Conversations with History - James M. McPherson

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is James M McPherson who is the George Henry Davis oayk professor of history emeritus at Princeton University he is the best-selling author of numerous books on the Civil War including battle cry of freedom which won the Pulitzer Prize his new book is tried by war Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief professor McPherson welcome to Berkeley well thank you where were you born and raised I was actually born in North Dakota aha I lived there till I was 6 years old and then my family moved to Minnesota and I grew up in Minnesota and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world well my parents were the first generation college graduates in their families and they always placed a high premium on education and so I was brought up in a family that valued education and even though this was small-town America in the Midwest I think that they encouraged me to have broader horizons than that was there talk of history around the dinner table or did you you get the history bug as a student well curiously enough I didn't unless it was subconsciously being absorbed which I don't recall I didn't have that much interest in history in any particular way when I was growing up I had the usual small-town public school high school experience where I was more interested in sports and I played in the band and so on and then in academics so it wasn't really until I went to a college a small liberal arts college in Minnesota Gustavus Adolphus College that I got turned on to history by a couple of professors there and what history interested you I mean we had you begun your interest in the civil war yet in college my interest in history were fairly eclectic one of the professor's who really got me interested in the subject was not even in the storing of the United States he was a historian of Europe and so was European history courses the principal courses in American history were in 20th century in the history of American foreign policy that I took and so it wasn't really my college experience that got me interested in the civil war but rather my graduate school experience growing up in Minnesota I had didn't I'd never visited the South didn't really know that much about the South but was fascinated and a little bit horrified by the South of the late 1950s the years of the crisis over school integration at Little Rock federal troops being sent into Little Rock to enforce the rights of black students to attend that High School Little Rock Central High School and so I decided I needed to know more about the south and I went to Johns Hopkins who had the foremost historian of the American South at that time C Vann Woodward for my graduate study and I was there during the years of the civil rights movement and it was really that that got me interested in the civil war it also happened to be the early years of the Civil War Centennial but that wasn't what really got me interested in the Civil War it was the parallels between the time and place I was living in and the events of exactly 100 years earlier in the 1860s confrontation between the United States government and southern political leaders that were evolving massive resistance to national law federal troops being sent into the south Martin Luther King trying to get President John F Kennedy to issue a new Emancipation Proclamation on the hundredth anniversary of the original Kennedy didn't so King and others organized the march on Washington which took place we're in front of the Lincoln Memorial and in fact King and his famous I have a dream speech invoke Lincoln so I got very interested in the civil rights activists of the 1860s the abolitionists both black and white and their parallels between that era and my own era and so I did my doctoral dissertation which became my first book on the abolitionist once slavery was abolished what today envisage as the next step in race relations and and once you finish that work was it it was just kind of a natural movement into really exploring all aspects of the civil war it was it was a natural step-by-step movement I was originally interested in these radicals of the 1860s and they were very critical initially of Lincoln because they saw him moving too slowly toward making this a war to abolish slavery and not merely a war to preserve the old Union but the more I studied the the achievement of their aims the more I realized that what they were trying to accomplish depended on the larger political context of the 1860s and reconstruction as well as the war and in turn that larger political process was dependent on the military context emancipation the abolition of slavery was quite literally accomplished at the Barrett by the barrel of a gun so I expanded my interest from the kind of this kind of specific focus on this set of reformers and their ideologies to the larger political context which of course included Lincoln pre-eminently to the to the whole military course of the war and for that matter reconstruction because reconstruction was also enforced by the presence of the United States Army in the south your new book and I will show it again tried by war Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief why did you write this book well the simple answer is that a editor and a publisher approached me about writing this book but that's only part of the answer I've long been fascinated with Lincoln and I also have become increasingly convinced that almost everything that happened in the course of the Civil War and that means in the course of American history since the Civil War can be traced back to Lincoln's leadership we would be a much different country today and maybe not just one country today had it not been for the outcome of the Civil War and the outcome of the Civil War it was heavily dependent on Lincoln's leadership and so what I wanted to do was to look at what was really Lincoln's central preoccupation during the Civil War and that is his role as commander