Which sentence best explains Lincoln's wartime decisions?
adapted from Lincoln the Great
by Wilfred W. McClay
We should remember too that, with events controlling him. Lincoln had to do things as president that he
not equipped to do, either by
experience or temperament. He had not only opposed the aggression of the Mexican War but was something of an antimilitarist* who abhorred-
violence. How then to account for the fact that he became such a remarkably effective war leader, indeed the quintessential- war president-the only
president in our history whose entire term of office was defined by the conditions of war, and
the employer and enabler of such legendarily
destructive warriors :
Grant and Sherman? It is surely one of the many mysteries about this man.
the war, in riding the flow of events and changing Northern public opinion with a
He also excelled in understanding the larger political dimensions of
consummate® sense of timing. He understood the importance of isolating
and containing the South, keeping the border states out of the
Confederacy and European mischief-makers out of the struggle. He gradually and deftly* redefined the war as an unlimited, total struggle to
overthrow the South's political system, and pushed his military leaders toward a strategy of unconditional surrender that was appropriate to the war's
changing objectives. Such maneuvering helps us appreciate why Lincoln at first so actively suppressed the idea that the war was
be a war for
emancipation, to the extent of countermanding® John C. Frémont's Missouri Emancipation Proclamation in 1861. It helps us appreciate
the mixture
of genuine moral idealism
and shrewd military calculation that lay behind Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Prociamation, a document that
is often unfairly disparaged® on the grounds that it refrained from abolishing slavery and technically freed almost no one.
Which brings us to the question of Lincoln's halfway measures, whose fuller context we need to remember. He rose to prominence as a politician also anti-abolitionist.