How did Abraham Lincoln grow into his role as the nation’s commander-in-chief and outwit his formidable opponent, Jefferson Davis? Davis was a trained soldier and war hero. Lincoln was a “rail-splitter” and country lawyer who had only briefly served in the militia.
Confronted with the most violent and challenging war ever waged on American soil, Lincoln appeared to be ill-suited to the task: Inexperienced, indecisive, and a questionable judge of people’s motives, he allowed his administration's war policies to be sabotaged by fickle cabinet officials while entrusting command of his army to a preening young officer named George McClellan, whose defeat in battle left Washington, D.C., at the mercy of General Robert E. Lee, Davis’s star performer. The war almost ended then and there.
But in a Shakespearean twist, Lincoln summoned the courage to make a climactic decision. He issued as a “military necessity” a proclamation freeing the 3.5 million enslaved Americans without whom the South could neither feed nor fund their armed insurrection. The new war policy doomed the rebellion—which was in dire need of support from Europe, none of whose governments would dare to recognize rebel “independence” in a war openly fought over slavery. Jefferson Davis's presidential aspirations crumbled.
Drawing from his most recent scholarship, British-born presidential chronicler Nigel Hamilton discusses an untold story of the Civil War: how two Americans faced off as the fate of the nation hung in the balance—and how Abraham Lincoln came to embrace emancipation as the last best chance to save the Union.
Copies of Hamilton's book Lincoln vs. Davis (Little, Brown and Company) are available for purchase.
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