in chief and I think that that has been an understudy aspect of Lincoln's presidency or of Lincoln's life we know a lot about Lincoln's rise from Log Cabin to the presidency we know a lot about his his political leadership in the founding of the Republican Party and in Illinois and nationally we know a lot about his election in 1860 we know quite a bit about different aspects of his personality we know about his relationship with his cabinet his relationship with Congress and so on but Lincoln himself spent more time and energy I think in the in the role of commander-in-chief that is running the war and defining the purpose of the war then he didn't anything else and I think he spent more time in the War Department telegraph office right next door to the White House in Washington than he did anywhere else except the White House so I thought that understanding more about Lincoln's role as commander in chief how he carried that out how he defined it how he really created the modern the modern concept of commander in chief would be an important contribution to understanding the Civil War ah as one reads your book and of course we can't do justice to it in an hour interview one what stands out is how impressive Lincoln was as an all-around leader before we talk about him is you know commander in chief and I want to talk a little about that and one thing that is quite striking is his ability to see the complexity of the situations with which he was confronted and by that I mean not just a particular military engagement but rather all of the levels of politics and strategy that were involved in the decisions that he had to make yes and I think that the first thing they need to understand about Lincoln is that he was pre-eminently a politician from the time he was 23 years old when he first ran for the Illinois legislature until he became president of the United States politics was not merely an avocation it was a vocation I mean he made his living as a lawyer but I think he served four terms eight years in the Illinois legislature a term in Congress he ran for the Senate from Illinois twice was defeated he became a leader in Illinois politics and then the President of the United States so he put everything into a larger political context and since the Civil War really had its roots in the polarized politics of the 1850s he as a politician as an experienced politician I think was in a position to see how all of these things related to the the political crisis of what we might call the the political crisis of the 1850s and 1860s the bigger picture it was more as Georges Clemenceau they've French prime minister in World War one put it war is too important to be left to the generals and I think this was a sentiment with which Lincoln could agree he would had the bigger picture in mind of which the military aspects of the war were only a part and and Lincoln was a person who throughout this whole career was a learner if he didn't know something he would teach him himself you tell the story of his his family life when he was much younger and in how he addressed a problem and he didn't understand what the conversation was about he once told somebody who was talking to him about his his impressive ability to get at the core of a problem that when he was a boy and his father would have other adults over and they would talk about something and he couldn't really understand what they were talking about it he was very frustrated and he would go to his room this was I suppose when he was 8 or 10 years old and he would pace back and forth and try to understand what it was they were talking about and it wasn't until he could really figure this out that he felt that he felt like he had achieved anything and so that sense of of wanting to understand and determination to get at the at the core of any problem goes back to his childhood and I think it was a secret of his of his leadership he wanted to penetrate to the core of any issue and he turned out to be very successful at it he was he was superb with juries as a lawyer and I think he was superb with juries because he could put aside extraneous and the irrelevant things and get at the core of a problem and make a jury see it mm-hmm and in the irony of ironies is he really had once said in the Congress that he really didn't know much about Wars in the military he had served in the military but he didn't bring a body of experience to the well he he made light of his own military experience back in 1832 in the Blackhawk war broke out in Illinois when the Blackhawk Indians tried to come back to their ancestral homeland he like many others enlisted in the militia that was actually elected captain of this militia unit but this militia unit saw no action in the war and later on when he was in Congress which was during the Mexican War a war that Lincoln opposed he gave a speech on the floor in the house in which he mocked his own military career he said that he had participated in a many wild good many wild charges upon the wild onions and a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes but he never saw an enemy so clearly he had no relevant military experience and in fact in the only war the United States had fought up until the Civil War during his lifetime he had been opposed to American policy it's very important I think to emphasize that he was a war president from almost day one of his presidency until the very end so one point but then the second point that I think we need to emphasize is the particular kind of war this was namely a civil war you know in the homeland so to speak talk a little about that because that seems to be so much a part of the politics of the war which he was so insightful about throughout the conflict well it is quite true that Lincoln was the only president on our history whose entire presidency was occupied by war we've had plenty of other presidents who were presidents during war but part of their presidency also took place during peacetime not with Lincoln the first thing that crossed his desk the