Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

In half an hour it was all over. Of the 14,000 Confederates who had gone forward, scarcely half returned. Pickett’s own division lost two-thirds of its men; his three brigadiers and all thirteen colonels were killed or wounded.

Hancock, despite being wounded in the repulse of Pickett’s assault, urged Meade to launch the 20,000 fresh reserves of the 5th and 6th Corps in pursuit of Lee’s broken brigades. But a heavy load of responsibility weighed on Meade’s shoulders. He had been in command only six days. For three of them his army had been fighting for the nation’s life, as he saw the matter, and had narrowly saved it. Meade could not yet know how badly the enemy was hurt, or that their artillery was low on ammunition. He did know that Stuart was loose in his rear,

Meade’s lack of aggressiveness was caused by his respect for the enemy. He could scarcely believe that he had beaten the victors of Chancellorsville.

In London the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg gave the coup de grace to Confederate hopes for recognition. “The disasters of the rebels are unredeemed by even any hope of success,” crowed Henry Adams. “It is now conceded that all idea of intervention is at an end.”52

Having given Lee a two-day head start from Gettysburg, Meade did not get his reinforced army into line facing the Confederates at Williamsport until July 12. In Washington an “anxious and impatient” Lincoln awaited word of Lee’s destruction. As the days passed and no word arrived, the president grew angry.

A pretended deserter (a favorite southern ruse) had entered Union lines and reported Lee’s army in fine fettle, eager for another fight. This reinforced Meade’s wariness. He allowed a majority of his corps commanders to talk him out of attacking on the 13th.

In either case, the destruction of Lee’s veteran army was scarcely a sure thing. When word of Lincoln’s dissatisfaction reached Meade, the testy general offered his resignation. But Lincoln could hardly afford to sack the victor of Gettysburg, so he refused to accept it.

In little more than a week of marching and maneuvering, the Army of the Cumberland had driven its adversary eighty miles at the cost of only 570 casualties. Rosecrans was annoyed by Washington’s apparent lack of appreciation.

Chattanooga had great strategic value, for the only railroads linking the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy converged there in the gap carved through the Cumberlands by the Tennessee River. Having already cut the Confederacy in two by the capture of Vicksburg, Union forces could slice up the eastern portion by penetrating into Georgia via Chattanooga.

Orders flew around the country; dozens of trains were assembled; and forty hours after the decision, the first troops rolled out of Culpeper for a 1,233-mile trip through Union-held territory over the Appalachians and across the unbridged Ohio River twice. Eleven days later more than 20,000 men had arrived at the railhead near Chattanooga with their artillery, horses, and equipment. It was an extraordinary feat of logistics—the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.

Within a week of Grant’s arrival on October 23, Union forces had broken the rebel stranglehold on the road and river west of Chattanooga and opened a new supply route dubbed the “cracker line” by hungry bluecoats. Although Rosecrans’s staff had planned the operation that accomplished this, it was Grant who ordered it done.

By mid-November, Sherman had arrived with 17,000 troops from the Army of the Tennessee to supplement the 20,000 men Hooker had brought from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce the 35,000 infantry of Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. Though Bragg still held Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, his immediate future began to look cloudy.

Some Confederate regiments at the base of Missionary Ridge had orders to fall back after firing two volleys; others had received no such orders. When the latter saw their fellows apparently breaking to the rear, they were infected by panic and began running. The Union attackers followed the retreating rebels so closely that Confederates in the next line had to hold their fire to avoid hitting their own men.

Perhaps the ultimate explanation, however, was the Army of Tennessee’s dispirited morale which had spread downward from backbiting generals to the ranks. Bragg conceded as much in a private letter to Jefferson Davis tendering his resignation. “The disaster admits of no palliation,” he wrote. “I fear we both erred in the conclusion for me to retain command here after the clamor raised against me.”17 As the army went into winter quarters, Davis grasped the nettle and grudgingly appointed Johnston to the command. Meanwhile the repulse on November 29 of Longstreet’s attack against Knoxville deepened Confederate woes.

Louis Napoleon continued to nurture southern hopes for recognition. He was still trying to restore a French empire in the new world. In June 1863 a French army of 35,000 men captured Mexico City and overthrew the republican government of Benito Juarez.

When Napoleon made clear his intent to set up the Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, Confederate envoys made contact with Maximilian and offered to recognize him if he would help obtain French recognition of the South. Maximilian was willing, but by January 1864 Napoleon seemed to have lost interest in the scheme. A

In early 1864 he scaled down the French commitment to Maximilian and spurned Confederate attempts to use Mexico as bait for French recognition. Napoleon’s foreign ministry also shut down Confederate efforts to build a navy in France. The six ships contracted for by the South were sold instead to Peru, Prussia, and Denmark.

