Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

On June 2 the troops marched Burns to the wharf through streets lined with sullen Yankees standing in front of buildings draped in black with the American flag hanging upside down and church bells tolling a dirge to liberty in the cradle of the American Revolution. At the cost of $100,000 (equal to perhaps two million 1987 dollars) the Pierce administration had upheld the majesty of the law.5

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.

Although he had gone to war to prevent coercion of a state by the national government, Lee now believed the war would be lost unless the government in Richmond obtained the power to coerce men into the army.

This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”

Well, one of these days history will I trust do me justice.”49

Wrong again McClellan

After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. . . . The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas.”

A nation “which leaves the power to regulate its currency to the legislation of thirty-four different states abandons one of the essential attributes of sovereignty,” said Representative Samuel Hooper of Massachusetts.

“The policy of this country,” added Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Sherman, “ought to be to make everything national as far as possible; to nationalize our country so that we shall love our country.”

Instead, many of them subscribed to one variant or another of a theory that by attempting the treasonable act of secession, southern states had committed “state suicide” (Charles Sumner’s phrase) or had “forfeited” their rights as states and reverted to the condition of territories.23

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city.

“We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”5

In the contrasting impact of the war on the northern and southern economies could be read not only the final outcome of the war but also the future economic health of those regions.19

A South Carolina woman whose house was plundered recalled that the soldiers “would sometimes stop to tell me they were sorry for the women and children, but South Carolina must be destroyed.”36

This enabled the Amendment to pass with two votes to spare, 119 to 56. When the result was announced, Republicans on the floor and spectators in the gallery broke into prolonged—and unprecedented—cheering, while in the streets of Washington cannons boomed a hundred-gun salute. The scene “beggared description,” wrote a Republican congressman in his diary. “Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.” By acclamation the House voted to adjourn for the rest of the day “in honor of this immortal and sublime event.”

Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of change occurred on February 1, the day after House passage of the 13th Amendment. On that day Senator Charles Sumner presented Boston lawyer John Rock for admission to practice before the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase swore him in. There was nothing unusual in this except that Rock was a black man, the first Negro accredited to the highest Court which eight years earlier had denied U.S. citizenship to his race. The Court had been virtually reconstructed by Lincoln’s appointment of five new justices including Chase. The transition from Roger Taney to Chase as leader of the Court was itself the most sweeping judicial metamorphosis in American history.24

“Thank God I have lived to see this. It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”32 Porter took Lincoln upriver to the enemy capital where the President of the United States sat down in the study of the President of the Confederate States forty hours after Davis had left it.

The vanquished commander, six feet tall and erect in bearing, arrived in full-dress uniform with sash and jeweled sword; the victor, five feet eight with stooped shoulders, appeared in his usual private’s blouse with mud-spattered trousers tucked into muddy boots

The fall of the rebel capital had merited a nine-hundred gun salute in Washington; the surrender of Lee produced another five hundred.

This change in the federal balance paralleled a radical shift of political power from South to North. During the first seventy-two years of the republic down to 1861 a slaveholding resident of one of the states that joined the Confederacy had been President of the United States for forty-nine of those years—more than two-thirds of the time.

The South more closely resembled a majority of the societies in the world than did the rapidly changing North during the antebellum generation.

four years later George Ticknor, a retired Harvard professor, concluded that the Civil War had created a “great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.”

The libertarians and southern conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s who wanted to revive the exclusively negative form of liberty that prevailed before the Civil War were right to make Lincoln a target of their intellectual artillery.6 Unlike these one-dimensional philosophers of negative liberty, however, Lincoln understood that secession and war had launched a revolution that changed America forever. Eternal vigilance against the tyrannical power of government remains the price of our negative liberties, to be sure. But it is equally true that the instruments of government power remain necessary to defend the equal justice under law of positive liberty.