It's a little bit of a difficult task tonight. We're going to talk about Lincoln and his generals' leadership during the Great American Crisis. And we're talking to a group of people who already know a lot about Abraham Lincoln, his life and his career and his place in United States history, which means that giving a program like this is a little bit daunting. The odds against her presenting anything about Abraham Lincoln that is absolutely new that no one's ever heard about is zero. That is not going to happen. What we've decided to do tonight is to pursue another strategy. We're going to offer what we think is a useful way for ordinary Americans, perhaps not knowing a great deal about the Civil War era or any part of US history, which is to say almost all people who live in the United States, a way for them to think about Abraham Lincoln and his leadership, especially as that leadership is illuminated by his relationship with key military commanders. Our focus is going to be on Lincoln and four of his generals, his most important ones: Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, Joseph Hooker, and U.S. Grant. All but Hooker, as you know, served as general-in-chief of United States armies, which was the highest position you could hold in US military forces in the 19th century. And Hooker, the fourth, commanded the republic's preeminent field army for a critical period in 1863. And we take as our baseline that no other US president has faced a set of challenges comparable to those that Lincoln faced, including George Washington, who shepherded the young republic through its first fraught decade, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in the White House during both the Great Depression and World War II. Our presentation is in three parts. And there's the man right there looking at you from a photograph taken in 1863. The first part consists of framing observations that convey the scale and complexity of the task that confronted Lincoln and the structure of the government within which he functioned. The second focuses on Lincoln's style of leadership as commander-in-chief. And we'll finish with analysis of Lincoln's relationship with those four generals. And we'll use each one of those generals to illustrate key elements of his presidential leadership.
So we'll start with these framing observations, and the first of those is that the scale of the Civil War was unprecedented. Any evaluation of Abraham Lincoln's leadership must begin with an appreciation of the magnitude of the war that engulfed the nation about six weeks after he took the oath of office on March 4th, 1861. Of all military conflicts in US history, the Civil War directly touched by far the highest percentage of the population. A few statistics are instructive. More than 3 million citizens took up arms during the Civil War, which would translate to more than 35 million under arms today in the United States of 2025. Four years of fighting produced between 620,000 and 750,000 military deaths. Scholars disagree about those numbers. They disagree about everything. I think 750,000 is too high, but we know that 620,000 is the absolute lowest number. That's more than all other US wars combined, and the equivalent of between 6.5 and 8 million dead in the United States of 2025. We'll never know the number of civilians who died either directly or indirectly because of the war, but we do know that between 550,000 and 750,000 black and white Americans became refugees during the war. That number, again, that would be 8 million refugees now. And 4 million enslaved African Americans, about 12% of the entire population, were freed.
The war also extracted a staggering fiscal cost. The United States government's budget in 1860, the last year before the war, was $63 million. By 1865, it had mushroomed to 1.3 billion. And if you add the Confederate expenses in that same year, it surpasses $2 billion. That means that 1860's annual expenditures would have paid for about 11 days of the government's activities in 1865. In the long term, the cost of the war would mushroom, especially in the form of pensions for United States veterans that composed more than a quarter of the United States budget for every year between 1880 and 1910. As late as 2016, at least one Union soldier's widow was still receiving a Civil War pension from the United States government. Our second framing observation is that waging a war in a democratic republic posed special challenges to Lincoln. Lincoln had to balance demands from a welter of political constituencies to keep the war going. Most obviously, he had to maintain support for the war among both Republicans and Democrats, and the latter constituted about 45% of the electorate. During the first two years of the war, he often had to keep in mind the four slaveholding border states—Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri—that had not seceded. Border state interests and those of the Democratic Party in general seldom aligned well with the anti-slavery wing of the Republican Party, complicating Lincoln's handling of policy regarding emancipation and many other issues.
Lincoln's cabinet included both Republicans and Democrats, and a number of prominent political figures were commissioned generals and given charge of the armies to satisfy various interests. Among the latter group, John Charles Frémont and Nathaniel Prett... Banks stood among the most prominent. Frémont had been a US senator from our state of California in the 1850s and the Republican candidate for president in 1856. Banks from Massachusetts had been the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the mid-1850s. These two, together with other political generals, compiled a record of—wait for it—almost unbroken failure. We have no equivalent of them today. Imagine turning on your newscast some evening or your podcast and hearing a report that General Nancy Pelosi or General Ted Cruz had been deployed to lead the US forces in response to a crisis. Under the Constitution, the civilian government was supreme, with military leaders always subordinate to political leaders. Some generals understood this, and some did not. Friction in this regard led to difficult times between Lincoln and some of his generals. As we shall see, Lincoln understood that maintaining civilian morale in the United States would be the most important factor in forging a winning war effort. If events on the battlefield or political controversies on the home front—and the two were often linked—convinced enough citizens of the United States that the war was not worth the human and material cost, the Confederacy would win despite having fewer soldiers and resources. The United States experience in Vietnam offers us a clear lesson about how wars end, excuse me, in democratic republics, regardless of the military reality on the ground when voters decide to withhold their support.
Our third framing observation is that technology forced Lincoln to adapt to conditions previously unknown in managing a war. He oversaw a conflict in which telegraphic communications and railroads shrank time and space dramatically. And neither of these technological innovations was new. There's not a single technological innovation that's actually new in the Civil War. There's no new technology that made any big difference. But the degree to which these played central roles in the conflict far surpassed what had come earlier in the Crimean War. Lincoln quickly grasped the centrality of railroads in both operational and logistical dimensions of the conflict. A number of campaigns, as you all know, were designed to disrupt Confederate communications and the transfer of supplies from one part of the Confederacy to another. Key rail centers that became targets included Nashville and Chattanooga in Tennessee, Corinth in Mississippi—two major roads crossed in Corinth—Atlanta, Georgia, and Petersburg, Virginia. The boundary of the state of West Virginia, which joined the Union in 1863, was drawn to make certain that the vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad did not dip below—excuse me—did not dip into Virginia below the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. If the people in a couple of key counties had been allowed to vote, they certainly would have voted against going into the new state of West Virginia. But because the B&O Railroad did, that part of Virginia became part of the new state of West Virginia.
The telegraph loomed even larger as a consequential factor for Lincoln. This technological phenomenon was immensely important. It's the equivalent now to the many ways in which our methods of communication have been advanced over the past few decades. The telegraph provided almost instant communication with generals in the field and allowed Lincoln to intervene more directly in what was going on in military fronts than had been the case with any previous president. He often spent time in a telegraph office built near the White House, literally looking over the shoulders of young soldiers who translated from Morse code the texts of incoming dispatches. Lincoln called those dispatches lightning messages. He sometimes slept on a cot in the telegraph office when great battles were in progress. You all know that scene in Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln that has Lincoln in the telegraph office. He argues with Stanton in this scene, but he's talking back and forth with the young telegraphers who work there. That scene is actually quite accurate in terms of how they can actually behave. During his first year as president, he sent an average of one telegram per month to his generals. By the middle of 1862, he often sent flurries of messages in a single day. The telegraph office also served as a place of refuge for him, where the stream of visitors seeking favors could not intrude. "I came here to escape my persecutors," he said once to the young soldiers of the US Military Telegraph Corps in the office. And one telegrapher observed, "He would there relax from the strain and care ever present in the White House, and while waiting for fresh dispatches, or while they were being deciphered, he would make running comments or tell his inimitable stories."
Our fourth and final framing observation is how the size and power of the presidency shaped what Lincoln could and could not do as commander-in-chief. The United States bureaucracy was tiny. Imagine that. And the presidency in no way resembled today's imperial edifice. The civilian—federal civilian workforce numbered just 5,381 in 1861 in a population of roughly 31,500,000. By way of comparison, today's United States, with a population 11 times as large, employs 2.1 million civilian federal workers, roughly 390 times the number in 1861. The only regular contact most Americans of Lincoln's day had with the federal government was when they sent or received mail. Not a single agency provided the type of services Americans now take for granted. Abraham Lincoln's personal staff, one that oversaw the day-to-day operations in the White House, consisted of just three principal secretaries, all men. And in case you're wondering, that would be John Hay, John Nicolay, and William Stoddard. Lincoln had no press office, no political chief of staff, no cluster of talented speechwriters to craft his statements. There was no Secret Service to protect the president, office seekers, or others who sought an audience with Lincoln. He simply just show up at the White House and wait in line for the chance to see him, which perhaps accounts for his frequent presence in the telegraph office, a place of refuge.
