Did Lincoln Blunder Into War?

A new book takes a critical look at the sixteenth President.

“Was it wise to meet secession with extralegal force? Was the preservation of the national borders worth the precedent of the chief executive unilaterally initiating warfare, arbitrarily suspending civil liberties, jailing thousands on suspicion or political whim, using the military to manipulate elections, and even overthrowing the legitimate governments of states?” These are some of the provocative questions the Civil War historian William Marvel asks in Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (Houghton Mifflin, $30), a new account of the war’s beginnings that casts President Lincoln’s leadership in a starkly critical light.

According to Marvel, Lincoln did little to avert war; indeed, he welcomed and hastened the outbreak of hostilities. The book questions not only Lincoln’s actions but also the basic aims of the Civil War, asking, “Would the bifurcation of the United States have been worse than the war waged to prevent it?”

That question would certainly seem to raise the matter of slavery, but rather than focus on that, the author emphasizes mistakes by the Union’s military and political leadership. He faults Lincoln for employing authoritarian techniques in border areas like Maryland, where, he argues, they only inflamed preexisting anger. In Baltimore, he writes, the President “initiated a cycle of increasing resentment and repression that Lincoln could have avoided by permitting the expression of displeasure in a province he had all but won.” If the President had tolerated Marylanders’ dissent, rather than attempting to quash it, their Confederate sympathies might never have given rise to actual violence.

Marvel also looks at destructive behavior on the part of the federal army, in particular the actions of one Nathaniel Lyon—“an insubordinate, self-righteous psychopath”—who provoked and attacked Missourians in a series of incidents that helped expand the war onto the plains of the West. The United States descended into war, Marvel argues, not only because of Confederate rebellion but also, and perhaps even primarily, because of federal immoderation.

The book offers a striking portrayal of the chaos at the start of the war. For soldiers, politicians, and ordinary civilians, the collapse of the Union was not just confusing but terrifying. Channels of communication were unreliable, with government agents muddling their messages as they tried to disguise them in rudimentary code. Chains of command frequently failed to function. When Lincoln decided to relieve Lyon of his duties, the officer clung to power by claiming that Lincoln’s orders were unclear.

In the realm of popular opinion, rumors and myths took precedence over hard news as horrifying stories ran through the North of “a Confederate command known as the ‘Black Horse Cavalry,’” and unsubstantiated reports spread of grotesque atrocities on the battlefield. In the heat of battle, confusion was similarly intense as the lack of standardized uniforms led to numerous friendly-fire incidents, as well as mix-ups in which Northern soldiers wandered unwittingly into the Confederates’ range of fire, thinking that the gray uniforms of the Southern soldiers were those of Union conscripts. As Marvel’s narrative describes them, errors and misconceptions such as these were common and had irreversible consequences.

Though Mr. Lincoln Goes to War contains a number of useful and surprising pieces of history, even beyond those already described, it also possesses a few persistent tics. For instance, he has a habit of making oblique references to historical figures he never fully describes. In one case he mentions the writing of “an Ohio attorney who would one day occupy the White House” but makes his reader go hunting through the footnotes to discover that this anonymous Ohioan was Rutherford B. Hayes. He seems almost to prefer flaunting his superior knowledge over sharing it with his reader.

More seriously, there is a frustratingly circular quality to the logic of Mr. Lincoln Goes to War. In analyzing the Battle of Bull Run, for example, Marvel writes that Lincoln “owned an indirect but ironic share of the responsibility” for the Northern loss. “His April 15 appeal for militia had given the Confederacy the very troops that won the first battle.” Had Lincoln not called up an army, the argument goes, the South could not have summoned a force large enough to defeat the Union at Manassas. This reasoning is obviously limited, though, as Lincoln would not have been able to mount a campaign against the Confederacy without making a call for troops. Reduced to its logical boundaries, Marvel’s point boils down to the assertion that the Union would not have lost at Bull Run if neither the Union nor the Confederacy had deployed troops. This may be true, but it is hardly illuminating.

Mr. Lincoln Goes to War is an interesting, offbeat look at a central moment in American history. But in the final analysis it fails to seriously reconsider Lincoln, as its title suggests it might. There is no character portrait of the President. There are forceful assertions about Lincoln’s failings and mistakes, but the narrative presents Lincoln as merely one of many actors driving events. We hear about “Abraham Lincoln’s war,” but the impression that emerges is of a conflict driven by confusion, widespread distrust, and a diverse cast of aggressive personalities.

Although the author effectively ties Lincoln to civil rights violations in the border states, the most egregious offenses, like Lyon’s, seem only tenuously linked to the White House. Marvel’s book swipes at the sixteenth President’s reputation, but it never fully lands its blows.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.