Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Of the men chosen in the four drafts, more than one-fifth (161,000 of 776,000) “failed to report"—fleeing instead to the West, to Canada, or to the woods. Of those who did report to the provost marshal’s office, one-eighth were sent home because of already filled quotas. Three-fifths of the remaining 522,000 were exempted for physical or mental disability or because they convinced the inducting officer that they were the sole means of support for a widow, an orphan sibling, a motherless child, or an indigent parent.

Of the 207,000 men who were drafted, 87,000 paid the commutation fee and 74,000 furnished substitutes, leaving only 46,000 who went personally into the army. The pool of substitutes was furnished by eighteen- and nineteen-year olds and by immigrants who had not filed for citizenship, who were not liable to conscription.

On the face of it, the privileges of commutation and substitution did seem to make the conscription act, in the words of a modern historian, “one of the worst pieces of class legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”24 But a closer examination challenges this conclusion. Substitution was hallowed by tradition, having existed in European countries (even in France during the levée en masse), in American states during the Revolution, in the militia, and in the Confederacy.

But substitution was so deeply rooted in precedent as to be viewed as a right. Civil War experience changed this perception, and after twenty months of such experience the Confederacy repealed substitution in December 1863.

Studies of conscription in New York and Ohio have found virtually no correlation between wealth and commutation. Districts in New York with low per capita wealth had about the same percentage of men who paid commutation (or hired substitutes) as those with higher wealth. In four Ohio districts—two rural and two urban—the proportion of unskilled laborers who commuted was 18 percent, compared with 22 percent for skilled laborers, 21 percent for merchants, bankers, manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, and clerks, and 47 percent for farmers and farm laborers.

What kind of conscription was this, in which only 7 percent of the men whose names were drawn actually served? The answer: it was not conscription at all, but a clumsy carrot and stick device to stimulate volunteering. The stick was the threat of being drafted and the carrot was a bounty for volunteering.

The half-billion dollars paid in bounties by the North represented something of a transfer of wealth from rich to poor—an ironic counterpoint to the theme of rich man’s war/poor man’s fight. By 1864 a canny recruit could pyramid local, regional, and national bounties into grants of $1,000 or more.

One notorious facet of the bounty and substitute business was the crimping of immigrants. Immigration had declined sharply during the first half of the war, but picked up again in 1863 because of wartime labor shortages.

Crowded into noisome tenements in a city with the worst disease mortality and highest crime rate in the Western world, working in low-skill jobs for marginal wages, fearful of competition from black workers, hostile toward the Protestant middle and upper classes who often disdained or exploited them, the Irish were ripe for revolt against this war waged by Yankee Protestants for black freedom. Wage increases had lagged 20 percent or more behind price increases since 1861.

They made good their threat, setting off four days of escalating mob violence that terrorized the city and left at least 105 people dead. It was the worst riot in American history.

And Congress added insult to injury by a provision to exempt one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves. This controversial exemption was the result of pressure from planter families. The South had gone to war, among other reasons, to defend slavery. But if all white men on plantations went into the army, discipline would erode, slaves would continue to run off to the swamps or to the Yankees, and slavery itself would crumble away.

By granting a special privilege to a class constituting only 5 percent of the white population, the “Twenty-Negro Law” became as unpopular in the South as commutation in the North.

The Confederate government’s taxes and impressments to sustain the army also caused it to appear as an oppressor. By the spring of 1863, runaway inflation finally compelled Richmond’s lawmakers to seek alternatives to the printing press to finance the war. In April they followed the Union example and enacted a comprehensive tax law that included a progressive income tax, an 8 percent levy on certain goods held for sale, excise and license duties, and a 10 percent profits tax on wholesalers

More pointedly, why was the chief property of the rich—slaves—not taxed? The answer: a tax on slaves was considered a direct tax, constitutionally permissible only after an apportionment on the basis of population. No census could be taken in wartime, hence no direct tax was possible.

But these measures came too late to avert the most shocking revelation of internal stress—the bread riots in the spring of 1863. In a dozen or more cities and hamlets from Richmond to Mobile, desperate women raided shops or supply depots for food. Many of the riots followed a similar pattern. Groups of women, many of them wives of soldiers and some armed with knives or revolvers, marched in a body to shops owned by “speculators” and asked the price of bacon or flour.

