Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

No period of American history makes greater demands on the historian than that of the Civil War. To meet this extraordinary challenge

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.

All people were equal in God’s sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God’s children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution.

A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France. By 1860 the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves. During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe’s and six times the world average.

Three factors explained this phenomenon: a birth rate half again as high as Europe’s; a death rate slightly lower; and immigration. All three were linked to the relative abundance of the American economy.

Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 1860, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total. This was the highest rate of urbanization in American history.

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. More important, New York state pioneered the canal era by building the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, linking New York City to the Northwest by water and setting off a frenzy of construction that produced 3,700 miles of canals by 1850. During those same years, steamboats made Robert Fulton’s dream come true by churning their way along every navigable river from Bangor to St. Joseph. The romance and economic importance of steamboats were eclipsed in both respects by the iron horse in the 1850s.

The 9,000 miles of rail in the United States by 1850 led the world, but paled in comparison with the 21,000 additional miles laid during the next decade, which gave to the United States in 1860 a larger rail network than in the rest of the world combined. Iron ribbons breached the Appalachians and bridged the Mississippi. An even newer invention, the telegraph, sent instant messages along copper wires and leaped beyond the railheads to span the continent by 1861.

Despite higher rates, the railroad’s greater speed and dependability (most canals froze in winter; rivers became unnavigable in low water or floods) gave it an edge. Towns bypassed by the tracks shriveled; those located on the iron boomed, especially if they also enjoyed water transport. Springing from the prairie shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago became the terminus for fifteen rail lines by 1860, its population having 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.

A new institution, the “department store,” sprang up to market the wares of mass production to a mass public.

This was perhaps putting it a bit strongly. But many American technological innovations were indeed contributed by workers themselves. Elias Howe, a journeyman machinist in Boston who invented a sewing machine, was one of many examples. This was what contemporaries meant when they spoke of Yankee ingenuity. They used “Yankee” in all three senses of the word: Americans; residents of northern states in particular; and New Englanders especially.

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.

The connection made by British observers between Yankee “adaptative versatility” and education was accurate. New England led the world in educational facilities and literacy at midcentury. More than 95 percent of its adults could read and write; three-fourths of the children aged five to nineteen were enrolled in school, which they attended for an average of six months a year. The rest of the North was not far behind.

Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living.

Americans in the mid-nineteenth century could point to plenty of examples, real as well as mythical, of self-made men who by dint of “industry, prudence, perseverance, and good economy” had risen “to competence, and then to affluence.”32 With the election of Abraham Lincoln they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!”

By 1850 nearly three-quarters of the public school teachers in Massachusetts were women.

But slaves nevertheless married and raised large families. Most slaveowners encouraged this process, in part because abolition of the African slave trade after 1807 made them dependent on natural increase to meet the labor demands of an expanding cotton kingdom. In contrast to the United States, slave economies in most other parts of the western hemisphere reached their peak development while the African slave trade flourished.

Harriet Beecher Stowe used Weld’s book as a source for scenes in the most influential indictment of slavery of all time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (of which more later). Written in the sentimental style made popular by best-selling women novelists, Uncle Tom’s Cabin homed in on the breakup of families as the theme most likely to pluck the heartstrings of middle-class readers who cherished children and spouses of their own. Eliza fleeing across the ice-choked Ohio River to save her son from the slave-trader and Tom weeping for children left behind in Kentucky when he was sold South are among the most unforgettable scenes in American letters.

Although many northern readers shed tears at Tom’s fate, the political and economic manifestations of slavery generated more contention than moral and humanitarian indictments.

"Go West, young man,” advised Horace Greeley during the depression of the 1840s. And westward did they go, by millions in the first half of the nineteenth century, in obedience to an impulse that has never ceased. “The West is our object, there is no other hope left for us,” wrote a departing migrant. “There is nothing like a new country for poor folks.” “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,” wrote one pioneer on his way to Illinois in 1817.

Brigham Young proved to be one of the nineteenth century’s most efficient organizers. Like Joseph Smith, he had been born in Vermont. What Young lacked in the way of Smith’s charisma he more than compensated for with an iron will and extraordinary administrative ability. He organized the Mormon migration down to the last detail. Under his theocratic rule, centralized planning and collective irrigation from mountain streams enabled Mormons to survive their starving time during the first two winters at Salt Lake and to make the desert literally bloom—not as a rose, but with grain and vegetables. As thousands of new converts arrived each year from Europe as well as the United States, the Great Basin Zion attained a population of 40,000 by 1860. Young even managed to prevent the faithful from joining the various gold rushes to California in 1849 and to the Virginia City and Denver regions in 1859. The Mormons earned more from trade with prospectors on their way to the gold fields than most of the miners did after they got there. The greatest threat to the Saints was conflict with the United States government, which acquired the Great Basin from Mexico just as the Mormons were founding their Zion at Salt Lake. In 1850, Young persuaded Washington

The manifest destiny that represented hope for white Americans thus spelled doom for red Americans. And it also lit a slow fuse to a powder keg that blew the United States apart in 1861.

James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history.

During his one-term administration the country expanded by two-thirds with the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the seizure of all Mexican provinces north of 31°.

The trickle of migrants to California during the previous decade became a flood in the great gold rush of ‘49, soon chronicled in song and story and ultimately transmuted into miles of Hollywood celluloid. Some eighty thousand of these Forty-niners actually reached California during that first year. Thousands of others died on the way, many from a cholera epidemic. A few of the Forty-niners struck it rich; but toil, hardship, and disappointment became the lot of most. Yet still they came, until by the census year of 1850 California had a larger population than Delaware or Florida.

