‘Lincoln vs. Davis’ Review: Clash of the Presidents
Until his choice to allow Lee to invade the North—one historian argues—Davis outfoxed the indecisive occupant of the White House.
By Walter Russell Mead The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 1, 2024
Nigel Hamilton is one of America’s least conventional and most interesting historians. His landmark, three-volume study of Franklin Roosevelt’s military leadership, “FDR at War,” offers extraordinary insights into the battles between American and British military leaders during World War II and makes a strong case that Roosevelt was a better strategist than Winston Churchill. His “American Caesars,” a series of short biographies of the American presidents from FDR to George W. Bush, provides an astonishing amount of insight and information in easily digestible form.
Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents
In his latest book, “Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents,” Mr. Hamilton analyzes the first two years of the American Civil War. The story of America’s national epic has been recounted many times. Mr. Hamilton manages to keep his eye on the larger strategic questions even as he probes the day-to-day shifts in the military, diplomatic and political realities the two leaders scrambled to grasp. The book offers insights that will surprise even readers who know their Civil War history in depth.
Jefferson Davis, Mr. Hamilton argues, was much better prepared for wartime leadership than Abraham Lincoln, and up through his decision to allow Robert E. Lee to invade the North in what became the Maryland Campaign of 1862, Davis consistently outfoxed the untutored, indecisive newbie in the White House. Trained at West Point, familiar with combat from his experience in the Mexican War and seasoned through his years as a senator in Washington, including a stint as secretary of war, Davis had the more presidential résumé and, in the beginning, a better sense of how to fight a war that he never expected the Confederacy to win.
The book’s portrait of Lincoln is less flattering. Abraham, as Mr. Hamilton somewhat disconcertingly calls him, made military decisions on impulse, and his impulses were generally wrong. Mr. Hamilton tells us that Lincoln bungled the siege of Fort Sumter, then issued a panicky call for troops that led Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas to join the Deep South cotton states to form a much more formidable Confederacy. He picked poor generals and allowed the worst of them, George B. McClellan, to bully him. His order to the Union Army to advance into Virginia led to the disastrous First Battle of Bull Run. His acquiescence in McClellan’s scheme to attack Richmond, Va., from the Chesapeake led to the humiliating losses of the Peninsula Campaign.
Worst of all, in Mr. Hamilton’s view, Lincoln handled the issue of slavery too timidly. Most notably, he forced Gen. John Frémont to withdraw a proclamation freeing the slaves of those engaged in armed rebellion against the United States. Frémont’s reasoning, that military necessity would provide a legal justification for freeing the slaves of rebels, would later inform Lincoln’s own approach to the slavery question. Nevertheless, Lincoln, concerned about driving other still-loyal slaveholding states, and especially Kentucky, into rebellion, slapped Frémont down.
Mr. Hamilton sees this decision as a major blunder, one that furthered the South’s effort to win diplomatic recognition from the European powers and disheartened the North. Lincoln’s defenders will reply that the border states and Northern Democratic opinion were not yet ready for such a revolutionary step and that Lincoln’s restraint on emancipation early in the war was the wiser course.
But it is the Confederate duo of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee that, in Mr. Hamilton’s view, made the greatest blunder of the first two years of war. Early in the war, Davis was pessimistic about the South’s chances. With a smaller population, a sparser rail network and fewer munitions factories, the South would have to fight a defensive war. After Bull Run, when hotheads urged Davis to attack Washington, the Confederate president wisely demurred. But Lee’s aggressive temperament and brilliant early successes against Union armies tempted Davis into abandoning his caution. He allowed Lee to go ahead with his plan to invade the North, an invasion that culminated in the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.
In Mr. Hamilton’s telling, that invasion, and Lee’s bombastic and ill-advised proclamation calling on the citizens of Maryland to join the Confederacy, constituted a decisive shift in the war. Invading the North cast the Confederacy as an aggressor. The reluctance of Marylanders to join Lee’s ragged army reassured Lincoln that emancipating rebel slaves would not precipitate more secessions. And the combined impact of the Confederate defeat at Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation would stymie those in Britain and France who hoped to recognize the Confederacy and perhaps even intervene in the war.
Not all readers will agree with Mr. Hamilton’s arguments. As to the wisdom of Frémont’s emancipation initiative, Northern Democrats were, barely, willing to fight a bloody Civil War for the Union. They were not ready in 1861 to fight and die to end slavery. And behind Lee’s desire to invade the North was his—and Davis’s—awareness that the status quo was working against the South. By the time Lee started the march to Antietam, almost the entire Mississippi River was back in Federal hands, and Tennessee, the source of much of the Confederacy’s food supply, was increasingly under Union control. The Union blockade, meanwhile, had cut off the South’s access to the weapons and supplies it desperately needed. Lee’s gamble at Antietam, like his later, larger gamble at Gettysburg, may have failed, but the belief that only a major victory on Northern soil could avert Southern defeat was not unreasonable.
Be that as it may, “Lincoln vs. Davis” is a book that both scholars of the Civil War and casual readers will enjoy. It also reminds us of the immense difficulties Abraham Lincoln had to overcome—not least his own inexperience—as he learned to lead a fractured Union to victory in the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.
Mr. Mead is the Journal’s Global View columnist.