Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

At the very least, Lee could cut the B & O and—if things went well—burn the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge over the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, thereby severing Washington’s main links with the West. A successful invasion might induce European powers to recognize Confederate nationhood. It might encourage Peace Democrats in the upcoming northern elections.

For political as well as military reasons, therefore, Lee started his army splashing across the Potomac fords thirty-five miles above Washington on September 4. Reinforced by three divisions called from Richmond, the army numbered some 55,000 men before it crossed the river. But from a variety of causes—exhaustion, hunger, sickness from subsisting on green corn, torn feet from marching barefoot on stony roads—stragglers fell out by the thousands during the next few days.

Lee replied: “Are you acquainted with General McClellan? He is an able general but a very cautious one. . . . His army is in a very demoralized and chaotic condition, and will not be prepared for offensive operations—or he will not think it so—for three or four weeks. Before that time I hope to be on the Susquehanna.”

Antietam (called Sharpsburg by the South) was one of the few battles of the war in which both commanders deliberately chose the field and planned their tactics beforehand.

It was a good battle plan and if well executed it might have accomplished Lincoln’s wish to “destroy the rebel army.” But it was not well executed. On the Union side the responsibility for this lay mainly on the shoulders of McClellan and Burnside. McClellan failed to coordinate the attacks on the right, which therefore went forward in three stages instead of simultaneously. This allowed Lee time to shift troops from quiet sectors to meet the attacks. The Union commander also failed to send in the reserves when the bluecoats did manage to achieve a breakthrough in the center.

On the Confederate side the credit for averting disaster belonged to the skillful generalship of Lee and his subordinates but above all to the desperate courage of men in the ranks. “It is beyond all wonder,” wrote a Union officer after the battle, “how such men as the rebel troops can fight on as they do; that, filthy, sick, hungry, and miserable, they should prove such heroes in fight, is past explanation.”42 The fighting at Antietam was among the hardest of the war.

This frenzy seems to have prevailed at Antietam on a greater scale than in any previous Civil War battle.

Now was the time for McClellan to send in his reserves. The enemy center was wide open. “There was no body of Confederate infantry in this part of the field that could have resisted a serious advance,” wrote a southern officer. “Lee’s army was ruined, and the end of the Confederacy was in sight,” added another.45 But the carnage suffered by three Union corps during the morning had shaken McClellan.

Nearly 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded groaned in agony or endured in silence. The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.

At Whitehall and the White House the battle of Antietam also went down as a northern victory. It frustrated Confederate hopes for British recognition and precipitated the Emancipation Proclamation. The slaughter at Sharpsburg therefore proved to have been one of the war’s great turning points.

The long-awaited cotton famine finally took hold in the summer of 1862. Louis Napoleon toyed with the idea of offering recognition and aid to the Confederacy in return for southern cotton and southern support for French suzerainty in Mexico. Of all these occurrences, the building of commerce raiders was the only one that generated tangible benefits for the Confederacy. Liverpool was a center of pro-southern sentiment. The city “was made by the slave trade,” observed a caustic American diplomat, “and the sons of those who acquired fortunes in the traffic, now instinctively side with the rebelling slave-drivers.”

This last prospect had a powerful appeal, for the cotton famine was beginning to pinch. In July 1862 the supply of raw cotton in Britain stood at one-third the normal level. Three-quarters of the cotton-mill workers were unemployed or on short time. Charity and the dole could not ward off hardship and restiveness in Lancashire working-class districts.

The attitude of textile workers toward the American war has been something of a puzzle to historians as well as to contemporaries. Henry Hotze confessed frustration at his failure to win support from this class whose economic self-interest would seem to have favored the South.

In this view, the issues of the American Civil War mirrored the issues of class conflict in Britain. The Union stood for popular government, equal rights, and the dignity of labor; the Confederacy stood for aristocracy, privilege, and slavery.

British radicals expounded numerous variations on the theme. For a generation they had fought for democratization of British politics and improved conditions for the working class. For them, America was a “beacon of freedom” lighting the path to reform. The leading British radical, John Bright, passionately embraced the Union cause.

Liberal intellectuals shared this belief that a southern victory, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “would be a victory of the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilized world.”5 A German revolutionary living in exile in England also viewed the American war against the “slave oligarchy” as a “world-transforming . . . revolutionary movement.” “The working-men of Europe,” continued Karl Marx, felt a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, “the single-minded son of the working class. . . . As the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working classes.”

