Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

But 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.

The first victim of McClellan’s vainglory was General-in-Chief Scott. More than twice McClellan’s age, Scott was America’s foremost living soldier, a hero of two wars, second only to George Washington in military reputation. But Scott’s fame belonged to past wars. McClellan aspired to be the hero of this one. A rivalry with the “old general,” as McClellan privately called Scott, soon developed.

McClellan set about this task with great energy. He put in eighteen-hour days that achieved quick and visible results. McClellan communicated directly with the president, bypassing Scott. The latter, whose age and infirmities prevented him from doing more than a few hours of daily paperwork, grew piqued at being left out of things.

Lincoln tried to mediate between the two generals, but only succeeded in delaying the inevitable. The president finally succumbed to pressure from Republican senators and allowed Scott to retire on November 1 “for reasons of health.” McClellan succeeded him as general in chief. Lincoln cautioned McClellan that the dual jobs of general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac “will entail a vast labor upon you.” Replied McClellan: “I can do it all.”36

But that was the rub. 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.

an important difference between Davis and Lincoln as war leaders. A proud man sensitive of his honor, Davis could never forget a slight or forgive the man who committed it. Not for him was Lincoln’s willingness to hold the horse of a haughty general if he would only win victories.

At the cost of thirty-one casualties, the Union navy secured the finest natural harbor on the south Atlantic coast. More than that, the navy acquired a reputation of invincibility that depressed morale along the South’s salt-water perimeter.

By April 1862 every Atlantic coast harbor of importance except Charleston and Wilmington (N.C.) was in Union hands or closed to blockade runners. Because of this, and because of the increasing number of Union warships, the blockade tightened considerably during the first half of 1862.

And what a day—the worst in the eighty-six-year history of the U. S. navy. The Virginia sank two proud ships within a few hours—a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941.

When McClellan’s army invaded the Virginia peninsula and forced the Confederates back toward Richmond in May 1862, Norfolk fell to the Federals and the Virginia was stranded. Too unseaworthy to fight her way into open water and too deep-drafted to retreat up the James River, the plucky ironclad was blown up by her crew on May 11, less than three months after she had been launched.

Cotton prices in European markets soared to six, eight, ten times their prewar levels, enabling speculators who bought cotton in the South and shipped it out to earn a return of several hundred percent. By 1864 captains of blockade runners received $5,000 or more in gold for a round trip, other officers from $750 to $3,500, and common seamen $250.

The crowding out of war matériel by high-value consumer goods on incoming runners became so notorious that in early 1864 the Confederate government enacted (much evaded) regulations banning luxury goods and requiring all runners to allot at least half their space to the government at fixed rates.

But most southerners who lived through the blockade gave a different answer. “Already the blockade is beginning to shut [ammunition] out,” wrote Mary Boykin Chesnut on July 16, 1861. It was “a stockade which hems us in,” she added in March 1862. In July 1861 a Charleston merchant noted in his diary that the “blockade is still carried on and every article of consumption particularly in the way of groceries are getting very high.” Four months later he wrote: “Business perfectly prostrated everything enormously high salt selling at 15 and 20 cents a quart hardly any shoes to be had dry goods of every kind running out.” A southern naval officer conceded after the war that the blockade “shut the Confederacy out from the world, deprived it of supplies, weakened its military and naval strength.”10

As far as the greater dollar volume of Charleston’s wartime trade is concerned, there were two reasons for this: Charleston was one of the principal ports for blockade runners because they were shut out of the other ports; and inflation so eroded the Confederate dollar that by March 1863 it required ten such dollars to buy what one had bought two years earlier. Indeed, the blockade was one of the causes of the ruinous inflation that reduced the Confederate dollar to one percent of its original value by the end of the war. To

A major goal of Confederate diplomacy in 1861 was to persuade Britain to declare the blockade illegal as a prelude to intervention by the royal navy to protect British trade with the South.

But in the end several factors prevented such action. The first was Russell’s and Palmerston’s desire to avoid involvement in the war. “For God’s sake, let us if possible keep out of it,” said Russell in May 1861, while Palmerston quoted the aphorism: “They who in quarrels interpose, will often get a bloody nose.” Even without Secretary of State Seward’s bellicose warnings against intervention—which the British regarded as insolent blustering—Britain recognized that any action against the blockade could lead to a conflict with the United States more harmful to England’s interests than the temporary loss of southern cotton.

