It will be useful to compare the leadership styles of two wartime American presidents of the nineteenth century.  James Madison was president during the War of 1812, while Abraham Lincoln occupied the office of chief executive during the American Civil War.  The first of these must be counted a failure as a wartime commander-in-chief, while the second was able to prosecute his nation’s most terrible conflict to a successful conclusion.  What qualities enabled one to emerge triumphant, and the other to suffer the indignity of failure, we will now examine.

Their respective upbringings were very different.  Madison came from a wealthy background and would never experience the pangs of want, or the insecurity born of an underprivileged childhood.  He was highly intelligent, capable, and had access to a college education, something which only the landowning elite could afford in eighteenth century America.  Yet he did suffer from an affliction of the nerves, which could incapacitate him during times of extreme stress.  Lincoln came from an extremely poor background on the margins of the American frontier; he had only a fleeting experience with a father figure, and was left to his own devices at an early age.  If any man could be called self-made, it was he.  Lincoln had little formal schooling, but was extremely hungry for learning of any kind, devouring whatever books and printed material he could find.  Perhaps equally important in an estimation of Lincoln’s character was his ambition:  he was utterly determined to succeed, and was willing to do what was necessary to improve his situation.  Both men kept their own counsel. Lincoln, unlike Madison, was not in the habit of revealing his inner thoughts and feelings to others; as a practicing lawyer, he had learned the value of discretion at an early age. 

Neither man had much in the way of military experience.  Madison was appointed a colonel in the Virginia militia during the Revolutionary War; but this was largely a ceremonial post, and he did not see action in the field.  Lincoln had had some exposure to military matters during the Black Hawk War, but this did not provide him with any experience of command under fire.  Both men, then, entered the presidency as novices.  But Lincoln sought to improve his understanding of war by extensive reading of military treatises from the Library of Congress.  Madison, by contrast, showed little intellectual interest in the study of warfare and strategy, preferring to rely on the advice of his cabinet. 

Both men were caught unprepared by the outbreak of war.  Madison had lobbied for war with Great Britain in 1812, believing that only war would compel the British to take American grievances seriously.  But when Madison got his war, he found himself pitifully underprepared to fight it.  The American army could barely field 12,000 men, and was extremely short of experienced officers.  Years of deliberate neglect had hollowed out American military capability.  Madison had subscribed to the naïve Jeffersonian view that standing armies were a threat to democracy.  He believed that American militia forces (which numbered about 35,000) would quickly be able to take Canada, a delusion that turned out to be completely false.  Worse still, Madison never learned from his wartime mistakes; he lurched fitfully from one crisis to the next until the Treaty of Ghent saved his administration.  He never created a command structure that might impart strategic coherence in the war’s prosecution.  He entrusted the security of his nation’s capital to the incompetent general William Winder, who was later court-martialed after the Battle of Bladensburg. The utter ineptitude of Madison’s “defense” of Washington enabled a British force of only 5,000 men to enter the city and burn every government building except the patent office.

Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, acted quickly to rectify his lack of readiness for war.  He immediately called for 75,000 volunteers after Fort Sumter, and created a conscription mechanism that, however flawed it may have been, provided the Union with a continuous flow of manpower.  Lincoln’s administration sought novel ways to finance the war, such as selling war bonds to the public.  Madison, by contrast, was crippled by the fact that the United States did not even have a central bank in 1812.  Lincoln understood the need for good generalship and, unlike Madison, was not squeamish about relieving incompetent generals from command.  It is remarkable, in fact, just how many generals Lincoln fired during the Civil War before he found the leaders he needed to win the war. There is evidence that Madison’s nerves sometimes faltered during the course of the war; Lincoln, though under tremendous personal strain, never buckled under the weight of his burdens.

The difference between the two wartime presidents is perhaps nowhere so pronounced as in their choice of cabinet members.  Madison, either by choice or through lack of sound judgment, surrounded himself with mediocre ministers who did not serve him well.  Madison’s secretaries of war—Alexander Dallas, John Armstrong, and William Eustis—were neither capable nor willing to take guidance.  Eustis was forced to resign later in the conflict, Armstrong was court-martialed, and Dallas was of no consequence.  Lincoln, however, benefitted greatly from his cabinet.  It would not be an exaggeration, I think, to say that Lincoln’s cabinet was the best ever assembled.  Men like Samuel Chase, William Seward, Simon Cameron, and Gideon Welles may have been egotistical and aggressive, but they were extremely competent.  The result was that the Civil War was managed with far more strategic vision than the War of 1812. 

I understand that some of Madison’s problems cannot be laid solely at his doorstep.  The United States of 1812 was much different from the United States of 1861.  But some aspects of war are so basic and fundamental that even a child can articulate them.  Foremost among these, perhaps, is the need to protect the nation’s capital from attack.  Madison assigned the defense of Washington to an incompetent, John Armstrong; he compounded his mistake by failing to check on Armstrong’s progress or to exercise his authority as commander-in-chief.  Lincoln never wavered in his defense of Washington; even when the Army of the Potomac was attempting to move against Richmond, Lincoln always made sure that sufficient men were left behind to protect the capital. 

We must conclude from all this that Madison was a complete failure as a wartime commander-in-chief.  He was by no means a timid or cowardly man; on the contrary, he was nearly captured by the British at Bladensburg after approaching enemy lines too closely.  It is true that the enemy Madison faced, Great Britain, was a much more formidable enemy than the adversary faced by Abraham Lincoln in 1861. England controlled the seas in 1812, and handily outclassed the American army as well. But this fact does not excuse Madison’s bumbling performance when his nation’s existence was at stake.

The reasons lie deeper. Madison’s problem was simply that his personality was ill-suited to wartime command.  He was what we might today call a “micromanager,” in that he tried to do too much himself.  He could be hesitant and waffling in his decision-making, and he disliked personal confrontations.  He lacked the temperament, flexibility, and qualities of judgment that would have allowed him to learn and adapt to unfamiliar conditions.  Lincoln, however, possessed a very shrewd and canny political mind.  He knew how to take the measure of a man; he was a good judge of character, and would not hesitate to fire underlings who were burdens to him.  Lincoln learned quickly and readily adapted to changing wartime conditions; he was not afraid to seek unorthodox solutions to the problems he faced.  These were the reasons why he was a successful wartime president, and Madison was not.        

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Read more comparative discussions of battlefield leadership in the new translation of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders.