Politics and war

Sorry for the dirth of posts lately. I've been on vacation and being unchained from a desk means also being untethered from the blog.

I have nevertheless been reading, in particular, James M. McPherson's Tried by War, Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. It's helped put into perspective the numerous fronts in the war, and explains, as you'd expect from the title, how Lincoln became the young country's first true commander in chief in wartime. War strategy became his full time responsibility, ultimately taking decision making away from the "professionals."

The professionals usually didn't like that, but the dithering of McClellan and others -- many of them Democrats with sympathies towards the South and holding hopes that if they merely besieged southern cities that a compromise could be reached. Lincoln understood early on that compromise wasn't possible and only the total destruction of the Confederate Army could win the war.

What amazes me most is the open hostility so many commanders had towards "Washington," especially Lincoln's Sec'y of War, Edwin Stanton, and Lincoln himself. Not only was the officer corps littered with southerners, but many of them simply ignored Lincoln's orders and were not afraid to insult him openly. Lincoln, to the amazement of his cabinet and others around him, sloughed off the insults and focused on winning the war.

The other thing that amazed me, after so many years of hearing that "political decisions" dilutes war fighting, is how integral politics were to fighting the Civil War. Lincoln recognized that war was an extension of politics, but at the same time, every decision he made about the war had to be made with eye towards the politics of it. He knew he could lose control of Congress to northern Democrats and he was also fearful of inciting the border states, many of which were slave states, to join the rebellion. It was quite a balancing act.

The president's next venture in preparing public opinion for the [Emancipation Proclamation] was more successful. On August 19 the New York Tribune published an open letter to Lincoln by editor Horace Greeley titled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions." Greeley chastised the president for "a mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery" and urged him to heed the prayers of twenty million loyal Northerners for the abolition of slavery. In an unusual public response, the commander in chief carefully explained: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps slave the Union." In closing Lincoln said that these statements represented "my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

This presidential letter was a stroke of genius. To conservatives who insisted that preservation of the Union must be the sole purpose of the war, Lincoln said that such was his purpose. To radicals who wanted him to proclaim emancipation in order to save the Union, he hinted that he might do so. To everyone he made it clear that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary (as of course he thought it had) to accomplish the purpose on which they all agreed.

Indeed, when he did finally issue the proclamation, it did not end the war but it did send the message to North and South alike, that the war was then all about the total destruction of the very institution on which the South -- economically, politically, and socially -- was based.

But it's worth pointing out that he waited to issue it until after the mid-term elections of 1862.