A lesson learned from LINCOLN VS. DAVIS, by Nigel Hamilton

Your strength can quickly become your weakness, if you cannot pivot to changing circumstances.

Nigel Hamilton’s Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents is an intriguing and at times frustrating book, especially if you’re well familiar with the Lincoln presidency and its major outline. The book sells itself as a study of the two leaders’ approaches to war leadership, yet it focuses almost exclusively on the first two years of the war (1860-1862), i.e. the time period when Lincoln often looked like a commander-in-chief who was totally in over his head, while Davis looked like he might very well successfully lead the Confederate States of America in a successful bid for independence. The book is a great read, but also frustrating in how limited its focus is; that said, Hamilton does a superb job in setting up the book’s heel turn in its final section, when Lincoln suddenly pivoted into greatness while Davis floundered his new “country” into oblivion, and that was in how Lincoln recognized what the Civil War was truly about–not a war to reunify a morally neutral slave-owning Union, but a war for emancipation.

At the beginning of the war, Lincoln (by his own admission) knew nothing about military leadership, and instead the new Confederate President Jefferson Davis seemed to be the one destined for greatness. Davis had distinguished himself during the Mexican-American War, and had a long career in the U.S. Senate, whereas Lincoln had almost exclusively lived and worked in the then-backwater state of Illinois. Davis expertly organized and crafted a Confederate military structure that attracted the South’s best leaders, while Lincoln floundered from one hapless Union general to the next. (Side note: Hamilton has a great time mocking George McClellan, the Union’s main general in the early years of the war–and a vain, racist, monomaniacal general who was one of the single most unlikable figures in all of American History; alas, the entertaining book I read about him was prior to the existence of this blog). Davis was stubborn, decisive, and ran the Confederacy like a military general, while Lincoln never stopped questioning, analyzing, and deliberating situations, a contrast that led to the Union repeatedly getting outmaneuvered and trounced in the early years of the war.

Then suddenly, Lincoln’s supposedly weak intellectualism became a strength over Davis’ military resolve, when his analytical mind finally grasped that slavery was the very strength and heart of the Southern rebellion, and that the Union could not survive as long as slavery remained intact. As Hamilton relates, both men always had the potential in them to become emancipators; Lincoln had been anti-slavery his entire life, and was partly elected by a united North on a platform that slavery could not forever remain a cornerstone of the American economy. Davis was a major slave-owner who had deep reservations about the system–a claim that slave-owners loved to make after slavery collapsed, but appeared to have had an element of truth in Davis’ case. As his own former slaves testified, Davis went out of his way to shield them from the system’s worst barbarities and grant them a level of independence, while Davis’ wife Varina detested becoming a slave-owner through marriage and continued to befriend freed black people throughout her life. In the end, Lincoln was the first leader who realized the world had changed and he had to completely pivot his approach, and that left Davis completely flat-footed. Lincoln’s weaknesses became strengths as he remained open-minded to completely changing the Union’s war approach, while Davis never gave up on his early approaches to the war or stood up to the South’s slavery-loving firebrands.

Hamilton’s book is full of great stories, even as some of his clear biases make it a questionable source for Civil War scholars (example–he can’t hide his contempt for Lincoln’s top advisor William Seward, a complicated figure who Hamilton sees as a conniving snake). Its focuses can be frustrating, but it does provide a fascinating story of how open-mindedness and being willing to completely change your approach is a vital tool for successful national leadership, whereas people who cling too completely to the past often find themselves becoming useless relics. We must always be willing to try anything to preserve the things we hold most dear, even if it means we need to question everything that has previously worked for us.