Great wars prove voracious in terms of money and manpower. And in these vital areas, Congress, not Abraham Lincoln, held the power and took the lead. To help bear the cost of the war, Congress enacted the first graduated income tax, printed a half-billion-dollar worth of paper money that, for the first time in US history, served as legal tender, and created a national banking system. To fill the armies, Congress passed the first national conscription act in US history, implemented in the spring of 1863 and profoundly controversial. Lincoln supported all these measures and more as necessary expansions of federal authority to sustain a massive military effort. Lincoln pushed the limits of his own authority on many occasions and did not shrink from taking unpopular actions. For example, he suspended the constitutionally protected right of habeas corpus to deal with the pro-Confederate activity in parts of Maryland in 1861. He also agreed that some Democratic newspapers should be shut down for voicing opinions that could weaken the war effort. Many Democrats attacked him as a tyrant who trampled on basic constitutional rights, and he routinely received savage criticism from a variety of directions. One newspaper editor compared him to the Roman Emperor Nero, or Numa, and seemed to call for his assassination. This man praised the, quote, Roman patriot who exclaimed, "Why was not this monster killed when he took the first step of that despotism which had been allowed to go on until he has shed the blood of the best sons of Rome?" End of quote.
In terms of constitutionally mandated executive power, Lincoln issued proclamations. His position as commander-in-chief during wartime expanded this aspect of his authority. For example, neither he nor Congress had any constitutional power to end slavery in a state or locality loyal to the Union. He based the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863 on, quote, "The power vested in me, the power in me, vested as commander-in-chief of the Navy and Army of the United States in times of actual armed rebellion as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion." End of quote. Apart from proclamation, Lincoln had substantial constitutional authority in two key areas. Number one, he shaped a national strategic policy that demanded re-establishment of the Union and later emancipation as non-negotiable elements to any resolution of the war. This is where the slogan "Union and Freedom" originated. And two, he made two types of vital personnel decisions: selecting and removing cabinet officers and deciding which generals would serve at the highest level of command. His decisions in naming generals and the way in which he worked with them proved to be decisive in winning a war that, as late as the summer of 1864, seemed destined to end in Confederate independence. Lincoln's selection of Ulysses S. Grant to be general-in-chief in March of 1864 and the two men's resulting relationship eventually provided the foundation for victory.
All right, let's move now to our second part of our presentation, and that is a look at Lincoln's style as commander-in-chief. He brought very little education, military experience, national political service, or administrative background to his new job. In fact, he provides a cautionary example for anyone who fetishizes credentials. Anyone looking at the resumes of Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in 1861 would have concluded without question that Jefferson Davis had far more potential to be a successful commander-in-chief. Davis had attended Transylvania University before he went on to graduate from the United States Military Academy. He successfully led a regiment of Mississippi volunteer infantry during the war with Mexico. He commanded more men in combat before the Civil War than anyone who commanded an army on either side during the war except Winfield Scott. He was twice elected a senator from Mississippi and was an innovative secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. He's the one who brought camels to the Southwest as animals that might do better than mules or horses. What a thought. He also chaired the Senate's military affairs committee. He checked just about every box you could check. Lincoln, in contrast, had a meager six months of formal education, had logged a few weeks of militia duty as a company-grade officer during the Black Hawk War of the 1830s, and served a single term as a member of the US House of Representatives from Illinois in the 1840s. He could boast of no administrative experience beyond running a small legal office in Springfield, Illinois.
