Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The Impending Crisis. This of course only attracted more attention to the book. A Republican committee raised funds to subsidize an abridged edition in 1859 to be scattered far and wide as a campaign document.

Brown’s activities for three years after 1856 were more mysterious than notorious. He made several trips east to raise money for the freedom fight in Kansas. As he shuttled back and forth, Brown evolved a plan to strike against slavery in its heartland. Like the Old Testament warriors he admired and resembled, he yearned to carry the war into Babylon. He studied books on guerrilla warfare and on slave revolts. Fascinated by the ability of small bands to hold off larger forces in mountainous terrain, Brown conceived the idea of a raid into the Appalachian foothills of Virginia. From there he would move southward along the mountains attracting slaves to his banner. In May 1858 Brown journeyed with eleven white followers to a community of former slaves in Chatham, Canada. Thirty-four blacks met secretly with Brown’s group to adopt a “provisional constitution” for the republic of liberated slaves to be established in the mountains. The delegates elected Brown commander in chief of the army of this new nation.1

Before 1850 Frederick Douglass had been a pacifist. “Were I asked the question whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood,” he said in the 1840s, “my answer would be in the negative. … The only well grounded hope of the slave for emancipation is the operation of moral force.” But a month after enactment of the fugitive slave law he changed his tune and advocated “forcible resistance” to the law. “Slave-holders … tyrants and despots have no right to live,” said Douglass now. “The only way to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”

Extraordinary events took place in many northern communities on the day of Brown’s execution. Church bells tolled; minute guns fired solemn salutes; ministers preached sermons of commemoration; thousands bowed in silent reverence for the martyr to liberty. “I have seen nothing like it,” wrote Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard. More than a thousand miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, the editor of the Republican wrote that “the death of no man in America has ever produced so profound a sensation. A feeling of deep and sorrowful indignation seems to possess the masses.”13 A clergyman in Roxbury, Massachusetts, declared [Page 210] that Brown had made the word Treason “holy in the American language”; young William Dean Howells said that “Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea”; Henry David Thoreau pronounced Brown “a crucified hero.”14

“I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was helping to found a nation of slaves.”15

“I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men,” wrote a reporter. “They say they do not care a d—n where the South goes. … ‘She may go out of the Convention into hell,’ for all they care.” But most southern bolters aimed to seek readmission at Baltimore. Their strategy was “to rule or ruin,” wrote Alexander Stephens, who had moved toward moderation during the past year and was now supporting Douglas.31

This left Lincoln. By the time the convention’s opening gavel came down on May 16, Lincoln had emerged from a position as the darkest of horses to that of Seward’s main rival. Party leaders gradually recognized that the Illinoisian had most of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of an ideal candidate. He was a former antislavery Whig in a [Page 218] party made up mostly of former antislavery Whigs. But despite his house-divided speech, he had a reputation as a moderate.

The Buchanan administration handed Republicans another issue: corruption. Americans had always viewed malfeasance and abuse of power as the gravest dangers to republican liberty. Not only was Buchanan, in Republican eyes, the pliant tool of the slave power but his administration also, in the words of historian Michael Holt, “was undoubtedly the most corrupt before the Civil War and one of the most corrupt in American history.”47 An exposure of frauds filled a large volume compiled by a House investigating committee. The committee’s report came off the presses in June 1860, just in time for an abridged edition to be distributed as a Republican campaign document.

“the Slave Hound of Illinois” because he refused to advocate repeal of the fugitive slave law.50

The second Continental Congress had deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776. To produce the United States Constitution and put the new government into operation required nearly two years. In contrast, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election.

“It is a complete landsturm. … People are wild. … You might [Page 238] as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them.”6 Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people literally to dance in the streets. Their fierce gaiety anticipated the celebratory crowds that gathered along the Champs-Elysées and the Unter den Linden and at Picadilly Circus in that similarly innocent world of August 1914. Not that the flag-waving, singing crowds in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans wanted or expected war; on the contrary, they believed that “the Yankees were cowards and would not fight”—or said they did, to assure the timid that there was no danger. “So far as civil war is concerned,” remarked an Atlanta newspaper blithely in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” A rural editor thought that women and children armed with popguns firing “Connecticut wooden nutmegs” could deal with every Yankee likely to appear in Georgia. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina offered to drink all the blood shed as a consequence of secession. It became a common saying in the South during the secession winter that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed.”7

“revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] … themselves become the victims.”

