Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year

Von Drehle argues that 1862 was the most important year in the history of our nation, and he does so quite persuasively.

Many of Lincoln’s tasks after the onset of the Civil War involved appeasement: he had to make sure the touchy border states remained in the Union [ergo he could not speak out too forcefully for emancipation]; he had to make sure Britain and France did not join the war on the side of the South [thus his capitulation on the so-called “Trent Affair”) and he had to ensure that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney (author of the notorious Dred Scott decision declaring that African Americans could never be considered U.S. citizens) did not thwart his military plans to protect the North by using what show more could be considered extra-Constitutional actions. Moreover, the Army, which numbered only 16,000 men before the war (and these men were spread out all over the continent), had been rapidly increased to nearly five times that number. But none of them knew how to fight! Nor did most of the men picked to lead them. Somehow Lincoln had to figure out which of these novices had the makings of generals who could lead the North to victory.

Needless to say, it took Lincoln a while to accomplish this last, especially since he had to take great care not to alienate all the supporters (among whom numbered many soldiers) of the infuriating and perhaps even treasonous George McClellan. But Lincoln was one of the few men in a leadership position at the time who was willing and able to take the long view, and to keep his eye on the prize, which was preservation of the Union.

Why was this so important? Lincoln believed the American nation, with its bestowal of power upon ordinary people to elect its government (i.e., the doctrine of self government), was “absolutely and eternally right.” Furthermore, he could conceive of no government more noble than one “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He could find no moral right in the despotism of men not only governing themselves but governing other men. But he knew a critical factor determining the success of this experiment was assurance to the citizenry that losing voters would not and could not destroy the system just because they lost. Like a marriage, any union won’t work when the parties say “I’m getting a divorce” every time something doesn’t go their way. Compromise is the key to maintaining any union worth having, and Lincoln believed firmly that the United States – this great experiment – should not perish from the earth.

[And yes, there was a slight problem with the reality of the nation as it was then constituted not living up to the promise, since some men were more equal than other men, and certainly more equal than women.] Lincoln begged his audience, in an 1858 debate against Stephen Douglas:

"Now, my countrymen . . . if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. … I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity—the Declaration of American Independence.”

Lincoln intended to help the nation “heed these sacred principles.” But he could not do it unless the “nation so conceived and so dedicated” were still in existence. This concern dictated all of his strategy, all of his decisions, all of his tactics, and it is this long-term vision that so many others in the government were unable to realize.

They also were not nearly as savvy as Lincoln about realpolitik. Lincoln felt he couldn’t just get rid of Simon Cameron, his corrupt and incompetent Secretary of War, or he would create a dangerous enemy and hopelessly alienate Pennsylvanians; nor could he just get rid of Samuel Chase, whose over-the-top politicking for Lincoln’s job outraged everyone but Lincoln – he needed Chase’s financial prowess to raise the money to fight the war. Nor could Lincoln satisfy Congress by firing George McClellan, the do-nothing general who consistently snubbed, insulted, and disrespected Lincoln. McClellan was far too popular among the troops; Lincoln knew better than to lose the loyalty of the army. He could not even appease the abolitionists by outlawing slavery just yet – the preservation of the union had to take precedence.

Again and again, Lincoln was able to push aside and rise above personal snubs, Congressional pressure, embarrassment over his wife’s questionable friendships with Confederates, and all the rest, to save the Union. Lincoln said:

“Perhaps I have too little [resentment], but I never thought it paid.”

This remarkable man had a remarkable year in 1862. As Drehle writes:

"…when the first day of January [1863] came around again, Lincoln’s greatness was no longer raw. Even as he had redefined American society, he had invented the modern presidency. He had steered himself and the nation from its darkest New Year’s Day to its proudest, and in the process Lincoln had become the towering leader who forever looms over the rebirth of the American experiment.”

