Henry Halleck's War: A Fresh Look at Lincoln's Controversial General-In-Chief [Hardcover]

Curt Anders (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

Henry Halleck has not always fared well with historians. Curt Anders, noted Civil War expert, presents a Halleck whose cool-headedness in crisis, competence in military management, and unflinching fidelity to principle perhaps didn't win the war for Lincoln, but certainly helped keep him from losing it.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 750 pages
• Publisher: Guilde Press of Indiana; 1 edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578600294
• ISBN-13: 978-1578600298
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,383,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Books are Easier to Write than to Review, December 8, 1999

By 

The author, Curt Anders (Garrison, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Henry Halleck's War: A Fresh Look at Lincoln's Controversial General-In-Chief (Hardcover)

When I sent copies of this book to members of my family and some friends, their reactions were all the same: "It sure is big!" That's true. Henry Halleck's War is more than 700 pages long; it uses roughly 250,000 words; its 20 chapters contain close to 1,800 source citations -- what we used to call footnotes; and it weighs three pounds, six and a half ounces. Why is it so big? A great many pages are devoted to messages, letters, and reports General Halleck wrote during the war. They show that his contributions to the Union's successful war effort were both numerous and valuable -- and that critics such as Gideon Welles were wrong. It was Welles who said, "Halleck originates nothing, anticipates nothing, takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing." Hardly anyone ever said anything good about Halleck during his lifetime. His friend Cump Sherman urged him to defend himself, to fight back. General Halleck refused. He was willing to be judged by what was in the records. In them, he told Cump, some future historian would find the truth about him and what he did. But during the past hundred years, too few scholars have bothered to go through the 128 thick volumes of the Official Records, flip through crumbling pages until they found the documents that involved General Halleck, and study them. As a result, just about everyone has agreed with Welles that Henry Halleck was a disaster. However, recently Guild Press of Indiana put the entire wall of books called the Official Records on a single wafer-thin CD-ROM. That made it possible for me to do what General Halleck trusted someone would do -- study his record. But I've gone beyond that. The messages, letters, and reports included in this book enable readers to judge Halleck for themselves -- which, I think, is what he hoped would happen. In the course of selecting all these materials and providing enough narrative to place them in historical context, several things surprised me. First, the requirements of the job of general-in-chief were very different from what Halleck's critics assumed. No one knew what a general-in-chief was supposed to do. No valid precedent or standards for judging his performance existed. Even so, ignorance didn't stop anyone from declaring General-in-Chief Halleck a failure. Second, his relationship to Abraham Lincoln had a special aspect that has been completely overlooked. Both men were lawyers: Lincoln in central Illinois, Old Brains out in San Francisco -- indeed, he was the respected senior partner of California's leading law firm. Accordingly, Halleck's performance ought to be judged as that of a special counsel retained to help Lincoln prosecute Union versus Confederacy -- a case that was being tried on battlefields from eastern Virginia to New Mexico. In everything General Halleck wrote you will find precision of thought and expression reflecting his expertise both in military art and in the ability to reduce complex questions to basic principles -- and then to apply them. These were skills that Lincoln needed desperately. Some observers have hailed him as a military genius -- but if you read closely some of the documents he signed, you will see how dependent he actually was on special counsel Halleck. Third, this book also contains messages and letters to Halleck from Don Carlos Buell, George McClellan, William Rosecrans, Cump Sherman, Ulysses Grant, and many other generals. I was surprised by how much they revealed about themselves in what they wrote Halleck. I had never known enough about General Buell, for example, to have an opinion about him. But from the messages he sent Old Brains, I learned why he was such a disappointment. Same regarding McClellan -- the "Young Napoleon." If you doubt that he was a spoiled brat, just read his messages to his wife and to General Halleck. My fourth surprise was that I could compress the quarter of a million words in this book into a single simple sentence: General Halleck didn't win the war, but clearly he kept Abraham Lincoln from losing it. Lincoln was completely unprepared to be Commander- in-Chief, and initially he made some dreadful mistakes. That stopped in mid-1862 when he sent a peremptory order to Halleck to come to Washington. Halleck saved the Union capital by moving McClellan's Army of the Potomac northward to help John Pope. He saved Grant when Lincoln secretly gave command of the Vicksburg operation to a political general already notorious for incompetence. But Halleck couldn't always save Lincoln from blundering. Behind Halleck's back, Lincoln gave command of the Army of the Potomac to "Fighting Joe" Hooker -- with General Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville as a humiliating result. Ordinarily, however, Old Brains and the President reached a meeting of the minds. Both men, being lawyers, placed great weight on principles. Halleck was driven by a high sense of duty and of honor and of love of country. But he was also an expert on the principles of military art, and he enforced them. He told Lincoln and later Grant, You cannot, you dare not try to control a battle from a desk hundreds or thousands of miles from the killing site. "I hold," Old Brains declared, "that a general in command of an army in the field is the best judge of existing conditions."

That was the Halleck Doctrine. It was turned on its head recently during military operations in the Balkans directed from the White House. Reputations, Professor Walter McDougall has written, are the only things over which historians have control. Historians destroyed Henry Halleck's reputation. It's time to give some of his good name back to him.