Book Review: McPherson’s Tried by War—Déjà Vu All over Again

POSTED DECEMBER 2, 2008


Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. By James M. McPherson. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. Pp. 384. Cloth $35.00.)

In 1988, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, a sweeping, one-volume history of the Civil War era, was published by Oxford University Press. The book received overwhelming praise and catapulted McPherson, a professor of history at Princeton University, to national fame. Unlike most history books, Battle of Cry of Freedom found a place on the national bestseller lists, and the New York Times Book Review declared that the book contained “historical writing of the highest order.”(1)[For notes, see below.] That assessment was echoed the following year when McPherson’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Seemingly overnight (although he had published, over a twenty-year period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, several other Civil War-related books, including an earlier textbook that covered the same ground as Battle Cry of Freedom), McPherson was acclaimed as the dean of Civil War studies in the United States. Since that time, his stature as a historian has steadily grown, and he has won numerous prizes for his many works, including a Lincoln Prize, the highest literary honor bestowed on Civil War historians.(2) Scholars and other reviewers heap praise on him for his graceful literary style, which consistently reaches a wide audience of general readers beyond the niche market of Civil War buffs, and for his insightful interpretations of the Civil War era. I, too, have applauded his many books, including his last one, This Mighty Scourge, which I hailed as “a masterly collection of essays” on a broad range of Civil War topics, including Abraham Lincoln and his presidency.(3) [For the sake of full disclosure, I should point out at the outset of this review that I once wrote a negative review of McPherson’s slim book, What They Fought For, 1861-1865, that caused him to sputter an ad hominem reply in which he called into question my training as a Civil War historian.(4) Yet he has since said kind things—although not publicly—about two of the three books I have written on Civil War subjects.]

But I wonder now, as I take into consideration his latest book, Tried by War, if I might have been just a little too gushing—and more than a little fawning—in my admiration of his scholarship. What my reading of This Mighty Scourge and Tried by War in tandem has revealed is that McPherson’s talent as a writer and his perspicacity as a historical interpreter have been greatly overrated, including by me. His current book is an account of Lincoln’s role as commander in chief. While the book is hefty enough in weight and length, running to 384 pages, it is notably slim in content and analysis. For one thing, the narrow columns on the page and the large point size suggest that the book was designed to fill the 384 pages simply to justify its retail price, $35, rather than to accommodate a weighty tome with a huge number of words. Indeed, my liberal estimate is that the book amounts to only 85,000 words, not including bibliographic endnotes (by comparison, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals, contains about 350,000 words, plus endnotes, at a retail price of $35, a far better bargain as far as price-per-word goes).(5) The word count of Tried by War could have been easily designed to fit within 150 pages or so (at, one assumes, a lower retail price) without sacrificing quality or readability. Instead, the book has been published as a bloated cow, just in time for Christmas and the Lincoln bicentennial celebrations. (By the way, expect to see a short biography of Lincoln by McPherson issued in February 2009 by Oxford University Press; the slated number of pages will be 96 at a retail price of $12.95.) As presented by its author and publisher, Tried by War is a minor work dressed up to look like an epic, replete with humdrum half-tone illustrations chosen entirely from the collections of the Library of Congress. The book’s single map serves no practical purpose whatsoever; one would think that good military maps might have been useful in a book about Lincoln as commander in chief.

In other respects, Tried by War is also less than it appears to be. Although the book has been long anticipated by adoring historians and Civil War enthusiasts, it offers surprisingly little that’s new in its telling (or, more precisely, retelling) of Lincoln’s story or in its assessment of how the sixteenth president defined his constitutional duties as commander in chief. What McPherson has written about Lincoln is remarkably redundant and stale. He reiterates without much additional elaboration the same ideas and interpretations he first set forth two decades ago in Battle Cry of Freedom and in a smaller book of essays entitled Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, published in 1990. As a result, Tried by War seems dusty and dated. Nothing in its pages is new or provocative.

Its lack of originality and freshness flows from two causes. To begin with, McPherson has simply recycled—actually rehashed is a better word—his take on Lincoln as commander in chief that he not only first presented in considerable detail in earlier works, but that he issued (and reissued, sometimes lifting whole passages from one work and using them in another) in a bevy of articles published in various periodicals, including Civil War Times Illustrated, New York Review of Books, American Historical Review, and in three separate collections of essays: Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, Drawn with the Sword, and This Mighty Scourge, not including similar essays published in collections compiled and edited by other historians (for example, a recent one edited by Eric Foner).(6) Granted, it’s fairly common for historians to try out their ideas in articles or on the lecture circuit before revising them in final form as a book. But the difference in this case is that McPherson has not significantly expanded his treatment; nor has he dug any deeper into the available sources or pushed his thinking beyond the limits of what he offered his readers in his earlier works. To be sure, Tried by War is not a composite of earlier works, although one chapter does seem to have been only slightly revised from a journal article (which, in turn, was based on McPherson’s presidential address to the American Historical Association) and some passages appear to have been lifted, almost verbatim, from earlier publications, including Battle Cry of Freedom and Crossroads of Freedom.(7) Thus the book is a redo—old material, even some cut-and-pasted paragraphs, reshaped to fit between new covers. As a result, reading this book does not produce much satisfaction. For Lincoln aficionados, it’s a real let-down; for any reader familiar with McPherson’s repertoire, one finishes this book—which can easily be read in one sitting—feeling cheated and with more than a vague sense of déjà vu.

