Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (review)

Tom Wheeler's Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails delivers a fresh telling of the Civil War as it guides readers via the small but significant aperture of Lincoln's telegraph correspondence to his field generals. This not only provides a unique understanding of the war, it also sheds considerable light on Lincoln's developing leadership skills and dogged initiative as he embraced the emerging communications medium of the telegraph to assert his executive will on the chaotic events of the battlefields, thus leading what some have called the first "modern war" (p. xvi). As much a book about effective leadership as a history of the Civil War, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails weaves a thought-provoking picture of one of America's defining moments as it pulls together for the first time the historical threads of communications technology and Lincoln's Civil War command.

Wheeler traces Lincoln's development as a leader via close analysis of his evolving use and understanding of the telegraph as a leadership tool, breaking this development down into three phases: early, middle, and late war. During his first fourteen months in office, Lincoln seldom uses the telegraph. During the next twenty-two months, however, he begins to realize the power of the telegraph as a tool of war and injects his thoughts directly into military affairs via telegraphic communication to battlefield generals. Finally, in the last thirteen months of the war, learning from his nearly three years of experience using the telegraph, Lincoln demonstrates his savviest implementation of this technology. He continues to use the telegraph frequently, but more importantly, he begins to understand the nature of the medium and to adjust his rhetoric to more effectively communicate his thoughts to the battlefield. Wheeler's close study of Lincoln's telegraphic communication supports his astute assertions that this new communications medium provided a leadership opportunity never before employed in war, and that Lincoln's attention to this opportunity and the need to exploit it made him a superior leader—and ultimately gave the Union army the competitive edge it needed to prevail.

What is even more compelling about Wheeler's book is the obvious parallel that emerges between Lincoln's revolutionary "lightning message" warfare tactics and today's "information revolution." Indeed, Wheeler describes how many of Lincoln's telegraphs were coded in such a way that the recipient would receive, along with the message, instructions for how to decode it; this bears a striking resemblance to information packets decoded by today's high-tech web browsers. Wheeler's parallel makes his study all the more salient, for, along with its historical insight, it delivers a model for using communications technology to effectively manage one's own battlefield. Whether that battle equates to modern war, office politics, or student squabbles is irrelevant; the leadership methods Lincoln pioneered during the Civil War are perhaps more universally applicable now than they have ever been.

In a thin volume with fewer than two hundred pages of prose, Wheeler offers an incisive history of the Civil War that gleans startling lessons from a familiar moment in America's history. If Wheeler's study lacks anything, it is further development of what it sets out to establish. But it makes up for this in the thoughts it will provoke in readers—thereby extending the study past the limits of the text, much as Wheeler extends the lessons of the Civil War past the confines of their historical moment to offer valuable insights to contemporary society.