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9 Mr. Lincoln’s Victory at Gettysburg By the spring of 1863, as the Civil War cast a dark shadow across the land, it became more and more evident to soldiers and civilians alike that the terrible conflict between North and South had grown into a behemoth that no one could successfully control or constrain—a leviathan, like Melville’s great white whale, that set its own course and moved at its own speed and evaded every attempt to arrest its awesome power. Nothing in this awful war—what Abraham Lincoln called this “great national trouble”—had gone according to plan.1 The war had grown in intensity, in brutality, in the vastness of misery and loss that went far beyond what any American could have imagined in the passionate years that led up to the fall of Fort Sumter. When mankind turns to war, as the North and South did in 1861, it sets in motion events that cannot be predicted or harnessed. “War,” wrote Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century, “involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances . . . that no human wisdom can calculate the end.”2 Unanticipated consequences flow out of actions that in retrospect seem tiny and insignificant. The Civil War, like all wars, swept over the land and unleashed itself from the hands of the men who had started it—men who could barely ponder its depth and fury in the wake of all that it had laid to waste. Yet, in the spring of 1863 there was at least one man who believed that he knew how to end and win the war, one man who seemed to recognize— like Melville’s Ahab—the behemoth’s weakness, one man who thought it possible to take hold of the monster and slay it once and for all. Abraham Lincoln believed that if the Army of the Potomac could deliver a death blow to the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under the command of Robert E. Lee, the conclusion of the Civil War would at last be in sight. Lincoln grew into his role as commander in chief, just as all presidents must grow into their offices, but Lincoln’s conduct as head of the Union’s armed forces during the first eighteen months of the war was determined Mr. Lincoln’s Victory at Gettysburg 149 to a great extent by the anguish he experienced trying to get General George B. McClellan to commit himself and the Army of the Potomac to a strategic course of action. At first, trusting in McClellan’s expertise as a professional soldier, Lincoln gave his commanding general wide latitude in organizing the army, training its soldiers, and formulating campaign plans. But as McClellan’s notorious reluctance to commit his army to battle stretched from weeks to months, and from months to entire campaign seasons, Lincoln—and the rest of the nation—began to wonder if the commanding general of the Union’s finest army ever intended at all to fight the enemy on the battlefield. Throughout his ordeal with McClellan, Lincoln came to see that something more was required of him as commander in chief than simply waiting in Washington for his armies to march and for battles to be fought. As his anger rose steadily over McClellan’s recalcitrance, the president received stern urging from his conservative attorney general, Edward Bates, to assert himself more forcefully as commander in chief in accordance with the Constitution.“The Nation requires it,”Bates said to Lincoln,“and History will hold you responsible.”3 Apparently taking this advice to heart, Lincoln assumed a new posture as commander in chief and became increasingly more vocal in expressing his opinions to McClellan and pushing the general toward commencing an actual campaign against the enemy. From where McClellan stood, the president and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton were nothing but meddlers in army matters—civilians who knew precious little about how to fight a war or lead an army. To some degree, a good number of historians have also agreed with McClellan on this score, seeing Lincoln as interfering far too much and far too often in the operations of generals and armies in both theaters of the war, east and west. To be sure, McClellan and Lincoln had diametrically opposite views of how the military was supposed to function within the republic. Expressing a firm opinion held by some military men in his own time and by many other soldiers...

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