As a leader, Lincoln proved willing to put aside his ego. He had an ego. He had a substantial ego, but he often put it aside. He could overlook slights. He could tolerate prima donnas if they delivered results. He maintained an unwavering focus on the overriding national goal of crushing the Confederate rebellion and restoring the Union, however unpopular individual decisions to achieve that goal might be among various parts of the national voting populace. Members of his own party tried to dump him from the ticket in 1864. And as we shall see, some of his top generals openly opposed him. Let me look briefly at some of the important elements of his style of leadership. And I'll start with the fact that he surrounded himself with able advisers. Somebody is walking out of here with Doris Kearns Goodwin's book tonight. I forget who it is. There we go. And someone else has copies to give away. Someone over here. Lot of Doris's books floating around. He surrounded himself with able people. And he chose for his initial cabinet three individuals who had national reputations and who in fact had vied for the party's nomination in 1860. William Henry Seward, and he's the buckaroo on the right up here, was the most famous Republican politician in the country. He became Secretary of State. Salmon P. Chase on the left up there, your left, headed the Department of the Treasury. And the third one who doesn't get as much attention as the others and didn't merit a picture here tonight was Edward Bates from Missouri who accepted appointment as attorney general. Seward and Chase early on definitely believed that they would have been better people to occupy the White House than Abraham Lincoln. Seward came to admire Lincoln a great deal. Chase, not so much. And he maneuvered to win the Republican nomination in 1864. Yet Lincoln utilized Chase's undeniable talents as the head of Treasury to help move the Union war effort along, and then after being reelected president in November, very deftly solved any problems that might go forward by making Chase Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after Roger Brooke Taney died. Lincoln more than held his own among these powerful figures. Doris Kearns's team of rivals, as we've heard already tonight. He benefited from their counsel and talents, but he went his own way when he thought it necessary. An anecdote about his style of leadership, it's apocryphal, but nonetheless revelatory, recounted a cabinet vote that went seven to one against the president, at the end of which Lincoln announced, "Seven nays, one aye. The ayes have it."
The second element is that Lincoln exhibited tremendous capacity for growth, a willingness to learn from those better versed on some topic. Early in the war, for example, like most Americans, he believed one big battle would settle the issue. He urged his generals to force a showdown in Northern Virginia, rejecting the argument that volunteer soldiers were green and needed more training. At a cabinet meeting on June 29th, 1861, he commented to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott about the two forces facing each other in Washington, quote, "You are green, it is true, but they are green also. You are green alike." The more numerous green soldiers on the US side, Lincoln reasoned, would defeat their less numerous rebel opponents. After a humiliating defeat at First Bull Run the following month, Lincoln acknowledged that he had been wrong and General Scott correct. Only training and experience, both of which took time, would convert the volunteers into soldiers. The war would take much longer and require far more men and material than Lincoln initially imagined.
Lincoln also manifested a willingness to give great latitude to generals who might deliver results, even if they exhibited problematical traits or proved personally antagonistic to him. Here he kept his eye on the final overreaching goal: victory and a restored Union. Complaining, snubs, and posturing, all of which he endured in full measure in dealing with his generals, never persuaded Lincoln to think first about himself or engage in efforts to get back at the offenders. Jefferson Davis, in contrast, pursued long-running feuds with some of his generals, most notably the prickly Joseph E. Johnston. As he matured as commander-in-chief, Lincoln settled on four requirements for military victory. First, efficient logistics would undergird successful military campaigning. He devoted considerable attention to the unglamorous tasks necessary to clothe, to feed, to arm large numbers of soldiers. Second, control of the Mississippi River as well as other major waterways would support Union initiatives and undercut the rebel war effort. Winfield Scott's influence is very apparent here. Third, US commanders should target Confederate armies rather than cities. If the major rebel armies were defeated, the places they defended would thus fall into Union hands. Finally, and perhaps most important, the United States must apply its far greater industrial power and its two-and-a-half-to-one edge in manpower in the most sustained, relentless manner to win the war before the civilian morale collapsed. It should do so, he believed, even at the risk of high casualties that might prove problematical in the short term, but would shorten the war and save lives in the end.
