Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

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.

On March 28, 1862, he sent to Congress a special message recommending conscription. State’s righters and libertarians protested that such a measure contradicted what the South was fighting for.

On April 16 they enacted the first conscription law in American history.

The practice of buying substitutes had deep roots in European as well as American history. Men called into militia service in previous wars, including the Revolution, had been allowed to send substitutes. Even the levée en masse of the French Revolution permitted substitution.

Hiring a substitute was the most controversial form of exemption. Rich men could buy their way out of the army whether or not their skills were needed at home. This gave rise to a bitter saying: “A rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Some poor men, however, might become rich—if they survived—by selling themselves as substitutes. "Substitute brokers” established a thriving business. Many substitutes deserted as soon as they could, and sold themselves again—and again, and again. One man in Richmond was said to have sold himself thirty times.

Despite its success in getting more men into the army, conscription was the most unpopular act of the Confederate government. Yeoman farmers who could not buy their way out of the army voted with their feet and escaped to the woods or swamps. Enrollment officers met bitter resistance in the upcountry and in other regions of lukewarm or nonexistent commitment to the Confederacy. Armed bands of draft-dodgers and deserters ruled whole counties. Conscription represented an unprecedented extension of government power among a people on whom such power had rested lightly in the past.

Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this.

Lincoln recognized the justice of these protests. By February 1862 the detention of some two hundred political prisoners was doing more harm than good to the Union cause. The appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war provided an opportunity for a change. On February 14 Lincoln transferred enforcement of internal security to the War Department.

The Confederate economy had started with two strikes against it. Most of the South’s capital was tied up in the nonliquid form of land and slaves. While the Confederate states possessed 30 percent of the national wealth (in the form of real and personal property), they had only 12 percent of the circulating currency and 21 percent of the banking assets. The cotton embargo prevented the South from cashing in on its principal asset in 1861–62.

Of the three principal methods to finance the war—taxation, borrowing, and fiat money—taxation is the least inflationary. But it also seemed the least desirable to southerners in 1861. Antebellum Americans had been one of the most lightly taxed peoples on earth. And the per capita burden in the South had been only half that in the free states. A rural society in which one-third of the people were slaves, the South had few public services and therefore little need for taxes.

The Confederate government possessed no machinery for levying internal taxes and its constituents had no tradition of paying them.

Loans seemed a better and fairer way to pay for the war. Risking their lives for liberty, southerners expected future generations to bear the financial cost of the independence won for them by the men of ‘61.

the Confederacy financed itself primarily with a billion and a half paper dollars that depreciated from the moment they came into existence.

It exacerbated class tensions and caused a growing alienation of the white lower classes from the Confederate cause. Wage increases lagged far behind price increases. In 1862 wages for skilled and unskilled workers increased about 55 percent while prices rose 300 percent. Conditions on the small farms where most southern whites lived were little better. Although farm families grew much of what they consumed, the absence of adult males from many of the farms reduced crop yields and caused severe hardship.

Despite this condemnation of “native” merchants, the Examiner and many other southerners focused on Jews as the worst “extortioners.” Jewish traders had “swarmed here as the locusts of Egypt,” declared a congressman. “They ate up the substance of the country, they exhausted its supplies, they monopolized its trade.”

By 1862 the Confederate economy had become unmanageable. The futility of trying to bring it under control was illustrated by the attempts of several states to curb “monopolies” or fix maximum prices.

Under the pressures of blockade, invasion, and a flood of paper money, the South’s unbalanced agrarian economy simply could not produce both guns and butter without shortages and inflation.

But for a time in the winter of 1861–62, fiscal problems threatened to overwhelm the Union cause. Lincoln’s administration entered the war with at least two financial advantages over the Confederacy: an established Treasury and an assured source of revenue from the tariff. But the lower rates enacted by the tariff of 1857 and the depression following the panic of that year had reduced revenues by 30 percent. From

Secession produced a new panic. Specie fled the Treasury and the government’s credit rating plunged. When Lincoln took office the national debt was the highest in forty years. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase was a political appointee without prior financial experience—in contrast to the Confederacy’s Memminger, who was an expert in commercial and banking law. But Chase was an adept learner and turned out to be a good treasury secretary.