One historian has found twice as many meetings in Lancashire supporting the Confederacy as favoring the Union.7 This revisionist interpretation overcorrects the traditional view.

Well-born Englishmen professed to dislike Yankees as much for their manners as for their dangerous democratic example to the lower orders.

The Earl of Shrewsbury looked upon “the trial of Democracy and its failure” with pleasure. “The dissolution of the Union [means] that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.”9 Similar statements found their way into prominent newspapers, including the London Morning Post and the magisterial Times, both with close ties to the Palmerston government. The Times considered the destruction of “the American Colossus” a good “riddance of a nightmare.

This war of words against the Yankees contributed to an embitterment of Anglo-American relations for a generation after the Alabama had sunk below the waves and the Enfield rifles shipped through the blockade had fallen silent.

Palmerston branded Butler’s conduct “infamous. Sir, an Englishman must blush to think that such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race.” This was more than Charles Francis Adams could stand. For months he had silently endured the gibes of Englishmen. But this self-righteous condemnation of Butler, with its implied approval of a people who held two million women in slavery, evoked an official protest by Adams. Palmerston’s huffy reply caused an estrangement between the two men at a time when Anglo-American relations were entering a critical stage.11

One thing upon which Englishmen prided themselves was their role in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade and abolishing slavery in the West Indies. To support a rebellion in behalf of slavery would be un-British. To accept the notion that the South fought for independence rather than slavery required considerable mental legerdemain. But so long as the North did not fight for freedom, many Britons could see no moral superiority in the Union cause. If the North wanted to succeed in “their struggle [for] the sympathies of Englishmen,” warned a radical newspaper, “they must abolish slavery.”

Southerners believed that recognition would help the Confederacy by boosting its credibility abroad and strengthening the peace party in the North. They may have been right. But so far as Palmerston was concerned, the South could earn recognition only by winning the war: Britain must “know that their separate independence is a truth and a fact” before declaring it to be so.14 Across the Channel, Louis Napoleon felt fewer inhibitions against expressing his partisanship for the South.

By the summer of 1862 thousands of French soldiers were fighting in Mexico to overthrow the liberal regime of Benito Juarez and turn the country into a French colony. Napoleon had sent these troops on the pretext of enforcing the collection of Mexican debts. But his real purpose was the creation of an empire in the new world to replace the one that his uncle had sold to Thomas Jefferson.

John Slidell offered Napoleon several hundred thousand bales of cotton and an alliance against Juarez in return for French diplomatic recognition and possible naval assistance in breaking the blockade. Napoleon was intrigued by the offer but reluctant to court hostilities with the United States.

Napoleon dared not act unilaterally. Although he hoped to surpass Britain as the world’s leading power, he recognized that a confrontation with the Union navy without Britain at his side might scuttle his plans.

The ancient hostility between Britain and France had not vanished. Palmerston was suspicious of Napoleon’s global designs.

The European belief that defeat might induce Lincoln to accept mediation misjudged his determination to fight through to victory. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,” Lincoln had said, and he meant it. Even after the setback at Second Bull Run, Seward told the French minister that “we will not admit the division of the Union . . . at any price. . . . There is no possible compromise.”

But even before reports of Antietam reached England (news required ten days or more to cross the Atlantic), Palmerston turned cautious.

But Antietam did not cool the ardor of Russell and Gladstone for recognition. They persisted in bringing the matter before the cabinet on October 28, despite Palmerston’s repeated insistence that matters had changed since mid-September,

The cabinet voted Russell and Gladstone down. The French weighed in at this point with a suggestion that Britain, France, and Russia propose a six months’ armistice—during which the blockade would be suspended. This so blatantly favored the South that pro-Union Russia quickly rejected it. The British cabinet, after two days of discussion, also turned it down. Thus ended the South’s best chance for European intervention. It did not end irrevocably, for the military situation remained fluid and most Britons remained certain that the North could never win. But at least they had avoided losing.

But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president’s prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States.

Democrats scored significant gains in the 1862 elections: the governorship of New York, the governorship and a majority of the legislature in New Jersey, a legislative majority in Illinois and Indiana, and a net increase of thirty-four congressmen. Only the fortuitous circumstance that legislative and gubernatorial elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania were held in odd-numbered years and that the Republican governors of Illinois and Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms prevented the probable loss of these posts to the Democrats in 1862.