day after his inauguration was a message from major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter that the American that the garrison of about 90 soldiers only had enough supplies to hold out for a few more weeks so Lincoln on those very first day in office was presented with a crucial decision of whether to pull those troops out in response to the demand from the South Carolina Confederate state government backed up by the new Confederate States of America government or whether to maintain those soldiers there as a symbol of the sovereignty of the United States over all of all of its all of its states and all of its facilities like Fort Sumter and that consumed the first six weeks of Lincoln's present see so right off the bat he had to make decisions that our decision made by commander in chief in wartime even though the war had not yet broken out the decision he made would determine the question of peace and war and he came up with a brilliant solution of notifying the Confederates that he was going to send in supplies but not send in reinforcements unless they tried to interfere with the resupplying of these troops in a fort that was flying the American flag that shifted the burden of deciding whether peace or war on to Jefferson Davis's shoulders he did not hesitate at all he ordered his military commander and Charleston general Beauregard to fire on Fort Sumter and capture it before the supply ships could even get there that only snot only started the American Civil War but started in such a way that the Confederates had to bear the burden of having fired the first shot and therefore were the aggressor which United a previously divided north and in fact had the same kind of effect I think on the American people that is defining the the loyal states of the United States as the American people that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had in 1941 it United a divided people and this was entirely a political decision on Lincoln's part with important military consequences and that set the pattern I think for his conception of and exercise of the role of commander-in-chief and it is quite true that this is a war within the boundaries of what Lincoln considered to be the United States the basis on which the United States fought that war was that secession was unconstitutional the illegal illegitimate and that these eleven states that constitute the Confederate States of America were were rebellious that this was a rebellion and not a foreign war of course as it went on it took on some of the characteristics of a foreign war prisoners of war were not executed they were treated as prisoners of war that's typical of a foreign war they were when the United States forces captured Confederate soldiers or Confederate sailors they didn't execute them as as traitors or his pirates they treated them as prisoners of war and Lincoln declared a blockade of the southern coast which is an act of war so the American Civil War was this curious combination of a domestic rebellion with some characteristics of a foreign war and I think Lincoln was able skillfully to juggle these two things in such a way as to as to maintain a kind of consistent policy on the part of the North that denied the theoretical legitimacy of the Confederacy but at the same time recognized the reality that these that the Confederate government did in fact constitute a separate nation with an army with a government with a Treasury with a Navy and so on so this is this is one example I think of Lincoln's ability to to solve what might appear to be a kind of paradox of an internal rebellion that had some characteristics of a foreign war and and it's important to emphasize as you do in the book that he had his eye on the prize and the prize was you know the restoration of one United States of America and and so as a result often he had to look at a particular military situation with an eye on building the coalition that would keep the war going and end up with one Union so so he had to worry about keeping the the border states that were you know on the on the edge and could be brought over to the Union side that's quite true and the issue on which he had the to walk this tightrope was the issue of slavery Lincoln had been elected by a majority of the northern voters but not by a majority of all voters and in order to the Republican Party had been strong enough to win the election in 1860 but was not strong enough to fight a war on its own and so Lincoln needed the crucial support of northern Democrats as part of this coalition for the to prosecute this war for the Union and he also needed the border slave states that had not succeeded but had large minorities of their population that were pro-confederate and might possibly see seed and the most important states were Kentucky Maryland and Missouri so the slavery issue became a kind of test case Lincoln was under a lot of pressure from radicals in his own party to move against slavery the slave power they said had brought on this war slavery was essential to the Confederate economy into the logistics of Confederate armies so strike against slavery and Lincoln said we can't do that because if I do northern Democrats and the border state unionists will bail out of this war Kentucky will be forced into secession Maryland might be forced into secession Missouri right before it's in secession all of these three states were teetering on the edge and as he said in September 1861 if they leave a job on our hands is too big for us and so in the first year of the war he had to make it clear in order to maintain his war coalition that this was a war only for the restoration of Union this is not a war to abolish slavery but as time went on more and more northerners including Lincoln himself moved in a kind of step-by-step gradual fitful back-and-forth way toward the conviction then in fact in order to win this war against a nation that was based on slavery and fighting for slavery the North was going to have to strike against slavery and show the key part of