Light on a grey area

It doesn't look like much, this modest patch of green in Washington.

There is a flagpole, a couple of Civil War artillery pieces and a few yards of carefully reconstructed earthworks.

Stand behind those Fort Stevens earthworks with James McPherson, however, and you can travel back in time to the bloody summer of 1864.

And imagine this: The tall guy with the gaunt face and the awesome responsibilities is standing right beside you.

“Lincoln was here and he watched real infantry fighting going on out there,'' McPherson says.

He gestures past Rittenhouse Street towards Georgia Avenue, which was open farmland at the time.

The occasion of the fighting was the sudden, scary move towards Washington of some 15,000 Confederates under General Jubal Early.

Lincoln rode out to Fort Stevens on both days of the encounter, July 11 and 12, to observe. Each time, someone had to tell him — politely or otherwise — to keep his fool head down.

McPherson, America's best-known Civil War historian, has the silver hair befitting a man of 72 but the energy of someone at least a decade younger.

He has driven down from Princeton, as part of the tour for his latest book, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

And he has been lured to Fort Stevens because it is as good a place as any to ponder the way Lincoln performed that sometimes overlooked role.

As it happens, McPherson's great-grandfather served as a white officer in a black regiment, the 22nd US Coloured Troops.

But McPherson didn't learn this until he had already become a historian. He got turned on to history at Gustavus Adolphus, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota.

In graduate school at Johns Hopkins, he began to home in on the Civil War. “I was there during the civil rights movement,'' he says, and the fact that it was “trying to achieve the unfinished business from the 1860s'' intrigued him.

His first book was on the abolitionists. After it was accepted for publication, he got a call from Andre Schiffrin at Pantheon Books.

Schiffrin had noticed that during the noisy public celebration of the Civil War centennial, blacks were barely mentioned.

“Why don't you do a book about the black role in the war?'' McPherson recalls the publisher asking. So he did.

He was teaching at Princeton by then and for the next couple of decades, he had a nice, solid academic career going.

Then in 1988 he published a thoroughly researched yet readable one-volume history of the Civil War era — and hit the kind of jackpot most academics can only dream of.

Battle Cry of Freedom sold much better than expected, won the Pulitzer and along with Ken Burns's famed public television documentary, which aired in 1990, helped spark a revival of interest in the Civil War.

McPherson is reluctant to claim credit. “There had to be something out there to start with. I struck a vein,'' he says. Nonetheless, Battle Cry established him as the preeminent historian of the Civil War.

Asked about McPherson's stature, University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher says: “He's the man.''

Gallagher also points to the importance of McPherson's present subject. Analysis of Lincoln's role as commander-in-chief, he says, is seriously underrepresented in the “vast outpouring of books'' being published in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth on February 12, 1809.

“This really is the main thing Lincoln did during the Civil War,'' Gallagher says. “If he doesn't preside over winning the war, then nothing else happens.''

Yet the most significant previous treatment of the subject — Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams — is more than 50 years old.

The reasons for historians' neglect of Lincoln as commander-in-chief are historical themselves.

By the mid-1980s, as McPherson was working on Battle Cry of Freedom, social history had superseded political, diplomatic and military history among academic historians.

Many were hard at work on the previously ignored stories of non-white, non-elite, non-male Americans. Military history was especially marginalised, in part because of fallout from Vietnam.

Battle Cry tried with considerable success to treat social, economic, political and military issues as conjoined. Since then, McPherson is happy to report, history has become more integrated.

“Military history is now seen as much more important,'' he says, “and much of the military history of the Civil War is really social history.''