l incoln’s s hadow 45
outspoken in favor of a limited war, he was, as we’ve seen, jettisoned
shortly before the 1862 midterm elections. (His removal was made
easier by his record—mediocre at best—as a battlefi eld commander.)
Major General Don Carlos Buell, a close McClellan associate, com-
mander of the Army of the Ohio, and a foe of the “hard war” approach
toward southern civilians, was let go at about the same time. B y t h e
end of the war, Democrats had largely disappeared from the ranks of
senior Union command, and the handful who remained had excep-
tional combat records. Th e offi cers who led the Union Army to victory
in 1864–1865 shared Lincoln’s conception of the kind of war that had to
be fought. Generals such as William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sher-
idan may have detested partisan politics, but they made themselves
eager instruments of the president’s commitment to destroy slavery by
breaking utterly the will of the southern white population to continue
the confl ict.
Th e Union needed a strategy that would let it use the army to
defeat the Confederacy. To define that strategy, Lincoln made
himself a student of military aff airs. Historians praise him for the
speed with which he mastered strategic principles. Learning both
from offi cers such as Scott and McClellan and through books bor-
rowed from the Library of Congress, Lincoln became an insightful
military planner within the fi rst year of the war. Although some-
times derided by the professional soldiers whom he commanded for
his schemes, he soon demonstrated a superior grasp of the core stra-
tegic challenges the Union would face. It may have helped that
Lincoln came to the study of war without preconceptions, because
the Civil War would be fought in the midst of dramatic techno-
logical innovations that would reshape military affairs. His
open-minded approach made him highly receptive to the use of new
weapons and alert to the possibilities inherent in the widespread use
of railroads and telegraph communications.
The fundamental military task, as Lincoln appreciated, was how
to best use the Union’s advantages to offset those enjoyed by its
formidable adversary. In terms of such key resources as population
and industrial capacity, the North far outstripped the Confederacy.
The white population of the Union in 1861 numbered some 22
million, while there were only about 5 million whites in the South.