Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff

Halleck is a challenged biography of controversial figure Union General-in-Chief Henry Wager Halleck, who was cast into negative stereotype by many historians since Appomattox more famously by Lincoln's secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles. The author argues that Halleck has been greatly underrated as a war theorist because of past writers' failure to do justice to his close involvement with movements basic to the development of the American military establishment. He concedes that "by all the touchstones used to judge great captains of the past, Halleck was a failure," but maintains he was nonetheless, "the 'Old Brains' of the Union Army in the time of the testing of the nation."