Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors by Stephen D. Engle (review)

In Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors, Stephen D. Engle has written the definitive monograph on the relationship between federal and state government during the Civil War. Engle's ambitious project follows the careers of dozens of northern wartime governors, each of whom walked the perilous tightrope of balancing federal war aims with home front realities. Governors strove to supply the men and resources necessary to fuel the Union war machine to a swift victory while maintaining sufficient popularity for government policy to avoid political defeat themselves. In this process, Engle contends, the war governors increased the power of the state executive branch and forged a model for a cooperative, rather than combative, state-federal relationship that ultimately won the war.

Engle explores the various roles that governors played in the conflict, from maintaining popular support for the war at home to lobbying President Abraham Lincoln to expand war aims. But the chief war responsibility for every governor was rallying men from his state to enlist in the Union army. At first, so many volunteers turned out that neither governors nor the federal government could provision them, but as the war dragged on and early enthusiasm waned, governors wielded the carrot of enlistment bonuses while attempting to fend off the looming stick of conscription.

Furnishing men for the front was just the start of the governors' role in facilitating Union victory. When the soldiers mustered in, governors supplied them with clothes, weapons, and food. When they fell on the battlefield, governors provided them with medical care and comfort, often arriving personally just days after a clash to view the carnage firsthand and distribute aid. For their trouble, governors enjoyed overwhelming support from their soldiers and made sure to arrange furloughs when election season rolled around.

Tracking the progress of the war from month to month, Engle's narrative reveals the Union war effort as a lumbering, many-legged beast, with states and constituents at times rushing far ahead of the federal government in their demands for vigorous prosecution of the war and at other times lagging behind federal policy. From the vantage point of the state governors, who were constantly torn between competing national and local exigencies, the cooperation and ultimate victory of the North looks miraculous rather than inevitable.

No issue divided the northern states more than the Union's stance on slavery and, later, black enlistment. New England governors, notably Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew, urged Lincoln to pursue emancipation as a war aim immediately and were frustrated when the president countermanded John C. Frémont's 1861 emancipation edict in Missouri. Lincoln was, of course, desperate to avoid driving border states from the Union by attacking the institution of slavery, but building a united fighting force composed of citizens of both free and slave states was no easy task. Having alienated New Englanders by delaying emancipation, Lincoln found that white citizens of western states like Indiana were furious that freeing enslaved African Americans had become part of the Union army's mission once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Governors, caught in the middle of this tug-of-war, attempted to garner support for the president's policy by casting emancipation as the best mechanism to strike at the heart of the Confederacy and shorten the war. Nevertheless, guarding against burgeoning secret societies on the home front in order to avoid a rebellion within a rebellion became a major concern for governors outside New England. Their own political fortunes turned on the national administration's popular support as well as the army's success, neither of which would prosper without a constant influx of soldiers from the states.

With so many factors at play, and so many governors among its large and rotating cast of characters, Gathering to Save a...