Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Of all the army commanders on both sides, Lee had the highest casualty rate.22 One reason for this was Lee’s concept of the offensive-defensive, which he applied to tactics as well as to strategy. Lee probably deserves his reputation as the war’s best tactician, but his success came at great cost.

Even in 1864–65, when their backs were to the wall and they had barely strength enough to parry their adversary’s heavier blows, the Army of Northern Virginia essayed several offensive counterstrokes. The incongruity between Lee’s private character as a humane, courteous, reserved, kindly man, the very model of a Christian gentleman, and his daring, aggressive, but costly tactics as a general is one of the most striking contrasts in the history of the war.

Given the rifle’s greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to “take” the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in a battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.

The superiority of the rifle was demonstrated by British and French soldiers who carried them in the Crimean War. As Secretary of War in 1855, Jefferson Davis converted the United States army to the . 58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. Along with the similar British Enfield rifle (caliber . 577, which would take the same bullet as the Springfield), the Springfield became the main infantry arm of the Civil War.

Progress in solving this problem made the single-shot Sharps carbine and rifle popular with the Union cavalry and sharpshooter units that managed to obtain them. The development of metal cartridges enabled the northern army to equip its cavalry and some infantry units with repeaters by 1863, of which the seven-shot Spencer carbine was most successful.

Northern industry geared up to manufacture more than two million rifles during the war; unable to produce more than a fraction of this total, the South relied mainly on imports through the blockade and on capture of Union rifles. In 1861 neither side had many rifles, so most soldiers carried old smoothbores taken from storage in arsenals. During 1862 most Union regiments received new Springfields or Enfields, while many Confederate units still had to rely on smoothbores.

The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation.

Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. Officers on both sides soon began to stay off horseback when possible and to wear a private’s uniform with only a sewn-on shoulder patch to designate their rank.

The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

Many civilians on both sides, especially in the South, experienced these sights and smells of war directly as well as through soldiers’ letters. Much of the fighting in May and June 1862 occurred almost on Richmond’s doorstep. Many of the 21,000 wounded Confederates from Seven Pines and the Seven Days’ were brought into the city.

The Civil War marked a milestone in the transformation of nursing from a menial service to a genuine profession. The war also produced important innovations in army medical practice. One such innovation was the creation of a special ambulance corps for first-aid treatment of the wounded and their evacuation to field hospitals.

This was one reason why about 18 percent of the wounded rebels died of their wounds compared with 14 percent of the wounded Yankees.37 The record of both armies in this respect, of course, was abysmal by twentieth-century standards. In the Korean War only one of every fifty wounded Americans died of his wounds; in Vietnam the proportion was one in four hundred. The Civil War soldier was eight times more likely to die of a wound and ten times more likely to die of disease than an American soldier in World War I. Indeed, twice as many Civil War soldiers died of disease as were killed and mortally wounded in combat.

The Civil War was fought at the end of the medical Middle Ages. The 1860s witnessed the dawn of a new era with the research in Europe of Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others who discovered those microscopic culprits that infected water and food and entered the bloodstream through open wounds. Within a generation the new science of bacteriology had revolutionized medicine.

Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of disease for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one"and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one.

These commentators, of course, could not foresee the profound irony of Lee’s achievement. If McClellan’s campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.

Although the North had mobilized only a third of its potential military manpower, a booming war economy and the busy summer season on farms had left few young men at loose ends and ready to volunteer.

In response the government adopted an ingenious carrot and stick approach. The carrot was bounties. The War Department authorized payment in advance of $25 of the traditional $100 bounty normally paid in full upon honorable discharge.

The “copperhead” faction of the northern Democratic party opposed the transformation of the Civil War into a total war—a war to destroy the old South instead of to restore the old Union.8 In Republican eyes, opposition to Republican war aims became opposition to the war itself. Opponents therefore became abettors of the rebellion and liable to military arrest.

By the beginning of 1862 the impetus of war had evolved three shifting and overlapping Republican factions on the slavery question. The most dynamic and clearcut faction were the radicals, who accepted the abolitionist argument that emancipation could be achieved by exercise of the belligerent power to confiscate enemy property. On the other wing of the party a smaller number of conservatives hoped for the ultimate demise of bondage but preferred to see this happen by the voluntary action of slave states coupled with colonization abroad of the freed slaves. In the middle were the moderates, led by Lincoln, who shared the radicals’ moral aversion to slavery but feared the racial consequences of wholesale emancipation. Events during the first half of 1862 pushed moderates toward the radical position.

