous for their military prowess, the Prussians, their officer corps might be described as narrowly restricted to a hidebound aristocracy. Even with a militaristic constitution, frequent wars for practice, the unique institution of a general staff to study and plan for war all the time, and Helmuth von Moltke as de facto commander-in-chief, selection of commanders could not be made from military considerations alone. Moltke sneered at the amateurism of the American conflict–it was not so much warfare as ‘the movement of armed mobs’–but five years later he chose as commanders of the three great German armies in the Franco-Prussian War men whose professionalism was not their only recommendation, the king’s son, the king’s nephew, and a seventy-four-year-old born in the eighteenth century, who, in the words of historian Michael Howard, ‘brought the whole German army within measurable distance of catastrophe.’ By standards of comparison with his international peers, Lincoln performed reasonably well.” [pp. 57-58]

We learn also, “Terrain is the most underestimated factor in the military history of the Civil War. Conversely, the importance of terrain is the clearest lesson of even the most modern wars. Given jungle or mountain terrain, a tiny underdeveloped third-world nation like Vietnam can old a superpower at bay for years. Eliminate that unfavorable terrain as a factor by turning it into level desert, and the superpower will bury the third-world nation in a matter of weeks, as the United States and its allies did Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991. Unhappily for Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy was not everywhere protected by mountain ranges, and what help the mountains offered him physically was usually undermined by a political problem, the disaffection of the subsistence farmers of the Confederate uplands, who were not fond of the Confederacy’s ruling elite of slaveowners from the lowlands. There were no jungles in the Confederacy either. But the Wilderness of northern Virginia came close. And when Union armies fought there, they lost.” [p. 61]

Terrain was Lincoln’s weakness as well. The maps on his tables and walls didn’t reveal the effects of terrain on armies. “Lincoln mentioned entrenchments but not terrain. His strategic ideas assumed that all other things were equal, but terrain is never equal. It varies in ways critical to combat from kilometer to kilometer.” [p. 65] Terrain was key to Hooker’s defeat. “Hooker lost his battle in the Wilderness for obvious and now famous reasons, the main one being that he fought it in a wilderness where the Confederates’ superior knowledge of the local area led Stonewall Jackson to a little-known road, hidden in the forest, that he could use to flank the right of the Union army. Operating where the people conveyed information to the Confederates but not to the Union, Jackson learned about the road through his chaplain Tucker Lacy, whose brother lived nearby. When Jackson objected that the route would take him too close to the Union pickets. Lacy assured him that a man named Charles Wellford, who lived at nearby Catherine Furnace, knew alternate routes. Jedediah Hotchkiss, Jackson’s mapmaker, went to see Wellford, and the rest is history. The Wilderness itself helped obscure Jackson’s movements from Union observation. Jackson’s army fell on the unsuspecting Yankees and put to flight Hooker’s right wing.” [p. 67]

Professor Boritt’s essay on Meade brings into play an order from Lincoln for which there is no documentary evidence. “Perhaps on July 10, the president sent an extraordinary confidential order that only a crafty civilian could have devised. The text no longer appears to survive, but Robert Todd Lincoln reconstructed the substance of the words as early as 1872 for General Rush C. Hawkins, of Hawkins’ Zouaves fame, by then American consul in Hamburg. Hawkins in turn committed all to paper on the spot:

‘To Major General Meade, Commanding the Army of the Potomac, You will follow up and attack General Lee as soon as possible before he can cross the river. If you fail, this dispatch will clear you from all responsibility and if you succeed you may destroy it.’ Surely the president would have understood the insulting nature of such an order and intended with it in part to goad his conservative commander into action, and in part to absolve him from blame should an attack on Lee fail. Lincoln spoke of the order to his son on July 14, 1863, the day the young man arrived in Washington to visit his injured mother. It was then that he saw his father with tears on his face.” [pp. 98-99]

Later in the essay, Professor Boritt writes, “In later years, having no independent proof, Robert Lincoln would not mention the order in public, much less permit its inclusion in a biography–however vivid and disturbing his own memory was. After all, in the post-war era, the issue was powerfully charged. Many people assumed that had Meade attacked Lee at Williamsport, the war would have come to an end more than a year and a half earlier than it actually did, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Untold numbers of bereaved mothers, widows, and orphans of the latter part of 1863, 1864, and 1865 were then still alive. General Meade’s son never heard of the order, and President Lincoln’s son did not wish to engage in public controversy. Nor did John G. Nicolay and John Hay, the President’s wartime secretaries and most eminent biographers in the nineteenth century. Nicolay could not find a copy of the order, and he may have been loath to believe that he had been excluded in 1863. Historians ever since have followed Nicolay and Hay’s lead.” [p. 100]

We find from Professor Fellman’s essay Major General William T. Sherman and Lincoln clashed over the issue of Black soldiers. “Of all the leading Union generals, Sherman was by far the most outspoken in his resistance to this revolution in racial policy, the most overtly racist in his opposition, and the most openly insubordinate to civilian dictates, from those issued by the president on down.” [pp. 140-141] Sherman, a virulent racist, was “perfectly willing to use blacks as laborers and in ‘pioneer brigades,’ to dig the trenches, build the forts, chop the wood and haul the water, all in aid to the real, white soldiers. The more actively the government pursued its recruitment of black troops, the more urgently and angrily Sherman resisted the policy.” [p. 142] This conflict, though, would eventually lead to Sherman putting out Special Field Orders 15, the famous “forty acres and a mule” order.

This book is dated, but several of the essays are very useful to students of the war. In fact, there’s something here I haven’t seen anywhere else. In the Introduction, Professor Boritt tells us, “In 1865 Harvard University would bestow an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on him [Meade] with the following citation: ‘Illium exercitus Americani Imperatorem, qui periculosissimo belli discrimine res patriae virtute et consilio restituit, Georgium Gordon Meade.’ ” [p. xiv] He provides us a translation of the Latin: “We honor him, the commander of the American army, who in the most perilous crisis of the war, restored the fortunes of his fatherland by his courage and counsel: George Gordon Meade.” [p. xiv]

Students of the war will find this book useful.