Napoleon III of France leaned toward intervention, but was unwilling to take any action without British cooperation. If Britain took umbrage at Seward’s “bullying,” many Englishmen resented even more the Confederacy’s attempt at economic blackmail.

But the impact of this did not measure up to southern hopes or British fears. Even before the war, textiles had been losing their dominant role in the British economy. The war further stimulated growth in the iron, shipbuilding, armaments, and other industries. This offset much of the decline in textiles. The manufacture of woolen uniforms and blankets for American armies absorbed some of the slack in cotton manufacturing.

Crop failures in western Europe from 1860 through 1862 increased British dependence on American grain and flour. During the first two years of the Civil War the Union states supplied nearly half of British grain imports, compared with less than a quarter before the war.

And because Confederate commerce raiders drove much of the U. S. merchant marine from the seas, most of this expanded trade with the North was carried by British ships—another economic shot in the arm that helped discourage British intervention in the war.

In the quest for recognition, the Confederate State Department sent to Europe a three-man commission headed by William L. Yancey. As a notorious fire-eater and an advocate of reopening the African slave trade, Yancey was not the best choice to win friends in antislavery Britain.

This would seem to have been unexceptionable—except that it automatically recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power. Other European nations followed the British lead. Status as a belligerent gave Confederates the right under international law to contract loans and purchase arms in neutral nations, and to commission cruisers on the high seas with the power of search and seizure.

Adams had been a superb choice for the London legation. His grandfather and father had preceded him there; Charles had spent much of his youth in the St. Petersburg and London legations. His reserve and self-restraint struck an empathic chord among Englishmen, who were offended by the braggadocio they attributed to American national character. Adams and Lord Russell took each other’s measure at their first meeting, and liked what they saw.

The Union army’s capacity to carry on even that one war was threatened by an aspect of the Trent crisis unknown to the public and rarely mentioned by historians. In 1861, British India was the Union’s source of saltpeter, the principal ingredient of gunpowder. The war had drawn down saltpeter stockpiles to the danger point. In the fall of 1861 Seward sent a member of the du Pont company to England on a secret mission to buy all available supplies of saltpeter there and on the way from India. The agent did so, and was loading five ships with 2,300 tons of the mineral when news of the Trent reached London. The government clamped an embargo on all shipments to the United States until the crisis was resolved. No settlement, no saltpeter.

It was lucky for the North that Grant and Foote worked well together, because the institutional arrangements for army-navy cooperation left much to be desired.

The iron works at Clarksville on the Cumberland were second in the South only to Tredegar at Richmond, while Nashville on the same river was a major producer of gunpowder and the main supply depot for Confederate forces in the West.

While Davis was forming a low opinion of the other Johnston—Joseph—he pronounced Albert Sidney “the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Federal.”

Halleck had graduated near the top of his West Point class. He wrote Elements of Military Art and Science, essentially a paraphrase of Jomini’s writings, and translated Jomini’s Life of Napoleon. These works earned Halleck renown as a strategic theorist. Old Brains, as he was sometimes called

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. Grant’s

Grant suddenly realized that the enemy colonel “had been as much afraid of me as I 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.

The strategic consequences of this campaign were the most important of the war so far. Nearly a third of Johnston’s forces in the Tennessee-Kentucky theater were hors de combat. Half of the remainder were at Nashville and half at Columbus, 200 miles apart with a victorious enemy between them in control of the rivers and railroads. Buell’s un-bloodied Army of the Ohio was bearing down on Nashville from the north, while a newly organized Union Army of the Mississippi commanded by John Pope threatened Columbus from across the Mississippi River. Johnston had to evacuate Nashville on February 23, making it the first Confederate state capital and important industrial center to fall.

All of Kentucky and most of Tennessee came under Union military control—save for guerrilla activity and periodic rebel cavalry raids, which thenceforth became endemic in this theater.

plus three regiments of Indians from the Five Civilized Nations in Indian Territory. The latter, mostly Cherokees, served under chiefs who had made treaties of alliance with the Confederacy in the hope of achieving greater independence within a southern nation than they enjoyed in the United States—an ironic hope, since it was mostly southerners who had driven them from their ancestral homeland a generation earlier.