In July 1862 the 37th Congress climaxed its second session with passage of two laws that signaled the turn toward a harsher war policy. The first was the militia act under which the government subsequently called for a draft of nine-month men. This bill also empowered the president to enroll “persons of African descent” for “any war service for which they may be found competent"—including service as soldiers, a step that would horrify conservatives and that the administration was not yet prepared to take.

This theme was underlined by the confiscation act of July 1862 which punished “traitors” by confiscating their property, including slaves who “shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.”

McClellan had made it clear that he was not the general to strike this sort of vigorous blow. After giving the president his memorandum on noninterference with slavery, McClellan followed it with a letter to Stanton warning that “the nation will support no other policy. . . . For none other will our armies continue to fight.” This was too much for Stanton and Chase. They joined a growing chorus of Republicans who were urging Lincoln to remove McClellan from command.

But Lincoln also recognized that soldiers in the Army of the Potomac revered McClellan as the leader who had molded them into a proud army. The enlisted men did not subscribe to Republican criticisms of McClellan, and many of their officers did not share the Republican vision of an antislavery war. Because of this, Lincoln believed that he could not remove McClellan from command without risking demoralization in the army and a lethal Democratic backlash on the homefront.

Lincoln was “nothing better than a wet rag,” wrote William Lloyd Garrison, and his war policies were “stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute.” Frederick Douglass believed that Lincoln was “allowing himself to be . . . the miserable tool of traitors and rebels.” In a letter to Charles Sumner on August 7, Horace Greeley asked: “Do you remember that old theological book containing this: ‘Chapter One—Hell; Chapter Two—Hell Continued.’ Well, that gives a hint of the way Old Abe ought to be talked to in this crisis.” Greeley proceeded to give Lincoln hell in the columns of the New York Tribune.

The emergence of slavery as the most salient war issue in 1862 threatened to turn a large element of the Democrats into an antiwar party. This was no small matter. The Democrats had received 44 percent of the popular votes in the free states in 1860. If the votes of the border states are added, Lincoln was a minority president of the Union states.

In 1862 a third element began to emerge: the Peace Democrats, or copperheads, who would come to stand for reunion through negotiations rather than victory—an impossible dream, and therefore in Republican eyes tantamount to treason because it played into Confederate hands.

War and Peace Democrats would maintain a shifting, uneasy, and sometimes divided coalition, but on one issue they remained united: opposition to emancipation. On four crucial congressional roll-call votes concerning slavery in 1862—the war article prohibiting return of fugitives, emancipation in the District of Columbia, prohibition of slavery in the territories, and the confiscation act—96 percent of the Democrats were united in opposition, while 99 percent of the Republicans voted aye. Seldom if ever in American politics has an issue so polarized the major parties. Because of secession the Republicans had a huge majority in Congress and could easily pass these measures, but an anti-emancipation backlash could undo that majority in the fall elections.

In a half-dozen or more cities, anti-black riots broke out during the summer of 1862. Some of the worst violence occurred in Cincinnati, where the replacement of striking Irish dockworkers by Negroes set off a wave of attacks on black neighborhoods.

Despite the desperate need for hands to gather crops, riots forced the government to return most of the blacks to contraband camps south of the Ohio River. Anti-black sentiments were not a Democratic monopoly.

Old Abe did indeed advocate colonization in 1862. From his experience in Illinois politics he had developed sensitive fingers for the pulse of public opinion on this issue. He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections.

Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln’s proposal and denounced its author. “This is our country as much as it is yours,” a Philadelphia Negro told the president, “and we will not leave it.” Frederick Douglass accused Lincoln of “contempt for negroes” and “canting hypocrisy.” The president’s remarks, said Douglass, would encourage “ignorant and base” white men “to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people.”

The conquest of the Mississippi bogged down before Vicksburg. Triumphs on land came to a halt at Corinth. Why did this happen? The usual answer is to blame Halleck for dispersing his army and missing a grand opportunity to cripple the rebellion in the Mississippi Valley. The true answer is more complex.