“The great lever by which the abolitionists hope to extirpate slavery in the States is the aid of non-slaveholding citizens in the South,” fretted a Kentucky editor. How would they ply this lever? By using the patronage to build up a cadre of Republican officeholders among nonslaveowners—first in the border states and upcountry where slavery was most vulnerable, and then in the heart of the cotton kingdom itself. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia feared that some whites would be “bribed into treachery to their own section, by the allurements of office.” When Republicans organized their “Abolition party … of Southern men,” echoed the Charleston Mercury, “the contest for slavery will no longer be one between the North and the South. It will be in the South, between the people of the South.”18

So they undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation. Georgia’s Governor Brown carried this message to his native uplands of north Georgia whose voters idolized him. Slavery “is the poor man’s best Government,” said Brown. “Among us the poor white laborer … does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. … He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.” Thus yeoman farmers “will never consent to submit to abolition rule,” for they “know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves. … When it becomes necessary to defend our rights against so foul a domination, I would call upon the mountain boys as well as the people of the lowlands, and they would come down like an avalanche and swarm around the flag of Georgia.”20

If Georgia remained in a Union “ruled by Lincoln and his crew … in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.”21 “If you are tame enough to submit,” declaimed South Carolina’s Baptist clergyman James Furman, “Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” No! No! came an answering shout from Alabama. “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! … Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism.”22

But in one respect the Confederacy departed from the classic pattern of the genre. Most counterrevolutions seek to restore the ancien régime. The counterrevolutionaries of 1861 made their move before the revolutionaries had done anything—indeed, several months before Lincoln even took office. In this regard, secession fit the model of “pre-emptive counterrevolution” developed by historian Arno Mayer. Rather than trying to restore the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize. “Conjuring up the dangers of leaving revolutionaries the time to prepare their forces and plans for an assault on their terms,” writes Mayer, “counterrevolutionary leaders urge a preventive thrust.” To mobilize support for it, they “intentionally exaggerate the magnitude and imminence of the revolutionary threat.”27

“The doctrine of secession is anarchy,” declared a Cincinnati newspaper. “If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government.” Lincoln too considered secession the “essence of anarchy.” He branded state sovereignty a “sophism.” “The Union is older than any of the States,” Lincoln asserted, “and, in fact, it created them as States.”

“if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders [and] a new drain on the negro’s blood, then … let the Union perish.” Several radical Republicans initially took a similar position. If South Carolina wanted to leave, said the Chicago Tribune in October 1860, “let her go, and like a limb lopped from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls.”

The very notion of a territorial compromise, Lincoln pointed out, “acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. … We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. … If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.”45

Befitting the new Confederacy’s claim to represent the true principles of the U. S. Constitution which the North had trampled upon, most of the provisional [Page 258] constitution was copied verbatim from that venerable document. The same was true of the permanent Confederate Constitution, adopted a month later, though some of its departures from the original were significant. The preamble omitted the general welfare clause and the phrase “a more perfect Union,” and added a clause after We the People: “each State acting in its sovereign and independent character.” Instead of the U. S. Constitution’s evasions on slavery (“persons held to service or labor”), the Confederate version called a slave a slave. It guaranteed the protection of bondage in any new territory the Confederacy might acquire. The Constitution did forbid the importation of slaves from abroad, to avoid alienating Britain and especially the upper South, whose economy benefitted from its monopoly on export of slaves to the lower South.

This tour may have been a mistake in two respects. Not wishing by a careless remark or slip of the tongue to inflame the crisis further, Lincoln often indulged in platitudes and trivia in his attempts to say nothing controversial. This produced an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer. Second, Lincoln’s mail and the national press had for weeks been full of threats and rumors of assassination.

Therefore to Abraham Lincoln’s challenge, Shall it be Peace or War? Jefferson Davis replied, War. A fateful cabinet meeting in Montgomery on April 9 endorsed Davis’s order to Beauregard: reduce the fort before the relief fleet arrived, if possible. Anderson rejected Beauregard’s ritual summons to surrender, but remarked in passing that he would be starved out in a few days if help did not arrive. The Confederates knew that help was about to arrive, so they opened fire on April 12 at 4:30 a.m. Fox’s fleet, scattered by a gale and prevented by high seas from launching the supply boats, was helpless to intervene.82 After thirty-three hours of bombardment by four thousand shot and shells which destroyed part [Page 274] of the fort and set the interior on fire, Anderson’s exhausted garrison surrendered. Able to man only a few of Sumter’s forty-eight mounted guns, they had fired a thousand rounds in reply—without much effect. On April 14 the American flag came down and the Confederate stars and bars rose over Sumter.

Ulysses S. Grant, slouchy and unsoldier-like in appearance, of undistinguished family, a West Point graduate from the lower half of his class who had resigned from the army in disgrace for drunkenness in 1854 and had failed in several civilian occupations before volunteering his services to the Union in 1861. “I feel myself competent to command a regiment,” Grant had diffidently informed the adjutant general in a letter of May 24, 1861—to which he received no reply.29 Grant’s commission as colonel and his promotion to brigadier general came via the congressman of his district and the governor of Illinois, who were scraping the barrel for officers to organize the unwieldly mass of Illinois volunteers. A man of no reputation and little promise, Grant would rise to the rank of lieutenant general commanding all the Union armies and become president of the United States.

