Lincoln, as defined by war

James M. McPherson is the most important historian of the most important event to occur in these United States since the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution -- the Civil War.

Any new book of his is -- by definition, therefore -- an event, but “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” is one that speaks directly to a nation on the cusp of a momentous decision regarding its next president. Given the author’s vocal disapproval of the war in Iraq, it’s possible he elected to fill this obvious hole in the Lincoln portrait because the example of our greatest president is particularly instructive at this crucial juncture, though next year also happens to be the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator’s birth.

Still, the question of what constitutes both a constitutionally licit and effective wartime presidency has taken on a special urgency over the last seven years. On the one hand, partisans of the “unitary executive theory” within the Bush-Cheney administration have pushed a dramatic expansion of the chief executive’s powers, frequently in areas heretofore regarded as extralegal. According to this previously marginal line of thinking, for example, the president’s rights to order torture, confinement without charges or trial, and warrantless domestic surveillance are “inherent” in his constitutional role as “commander in chief” and beyond scrutiny by the other, co-equal branches of government. On the other hand, this unprecedented extension of unchecked executive power has been accompanied by repeated deceptions of the electorate and, until recently, a generally incompetent prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this context, McPherson’s study of Lincoln is particularly welcome -- and not only because the author is both a fine writer and a historian with an unmatched mastery of his era’s original sources. McPherson also happens to be one of those scholars whose ingrained integrity simply precludes him from stacking the historical deck.

As the author points out, Lincoln is our only president whose entire tenure was circumscribed by war. The request to resupply besieged Ft. Sumter was the first official document to cross his desk after inauguration, and, though Robert E. Lee finally had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, several Confederate forces still were in the field the night Lincoln was assassinated. Moreover, though two earlier chief executives had lived through wars -- James Madison in the War of 1812 and James K. Polk in the Mexican War -- the presidential role as commander in chief remained hazy and ill-defined, both politically and legally.

Lincoln would change all that, for as McPherson points out, he spent nearly as much time in the War Department’s telegraph room, sending and receiving messages from his commanders in the field, as he did in the White House and was personally and politically consumed by the conflict’s prosecution. His only recreation was a daily carriage ride, and his only trips out of Washington were to visit battlefields or the troops and their commanders -- a total of 42 days out of the District of Columbia during his entire term. Moreover, when he assumed office at the very moment of the nation’s supreme crisis, not only was his institutional path unclear, but both he and his country also seemed woefully unprepared.

The new president was painfully aware that his Confederate counterpart brought credentials to office Lincoln couldn’t match. Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate, had served with distinction as a colonel in the conflict with Mexico, subsequently, as secretary of War. The federal army numbered just 16,000 when Lincoln took office, and its officer corps was disproportionately from secessionist states, particularly Virginia. Nor, as McPherson points out, was the new president the “natural strategist” other historians have made him out to be. What he brought to his task, though, was the same keen intellect and high sense of serious purpose that he’d brought to other facets of his life. This, after all, was a man who had educated himself into one of the most formidable trial lawyers of his day and who -- in middle age -- taught himself Euclidean geometry for the sake of its mental discipline.

He once recalled that, when something perplexed him as a boy, “I could not sleep . . . when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it. . . . This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me.” A colleague at the Illinois bar once noted that Lincoln, “by giving away six points and carrying the seventh, he carried the case . . . the whole case hanging on the seventh. . . . Any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.” White House diarists record that, in the earliest stages of his first term, Lincoln could be heard prowling the upstairs of the official residence through the night, reading works on military strategy until dawn. (Who can’t help but compare that with George Bush’s frequently described lack of curiosity?)

McPherson is one of our greatest narrative historians, with an unequaled ability to lucidly describe battles and strategy. In this book, he displays a similar virtuosity with the politics that were an inevitable part of Lincoln’s management of an essentially volunteer army with what amounted to an elected and politically appointed officer corps. So too his utterly adroit engagement with the issues that the author’s scholarship -- more than any other historian of his rank -- consistently has maintained at the heart of his account of the Civil War: slavery and race.

Similarly, McPherson shows a steady hand and mastery of his sources in assessing the act that most troubles civil libertarians who otherwise idolize Lincoln -- and most reassures the unitary executive theorists, who claim him as their model. That action, of course, is Lincoln’s suspension of that most fundamental of common law remedies: the aptly styled Great Writ, habeas corpus. McPherson makes clear the context in which the new president ignored the ruling of then-Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who, just for the record’s sake, happened to be the author of the Dred Scott decision. Taney had ordered the release of a fellow wealthy Maryland landowner, John Merryman, an officer in a Confederate cavalry unit caught sabotaging telegraph lines.

Lincoln refused to release him, relying on the opinions of other constitutional scholars and on Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, that habeas “shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

That seems clear enough, though Lincoln later would extend that suspension from “any military line” to the country as a whole.

As the president himself would write several years later, “Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution through preservation of the nation.”

Lincoln would display a similarly shrewd judgment when it came to matters of strategy. From the start, he saw that, if the moral and legal challenge posed by secession was that the states in rebellion still were part of the United States and subject to its laws -- and protections -- then the real objective was to destroy the armies behind which this lawlessness (he called it an ultimate “anarchy”) sheltered.

Lincoln, as we would say, micromanaged the war until he finally found three generals in the great fighting trio of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, who shared his vision; then he left them alone to do their jobs.

It is hard to do justice in a short review to how convincingly and compellingly McPherson narrates Lincoln’s simultaneous mastery of the political, strategic and moral challenge of his historical moment.

Suffice to say that he does and that, in the process, he makes the case that Lincoln was our greatest wartime president for many reasons -- not least because he so strongly possessed that inestimable and now so neglected traditional virtue, discernment.

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Rutten is a Times staff writer.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com