Four tasks faced Halleck after his army of 110,000 occupied Corinth at the end of May. 1) Push on south after the retreating rebels and try to capture Vicksburg from the rear. 2) Send a force against Chattanooga to “liberate” east Tennessee. 3) Repair and defend the network of railroads that supplied Federal armies in this theater. 4) Organize occupation forces to preserve order, administer the contraband camps where black refugees had gathered, protect unionists trying to reconstruct Tennessee under military governor Andrew Johnson

This thesis overlooks some physical, logistical, and political realities. The disease problem for unacclimated northern soldiers has already been mentioned. An unusually wet spring had turned into a disastrously dry summer. The streams and springs that supplied water for men and horses were rapidly drying up in northern Mississippi. Several cavalry and infantry brigades did pursue the Confederates twenty miles south of Corinth but could go no farther by July for lack of water.

Any overland campaign against Vicksburg would have been vulnerable to rebel raids on railroads and supply depots, as Grant learned six months later when such raids compelled him to abandon his first campaign against Vicksburg.

Finally, Lincoln’s cherished aim of restoring east Tennessee made this political goal into a top military priority.

Buell also believed in limited war for limited goals. This slowed his drive toward Chattanooga along the railroad from Corinth through northern Alabama. Guerrillas cut his supply lines frequently.

Union commanders learned these things the hard way in 1862. The Yankees did not catch up with the rebels in this respect until 1863, when they finally began to give as good as they got in the war of cavalry raids.

The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, rundown, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.8 But in 1862 the dependence of Union armies on railroads proved as much curse as blessing.

These experiences would ultimately teach Union generals the same lesson that Napoleon had put into practice a half-century earlier. The huge armies of the French emperor could not have been supplied by the wagon transport of that era, so they simply lived off the country they swarmed through like locusts. Buell was unwilling to fight this kind of war, and that led to his downfall.

Pope’s first act as commander of the newly designated Army of Virginia was to issue an address to his troops. He did nothing to diminish his reputation for braggadocio in this singularly inept document. “I come to you out of the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies,” he declared. “I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you . . . certain phrases [like] . . . ‘lines of retreat,’ and ‘bases of supplies.’ . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”20 This snide denigration of eastern troops won Pope few friends.

The president did not have 50,000 men to spare, but even if he could have sent 100,000, he told a senator, McClellan would suddenly discover that Lee had 400,000.23 At the end of July, Lincoln and Halleck decided to withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula to unite it with Pope’s force.

This maneuver defied military maxims about keeping an army concentrated in the presence of an enemy of equal or greater size. But Lee believed that the South could never win by following maxims. His well-bred Episcopalian demeanor concealed the audacity of a skillful gambler ready to stake all on the turn of a card. The dour Presbyterian who similarly concealed the heart of a gambler was the man to carry out Lee’s strategy.

In one of the war’s great marches, Jackson’s whole corps—24,000 men—had covered more than fifty miles in two days.

Lee’s achievement in his second strategic offensive was even more remarkable than in his first. Less than a month earlier the main Union army had been only twenty miles from Richmond. With half as many troops as his two opponents (Pope and McClellan), Lee had shifted the scene to twenty miles from Washington, where the rebels seemed poised for the kill.

But the president instead merged Pope’s army into the Army of the Potomac, put McClellan in charge of the defense of Washington, sent Pope to Minnesota to pacify Indians, and relieved McDowell of command and ultimately exiled him to California. Stanton and Chase remonstrated against the retention of McClellan. Lincoln himself was “greatly distressed” by having to do it. But while McClellan “had acted badly in this matter,” said the president, he “has the Army with him. . . . We must use what tools we have. There is no man in the Army who can lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he. . . . If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”

Within days McClellan had the army ready for field service again. And they had to take the field immediately, for with scarcely a pause Lee was leading his ragged but confident veterans across the Potomac for an invasion of the North. Most northerners saw this as a calamity. But Lincoln viewed it as an opportunity to cripple Lee’s army far from its home base. He told McClellan to go after Lee, and “destroy the rebel army, if possible.”

The Army of Northern Virginia could not attack the formidable Washington defenses. It could not stay where it was, in a fought-over region denuded of supplies at the end of a long and precarious rail line.

The safe course was to pull back toward Richmond to rest and refit. But Lee was not the man to choose the safe course. Though weary, his army was flushed with victory and the enemy was unnerved by defeat. Lee sensed that this was the North’s low-water mark.

This was no time for the Army of Northern Virginia to rest on its laurels. It must take the war into the North and force the Lincoln government to sue for peace.