Lincoln's decision-making process and what I call in the book national strategy how do you mobilize maximum support for this war effort and how do you weaken the enemy move towards striking against slavery by the summer of 1862 he had made the decision that that the balance of forces would actually to substitute to preserve the Union would actually be strengthened by striking against slavery for one thing a lot of slaves were already coming into Union military lines in states like Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky Tennessee where Union forces had had already invaded what are you going to do with these people they go and send them back to slavery no the Lincoln administration made the decision early on that they were not and it became increasingly clear that if you could encourage more slaves to escape and try to achieve freedom that you're going to weaken the Confederacy and you are going to add the potential manpower of these slaves to your own side so by 1862 Lincoln and made the decision that if he used his War Powers and he was the first president to use the phrase war powers as commander-in-chief to seize enemy property being used to wage war against the United States the slaves that he had the legal power to do that and that this would actually strengthen the northern cause so one of the one of the key themes in my book on the on this issue of national strategy is the shift Lincoln shift which paralleled and and led a shift in northern opinion on this various issue on this very issue from a war merely to restore the Union to a war whose primary purpose was to restore the Union but in which the striking against slavery would aid the cause of restoring the Union is a key part of the story of the first half of the war the first first half of Lincoln's leadership as commander in chief this the subtlety the insight that Lincoln showed as leader leads you to throughout the book to to really show us how he understood all aspects of the notion of commander-in-chief so being commander-in-chief meant a national policy it meant a national strategy it meant a military strategy it involved operations on the ground and tactics on the ground talk a little about that because we're as we talk and in the book you sort of are making us understand sort of really the many layers that he had to operate on Lincoln really had to invent the role of commander-in-chief the Constitution merely says that the President shall be commander in chief of the army and navy and of the militia of the various states when called into Federal service period it does not define the powers of the commander-in-chief and the precedence really didn't define those powers very much either when Lincoln had come into office the United States had fought two large two major Wars the war of 1812 in the Mexican American War but the presidents in both cases had pretty much left the fighting of those Wars to the military commanders in the field so when Lincoln came into office there wasn't much of the way of precedent for him to draw on and so he basically created the the function of commander in chief in his first message to Congress on July 4 in 1861 he used the phrase war power twice and on various occasions he said that the the Constitution gives me as commander-in-chief the power and the responsibility to do whatever is necessary to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States which is the I took when I office so whatever I do as commander-in-chief is is directed toward fulfilling that oath of office and so he undertook a number of actions he proclaimed a blockade he suspended the writ of habeas corpus by executive order he increased the size of the of the regular United States Army and Navy and also called out three-year volunteers all in the name of winning this war in order to fulfill his constitutional duties as commander-in-chief and as president to preserve protect and defend the Constitution so he had a very expansive vision of his powers as commander-in-chief and that eventually extended in 1862 to his right to issue an Emancipation Proclamation and also in almost the same date that he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation September 1862 he declared martial law in the entire country and created military tribunals to try civilians if they were undermining the Union war effort so almost every power that has been claimed by subsequent presidents in war time had actually been pioneered by Lincoln during the Civil War and and he was responding to on the one hand military necessity but also I guess one would have to say the political necessity of moving toward this larger national goal which was to keep the Union intact yeah Lincoln's critics would say that his conception of his powers as commander-in-chief was that the end justified the means and he might well have agreed with that that is the end was to preserve the United States as one nation and therefore any means that were efficacious in doing that we justified now Lincoln himself said on more than one occasion during the war that there were certain means that would not be justified you could not kill civilians without any authority of law he also said that whatever actions he took during the Civil War in this greatest crisis which actually threatened the very existence of the United States would not necessarily constitute a precedent for presidential powers in in peacetime or even in the future war where the actual existence of the United States was not at stake so presidents since Lincoln who have actually invoked his actions as a precedent that justified their actions suspending the writ of habeas corpus exact for example or establishing military courts or declaring Martial Law Lincoln him Lincoln would not necessarily have agreed that his actions constituted a precedent because the subsequent wars fought by the United States were not civil wars the very existence of the United States was not at stake in the spanish-american war and World War one even in World War two that worldwide conflict even