All right, we'll move to the third part of our presentation now, and that is Lincoln and his relationship with the four generals that we've mentioned. His relationship with these generals centered on his search for a leader who would utilize the nation's, as John said, superior manpower and resources effectively. His greatest disappointments from beginning to end arose when commanders failed to do so. Everybody knew the United States had more men. Everybody knew the United States had far more in a material sense than the Confederacy, which made it especially vexing when Confederates would achieve successes. We're going to look in chronological turn at the four officers we mentioned, each of whom Lincoln trusted to achieve the nation's military goals. And we're going to look at how his relationships with each of them illuminates an element of his leadership. The crucial problem in finding capable commanders, capable candidates to lead armies, arose from the fact that pre-war experience for United States soldiers had not in any way prepared them for the size of the conflict they would find themselves engaged in. The US Army in 1861, as you all know, had numbered about 15,000 men scattered all over the landscape in small garrisons and along the coast for the most part. Lincoln knew this. He knew there wasn't a deep bench, so to speak, of possible army commanders. There wasn't a room somewhere that had a sign on the door that said, "Able army commanders inside. Please knock." There's nothing like that.
His dealings with Winfield Scott, the Army's senior officer, showcased his efforts to educate himself about military affairs. Scott was nearly 75 years old at the start of the war. A splendid age, I've decided. He'll be 75 in two weeks. Scott first gained combat experience in the War of 1812. During the war with Mexico in the mid-1840s, his strategic and operational planning and execution proved daring and innovative. Such was Scott's skill in Mexico that the Duke of Wellington, who possessed one of the most towering egos of any military figure of the 19th century, pronounced Scott, quote, "The greatest soldier of the age." Although little known to modern Americans, I believe Scott ranks among the five best generals in United States history. After his initial failure to follow Scott's advice, Lincoln wisely sought to learn as much as possible from his venerable general-in-chief. Scott drew on vast experience and a first-rate intellect to propose a strategy that the press called the Anaconda Plan. And here is how one of the newspapers at the time presented this plan. There's the Anaconda snake surrounding the Confederacy. It was called the Anaconda Plan because people said it sought to squeeze the life out of the Confederacy. You all know this. Scott envisioned a naval blockade to deny war-related imports to the Confederacy. He also envisioned a combined army-navy strike down the Mississippi River to split the rebel republic into two pieces. And should the Confederacy continue to resist after those two things were in place, Scott said the United States might be required, in his words, quote, "to conquer the seceding states by invading armies." These proposed operations, cautioned the aged general, would take several months to organize, might stretch across two or three years, and might involve as many as 300,000 men. He's saying these things at a time when most people envisioned a one-battle war with relatively few soldiers over quickly and so forth. Scott, when he devised this, brought his experience in Mexico to bear. This is what the United States had done against the Republic of Mexico. They had blockaded the Gulf Coast of Mexico to keep it from bringing things in, had sheared off the northern provinces of Mexico in the early stage of the war, and then in the end had projected power into the hinterlands and then the heartland in Scott's famous campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City.
Scott was well aware of the political and popular pressures on Lincoln to strike an immediate blow to end the rebellion, but he eventually proved successful in convincing the president that precipitate action held scant promise. Lincoln accepted that it took time to train raw troops and collect supplies. "Somebody isn't a soldier just because he has a uniform on," said Scott. "A soldier is somebody who's had training, that actually might have learned something, not just how he is dressed." Lincoln accepted this. Military realities sunk in with Lincoln that eluded many newspaper editors and a quite high percentage of the members of Congress. Although he retired on November 1st, 1861, Scott had sketched a strategic blueprint that Lincoln embraced and which proved prescient in terms of what actually took place during the war. Winfield Scott in March and April 1861 essentially sketched out how the war would be waged over the next four years.
