All the President's Men

摘要

From the moment the war started, Abraham Lincoln was surrounded. Across the Potomac was the Confederacy; in Washington was a Cabinet unsure of his abilities, an increasingly hostile Congress and a growing list of Union generals with sensitive egos but alarmingly few victories on the battlefield. As the war's shocking toll mounted, Lincoln turned from commander to commander, looking for the man who would protect Washington from rebel armies and press the Union's biggest advantage: "We have the greater numbers." Lincoln had no real military experience except for 77 combat-free days in an Illinois militia, but he became an avid strategist, continually peppering field leaders with questions, suggestions, precise orders and emphatic, if often ignored, exhortations to drive against the enemy. By 1864 he had found his fighter. When Ulysses S. Grant took command in the East, Lincoln didn't, for once, demand specific plans, Six weeks later Grant had lost more men than every general before him, but Robert E. Lee's army was bottled up in Petersburg, Va. "Hold on with a bull-dog grip," Lincoln urged Grant Unlike his predecessors, Grant did.