Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The bickering Americans won the Mexican War because their adversaries were even more riven by faction. They won also because of the marksmanship and élan of their mixed divisions of regulars and volunteers and above all because of the professionalism and courage of their junior officers. Yet the competence of these men foreshadowed the ultimate irony of the Mexican War, for many of the best of them would fight against each other in the next war.

The greatest danger to American survival at midcentury, however, was neither class tension nor ethnic division. Rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery.

During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe’s and six times the world average.1

Before 1815 the only cost-efficient means of carrying freight long distances were sailing ships and downriver flatboats. Most American roads were rutted dirt paths all but impassable in wet weather. The cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland from an American port equalled the cost of carrying the same goods across the Atlantic.

All this changed after 1815 as a result of what historians, without exaggeration, have called a transportation revolution. Private companies, states, even the national government financed the construction of all-weather macadamized roads.

grown by 375 percent during the previous decade. Racing at breakneck speeds of thirty miles an hour, the iron horse cut travel time between New York and Chicago from three weeks to two days. Train wrecks soon exceeded steamboat explosions as a prime cause of accidental death. But together these modes of transport reduced the shipment time of freight between, for example, Cincinnati and New York from fifty days to five.

As late as 1815, Americans produced on their farms or in their homes most of the things they consumed, used, or wore. Most clothing was sewn by mothers and daughters, made from cloth that in many cases they had spun and woven themselves by the light of candles they had dipped or by natural light coming through windows in houses built of local materials from a nearby sawmill or brickyard by local carpenters or masons or by the male members of the household. Shoes were made by members of the family or by the village cordwainer from leather cured at a local tannery. Blacksmiths forged the tools and farm implements used in the community. Even firearms were built with handicraft skill and pride by a nearby craftsman. In larger towns and cities, master tailors or shoemakers or cabinetmakers or wheelwrights presided over small shops where they worked with a few journeymen and an apprentice or two who turned out fine custom or “bespoke” goods for wealthier purchasers. In an age of slow and expensive overland transport, few of these items were sold more than twenty miles from where they were made.

A fourth reason offered by British observers to explain American economic efficiency was an educational system that had produced widespread [Page 19] literacy and “adaptative versatility” among American workers.

Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region’s proportion of the free population.

Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism, they insisted. Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty. Wage labor was no better than slave labor—hence “wage slavery.”

Manufacturers encouraged the temperance movement that gathered force after 1830 because its Protestant ethic virtues of sobriety, punctuality, reliability, and thrift were precisely the values needed by disciplined workers in the new order. Some employers banned drinking on the job and tried even to forbid their workers to drink off the job. For men who considered their thrice-daily tipple a right, this was another mark of slavery.

In the eyes of labor reformers, capitalism also violated other tenets of republicanism: virtue, commonweal, and equality. Virtue required individuals to put the community’s interest above their own; capitalism glorified the pursuit of self-interest in the quest for profits.

However idealized Lincoln’s version of the American Dream may have been,34 this ideology of upward mobility mitigated class consciousness

The Gospel of Success produced an outpouring of self-improvement literature advising young men how to get ahead. This imparted a dynamism to American life, but also a frenetic pace and acquisitive materialism that repelled some Europeans and troubled many Americans.

Many of them endorsed the temperance crusade, which sobered up the American population to the extent of reducing the per capita adult consumption of liquor from the equivalent of seven gallons of 200-proof alcohol annually in the 1820s to less than two gallons by the 1850s. During the same years the per capita consumption of coffee and tea doubled.

Given the illogicality of American politics, these generalizations are subject to numerous qualifications. Despite their marginality, the tiny number of black men who lived in the half-dozen northern states that allowed them to vote formed a solid Whig bloc. The Democratic party’s professed egalitarianism was for whites only. Its commitment to slavery and racism was blatant in the North as well as the South, while Whiggery [Page 31] grew in part from the same evangelical reformism that had generated the abolitionist movement. At the other end of the social scale, Democratic leaders in New York included many bankers and merchants who had nothing in common with the Irish-American masses in the tenements except their allegiance to the same party. The generalizations in the preceding paragraph, therefore, describe a tendency, not an axiom.

The economic transformation took men as producers out of the home into office or factory. This separation of job from home evoked a notion of separate “spheres” for men and women. Man’s sphere was the bustling, competitive, dynamic world of business, politics, affairs of state. Woman’s world was the home and family; her role was to bear and nurture children and to make the home a haven to which the husband returned from work each day to find love and warmth at the hearth. To the extent that this “cult of domesticity” removed women from the “real world” and confined them to an inferior sphere, it was a setback to any quest for equal rights and status.41

Therefore while the notion of a domestic sphere closed the front door to women’s exit from the home into the real world, it opened the back door to an expanding world of religion, reform, education, and writing. Inevitably, women who could write or speak or teach or edit magazines began to ask why they should not be paid as much as men for these services and why they could not also preach, practice law or medicine, hold property independently of their husbands—and vote. Thus “domestic feminism”—as some historians label it—led by an indirect route to a more radical feminism that demanded equal rights in all spheres.

