The American Civil War was a war of dualities—North and South, Union and Confederate, slave and free—and never less so than when it comes to dual biographies. Pairing personalities—Lee and Grant, Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman, McClellan and Lincoln—has been one of the most unusual features of the limitless literature of the Civil War. Inevitably, the two wartime presidents, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, have garnered their own large share of such double-barreled studies: Brian Dirck’s Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865 (2001), Augustin Stucker’s Lincoln & Davis: A Dual Biography of America’s Civil War Presidents (2011), Bruce (and William) Catton’s Two Roads to Sumter (1963), Bruce Chadwick’s The Two American Presidents: A Dual Biography of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (1999).
To this congregation we must now add Nigel Hamilton’s Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents—not only the most recent but, at 707 pages of text, the heftiest. Even then, Lincoln vs. Davis describes only the first two years of the Civil War, from its untidy outbreak in April 1861 to the formal issue of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Almost as a teaser, Hamilton wonders at the close whether he ought next to "look at the way the war ended for the two adversaries, and what happened to the two men and their families thereafter."
This is an unconventional subject for Hamilton. But then, Hamilton has led an unconventional life, first in newspaper and book publishing, then in teaching, and then (beginning in 1978) writing biography. His first biographical adventure was, curiously, a dual biography of the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, which he followed with a highly successful three-volume biography of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and an even more successful three-volume study of Franklin Roosevelt as wartime president.
Nor has Hamilton lacked for unconventional judgments in these books. The first volume in Hamilton’s projected three-volume pursuit of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK: Reckless Youth (1992) was, according to one reviewer, so "gratuitous and unnecessary" in its accounting of Kennedy’s "extracurricular relationships" (and the follies of Kennedy’s father, Joseph) that the Kennedy family slammed shut the door to the family archives (and the possibility of ever completing the series). A biography of Bill Clinton in 2007 was panned by the New York Times for much the same reason. Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, wrote Michael Crowley, was concerned "more with psychodrama and sex scandals than with the mechanics of American politics" and based on "dubious anecdotes from sources of suspect credibility."
But anyone who, after this, expects a version of the wartime lives of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis wallowing in tabloid-style revelations will be greatly, but properly, disappointed. Lincoln vs. Davis is a remarkably straightforward and spaciously detailed account of the wartime political lives of the two most vital decision-makers of the American Civil War, an account which unfolds almost on a day-by-day basis.
At the same time, though, it is no exercise in historical tedium. As we could expect from someone who has lived a life in print, Hamilton is blessed with a vivid and swiftly rollicking style—the one-sentence paragraph, the calculated guess, the pitch-perfect timing. Above all, there is the quick-stroke uncovering of personality, sometimes in the most shocking terms. Lincoln is "often indecisive, and sometimes deeply depressed," occasionally "deceitful" with a "tendency to vacillate," and "solely concerned with garnering white support for the war" until it is nearly too late. Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, is "a serpent if ever there was one," a "pro-slaver" with "all the devilish, Iago-like skills of deceit, intimidation, manipulation and ambition." By contrast, Jefferson Davis "was neither shifting nor wavering," and based his "entire plan of Confederate survival to be a war of military defense," even in the face of the pleas of his generals. George McClellan, Lincoln’s first choice as a Union general-in-chief, is simply an "idiot" who "went completely to pieces" at his defeat during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862.
This narrative and these characters conform to a well-known pattern in Civil War interpretation, a pattern that places Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in very different and unexpected positions at the start of the war than the ones they occupied at the end. Davis begins the war as a plantation owner and slaveowner, a veteran Washington politician, and West Pointer, all of which presumably gives him quite an edge in expertise over Lincoln, a lawyer who never owned much more land than the plot surrounding his two-story home in Illinois, had never been anything of a soldier apart from some sketchy service in the Illinois militia, and had never served in any political office grander than a single, fruitless term in the House of Representatives.
In this way, Davis becomes an example of the professional swellhead who trips over his own shoelaces and loses the war, while Lincoln, the consummate amateur, rises to the occasion by sheer merit and turns out to be wiser, shrewder, and an infinitely more perceptive leader—and the winner. It is, in other words, Horatio Alger, transposed to politics. And to that extent, Hamilton tells us a very familiar story about America, as much as about Lincoln or Davis.
In some respects, however, Hamilton overplays that hand. Lincoln’s "refusal to address slavery" for the first two years of the war was "morally reprehensible" and "also a war-losing strategy," and underscores for Hamilton his lack of fixed purpose. Historians "are entitled to ask why President Lincoln had been so tardy in embracing emancipation as a military measure," and should entertain no excuses based on Lincoln’s fear that it would lose "faraway, neutral Kentucky" for the Union.
