Review - "Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief" by Kenneth Noe

[Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief by Kenneth W. Noe (Louisiana State University Press, 2026). Hardcover, 7 maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xix,278/420. ISBN:978-0-8071-8521-6. $49.95]

Civil War readers raised on the vast body of post-Centennial publications can be forgiven for assuming that profound admiration for Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief has been an unbroken popular and scholarly phenomenon ever since the martyred president's April 1865 assassination. While this "heroic legend," as historian Kenneth Noe puts it, of Lincolnian strategic brilliance formed through a winning combination of exceptional natural intellect, close study of contemporary military science, and bitter early-war experience still predominates to this day, a closer following of the historiography reveals a winding road rather than a straight, well-worn pathway. Delving deeply into a near century-long stretch of Lincoln publishing produced after the end of the Civil War, Noe's Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief reinvestigates this widely cherished component of the set of core beliefs that still surround our assessment of Lincoln's war presidency.

So how does Noe define the Lincoln "heroic legend?" Intertwined with it are key elements of Lincoln's statesmanship, character/personality,  legendary eloquence, and mastery of the political game, but it is centrally about war leadership. Noe's conceptualization of the heroic legend is identified, developed, and scrutinized at great length in the book, but, for our purposes here, it can be summarized (in the author's own words) as "the now-canonical assertion that Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief was a military genius both strategically and tactically, not to mention a naturally intuitive and self-taught military thinker so modern in his views that he became a superior commander to his generals" (pg. 1). Though the biographical and military history literature published over the past few decades has exposed (or, in many cases, revived from earlier writings) the evident flaws in that edifice, the concept of Commander in Chief Lincoln as natural military genius still holds broad sway, especially in the popular mind.

As referenced above, the heroic legend and its principal assumptions, as deeply ingrained as they are, nevertheless continue to be reevaluated. Over the first four chapters of this book comprising Part I, Noe offers readers a well-structured critical survey of Lincoln as commander in chief, one that explores broad themes as well as very specific strategic decisions and tactical interventions. It was over this 1861-65 period, obviously, that the heroic legend was spawned, and Noe's text highlights both key elements of the developing legend and those objections that strongly challenge its central tenets.

Naturally, every discussion of Lincoln as commander in chief devotes a great deal of attention to the president's fraught relationship with George McClellan, and Noe's does as well. That troubled relationship dominated how Union forces conducted themselves over much of the war's first half, and, with the top leadership duo during that period frequently at loggerheads, the heroic legend practically demands that Lincoln be right and McClellan be wrong. Nevertheless, a common strain of Lincoln criticism is heavily grounded in a corresponding defense of McClellan (and the reverse is also the case, with Lincoln hagiography routinely pairing profound admiration of Lincoln with deep disdain for all things McClellan). Noe assiduously avoids both camps. An important theme that emerged from the messy final break-up between the two in late-1862 was Lincoln's development of an almost knee-jerk negative response to his top generals proposing to conduct their campaigns through "strategy." After McClellan left the scene, a frustrated Lincoln tended to equate any favoring of the indirect approach with McClellan-like (as he saw it) combat hesitation and avoidance. As Brooks Simpson has maintained in his persuasive rebuttal to the notion that Lincoln finally found his man in U.S. Grant and consequently gave the new General in Chief a free hand in planning the end of the war, this stubborn mistrust even extended to Grant's proposals for the eastern theater in 1864, committing the Army of the Potomac to a grinding overland campaign.

In addition to critiques related to specific campaign decisions, significant among them Lincoln's personal management of the final stages of the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign (a meddling that failed spectacularly), more general themes that contest the Lincoln heroic legend emerge in Noe's retelling. All of these issues have been raised before in some way or another, but Noe's fresh synthesis is well-organized and engagingly presented. Among these challenges to the heroic legend are Lincoln's untimely interventions in military affairs, his curtailment of civil liberty protections, his flawed appreciation of weather and logistical limitations, his impairment of army discipline and efficiency through allowing scheming officers to bypass the proper chain of command, his arguably imbalanced prioritization of political considerations when it came to important command appointments and strategic goals, and his inability until late in the process to find top generals who could fulfill his expectations. The weight assigned to these and other objections to the heroic legend might lead some readers to accuse the author of being too harsh toward Lincoln's wartime leadership (which achieved total victory in the end after all), but one might argue that it is a necessary precondition for comprehending the depth and pervasiveness of the skepticism Lincoln contemporaries and successive generations alike felt toward the president's military management skills before the tide of interpretation shifted decisively during the period between the two world wars (all of that addressed in Part II).

Part II brilliantly traces the development and evolution of the Lincoln heroic legend. Wading through both well-known and obscure Lincoln biography and commentary (both domestic and foreign) that emerged between roughly 1865 and 1959 must have involved an incredible effort of new reading and fresh revisitation. As Noe explains, the legend really originated with Lincoln himself. In matters of military strategy, Lincoln quickly transformed from hesitant amateur conscious of his inexperience to self-confident interventionist entirely willing to question and overrule his professional military advisers and commanders in the field. Indeed, as the war progressed, Lincoln damned his top generals again and again for not recognizing what he himself claimed to recognize as the proper course for employing a national strategy that would crush Confederate resistance. After the war, the most notable early proponents of the heroic legend were former Lincoln secretaries Hay and Nicolay, whose ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History sanctified the Lincoln memory and was the leading early image maker of the slain president as masterful strategist. Full enshrinement would arrive much later.