Could he find nothing more to say about Lincoln other than what he has said—and, as it turns out, has said more than once or twice or thrice—in his earlier works? Even McPherson’s quotations of Lincoln are stale, since nearly every one in Tried by War can be found in his other writings or in the standard (and plentiful) works on Lincoln that are now bulging the shelves of book stores and libraries. We are used to repackaging in our modern marketplace, but the repackaging of old passed off as new is not something we necessarily expect in a book. The public might reasonably expect that McPherson’s book would offer a culmination of his scholarship on Lincoln, an entirely new contribution, rather than just a remake of what’s come before. Of course, the dust jacket heralds Tried by War as “genuinely novel”—meaning new, but it less novel than it is derivative. The jacket also features blurbs by other historians who predictably hail the book as a “masterpiece,” “definitive,” and “surprising.” That last accolade is indeed surprising, since it leads the potential reader to believe that what’s found in this book has never been said before about Lincoln as commander in chief.

But that raises another concern about Tried by War. Not only is the book a repackaging of vintage McPherson in somewhat different form, it simply repeats most of what can be found in an earlier book by a different author, Lincoln and His Generals, written by T. Harry Williams and published in 1952.(8) Astonishingly, though, Williams’s book contains far more detail—more nitty-gritty substance—about how Lincoln defined his role and worked in the White House as the Union’s commander in chief. Nevertheless, McPherson contends that Williams erroneously and misleadingly called Lincoln a “natural strategist” (McPherson, p. 4; compare Williams, p. vii). Lincoln, says McPherson, was not a natural strategist, since he had to work very hard at mastering the business of war and at defining how he would fulfill his constitutional duties as commander in chief. But this turns out to be much ado about nothing. On closer inspection, McPherson has set Williams up as a straw man. By challenging Williams, McPherson hopes to convince readers that his own interpretation is the correct one. But, as it turns out, he and Williams are in total agreement about how the sixteenth president functioned as commander in chief: both present Lincoln as struggling hard with uncooperative generals, intervening when generals seemed unable or unwilling to do their job, and slowly learning the responsibilities of commander in chief by trial and error. More tellingly, Williams and McPherson both agree in earnest that Lincoln was “Clausewitzian” in his approach to strategy and military affairs (McPherson, pp. 6, 142; compare Williams, p. 7). McPherson turns Williams’s use of the phrase “natural strategist” into a fabricated point of contention, misleadingly making the reader think that Williams did not believe that Lincoln grew slowly or hesitantly into the duties of commander in chief, when, in fact, that was the essence of Williams’s account of Lincoln’s military leadership—i.e., how Lincoln learned to become commander in chief. Tellingly, the dust jacket of McPherson’s book resembles the reprint dustjacket and the paperback cover of Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals: all use the famous photograph of Lincoln posing with McClellan after Antietam.

If McPherson’s book echoes the content and interpretation of Williams’s more penetrating and readable work of the early 1950s (which was a truly path-breaking book in its own right when it was published), the close student of Lincoln will also perceive that the broad outline of what McPherson says about the sixteenth president as commander in chief can be readily found in numerous studies written, for the most part, in the 1950s and 1960s by Allan Nevins, Kenneth P. Williams, Bruce Catton, and others, some of whom were, in turn, indebted to T. Harry Williams for their own understanding of Lincoln’s role as commander in chief.(9) While it is disturbing to realize that McPherson’s view of Lincoln is not at all new or original, it’s even more jarring to discover that his basic interpretation—the analytical thread meant to tie this book together—actually harkens back to the received historical wisdom of fifty years ago. Certainly it is not a crime to cover the same ground that earlier historians have trod, as evidenced in Fred Kaplan’s new book on Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, a subject that has been drilled and mined by many authors over the years, including Jacques Barzun, Edmund Wilson, Garry Wills, Ronald C. White, Jr., Harold Holzer, Douglas Wilson—and James McPherson.(10) But it is intellectually dishonest to write a book that says pretty much, if not entirely, what countless historians have been saying for half a century and what you yourself have been saying for at least three of those five decades without injecting any new insight, any depth of perception, into the subject. All in all, McPherson has not advanced our understanding of Lincoln as commander in chief. He has instead reiterated things said about Lincoln for more than five decades or more. It is as if fifty years of scholarship on Lincoln never took place. Or, worse still, it is as if McPherson and his publisher are banking on the fact that the public won’t know the difference and historians won’t dare criticize the anointed dean of Civil War studies.

