Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

For reasons of their own most northerners initially agreed that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

The navy was little better prepared for war. Of the forty-two ships in commission when Lincoln became president, most were patrolling waters thousands of miles from the United States. Fewer than a dozen warships were available for immediate service along the American coast. But there were some bright spots in the naval outlook. Although 373 of the navy’s 1,554 officers and a few of its 7,600 seamen left to go with the South, the large merchant marine from which an expanded navy would draw experienced officers and sailors was overwhelmingly northern.

Nearly all of the country’s shipbuilding capacity was in the North. And the Navy Department, unlike the War Department, was blessed with outstanding leadership.

The northern naval outlook appeared especially bright in contrast to the southern. The Confederacy began life with no navy and few facilities for building one.

world’s first combat submarine, the C.S.S. Hunley, which sank three times in trials, drowning the crew each time (including its inventor Horace Hunley) before sinking a blockade ship off Charleston in 1864 while going down itself for the fourth and last time.

By the time Lincoln called for 75,000 men after the fall of Sumter, the South’s do-it-yourself mobilization had already enrolled 60,000 men. But these soldiers were beginning to experience the problems of logistics and supply that would plague the southern war effort to the end. 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 the North or from Britain; of 470 locomotives built in the United States during 1860, only nineteen had been made in the South.

Thomas J. Jackson, a former professor at V.M.I, now commanding a brigade of Virginians from the Shenandoah Valley. Humorless, secretive, eccentric, a stern disciplinarian without tolerance for human weaknesses, a devout Presbyterian who ascribed Confederate successes to the Lord and likened Yankees to the devil, Jackson became one of the war’s best generals, a legend in his own time. The legend began there on Henry House Hill. As the Confederate regiments that had fought in the morning retreated across the hill at noon,

Jackson brought his fresh troops into line just behind the crest. General Barnard Bee of South Carolina, trying to rally his broken brigade, pointed to Jackson’s men and shouted something like: “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!” But at least one observer placed a different construction on Bee’s remark, claiming that the South Carolinian gestured angrily at Jackson’s troops standing immobile behind the crest, and said: “Look at Jackson standing there like a damned stone wall!”

Whatever Bee said—he could not settle the question by his own testimony, for a bullet killed him soon afterward—Jackson’s brigade stopped the Union assault and suffered more casualties than any other southern brigade this day. Ever after, Jackson was known as “Stonewall” ...

Lincoln agreed with this editorial rather than with Greeley’s letter. Though shaken by the news of Bull Run, the president and General Scott did not panic. They worked through the night to salvage some order from the chaos of defeat.

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.

The navy achieved some of the Union’s most important military successes in 1861. The primary naval task was the blockade. It was no easy task.

Lincoln also believed that the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had set the Confederacy tottering.

For the Lincoln administration, victories on the battlefield translated into political success at home as well as abroad in 1863. Several state elections occurred during the fall, of which the most important were the gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania. A year earlier the Republicans had suffered a setback in congressional elections. The issues in 1863 remained the same: the conduct of the war; emancipation; civil liberties; and conscription.

At dusk on July 18 two Union brigades assaulted Fort Wagner, a Confederate earthwork defending the entrance to Charleston harbor. Leading the attack was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. This was not unusual in itself: Bay State regiments fought in the hottest part of many battles, and the combat casualties of Massachusetts were among the highest for Union states. But the 54th was the North’s showcase black regiment. Its colonel and lieutenant colonel were sons of prominent abolitionist families. More was riding on the 54th’s first big action than the capture of a fort, important as that might be. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw had implored his brigade commander to give the regiment a chance to prove its mettle. The general responded by assigning Shaw to lead the frontal

assault across a narrow spit of sand against this strong earthwork. The result was predictable; the rebels drove back the attacking brigades and inflicted heavy losses. The 54th took the largest casualties, losing nearly half of its men including Colonel Shaw with a bullet through his heart. Black soldiers gained Wagner’s parapet and held it for an hour in the flame-stabbed darkness before falling back. The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers. “Through the cannon smoke of that dark night,” declared the Atlantic Monthly, “the manhood of the colored race shines before many eyes that would not see.” The New York Tribune believed that this battle “made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill had been for ninety years to the white Yankees.”

When a Confederate officer reportedly replied to a request for the return of Shaw’s body with the words “we have buried him with his niggers,” Shaw’s father quelled a northern effort to recover his son’s body with these words: “We hold that a soldier’s ...