if the United States had lost that war it didn't mean that the United States would have ceased to exist but in the case of the Civil War at least as Lincoln perceived it the the stakes were that great and so yes the end justified the means although there were limits even on the means that Lincoln would have been willing to take the suspension of habeas corpus is a topic that has come up a lot in in the current war on on terror and and I'm I would like for you to talk a little about the the particular kinds of situations that led Lincoln in the beginning to move in this direction because it's really about rebellious legislators meeting to make decisions that might work against his primary goal very very different situation in a way yes well the Constitution in this particularly passive voice and negative voice states that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless in cases of rebellion or invasion the public interest may require well this was clearly a case of rebellion and so Lincoln very early in the war suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the rail corridor between Philadelphia and Washington and the reason he did so was because secessionist from the state of Maryland were burning bridges and tearing down telegraph lines which cut Washington off from the rest of the north and under that suspension of the writ of habeas corpus a man named John Merriman who was captain of a pro Confederate military company in Maryland and had participated in tearing down telegraph lines was arrested and imprisoned at Fort McHenry the Chief Justice no lesser personage than the Chief Justice of the United States Roger Brooke Tawney in his capacity as the superior judge in the Maryland Circuit Court issued a writ ordering Maryland's release Lincoln refused Tawney issued a ruling saying the president does not have the Constitution to write on his own authority to suspend the writ this is something only Congress can do Lincoln disagreed the writ stays suspended Lincoln expanded it all kinds of people were arrested mostly in the border states including in September 1861 about 27 members of the Maryland legislature at a time when the Lincoln administration was afraid that they were going to vote Maryland out of the Union thus leaving the capitol of the United States surrounded by enemy territory Lincoln justified the suspension on the grounds that these people were threatening the survival of the United States it was one of his most controversial actions and quite frankly I think that some of his subordinates were over enthusiastic in some of the people that they arrested and imprisoned for a time under what we will today call preventive detention Lincoln Lincoln administration made the decision that if these people took an oath of loyalty to the United States they will be released most of them eventually did some refused some of these Marylanders who were clearly pro-confederate were kept in prison without trial for more than a year but most of them were eventually released and most of the people arrested under the suspension of the writ and for that matter tried by military tribunals were in the border states which were actives or zone or even in parts of the Confederacy that had been in Concord and were occupied by Union troops the most celebrated cases though did take place in the north and eventually led to a Supreme Court decision after the end of the war the milligan decision in 1866 which said that when lincoln created military courts to try civilians in a state like indiana that's where the Milligan case came from that was not part of the war zone then he had gone beyond his constitutional powers that as long as the civil courts were open civilians had a right to be tried in civil courts not military courts Lincoln if he had lived probably would not have agreed with that decision because the basis for his declaration of martial law on creation of military tribunals in 1862 which goes beyond the mere suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was the assumption that the whole country was a war zone that this was a civil war in which there were Confederate sympathizers in a state like Indiana where trial in the civilian courts would not you know you could never get a jury conviction because too many people too many people there were sympathetic with the Confederacy that this was a war that was going on even in the north as well as in the actual Confederate States themselves whether he was justified in doing that as continued to be a matter of great debate among constitutional historians i10 come down with my sympathies on Lincoln side in this question one of the stories themes that runs throughout the book is Lincoln's relation with his generals and and it's in those relations that we see all the themes that we've really been discussing that is his political astuteness about what he could do and the patience for overtime where he could have the support to do what he wanted to do and make his military but but before we get into that it's very important to understand Lincoln the neophyte in terms of military strategy actually had a strategy through study and he understood what he had to do with regard to time and space if he was going to win the war and he had trouble making his generals understand it tell us what that strategy was well Lincoln evolved I think through his study of military history and strategy and I think his own common sense is own sort of intellectual acumen a strategy of what military historians or strategists theorists have called concentration in time in order to counter the Confederacy's ability to to concentrate to use interior lines to concentrate in space well what does that mean if you envisage the geography of the Civil War the Confederate states the eleven states that constitute the Confederate States of America were surrounded on the north and the west by the United States and on the south and the east by the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific other than the Atlantic Ocean within that perimeters