Back to the history of New York City! We have begun with the city’s origin before the founding of the United States and left off in the 1880s in the last post – when New York was undeniably the economic and cultural center of the United States. Today, we are covering New York in its most iconic form as a moloch of steel, concrete, and millions of people. A chronological narrative will not help us here. Instead, we adopt a thematic approach and look the economy, construction, infrastructure, and culture which made New York from the late 19^th to the mid-20^th century the model city of high modernity.

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Economy: Transformation

New York had been America’s most dynamic hub for trade and manufacturing for decades. Yet the city’s riches had been shared unequally, just like the risks in producing them. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, New York’s working class grew more assertive and found more political support to improve their lives: For example, the three Tenement House Acts of 1867, 1879, and 1901 mandated such luxuries as windows in every apartment and toilets in every building.

The 1909/1910 textile worker strikes led to improved pay and shorter hours. Just one year later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Lower Manhattan burned down and 146 garment workers died – many of them unable to escape through the staircase because management kept the doors locked during shifts. The fire catastrophe led to a public outcry against such practices and New York state introduced better workplace and fire safety regulations.

The garment workers were in some ways emblematic for the New York working class – most of them were young immigrants (especially Jewish and Italian). In another, they represented a shift – almost all of them were women, and their struggle for better working conditions mirrored the force of the American women’s movement in the political arena.

In one way, however, they represented New York’s present, but not its future: The industrialization of the 19^th century had turned New York into the largest manufacturing hub of the world. Yet manufacturing, the physical production of goods, ran out of steam when the improved productivity provided most people in the United States with most of their basic needs. Eager customers were thus not to be taken for granted anymore. Instead, they had to be wooed and their desires – for items of whose existence they had recently been still ignorant – awakened. New York became a hotbed for the growing advertisement industry (with which Madison Avenue is synonymous until today) as well as for shopping (here, Fifth Avenue is the symbolic street). Our age of trends, shopping as a leisure activity, and overconsumption cannot be imagined without New York.

In the 19^th century, foreign capital had funded the expansion into the American West, but now the capital flows reversed: American capital was instrumental in financing the Allies’ Great War effort. At the end of the Great War, America was for the first time a net creditor nation. Its role in the international financial system expanded after the war as American loans enabled defeated Germany to pay its reparations to the Allies (who, in turn, paid off their American war loans). At the same time as New York took London’s place as the premier finance hub in the world, America at large withdrew from the world under a renewed isolationism and the xenophobia which came with the Red Scare after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Political upheaval did not stop the investment craze of the 1920s: When a bomb exploded in Wall Street in 1920 and killed 30 people, stock trading resumed normally the next day – much in contrast to 1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games), where the bombing marks the end of the game (and players hope to have made all their profits by then).

The New York-based financial system was robust enough to withstand such external shocks, but it collapsed under its own contradictions: The stock market boom of the 1920 led to ever more capital pouring into the New York Stock Exchange (at the expense of all other forms of investments, for example the American overseas loans on which the global financial system was now based). The spectacular gains fueled a debt-based speculation bubble which burst in October 1929. The inadequate response by central banks which did nothing to combat the contraction of the monetary supply led to an extended, global economic crisis – the Great Depression.

Unemployment and poverty plagued New York much like the rest of the world in the 1930s. The city bounced back through ambitious public works initiated by the energetic new mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (many of them funded by New Deal funds in a cross-party cooperation between the Republican LaGuardia and the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt). Still, New York’s economy only recovered when demand for manufactured goods skyrocketed because of World War II: The industrial giant rose one last time. One example of New York’s awesome productive capacity may suffice: From 1941 to 1945, the New York Navy Yard built more warships than all of Japan combined. The United States won World War II because of their industrial productivity, and New York was the beating heart of it.

Construction: Upwards

New York had always grown. From the 1880s on, the city grew in a heretofore barely used dimension – upwards. The twin innovations of the elevator and steel frame construction allowed for building heights which had been considered impractical, if not impossible, before. While New York was not the pioneer of these technologies – that merit belongs to Chicago – they were accepted in Manhattan on a scale not known before. Ever more “skyscrapers”, as the tall buildings were soon to be known, sprang up between the Hudson and the East River, giving the city a characteristic look from far away. New York’s skyline has been continually changing, but since then, it has always been dominated by skyscrapers – as has been the image of the city in the public imagination.

