Lincoln Revisited by Simon John Y.;Holzer Harold;Vogel Dawn; & Harold Holzer & Dawn Vogel

Author:Simon, John Y.;Holzer, Harold;Vogel, Dawn; & Harold Holzer & Dawn Vogel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2007-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Lincoln and His Admirals

Craig L. Symonds

IN 1952, T. HARRY WILLIAMS PUBLISHED A BOOK THAT HAS since become a classic in Civil War military history, and which remains in print to this day. It is titled Lincoln and His Generals, and in it Williams posits that Abraham Lincoln was, in his words, “a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Those generals, incidentally, do not come off particularly well in Williams’s book. Though he has some good things to say about Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, Williams has mostly scorn for the likes of Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, William S. Rosecrans, and Don Carlos Buell, and he reserves his most vitriolic prose for George B. McClellan. In part, of course, this is because McClellan is such an easy target, but also it is because, of all Lincoln’s generals, McClellan was the most dismissive of the president, whom he referred to in private letters as “the original gorilla.”1

Williams admits that Lincoln had a steep learning curve as a military strategist, especially in the first few months of the war. Issues such as grand strategy and especially military tactics and doctrine were all new to him. And, inevitably, he made mistakes. But Williams insists that Lincoln was a good judge of men, and that he had a profound commonsense grasp of strategy. In particular, Lincoln’s persistent effort to get his generals to see the importance of attacking the enemy army rather than occupying strategic locations was a centerpiece of Lincoln’s strategic vision, and he struggled for years before he finally found a field commander who embraced it. Likewise, Lincoln understood almost instinctively that because the Union had a four-to-one manpower advantage over its opponent, the logical thing to do was attack simultaneously across a broad front so that the outmanned Confederates could not concentrate their armies against each Union force one at a time. A simultaneous advance by all Union armies would force the Confederates to choose which advance to contest, and meanwhile the other Union armies could move forward largely unopposed, thus achieving what some strategists have labeled a “concentration in time.” Or, as Lincoln later phrased it to Grant in a much-quoted, and typically Lincolnesque, aphorism: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”2

Williams’s book went a long way to strengthen Lincoln’s reputation among military historians. Williams’s Lincoln was not merely a gentle, awkward man who could turn a fine phrase, who bore malice toward none, who freed the slaves and then sought to bind up the nation’s wounds. He was all that, perhaps, but he was also a pragmatic and insightful grand strategist who understood, or at least who came to understand, the military art.

But what about naval warfare? Did Lincoln understand the admirals in the same way he understood the generals? Did he understand sea warfare as fully as he came to understand land warfare? As was the case in his early efforts to understand land warfare, Lincoln had a few early stumbles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.