Rather predictably, therefore, he dismisses the work of previous historians out of hand. It’s not simply that he casts T. Harry Williams into the starring role of straw man. In a remarkable (and false) statement made in the book’s preface, McPherson further claims that Lincoln’s role as a commander in chief has never been properly studied by historians or Lincoln biographers: “In the vast literature on our sixteenth president . . . the amount of attention devoted to his role as commander in chief is disproportionately far smaller than the actual percentage of time he spent on the task” (p. xiv). McPherson knows that this is not really the case (one can claim, for example, that the literature on any Lincoln subject, such as Lincoln the writer or Lincoln the attorney, is by rights disproportionately smaller than the amount of time Lincoln spent in those endeavors), but he nonetheless sets himself up as the ultimate authority on Lincoln as commander in chief and presents his book as righting a great historiographical wrong. He is perfectly satisfied to leave readers with the impression that he has singlehandedly planted a tree of knowledge in an otherwise barren desert. If McPherson were to be believed, no other historian—other than the mistaken T. Harry Williams—ever got the bright idea to look into Lincoln’s role as commander in chief. Or if they did, they did not pursue the subject in the correct proportion to its overall importance. Ergo, these previous efforts can be pushed unceremoniously aside.

Yet for all of McPherson’s bravado and audacity in relegating the work of previous historians to the sidelines, his own book is actually small and disconcertingly lightweight. At bottom, what’s so astonishing about Tried by War, given McPherson’s stellar reputation, is its overflowing and drenching banality. Not only is the book’s content stale, old hat, and duplicative of T. Harry Williams’s far better work, but McPherson’s writing—typically praised to the high heavens by reviewers—is conspicuously flat and dull. It’s not that the book is unreadable. But it is fairly boring and wearisome, made especially so because of the commonplace topics it covers and by the author’s unanimated prose. Despite all the praise he has received for his literary talent, McPherson’s writing has never—in any of his other works or in this one, either—come close to that of the two greatest Civil War wordsmiths, Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote.(11) In contrast, McPherson’s style has always been more pedestrian and prosaic; he tends to write straightforward, uncomplicated sentences that are dry and usually devoid of artistic flourishes of any kind. One must place him more fully in the “just-the-facts, ma’am” school of writers rather than among modern stylists who strive for color and verve, including the popular historians Catton, Foote, David McCullough, or Doris Kearns Goodwin. As such, he lacks the ability to limn characters, set the stage, paint the scene, or describe action with an eye toward carrying the story forward with any dramatic rhythm or pathos. Bathos is far more his forte.

One can spot this repeatedly in Tried by War with its frequent reliance on clichés and malapropisms. For instance, he says that Lincoln paid so much attention to the actions of Union Major General George B. McClellan because “as usual it [he?] was the squeaky wheel that got the grease” (p. 83). Striking precisely the wrong note, McPherson asserts that Lincoln hoped to gain the support of Southern Unionists who would come “out of the closet” (p. 103). Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, he says, using another off-kilter colloquialism, upset Union Major General George B. McClellan’s campaign plans by throwing “a monkey wrench into the operation” (p. 79). All analogies are imperfect, but this one doesn’t fit at all (isn’t the saying actually throwing a monkey wrench—or just a wrench—into the machinery and doesn’t it date from the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth?). In another passage, he writes that Lincoln and Stanton “practiced a sort of good cop/bad cop administrative style” (p. 69). He doesn’t explain what he really means by this, except to allude to something having to do with patronage appointments, and he certainly doesn’t explain why he’s using parlance from television crime dramas of the 1970s to describe the relationship between commander in chief and his secretary of war during the Civil War. [UPDATE: Since posting this review, I have discovered McPherson's meaning. He has borrowed, in fact, Richard N. Current's argument, first articulated by Ulysses S. Grant, that Lincoln tended to be lenient while Stanton followed the letter of the law. See Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York, 1958), 175-176. Of course, McPherson does not cite Current's book.] In other places, he repeats the hackneyed phrase “steep learning curve” (pp. 2, 20) to describe how Lincoln grew into his job. Striving to achieve a colloquial tone, he calls Union Major General John A. McClernand “a loose cannon” (p. 151). At another point, he says that Northerners were pushing the “panic button” (p. 242) and that public opinion in the North turned around “by 180 degrees almost overnight” (p. 244). In the space of two sentences (p. 246), he writes: “Elections are never over until they are over, however,” which is probably the book’s most absurd and funniest (unintentionally) sentence, and that Lincoln’s election chances in 1864 received “a shot in the arm” from the victories of Sherman and Sheridan in the field—which might be true in the vernacular of the twenty-first century, but in the Civil War a shot in the arm was something you didn’t want to get. I suppose we must be grateful for the fact that McPherson does not say that Lincoln liked to chill out at the Soldiers’ Home on the outskirts of Washington, but his colloquialisms do not lighten the tone of the book, as apparently they were meant to do; instead, they grate and annoy.

Although he alludes offhandedly in this book, as he did more explicitly in an essay first published twenty-three years ago, that Lincoln won the war with metaphors, McPherson himself mostly eschews metaphors in his own writing. At one point, he even chides Lincoln for mixing metaphors, when, in fact, no such mixture is apparent (p. 147). When McPherson does use metaphors and similes, the outcome is often strained and strange. In an attempt to convey how harshly Jessie Frémont spoke to Lincoln when the two met in September 1861, he says that Lincoln “could barely hold his temper as the sharp-tongued Jessie gave him the rough side of that tongue” (p. 59). Laying aside his completely indecorous phraseology, shouldn’t McPherson have said that she gave Lincoln the serrated side (do tongues have sides?) of her tongue? Might it have been better to reword this sentence? Probably so, but McPherson often uses wording that is quirky and stumbling. Twice, for instance, he awkwardly writes, in the space of only ten pages, that the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee returned to their “namesake state” (pp. 126, 135). More than once, McPherson fails to note the difference between a brigadier general, major general, and lieutenant general, preferring, in most instances, to refer to these high officers as simply generals. It’s a minor point, of course, and one that might have more to do with the copyeditor’s vices than with the author’s lack of precision, but one does get the impression that McPherson wasn’t paying much attention to details—particularly military details—as he dashed off this text.