The rebels turned tail and ran. It was as inglorious a rout in reverse as Bull Run. Although each side suffered about 1,300 casualties, the battle of Pea Ridge was the most one-sided victory won by an outnumbered Union army during the war.

Grant did not entrench his men at Pittsburg Landing because he did not expect to fight there and did not want to rob them of their aggressive spirit. Regiments laid out their camps with no idea of forming a defensive line. Their picket posts and patrols were inadequate to detect enemy movements more than a few hundred yards away. The two divisions nearest Corinth, which would receive the first thrust of any attack, were composed of new troops untried by combat.

After the initial shock, Sherman performed this day with coolness and courage. The next twelve hours proved to be the turning point of his life. What he learned that day at Shiloh—about war and about himself—helped to make him one of the North’s premier generals. Sherman was everywhere along his lines at Shiloh, shoring up his raw troops and inspiring them to hurl back the initial assaults—with staggering losses on both sides. Sherman himself was wounded slightly (twice) and had three horses shot under him.

Johnston went personally to the front on the Confederate right to rally exhausted troops by his presence. There in midafternoon he was hit in the leg by a bullet that severed an artery and caused him to bleed to death almost before he realized he had been wounded.

Beauregard did not know this yet, but he sensed that his own army was disorganized and fought out. He therefore refused to authorize a final assault in the gathering twilight. Although partisans in the endless postwar postmortems in the South condemned this decision, it was a sensible one. The Union defenders had the advantages of terrain (many of the troops in a Confederate assault would have had to cross a steep backwater ravine) and of a large concentration of artillery—including the eight-inch shells of two gunboats. With the arrival of reinforcements, Yankees also gained the advantage of numbers.

About 2:30 Beauregard’s chief of staff said to the general: “Do you not think our troops are very much in the condition of a lump of sugar thoroughly soaked with water, but yet preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve? Would it not be judicious to get away with what we have?”26 Beauregard agreed, and issued the order to retreat.

What a thing to say

Coming at the end of a year of war, Shiloh was the first battle on a scale that became commonplace during the next three years. The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined.

Before Shiloh, Grant had believed that one more Union victory would end the rebellion; now he “gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”28 Shiloh launched the country onto the floodtide of total war.

With an inadequate water supply befouled by the army’s refuse, Corinth was becoming an ecological trap. As many soldiers died there of disease as had been killed at Shiloh.

When Beauregard took an unauthorized leave of absence to recuperate his broken health, Davis seized the opportunity and replaced him with Braxton Bragg.

The Yankees occupied Memphis and turned it into a base for future operations, while the fleet steamed 300 miles downriver to the Confederacy’s next bastion at Vicksburg. Meanwhile the spectacular achievements of the river fleet had been eclipsed by the salt-water navy, which captured New Orleans and pushed upriver to plant the American flag deep in the heart of Dixie.

Union pressure in Tennessee had forced southern leaders to strip Louisiana of an army division (which fought at Shiloh) and eight gunboats (the fleet destroyed at Memphis). Left to defend New Orleans were 3,000 short-term militia, some river batteries just below the city where Andrew Jackson had beaten the British in 1815, a mosquito fleet of a dozen small gunboats, two unfinished ironclads, and two forts mounting 126 guns astride the Mississippi seventy-five miles below the city.

born in Tennessee and married to a Virginian, Farragut’s loyalty to the flag he had served for half a century was unswerving. When fellow southerners tried to persuade him to defect, he rejected their entreaties with the words: “Mind what I tell you: You fellows will catch the devil before you get through with this business.”35 They would catch much of it from Farragut himself.

With all this happening in a space of scarcely a square mile, it was the greatest fireworks display in American history.

During the next two months most of Farragut’s ships twice ascended the Mississippi, receiving the surrender of Baton Rouge and Natchez along the way.

This event served as a coda to what the New York Tribune had described in May as “A Deluge of Victories” in the West.40 From February to May, Union forces conquered 50,000 square miles of territory, gained control of 1,000 miles of navigable rivers, captured two state capitals and the South’s largest city, and put 30,000 enemy soldiers out of action.

Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.