of the Confederacy they could use what were called interior lines to shift troops from one section to another if the enemy invaded along a particular line the United States Army had to use exterior lights in ordered you know to invade the Confederacy from the outside Lincoln came up with the idea that the Confederacy's ability to use their interior lines to concentrate troops against the most threatened point for example in the first major campaign of the war when the principle United States Army moved down to attack the Confederate defenders at Manassas Junction 25 miles from Washington the Confederates were able to shift troops from the Shenandoah Valley using their rail connections to counter that Union invasion and to repulse it now Lincoln learned from that and he learned from subsequent situation in Kentucky Missouri and Tennessee that the only way the United States army could counter the ability of the Confederates to shift troops was to and to send forward to invade on two or more fronts simultaneously so that the Confederates couldn't shift troops from one to another and he wrote a famous letter to general Halleck who was in command in the western theater when Lincoln wanted helican and Buell to cooperate in simultaneous advances against the Confederate defenders in Tennessee in Kentucky in which he said we have the superior numbers the enemy has the superior facility of concentrating his forces on points of collision we will fail unless we use our advantage to counter his advantage and we should use our advantage of superior numbers to advance on two or more fronts simultaneously so that he cannot shift forces from one to the other it took a long time for his generals to see as Lincoln saw the larger picture of coordinating Union advances across the front as much of him of thousand miles from from the Mississippi River to to Virginia and it wasn't really until Lincoln got grant in as general-in-chief in 1864 that grant worked out a strategy for simultaneous advanced advances of five Union armies so that the Confederates couldn't shift troops and that's one reason why Lincoln was so gratified by grants grants leadership as general and chief when he finally got him in there in March of 1864 is because grant came up with the same kind of strategy that Lincoln had been pressing on his generals for the past three years and how do we explain the poor quality of this string of generals that that Lincoln had in comparison to the southern generals was it the fact that the army had been so southern and it seems also to be the case that a lot of these generals that were inadequate were political generals well yes political generals were the people appointed by Lincoln because of their political prominence rather than their military experience or training I argue in the book that while these political generals were not particularly effective most of them as military commanders there were exceptions who who liked to actually turned out to be good military commanders but some of the most prominent ones didn't were not that nevertheless Lincoln had appointed these political generals as part of his national strategy to mobilize a large army as volunteers because these people had a large constituency a large following but in the case of Union commanders in the eastern theater starting with general McClellan followed by Burnside Hooker even general Meade they did not seem capable of carrying out Lincoln's aggressive strategy Lincoln had come to the to the conviction that the United States was not going to win this war merely by nibbling at around the edges of the Confederacy and merely by imposing a blockade merely by gaining control of of key railroad junctions or of ports that the only way that they were going to win the war was by attacking carrying the war to the enemy trying to or destroy enemy armies and that was something that before grant became general-in-chief his commanders in the Eastern theater seemed incapable of understanding with respect to your question about why these why these military commanders seemed not to get it and not to be very effective that impression comes mostly from the Virginia theater of the war the eastern theater of the war where during the first three years of the war the Confederates were more successful especially under the leadership of robert e lee and the Army of Northern Virginia and because of the importance of that theater of the war and because of his problems with the generals who were in command in that theater the war Lincoln spent more of his time and energy and dealing with those problems than anything else but at the same time in the West defined in those days as the Mississippi River Valley that Tennessee River Valley and Cumberland River Valley states like Mississippi Louisiana Tennessee Arkansas the Union forces were much more successful and it was out of this western theater that the generals who eventually won the war for the North came grant Sherman George Thomas Sheridan they all came out of the Western theater and because the eastern theater for Lincoln was the squeaky wheel it got most of the grease but Lincoln himself from Illinois also was very conscious of the importance of what they called in those days the Great West basically the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries and he spotted grant fairly early on as an effective commander in this theater and although and and while grant came under a lot of criticism for his being surprised at Shiloh for the initial failures in his Vicksburg campaign Lincoln supported grant through thick and thin and as I argue in the book that maybe one of his major contributions to ultimate Union victory was his ability to to identify grants good qualities and to defend him against his critics and eventually to bring him up to the supreme command of Union armies so while Lincoln was dealing with frustrating problems and failures in the Eastern theater and because he had to spend so much of his time and energy on that we get the impression that the Union was failing