Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the Navy had a variety of missions. These included

The peacetime armed forces were tiny-the entire United States army numbered only 16,000 men-many of the officers were either old and infirm or young and inexperienced (or worse, had defected to the Confederacy), and the federal government’s bureaucratic structure was inadequate for the task of administering a large and sustained war effort. Americans in 1860 were shockingly unprepared for what they now faced. Lincoln knew very little about actual warfare, and even less about the immense complexities surrounding the deployment of modern armies and navies.

Polk for bullying Mexico and engaging in a western land grab that only benefited slaveholders. He distinguished himself during the War with Mexico chiefly as an outspoken critic, using his single term in the United States Congress to blast President James K. He had served briefly as an officer in the Illinois state militia during the Black Hawk War 1832, seeing no combat, but having “a good many bloody struggles with the musquetos ,” as he later joked. Lincoln was almost comically lacking in military experience when he became president in 1860.

Small wonder that each man’s tenure as commander in chief was beset with difficulties and unprecedented problems. Both he and Jefferson Davis-whose short-lived Confederacy operated under a similar constitutional and political system-were forced to improvise, essentially engaging in on-the-job training as commanders-in-chief. In Lincoln’s case, he is the only president in American history who was at war just about every day he occupied the White House. But the Civil War-that was big, terrifying and long.īoth the Union and Confederate presidents found this immense war on their very doorsteps. The various conflicts with Native American tribes were far away on the frontier, the War of 1812 was of relatively short duration, and the War with Mexico in the 1840s was brief and distant. The Constitution named the president “commander in chief” of the nation’s armed forces, but what did that mean, exactly? No one really knew, because the United States had not yet fought a war that truly tested any president’s war-making powers. “Commander in chief” was a vague phrase for Americans prior to the Civil War.

Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the Navy had a variety of missions. These included