Evaluation: You have to admire the author for undertaking this book. As he observed in his Note on Sources, “the sheer volume of material, both primary and secondary… is so vast that dropping into the subject as a writer is like falling into the sea.” Yet he succeeds admirably, providing a month-by-month account of Lincoln’s life in 1862 that puts us right into the thick of the times with a welcome lack of turgidity and tedium. Obviously the author could not include everything; new students of Lincoln may want to start with a more comprehensive biography. But for those who know even the bare outlines of Lincoln’s life and the politics surrounding it, this book provides a lively and always-interesting focused look at one of the most important years in America’s history. show less

1862 was certainly, as the title posits, the "most perilous year" in the Civil War. By concentrating on this year, the author draws attention to how the up and down fortunes of the Union could have resulted in the failure of ultimate Union victory. The author makes clear, in this highly readable book, that it was Lincoln's incredibly deft handling of massively complex issues that positioned the North to prevail, even though its success was 2 1/2 years away.

The major lines in the story are the evolving sophistication of Lincoln as a military strategist, his handling of the utterly contradictory views of abolitionists and those who cared little about the continuation of slavery, the delicate treatment of the border states, his handling of show more his head strong cabinet, and the frustrating attempts to get an eastern army that would fight. Through all of these difficulties, Lincoln kept his eye on Europe which any number of times was on the brink of intervening on the side of the Confederacy.

Lincoln's handling of emancipation is one of these themes. Lincoln was personally deeply opposed to slavery. While he recognized that the war was in the first instance one to preserve the union, he came to realize that in the end the union could not be preserved with slavery still extant. His thinking on how to deal with this evolved from his attempts to "buy out" slave holders in the border states, to a serious effort at colonization of blacks to Central America or Africa to finally determining to emancipating slaves in the rebelling states on the premise of military necessity. (There were constitutional limitations on legislating slavery away versus doing so under executive decree). His executive proclamation issued after and under the strength of the Union victory at Antietam compelled the acceptance (grudgingly by many) that slavery must be abolished if a new political compact was to emerge from the military conflict.

Lincoln's personal history is also told in this book. His loyalty to his wife who brought great trouble to him through her profligate spending and her mental instability. His deep grief over the death of his beloved son Willie from typhoid. The focus of the book on just one year allows full treatment of these issues.

PS Some time after writing this review I noticed that Lincoln's handwritten preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was to be on exhibit at the local museum in our small upstate New York city. I went to see it after voting on election day. (What a wonderful juxtaposition of historical race-related occurrences -- doesn't matter who you voted for, just think about it.) I thought I'd just buzz down and whisk through the exhibit. Not so. I waited on line for 1 1/4 hours. By the end of the two-day showing, over 6,000 people had seen it. This speaks to the feelings held by people for Lincoln's action even these many years later. The document does affirm that Lincoln's intent, while ultimately moral, was largely political and justified on military necessity. Note in the document his care not to offend the border states (he asked for legislation to buy their slaves) and there's little said about equality. As the terrific new movie portrays, note also that Lincoln's confidence in "forever" free was not strong; perhaps the confiscated slaves would be forever free, but what about slavery itself. The movie tells the story of Lincoln's plan for dealing with that uncertainty.

We sometimes think of Lincoln in terms of his principles. This is correctly so, but it is a fuller understanding of the man when we realize how incredibly politically skillful he was. And patient. With enormous conflicting interests and forces pulling and tugging nearly daily on him, he had to find and stick with courses that would hold together in the midst of powerful forces that would pull them down. This book does an excellent job in conveying how incredibly thoughtful Lincoln was in finding and preserving on the right path to the end. show less

By the middle of 1863, it was obvious to most observers that the Confederacy was doomed; it was only a matter of time. If the North could just find the will to keep fighting, the Union would survive. But only eighteen months earlier, the outcome had been very much in doubt, and were it not for the particular talents of one man, things might have turned out very differently. As often seems to have happened throughout history, the right man was in the right place just when he was most needed: Abraham Lincoln was in the White House.

Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year is David Von Drehle’s account of how Lincoln, during 1862, evolved into exactly the leader the United States so desperately needed if the show more Union were to win the Civil War. The book offers a month-by-month account of the challenges faced by a President in command of an army led by one incompetent general after the other. Von Drehle makes a strong case that if Lincoln had not been up to the challenges of 1862, the military successes of 1863 may never have happened because it might have already been too late by then.

