‘Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents’
By Nigel Hamilton
Little, Brown and Company, 800 pages

Even after becoming presidents respectively of the United States and the Confederacy, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis wanted war. Lincoln desperately looked for a way out of the conflict, even at the cost of tolerating slavery in the South, while Davis, a slave owner, shared Lincoln’s view that slavery would eventually die out and wanted to fight a defensive action that might convince the North it could not win.

Lincoln behaved like a lawyer, sending his Cabinet interrogatories about what to do, putting the war in the charge of the preening General McClellan, who concocted ridiculous plans for an amphibious invasion of the South rather than heading 80 miles straight on land toward the undermanned rebels, even as the Union military leader preposterously exaggerated the enemy’s numerical superiority.

In the war’s first two years, as Nigel Hamilton shows, Davis, a superb soldier, made the most of his smaller forces, posing as the head of a beleaguered new nation gallantly fighting for its life against a tyrannical federal government.

In Mr. Hamilton’s telling, Lincoln was almost as feckless as President Buchanan. Mary Lincoln, no matter her reputation as a madwoman, took the measure of McClellan, calling him a humbug — no better, she said, than the duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, who actually tried to make a separate peace with the South and considered a coup d’état.

Davis, following only his own narrow-minded counsel, was no politician, and his cause was bogus, as his own wife, Varina, understood. Among the best parts of Mr. Hamilton’s book are passages about presidential wives who knew far better than their husbands what was wanted in politics and on the battlefield.

Mr. Hamilton portrays in powerful detail Lincoln’s inability to take decisive action that puts to shame any notion of the so-called team of rivals assembled by a canny president who knew how to play Cabinet members off one another.

Davis hoped he could still win a losing hand — if Lincoln continued not to mention slavery as a cause of the war. That way, perhaps European powers, especially England and France, would come to the Confederacy’s aid, thinking of all that cotton and not the forced labor that produced it. No less than William Gladstone started to think of the Confederacy as a fait accompli by 1862.

The combination of Davis and Robert E. Lee seemed invincible. Unlike the timid McClellan, who excelled at training soldiers but never wanted to actually fight a war, Lee and Davis took huge casualties in stride and kept moving forward.

As long as the South positioned itself as rebuffing an invader, it had a chance — if only a slim one — of winning, Davis and Lee agreed. The bold Lee, however, flush with many victories, changed course and convinced Davis that a Northern invasion through Maryland might be enough to drive the inept Lincoln out of the war.

Lee issued a proclamation to Maryland’s citizens that he had come to relieve them of Northern despotism. Lee’s appeal is what Lincoln feared — that the border states would join the Confederate cause. In the event, though, Marylanders were not impressed with Lee’s barefoot, stinking soldiers, and remained loyal to the Union.

At nearly the same time, still unable to launch a major offensive under competent military leadership, a desperate Lincoln decided to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the belligerent states. Eventually, Lincoln realized that 200,000 Black soldiers had made the difference in the union’s victory as the South was finally deprived of the three million slave laborers that had kept its war economy going.

Mr. Hamilton halts his narrative with the Emancipation Proclamation, showing how it deprived the European powers of any inclination to join Southern slaveholders. Not only did Lincoln finally become a decisive president, he had done so without all those interrogatories and Cabinet consultations. He became his own man and a great president.

Yet you will spend a long time in this book wondering if Lincoln is ever going to come to his senses. The waiting period will seem as long as it seemed to his contemporaries. And you will be just as shocked as his Cabinet was to discover that he had made up his mind without their input.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”