Board games are no exception. No theme is as prevalent in games about New York as the construction of skyscrapers. Some are specific, like Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova) which has players build the eponymous Flatiron Building together, but many could be set in any city with tall buildings – but as they are about tall buildings, their designers and publishers think they fit best for a New York setting: Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus) is a variant of Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill) to which the third dimension is added. New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games) is a remake of Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG) – just that the struggle for majorities in Venetian districts of the original, fought with councilmembers, has been replaced by a struggle for majorities in New York boroughs, fought with – you guessed it – skyscrapers.

The skyscrapers got ever taller: The first steel frame buildings in the 1880s and 1890s were well below 100 meters. In 1909, the Singer Building (187m) was the first structure in New York to exceed the height of Europe’s church spires – the first time that the world’s tallest building stood in New York. The city would retain that honor until the 1970s with a succession of ever taller skyscrapers.

The most iconic one was the Empire State Building whose construction was begun in October 1929 – just weeks before the stock market crash. It became the most visible sign of the economic crisis: Even five years after its completion in 1931, half of the Empire State Building’s office space remained empty. Like the rest of New York, it recovered by the 1940s. It would remain the world’s tallest building until it was overtaken by another New York icon in 1973 – the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Infrastructure: Transport and Leisure

New York did not only grow vertically. Originally, the city had been confined to Manhattan Island and gradually expanded into what became the Bronx. In 1898, New York merged with its neighbor Brooklyn (itself America’s third-largest city at the time) as well Queens county and Staten Island to become a massive metropolis of more than three million inhabitants.

This sprawling moloch, however, was initially still centered on Manhattan, as most people worked there and thus couldn’t live too far away: In 1900, more than half of New Yorkers lived in Manhattan. That changed with the construction of the New York subway from 1900 on. New York was late to embark on such a project (London had started in the 1860s), but it was undertaken with the characteristic boldness of the city and soon became the largest in the world.

Thus, the geography of the city changed: New Yorkers could work in Manhattan, but commute every day from one of the other boroughs. As land there was a lot cheaper, a residential construction boom set in, and by the 1920s, Brooklyn had become the most populous borough of New York.

The growth of the city required its transport and leisure infrastructure to keep up. One man would become synonymous with it from the 1920s on: Robert Moses, starting out on the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, became responsible for all kinds of parks, beaches, roads, bridges, and tunnels for both the state and the city of New York over the next decades.

These projects shaped the face of New York: The parks, both in the center and on the outskirts, provided very real benefits in one of the largest, most densely settled cities in the world. And the transport projects took inspiration from the new trend of motorized individual transport – and reinforced it.

Large-scale engineering projects like these go beyond the mere technical aspects. Moses’s creations were shaped by his ideas about how society should look like. For example, already his very first project – Jones Beach State Park on Long Island – outlined his ideal: It provided New Yorkers with a beautifully designed leisure park on the seashore. They arrived there after a pleasurable drive on the new parkways through lush greenery – by car, as no train or subway station was built in Jones Beach, and the bridges crossing the parkway were too low for buses to pass through. This lack of public transport meant that Jones Beach was exclusively accessible for the middle classes.

An even more striking example is Riverside Park in Manhattan along the Hudson River. Around a third of the park is in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem, two thirds in the predominantly White Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side. These southern two thirds were liberally sprinkled with dozens and dozens of playgrounds, the third in Harlem only received one – and here, the iron lattice at the toilets was “decorated” with little ape sculptures.

As you can see, Robert Moses was not quite a nice guy. We’ll see more of him in the next post in this series!

Culture: Roaring Twenties

America’s new, more assertive role in the world after World War I also increased global interest in the country’s cultural output. American literature developed a new confidence, and American jazz became the hottest new music around the world. New York as America’s cultural center both attracted established artists (like the jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong who both made the city their home in 1923) and produced its own original creations (like the Harlem Renaissance, which marked the first time that a movement of Black American writers and visual artists left their imprint on the wider American cultural consciousness).