By far the largest and most momentous riot occurred in Richmond. Special circumstances made the Confederate capital particularly volatile. Its population had more than doubled since 1861. Military operations had desolated many food-producing areas of Virginia. Lee’s army on the Rappahannock, reduced to half-rations by March 1863, competed with the civilian population for dwindling stocks of the previous year’s drought-curtailed crops. In late March a freak nine-inch snowfall made roads impassable for several days. Prices for the few goods left on merchants’ shelves skyrocketed to famine levels.

But serious problems persisted, and the South was never able to solve them. Priorities for military traffic on deteriorating railroads caused food to rot at sidings while thousands went hungry a hundred miles away. Union advances further constricted the food-producing areas of the Confederacy. In July 1863 the commissary general warned of a subsistence crisis for southern armies.

Refugees exacerbated the South’s food crisis. Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes as the Yankee juggernaut bore down on them. Thousands of others were exiled by Confederate officers who turned their cities into a battle zone (Corinth and Fredericksburg, for example) or by commanders of Union occupation forces who insisted that they take the oath of allegiance or leave.

As these fugitives packed the roads and crowded in with friends and relatives or endured cheerless boardinghouses in towns and cities, they taxed the South’s ever-decreasing resources and added to the uncounted deaths of white and black civilians from disease and malnutrition—deaths that must be included in any reckoning of the war’s human cost.53

The South needed salt, shoes, clothing, bacon, flour, medicine, gunpowder, lead, and other necessities of war from the outside world. Since the blockade restricted the flow of these supplies from abroad, canny Confederates sought to flank the blockade by direct trade with the North. Enterprising Yankees were willing to exchange such goods for cotton.

Believing that “we cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time,” Sherman and Grant did their best to stop the illicit cotton trade through Memphis and western Tennessee in 1862.60 The two generals issued a stream of regulations to tighten the granting of permits for legal trade, banished southerners who refused to take the oath and imprisoned some who violated it, required that all payments for cotton be made in U.S. greenbacks (instead of gold that could be converted into guns at Nassau), and tried to prevent the access of unscrupulous northern traders to Memphis.

Several highly visible traders who defied Grant’s orders were Jews. Grant and other Union generals had frequently complained about Jewish “speculators whose love of gain is greater than their love of country.”

On the other hand, Butler’s martial law gave New Orleans the most efficient and healthy administration it had ever had. Rigorous enforcement of sanitary and quarantine measures cleaned the normally filthy streets and helped ward off the annual scourge of yellow fever.

After three months of martial law even the pro-Confederate Picayune had to confess that the city had never been “so free from burglars and cutthroats.”

The Union blockade by sea and the Confederate blockade of river commerce with the North had strangled the city’s economy. Most workers were unemployed when Farragut captured the city. Butler distributed Union rations to the poor and inaugurated an extensive public works program financed in part by high taxes on the rich and confiscation of the property of some wealthy rebels who refused to take the oath of allegiance.

Combining speed, boldness, and cunning, Grierson’s troopers swept through the entire state of Mississippi during the last two weeks of April. They won several skirmishes, killed or wounded a hundred rebels, and captured five hundred at a cost of two dozen casualties. They tore up fifty miles of three different railroads supplying Pemberton’s army, burned scores of freight cars and depots, and finally rode exhausted into Union lines at Baton Rouge after sixteen days and six hundred miles of marauding.

Sherman’s corps set to work at a task in which they soon became experts—wrecking railroad facilities and burning foundries, arsenals, factories, and machine shops in the capital along with a fair number of homes that got in the way of the flames, doing their work so thoroughly that Jackson became known to its conquerors as Chimneyville.

Thus had Grant wrought in a seventeen-day campaign during which his army marched 180 miles, fought and won five engagements against separate enemy forces which if combined would have been almost as large as his own, inflicted 7,200 casualties at the cost of 4,300, and cooped up an apparently demoralized enemy in the Vicksburg defenses.

But as the weeks passed and Johnston did not come, spirits sagged. Soldiers were subsisting on quarter rations. By the end of June nearly half of them were on the sicklist, many with scurvy. Skinned rats appeared beside mule meat in the markets. Dogs and cats disappeared mysteriously. The tensions of living under siege drove people to the edge of madness:

The Fourth of July 1863 was the most memorable Independence Day in American history since that first one four score and seven years earlier. Far away in Pennsylvania the high tide of the Confederacy receded from Gettysburg. Here in Mississippi, white flags sprouted above rebel trenches, the emaciated troops marched out and stacked arms, and a Union division moved into Vicksburg to raise the stars and stripes over the courthouse.

