Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

So, Lincoln’s credit for building a cabinet of rivals and then brilliantly managing it is put into doubt by the statement of some of his closest associates and by the relatively narrow range of views he ultimately chose to accommodate. He was a good enough politician to know it was best to be surrounded by friends, although not good enough to figure out how to keep his own party united while avoiding the pressure to include dissidents. Furthermore, his and the nation’s Civil War experience hardly provides a strong basis for concluding that Lincoln was a brilliant politician or a stellar commander in chief. Did he in fact successfully and effectively manage disparate views in his cabinet, Congress, and the country? We think not, and offer evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the view of Lincoln as a consummate politician seems like a very generous interpretation, perhaps driven in part by the knowledge today that the war was won, he was reelected (which no president had managed since Andrew Jackson), and he was murdered. A less generous, but no less compelling, view is that he was an indecisive leader and a terrible commander in chief. Consider the facts:

Even the most prominent politicians in the Confederacy—such men as Confederate president Jefferson Davis and (late in the war) Confederate secretary of war (and previously James Buchanan’s vice president) John Breckinridge—believed the South could not win the war.24 Lincoln, however, could not figure out how to win it quickly, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. The Confederate leaders were men of experience. Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, and had served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Breckinridge had worked with Senator Douglas to advance the Kansas-Nebraska Act and had a long résumé of political successes. They understood that the North was wealthier, had a thriving industrial economy, manufactured most of the nation’s weaponry, and had a much bigger population than the South. Hence, they both opposed secession and then looked for ways to compromise with Lincoln to avoid war. We will have more to say about that later. For now, the point is that Lincoln’s leading southern opponents adamantly opposed secession and thought the North would win, and yet the Civil War lasted for all of Lincoln’s first term.

How long might we—or Lincoln—have reasonably expected the war to last, given the asymmetry in the capabilities of the two sides? The North, for instance, had about 22 million people; the South, 9 million, of which about 4 million were slaves. As we have noted, the North produced most of the munitions made in the United States at the time. Against the overwhelming manpower and economic advantage, the Confederacy’s main advantage was that it would be on the defense and so the venue of fighting would be turf more familiar to the Confederate army than the Union army, but then that also meant the South’s infrastructure would take a bigger hit than the North’s. With facts like these in mind, it is fortunately straightforward to estimate how long the war might have been expected to last.

We treat the US Civil War as if it were a war between two independent nations, each with its own central government, and each with its own regular army. Hence, we compare it to all other wars fought by nations between 1816 and 1985. The method we use is based on a prominent article on the duration of wars by Professors Scott Bennett and Allan Stam. They examined the duration of war based on the type of governments of each side, the type of military strategies used, the number of nations on each side, the type of terrain, and the total and relative size of military and economic strength on each side. Adapting Bennett and Stam’s method to the North and South (see endnote), we find that the Civil War should have lasted only about six months.25 Yet it went on for a bit over four years. Is that really to Lincoln’s credit?

Why was the war so much longer than the difference in capabilities had suggested it would be to Davis or to modern statistical analysis? There could be many answers, of course, but we think the clearest is one people prefer not to address. Lincoln was an indecisive and inept commander in chief. He was unable to find a general to command the Army of Washington (later the Army of the Potomac) and crush its weaker adversary. Why didn’t he have a parade of generals coming through his office, interviewing them about how they would fight the war, giving himself a chance to discover a “George Washington” for his time? Instead, he turned to old, tired military men or to those with political ambitions of their own. When the elderly General Winfield Scott failed him, he turned to his political foe, General George McClellan, who had been a staunch backer of Stephen Douglas in 1858 and 1860, to run the war. Lincoln allowed General McClellan to humiliate him (for which, oddly, we laud him today—and conversely we laud Lyndon Johnson because we cannot imagine his ever putting himself in a politically humiliating position). McClellan, for example, willfully kept Lincoln cooling his heels, waiting to meet with him, rather than showing the president (and his office) the respect he deserved. After Lincoln had waited for thirty minutes at McClellan’s home, he was informed that the general had gone to sleep for the night!26 And then McClellan, finally having been sacked by Lincoln and returned to civilian life, also pursued a course designed to advance his own presidential ambitions at his former commander in chief’s expense, unfettered by Lincoln. Indeed, before the fortuitous fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, just weeks before the presidential election, George McClellan, not Lincoln, was expected to win the presidency. Prior to that, the electorate seemed to favor the Democratic Party platform, which called for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. That, of course, became irrelevant after September 2, 1864, thereby ensuring Lincoln’s reelection.

The view of Lincoln as an inept decision maker is certainly out of favor today. But contemporaries thought of him in just that way. Maybe they were blind to his political genius and maybe, just maybe, their experiences with him and especially his failure to bring the war to a rapid conclusion were fully consistent with who he was as a politician and the evidence amassed about him in that role earlier in his political career. Perhaps it is we who with hindsight reconstruct Lincoln’s failures into triumphs.

It is easy to overlook the simple fact that Lincoln was a failed politician for much of his career. He was a local Illinois state legislator who managed to win but one term in Congress and then twice lost bids to become a senator, once in 1855 to Lyman Trumbull (who later was to become one of the authors of the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery) and once to Stephen Douglas in 1858. True, he did manage to win an election to the state assembly, following his failure to win a second term in Congress, but then he passed up that opportunity to pursue unsuccessfully election to the Senate (then done by the state legislature and not by popular vote) instead. He ran mostly failed campaigns before the Dred Scott decision. With that decision, he had the insight to see how to use it to open the door to a change in his electoral fortunes.

Lincoln’s political skill fell in two directions, only one of which can truly be seen as laudable. He was a smoke-filled-room politician, skilled at political machinations, and a superb lawyer capable of using legal-like briefs as campaign instruments to great advantage. Consider how he won his party’s nomination for president in 1860.

Going into the nominating convention, William Seward (later Lincoln’s secretary of state—foreshadowing the Obama–Rodham Clinton relationship of 150 years later) was the frontrunner. Indeed, the view at the time was that he was practically a sure thing. The main concern expressed about Seward was whether he could win the national election. His strong antislavery stance and his proimmigrant attitude raised doubts about whether he could carry the crucial “swing-states” of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, without which a solid South was likely to defeat the Republican candidate for president. Lincoln was positioned as a more moderate candidate on the slavery question. On immigrants as well, he was more moderate than Seward but still perceived nationally as having proimmigrant views. That he had such views cannot be in doubt.