And we turn now to George Brinton McClellan, who is not there, and there he is. Look at George B. McClellan there striking a Napoleonic pose with his right hand. And you can tell what he's thinking. It's his first thought every morning when he woke up: "What about me? Do people realize how wonderful I am?" he's thinking. "If they don't, I'll do my best to convince them." He provides an example of how much aggravation Lincoln would tolerate from a subordinate he believed might achieve military success. A subordinate who did not respect the civilian superiors who ran the war in our system of government and who often pursued his own plans to prosecute the war even when they deviated from those of Abraham Lincoln and other civilian superiors. For example, McClellan never accepted the transition to a harder kind of war in the late summer of 1862, a war that targeted the institution of slavery as a way to defeat the Confederates. He always hoped to restore the Union as it had been before the war, restore the Union on the antebellum model. He was only 34 years old in 1861. 34 years old. He's in charge of all the armies of the United States. I can promise you right now that will never happen again. I used to think about this when my own son was 34. I loved my son dearly. I thought, "Will in charge of all the armies of the United States? I don't think so." He graduated second in his class of 1846 at West Point and served as a member of Scott's staff in Mexico. If you were on Scott's staff in Mexico, that is a very good thing to have on your resume. He resigned his commission in the mid-1850s to pursue a lucrative career as a railroad executive. He also succeeded at that. During the Civil War, he demonstrated superb organizational but deeply flawed operational leadership. Undoubtedly charismatic, he forged an unmatched bond with his soldiers. No other commander on the US side built the kind of bond that McClellan had with the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. In the wake of Union disaster at First Bull Run, McClellan converted a dispirited rabble of 35,000 into a competent and well-trained force of more than 100,000, by far the largest army to that point in United States history. He also instilled in the subordinate officer corps a culture of caution that lingered long past his own departure from command. Every organization has a culture.
Everyone in this room knows that culture is often put in place by people at the top. McClellan absolutely did that with the Army of the Potomac. Within that culture, he counseled avoidance of risk. He obsessed about logistics and sought never to undertake a movement until everything was perfect. Everybody, again, in this room knows everything is never perfect in life. If you're waiting till everything is perfect, you'll never do anything.
He avoided delivering a true knockout blow to the enemy, aiming instead to defeat the rebels just enough to persuade them to come back into the Union. And he always manifested an awareness of possible political repercussions from his military activities. He opposed many of Lincoln's policies, as I've already said. In the end, McClellan created a powerful military instrument, but proved hesitant to risk it in battle. In mid-nineteenth-century parlance, he lacked the moral courage to take chances in pursuit of decisive results. Lincoln entrusted McClellan with two jobs from the autumn of 1861 through the spring of 1862: general-in-chief of the United States armies and field commander of the Army of the Potomac.
He warned McClellan that the dual positions of general-in-chief and commander of the army might be taxing. And McClellan replied, and I will quote him directly, "I can do it all."
Lincoln wanted two things from McClellan. First, keep his civilian superiors informed about strategic and operational plans, and second, carry out an aggressive campaign against rebel forces in Virginia. Well, McClellan refused to keep Lincoln informed about what he was planning to do, and he let many months elapse without moving anywhere in the eastern theater, all the while demanding more men and material and grotesquely inflating Confederate numbers to justify his inaction.
Everybody, the 1860 census had already been published at the time this was going on. Everybody knew that there were four times as many white men of military age in the United States as there were white men of military age in the Confederacy. And the notion that the Confederacy could put larger armies in the field was simply not a reasonable thing to argue. That is what McClellan was doing. "I am doing everything I can to increase our force," he wrote to his wife in the early autumn of 1861. "But the old General Scott always comes in the way."
Scott finally had his belly full of McClellan's behavior and he said simply, you know, "I'm 75. I've had enough. I'm going to West Point and I'm going to write my memoirs." He left in November of '61. As for Lincoln, McClellan described the president, quote, as nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.
McClellan's contempt for Lincoln reached a low point on November 13th, 1861, when the president and secretary of state paid a visit to the general's home. They went to him. They didn't ask him to come to them. McClellan wasn't home when they got there and they were ushered into a little parlor. McClellan later came home, went upstairs without speaking to Lincoln and after about 20 minutes told his butler that he could tell the president, the commander-in-chief, that he would be happy to see him some other time, but was retiring for the evening.