in the Eastern theater things were going better in the Western theater and the one man who was more responsible for the successes in the Western theater grant was somebody that Lincoln had identified early on and Men and brought along and brought him east in 1864 to turn the war around in that theater as well putting aside generals like McClellan who seems to be I think at one point what Lincoln is saying you see all these soldiers around McClellan they're his bodyguards as opposed to soldiers because McClellan was reluctant to move decisively he always wanted more troops more supplies and over overestimated the enemy's troop numbers but there's a turning point which I thought was a small little anecdote you had but which was a very nice way both to show Lincoln's leadership skills and on all dimensions and also the turning point here and this was late in the war McClellan is reluctant to move and Lincoln overhears or it's reported to him that a major key and the General Staff had said well we really don't want to bag the rebel army because that's not our game and Lincoln fired him because that hit to the core of what his goal was versus what many in the military's goal were yeah that's true this was after the Battle of Antietam in the fall of 1862 and Lincoln was very upset with McClellan for having failed to follow through on what was a limited an indecisive victory in this battle in in Maryland which stopped robert e lee's invasion of maryland and forced him to retreat to virginia but did not follow up and tried to inflict a greater damage in a major on on general Halleck staff commented to one of his colleagues who had asked about why McClellan didn't pursue didn't try to attack well that's not the game the game is to achieve stalemate so that we can have a negotiated peace and safe slavery and when Lincoln heard that he was incensed he didn't really believe that that was McClellan's purpose although there were a lot of Radical Republicans who believe that's about McClellan that's that's the very edge of treason really and McClellan or Lincoln called this major into his office called him on to the carpet and asked him if he'd really said that and the man said yes he did he admitted it so to make an example of him Lincoln fight him right away cashiered him not just dismissed him from his post but removed him from the United States Army well it's like a dishonorable discharge basically Lincoln was sending a message by doing that he was sending a message principally to McClellan who got that message I think because very soon after that McClellan issued an order to his army basically saying it's the military's purpose to carry out the policy of the civilian leadership of this government and not to make policy itself and basically Lincoln Lincoln was even McClellan got that message even though it didn't make any difference in his military aggressiveness at least he realized that under the Constitution and under Lincoln's leadership it was the president of the United States as commander-in-chief who's going to make the basic decisions about how this war was going to be fought and what the purpose of the war was and not generals or even officers in the army it was a it wasn't him you're quite right this was an important turning point and another important evolution here is Lincoln's popularity with the soldiers because one of his problems in moving against McClellan you tell us is that McClellan was very popular among his soldiers but by the end of the war the last phase of the war when Lincoln would go visit the troops which he did often he was very popular and this put him politically in a position to decisively move against McClellan as inadequate for the command that he held yes I people often ask me why Lincoln didn't fire McClellan earlier than November 1862 which he thought was when he finally removed him from command and I think there are two reasons for that one is that McClellan had a very strong constituency in the north he was supported by the Democratic Party and by conservative some conservative Republicans and by newspapers like the New York Herald which was the largest newspaper in the United States but secondly and probably more important McCall had a powerful constituency in the army itself he had created its officer corps and he was amazingly popular among the rank and file of soldiers themselves who tended not to blame Lincoln for mccollins failures but to placate blame Secretary of War stand to blame the Republicans in Congress and when Lincoln visited the army he would talk with the soldiers as man-to-man he did not talk down to them he was not like their officers who you know felt that they were way above the soldiers he had a kind of rapport with the common soldiers and so he was popular with them and I think a key experience that Lincoln had was after the Battle of Antietam in the first four days of October 1862 he went up to the Antigua the area where that battle had been fought near Sharpsburg Maryland and spent four days with the army and he saw her that he was popular with the soldiers they cheered him he talked with them one-on-one and I think that gave him confidence that if McClellan did not measure up to his expectations to carry out an aggressive campaign after Antietam he was going to replace him and that he could do so without the danger of mutiny and as the war went on Lincoln grew more and more popular with the soldiers he visited soldiers in the hospital he was famous for commuting the sentences of soldiers who had been court-martialed for sleeping on duty or for going a WOL or something like that so there was a kind of rapport and when Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864 who is his Democratic opponent none other than General George B McClellan and one of the reasons the Democrats had nominated McClellan was their expectation that he would get the soldier vote well as it turned out Lincoln got the overwhelming majority of soldier votes 78% of the soldiers voted for McClellan after Lincoln only 22% for McClellan