36 e lusive v ictories
disunion. (Delegates from the western part of the state never agreed,
resulting in the breakaway of that region and eventual formation of a
separate state.) Virginia’s decision placed Washington, D.C., at imme-
diate risk, a situation made more precarious by uncertainty over the
course that Maryland, another slave state, would pursue.
Lincoln fi rst established national preservation as the goal for which
the North would fi ght, putting aside the question of slavery. In doing
so, he chose the approach that plainly commanded the broadest public
support. Even abolitionists at the outset of the war rallied behind the
narrow cause of restoring the Union. At the other end of the political
spectrum, Democrats embraced the idea that the war would be waged
to compel the rebellious South to return to the fold even as they rejected
any attempt to interfere with southern property rights (read: slavery).
McPherson terms Lincoln’s initial approach a commitment to a “limited
war,” likening it to other armed confl icts in which a nation seeks objec-
tives short of the complete destruction of the political system of the
enemy state. (By comparison, in the Second World War the United
States fought for the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, a
clear marker of a total war.) Labels fi t awkwardly in the case of the
Civil War, because Lincoln and the North made clear from the fi rst that
they would never settle for anything less than full submission of seces-
sionist states to the authority of the United States government—that is,
the Confederate States of America as a political entity would cease to
exist, an outcome associated with total war. However, Lincoln promised
in the beginning to leave untouched the social structure of the South,
to restore the status quo ante bellum. Besides commanding the broadest
support within the North, noninterference with slavery would reassure
southern Unionists, whom he and some other key northern leaders
thought constituted the true majority in the Confederacy. W e r e t h e
South to be defeated on those terms, then, it would be as though
secession had never happened.
Although Lincoln made the prudent choice at the start, he faced a
far more diffi cult task in reevaluating war aims as the confl ict progressed.
Consensus over war goals in the North barely lasted through the initial
battles in the summer months of 1861. By autumn 1861 abolitionists
were clamoring that the president widen the purpose of the Union
struggle to include the destruction of slavery. War Democrats warned