One of the institutions of the 1920s New York cultural scene has gotten its own board game: 1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games). The historical Cotton Club was founded in Harlem in 1923 and soon became the venue to see many of the finest jazz musicians – an attraction not only for regular New Yorkers, but also for the celebrities of the time. That, in turn, made the club even more attractive… well, not for everyone. While the performers on stage were Black, the club would not admit Black patrons (except for the rare Black celebrity). That is not explicitly addressed by the board game, but attentive players will notice that the almost all of the artists which can perform at the players’ clubs are Black, almost all of the celebrities which may attend the club (and are the chief source of points) are White – as are the gangsters.

“Gangsters?” you may ask. “In a game about running a nightclub?” Yes, as we are in the age of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. This fleeting episode (1920 to 1933), and the massive expansion of organized crime which came with it, is almost as irresistible to board game designers as the construction of skyscrapers. Sometimes, it is only the corollary to another activity (like in 1923 Cotton Club).

At other occasions, it takes center stage: Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is all about building a crime empire in Manhattan based on the distribution of illegal alcohol. Frankly, there is a mafia game set in New York for all kinds of gaming tastes: Speakeasy caters to heavy euro gamer, The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON) to those who love miniatures.

Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games) is for combat-oriented gamers, and Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H) for those who don’t want to take their game so seriously: Gangs of squirrels try to dominate the nut-smuggling business in Central Park, 1925.

Of course, all these mafia games could be set elsewhere. After all, alcohol was prohibited everywhere in the United States. New York, however, is irresistible as the biggest city, where presumably also the biggest crimes are committed. It is no coincidence that both Superman and Batman, those heroes of the Golden Age of Comics, fight their mastermind criminal enemies in fictionalized versions of New York (Metropolis and Gotham, respectively). Apropos: Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games) allows players to run a comic book publisher, develop ideas, print, and sell comic books… and of course, they do so in New York.  

New York’s status as leading America in culture and crime will feature in our next (and last) instalment of this series. Watch this space!

Games Referenced

Fifth Avenue (Wilko Manz, Ravensburger)

1920 Wall Street (Perepau Llistosella, Looping Games)

Flatiron (Isra C./Shei S., Ludonova)

Manhattan (Karl-Heinz Koch, Fagus)

Acquire (Sid Sackson, Avalon Hill)

New York City (Stefan Feld, Queen Games)

Rialto (Stefan Feld, TMG)

Ticket to Ride: New York (Alan R. Moon, Days of Wonder)

1923 Cotton Club (Pau Carles, Looping Games)

Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda, Eagle-Gryphon Games)

The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire (Eric M. Lang, CMON)

Blood Feud in New York (Kyle Weinandy, Eagle-Gryphon Games)

Nutty Business (Alain Rivollet, Studio H)

Age of Comics: The Golden Years (Giacomo Cimini/Sónia Gonçalves, Lirius Games)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.

The morning dawned early and I was up and ready to go by 8:30am. I had a muffin in my room and a trusty diet Mountain Dew for breakfast and we were on our way to the Winterberry Room to get going on our continued game of GTS.

We jumped right back into GTS Where Eagles Dare and The Devil’s Cauldron from MMP. I was assigned to command the area around Eindhoven/Best/Son and to eliminate the few pockets of German resistance remaining there and then move our armor north to cut off possible German reinforcements from the east. We jumped back in at the 1100 turn and played into the 1700 turn although I had to leave shortly after lunch to meet up with Gregory M. Smith. This system is just so solid and is really great fun.

And I also very much enjoy the deep historical immersion into the event and its incorporation of things like heroes and artillery parks as well as the gorgeous production values with amazing counters, a very detailed and beautiful board and the way it portrays company-level combat. I will say that there is a fairly steep learning curve and rules overhead and while I feel the combat system works it is very involved and bits can be forgotten. But it really is a solid operational level portrayal of WWII combat. I very much can’t wait to play it again in the future and we actually have the reprint of The Devil’s Cauldron on pre-order and I have heard it might be out by the end of the year. I need to find me a copy of Where Eagles Dare as well although I most likely will never get the full combined games together on the table at the same time.

After 14 hours of pushing counters, I am now a follower of this system and want to thank Joe and Matt, as well as my friend Mike Heckman, for teaching me.