Lincoln’s first task was to build an army almost from scratch. The military was unprepared to fight a war of the scale of the one it now faced, and the thousands of newly recruited soldiers depended on a handful of experienced officers (thanks to the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848) to get them ready for combat. By 1862, Lincoln expected his army to be the aggressor, but he had little luck in finding a commanding general capable of taking the fight to the enemy. That he allowed the incompetent egomaniac George McClellan to keep overall command of the Union army for as long as he did was, perhaps, Lincoln’s biggest failure. By the end of 1862, when he had finally ridded himself of the insubordinate little man, it was obvious that Lincoln had solidly redefined his role as Commander-in-Chief - and that he was prepared to do whatever was necessary to win the war.

Incompetent generals with no game plan were not Lincoln’s only problem. The civilian population of the North did not seem to have any more of a will to fight, or confidence in ultimate victory, than most of his generals had. His cabinet was, by Lincoln’s choice, filled with political rivals with agendas of their own. In addition to his political problems, the president had to overcome the great personal grief of losing a son to typhoid, and had to endure the erratic, often embarrassing, behavior of his wife as she tried to cope with the same loss. Not a moment of peace, would this president know.

But, endure it all, he did, and in the process, Lincoln would claim his place in history as one of the greatest leaders, especially in time of war, that the world has ever seen. David Von Drehle’s account of the year Abraham Lincoln “invented the modern presidency” is a fascinating one that now has a permanent spot on my bookshelves.

Rated at: 5.0 show less

This is a most interesting book chock full of information, both trivial and illuminating of behind the scenes action of both Abraham Lincoln and his opposition within the Washington political establishment during the year 1862. Von Drehle is able to translate chaos into mere complexity. A recurring image in my mind, especially when reading the opening chapters, was of an ancient seer sorting through the entrails of a goat in order to divine the future and here was an author up to his elbows in the same sort of mess trying to make sense of the past.
The book takes the reader in a month by month odyssey through the year 1862. There are indications that the original intent was to focus on that year as the most crucial in the greater history show more of America but devolved, in manner of speaking, into a close examination of the maturation of Lincoln as a leader. That is not meant to be a criticism but as an explanation of a seemingly dulling of interest in the bigger picture and concentration on the latter (or, maybe, the massiveness of the compilation of data led me to that feeling). As the book progresses, there is an emergence of the character of Lincoln from the flotsam and jetsam of the tumultuous years leading up to January 1, 1862.
Because its scope is limited to one year, it loses its contextual mooring and, therefore should not be read in isolation from broader histories of the Civil War Era. It augments those histories in a most useful way but should not be read in lieu of them. It might be better thought of as a social profile of a particular man at a particular time in his life rather than as a history.
There can be much that can be said about the content of the book but what it does not say is also of interest. To Von Drehle’s credit, there is no aggrandizing of “Father Abraham”; that was to come later after elevation to Sainthood brought about by the successful conclusion of the war and his assassination. There is even reference to his alleged bi-sexuality and the purely politically inspiration for the issuance of the Proclamation of Emancipation and the timing of McClellan’s ouster. By these omissions, the author adds to the credibility of his work.
It is apparent that Lincoln was not the Master of the Ship of State in the opening days, weeks and months of 1862. The idea that man (read Lincoln) drives or drove events versus the proposition that events define the man is clearly decided. The seeds of the Civil War (or War Between the States) were planted well before that time during the arguments surrounding the ratification of the Constitution – the arguments presented in the Federalist Papers and the anti-federalists were to be decided on the fields of battle rather than the halls of debate. The immoral specter of slavery snuffed out the political pertinence of those legitimate arguments. The head to head confrontation between proponents of an unlimited central government and those in favor of shifting the balance of power to the states was, rightfully, overwhelmed by the immoral conviction that a state, or any level of government, can rightfully overrule the God-given rights of justice and freedom for all. Except for rare and oblique references to “States Rights”, Von Drehle avoids this issue that was, arguably, central to the secessionist’s motivation. Did Von Drehle omit or not find supporting evidence or did Lincoln not know that State’s Rights was an issue or did not care? He knew and acknowledged that fact because he hung the portrait of Andrew Jackson as a constant reminder of a similar crisis in that administration. The seeds of civil strife may have been fertilized and incubated by the Abolitionists but their germination was inevitable with or without the intervention of Lincoln, his cadre of supporters and detractors or the will of plantation owners – the war was predestined to occur, each battle demanded of itself to be fought, and every outcome was beyond the control of the military leaders involved. Lincoln’s legacy was shaped as much or more by events outside of his sphere of influence as by his strength of character. I attribute those conclusions as much to what the author says as to what he does not say.
As a corollary to the above, I was struck by the revelation that, apparently, little strategic thinking went onto the North’s conduct of the war – it was conducted as a series of tactical operations and the accumulation of tactical operations bear no resemblance to strategic planning regardless of the fact that, in this case, the results were indistinguishable. Lincoln was equally engrossed in political manipulation and patronage, family tragedies, the cultivation of personal relationships and the establishment of a permanent legacy as he was of excising the cancerous growths eating their way through the flesh of our new nation not yet four score and seven years old. The author was either unable to find the wizard behind the screen manipulating the chessmen acting out the national tragedy of that era or there was no puppet master or group of conspirators pulling the strings – the North wallowed its way to victory with only a moral compass to guide it.
I draw these conclusions as the result of a review of this book and its limited range between January 1 and December 31, 1862; a broader view and inclusion of supplemental knowledge might offer mitigating evidence. Further reading of histories and commentaries broader in scope might well offer contrary evidence. show less