But a closer look at the results challenges this conclusion. Republicans retained control of seventeen of the nineteen free-state governorships and sixteen of the legislatures. They elected several congressmen in Missouri for the first time, made a net gain of five seats in the Senate, and retained a twenty-five-vote majority in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of congressional seats in an off-year election in twenty years.

But elsewhere the Republicans more than held their own. And the Democratic margins in most of those six states were exceedingly thin: 4,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 6,000 in Ohio, 10,000 each in New York and Indiana. These majorities could be explained, as Lincoln noted, by the absence of soldiers at the front, for scattered evidence already hinted at a large Republican edge among enlisted men, a hint that would be confirmed in future elections when absentee soldier voting was permitted.

Here was revolution in earnest. Armed blacks were truly the bete noire of southern nightmares. The idea of black soldiers did not, of course, spring full-blown from Lincoln’s head at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. The notion had been around since the beginning of the war, when northern blacks in several cities had volunteered for the Union army.

Despite the service of black soldiers in the Revolution and the War of 1812, Negroes had been barred from state militias since 1792 and the regular army had never enrolled black soldiers.

The recruitment of black soldiers did not produce an instantaneous change in northern racial attitudes. Indeed, to some degree it intensified the Democratic backlash against emancipation and exacerbated racial tensions in the army.

But as the real import of the edict sank in, and as Lincoln made clear on January 1 that he really meant it, British antislavery sentiment mobilized for the Union. Mass meetings took place throughout the kingdom. Confederate sympathizers were forced to lie low for a time.

Nothing came of this, however, and nothing in McClellan’s tenure of command became him like his leaving of it. “Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well,” he told the men as they yelled their affection for the leader who had created them as an army. Among those who most regretted McClellan’s removal was Burnside himself. Although he was one of the few Union generals in the East with marked successes to his credit—along the coast of North Carolina—Burnside considered himself unqualified to command the Army of the Potomac. This conviction would all too soon be confirmed.

When the early twilight finally turned to darkness the Union army had suffered one of its worst defeats of the war. Nearly 13,000 Federals were casualties—about the same number as at Antietam—most of them in front of the stone wall at the base of Marye’s Heights. Fighting on the defensive behind good cover, the Confederates suffered fewer than 5,000 casualties.

But in truth there was little he could do, for more than a third of his troops had been killed, wounded, or captured. The Yankees had suffered 31 percent casualties, making Stones River the most deadly battle of the war in proportion to numbers engaged.

In March the War Department virtually ordered Johnston to take command of the Army of Tennessee. But he demurred on the grounds that to remove Bragg while his wife was critically ill would be inhumane. Johnston himself then fell ill. So Bragg stayed on and continued to feud with his leading subordinates.23

But Lincoln astonished Burnside by appointing Hooker as his successor. Fighting Joe was hardly an exemplary character. Not only had he schemed against Burnside, but his moral reputation stood none too high.

Hooker proved a popular choice with the men. He took immediate steps to cashier corrupt quartermasters, improve the food, clean up the camps and hospitals, grant furloughs, and instill unit pride by creating insignia badges for each corps. Hooker reorganized the cavalry into a separate corps, a much-needed reform based on the Confederate model. Morale rose in all branches of the army. Sickness declined, desertions dropped, and a grant of amnesty brought many AWOLs back to the ranks.

It is hard to separate fact from fiction in this matter. Many wartime stories of Grant’s drunkenness are false; others are at best dubious. Grant’s meteoric rise to fame provoked jealousy in the hearts of men who indulged in gossip to denigrate him. Subject to sick headaches brought on by strain and loss of sleep, Grant sometimes acted unwell in a manner to give observers the impression that he had been drinking. But even when the myths have been stripped away, a hard substratum of truth about Grant’s drinking remains. He may have been an alcoholic in the medical meaning of that term. He was a binge drinker.

In the end, as a recent scholar has suggested, his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.

Vallandigham had no use for the “fanaticism and hypocrisy” of the objection that an armistice would preserve slavery. “I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war . . . and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power” than in Negro slavery.

The Enrollment Act of 1863 was designed mainly as a device to stimulate volunteering by the threat of a draft. As such it worked, but with such inefficiency, corruption, and perceived injustice that it became one of the most divisive issues of the war and served as a model of how not to conduct a draft in future wars.

Like the Confederacy in early 1862, the Union army in 1863 faced a serious manpower loss through expiration of enlistments: 38 two-year regiments raised in 1861, and 92 nine-month militia regiments organized in 1862 were due to go home during the spring and summer of 1863. This prompted Congress to act.