Lincoln, as defined by war

Still, the question of what constitutes both a constitutionally licit and effective wartime presidency has taken on a special urgency over the last seven years. On the one hand, partisans of the "unitary executive theory" within the Bush-Cheney administration have pushed a dramatic expansion of the chief executive's powers, frequently in areas heretofore regarded as extralegal. According to this previously marginal line of thinking, for example, the president's rights to order torture, confinement without charges or trial, and warrantless domestic surveillance are "inherent" in his constitutional role as "commander in chief" and beyond scrutiny by the other, co-equal branches of government. On the other hand, this unprecedented extension of unchecked executive power has been accompanied by repeated deceptions of the electorate and, until recently, a generally incompetent prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this context, McPherson's study of Lincoln is particularly welcome -- and not only because the author is both a fine writer and a historian with an unmatched mastery of his era's original sources. McPherson also happens to be one of those scholars whose ingrained integrity simply precludes him from stacking the historical deck.

As the author points out, Lincoln is our only president whose entire tenure was circumscribed by war. The request to resupply besieged Ft. Sumter was the first official document to cross his desk after inauguration, and, though Robert E. Lee finally had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, several Confederate forces still were in the field the night Lincoln was assassinated. Moreover, though two earlier chief executives had lived through wars -- James Madison in the War of 1812 and James K. Polk in the Mexican War -- the presidential role as commander in chief remained hazy and ill-defined, both politically and legally.

Lincoln would change all that, for as McPherson points out, he spent nearly as much time in the War Department's telegraph room, sending and receiving messages from his commanders in the field, as he did in the White House and was personally and politically consumed by the conflict's prosecution. His only recreation was a daily carriage ride, and his only trips out of Washington were to visit battlefields or the troops and their commanders -- a total of 42 days out of the District of Columbia during his entire term. Moreover, when he assumed office at the very moment of the nation's supreme crisis, not only was his institutional path unclear, but both he and his country also seemed woefully unprepared.

The new president was painfully aware that his Confederate counterpart brought credentials to office Lincoln couldn't match. Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate, had served with distinction as a colonel in the conflict with Mexico, subsequently, as secretary of War. The federal army numbered just 16,000 when Lincoln took office, and its officer corps was disproportionately from secessionist states, particularly Virginia. Nor, as McPherson points out, was the new president the "natural strategist" other historians have made him out to be. What he brought to his task, though, was the same keen intellect and high sense of serious purpose that he'd brought to other facets of his life. This, after all, was a man who had educated himself into one of the most formidable trial lawyers of his day and who -- in middle age -- taught himself Euclidean geometry for the sake of its mental discipline.