68 e lusive v ictories
alters dramatically the institutional equation for a president and leaves
him with reduced capacity to determine the national agenda.
A president planning for postwar needs to have a realistic appreci-
ation of the scale of the challenges the nation will face. As the end of
the war approaches, moreover, he should shift his attention from mil-
itary matters to political ones. Finally, because postwar operations
involve ongoing commitments and costs, a president needs to invest in
forging a public consensus around his peace-building agenda. By these
standards, Lincoln does not score well. At certain moments, he voiced
an expansive vision of a more inclusive social order. But he did little
while the fi ghting raged to lay the necessary groundwork. Th is high-
lights a sobering truth: even the most able commanders in chief stumble
when it comes to peace.
As the Civil War moved from its initial limited character to a total
struggle, the postwar challenge assumed a far more complex and
demanding form. When the North sought merely to force the rebel
states to rejoin the Union with their social institutions intact, the
postwar challenge seemed straightforward: once a seceded state accepted
federal authority, it would be welcomed back. Th e Republican program
explicitly blocked any extension of slavery into new territories, but early
on Lincoln had made plain he did not intend to interfere with it where
it existed. Emancipation transformed the terms for a postwar set-
tlement. From the moment the president made slavery itself a major
focus of military operations, a Union victory would fundamentally rev-
olutionize social relations across the South. The potential for
far-reaching upheaval was magnifi ed by the decision to muster into the
ranks of the Union armies freedmen by the tens of thousands. What to
do with the free black population—a problem that had vexed observers
of slavery since the American Revolution fi rst placed its future on the
national agenda—would move from the realm of abstract speculation
to urgent priority.
Lincoln himself had grappled with the question at least since the late
1850s. Although he loathed slavery as a violation of everything the
nation represented and had argued steadfastly for the rights of all
persons, regardless of color, to control the fruits of their own labor, he
recognized the deep-seated obstacles to racial equality and social inte-
gration. Whites would not acknowledge Negro equality, Lincoln had