General in the White House

LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS (363 pp.)--T. Harry Williams--Knopf ($4).

The Civil War had not been going very long when Abraham Lincoln discovered that the North's top generals had a perverse occupational disease: they didn't like to fight. Like most civilians, Lincoln thought that generals were supposed to fight, and" in his letters he kept begging them to do so. If the Confederacy's Lee and Jackson could raise the devil using smaller numbers, why couldn't the North, with men just as brave, get in a sound lick now & then? Sadly the President was forced into a job he did not want and was not prepared for. He became his own general. Not until he gratefully handed the job to Grant did Lincoln find a hard-hitting top general, and by that time the President had become something of a master of strategy himself.

This is the generally sound thesis that Professor T. Harry Williams* of Louisiana State University documents in his Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Lincoln and His Generals. The thesis is not quite as fresh as it must have seemed to the B-o-M judges, nor as urgent as Professor Williams' somewhat hortatory account makes it sound. British Brigadier General Colin R. Ballard spelled it all out a quarter-century' ago in his witty and clear-eyed Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln (just re-issued by World; $5). What Scholar Williams has done, with fresher materials at his disposal, is to chink in the gaps, make the story more watertight. In Lincoln and His Generals, Williams does not refight the Civil War any more than he has to to make his point. The assumption that his readers know enough history to orient themselves will please Civil War buffs, even if it leaves some of the B-o-M's lady amateurs calling for compasses.

Yet Lincoln and His Generals does show, clearly and readably, why Lincoln had to fire one general after another: 1) McDowell, who was routed at Bull Run; 2) McClellan, who, in Lincoln's phrase, was afflicted with "the slows"; 3) Burnside, equivocal in the field and, by his own admission, lacking the confidence of his own officers; 4) Hooker, who disliked his unearned nickname, "Fighting Joe," and hesitated when he should have moved; 5) Meade, who let Lee get away after Gettysburg.

With Grant and Sherman, the President found himself backed for the first time by generals who believed as he did, that the Union's real objective was the Confederate Army. Never again would Lincoln have to complain: "Thus, often, I, who am not a specially brave man, have had to sustain the sinking courage of these professional fighters in critical times."

* No kin to Indiana University's Professor Kenneth P. Williams, whose Lincoln Finds a General (TIME, Jan. 2, 1950) was a more notable work.

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