by Michael Burling
Game
Upon being inaugurated as President of the United States
Abraham Lincoln found on his desk a letter from Major Robert Anderson,
commander of the garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Anderson explained that in six weeks the
garrison’s supplies would be exhausted, and the fort would need to be either
resupplied or surrendered. It was the
first of many such decisions that Lincoln would ultimately face in his years in
the White House.
Michael Burlingame, noted Lincoln biographer and historian,
has written a volume in Southern Illinois University Press’ series The Concise
Lincoln Library. In Lincoln
and the Civil War, Mr. Burlingame presents a compact overview of Lincoln’s
presidency during the Civil War.
Beginning with Lincoln’s election, Mr. Burlingame’s linear
narrative moves quickly but thoroughly through the “Secession Winter” to his inauguration. All the while Lincoln tried to do nothing
that would provoke the outbreak of open hostilities. Deciding to resupply and not re-enforce Fort
Sumter was a masterful decision; placing the blame on the Confederacy for
firing the first shot of the war.
In the next chapter, “The War Begins,” Mr. Burlingame covers
the daunting challenges Lincoln faced in raising, training, and arming an army
to put down the rebellion, and its first battle at Bull Run.
Mr. Burlingame follows Lincoln as he methodically searches
for a commanding general who will lead the Union army to victory; hiring and
firing, McClellan, Halleck, Burnside, Hooker and Meade. Finally with Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln found
a man who knew what needed to be done to end the war, and who was not afraid to
do it.
One of the largest decisions that faced Lincoln was what to
do about slavery. “If I could save the
Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by
freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some
and leaving others alone I would also do that,” Lincoln famously replied to
Horace Greeley. Mr. Burlingame traces
Lincoln’s evolving thoughts on slavery from the deportation and colonization of
free blacks, to a gradual compensated emancipation, and finally through to his
greatest achievement, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Among the last decisions of the war would be how to end
it. Lincoln wanted a peaceful end to the
war, and therefore encouraged Grant and Sherman to offer the Confederate armies
generous terms under which to surrender.
By not prosecuting the leaders of the Confederacy, and allowing the
Confederate soldiers return to their homes and their lives unmolested Lincoln hoped
to secure a peace, which had he lived would have made the reconstruction
process easier.
Lincoln and
the Civil War is a well researched, compact history, of Lincoln’s
leadership through the United States greatest tragedy.
Michael Burlingame is the holder of the Chancellor Naomi B.
Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of
Illinois-Springfield, and the author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life and The Inner World of
Abraham Lincoln.
ISBN 978-0809330539, Southern Illinois University Press, ©
2011, Hardcover, 176 pages, End Notes & Index. $19.95
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