So much has been written about the Civil War and about Abraham Lincoln that there may seem to be no nuance of either that has been left unexplored. In Rise to Greatness, however, David Von Drehle finds an intriguing new avenue of approach. The book follows Lincoln month by month through 1862, which, the author argues, was the pivotal year of the war--not 1863, as many aver. Eighteen sixty-two, after all, saw such events as the fall of New Orleans, which yielded access to the lower Mississippi River; the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; and the adoption of the practice of living off the land, which lessened the need for supply lines and facilitated troop movements. Not all readers will concur with Von Drehle's assertion, but show more this reviewer found his argument persuasive. Rise to Greatness is an outstanding read and a real page-turner. Those interested in Lincoln or in the Civil War should not miss it. show less

In “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s most perilous year” Dave Von Drehle argues that 1862 was the year in which Lincoln’s government came closest to failing and the year that Lincoln grew into the leader that we celebrate today. Von Drehle is an excellent writer and historian, who is, in my opinion, David McCullough’s equal when it comes to writing well researched, well reasoned, popular history.

Von Drehle carefully lays out the challenges, military, domestic, and international, and personal, that Lincoln faced at the start of 1862. He does this with the skill of a novelist creating backstory, he neither assumes the reader is an expert nor complicates the reading with dry minutiae. Once Von Drehle has set the show more stage he takes us through the year, month by month, looking at the events affecting Lincoln and the course of the war. For me this chronological, inclusive approach, is what made the book so interesting and informative.

I have never been a student of the Civil War but I found this book hard to put down. I can’t count the number of “ah-ha” moments I had while reading the book, we Americans hear so much about Lincoln and the Civil War but seldom are we given the details and background that Von Drehle provides. We are told that Lincoln was a great president but are not shown evidence to support the claim. Von Drehle provides the evidence, he shows us Lincoln’s brilliance and humor and proves that Lincoln forever be one of our greatest leaders. show less

David Von Drehle's "Rise to Greatness" is a fascinating in-depth look at the life of Lincoln in 1862, as he interacts with government and military officials, as well as his family. Reading of his frustrations with McClellan and other military leaders, in particular, had me constantly thinking of what might have been 'if only' this or that had happened - especially when reading about Grant and Sherman, who were showing glimpses of their own future greatness in this period. Highly recommended.