Cotton from the American South grown mostly by slave labor furnished three-fourths of the world’s supply.

“Eastward I go only by force,” wrote [Page 42] Henry David Thoreau, “but westward I go free. Mankind progresses from East to West.”50

Most reservations were located on poor land, and a good many Indians had little inclination to learn the white man’s ways. So they perished—in California alone disease, malnutrition, firewater, and homicide reduced the Indian population from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to 35,000 by 1860. Although the Great Plains and the desert Southwest remained as yet uncoveted by white settlers, the reservation policy foretokened the fate of the proud warriors of these regions a decade or two later.

Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not.

Whigs were not averse to extending the blessings of American liberty, even to Mexicans and Indians. But they looked askance at doing so by force. Befitting the evangelical origins of much Whig ideology, they placed their faith in mission more than in annexation. “ ‘As a city set upon a hill,’” the United States should inculcate the ideas of “true republicanism” by example rather than conquest, insisted many Whigs.

In return for a payment by the United States of $15 million plus the assumption of Mexican debts to American citizens, Mexico recognized the Rio Grande boundary of Texas and ceded New Mexico and upper California to the United States.6 When this Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo reached Washington in February 1848, Polk initially spurned it. On second thought, however, he submitted it to the Senate, where the Whigs would have enough votes to defeat any treaty that sliced off more Mexican territory but might approve one that avoided the appearance of conquest by paying Mexico for California and New Mexico. The strategy worked; the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 38-14, with five of the opposition votes coming from Democrats [Page 51] who wanted more territory and seven from Whigs who wanted none.7

When Wilmot introduced his proviso, therefore, he released the pent-up ire of northern Democrats, many of whom cared less about slavery in new territories than about their power within the party. Northern Whigs, who had a more consistent antislavery record, were delighted to support the proviso. This bipartisan northern coalition in the House passed it over the united opposition of southern Democrats and Whigs. This was a dire omen. The normal pattern of division in Congress had [Page 54] occurred along party lines on issues such as the tariff, the Bank, federal aid to internal improvements, and the like. The Wilmot Proviso wrenched this division by parties into a conflict of sections. The political landscape would never again be the same. “As if by magic,” commented the Boston Whig, “it brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.”15

Having furnished most of the soldiers who conquered Mexican territory, the South was particularly outraged by the proposal to shut them out of its benefits. “When the warworn soldier returns to his home,” asked an Alabamian, “is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?”22 “No true Southron,” said scores of them, would submit to such “social and sectional degradation. … Death is preferable to acknowledged inferiority.”23

Whether for weal or woe, Taylor’s death marked a turning point in the crisis. The new president, Millard Fillmore, was a New York Whig hostile to the Seward faction in his own state.

In 1837, Pennsylvania convicted Edward Prigg of kidnapping after he had seized a slave woman and her children and returned them to their Maryland owner. Prigg’s lawyers appealed the case to the U. S. Supreme Court, which in 1842 rendered a complex decision. Declaring the Pennsylvania anti-kidnapping law of 1826 unconstitutional, the Court upheld the fugitive slave law of 1793 and affirmed that a slaveholder’s right to his property overrode any contrary state legislation. At the same time, however, the Court ruled that enforcement of the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution was a federal responsibility and that states need not cooperate in any way. This opened the floodgates for a new series of personal liberty laws (nine between 1842 and 1850) that prohibited the use of state facilities in the recapture of fugitives.1

The fugitive slave law of 1850 put the burden of proof on captured blacks but gave them no legal power to prove their freedom. Instead, a claimant could bring an alleged fugitive before a federal commissioner (a new office created by the law) to prove ownership by an affidavit from a slave-state court or by the testimony of white witnesses.

In February 1851 agents arrested a black man in southern Indiana, while his horrified wife and children looked on, and returned him to an owner who claimed him as a slave who had run away nineteen years earlier. A Maryland man asserted ownership of a Philadelphia woman whom he said had run away twenty-two years previously. For good measure he also claimed her six children born in Philadelphia. In this case the commissioner found for the woman’s freedom. And in the cases of the Poughkeepsie tailor and the New York porter, black and white friends raised money to buy their freedom. But most fugitives who were carried south stayed there.5

President Fillmore ordered the district attorney to prosecute all “aiders and abettors of this flagitious offense.” A grand jury indicted four blacks and four whites, but juries refused to convict them. “Massachusetts Safe Yet! The Higher Law Still Respected,” proclaimed an antislavery newspaper. But a Savannah editor expressed a more common opinion—perhaps in the North as well as in the South—when he denounced Boston as “a black speck on the map—disgraced by the lowest, the meanest, the BLACKEST kind of NULLIFICATION.”9