After lunch I found my friend John Sy from the Philippines and said hello but he had a gift he had brought for me. It was Japanese occupation currency in the form of Philippine pesos from WWII. What a very cool and thoughtful gift and upon my return home I will be placing it in a frame and hanging it in my game room. Thanks John!

I then was able to meet up with my friend and fantastic designer Gregory M. Smith as well as Kevin McPartland to get a look at a few games that they are designing together, including Viking Dawn from Compass Games and Star Spangled Tide: The War of 1812 from Compass Games.

We first got a play in of Viking Dawn and had a great time with the game. It is a light, beer and pretzels style game based on the SPI Conquistadors designed by Richard Berg where players control 1 of 4 Viking clans and are trying to build longboats, train war bands, develop explorers and lead them to explore, settle, raid and conquer Europe from Russia in the east, to Iceland and Newfoundland in the west, the Mediterranean and parts of North Africa. When leaders die you must bury them with silver gaining VP’s or if you can’t afford it bury them with nothing and lose VP’s. The main mechanic is a press your luck exploration mechanic where you must roll for the destruction of your fleets based upon how far they have traveled that year. You might lose all of your ships or may get lucky and lose none, you can mitigate this be investing in the journeys with additional supplies and tech to ensure better offs but the dice are cruel and you might just lose not only your fleets but also the booty they have collected from raiding.

It’s a very fun and lite take on this chaotic time in history and I very much enjoyed it. The game is nearly complete and should be printing and ready for shipping in early 2027. I think that this one is a perfect convention game and is sure to see more plays on my table.

We then shot a video with both designers together and then broke off with just Greg to talk about 6 of his other in-design projects. These included the following Korean Tide (next entry in the Tide Series covering the Korean War 1940-1953), Rifle Platoon (tactical level squad based solitaire game using the American Tank Ace Series), Project Z (what if bombing game where Japan won at Midway and began to run bombing operations against the United States mainland and Australia similar to Amerika Bomber), Western Desert Ace (solitaire Ace Series game focused in North Africa), B-52D Linebacker II (solitaire Vietnam War bombing game in 1972) and then finally a scoop on a joint design from Kevin McPartland and Greg Smith called Star Spangled Tide. It was a great discussion and I’m very much looking forward to all of these games.

To end the video, Greg spoiled his upcoming Lone Banner game which is a 1-4 player dungeon crawler set in the fantasy world of Kalar from Burning Banners from Compass Games. This one is going to be fun and I got a look at the characters, spells and weapons and also saw the dungeon tiles that will be laid out as players move through the dungeon encountering traps, monsters and bosses to fight. This looks great but it is a ways off as Greg said he has only been designing it for a month or so.

I then got to play the new The Great Hunger from Compass Games with designer Kevin McPartland. In The Great Hunger players represent families of tenant farmers and field hands. At first, when the potatoes are plentiful your clan will grow, using the events on the top half of cards to help your family expand across the map moving into counties, working on estates and in factories. When the potatoes blight arrives, you’ll use the events on the bottom half to save as many as you can, finding them aid or employment in Ireland, or scrambling to ports to secure passage to America. 

The game is a very light Euro style game of survival and is well done as it’s rooted in history and teaches about the struggles of the Irish. I am glad to have played the final production copy as I got to play a prototype copy a few years ago at WBC. This one will catch some heat from people for it’s dark topic and will just not be for everyone but it has something to teach about history and I have Irish ancestry and am interested as to what happened to cause my ancestors to leave their home to come to America.

One final thing I want to show you is the lineup of games that GMT has staged in the main gaming area. These are all of their newest arrivals and they are just gorgeous. I’m most interested in Coast Watchers designed by Volko Ruhnke and The Weimar Republic designed by Gunnar Holmbäck.

That was it for Day 3 and I’m off to bed with an early start tomorrow with a few games on the docket including World Order from Hegemonic Games Project and Coalitions: Realpolitik from PHALANX.

See you tomorrow night!

