Review Essay:
Tearing Down Slavery and the Confederacy

John F. Marszalek. Lincoln and the Military. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. Pp. 160.

Edna Greene Medford. Lincoln and Emancipation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pp. 160.

 
John F. Marszalek, the Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Mississippi State University, and Edna Greene Medford, a professor of history at Howard University, have produced quite different yet complementary volumes for the Concise Lincoln Library, a series from Southern Illinois University Press that aims to provide brief, easily accessible books on various aspects of Lincoln’s career that are equally valuable to scholars and novices. The linkages between the military course of the war and the progress of emancipation ensure that these two works will plow some of the same ground from different perspectives, but in the end, Medford’s contribution seems to be the more successful.

In Lincoln and the Military, Marszalek provides a practically comprehensive overview of the many military issues confronted by the Republican president. As the author acknowledges in his preface, this work is in the tradition of nearly three-­quarters of a century of scholarship that dates back at least to T. Harry Williams’s 1952 Lincoln and His Generals and includes specific studies of Lincoln’s military leadership, biographies of military commanders, and campaign or battle studies.[1] Given this wide swath of literature, a bibliography identifying the most pertinent works would have been a boon to students new to the topic, but one has not been provided in this slim volume.

The major themes that emerge from Marszalek’s primarily chronological approach, aside from Lincoln’s ability to master a complex new field of knowledge, are his search for competent commanders, his need to direct those leaders to adopt the proper means, and his ultimate realization that to save the Union he had to destroy slavery. When it came to selecting commanders, the three critical choices were those men Lincoln appointed commanding general during the war: George McClellan, Henry Halleck, and Ulysses Grant. Marszalek clearly illuminates the president’s increasing impatience with McClellan’s unwillingness to use the Army of the Potomac over the winter of 1861–62, until finally relieving him of the office of commanding general just prior to the Peninsula campaign. For a few months thereafter, the president and his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, attempted to manage the war on their own, leaving McClellan to focus entirely on the Army of the Potomac, and demonstrating, at least for a time, Lincoln’s growing confidence in his own military leadership. It was in this period that Lincoln first tried, with only limited success, to implement a strategy of simultaneous advances by Union forces before turning to Halleck in the summer of 1862, bringing him to Washington as commanding general. Halleck, however, proved unable or unwilling to issue orders or, in some cases, even provide guidance to Union field commanders. According to Marszalek, only with Grant’s elevation to commanding general in March 1864 did Lincoln finally secure a war-­winning team: Halleck remained in Washington and functioned as a chief of staff, handling the administrative tasks of the army; Grant issued the orders and directly ensured that they were implemented in the eastern theater where he traveled with the Army of the Potomac under George Meade; and William Sherman, elevated to overall command in the west when Grant moved east, made certain that the new commanding general’s orders were followed in the western theater.

While Lincoln sought competent commanders, by early 1862 he was also trying to get his generals to adopt the core principles that Marszalek credits him with inaugurating—the simultaneous advance of all Union forces as well as a concentration on the destruction of Confederate armies rather than the seizure and occupation of particular geographic locations. The portrait that emerges here, however, seems somewhat one-­dimensional: Lincoln learns these realities, most of his generals do not, and he must teach them. That does a disservice to the men who led Union armies. Even McClellan, for all his flaws, proposed what Donald Stoker has called a “multi-­pronged offensive” to destroy southern forces everywhere at once, and he did so as early as August 1861.[2] Similarly, Marszalek depicts Grant and Sherman as just the men Lincoln sought, commanders who “would battle Confederate armies all over the nation at the same time” (78). But this portrayal ignores the raiding strategy developed by Grant to undermine Confederate logistical support that has been so ably described by Joseph T. Glatthaar in Partners in Command.[3]

There are other issues as well. The author’s attempt to be comprehensive sometimes becomes a distraction, tending toward a dry factual recitation. For instance, it seems odd in such a slim volume focused on Lincoln’s relation to the military in the Civil War to discuss the death of his young son, Willie, in February 1862, particularly when no attempt is made to connect the event with Lincoln’s role as commander in chief other than to suggest that the loss of his own child allowed the president to understand the grief felt by the parents of Union soldiers killed in the war. Similarly, half a page dedicated to a bogus Lincoln proclamation calling for an additional draft of four hundred thousand men in May 1864 that was quickly identified as a fraud and thus had little effect on the war, seems unnecessary. These and many other such discussions with seemingly little relevance to the volume’s main emphasis often distract the reader.

The largest shortcoming, however, is related to the work’s final theme: the linkage between the destruction of slavery and the salvation of the Union, as well as Lincoln’s slow realization of that connection. While this relationship is not in doubt, Marszalek never clearly explains it. Except in terms of the importance of African American soldiers to the Union cause, he merely asserts this connection, but in a series aiming at a wide readership, such an approach seems flawed. The omission is understandable, however, given the other volume in this same series under review.