Lincoln didn't pitch a fit. He and Seward left. He never went to McClellan's house again. Needless to say, McClellan often paraded his anti-administration politics and encouraged subordinate officers to do as well. He wrote an influential Democratic friend about his opposition to making emancipation a possible war aim. "Help me to dodge the negro," he wrote. He didn't say negro. "I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union." Failing to capture Richmond during the Seven Days campaign in June and July 1862, he nonetheless gave what came to be called the Harrison's Landing letter to Abraham Lincoln, which lectured the president about what policies he should follow regarding emancipation.
In the end, Lincoln never could get McClellan to act aggressively. In March 1862, he removed his balky subordinate as general-in-chief, but left him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. When McClellan unnecessarily retreated from Richmond in July 1862 and then just two months later allowed Robert E. Lee to escape unharmed after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln lost patience. A note to Lincoln dated October 25th, 1862 conveyed his utter frustration with the general's lethargic actions. Lee's army had recrossed the Potomac in one night after the Battle of Antietam, but McClellan remained immobile near the battlefield for more than five weeks after fighting ended. He claimed he couldn't pursue Lee at one point because the Union Army's horses, quote, "are broken down from fatigue and want the flesh."
"Will you pardon me for asking," responded Lincoln with a mixture of sarcasm and anger. Many of you already know this quotation, but here's the punch line: "What have the horses of your army done since the Battle of Antietam? It fatigues nothing."
If McClellan had won victories, and Presley, that boy right there, Lincoln probably would have put up with his insubordination, his open political opposition and his personal snobbery. But the president would not do so with a man who did not win. The day after the autumn elections in 1862, he sacked McClellan. He timed that action to avoid Democratic backlash. At bottom, Lincoln is always attuned to politics. Of course, McClellan never led an army in the field again, but in 1864, he ran as the Democratic candidate for president against Abraham Lincoln.
A blessedly brief consideration of Joseph Hooker will further illustrate Lincoln's patience and frustration with problematical officers. I love his hair. Hooker took charge of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863. Nicknamed Fighting Joe, his appointment seemed to bode well for future aggressive operations.
Lincoln initially looked the other way about troubling behaviors. Hooker talked publicly about how the nation needed a dictator to win the war, implying that he would be a good one. The president reacted in a remarkably perceptive and blunt letter on January 6th, 1863. Quote, "I believe you to be a brave and skillful soldier," began Lincoln. "You have confidence in yourself, which is valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which within reasonable bounds does good rather than harm. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."
Hooker also bragged about what he was going to do to Lee, observing that he hoped God would have mercy on Lee because he, Joe Hooker, would not. Lincoln correctly feared that such boasting before the general had accomplished anything revealed insecurity. He used one of his barnyard examples to make the point. Quote, "The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation because she never cackles until the egg is laid." What will we do without these Lincolns?
Just before the Battle of Chancellorsville, which took place between May 1st and 4th in 1863, Lincoln pressed Hooker to utilize his superior manpower, 130,000 to Lee's 64,000. Hooker knew the numbers because he possessed excellent intelligence about the strength of Lee's army. But a failure of will and nerve at Chancellorsville brought humiliating Union defeat. Lincoln spent several critical days at the telegraph office carefully following the action. A witness recounted how the president, upon realizing that Hooker had retreated, turned ashen and exclaimed, "My God, my God, what will the country say?"
In June, when Lee marched north toward Pennsylvania, Hooker proposed to take the Army of the Potomac southward to capture Richmond instead of confronting the rebel army. Lincoln had had enough and fired Hooker. He simply could not bear a general who seemed unable or unwilling to deliver a knockout blow against the Army of Northern Virginia.
We'll close with Ulysses Grant, who apart from Lincoln did more than anyone else to defeat the Confederacy. He and Lincoln provide an example of how our constitutional system ideally functions during a military crisis: uniting a determined president with a talented soldier who understands and accepts civilian oversight to work toward a common national goal. 39 years old when the war erupted, Grant had logged both staff and line duty during the 1840s. He left the army in the 1850s desperate to rejoin his family after difficult postings to the West Coast. We can all agree with that. Financial failure dogged him and his family for much of the 1850s, a period of adversity that toughened him.