-Grant

Nine score and seven weeks ago, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, we branched out to American presidents, German chancellors, and even a German president. Today’s subject is another US president – Abraham Lincoln, our first rated subject from the 19^th century. And which game could be more appropriate for him than the first real political-military game of the American Civil War – For the People (Mark Herman, GMT Games)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Lincoln’s Life

Beginnings on the Frontier

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, as the son of Kentucky frontier farmers. The family moved around often during his childhood – first to Indiana, then Illinois. Lincoln received little formal education. He worked on his father’s farm and as a hired laborer from his youth on. However, he loved reading and yearned to escape physical labor by self-improvement – thus, he jumped at the chance to work as a store clerk (and later, store owner), postmaster, and, finally, taught himself law from books and passed the bar to practice as a lawyer.

Lincoln ran for the Illinois state legislature in 1832 and was narrowly defeated – as he proudly noted later, it was his only defeat in a popular election. Two years later, he was successful. During his eight years in the state house, Lincoln focused on supporting the infrastructural development of the state – railroads, canals, and the state bank to finance these projects.

The dominance of the Democratic Party in Illinois left little room for Whigs like Lincoln to be elected to national office. Lincoln thus waited until it was his turn in the Whig party candidate rotation to try for the US House of Representatives in 1846. Lincoln went to Washington where he attacked Democratic president James K. Polk’s war against Mexico. The Whig rotation meant that he could not run for re-election. Lincoln resumed his law practice and gloomily assumed his political career was over.

Lincoln vs. the Expansion of Slavery

The Mexican-American War ended in a resounding success for the United States – and in an expansion of slave-holding territory in the south which upended the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Instead of being bottled up in the south, slavery now seemed on the advance. The proponents of the “peculiar institution” saw their chance to export it to the territories, new states, and enforce their customs in the free states of the north as well. The possible expansion of slavery electrified its opponents as well, and the territories in the west – especially Kansas – soon became embroiled in a violent struggle over their status as slave-holding or free.

Lincoln was elected to the Illinois state legislature again in 1854, but declined to take his seat to stand for election to the US Senate (then elected by state legislatures). As he failed to obtain a majority, he struck a pact with anti-slavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull and had him elected on a cross-party coalition of Whigs and Trumbull’s small faction of anti-slavery Democrats. A political re-alignment was near.

When the new Republican Party formed, united in its opposition to slavery, Lincoln abandoned the sinking ship of the Whig Party. He stood again for election to the US Senate in 1858, this time against Democratic heavyweight Stephen A. Douglas who had made his fame as the evangelist of “popular sovereignty” – the position that the federal government should neither allow the expansion of slavery to the new states and territories nor ban it, and instead leave the decision to be decided in local referenda. Lincoln followed the immensely popular Douglas on his campaign trail and got him to stand in a series of debates against Lincoln. While Lincoln lost the Senate election once more, the debates elevated him to national standing as a moderate opponent of slavery with great intellectual and rhetorical capabilities.

Elected by the People

Lincoln’s moderate stance – he opposed the expansion of slavery, but did not call for its abolition in the slave states of the American South – was a liability in the new Republican Party if they just wanted to make a statement for their supporters. Yet when the dominant Democratic Party which had won six of the last eight presidential elections fractured over the question of slavery (Douglas’s platform of Popular Sovereignty gained a majority, but not the required two thirds of the delegates; the southern proponents of federal enforcement of slavery outside of the South bolted from the Democratic convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge as their own candidate), it became an asset – for the Republicans now played for victory. Lincoln was nominated as the Republican candidate, beating the party’s more radical heavyweights such as Governor Salmon P. Chase (Ohio) or Senator William H. Seward (New York). As the pro-slavery field fractured even further (John Bell ran as the candidate as the Constitutional Union Party which had the same views on slavery as the southern Democrats, but opposed their flirt with secession), the Republicans were suddenly the frontrunners. While Lincoln only won 40% of the popular vote in the election of November 6, 1860, he was ahead in all the populous free states of the north which gave him an easy victory in the electoral college (180 of 303 votes). John Bell had carried three states for 39 electoral votes with only 13% of the popular vote; Stephen Douglas only 12 electoral votes even though his 29% of the popular vote placed him second behind Lincoln. Yet he had been crushed in the north by Lincoln, and in the south by John Breckinridge who had only received 18% of the popular vote, but carried eleven slave-holding states in the south for 72 electoral votes.

