Presidents At War
By opting to invade Iraq, George W. Bush was following in the footsteps of history
As for the Civil War, almost no one anticipated its outbreak, course, and outcome. Only a few thought it would be a long war, notably William Tecumseh Sherman. While teaching at a military college in Louisiana in 1859, he wrote, "All here talk as if a dissolution of the Union were not only a possibility but a probability of easy execution. If attempted we will have Civil War of the most horrible kind." Abraham Lincoln had no such foresight. In his second inaugural, in March 1865, he admitted, "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained."
Nor did Lincoln seem to have a clear military strategy when the war began. He walked over to the War Department every day to read the latest telegraph dispatches and went through one general after another until he settled on Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. And he did meet with resistance: Lincoln's Democratic opponents called for a compromise peace with the South, retaining slavery, or even letting the Confederacy go. In the summer of 1864 Lincoln seemed sure to be defeated for re-election. But Grant's advance through Virginia and siege of Petersburg and Sherman's capture of Atlanta and March to the Sea across Georgia convinced northern voters that the Union was on the road to victory. Lincoln was re-elected by a 55 to 45 percent margin. What were his plans for rebuilding the Union? After his assassination (five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender), no one knew.
Post-Civil War, America's appetite for military action seemed sated. The Army policed much of the South during Reconstruction until 1877 and fought against the Plains Indians. The Navy was largely scrapped; in the 1880s it was ranked 12th in the world, behind Turkey's and Sweden's. But America ceased to look inward in 1890, when the Census Bureau declared that the frontier had been closed and when Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History focused American leaders' attentions abroad.
Rough Riders. A young New York politician and author named Theodore Roosevelt was one who looked beyond America's borders. At 38, he wangled an appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy. President William McKinley, a Civil War veteran and canny politician, had no eagerness for war. Roosevelt did. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898, there was an outcry for war with Spain, which had been brutally suppressing a colonial rebellion in Cuba. Ten days later, when Navy Secretary John Long left the office after lunch, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt did an end run: He wrote out orders positioning the American fleet for battle with Spanish forces in Cuba and its Pacific colony of the Philippines. Long was unnerved but didn't reverse the orders. So the Navy was ready to go on the attack in April, when McKinley sent a war message to Congress and war was declared. The Spanish fleet was defeated in Manila harbor on May 1; Cuba was blockaded, and America won land and sea battles July 3 at Santiago Harbor and San Juan Hill (where Roosevelt led his Rough Riders in a well-publicized charge). Puerto Rico was invaded on July 25. A peace protocol was signed on August 13.
advertisement