Chase pioneered the concept of selling bonds to ordinary people, as well as to bankers, in denominations as small as $50 to be paid in monthly installments. Cooke undertook to market these bonds by patriotic advertising that anticipated the great war-bond drives of the twentieth century.

Far more important in potential, though not at first in realization, were the new internal taxes levied in the North, beginning with the first federal income tax in American history enacted on August 5, 1861. This revolutionary measure grew from a need to assure the financial community that sufficient revenue would be raised to pay interest on bonds.

For the war as a whole the Union experienced inflation of only 80 percent (contrasted with 9,000 percent for the Confederacy), which compares favorably to the 84 percent of World War I (1917–20) and 70 percent in World War II (1941–49, including the postwar years after the lifting of wartime price controls).

Three main factors explain the success of the Legal Tender Act. First: the underlying strength of the northern economy. Second: the fortuitous timing of the law. It went into effect during the months of Union military success in the spring of 1862, floating the greenbacks on a buoyant mood of confidence in victory. The third reason was the enactment of a comprehensive tax law on July 1, 1862, which soaked up much of the inflationary pressure produced by the greenbacks.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

While far less serious than in the South, price increases did cause an average decline of 20 percent in real wages of northern workers by 1863 or 1864.

the labor shortage caused by a wartime decline of immigration and by the enlistment of workers in the army should have enabled wages to keep up with the cost of living, if not exceed it. Three factors seem to have prevented this from happening. The first was some slack in the economy left from the aftershocks of the Panic of 1857 and a renewed panic and downturn caused by secession in 1861, which meant that a labor surplus did not become a labor shortage until 1862. Second, a wartime speedup in mechanization of certain key industries helped alleviate the tight labor market:

Third was a great increase in the employment of women, in occupations ranging from government civil service and army nursing to agricultural field work and manufacturing.

The second session of the 37th Congress (1861–62) was one of the most productive in American history. Not only did the legislators revolutionize the country’s tax and monetary structures and take several steps toward the abolition of slavery;43 they also enacted laws of far-reaching importance for the disposition of public lands, the future of higher education, and the building of transcontinental railroads.

Yet it was the war—or rather the absence of southerners from Congress—that made possible the passage of these Hamiltonian–Whig–Republican measures for government promotion of socioeconomic development.

For good measure, Congress also created a Department of Agriculture. The success of the land-grant college movement was attested by the later development of first-class institutions in many states and world-famous universities at Ithaca, Urbana, Madison, Minneapolis, and Berkeley.

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted “the blueprint for modern America.”

labeled the “Second American Revolution"—that process by which “the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South

This new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world’s breadbasket for much of the twentieth century probably would have come about even if the Civil War had never occurred. But the war molded the particular configuration of this new society, and the legislation of the 37th Congress that authorized war bonds to be bought with greenbacks and repaid with gold and thereby helped concentrate investment capital, that confiscated southern property and strengthened northern industry by expanding internal markets, protecting those markets with tariffs, and improving access to them with subsidies to transportation, that settled the public domain and improved its cultivation, and rationalized the country’s monetary and credit structure

In May 1862, prospects for the Confederacy’s survival seemed bleak. Most of the Mississippi Valley had fallen to the enemy. In Virginia, McClellan’s army of 100,000 had advanced to within hearing of Richmond’s church bells.

Jackson seemed even more peculiar. Attired in an old army coat he had worn in the Mexican War and a broken-visored V.M.I, cadet cap, Jackson constantly sucked lemons to palliate his dyspepsia and refused to season his food with pepper because (he said) it made his left leg ache. A disciplinary martinet, Jackson had tarnished some of the fame won at Manassas by an aborted winter campaign into West Virginia that provoked a near mutiny by some of his troops. A devout Presbyterian, Jackson came across to some colleagues as a religious fanatic. Taciturn, humorless, and secretive, he rarely explained to subordinates the purpose of his orders. His rule of strategy—"always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy"—seemed to apply to his own officers as well.

This was Lee’s first essay in the kind of offensive-defensive strategy that was to become his hallmark. And as long as Jackson lived, he commanded the mobile force that Lee relied on to spearhead this strategy.

