LINCOLN, ABRAHAM

(b. February 12, 1809; d. April 15, 1865) Sixteenth president of the United States (1861–1865).

Abraham Lincoln's life was lived under the shadow of war. During his lifetime he would witness three major American wars: the War of 1812, the War with Mexico (1846–1848), and the Civil War (1861–1865).

Born in Kentucky to impoverished parents, Lincoln migrated with his family to Indiana and then to Illinois, where he left his father's farm in 1831 to settle in New Salem, Illinois, and try his hand unsuccessfully at business. In 1832, the Sac and Fox chieftain, Black Hawk, attempted to resettle his followers on lands near Rock Island, Illinois, which they had previously vacated by treaty. Governor John Reynolds called out the Illinois militia, and New Salem's militia company was sworn into state service on April 28, 1832, with Lincoln elected as captain for thirty days' service. He re-enlisted two more times in other units, and was finally mustered out on July 10, 1832, near Black River, Wisconsin, without having seen action.

The Black Hawk War would prove to be Lincoln's only direct experience of soldiering. In 1836, after years of private study, he was licensed as a lawyer—a profession in which he had considerable success. He aligned himself politically with the American Whig party, and endorsed the Whigs' ideological suspicion of the military, a suspicion aggravated by the popularity of General Andrew Jackson, the victor of the Battle of New Orleans (1815), as the figurehead of the rival Democratic Party. When Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1847 as the only Whig in Illinois's congressional delegation, he joined with Whig representatives from other states to criticize President James K. Polk's conduct of the War with Mexico.

In 1856 Lincoln joined the then-new Republican Party and two years later he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, engaging in a series of debates on slavery that attracted wide attention. As he rose to national prominence and became president in 1860 as the Republican candidate, he was increasingly forced to confront the likelihood of conflict over the slavery issue. That likelihood became a reality after the slave-holding states of the South formed the Confederate States of America and opened fire on the United States garrison in Fort Sumter. From that point onward, the Civil War demanded that Lincoln devote his energies to precisely the military affairs he liked least.

Lincoln had no experience in developing strategic doctrine, and the program of self-education he set for himself by reading textbooks in military science never raised his sights above conventional, and sometimes deeply-flawed, notions of strategy. On a few occasions, he even suggested taking field command of the armies; May 9–10, 1862, he personally participated in an amphibious expedition that captured Norfolk, Virginia. However, his real genius lay along the lines where political and military issues met, and as the constitutionally mandated commander-in-chief of the United States army and navy, he turned his attention to four major areas of war-related policy-making.

legal status of the war

Lincoln maintained that the secession of the Confederate states was a constitutional and legal nullity. The federal Union, as shaped by the Constitution, did not allow individual states to unilaterally withdraw from the Union. Once the Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter April 12–14, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation, calling on

the states for 75,000 militia to suppress what he described (using the words of the Militia Act of 1792) as "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Hence, Lincoln regarded the Civil War, from the viewpoint of law, strictly as a local insurrection, rather than a declared war between two sovereign and equal nations.

This, however, posed serious problems in international law. Captured Confederates could, as insurrectionists, be indicted as traitors and executed under civil law; but in practice, both Union and Confederate armies treated captives as prisoners of war, organized prisonerof-war camps and exchange policies, and in general behaved as though a normal state of belligerent war existed, rather than a civil insurrection. Much more important was the legal problem that emerged when Lincoln sought to impose a naval blockade on the Confederacy. On April 19, 1861, Lincoln announced the imposition of a complete "efficient" blockade of the Confederacy's ports "in pursuance of the laws of the United States and of the law of nations," which authorized capturing ships attempting to run the blockade, under whatever flag, and turning them over to admiralty courts for sale as prizes of war. However, according to the Paris Convention of 1856 (the first attempt by nations, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, to establish mutually-agreed-upon codes to govern international war) full blockades could only be imposed between sovereign belligerent nations—which was exactly what Lincoln denied that the Confederacy was.

This was a calculated risk. On May 13, 1861, the British government took advantage of the contradiction and extended recognition of belligerent rights to the Confederacy; and in 1863 the United States Supreme Court, ruling on a major suit known as Prize Cases, came within one vote of striking down Lincoln's blockade proclamation as unconstitutional. But the efficiency of a blockade in choking off supplies to the Confederacy was, in Lincoln's mind, worth the risk.

military personnel

The United States Army had only 16,000 men on its rolls in 1861, and only four of general officer rank. Lincoln sought to deal with the rebellion by calling on the states for the use of their militia alongside the regular army. But the state militias were clearly unequal to the task of serious campaigning, and in May Lincoln issued a call for 42,000 so-called volunteers. The use of volunteers rather than militia as a supplement to the regular army was first resorted to in the War with Mexico, and involved the organization and enlistment by the states of soldiers who were then mustered into federal service.