Lincoln was only a moderate opponent of slavery, but that was still likely to mean that he would end the federal practice to enforce slavery in the new states and territories as well as the free states (as when fugitive slaves were returned from the free states to their erstwhile masters). That thought put southern slaveholders in a frenzy. South Carolina declared its secession from the United States on December 20, 1860. Six other states followed suit in the next weeks. The seven proclaimed a new country, the Confederate States of America, on February 4, 1861 – one month before Lincoln had even taken office.

Any attempts to save the Union before Lincoln’s accession failed. Lincoln himself made a conscious effort not to provoke the southerners, he was also fiercely aware that their position was that of a political minority, having just been soundly defeated by the electorate, and that he could not act “as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness.” Constitutional Unionist Senator John C. Crittenden proposed to enshrine slavery in the US constitution to allay the fears of the slavers. These constitutional amendments could not gain a majority in Congress, as the Republicans were unwilling to use their electoral victory to enact their defeated opponent’s platform, and the southern Democrats were bent on secession.

Entering the White House, Lincoln found a mess. His predecessor James Buchanan, a pro-slavery Democrat, had done nothing to prevent secession or reign in the secessionists. Parts of his administration had even helped the secessionists before their terms in office ended. Lincoln himself dared not act to boldly to quash the secession as he (falsely) believed that the majority of southern whites supported the Union and would rise up against the secession. As that did not happen, the only committed Unionists in the South were representatives of federal institutions – most notably, the army. The secessionists seized army installations, where they could, and sieged them, where they couldn’t: The shots fired at Fort Sumter, a fort in the harbor of Charleston (South Carolina) which its commander refused to hand over to the secessionists, marked the beginning of armed insurrection to the United States – the American Civil War. Encouraged by the brazen action further south, four more states (including the all-important Virginia) joined the Confederacy.

Limited War to Save the Union

Lincoln now walked a dangerous tightrope. The secession could only be put down by military force, but he needed to apply it in a way which would not make the Union look the aggressor lest the slave states which were still in the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland) seceded as well. Lincoln managed these border states with a deft hand. In Missouri, the local unionists and the US forces overcame the secessionists. Lincoln left Kentucky deliberately alone until a Confederate invasion swayed the state in favor of the Union (and US forces defended it against the Confederacy). Maryland, the most crucial of the three for its position (it provided the only connection of Washington, D.C., to the rest of the Union), was put under tight control by the US military. Lincoln dispensed with the writ of Habeas Corpus to allow for a more effective control of secessionists there.

With the border states secured, the Union needed to put down the Confederacy. That proved to be a daunting task: While the Confederacy was far inferior in terms of manpower and industrial production, it only needed to hold out long enough for the war to become so unpopular in the North that the Union would seek a negotiated end to it. The Union, on the other hand, had to force the Confederacy into surrender by destroying its armies and taking its territory. This asymmetry is reflected in the victory conditions of For the People: The Union player can only win (the campaign game) by dragging Confederate Strategic Will all the way down from 100 to 0. The Confederate player, on the other hand, has other avenues of victory: Having more than twice the Strategic Will of the Union player will do, as will lowering Union Strategic Will under 50 in fall of 1864 – when Lincoln would be up for re-election.

Lincoln was thus on a timer. The Union needed to win decisively, and soon. Yet the first offensive toward the Confederate capital Richmond (Virginia) was repelled. Lincoln consequently approved a massive expansion of the army, the naval blockade of the south, and a multi-pronged approach into the Confederacy (not only in the east, but also through Kentucky and along the Mississippi River) – preparations for a long war.

Lincoln studiously avoided any infractions against slavery in the early phase of the war (and when his generals, such as 1856 Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont, overstepped their authority in that regard, sacked them). Yet as no southern Unionist movement arose to challenge the Confederacy, Lincoln’s belief in the unionist leanings of the white Southerners dwindled. By 1862, he had grown convinced that the still undecided war had broken out to serve a larger purpose – the end of slavery. Thus, he slowly racked up anti-slavery measures. Slaves taken from Confederate owners were treated as contraband of war, not to be returned. Slavery was abolished in D.C. (with the former slaveowners compensated), and banned in the territories. And by late 1862, Lincoln had changed his views on the relationship between slavery and the Union altogether: He no longer thought that respecting slavery would convince the South to re-join the Union, but that attacking slavery would weaken the Confederacy internally and sap its external sources of support and would thus help to end the war and restore the Union.