The idea that one Southron could lick ten Yankees—or at least three—really did exist in 1861. “Just throw three or four shells among those blue-bellied Yankees,” said a North Carolinian in May 1861, “and they’ll scatter like sheep.” In southern eyes the North was a nation of shopkeepers. It mattered not that the Union’s industrial capacity was many times greater than the Confederacy’s. “It was not the improved [Page 317] arm, but the improved man, which would win the day,” said Henry Wise of Virginia. “Let brave men advance with flint locks and old-fashioned bayonets, on the popinjays of Northern cities … and he would answer for it with his life, that the Yankees would break and run.”12

Even after the accession of four upper-South states, the Confederacy had only one-ninth the industrial capacity of the Union. Northern states had manufactured 97 percent of the country’s firearms in 1860, 94 percent of its cloth, 93 percent of its pig iron, and more than 90 percent of its boots and shoes. The Union had more than twice the density of railroads per square mile as the Confederacy, and several times the mileage of canals and macadamized roads. The South could produce enough food to feed itself, but the transport network, adequate at the beginning of the war to distribute this food, soon began to deteriorate because of a lack of replacement capacity. Nearly all of the rails had come from [Page 319] the North or from Britain; of 470 locomotives built in the United States during 1860, only nineteen had been made in the South.

concentrate the mass of your own force against fractions of the enemy’s; menace the enemy’s communications while protecting your own; attack the enemy’s weak point with your own strength; and so on. There is little evidence that Jomini’s writings influenced Civil War strategy in a direct or tangible way; the most successful strategist of the war, Grant, confessed to having never read Jomini.

Jefferson Davis agreed; early in the war he seems to have envisaged a strategy like that of George Washington in the Revolution. Washington traded space for time; he retreated when necessary in the face of a stronger enemy; he counterattacked against isolated British outposts or detachments when such an attack promised success; above all, he tried to avoid full-scale battles that would have risked annihilation of his army and defeat of his cause. This has been called a strategy of attrition—a strategy of winning by not losing, of wearing out a better equipped foe and compelling him to give up by prolonging the war and making it too costly.34

The Confederates eventually synthesized these various strands of strategic theory and political reality into what Davis called an “offensive-defensive” strategy. This consisted of defending the Confederate homeland by using interior lines of communication (a Jominian but also common-sense concept) to concentrate dispersed forces against an invading army and, if opportunity offered, to go over to the offensive, even to the extent of invading the North. No one ever defined this strategy in a systematic, comprehensive fashion. Rather, it emerged from a series of major campaigns in the Virginia-Maryland and Tennessee-Kentucky theaters during 1862, and culminated at Gettysburg in 1863. It almost emerged, in embryonic form, from the first battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in July 1861, a small battle by later Civil War standards but one that would have important psychological consequences in both the North and the South.

“our army was more disorganized by victory than that of the United States by defeat.”6

“Today will be known as BLACK MONDAY,” wrote a New Yorker when he heard the news. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped.” Horace Greeley, whose New York Tribune had done so much to prod the government into premature action, endured a week of self-reproachful, sleepless nights before writing a despondent letter to Lincoln: “On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair. … If it is best for the country and for mankind that we make peace with the rebels, and on their own terms, do not shrink even from that.”11

“This prick in the great Northern balloon will let out a quantity of poisonous gas, and rouse the people to a sense of the nature of the conflict on which they have entered.” In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—“adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed”—one of the North’s leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution. It was echoed by a soldier in the ranks: “I shall see the thing played out, or die in the attempt.” Even as Greeley was writing despairingly to Lincoln, an editorial in the Tribune by another hand maintained that “it is not characteristic of Americans to sit down despondently after a defeat. … Reverses, though stunning at first, by their recoil stimulate and quicken to unwonted exertion. … Let us go to work, then, with a will.”

“The fat is in the fire now,” wrote Lincoln’s private secretary, “and we shall have to crow small until we can retrieve the disgrace somehow. The preparations for the war will be continued with increased vigor by the Government.” The day after Bull Run, Lincoln signed a bill for the enlistment of 500,000 three-year men. Three days later he signed a second bill authorizing another 500,000.13

Thus the battle of Manassas, and more importantly the collective southern and northern memories of it, became an important part of the psychology of war in the eastern theater. This psychology helps explain why McClellan, having created a powerful army, was [Page 350] reluctant to commit it to all-out battle. He always feared, deep down, that the enemy was more powerful than he. And the Confederates, armed with the morale of victory, enjoyed an edge that went far toward evening the material odds against them in Virginia.16 Hence the paradox of Bull Run: its legacy of confidence both hurt and helped the South; the humiliation and renewed determination both hurt and helped the North.