In all of these swift, deceptive movements Jackson was aided by local scouts and spies who knew every foot of the country. Northern commanders had no such advantage. Moreover, Valley residents such as Belle Boyd of Front Royal kept Jackson informed of Federal troop dispositions. Banks had to contend not only with Jackson’s army but also with a hostile civilian population—a problem confronted by every invading Union army, and one that helped make this a war of peoples as well as of armies.

Jackson’s campaign accomplished the relief of pressure against Richmond that Lee had hoped for.

Jackson’s Valley campaign won renown and is still studied in military schools as an example of how speed and use of terrain can compensate for inferiority of numbers. Jackson’s army of 17,000 men had outmaneuvered three separate enemy forces with a combined strength of 33,000 and had won five battles, in all but one of which (Cross Keys) Jackson had been able to bring superior numbers to the scene of combat. Most important, Jackson’s campaign had diverted 60,000 Union soldiers from other tasks and had disrupted two major strategic movements—Frémont’s east Tennessee campaign and McDowell’s plan to link up with McClellan’s right wing before Richmond.

Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell’s corps to chase Jackson was probably a strategic error—perhaps even the colossal blunder that McClellan considered it. But if Union commanders in the Valley had acted with half the energy displayed by Jackson they might well have trapped and crippled Jackson’s army. And even if McDowell’s corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter’s previous record offered little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to capture Richmond.

The most important southern casualty was Joe Johnston, wounded by a shell fragment and a bullet through the shoulder on the evening of May 31. To replace him Davis appointed Robert E. Lee, who recognized the futility of further fighting by breaking off the engagement on June 1. When Lee took command of the newly designated Army of Northern Virginia, few shared Davis’s high opinion of the quiet Virginian.

He was also a superb leader of cavalry, especially in gathering information about enemy positions and movements. In this as in other tasks assigned to the cavalry—screening the army from enemy horsemen, patrolling front and flanks to prevent surprise attacks, raiding enemy supply lines, and pursuing defeated enemy infantry—the rebel troopers were superior to their adversaries at this stage of the war.

But Lee had already taken McClellan’s measure. The Union commander, as usual, believed himself outnumbered south as well as north of the Chickahominy.

and more significantly the weariness of Jackson, a man who seemed to need more than an average amount of sleep but had enjoyed only a few hours of rest during the past several days after six weeks of strain in the Valley. Jackson was probably suffering from what today would be called stress fatigue. Intolerant of weakness in others, he refused to recognize it in himself or to do anything about it—except to collapse into unscheduled naps at crucial times during the Seven Days’ fighting.

In reality the Army of the Potomac was still in good shape despite the defeat at Gaines’ Mill. But McClellan was a whipped man mentally. After midnight he again wired Stanton: “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. . . . The Government has not sustained this army. . . . If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” That McClellan escaped removal from command after sending such a dispatch was owing to an astonished colonel in the telegraph office, who excised the last two sentences before sending the message to Stanton.

When Union artillery and sharpshooters prevented this, Jackson lay down and took a nap. Meanwhile his officers found fords practicable for infantry, but Jackson, seemingly in a trance, did nothing while Long-street’s and Hill’s men bled and died two miles to the south. Jackson’s failure, in the words of one historian, was “complete, disastrous and unredeemable.”

When McClellan instead ordered a continuation of the retreat to Harrison’s Landing on the James, one of his most pugnacious brigadiers—Philip Kearny of New Jersey, who had lost an arm in the Mexican War—burst out to fellow officers: “Such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason. . . . We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond.”

Lee recognized the futility of any more attacks. Twenty thousand southerners—nearly a quarter of his army—had fallen dead and wounded during the previous week, twice the Union total.

The thirty thousand men killed and wounded in the Seven Days’ equaled the number of casualties in all the battles in the western theater—including Shiloh—during the first half of 1862. The Seven Days’ established a pattern for harder fighting and greater casualties in battles between the Army of Northern Virginia and Army of the Potomac than between any other armies.

The western farm boys and out-doorsmen regarded themselves as tougher soldiers than the effete “paper-collar” soldiers from the Northeast. But in truth the “pasty-faced” clerks and mechanics of the East proved to be more immune to the diseases of camp life and more capable in combat of absorbing and inflicting punishment than western Union soldiers. For the war as a whole the death rate from disease was 43 percent higher among Union soldiers from states west of the Appalachians than among the effete easterners, while the latter experienced combat mortality rates 23 percent higher than the westerners.