Noe's Part II chapters offer readers a wonderfully comprehensive and incisively written crash course in the extended historiography of Lincoln as commander in chief. Readers unfamiliar with that literature will likely be surprised to discover that Lincoln's wartime role as commander in chief was little discussed by contemporary biographers and for decades after the beloved president's death, and when it was it was a mixed commentary at best, often negative in nature. Nevertheless, it is often the case that current events trigger intense reappraisal, sometimes seismic in nature, of historical figures. In Lincoln's case it was the civilizational trauma of the Great War and the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe that spawned a new positive outlook on Lincoln as commander in chief. Even though American writers and historians of the time continued to focus on other parts of Lincoln's life and presidency, British military authors spawned a new appreciation of Lincoln's alleged military genius. While some writers such as Viscount Wolseley, G.F.R. Henderson, and B.H. Liddell Hart found little in Lincoln's military mind to admire, others such as Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, disgusted with his own country's civilian leadership, looked to Lincoln as a modern role model. Much more positive in his attempt to reboot the entire debate over Lincoln's abilities as a strategist was the enthusiastic championing of Lincoln from General Colin Robert Ballard. Ballard and Maurice both lauded Lincoln as the benevolent dictator made necessary by the times. Finally, J.F.C. Fuller further idealized Lincoln and especially his relationship with Grant. Though sincere, Fuller's appreciation of Lincoln's superior statesmanship and the president's development into a gifted strategist was, in Noe's view, also wielded as a "tool to pillory the generals of the Great War and shape the future" (pg. 230). In the end, Noe concludes that these writer-generals "completed the British reconstruction of the heroic legend," and, in the process, "canonized it." (pg. 234). The opinions of those disillusioned British generals possessed considerable trans-Atlantic influence, but a pair of American scholars, late to the game, eventually set things in stone.

Just like the Great War and interwar years influenced Lincoln's broader meaning to British writers, World War II and the ensuing Cold War deeply impacted how American writers revisited the Lincoln war presidency. Prior to WW2, Revisionist leading light James Randall spurred a renewed positivity when it came to Lincoln, his leadership, and his controversial exercise of presidential war powers. Still though, Randall did not rate Lincoln a military genius, his assessment of Lincoln as commander in chief far from bolstering the heroic legend (and he defended McClellan more than most). Lincoln was not a military despot (enlightened or otherwise) in Randall's view either. Noe does not equate Randall's views on avoiding war to isolationism, but he sees Randall's impact as fading alongside the spirit of the times, as U.S. involvement in WW2 took on the popular spirit of a moral crusade and, under the influence of the Roosevelt war presidency, "Lincoln metamorphosed into a symbol of democracy, freedom, just war, and military preparedness" (pg. 237). Out were Randall's strident antiwar stance and doubts about ending domestic slavery being worth the destructive costs of war, and in was a New Nationalist revival of "an interpretation of the Civil War that revolved around slavery, irrepressible conflict, and a good war" (pg. 242). This new intellectual climate primed a massive expansion of the heroic legend, and the two men leading that charge were Kenneth P. Williams and T. Harry Williams. In Lincoln Finds a General, Kenneth Williams, with both world wars in the back of his mind, lauded Lincoln's genius in both military and political affairs and praised Grant from on high while at the same time heaping scorn upon McClellan. Both books remain major forces in the field, but T. Harry Williams's Lincoln and His Generals, with its more sophisticated approach to Lincoln, McClellan, Grant, and the rest, ultimately proved the most influential of the two groundbreaking works. Though it is understandable that Part II ends with T. Harry Williams's grand triumph and the enshrinement of his contribution to the Lincoln heroic legend, it still would have been interesting to read the author's evaluation of more recent popular proponents such as James McPherson.

Even today, the heroic legend that still shapes our modern understanding of Lincoln as commander in chief is so ironclad that attempts to challenge it have only scratched the armor. It is not for want of trying, however. Casting aside the cranks, Noe's conclusion outlines the game efforts of four writers, Brooks Simpson, Geoffrey Perret, William Marvel, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, whose sound criticisms on a variety of fronts tried but failed to substantially dent, let alone shatter, the legend. Noe ends the discussion on a bit of a down note by linking the uses and misuses of the Lincoln heroic legend to a buttressing of the modern "Imperial Presidency," with its ever further expansions of presidential war powers.

Of all the enduring components of the Lincoln canonization, his performance as commander in chief provides some of the most fertile ground for critical reevaluation. Kenneth Noe's impressive Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend provides both new thrust to that movement as well as an essential historical framework for understanding exactly how and why Lincoln came to be celebrated as one of the finest, if not the finest, presidential war leaders in our nation's history.