Edna Greene Medford’s Lincoln and Emancipation examines the gradual evolution of Lincoln’s attitudes toward both the abolition of slavery and racial justice. The war ultimately drove him beyond his original Whiggish antislavery position that focused on containment, gradualism, and colonization, and toward immediatism and limited black suffrage. Critical to this transition and the ultimate destruction of slavery and restoration of the Union were the actions of African Americans, North and South, enslaved and free. As such, while Medford’s work serves as an introduction to the historiography of Lincoln’s evolving views on slavery, perhaps best represented by Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial, it also recapitulates the centrality of African American agency to emancipation, a theme summarized in works such as Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More.[4]

Medford begins by examining how Lincoln’s antebellum opposition to slavery emerged from the principles of the Whig Party and his own ideal politician, Henry Clay. As such, Lincoln, while an early opponent of slavery, was a conservative one whose hostility was grounded in the belief that the peculiar institution was holding back white America. While he personally favored gradual, owner-­compensated emancipation, followed by colonizing the former slaves, politically he supported the constitutional protections provided to the peculiar institution and championed a policy of containment until it collapsed on its own.

Lincoln’s essentially conservative antislavery position continued through the 1860 election and his early months in office. Though these views distanced him from the African American community, blacks remained hopeful in the opening days of the war because they understood slavery was central to the rising conflict. Moreover, as the war continued and escalated, Lincoln and other northerners were driven to reconsider how they dealt with the issue. The actions of enslaved people, particularly through their attempts to seize freedom by escaping to Union armies, wreaked havoc on Lincoln’s early attempts to win the loyalty of the border states with a hands-­off approach to slavery. Instead, these pressures from below forced him to reconsider his stance.

Ultimately, Lincoln proposed the Emancipation Proclamation for several reasons. Medford points to the border states’ refusal to adopt Lincoln’s gradual emancipation proposals, an insufficiency of Union manpower, northern abolitionist pressures, and the failure of George McClellan’s 1862 Peninsula campaign. Given this last reason, it is somewhat surprising that Medford does not draw on Glenn Brasher’s The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation to bolster her argument for African American agency, but limitations of length imposed by the series likely would have precluded the devotion of additional space to this source.[5] Nevertheless, according to Medford, the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s announcement of it also demonstrated his continuing conservatism on issues of race and slavery. He proposed voluntary colonization of anyone freed as a result of the war in an attempt to overcome white prejudice rather than arguing in favor of equal treatment, though once the final version of the document was implemented, Lincoln said little about colonization. Medford argues, however, that once the final proclamation was implemented on the first day of 1863, it was the action of African Americans who gave it meaning.

One of the key black reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation was the enlistment of approximately 186,000 African Americans in the Union military. This was made possible by the explicit authorization for black enlistment in the proclamation’s final version, and it helped provide the critical surge in manpower required by Federal forces as they fought to restore the Union and destroy slavery. Lincoln’s conservatism, however, continued; until black soldiers proved themselves in combat, he doubted their capabilities, and while he repeatedly threatened to retaliate against Confederate prisoners of war for any mistreatment of African Americans captured in Union blue, he never followed through on that threat.

While thousands of African Americans enlisted in the Union military after 1862, many of those in bondage seized on the opportunity for freedom the proclamation provided and did their best to make it real. Some ran away, though the vast majority remained with their owners. Many of those who stayed, however, altered their behavior in ways that undermined the peculiar institution, offering disobedience and defiance. Nor were these effects limited to those areas where the proclamation was in force. Even though it only applied to areas in active rebellion at the time of its implementation, enslaved peoples in border states and exempted areas escaped to freedom, enlisted, or weakened the institution of slavery through their altered behavior.

As Reconstruction began, African Americans pushed Lincoln even further from his conservative and gradualist prewar views on slavery. Medford clearly articulates the role of the black community in New Orleans putting African American suffrage on the Reconstruction agenda for the creation of Louisiana’s new state government in early 1864. It was in this period that Lincoln privately came to support restricted black suffrage, a position he took up publicly a little more than a year later, leading Medford to assert that Lincoln “believed he had extracted as much as he could from the former Confederacy” (92). Here she implies this was as far as Lincoln would have ever gone on the subject, even though historian Eric Foner writing on this same topic has suggested that had he lived, “Lincoln’s ideas would undoubtedly have continued to evolve.”[6]

Nevertheless, Medford has done a fine job charting the twin themes of African American actions and Lincoln’s evolution on the question of slavery, and the way that together they pushed the country toward a “new birth of freedom.” The only thing left unexplained is Lincoln’s seeming change of heart regarding what became the Thirteenth Amendment. Medford notes Lincoln’s changing approach to the amendment from a closed-­mouth one in early 1864 because, the author alleges, of his own preference for state action to his expenditure of “considerable political capital” on its behalf later in the year (99). However, she does not explain the shift. He could have simply been awaiting the right military or political climate, a view supported by the fact that it was at Lincoln’s behest that Senator Edwin Morgan introduced support for such an amendment at the Republican Party’s 1864 convention, prompting its inclusion as a plank in the party platform.

Overall, both Medford and Marszalek have produced useful and complementary volumes. Marszalek has produced a workmanlike survey of all the military concerns that Lincoln had to manage while president that, while somewhat overburdened with unnecessary details, is suitable for an undergraduate introduction to Lincoln’s role as commander in chief. On Lincoln and emancipation, Medford provides a nuanced view that both demonstrates Lincoln’s evolution from gradual, compensated emancipation to immediate, universal abolition and incorporates the active role played by African Americans in winning their own freedom. Because of the links between slavery and the war, both volumes cover some of the same ground, and both will stand as solid introductory surveys for their respective topics.

1. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Vintage, 1952).

2. Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 56–60.

3. Glatthaar, Partners in Command: The Relationship between Leaders in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994).

4. Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

5. Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

6. Foner, Fiery Trial, 334–35.