Books: General in the White House

LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS (363 pp.)—T. Harry Williams—Knopf ($4).

The Civil War had not been going very long when Abraham Lincoln discovered that the North's top generals had a perverse occupational disease: they didn't like to fight. Like most civilians, Lincoln thought that generals were supposed to fight, and" in his letters he kept begging them to do so. If the Confederacy's Lee and Jackson could raise the devil using smaller numbers, why couldn't the North, with men just as brave, get in a sound lick now & then? Sadly the President was forced into a job he did not want and...