and that was a much larger percentage than Lincoln God of the civilian vote so that was the proof of Lincoln's popularity among the soldiers much greater popularity than the old commander of the Army of the Potomac who once had been so popular with his men in the end of towards the end of the war Lincoln's vision of his in state but also his sense of politics gave him a very fine understanding of how he had to handle politically whatever peace initiatives were occurring because in the same way that the military didn't want to go all the way some people wanted to negotiate a peace to end the conflict but then that would have undermined Lincoln's national goal yes in the summer of 1864 when the war seemed to be going badly for the North especially in Virginia where Grant had launched what came to be called his Overland campaign with with such public expectation that he would this heavy hitter would win the war by the fourth of July but instead Union forces on all fronts seemed to be bogged down by the fourth of July after such enormous casualties especially in Virginia that a wave of defeatism and of war weariness of desire for a peace came over the northern people it looked like this war would have no end and Lincoln really had to deal with that and there were a couple of initiatives one of them by the editor of the most powerful Republican newspaper Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to meet with Confederate envoys to to negotiate some kind of an end ceasefire an armistice to try to bring this this cruel war which was killing so many young men to to an end and Lincoln had to walk through this minefield of on the one hand a realization that an appeal for that appeal by the United States government for a ceasefire and negotiation to end this war would be tantamount to a Confederate victory just as the German appeal fifty years later in 1918 for an armistice was tantamount to Allied victory in that war Lincoln saw that this would be the same but at the same time he had to appear to be open to the possibility of peace negotiations to end this killing so he very successfully I think said that he'd be willing to meet with any representative of Jefferson Davis for a peace negotiation on the preconditions of restoration of the Union and as he put an abandonment of slavery this abandon of slavery condition became a very controversial because it appeared to undermine any chances for negotiation and this was also happening at a time when presidential election of 1864 was approaching this is an August of 1864 and Lincoln was convinced that if the election had been held then or if things continued to go badly that he would be defeated for reelection nevertheless he refused to abandon his conditions his preconditions of Union and emancipation for any negotiations and if things had not approved on the military front he might well have been defeated for reelection and who knows what would have happened then but in the nick of time one might say to to save Lincoln's prospects and basically I think to save the prospects of victory in this war Sherman captured Atlanta general Sheridan won some impressive victories in the Shenandoah Valley Admiral Farragut damned the torpedoes and took at the United States Navy and to Mobile Bay and closed off one of the last ports for blockade running and Lincoln was triumphantly re-elected but he had he had stuck with his conditions he had walked that tightrope between giving up the war but also seeing seeming to be open to the possibilities of negotiation to end up in the war but on his own terms very successfully however if it hadn't been for military victories in the field we might now look back on Lincoln as a failed commander-in-chief it was that close one one final question and we have only a few minutes left how would you like how is a historian do you think historical insights like those in this book can inform sort of policy and action today by our presidents as well let's say our president-elect as he confronts two ongoing Wars well I've often asked about the lessons of history and especially the lessons of this this part of our history and I think like most historians I'm a little bit leery of saying okay here is the lesson from this that which we should draw on today I think that our leaders today have to be knowledgeable about history they have to be informed about history they can learn from studying history but they shouldn't necessarily follow a kind of lockstep lessons of history format because the situation today is different from what it was then but I think that the the story of Lincoln's role as a commander-in-chief combines two qualities that would be useful for any commander-in-chief or any leader today one kind of inflexible commitment to a principal or to a central policy in Lincoln's case preservation of the United States combined with flexibility and means a willingness to be open to trying something different in the way of national strategy or military strategy if what you're trying isn't working in Lincoln's case for example moving a national strategy from a policy of not touching slavery to a policy of emancipation as a means of mobilizing weakening the enemy and strengthening your own side and in military strategy of moving from for example a policy of merely invading and occupying places to one of trying to destroy enemy armies so a combination of inflexibility and principle and flexibility and means is I think probably the lesson that we can learn from Lincoln as commander-in-chief well on that note professor McPherson I want to thank you very much for joining us thank you for writing the book I will show the book again thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history Oh

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, ucberkeley, university, california, berkeley, Military, National, Security, Politics, Legislation, Democracy, yt:quality=high

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Length: 59min 39sec (3579 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 04 2008