The federal government soon got a chance to flex its muscles in Boston. A seventeen-year-old slave named Thomas Sims escaped from Georgia in February 1851 and stowed away on a ship to Boston, where he too found work as a waiter. When his owner traced him, the mayor of Boston decided to allow the police to be deputized by federal marshals to cooperate in Sims’s arrest. This time officials sealed the courthouse with a heavy chain (which abolitionists publicized as a symbol of the slave power’s reach into the North) and guarded it with police and soldiers. For nine days in April 1851 vigilance committee lawyers vainly sought writs of habeas corpus and tried other legal maneuvers to free Sims. When the federal commissioner found for his owner, 300 armed deputies and soldiers removed him from the courthouse at 4:00 a.m. and marched him to the navy yard, where 250 U. S. soldiers waited to place him on a ship going south to slavery.10

It seemed only a matter of time before real blood would be shed. When the time came the place was Christiana, a Pennsylvania village near the Maryland border, about halfway between Philadelphia and another village named Gettysburg. A Quaker community that had extended a welcome to fugitives, Christiana was anything but peaceable or friendly on September 11, 1851. That morning a Maryland slaveowner accompanied by several relatives and three deputy marshals came seeking two fugitives who had escaped two years earlier and were reported to be hiding in the house of another black man. They found the fugitives, along with two dozen armed black men vowing to resist capture. Two Quakers appeared and advised the slave hunters to retreat for their own good. The owner refused, declaring that “I will have my property, or go to hell.” Shooting broke out. When it was over the slaveowner lay dead and his son seriously wounded (two other whites [Page 85] and two blacks were lightly wounded). The blacks disappeared into the countryside; their three leaders sped on the underground railroad to Canada.12

But an obsequious Tom was not the Uncle Tom of Stowe’s pages. That Tom was one of the few true Christians in a novel intended to stir the emotions of a Christian public. Indeed, Tom was a Christ [Page 91] figure. Like Jesus he suffered agony inflicted by evil secular power. Like Jesus he died for the sins of humankind in order to save the oppressors as well as his own people. Stowe’s readers lived in an age that understood this message better than ours. They were part of a generation that experienced not embarrassment but inspiration when they sang the words penned a decade later by another Yankee woman after she watched soldiers march off to war:

“Enslave a man,” declared Horace Greeley, “and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort.”

Even more important than the fugitive slave issue in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.

On the contrary, said a good many Republicans, the main purpose of excluding slavery from the territories was to protect white settlers from degrading competition with black labor. To refute the charge of egalitarian abolitionism, the free-state “constitution” of Kansas contained a provision excluding free blacks as well as slaves. “It is not so much in reference to the welfare of the Negro that we are here,” Lyman Trumbull told the Republican convention, but “for the protection of the laboring whites, for the protection of ourselves and our liberties.”

John Brown himself reappeared in the territory. His band invaded Missouri, killed a slaveholder, and liberated eleven slaves and a good many horses and took them to Canada.

Though most of the free-state settlers had originally been Democrats, the struggle with the slave power pushed them into the Republican party, which regularly rolled up two-or three-to-one majorities during the early years of statehood.

Thus began an eleven-year saga that started as a simple freedom suit and escalated into the most notorious cause célèbre in American constitutional history.

Taney had no great love of the institution for its own sake, having freed his own slaves. But he did have a passionate commitment “to southern life and values, which seemed organically linked to the peculiar institution and unpreservable without it.”5 In private letters Taney expressed growing anger toward “northern aggression.” “Our own southern countrymen” were in great danger, he wrote; “the knife of the assassin is at their [Page 174] throats.”

“But when we see a lot of framed timbers … which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house … we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James … all worked upon a common plan.“20

‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” said Lincoln quoting Jesus. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”

“When you see Abe at Freeport, for God’s sake tell him to ‘Charge Chester! charge!’ … We must not be parrying all the while. We want the deadliest thrusts. Let us see blood follow any time he closes a sentence.”

Lecompton and Dred Scott accounted for much of this Republican gain. Once again, victories by the “slave power” had produced a backlash that strengthened its deadliest enemies in the North.

Republicans made tariff revision one of their priorities, especially in Pennsylvania, where recovery of the iron industry lagged behind other sectors. The argument that the lower 1857 duties had enabled British industry to undersell American railroad iron carried great weight among workers as well as ironmasters. Indeed, Republicans pitched their strongest tariff appeals to labor, which had more votes than management. “We demand that American laborers shall be protected against the pauper labor of Europe,” they declared.

Slavery demonstrated the superiority of southern civilization, continued Hammond. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. … It constitutes the very mudsill of society. … Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. … Your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated … yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated.”57

“The great evil of Northern free society,” insisted a South Carolina journal, “is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens.” A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. “Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? … The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant.”

“SMALL-FISTED FARMERS, MUD SILLS OF SOCIETY, GREASY MECHANICS, FOR A. LINCOLN.”

In a famous campaign speech of 1858, William H. Seward derided the southern doctrine that “labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, groveling, and base.” The idea had produced the backwardness of the South, said Seward, the illiteracy of its masses, the dependent colonial status of its economy. In contrast “the free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment to … all classes of men … brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State.” A collision between these two systems impended, “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will … become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”61