32 e lusive v ictories
Lincoln struggled to master the multiple responsibilities of the
political leader of a nation at war. As James McPherson, Eric Foner,
and other historians have observed, Lincoln’s political objectives
evolved over the course of the Civil War as the nature of the confl ict
changed, and one of his signature achievements was to reshape
political goals accordingly. Lincoln chose to play a hands-on role in
directing the war. Eliot Cohen, unsurprisingly, depicts him as the
paragon of eff ective wartime political leadership, the model to which
any president commanding a confl ict should aspire. But there is more
to the story. Lincoln established an overall strategy for pursuing
victory and kept his military subordinates focused on that strategy. In
the end, victory depended less on his active direction than on the
strategic course he established when he embraced emancipation.
Moreover, he took a back seat during the fi nal campaigns. It is not
clear, then, that he can serve Cohen’s prescriptive purpose. Interest-
ingly, the Civil War provides us with a second example of an active
politico-military chief executive, Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart,
Jeff erson Davis. A comparison of the two presidents is revealing: Davis
demonstrated that a political leader’s close involvement in military
matters is no guarantee of success.
Further, wartime political leadership involves more than military
matters, and we therefore need to extend analysis of Lincoln beyond the
military realm. Two other leadership tasks stand out: maintaining
popular support for the war eff ort and planning for peace. Both require
as much active direction as military aff airs. Here Lincoln’s record is
mixed. He did well in meeting the political challenge of keeping up
Union morale, which was severely tested time and again. Given the
depth of partisan strife in the North, this was an impressive achievement,
though I will show that he was aided not just by his own skills but by
the resources of the Republican Party. By contrast, Lincoln was far less
successful at defi ning, early on, the postwar settlement in the South.
After making the destruction of chattel slavery a central war goal, he
invested little attention in explaining how race relations might be
reconfi gured when peace was restored. At the time of his assassination
he had not articulated a coherent vision for Reconstruction, and had he
lived he would likely have struggled to retain control over policy against
resurgent congressional power.