But this means making no reckoning with the strategic importance of a state whose borders embraced both the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, and whose secession might well have been the trigger for the Great Lakes states to form a confederacy of their own. And Lincoln’s most basic reason for this "refusal" was not a failure in morality, but an attentiveness to the law. Lincoln possessed no direct authority to deal with slavery because, in real terms, no such authority existed. Slavery was legalized by state, not by federal, law. Ironically, Lincoln really was, through his first months in office, trying to confect an emancipation plan; but it was one which enticed the four border slave states to emancipate their slaves by their own legislative action, funded by a congressionally financed buyout scheme he had devised.
Lincoln hoped that the buyout plan in the border states would set up a domino effect that would pull the Confederacy down, and in that he may have been too optimistic. But the real disappointment in the plan came from the refusal of the border state legislatures to take the buyout offer at all. It was only when that failure became apparent, a full year-and-a-half into the war, that Lincoln finally issued an emancipation proclamation, based on his status as commander in chief in time of war.
Hamilton wishes that Lincoln had been able "to summon the psychic will" to use "his constitutional war powers to deal manfully" with slavery far earlier, and without dilly-dallying with border state politics. The problem with this, however, is that presidents have no "constitutional war powers"; they have only that designation—commander in chief—and it was by no means clear what that entailed. Lincoln knew this, and knew that he was going out on a constitutional limb in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation at all. He had no guarantee that, even in the border states, maniacal slaveowners wouldn’t file suit in federal court, arguing that their "property" had been unjustly taken (which is the reason the border states are not included in the proclamation). He himself admitted that once the shooting had stopped, the courts would have to decide whether the Proclamation should stand or not. And the plaintiffs would have found quite a friendly hearing with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision.
This is one reason Lincoln initially worked for the state buyout plan; it would avoid appeals to the federal courts. It is also the reason Lincoln never ceased after the Proclamation in pressing for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery outright; only such an amendment would put the whole question beyond the reach of Taney and his ilk.
Hamilton is also unhappy with Lincoln on strategic grounds, and especially for listening too much to General McClellan’s plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond with a dazzling combined Army-Navy landing on the James River. Hamilton dismisses McClellan’s Peninsula campaign as "a Veracruz fantasy," a "wild expedition by water," and frankly wonders why Lincoln didn’t listen to Irvin McDowell’s agitation for a straight-up-the-middle overland campaign in 1862. This is an unusual judgment, since McDowell was responsible for the Union Army’s first disaster at Bull Run in 1861, and nearly responsible for a similar disaster at Bull Run again in 1862 (after which he was ignominiously shipped to San Francisco to sit out the rest of the war). Why anyone, much less Lincoln, should have listened to McDowell is a profound mystery.
A better reason for not playing with overland campaigns in Virginia was that the Union’s most successful military efforts up through 1862 really were combined-arms operations, on the Carolina coast, at Forts Henry and Donelson, at New Orleans, and at Vicksburg. In fact, the campaign that finally did capture Richmond in 1865 required Ulysses Grant to abandon an overland strategy and use the James River to clamp a McClellan-like siege around Richmond. Like Hamilton, I am by no means an admirer of McClellan. But the general’s problem was tactical incompetence, combined with a genuine moral vacuity over slavery, not strategic vision and certainly not idiocy.
Idiocy, however, often makes for dramatic storytelling. It does not, on the other hand, always do adequate justice to the actual human geography in the 1860s. Hamilton insists that the Emancipation Proclamation made it "impossible" for the European monarchies "to recognize the Confederacy, let alone intercede in the war." But it was the argument of Howard Jones that the Proclamation was exactly what might trigger an intervention, in the name of snuffing-out an American race-war—"a servile insurrection"—of the sort Britain had only just experienced in India in the Sepoy Uprising of 1858. Lincoln was not trailing behind emancipation with a furrowed brow; the wonder is that, with a war on, he was willing to take the risks he did.
There is also some question whether John Charles Fremont’s martial-law emancipation in Missouri in 1861 really enjoyed "a furor of acclamation in the nation’s press," and even more doubt whether Orville Hickman Browning was correct to cite the "law of nations" as justification for the confiscation of Southern slaves, since the prevailing international law textbooks insisted that slave property could only be impounded and was liable to be returned at the close of hostilities. The legal landscape of emancipation is a furiously complicated one. Unhappily, complexity does not always feed the intensity of great drama.
Hamilton’s fervor in relating this drama is the long suit of Lincoln vs. Davis, and makes it a powerful and entertaining read. But if history makes for good theater, it should never be more than good theater, and it needs a careful and deeply read reckoning with the bushes and briars of long-ago times before the actors can become genuinely believable.
Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents
by Nigel Hamilton
Little Brown, 777 pp., $38
Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in Princeton University’s James Madison Program and author, most recently, of Voices from Gettysburg: Letters, Papers, and Memoirs from the Greatest Battle of the Civil War (Citadel).