To McPherson’s credit, he corrects T. Harry Williams’s oversight of failing to discuss how Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and issued the Emancipation Proclamation as war measures, but he does not go into much detail about those topics or any other subject in his book. (At one point, McPherson makes a curious comment about the Emancipation Proclamation. After observing that Lincoln decided to wait for a Union battle victory before making the preliminary proclamation public, he remarks that “it would prove to be a long, dismal wait” [p. 109]. Actually it was only two months, when McClellan repulsed Lee at Sharpsburg, Maryland, in September 1862—hardly a long wait at all.) Overall, McPherson is much more content in these pages to fly along at cruising altitude, pretty much on automatic pilot, without going into specifics or complicating the storyline with too many particulars—thus, the 85,000 words rather than a longer book, which would have taken him more time and effort to write. Nor is Lincoln always the focal point, as one might have reasonably expected. Instead, McPherson prefers to narrate his story as if he is floating above the events and its participants, rather than descending from his omniscient wild blue yonder to deal with his protagonists and antagonists from ground level, looking them in the eye. This view from the clouds works against any attempt McPherson makes to bring his human subjects to life. They always appear to be seen from the wrong end of a telescope. The lifeless quality of McPherson’s writing is also emphasized by his error in substituting drab description for enlightening explanation, a mistake frequently made by academic historians who attempt to write narrative history. But there’s no escaping the fact that the absence of life-like human characters is one of the book’s worst flaws.

In comparison, T. Harry Williams understood what McPherson seems not to know at all: that the key to telling the story of Lincoln as commander in chief—or, for that matter, Lincoln as a whole—is to be found in his relationships with other significant individuals and their concerns: in this case, as commander in chief, with his generals, cabinet members, congressmen, newspaper editors and correspondents, Northern citizens, and even ordinary soldiers. McPherson thinks the story is all about policy and strategy (and summarizing in breezy fashion the headline events of the war)—important elements, no doubt, but not the heart of the story. Lincoln attracts our attention because of his humanity and his remarkable ability to understand—and empathize with—the men and women, great and small, of his time. He appeals to Americans still because of his immense talent for dealing fairly with friend and foe alike. His magnanimity is now legendary. Yet McPherson mentions not a single instance of how Lincoln, as commander in chief, pardoned soldiers or visited the wounded in Washington hospitals. Ever so briefly, he does mention Lincoln’s “common touch” with soldiers (pp. 138, 249) and how he visited wounded at City Point close to the end of the war (p. 261). When Lincoln is described visiting the Army of the Potomac, as he did several times, McPherson tells only about the policy aspects of his visits, not the reactions of the soldiers themselves to seeing Old Abe, the commander in chief, in their midst. He says that a bond existed “between common soldiers and ‘Old Abe’” (p. 138), but he only tells us that it was so, he doesn’t show or explain what that bond was or how it manifested itself or even why it was important. Significantly, McPherson does not mention Mary Todd Lincoln once in the entire book, even though the visit of Mary’s half-sister, Emilie (Emily) Todd Helm, to the White House in 1863 (and again in 1864) caused a scandal that surely had an impact on Lincoln as commander in chief, especially given his extreme sensitivity to the pulse of public opinion in the North. Mary Lincoln also expressed her own opinions about cabinet members, generals, and other key players in the Northern war effort. Leaving her out of the story fully reveals how McPherson has no eye (or ear) for any of Lincoln’s intimate or casual relationships. Likewise, he frequently quotes John Nicolay and John Hay, two of Lincoln’s secretaries, but he keeps them entirely in the shadows.