He came to prominence in the western theater of the war, the vast expanse defined by the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the Mississippi River on the west. Victories in 1862 and 1863 at Forts Henry and Donelson, at Shiloh, at Vicksburg and Chattanooga brought Grant appointment as general-in-chief in March of 1864. He received promotion to the rank of lieutenant general, what we would today call a three-star general. This was extremely significant because only George Washington had held that rank. Congress reinstated it just for Grant.
Grant's subsequent behavior validated the most important personnel decision of Lincoln's presidency. In contrast to McClellan, Grant dutifully carried out all administration policies and came to agree with most of them. Always aggressive, he rewarded subordinates who pushed their men to achieve decisive results. During his year with the Army of the Potomac in 1864-65 as general-in-chief, he accompanied but did not officially command the army. While with the Army of the Potomac, he labored incessantly to root out the culture of caution McClellan had created.
In perhaps the most startling departure from McClellan, Grant made do with available resources rather than constantly asking for more. Grant's tribute to Zachary Taylor as a general might well be applied to himself. Quote, "General Taylor was not an officer to trouble the administration much with his demands, but was inclined to do the best he could with the means given him. No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage." End of quote. Now, Grant possessed those rare qualities in abundance.
He was willing to take responsibility for all of his actions and almost singular in his habit of making do with what the government gave him. He mirrored Lincoln's determination, his ability to focus on a goal, and perhaps most important, his refusal to be derailed by initial failure. Never making excuses for his setbacks or laying blame on subordinates or civilian superiors, he simply went back to the drawing board. Examples of this attribute can be found in his Vicksburg campaign, the Overland campaign against Lee in 1864, and elsewhere.
No one saw the large strategic picture more clearly than Grant as general-in-chief. In the spring of 1864, he planned a series of offensives that would strike at both the Confederacy's army and its capacity to produce and distribute materials needed to sustain the war. An old quartermaster, he knew the importance of logistics and targeted the economic, the agricultural, the transportation underpinnings of the Confederacy through what scholars have labeled a strategy of exhaustion.
Destroy the enemy's ability to clothe, to feed, and to arm its soldiers, he reasoned, and you don't need to kill these soldiers in large and bloody battles. But he also understood the political pressures on Lincoln and adapted when necessary. For example, at the time of his elevation to general-in-chief, he knew that the northern public thirsted for a direct confrontation between him, the Union's best soldier, and Robert E. Lee. He knew as well that Lincoln had wanted someone in charge of Virginia who could smash the rebels. He thus incorporated a direct challenge to Lee and his army into his broader strategy of exhaustion.
During the resulting Overland campaign of May to June 1864, he applied ceaseless pressure that brought combat on a scale unknown even in this bloody war. Constant attrition yielded in six weeks more than 65,000 US casualties in an army that began the campaign with 120,000 men. Try to imagine how Americans of today would respond to news that our military forces have lost close to three-quarters of a million casualties since the second week of October.
Later in the war, Grant embraced Lincoln's vision for an easy peace when he offered generous terms to the rebels who surrendered at Appomattox. Grant likely agreed with Lincoln's views in this respect, but the point to remember is that he did what his civilian superior wanted him to do. In short, this was a model civilian-military partnership between Lincoln and Grant. Lincoln gave Grant wide latitude and Grant calmed Lincoln down on occasion. Just before Vicksburg fell to US forces in July 1863, Lincoln stated, quote, "Grant is my man and I am his for the rest of the war." That was the case.
And the leadership of these two men, more than any other factor, enabled the United States to emerge triumphant from the crucible of a mammoth war. The next time any of you find yourselves in Washington, D.C. on the Mall, take a moment at each end of that long green swath. In front of the Capitol sits the imposing equestrian statue of Grant, dedicated in 1922 and bearing a single word: Grant. At the other end of the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial, also dedicated in 1922, faces eastward toward the Capitol from near the Potomac River. It's entirely appropriate that Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant face each other from opposite ends of the Mall in the capital of the nation. Their leadership did so much to save.
Questions, comments, arguments?
