l incoln’s s hadow 53
with the resources and geographic advantages of the Confederacy had
he not prodded them. But the Union triumph required far more than
fi nding the right general, as one narrative line about the Civil War tells
it, or even closely monitoring him (that is, Grant) once he was placed
in charge. Rather, a number of factors came together in the latter half
of the war, beginning with Lincoln’s decision to embrace the total war
objective of destroying the racial economy of slavery. From that point
forward, it became clear that campaigns would assume a more merciless
and destructive form, to be sustained without interruption and
regardless of combat losses by generals of unbending will. Once the war
took on this new character, Lincoln stepped back from his eff orts to
manage military affairs and largely left it to the professionals to
complete the job. His sporadic late-war interventions were usually
intended to remind commanders of the political dimensions of the
war. Th e key point is this: absent the elements that came together
beginning in 1863, no degree of intervention by the president would
have suffi ced to yield a Union victory.
Two Leaders and Th eir Mistakes
Any fair account of Lincoln as a military leader also has to reckon with
his mistakes. With the advantage of hindsight, of course, a later observer
can easily spot the ill-considered decisions. We need to judge decisions
in their context, that is, against the information available to the actors
at the time. Even from this perspective, Lincoln made errors: he pushed
for military initiatives that refl ected his own political assumptions,
which were not always correct; he attempted to micromanage military
operations; and his distance from conditions on the ground gave rise to
unrealistic expectations about what his generals could accomplish. Yet
his military direction of the Union war eff ort should not be assessed in
isolation. A more balanced appreciation can be generated through a
brief comparison between Lincoln and his Confederate opposite,
Jeff erson Davis. Lincoln emerges as the far more eff ective leader, pos-
sibly with decisive eff ects for the outcome of the confl ict.
Lincoln was not immune to the temptation to see things as he
wished them to be rather than as they were. Early in the Civil War, he
persuaded himself that the majority of southerners opposed secession