Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President as Commander in Chief.

Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President as Commander in Chief. By Geoffrey Perret. (New York: Random House, 2004. Pp. xviii, 470. $35.00, ISBN 0-375-50738-8.)

Geoffrey Perret has turned to the Civil War in this comprehensive study entitled Lincoln's War: The Untold Story of America's Greatest President as Commander in Chief Perret contends that Lincoln created the role of commander in chief of the army and navy, the latter designation only briefly stated, but not described or detailed, in the second article of the Constitution. Perret makes a good case that Lincoln's increasingly expansive definition of his war powers, his direction of military and naval forces, his choice, rotation, and dismissal of generals, his authorizations for black soldiers and conscription, and even his policies against suspected civilian subversion established the president's control over the direction of the war. "Before Lincoln," writes Perret, "the relationship between the commander in chief and his commanders in the field was amorphous." By 1864 it was not, as Lincoln had accomplished a "constitutional revolution" by redefining the relationship of the president to the military (pp. 357-58).

Much of what Lincoln did, according to Perret, removed military authority from Congress, whose most effective counterpoint to the president was the feckless Committee on the Conduct of the War. And--with only a few weeks of experience as a militiaman fighting against the Sauk Indians--Lincoln took power from generals who, even in a time without a clear command structure, were expected to control the direction of the war. "The war power was Lincoln's creation," writes Perret, in a book that focuses on how the sixteenth president "shaped it and used it--sometimes brilliantly, sometimes badly--through four years of war" (p. xv).

Of course we would not expect that earlier presidents would have shaped the commander-in-chief role in a nation that, for the most part, after the revolution lived in an age of free security. True, Madison led the forces retreating from British attack, and Polk occasionally intervened with his generals' plans in the faraway Mexican-American conflict. But these brief challenges were nothing like Lincoln's, so the point is something of a straw dog. Perret's most compelling comparison is to Jefferson Davis, who, perhaps because he was trained as a military man, never so directly inserted himself into military matters as did his counterpart in Washington. Still, like so many things that emerged in a conflict that must be recognized as sui generis in terms of patterns for future behavior, the Lincoln precedent of an assertive commander in chief did not survive into the Spanish-American War or World War I, much less World War II.

Lincoln's War is the first full-fledged study of the relationship between Lincoln and his generals in over fifty years. While Perret's subtitle heralds the untold story and the use of new documents, most of the material is familiar to students of the Civil War. It is only differently framed with a new emphasis. Perret has written an accessible, readable account mostly of the military events of the war and Lincoln's response to them, told in short paragraphs of sometimes no more than two sentences. Clearly this is a book intended for a popular audience. Frequently, Lincoln's apocryphal comments, as recounted in secondhand accounts, are enclosed in quotation marks that offer a sense of verisimilitude if not accuracy. With the spotlight on Lincoln and his response to events on the battlefront, Perret has accumulated evidence that displays Lincoln's painful development from an inexperienced chief executive into an activist commander who knew strategy and tactics better than many of the Union army's commanders in the field.

There are, however, a number of factual and interpretative errors that detract from the authenticity of this book. Inexplicably Perret writes that in 1861 the right to vote "extended only to the one third [sic] of the adult male population that paid property taxes above a prescribed level" (p. 198) He also argues that Lincoln "create[d] his own currency," a fact that would have surprised a Congress that--with little consultation with Lincoln--passed the Legal Tender Act in February 1862 (p. 358). He mixes up Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Martinsburg, West Virginia, and clearly has not read the new literature on the number of political prisoners in the North. There are also wrongheaded interpretations regarding Lincoln's obsession with taking Richmond and his neglect of the western theater. Unfortunately, the number of these errors detracts from the important argument Perret makes in Lincoln's War.

Goucher College

JEAN H. BAKER