In academic fashion, McPherson asserts that Lincoln “performed or oversaw five wartime functions [as commander in chief] . . . in diminishing order of personal involvement: policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations, and tactics” (p. 5). What he misses are two other aspects of Lincoln’s role as commander in chief that he actually discusses in this book but strangely does not otherwise name in his list as being among a commander-in-chief’s major tasks—personnel decisions and morale (both among the soldiers and on the homefront). As far as personnel actions go, Lincoln hired and fired a good number of generals and naval officers, not only for positions in high command but also as in the case of Major John Key, a McClellan subordinate who, in the autumn of 1862, offended the president by proclaiming in a private conversation that the war effort was simply a game that would keep the opposing armies in the field until exhaustion would necessitate a compromise to save slavery. Lincoln summarily cashiered Key for his remarks as an object lesson to other Union officers. To buttress morale, Lincoln used different techniques ranging from his visits to the Army of the Potomac, letters intended for publication in the press, and speeches or messages aimed at bolstering the spirits of the fighting men and the fretful citizenry of the North. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is simply the most famous example of the president’s attempt to explain the meaning of the war and steady Union morale (McPherson barely offers a passing glance at the Gettysburg speech, what must be considered Lincoln’s finest moment as commander in chief). McPherson’s failure to note these elements in his list of Lincoln’s tasks as commander in chief, even while discussing personnel matters and morale throughout the book, is another example of the author’s relaxed and slatternly approach to his subject. Thoroughness of thought or treatment cannot be said to be hallmarks of Tried by War.
According to McPherson’s scale of Lincoln’s diminishing personal involvement in the commander-in-chief’s five main tasks, he maintains that “the president did not become involved at the tactical level” (p. 8), except when he was sorely tempted to intervene after Gettysburg in the summer of 1863, when Major General George Gordon Meade failed to follow up his victory. If Lincoln was not involved in tactics, why does McPherson include it as one of the commander-in-chief’s primary endeavors? As it turns out, McPherson repeatedly demonstrates how Lincoln did become engaged in tactics (although the author seems to regard these instances as coming under the rubric of operations), including when the president suggested specific tactical approaches to various commanders of the Army of the Potomac (namely McClellan, Major General Ambrose Burnside, and Major General Joseph Hooker), but also when Lincoln, while visiting Fortress Monroe in May 1862, ordered a Union raiding party to land at Hampton Roads and conducted his own reconnaissance to determine the best beachhead for the landing. McPherson commendably delineates those occasions when Lincoln paid attention to tactics and recommended specific tactical plans to his generals, but it makes his flatfooted statement—that Lincoln “did not become involved at the tactical level”—totally bewildering.

In his preface, McPherson tells his readers that he has strived to combine “a narrative and analysis” to reveal “how—and how well—Lincoln met . . . the chief challenge of his life” as president and commander in chief. His brief account certainly demonstrates, in broad brush strokes, the “how,” but he never explicitly addresses the issue of “how well” Lincoln did his job (p. xv). He leaves it instead to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Just one example will suffice. McPherson argues explicitly that Lincoln with great determination faced the “steep learning curve” that required him to master the tasks of being the commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces during its worst military crisis. Along the way, as McPherson shows and often acknowledges, Lincoln made his share of mistakes, such as deferring too often and too long to McClellan’s ineffectual leadership of the Army of the Potomac.

But McPherson totally misses—and hence neither discusses nor analyzes—what might be considered Lincoln’s most glaring shortcoming as commander in chief. Indeed, McPherson, and a good number of other historians, have long praised Lincoln for the very quality that actually proved to be his worst trait as commander in chief—his relentless belief that destroying the Confederate armies and not capturing Richmond or other strategic cities in the South should have been the primary goal of Union generals. Why did this seemingly commonsense goal hinder Lincoln’s performance as commander in chief? The answer is rather simple: because the goal was totally unattainable by any of Lincoln’s generals and armies. Historians have often pointed out that Civil War armies fought increasingly bloody battles as the war wore on, driving up the number of casualties as the clashes became noticeably more fierce and brutal. But never during the entire war was one side or the other able to win a truly decisive victory. Union and Confederate armies hammered away at one another, but the result was either a stalemate (like Antietam) or a tactical victory in which the two sides retired, battered and limping, only to come together later on, after a period of rest and refitting, to fight yet another bloody, but indecisive, battle. Civil War scholars have long debated why this occurred over and over throughout the war, but one reason that most of them—including McPherson—have missed has to do with the nature of corps organization that was used by Union and Confederate armies (and most of the armies in Europe) at the time. As one student of Napoleonic warfare, Robert M. Epstein, argues: “Armies of the mid-nineteenth century were organized into corps, which gave them endurance and resilience. They were difficult to destroy in a single battle unless they could be surrounded. If not surrounded, they would soon revive and the campaign would continue.”(12)

If Epstein is right, and I believe he is, Lincoln’s constant refrain to his generals—“destroy the rebel army,” as he so instructed McClellan (p. 125)—was, in fact, misguided and could only result in frustration, as indeed it did, not solely because his generals (like McClellan) were obsessed with taking Richmond but also because competent generals like Meade discovered that their armies lacked the strength to deliver a truly crushing blow, a power punch of annihilation, against a resilient foe. It seems to me that this assessment of Lincoln’s performance, while critical of his high and unrealistic expectations, at least sheds some potentially provocative light on his experience as commander in chief that goes beyond the insipid estimate that McPherson supplies in his skimpy narrative. It also helps in part to explain why so many of his generals thought that strategic targets like cities or the conquering of territory were more important than trying to destroy enemy armies in the field, which they learned was nearly impossible to do until the very end of the war. Even then, only Major General George Thomas succeeded in destroying John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee at the battles of Franklin and Nashville in late 1864; or, one might justifiably argue that Hood himself, rather than Thomas, was the agent in his army’s destruction. McPherson does wonder whether or not “Lincoln had expected too much of his generals” (p. 95), and he notes that Lincoln himself finally realized his own mistake in hoping for the destruction of Lee’s army in the Gettysburg campaign (pp. 185-186).

