“Commander in chief” was a vague phrase for Americans prior to the Civil War. The Constitution named the president “commander in chief” of the nation’s armed forces, but what did that mean, exactly? No one really knew, because the United States had not yet fought a war that truly tested any president’s war-making powers. The various conflicts with Native American tribes were far away on the frontier, the War of 1812 was of relatively short duration, and the War with Mexico in the 1840s was brief and distant. But the Civil War—that was big, terrifying and long.
Both the Union and Confederate presidents found this immense war on their very doorsteps. In Lincoln’s case, he is the only president in American history who was at war just about every day he occupied the White House. Both he and Jefferson Davis—whose short-lived Confederacy operated under a similar constitutional and political system—were forced to improvise, essentially engaging in on-the-job training as commanders-in-chief. Small wonder that each man’s tenure as commander in chief was beset with difficulties and unprecedented problems.
Lincoln was almost comically lacking in military experience when he became president in 1860. He had served briefly as an officer in the Illinois state militia during the Black Hawk War 1832, seeing no combat, but having “a good many bloody struggles with the musquetos [sic],” as he later joked. He distinguished himself during the War with Mexico chiefly as an outspoken critic, using his single term in the United States Congress to blast President James K. Polk for bullying Mexico and engaging in a western land grab that only benefited slaveholders. Lincoln knew very little about actual warfare, and even less about the immense complexities surrounding the deployment of modern armies and navies. [1]