The capture of Vicksburg was the most important northern strategic victory of the war, perhaps meriting Grant’s later assertion that “the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”

The Union ultimately won the war mainly by victories in the West, but the Confederacy more than once came close to winning it in the East. During the spring and summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee scored his greatest success in this effort—followed by his greatest failure.

Despite his nickname of Fighting Joe, Hooker seems to have expected—and hoped—that Lee would “ingloriously fly” rather than “give us battle.” When Lee instead showed fight, Hooker mysteriously lost his nerve. Perhaps his resolve three months earlier to go on the wagon had been a mistake, for he seemed at this moment to need some liquid courage.

Sickles was a character of some notoriety, the only political general among Hooker’s corps commanders, a prewar Tammany Democrat with a reputation for philandering. His wife, perhaps in revenge, had taken a lover whom Sickles shot dead on a Washington street in 1859. He was acquitted of murder after the first successful plea of temporary insanity in the history of American jurisprudence.

Without Longstreet and with little more than half as many men as an enemy that had initially outmaneuvered him, Lee had grasped the initiative, gone over to the attack, and had repeatedly divided and maneuvered his forces in such a way as to give them superiority or equality of numbers at the point of attack.

The triumph at Chancellorsville, however, came at great cost. The Confederates suffered 13,000 casualties, 22 percent of their force (the Union figures were 17,000 and 15 percent). The most grievous loss was Jackson, who had

And the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.

Having used the month after Chancellorsville to rest and refit, the Army of Northern Virginia was much better prepared for this invasion than it had been for the previous one in September 1862.

Lee’s invasion became a gigantic raid for supplies that stripped clean a large area of south-central Pennsylvania.

Southern soldiers also seized scores of black people in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.

By now, though, their training in the school of hard knocks under fumbling leaders had toughened the soldiers to a flinty self-reliance that left many of them indifferent to the identity of their commander.

The most crucial Union casualty on this first morning of July was John Reynolds—considered by many the best general in the army—drilled through the head by a sharpshooter.

Neither commanding general had yet reached the field; neither had intended to fight there; but independently of their intentions a battle destined to become the largest and most important of the war had already started.

So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson.

Pointing to Cemetery Hill, he said to Longstreet: “The enemy is there, and I am going to attack him there.” Longstreet replied: “If he is there, it will be because he is anxious that we should attack him; a good reason, in my judgment, for not doing so.” But Lee had made up his mind, and Longstreet turned away sadly with a conviction of impending disaster.

They held him responsible for losing the battle—and by implication the war. Some of this criticism was self-serving, intended to shield Lee and other Virginians (mainly Stuart and Ewell) from blame. But Longstreet did seem to move slowly at Gettysburg. Although Lee wanted him to attack as early in the day as possible, he did not get his troops into position until 4:00 p.m. There were extenuating reasons for this delay: his two divisions had made night marches to reach the vicinity of Gettysburg and were then compelled to countermarch by a circuitous route to reach the attack position because Lee’s guide led them initially on a road in sight of an enemy signal post on Little Round Top, a high hill at the south end of the Union line. Yet Longstreet may have been piqued by Lee’s rejection of his flanking suggestion, and he did not believe in the attack he was ordered to make. He therefore may not have put as much energy and speed into its preparation as the situation required.

The Confederate assaults on July 2 were uncoordinated and disjointed. The usual skill of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia was lacking this day. On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness. They moved troops to the right spots and counterattacked at the right times. As a result, when night fell the Union line remained firm except for the loss of Sickles’s salient. Each side had suffered 9,000 or more casualties, bringing the two-day totals for both armies to nearly 35,000. It was the heaviest single-battle toll in the war thus far, but the fighting was not over.

In any case, Lee’s judgment was not at its best. He had come to Pennsylvania in quest of a decisive victory and he was determined not to leave without it.

In this mood Longstreet ordered a concentration of Confederate artillery—some 150 guns—for the largest southern bombardment of the war, to soften up the enemy at the point of attack.

Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.