This was what gave Uncle Tom’s Cabin such astounding success. As the daughter, sister, and wife of Congregational clergymen, Harriet Beecher Stowe had breathed the doctrinal air of sin, guilt, atonement, and salvation since childhood. She could clothe these themes in prose that throbbed with pathos as well as bathos. After running serially in an antislavery newspaper for nine months, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out as a book in the spring of 1852. Within a year it sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone—comparable to at least three million today.

The novel enjoyed equal popularity in Britain and was translated into several foreign languages. Within a decade it had sold more than two million copies in the United States, making it the best seller of all time in proportion to population.

Three main questions were before the Court: 1) As a black man, was Scott a citizen with a right to sue in federal courts? 2) Had prolonged residence (two years in each place) in a free state and territory made Scott free? 3) Was Fort Snelling actually free territory—that is, did Congress in 1820 have the right to ban slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30’?

Taney and six other justices (with only Curtis and McLean dissenting) concurred that Scott’s “sojourn” for two years in Illinois and for a similar period at Fort Snelling, even if the latter was free territory, did not make him free once he returned to Missouri.

Like Dred Scott, John Brown lived the first fifty-odd years of his life in obscurity. Unlike Scott, he attained notoriety not through the law but by lawlessness.

To reassure the South that sympathy for Brown was confined to a noisy minority, northern conservatives organized large anti-Brown meetings. They condemned “the recent outrage at Harper’s Ferry” as a crime “not only against the State of Virginia, but against the Union itself. . . . [We] are ready to go as far as any

John Brown’s ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened.

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.

The South moved so swiftly because, in seeming paradox, secession proceeded on a state-by-state basis rather than by collective action.

Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” wrote the correspondent of the London Times from Charleston.

The outbreak of war at Fort Sumter confronted the upper South with a crisis of decision. Its choice could decide the fate of the Confederacy. These eight states contained most of the South’s resources for waging war: more than half of its population, two-thirds of its white population, three-quarters of its industrial capacity, half of its horses and mules, three-fifths of its livestock and food crops. In addition, men of high potential as military leaders hailed from these states: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, James E. B. Stuart, and Ambrose Powell Hill of Virginia; Daniel H. Hill of North Carolina; Albert Sidney Johnston and John Bell Hood of Kentucky; Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee.

In the eyes of southern unionists, this tragic war was mainly Lincoln’s fault.

Such explanations for conversion to secession were undoubtedly sincere. But their censure of Lincoln had a certain self-serving quality. The claim that his call for troops was the cause of the upper South’s decision to secede is misleading. As the telegraph chattered reports of the attack on Sumter April 12 and its surrender next day, huge crowds poured into the streets of Richmond, Raleigh, Nashville, and other upper South cities to celebrate this victory over the Yankees.

News of Sumter’s fall reached Richmond on the evening of April 13. A jubilant procession marched on the state capital where a battery fired a hundred-gun salute “in honor of the victory.” The crowd lowered the American flag from the capital building and ran up the Confederate stars and bars. Everyone “seemed to be perfectly frantic with delight, I never in all my life witnessed such excitement,” wrote a participant.

Virginia brought crucial resources to the Confederacy. Her population was the South’s largest.

Her industrial capacity was nearly as great as that of the seven original Confederate states combined. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the only plant in the South capable of manufacturing heavy ordnance. Virginia’s heritage from the generation of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison gave her immense prestige that was expected to attract the rest of the upper South to the Confederacy. And as events turned out, perhaps the greatest asset that Virginia brought to the cause of southern independence was Robert E. Lee.

Lee was fifty-four years old in 1861, the son of a Revol...

But with Virginia’s decision, everything changed. “I must side either with or against my section,” Lee told a northern friend. His choice was foreordained by birth and blood: “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.” On the very day he learned of Virginia’s secession, April 18, Lee also received the offer of Union command. He told his friend General Scott regretfully that he must not only decline, but must also resign from the army. “Save in defense of my native State,” said Lee, “I never desire again to draw my sword.” Scott replied sadly: “You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.” Five days later Lee accepted appointment as commander in chief of Virginia’s military forces; three weeks after that he became a brigadier general in the Confederate army.

The example of Virginia—and of Robert E. Lee—exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the upper South. Arkansas was the next state to go.

North Carolina and Tennessee also went out during May.

On that day the 6th Massachusetts Regiment—the first fully equipped unit to respond to Lincoln’s call for troops—entered Baltimore on its way to Washington. No rail line passed through Baltimore, so the troops had to detrain at the east-side station and cross the city to board a train to the capital. A mob gathered in the path of the soldiers and grew increasingly violent. Rioters attacked the rear companies of the regiment with bricks, paving stones, and pistols. Angry and afraid, a few soldiers opened fire.

That unleashed the mob. By the time the Massachusetts men had fought their way to the station and entrained for Washington, four soldiers and twelve Baltimoreans lay dead and several score groaned with wounds. They were the first of more than 700,000 combat casualties during the next four years.

Union forces moved into western Virginia for strategic as well as political reasons. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Ohio River ran through this region and along its border for two hundred miles. The most direct rail link between Washington and the Midwest, the B & O would play an important role in Civil War logistics.

Robert E. Lee also hoped that McClellan’s soldiers would meet worthy foemen. But Lee, functioning in Richmond as a sort of commander in chief of Virginia’s armed forces, had few men and less steel to spare for faraway western Virginia.

Both sides believed they were fighting to preserve the heritage of republican liberty; but Davis’s last phrase (“all we ask is to be let alone”) specified the most immediate, tangible Confederate war aim: defense against invasion.