Total War: Emancipation and Union

A more sweeping statement on slavery was thus necessary. With one military disappointment after another (excepting Ulysses S. Grant’s victories in the west), it would look like an act of desperation, though. Lincoln needed a success. The marginal Union victory in the battle of Antietam (which repelled a Confederate offensive on Union territory) on September 17, 1862, was as good as it would get – and so Lincoln proclaimed that the insurgent states had until January 1, 1863, to re-join the Union. Otherwise, all slaves living in states in rebellion would be freed. Of course, that had no immediate effects – after all, the thus emancipated slaves were in territories under Confederate control – but it forced the Confederacy to increase the effort to keep their slaves from running, and it effectively precluded the European powers Britain and France (pro-Confederate from the point of view of their economies and power politics, but strictly anti-slavery) to recognize the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation is a crucial event in For the People as well (which sets the game apart from earlier Civil War games, which focused almost exclusively on the movement of armies and made at best cursory references to slavery). It is one of the very few mandatory events – if the conditions are met (a Union battle victory), it must be played for the event. While it lowers the Strategic Will of the Union (reflecting the unwillingness of many northerners to fight a war for the Black people of the South), it hurts the Confederacy much more – not only in terms of Strategic Will (a further penalty will be applied henceforth every round), but also by removing some military forces (which, presumably, either are kept back to guard plantations, or cannot be supplied anymore as the fleeing slaves shrink the southern economy).

Lincoln was also done with his earlier attempt at limited war in another respect: US forces in the crucial eastern theater had been commanded by General George B. McClellan since July 1861. McClellan had mishandled them at almost every opportunity, and even when he succeeded (such as Antietam), he squandered his advantage by failing to pursue. Even his political value to Lincoln – McClellan was a high-profile Democrat – could not save him now. Lincoln sacked him, continuing his search for a general who would act aggressively, deliver battle to the Confederacy, and victory to the Union – going in succession through Ambrose Burnside, Joe Hooker, and George G. Meade.

Sacking McClellan is something that a Union player at For the People might also want to do – while McClellan’s battle rating of 0-2 (offense/defense) is not too bad, his strategy rating of 3 means his forces can only be moved when spending a powerful 3-value card – bad for any US president who means to go on the offensive! Yet McClellan’s high political value (10) makes it painful for the player to relieve him of his command, as it will incur a steep Strategic Will penalty.

1863 would mark the turning point of the war. The Confederacy meant to undermine Union morale by another large-scale incursion into Union territory. On July 1, 1863, the Confederate and Union main armies clashed at Gettysburg. After three days of bloody battle, the Confederacy retreated. One day later, Grant took Vicksburg (Mississippi) and thus put the entire Mississippi River under Union control, cutting the Confederacy in half.

Yet the war remained unpopular in the North. Only two weeks after the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, riots against the draft broke out in New York. Lincoln had the draft momentarily suspended and quietly resumed a month later.

With only one more year until the presidential election, time was running out for Lincoln. The Democratic Party of the North, always split between the supporters of the war to re-establish the Union and its opponents, adopted a pro-peace platform… and selected George McClellan, whose incompetence had done so much to prolong the war, as their candidate. Lincoln had no problem securing his nomination (his control of the Republican Party was by now complete) and left it to the convention to select his running mate. They opted for Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who supported the war.

Political and Military Victory

If the Union did not win great victories in 1864, Lincoln’s chances for re-election were slim. Yet there were reasons to be optimistic: Lincoln had placed Grant in command of the eastern theater, whereas Grant’s former subordinate William T. Sherman now headed the forces in Tennessee, ready to invade Georgia. Grant slowly wore down the Confederate forces in Virginia which could not bear the attrition. In the meantime, Sherman had taken Atlanta – a psychologically invaluable success which shifted the electorate’s mood in Lincoln’s favor – and marched on Savannah. Lincoln was re-elected with 55% of the popular vote and 212 of 233 electoral votes.