Yet McPherson really believes, as he demonstrates throughout Tried by War, that Lincoln did not err in his desire to obliterate the enemy and that it was Union generals and their lack of competency, not Lincoln’s overly high expectations of them or of the outcome of battles, that caused Union military failures and prolonged the war. At least that was so, he says, until Grant emerged from a string of victories in the Western Theater and was appointed by Lincoln to serve as general in chief of the Union forces in the spring of 1864. But Grant (at Cold Harbor), and by extension his subordinate William T. Sherman (at Kennesaw Mountain), also discovered that their veteran armies could not destroy the enemy on the battlefield. Victory ultimately came out of a war of maneuver, rather than one of annihilation or attrition, that Grant and Sherman (with Lincoln’s blessing) waged against the Confederates rather than by fighting set-piece battles, as the events leading up to the sieges of Vicksburg, Petersburg, and Atlanta so emphatically proved. Similarly Grant did not destroy Lee’s army prior to Appomattox; he ran the Army of Northern Virginia to ground until it was surrounded and forced to surrender.(13)

McPherson also does not explain why Lincoln, if he was such an apt student of military affairs and such a sound reader of other men’s strengths and weaknesses, proved to be such a poor judge of character and military acumen in his generals, many of whom he commissioned. Nor does McPherson make plain why Lincoln tolerated incompetency in these generals as long as he did. Surely Lincoln, as McPherson does affirm, was faced with political realities that limited his options when it came to dealing with the likes of McClellan, McClernand, Frémont, and Major General Benjamin B. Butler. But political exigencies do not provide an explanation for why Lincoln put up with the gross inadequacies of Hooker, Major General Henry Halleck, Major General Don Carlos Buell—or, for that matter, the repeated fumblings of Burnside. It is mystifying—and McPherson tells us nothing to alleviate our puzzlement—why Lincoln could ever have considered the possibility of replacing McClellan with Major General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a sixty-three-year-old veteran of the Old Army, who turned down Secretary of War Edmund M. Stanton’s tentative offer, an offer that must have had Lincoln’s own approval. McPherson defends Lincoln’s personnel choices, including McClellan and other battlefield incompetents, by arguing that those generals looked good at the time and in most cases there was no one else who could have been elevated to those high commands. Perhaps that is how it looked to Lincoln at the time, but he had more options—and more talented officers—to chose from than he ever admitted or, perhaps, understood. Subordinate, but outstanding, generals such as John F. Reynolds and Winfield Scott Hancock in the Army of the Potomac were ill used and under-used before being killed, as Reynolds was, or seriously wounded, as Hancock was, in the battle of Gettysburg.

Nevertheless, McPherson maintains that Lincoln was a brilliant commander in chief because he understood what so many of his generals failed to comprehend—i.e., that the Union could militarily outweigh the benefit that the Confederacy gained by using its interior lines to create a concentration in space by implementing a strategy on two or more fronts simultaneously based on concentration in time (pp. 70, 269). But McPherson’s argument contains far too many holes. For one thing, the advantage of interior lines enjoyed by the Confederacy was diminished by the Union’s ability to muster greater resources of men and materiel, particularly in its adroitness of moving troops and supplies over long distances by ship and rail. Where railroads didn’t exist, the Union army constructed new ones to suit its needs. For another thing, if concentration in time was truly the essence of Lincoln’s strategy, he never got his generals to operate according to its principles before finally naming Grant as the Union army’s general in chief. Indeed, even Grant did not seem to be naturally predisposed to a strategy based on concentration in time. Grant’s successes in the Western Theater—Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga—were accomplished by taking the initiative (what many historians and biographers, including Jean Edward Smith and Michael Ballard, call his “determination”) and deftly outmaneuvering the Confederates (and forcing them into situations, like Vicksburg and Petersburg, where they did not wish to be), not by bringing about a concentration in time.(14) A few months before taking the reins as general in chief, Grant recommended to Halleck that the Union military should launch an amphibious operation against Suffolk, Virginia, with a later drive on to Raleigh, North Carolina—hardly an example of the principle of concentration in time. Not surprisingly, Lincoln and Halleck rejected the plan as rather harebrained, which it was, and, by so doing, helped Grant get his thinking back on track by focusing on—and developing concrete plans for—a war of maneuver against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (which Grant would supervise by traveling with the Army of the Potomac), General Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee (which Sherman would oversee), and Major General Jubal Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley (which Major General Philip Sheridan would eventually manage) once the spring campaigns got underway in 1864. McPherson makes no mention of Grant’s Suffolk plan or the Lincoln administration’s negative response to it.