The army's senior major general, Winfield Scott, was unwilling to parcel out the regular army's cadre of professional officers to lead the volunteer units. This, together with the comparatively small number of experienced former officers who returned to military service for the war, forced the commissioning of officers at all ranks who had little experience or who had conflicting political convictions. This created embarrassing confrontations for Lincoln, especially with Major General John Charles Fremont, whom he cashiered for imposing sweeping martial law decrees (including slave emancipation) in politically sensitive areas; and with Major General George McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom he cashiered for failing to press military opportunities against the Confederates. Not until 1864, when he offered the post of general-in-chief to Major General Ulysses Simpson Grant, did Lincoln find a senior commander sufficiently competent to bring the war to a successful close. By that point, conscription had been added as a means of swelling recruitment for the Union armies.

powers of the commander-in-chief

Although the Constitution designates the president as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in time of war, there was little jurisprudence or precedent to provide a clear picture of what Lincoln's war powers as commander-in-chief actually were. In 1861 the arrest of a Confederate recruiter, John Merryman, in Maryland provoked U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney to issue a writ of habeas corpus so that Merryman could be tried in a civil court rather than held in military detention. Citing the Constitution's allowance for suspension of the writ in times of insurrection, Lincoln had authorized military arrests such as that of Merryman "for the public safety." The difficulty was that the Constitution did not specify exactly who had the power to suspend the writ—the President, Congress, or the courts—and Taney categorically denied that Lincoln possessed the authority, commander-in-chief or not. Lincoln ignored Taney, and Congress later endorsed Lincoln's action.

A far larger difficulty loomed over whether Lincoln's war powers authorized him to deal with what he believed was the root cause of the war, slavery. The litigation over Merryman and the blockade taught Lincoln that any effort to use those powers to decree the emancipation of the South's slaves would be challenged in the federal courts. But by mid-1862, the progress of the war was so discouraging that Lincoln determined to risk the issue of an Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, on the strength of "military necessity." The question of the legality of the Proclamation was never put to the test, as Congress approved a constitutional amendment banning slavery in January, 1865, and its ratification lifted emancipation above court scrutiny.

reconstruction

Lincoln began working on plans to reintegrate a defeated Confederacy into the union in 1862, appointing military governors for those portions of the Confederacy occupied by Union troops. The record of the military governors, however, was uneven, so Lincoln turned in 1863 to fostering the organization of civilian loyalist regimes as the new governments of the conquered Southern states. Congress refused to recognize the legitimacy of the representatives these regimes sent to Washington, and by 1865, Lincoln was gradually returning to the idea of using military governors to oversee the political reconstruction of the South.

Although Lincoln refused to discuss any peace terms short of national reunification, by the last year of the war he was willing to sanction three separate peace initiatives. He would not, however, modify his insistence on emancipation and the restoration of federal authority as conditions for peace. In his second inaugural address (on March 4, 1865), Lincoln declared his hope that the Civil War could come to its close "with malice toward none, with charity for all." But this hope was cut short by his death only six weeks later from an assassin's bullet. The subsequent reconstruction of the defeated Confederacy was politically confused and ineffectively managed by Lincoln's successors.

bibliography

Bruce, Robert V. Lincoln and the Tools of War. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1956.

Davis, William C. Lincoln's Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Hattaway, Herman, and Jones, Archer. "Lincoln as Military Strategist." Civil War History 26 (1980): 293–303.

Hendrick, Burton J. Lincoln's War Cabinet. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946.

Lowry, Thomas P. Don't Shoot That Boy! Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice. Mason City, IA: Savas, 1999.

MacCartney, Clarence Edward. Lincoln and His Generals. Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co., 1925.

MacCartney, Clarence Edward. Mr. Lincoln's Admirals. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1956.

Prokopowicz, Gerald J. "Military Fantasies." In The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon, edited by Gabor S. Boritt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Williams, Kenneth P. Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War. 5 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1949–59.

Williams, T. Harry. Lincoln and His Generals. New York: Knopf, 1952.

Allen C. Guelzo

See also:Emancipation Proclamation; Lincoln, Mary Todd.