44 e lusive v ictories
Washburne, the ranking Republican in the House of Representatives
and an infl uential moderate, put forward Ulysses S. Grant for a brigadier
general commission despite Grant’s checkered background.
Another kind of politics, the organizational kind, would make these
initial choices consequential for the entire war. Within the military of
the Civil War era, a strong seniority convention held sway: where two
offi cers shared the same rank, command devolved upon the one who
held the earlier commission. Attempts to circumvent seniority, by vio-
lating protocol, generated ill feelings, intense bickering, and resigna-
tions by offi cers passed over for command. (For example, in 1864 Joseph
Hooker asked to be relieved of duty when the less-senior Oliver Otis
Howard was named to command the Army of the Tennessee following
the death of James B. McPherson.) Not surprisingly, then, the list of
notable Union commanders throughout the confl ict is dominated by
the 1861 fi rst-wave generals.
Apart from infl uencing the commissioning of generals, politics
also shaped Lincoln’s decisions about command appointments. In
the early months of the war, when Lincoln was determined to prevent
any premature moves to widen war aims, he could count on the con-
servative tendencies of generals closely linked to the Democratic
opposition. Th e highest ranks of the Union Army command struc-
ture were more likely to be fi lled by generals with known political
ties than was the general offi cer pool as a whole. Some two-thirds of
the early-war army commanders and those in charge of politically
sensitive departments (13 out of 20) had identifi able partisan back-
grounds. Of these, eight were Democrats, a pattern that refl ected the
president’s determination to contain the war and make it politically
inclusive. Th e single most important command, that of the Army
of the Potomac, went to George McClellan, a Democrat with obvious
political ambitions and an expressed commitment to leave slavery
undisturbed.
Over the course of the war, as the president redefi ned war goals and
reconsidered how best to keep up political support for the war, he also
weighed his commanders according to this new calculus. Lincoln’s
decision to embrace emancipation and the destruction of the southern
racial order based upon slavery spelled the end of conservative Demo-
cratic backing for his war policy. Because McClellan had been