At any rate, McPherson also does not explain that the ideas of concentration in space and time derive from the theories of Carl von Clausewitz. He does confess that Lincoln did not read Clausewitz (p. 6), but he doesn’t explain to his readers why the sixteenth president ignored such a mighty military mind. There is a simple answer: Clausewitz’s most famous tract, Vom Kriege (On War), was not translated into English until 1873. But what McPherson also doesn’t tell his readers is that a group of Civil War historians—Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William E. Still, Jr.—had emphasized the use of concentration in time by Lincoln and Halleck (and, by implication, Grant) in their book, Why the South Lost the Civil War, published in 1986 (a work that McPherson otherwise vilifies in Battle Cry of Freedom for its thesis that the Confederate defeat stemmed from a Southern loss of will).(15) Like so much else in McPherson’s book, his thesis about concentration in space versus concentration in time is derivative, not original; but perhaps his greatest crime in this regard is that he totally neglects to credit Beringer et al. (or, more specifically Archer Jones), for having contributed to his own understanding of Clausewitzian principles in the context of the Civil War.(16)

There is generally a danger in trying to apply anachronistic terms to any war, which Civil War historians—including McPherson—have learned as a result of their imprecise usage of the term “total war.” McPherson, who has steadfastly insisted that the Civil War was a total war has, nevertheless, refrained lately from calling it by that name, except when he is crossing swords with another prominent Civil War historian, Mark E. Neely, who has argued in an article published in 1991 and in a recent book, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction, that the Civil War was hardly “total” and that the combat was far more restrained than historians have generally allowed. In a nasty, almost hysterical review of Neely’s book in the New York Review of Books, McPherson acknowledged that he personally no longer uses the phrase “total war” to describe the conflict between 1861 and 1865, preferring instead to call it a “hard war,” by which he and other historians have borrowed a descriptive term Sherman once used in 1864 and that the modern historian, Mark Grimsley, skillfully appropriated for the title of his superb book about the war’s impact on Southern civilians, The Hard Hand of War.(17) In Tried by War, McPherson never uses “total war”; he now seems to like the term “full-scale war” (p. 267). The point is that McPherson is prone to adapting post-Civil War military concepts, whether from Clausewitz or Archer Jones or just about anybody, and imposing them anachronistically on the war itself, as he first did in his scholarship concerning the Civil War as total war and as he does in this book with his propositions about concentration of space and time, whether those concepts truly fit or not. The late Russell Weigley, a fine military historian who taught at Temple University, bravely suffered embarrassment and apologized in print for his sloppy scholarship when it was shown that his adaptation of Hans Delbrück’s annihilation-attrition/exhaustion model to explain The American Way of War was haphazard, blurry, and inexact, particularly with regard to his calling Grant an exemplar of annihilation strategy.(18) McPherson, however, has experienced no such epiphany. In Tried by War, he still paints the Civil War as evolving from a limited war to a “full-scale war” (read “total war”), just as he did as early as 1982 in the first edition of his college textbook, Ordeal by Fire. More to the point, McPherson unabashedly (or, perhaps, unknowingly) commits the fallacy of anachronism by calling Lincoln “Clausewitzian.” In fact, it would make as much sense to call Clausewitz "Lincolnian" as it is to call Lincoln "Clausewitzian."

Although he sets out in Tried by War to portray Lincoln as steadily climbing and mastering with each step “the steep learning curve” he faced as commander in chief, McPherson’s book instead shows us a rather different Lincoln: an uncertain, sometimes flailing, often insecure Lincoln moving across what he surely considered to be rocky—and perennially unsafe—terrain as he gingerly felt his way along as commander in chief. Inadvertently McPherson assembles enough evidence that depicts a Lincoln different from the one he thinks he is portraying, a Lincoln who often knew as little about what he was doing as his generals did. Frankly, that Lincoln is more believable than McPherson’s unerring commander in chief. But at the end of the day, it is McPherson’s purpose to demonstrate how the president rose to the challenge of the war and “stayed the course” (p. 266)—another of McPherson’s unfortunate choice of words, since current readers can only think of a far lesser president whenever that telltale phrase is used. In an epilogue, McPherson does concede that Lincoln made mistakes and his personnel choices were not always brilliant or wise. Nevertheless, he says, Lincoln learned from his mistakes. Maybe so. But why leave such judgments, sparse as they are, to a six-and-a-half page epilogue? (Indeed, most of the epilogue is really recapitulation anyway and not analysis.) McPherson bifurcates narrative and what little analysis exists in this book, apparently because he thinks the two cannot stand in an undivided house. Worse, he abandons his responsibility to render judgments about the past by, for example, leaving it to his readers to decide if Lincoln’s actions in the realm of civil liberties were draconian (a favorite McPherson word) or were offset “by the positive legacy of Union and emancipation” (p. 270). Are these questions too difficult for McPherson himself to answer? Does he really believe that his readers are better suited to answer them than he is? What does he believe the interpretive role of a historian should be? Apparently he thinks that a historian has the luxury of answering the easy questions and letting his readers wrestle with the hard ones, as he has so masterly done in this book.

How much better Tried by War would have been if McPherson had chosen to write it as an innovative example of how narrative and analysis are not mutually exclusive. How much better this book would have been if he had applied all of his vast knowledge of Lincoln and the Civil War to the undertaking instead of shortchanging his readers. How much better this book would have been if he had tried to muster some power behind his arguments, if he had piled on a veritable mountain of evocative detail, if he had offered a truly new vision of Lincoln and his times, and if he had attempted to achieve subtlety of analysis and complexity of argument instead of serving up a traditional, unexceptional book that has little to say. Tried by War fairly tries the reader’s patience and, to a considerable extent, insults the reader’s intelligence. It does not measure up to the high place McPherson occupies in the pantheon of Civil War historians. Indeed, it seriously calls his exalted position into question.


