WASHINGTON — It doesn’t look like much, this modest patch of green in Washington. There’s a flagpole, a couple of Civil War artillery pieces and a few yards of carefully reconstructed earthworks. Stand behind those Fort Stevens earthworks with James McPherson, however, and you can time-travel back to the bloody summer of 1864.
And imagine this: The tall guy with the gaunt face and the awesome responsibilities is standing right beside you.
“Lincoln was here, and he watched real infantry fighting going on out there,” McPherson says. He gestures past Rittenhouse Street toward Georgia Avenue, which was open farmland at the time.
The occasion of the fighting was the sudden, scary move toward Washington of 15,000 Confederates under Gen. Jubal Early. Lincoln rode out to Fort Stevens on both days of the encounter, July 11 and 12, to observe. Each time, someone had to tell him — politely or otherwise — to keep his fool head down.
The nation’s best-known Civil War historian has the silver hair befitting a man of 72 but the energy of someone at least a decade younger — a payoff, perhaps, for a lifetime devoted to work he loves.
He has driven down from Princeton, N.J., as part of the tour for his latest book, “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.” And he has been lured to Fort Stevens because it’s as good a place as any to ponder the way Lincoln performed that sometimes overlooked role.
By July 1864, McPherson says, the president “had been sending men into combat for three years.” In the course of those years, he had “learned that the professionals weren’t that much smarter than he was in terms of formulating strategy, even operations, even tactics.” In the aftermath of Fort Stevens, Lincoln saw the professional soldiers fail him once again.
Over and over, when a Confederate army took the offensive, Lincoln saw it “as an opportunity rather than a threat,” McPherson says.
Over and over, most famously after the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, slow-moving Union generals failed to destroy their overextended enemy. Now here was another target of opportunity.
Once Early’s surprise thrust had been blocked (by troops dispatched from Virginia by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant), Lincoln wanted him taken out.
Didn’t happen.
In the end, McPherson says, the frustrated president did get some results. He demanded a meeting with Grant, who put the youthful Gen. Philip Sheridan in charge of a reorganized force that eventually destroyed Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley.
“Coming off the victories of the second half of 1863,” McPherson says, “and now with Grant and Sherman in top commands, there was widespread expectation in the North that these two heavy hitters were going to win the war by the Fourth of July.” But both appeared bogged down, with Grant taking horrific losses in Virginia.
Then came the Early raid. Northerners went to bed one evening “thinking they were about to capture Richmond, and suddenly they find that the Confederates are threatening Washington.”
Lincoln’s political opponents, the Democrats, nominated Gen. George McClellan for president and adopted a platform that called for an armistice so peace negotiations could begin.
Meanwhile, Lincoln was under enormous pressure to drop the second of his stated preconditions for any negotiations: that the South agree to restore the Union and abolish slavery. He refused. “What he’s saying in August of 1864,” the historian explains, is that “he’d rather be right than president” on the issue of emancipation.
As McPherson writes in “Tried by War,” this decision was both principled and practical: “Lincoln pointed out that one hundred thousand or more black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union,” and he would be “damned in time and eternity” if he betrayed them.
Fortunately for Lincoln, Sherman captured Atlanta in early September and, before long, Sheridan was winning dramatic victories in the Shenandoah. Lincoln’s re-election was assured.
McPherson’s first book was on the abolitionists. After it was accepted for publication, he got a call from Andre Schiffrin at Pantheon Books.
In 1988, he published a thoroughly researched yet readable one-volume history of the Civil War era — and hit the kind of jackpot most academics can only dream of.
“Battle Cry of Freedom” sold vastly better than expected, won the Pulitzer Prize and, along with Ken Burns’ famed public television documentary, which aired in 1990, helped spark a revival of interest in the Civil War.
McPherson is reluctant to claim credit.
“There had to be something out there to start with. I struck a vein,” he says. Nonetheless, “Battle Cry” established him as the pre-eminent historian of the Civil War.
Asked about McPherson’s stature, University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher says simply, “He’s the man.” Gallagher also points to the importance of McPherson’s current subject. Analysis of Lincoln’s role as commander in chief, he says, is seriously underrepresented in the “vast outpouring of books” being published in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, on Feb. 12, 1809.
“This really is the main thing Lincoln did during the Civil War,” Gallagher says. “If he doesn’t preside over winning the war, then nothing else happens.” Yet the most significant previous treatment of the subject — “Lincoln and His Generals,” by T. Harry Williams — is more than 50 years old.
The reasons for historians’ neglect of Lincoln as commander in chief are historical themselves.
By the mid-1980s, as McPherson was working on “Battle Cry of Freedom,” social history had superseded political, diplomatic and military history among academic historians. Many were hard at work on the previously ignored stories of nonwhite, non- elite, non-male Americans. Military history was especially marginalized, in part because of fallout from Vietnam.
“Battle Cry” tried with considerable success to treat social, economic, political and military issues as conjoined. Since then, McPherson is happy to report, history has become more integrated.
“Military history is now seen as much more important,” he says, “and much of the military history of the Civil War is really social history.”
Nonfiction
Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, by James McPherson, $35