Now the great tasks of restoring the Union and abolishing slavery had to be brought to conclusion. While Grant and Sherman kept advancing, Lincoln worked to turn emancipation from a wartime measure to a constitutional right: The 13^th Amendment would end slavery in the United States. The amendment showed not only Lincoln’s acumen in dealing with Congress, but also how much the country had changed – Lincoln had lost the 1858 Senate election on a much more moderate position than what was now to become part of the US Constitution. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln interpreted the war as a punishment for the nation’s original sin of slavery, but expressed hope for the nation to move forward together.

The Confederacy collapsed under Grant’s and Sherman’s campaigns. Confederate General in Chief of the Armies, Robert E. Lee, surrendered on April 9, 1865, with other commanders following suit. The Reconstruction of the South with the eventual goal of its re-admission to the Union and the integration of the former slaves into American society were now Lincoln’s chief tasks. Yet before he could begin to deal with the requirements of peace, he was murdered by the Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865.

The Rating

Foreign policy

Lincoln left foreign policy largely to Secretary of State William H. Seward, yet intervened where necessary (for example, when the seizure of British mail ship Trent which carried Confederate envoys threatened to spark a crisis or even British intervention, Lincoln calmed the storm by releasing the envoys). He successfully forestalled foreign recognitions of the Confederacy (except by fellow slave-state Brazil), let alone military intervention on behalf of the Confederacy.

Domestic policy:

Lincoln recognized slavery as the chief obstacle to liberty in the United States. First tentatively, then boldly did he abolish the practice, resulting in the freedom of four million people. While he has been attacked for his alleged infractions on individual freedoms (most notably the suspension of Habeas Corpus), Lincoln used these measures in moderation. That Lincoln never even considered postponing the 1864 election (which he full well knew could end both his presidency and his policies) because of the war is the strongest testament to Lincoln’s deep respect for the rule of law.

Economic policy

Lincoln regarded economic policy as the prerogative of Congress and did not interfere with it. His own economic policy was concerned with the organization and financing of the war effort, in which he was largely successful (even though it must be said that the economic basis of the Union was much stronger than that of the Confederacy).

Vision

Lincoln’s vision of the United States was that of a country which was no longer “a house divided against itself.” While his own preference would have been to contain slavery and let it extinguish by itself in the South, the secession both enabled and required him to take firmer measures. Besides ending slavery, Lincoln laid the foundations during the Civil War for the United States to be a unified country, largely centrally administered, rather than a collection of individual states, and thus prepared the country’s 20^th century predominance. Not least of all, Lincoln’s unmatched rhetorical prowess allowed him to interpret political events in memorable language which shapes American thinking until today.

Pragmatism

Lincoln was a Washington outsider. Before his presidency, he had only spent two years in federal politics. Still, he quickly developed a productive working relationship with Congress and his cabinet – all the more remarkable as Lincoln’s Secretaries were not selected for their loyalty and subservience, but came from the heavyweights which had competed for the 1860 presidential nomination (including Secretary of the Treasure Chase and Secretary of State Seward). Lincoln’s legacy is remarkable as well: He established the nascent Republican Party as the dominant political force which would win twelve of the next 16 presidential elections.

Integrity

Lincoln respected the boundaries of his office and did not attempt to extend his influence into areas which were thought to be Congress’s province. The goodwill he extended to people of the most diverse backgrounds and convictions is legendary. Lincoln placed himself at the service of the Union – a nation he came to understand as larger than before, including four million heretofore disenfranchised slaves.

Overall

Abraham Lincoln faced challenges like no other American president. The secession and Civil War were both a struggle for survival of the United States against those who would not accept the democratic process and a moral crucible which would resolve the awkward question of slavery after 80 years of failed attempts to skirt it. Lincoln met these challenges head on and with resounding success. He jumps to the top of the ranking – and it’s not even close.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Wilhelm Marx 17/30
12. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
13. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Lincoln? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For an accessible biography of Lincoln, see Gienapp, William E.: Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America. A Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002.

For a “biography of the mind” of Lincoln, situating him in the intellectual currents of his time, see Guelzo, Allen C.: Lincoln. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009.

For an overview of how Civil War games treat the causes of the war, slavery, and emancipation, see Wallace, Alfred: The War in Cardboard and Ink. Fifty Years of Civil War Board Games, in: Kreiser Jr., Lawrence A./Allred, Randal: The Civil War in Popular Culture. Memory and Meaning, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 2014, pp. 175—89.