Notes

1. New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1988.

2. Among McPherson’s most important works are: The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J., 1964); The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York, 1965); Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (New York, 1968); The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, N.J., 1975; 2nd. ed., 1995); Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1982; 2nd ed., 1992; 3rd ed., 2001); Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988; illustrated ed., 2003); Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1990); What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1994); (Editor) “We Cannot Escape History”: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth (Urbana, Ill., 1995); Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York, 1996); For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997); (Editor with Patricia R. McPherson) Lamson of the Gettysburg: The Civil War Letters of Lieutenant Roswell H. Lamson, U.S. Navy (New York, 1997); (Editor with William J. Cooper, Jr.) Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia, S.C., 1998); (Editor) Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1999); Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York, 2002); Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (New York, 2003); (Editor) The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by the New York Times (New York, 2004); This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (New York, 2007). He won the Lincoln Prize for For Cause and Comrades in 1998. McPherson has also been a contributing author to several American history textbooks. Less significantly, he has also published a valise full of minor works, what might be properly considered commercial products rather than scholarly undertakings, including a children’s book and one for young adults on the Civil War. See, for example, Images of the Civil War: The Paintings of Mort Künstler (New York, 1982); (Editor) Battle Chronicles of the Civil War, 6 vols. (New York, 1989); Gettysburg: The Paintings of Mort Künstler (Atlanta, Ga., 1993); (Editor) The Atlas of the Civil War (New York, 1994); (Editor) The American Heritage New History of the Civil War, narrative by Bruce Catton (New York, 1996); (Editor) Encyclopedia of Civil War Biographies, 3 vols. (Armonk, N.Y., 2000); The Boys in Blue and Gray (New York, 2002); Fields of Fury: The American Civil War (New York, 2002).

3. See review, Bowling Green Daily News, March 30, 2008.

4. See my review in Civil War Regiments, 4 (1994), 99-102. The editors of this short-lived journal were so fearful that my negative review was unjust that they asked McPherson to reply and they published his response in the same issue that carried my review—an unprecedented practice in scholarly publishing. McPherson said he was vexed by my distortion “of a few points” while I ignored “its principal themes.” As for my other specific criticisms, McPherson called them “petty or misleading.” At the end of his response, he said: “If readers of his review happen also to read the book, I will be quite willing to stand the test of whose credibility [is] open to question.” So am I, but admittedly anyone trying to find copies of the obscure—and now defunct—journal in which my review appeared will experience some difficulty in their search.

5. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2005).

6. See McPherson, “A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief,” in Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York, 2008), 19-36.

7. McPherson, “No Peace without Victory, 1861-1865,” American Historical Review, 109 (February 2004), 1-18. This AHA presidential address broke with tradition by simply offering a long narrative excerpt from the author’s forthcoming Tried by War; McPherson made no attempt to put the story of Union war aims into a framework that might speak, as most outgoing AHA presidents try to do, to the shared professional concerns of the overwhelming majority of AHA members—i.e., historians who are generally not historians of the United States or specialists in Civil War history.

8. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952).

9. See, for example, Allen Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, 8 vols. (New York, 1947-1971); Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (Garden City, N.Y., 1956); Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 5 vols. (New York, 1949-1957). See also J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, rev. ed. (New York, 1969).

10. Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York, 2008); Jacques Barzun, “Lincoln the Literary Genius,” Saturday Evening Post, 232 (February 14, 1959), 30-64; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), 99-130; Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York, 1992); Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York, 2002); Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York, 2004); Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York, 2006); James M. McPherson, How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors, Eighth Annual R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture (Fort Wayne, Ind., 1985).

11. Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War, 3 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1961-1965); Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 vols. (New York, 1958-1974).

12. Robert M. Epstein, Napoleon’s Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern War (Lawrence, Kans., 1994), 3.

13. On Grant’s war of maneuver, see Brooks Simpson, “Butcher? Racist? An Examination of William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography,” Civil War History, 33 (March 1987), 63-83; Russell F. Weigley, “The American Way of War Revisited: Response,” Journal of Military History, 66 (April 2002), 531-533.

14. Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York, 2001); Michael B. Ballard, U.S. Grant: The Making of a General, 1861-1863 (Lanham, Md., 2005). On Grant’s determination, see also Harry S. Laver, “Determination and Leadership: Ulysses S. Grant,” in Harry S. Laver and Jeffrey J. Matthews, The Art of Command: Military Leadership from George Washington to Colin Powell (Lexington, Ken., 2008), 33-60.

15. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William E. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), esp. the chapter entitled “Union Concentration in Time and Space,” 236-267; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 855-856.

16. See, in particular, Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat (New York, 1992), 100. Prior to the publication of Why the South Lost the Civil War, a number of historians had already identified and discussed Lincoln’s idea of a Union strategy of “simultaneous advance,” which is the same strategic principle as “concentration in time.” See, for example, Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Champagne, Ill., 1983), 57, 89, 96, 124, 144, 148, 325, 387, 495.

17. Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Was the Civil War a Total War?” Civil War History, 37 (1991), 5-28; Neely, The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); McPherson, “Was It More Restrained Than You Think?” New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York, 1997).

18. Brian M. Linn, “The American Way of War Revisited,” Journal of Military History, 66 (April 2002), 501-530; Weigley, “Response,” ibid., 531-533.