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It was mid-January, 1862, and a Baltimore dentist was writing grudgingly to his clergyman brother, first to congratulate him on the birth of a son, and then to chide him for his hostility to the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned civilians without trial. Yes, he had called out federal troops and imposed blockade without Congressional sanction. Yes, he had confiscated Southern slave "property." But "when Mr. Lincoln came into office," Dr. Hervey Colburn explained to brother Edward, "he found an empty Treasury … a mere handful of men in the army, & no amount of arms or ammunition. Everything must be commenced anew, and no money to pay with. Commerce, & trade generally, [were] gone." The Confederates, who had been concocting" secession "for ten years" (and with the connivance of the British government, no less), had arranged to have "the largest quantities of arms & ammunition" shipped from federal arsenals to the South so that "when the rebellion broke out it was found that almost all of the arms … were in the seceded states." What on earth did Edward expect Lincoln would do? Send a police constable to arrest Jefferson Davis? "Look at the circumstances under which [Lincoln] came into office," Hervey Colburn pleaded, "and if he were not possessed of much talent, & great decision of character, we should have been completely broken down months ago." [1]
William Marvel might have done well to consider Dr. Colburn's letter as he was contemplating the first two volumes in a projected four-volume history of the Civil War, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War and Lincoln's Darkest Year: The War in 1862. The titles, to begin with, are misleading: Mr. Lincoln Goes to War is a book about 1861, the first year of the Civil War, and Lincoln actually plays a comparatively small role; Lincoln's Darkest Year devotes the bulk of its attention, not to the war in 1862, but to rising tides of war-weariness and disgruntlement. Neither offers a comprehensive history of the first two years of civil war; neither gives more than token attention to the war in the west. Lincoln Goes to War focuses mostly on North, and is composed of a loosely connected set of disastrous, and somewhat disjointed, Union battle scenarios, from the improvised defense of the District of Columbia in late April, through First Bull Run and Wilson's Creek, and ending up with Ball's Bluff. (In fact, fully a third of the book is about Ball's Bluff and its aftermath, which is curious, given the fact that Ball's Bluff was little more than a brigade-sized armed reconnaissance across the Potomac.)
Nevertheless, even if Lincoln is not the main character that the titles imply, he is still William Marvel's culprit-inchief, for it is Marvel's belief that the entire string of Union failures which he chronicles in these two volumes are to be laid at the doorstep of Lincoln's bungling. That the war occurred at all is the first proof of Lincoln's fault. Lincoln chose to handle the crisis over Ft. Sumter "aggressively rather than diplomatically," and ended up "provoking war to assure the dominance of federal authority." It was a mistake he compounded by calling on the states for 75,000 state militia to suppress the rebellion, a demand which drove the Union-loving states of the upper South into the arms of the Confederacy. Lincoln might have lost Washington itself, were it not for the labors of old General Winfield Scott and the man who emerged as his chief assistant, Col. Charles P. Stone, both of whom successfully recruited a scratch force to protect the capital until Northern state troops could arrive. When they did arrive, unhappily, most of those troops turned out to be either sky-larkers who had no understanding of what they had enlisted for, or unemployed workingmen who were driven to the recruiting offices by hard economic times. "Patriotism may have played a part in drawing some of the older, unattached men," while the "youthful" signed up for "travel and adventure," but the Union forces were predominantly the reserve army of the proletariat. Once they do get a clear view of what the war is like, they can hardly wait to abandon it.
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