“The result of the battle was a fearful blow,” wrote an abolitionist, but “I think it may prove the means of rousing this stupid country to the extent & difficulty of the work it has to do.” A rebellion sustained by slavery in defense of slavery could be suppressed only by moving against slavery. As Frederick Douglass expressed this conviction: “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it. … Fire must be met with water. … War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”22

“Free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion, if these things be necessary to preserve this temple of freedom.” We must “treat this [war] as a radical revolution,” said Stevens, “and remodel our institutions.”

perhaps McClellan’s career had been too successful. He had never known, as Grant had, the despair of defeat or the humiliation of failure. He had never learned the lessons of adversity and humility. The adulation he experienced during the early weeks in Washington went to his head.

A curious lack of confidence began to creep into McClellan’s words and deeds, even as he continued to think of himself as God’s chosen instrument to save the republic. The first signs appeared of a chronic tendency to overestimate enemy strength and to use this estimate as an excuse to remain on the defensive. In October, McClellan had 120,000 men while Beauregard and Johnston had only 45,000 in and near Manassas. But McClellan professed to believe that the enemy numbered 150,000 and was preparing to attack him.38

Although no admirer of slavery, McClellan liked abolitionists even less. He had political [Page 364] ties with New York Democrats who had begun to mention him as the party’s next presidential candidate. To one of these Democrats, McClellan wrote in November: “Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union. … To gain that end we cannot afford to mix up the negro question.”43

Military success could be achieved only by taking risks; McClellan seemed to shrink from the prospect. He lacked the mental and moral courage required of great generals—the will to act, to confront the terrible moment of truth on the battlefield. Having experienced nothing but success in his career, he was afraid to risk failure. He also suffered from what might be termed the “Bull Run syndrome”—a paralysis that prevented any movement against the Confederates until the army was thoroughly prepared. McClellan excelled at preparation, but it was never quite complete. The army was perpetually almost ready to move—but the enemy was always larger and better prepared.

The London Times correspondent in Washington reported that every foreign diplomat but one agreed that “the Union is broken for ever, and the independence of the South virtually established.”53

January 1862 proved to be the darkness before dawn for the Union cause. Although other dark nights would follow, the four months after January turned out to be one of the brightest periods of the war for the North.

For two hours the ironclads slugged it out. Neither could punch through the other’s armor, though the Monitor’s heavy shot cracked the Virginia’s outside plate at several places. At one point the southern ship grounded. As the shallower-draft Monitor closed in, many aboard the Virginia thought they were finished. But she broke loose and continued the fight, trying without success to ram the Monitor. By this time the Virginia’s wheezy engines were barely functioning, and one of her lieutenants found her [Page 377] “as unwieldly as Noah’s Ark.” The Monitor in turn tried to ram the Virginia’s stern to disable her rudder or propeller, but just missed. Soon after this a shell from the Virginia struck the Monitor’s pilot house, wounding her captain. The Union ship stopped fighting briefly; the Virginia, in danger of running aground again, steamed back toward Norfolk. Each crew thought they had won the battle, but in truth it was a draw. The exhausted men on both sides ceased fighting—almost, it seemed, by mutual consent.4

To maintain that the blockade “won the war” for the North, as naval historians are wont to do, goes entirely too far.12 But it did play an important role in Union victory. Although naval personnel constituted only 5 percent of the Union armed forces, their contribution to the outcome of the war was much larger. III

The president believed that the North would win this war only by using its superior numbers to attack “different points, at the same time” to prevent the enemy from shifting troops from quiet to threatened sectors.

Once unleashed, Grant moved with speed and force. This was his first real opportunity to dispel doubts stemming from the drinking problems that had forced his army resignation in 1854. Since re-entering the army in June 1861, Grant had served an apprenticeship in command that had increased his self-confidence. He had discovered that his laconic, informal, commonsense manner inspired respect and obedience from his men. Unlike so many other commanders, Grant rarely clamored for reinforcements, rarely complained, rarely quarreled with associates, but went ahead and did the job with the resources at hand.

“my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it were in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to know what to do; I kept right on.” It turned out that the Missouri regiment, learning of the Yankee approach, had decamped. Grant suddenly realized that the enemy colonel “had been as much afraid of me as I [Page 396] had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot. … The lesson was valuable.” It was a lesson that McClellan and many other Union commanders, especially in the East, never learned.

Lincoln did not know it yet, but here was the general he had been looking for these past six months.3

These instructions anticipated a pattern in Grant’s generalship: he always thought more about what he planned to do to the enemy than what his enemy might do to him.

“Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized, but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out, but has fallen back: the one who attacks first now will be victorious and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”6

In his inaugural address, Davis conceded that “after a series of successes and victories, we have recently met with serious disasters.”10