Civil War Leaders

3 Key excerpts on "Civil War Leaders"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Savage War

  A Military History of the Civil War

  • Williamson Murray, Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, substantial portions of the Northern population, at least before Sumter, preferred to see the Confederate states go in peace and were hardly willing to support a great war for the Union. As the war dragged on, violent outbreaks of Northern resistance—the most spectacular being the New York City draft riots of 1863—to intrusive military mobilization underlined the limits of Northern commitment. But perhaps most daunting of all was the fact that no one in the North at the war’s outbreak had a clue as to the difficulties that the translation of the North’s advantages in population and economic strength into military power would confront, much less the price that a successful war for the Union would demand. The political and strategic conduct of the war would require extraordinary leadership and therein lay the great imponderable on which success or failure in the Civil War, as in all conflicts, rested.

  Contingency and chance are the great determinants of history. Of all the uncertainties those twin sisters throw in the way of those who conduct war, the most important is that of leadership. The dominant themes among academic historians today are those of social and cultural history, and one of the leading mantras is that leaders matter little in the course of human affairs—a supposition that only those who have spent their lives comfortably ensconced in the gated communities of our colleges and universities could possibly hold. They are wrong. As in all great human trials, leaders, political and military, drove events and outcomes throughout the Civil War. Their strengths and weaknesses, their wisdom and incompetence, their vision or myopia, their understanding of their opponents, or their dogged unwillingness to adapt to war’s actual conditions, among a host of other attributes, determined the conflict’s outcome.

  The great historian of the war, James McPherson, notes four key turning points on which the war’s course depended, listing the Union victory at Antietam, the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and Atlanta as four moments when the Confederacy could have gained victory. However, we can also find additional important contingent decisions by leaders at a smaller but profoundly significant scale of human action. For example, it is entirely conceivable that in the first half of 1862 Henry Halleck, through either jealousy or dislike, might have removed Grant from the war’s chessboard, revealing the worst faults of the insular and personality-driven world of the antebellum Old Army. Indeed, Halleck treated Grant so badly in the post-Shiloh period that only Sherman’s intervention and Grant’s return to independent command after Corinth’s fall prevented the future leader of the victorious Union effort from packing up and leaving the army with consequences impossible to calculate. Grant’s absence from the chessboard might well have led to Confederate victory.

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  Lincoln's Legacy of Leadership

  • G. Goethals(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R T E N Abraham Lincoln as War Leader, 1861–1865 Brian Holden Reid The literature on Abraham Lincoln’s war leadership is surprisingly sparse. The term is usually applied to denote his policies and strategy as commander in chief, as if directorship of military activities and lead- ership are synonymous. T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals remains unassailable as a survey of military operations. 1 Military his- torians are also inclined to construe “leadership in war” to mean the leadership of troops in battle or as an aspect of command, and a gap has opened up as to how the president as commander in chief deploys and sustains his forces in the field. Leadership deployed beyond the battlefield is just as important as that evinced on it; perhaps it is more important. The sources of Lincoln’s leadership have been delineated by recent scholars, notably Richard Carwardine, and military historians can profit by his approach. It is the sources of Lincoln’s style of war leadership that is the subject of this essay, especially the qualities and the attitudes that Lincoln brought to his presidency during a period of unprecedented trial and crisis in American history. The whole argument of this essay opposes the approach of some of Lincoln’s biographers that depict him as a “passive” creature. Lincoln waited upon events undoubtedly, but only so that he could take the action that he deemed necessary; the events did not shape the program. When elected in 1860 the prestige of the presidency had been so bat- tered by the secession crisis that the new president could have been forced into assuming the role of a “chairman of the board.” In short, a faltering performance might have ended the presidency as we know it. Brian Holden Reid 188 The president might still be the titular head of state but reduced to a figurehead as in Ireland and India, not a significant force in American governance. Abraham Lincoln not only revived the office but enlarged its authority.

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  The American Civil War

  A Handbook of Literature and Research

  • Steven E. Woodworth(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  This is compounded by a further issue. Because of the interlocking relationship between military com- mand and political policy, only the most important civilians have received sig- nificant attention. Many people served in civilian and military capacities during the war. REFERENCE BOOKS Over the years, a number of dedicated students of the war assembled com- petent, useful compendiums that introduce many nonmilitary topics. Colonel Mark Mayo Boatner's The Civil War Dictionary (1959) has provided to a gen- eration of scholars a fine one-volume collection of essays on almost every topic that could be of interest to anyone studying the war. Though limited by an inconsistent system of notation, Boatner's Dictionary has remained in print and has just been reissued. The late Patricia Faust edited the Historical Times Illus- trated Encyclopedia of the Civil War (1986). Faust assembled outstanding schol- ars who wrote detailed articles on battles, leaders, and other aspects of the war. Unfortunately, Faust died before the completion of the volume, and as a result, there are a number of minor, limiting factors such as a complete lack of notation for the articles. With Boatner's volume, The Encyclopedia of the Civil War is an essential reference. Confederate Civilian Leaders 235 Recently, a monumental four-volume reference work on the South during the war was edited by Richard N. Current with the able assistance of Paul D. Escott, Lawrence N. Powell, James I. Robertson, Sr., and Emory M. Thomas. The Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (1993) may well set the standard for reference works on the war for years to come. A legion of talented authors contributed detailed articles on a wide variety of Confederate topics, including civilian lead- ers, with appropriate bibliographic information. Valuable as a one-volume biographic source is Who Was Who in the Con- federacy (1988), issued as volume 2 of Who Was Who in the Civil War.

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