The War Worth Fighting: Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency and Civil War America ed. by Stephen D. Engle (review)

The War Worth Fighting: Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency and Civil War America is a collection of essays that are broadly, though not exclusively, devoted to Abraham Lincoln and his presidency. Many of the contributions were originally presented as papers at a symposium held at Florida Atlantic University and were intended for a general audience. As a result, many of the nine essays are overviews of previously treated topics. However, four essays stand out for their originality and deserve special attention.

Mark Grimsley’s essay, “Lincoln as Commander in Chief: Forays into Generalship,” accepts the consensus view of Lincoln as skillful in directing the Union’s war policy, though Grimsley dissents from the accepted opinion that Lincoln consistently excelled in commanding the operational aspects of the war. Specifically, Grimsley is critical of Lincoln’s involvement in the Shenandoah Valley engagements in the spring of 1862, and especially of his decisions to divert the forces under the command of General Irvin McDowell from General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula campaign and to reassign some of McClellan’s other troops. According to Grimsley, Lincoln failed to see that adequate numbers of Union solders were already available to defend Washington, D.C. Additionally, Grimsley contends that Lincoln did not grasp the diversionary nature of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s movements in the Shenandoah or appreciate the critical importance of the quality of roads, the need for unity of command, and the difficulty of establishing simultaneous troop concentrations. At least in this instance, Lincoln did not prove to be a master general.

In “Legalities in Wartime: The Myth of the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” Mark E. Neely Jr. argues that the writ of habeas corpus has not always stood for individual liberty. Neely finds that during the Civil War, the writ was largely used to release underage soldiers from service in the army and to obtain child custody. In neither of these types of cases was imprisonment involved, and in neither was the issue of individual rights a question. Neely calculates that in only one of the fifty-six cases he studied was freedom of speech involved. The writ, he concludes, “had less to do with liberty than was previously thought” (p. 122). The Democratic Party created the myth that the writ involved individual freedoms for its own political purposes.

Kate Masur’s thoroughly researched and comprehensively argued essay, “Emancipation in Washington, D.C.: Battleground for Freedom and Reconstruction,” concentrates on African American history in the nation’s capital during the war. Masur first reviews the debates over emancipation both in Congress and among Washington residents. She describes Lincoln’s perspective on emancipation in the capital and especially his unrealized hope that emancipation would come only after a referendum of Washington citizens. Masur’s analysis of the capital’s African American community is her most important contribution. She recounts the community’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and describes fully residents’ cultural life, including their relief work in behalf of freed and escaped slaves and their efforts at military recruitment among the black population. Finally, Masur tells the story of the African American community’s fight for equal treatment.

The volume’s focus on Lincoln is best realized in Richard J. Carwardine’s superb essay, “Lincoln as Leader: The Visible Hand of Leadership at Home and Abroad.” A prizewinning authority on Lincoln, Carwardine argues that Lincoln’s concerns about his presidency were overcome “by his strong sense of self-worth” (p. 154). Carwardine identifies four major areas of Lincoln’s responsibility as a leader: the establishment of a vision for the Union, the maintenance of a policy to reflect that vision, the implementation of the policy, and finally, the ability to communicate that vision to the citizenry. Lincoln excelled in all of these areas, but...