Through legal legerdemain at which he had become expert, he eventually obtained transfer of one ironclad from Denmark to the Confederacy. Christened C.S.S. Stonewall, it crossed the Atlantic and arrived one month after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. The Stonewall ultimately found its way into the Japanese navy.20

But anti-abolitionism and racism seemed to have lost potency as Democratic shibboleths. Two almost simultaneous events in July 1863 were largely responsible for this phenomenon. The first was the New York draft riot, which shocked many northerners into a backlash against the consequences of virulent racism. The second was a minor battle in the campaign against Charleston.

The 54th took the largest casualties, losing nearly half of its men including Colonel Shaw with a bullet through his heart. Black soldiers gained Wagner’s parapet and held it for an hour in the flame-stabbed darkness before falling back. The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers.

When a Confederate officer reportedly replied to a request for the return of Shaw’s body with the words “we have buried him with his niggers,” Shaw’s father quelled a northern effort to recover his son’s body with these words: “We hold that a soldier’s most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen.”

Unhappily for Jefferson Davis, elections for the Confederate Congress took place in the fall of 1863 when southern morale was at low ebb. The Davis administration suffered a more severe rebuke from voters than the Lincoln administration had sustained the previous year in a similar situation.

Formal political parties did not exist in the Confederacy. This state of affairs arose from two main causes: the erosion of the two-party system in the 1850s and the perceived need for a united front during the emergencies of secession and war.

Southerners considered this circumstance a source of strength. The president pro tem of the first Congress congratulated its members that “the spirit of party has never shown itself for an instant in your deliberations.”2 But in fact, as historians now recognize, the absence of parties was actually a source of weakness. In the North the two-party system disciplined and channeled political activity. The Republican party became the means for mobilizing war resources, raising taxes, creating a new financial system, initiating emancipation, and enacting conscription. Democrats opposed most of these measures; the existence of this well-defined opposition caused Republicans to close ranks when the chips were down. Because measures were supported or opposed by parties, voters could identify those responsible for them and register their approval or disapproval at the polls by voting a party ticket. Both parties, of course, used their well-oiled machinery to rally voters to their side. In the Confederacy, by contrast, the Davis administration had no such means to mobilize support. No parties meant no institutionalized discipline over congressmen or governors. Davis could not invoke party loyalty and patronage in behalf of his policies, as Lincoln could. Opposition to the Davis administration became personal or factional and therefore difficult to deal with.

In the South the obstructionist activities of several governors hindered the centralized war effort because the centrifugal tendencies of state’s rights were not restrained by the centripetal force of party. The Confederate Constitution limited the president to a single six-year term, so Davis had no reason to create a party organization for re-election.

Support for the Davis government was strongest among congressmen from areas under Union occupation: Kentucky, Missouri (both considered part of the Confederacy and represented in its Congress), Tennessee, and substantial portions of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia. Regular elections were impossible in these areas, of course, so the incumbents merely continued themselves in office or were “elected” by a handful of refugees from their districts.

By the end of 1863 a consensus existed among Republicans that the pieces of the old Union could not be cobbled together. One piece lost but not lamented was slavery; another that must go was the prominent role played in southern politics by the old state’s-rights secessionists. Beyond this, however, a spectrum of opinions could be found in the Republican party concerning both the process and substance of reconstruction.

Lincoln never deviated from the theory that secession was illegal and southern states therefore remained in the Union. Rebels had temporarily taken over their governments; the task of reconstruction was to return “loyal” officials to power.

But at another level, no one could deny that the southern states had gone out of the Union and had formed a new government with all the attributes of a nation. A few radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens boldly insisted that they had therefore ceased to exist as legal states.

Despite the exclusion of top Confederate leaders from Lincoln’s blanket offer of amnesty, his policy would preserve much of the South’s old ruling class in power. To most abolitionists and radical Republicans this was unacceptable. They insisted that simply to abolish slavery without also destroying the economic and political structure of the old order would merely convert black people from slaves to landless serfs and leave the political power of the planter class untouched.

Four related issues emerged in this conflict: the fate of slavery; the political role of blacks in reconstruction; the definition of loyalty; and the status of free black labor in the new order.

The best solution for this problem was a national constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. All Republicans including Lincoln united in favor of this in 1864. But the problem persisted. The Senate quickly mustered the necessary two-thirds majority for a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but Democratic gains in the 1862 congressional elections prevented similar success in the House, where a 93–65 vote for the Amendment on June 15 fell thirteen votes short of success.

Abolitionists and radicals won converts among congressional Republicans with their argument that it was not only immoral but also fatuous to grant the ballot to former rebels and withhold it from loyal blacks.

The outstanding example of a self-governing black colony occurred at Davis Bend, Mississippi, where former slaves of the Confederate president and his brother leased their plantations (from the Union army, which had seized them) and made good crops. The

Part of the freedmen’s wages was often withheld until the end of the season to ensure that they stayed on the job, and most of the rest was deducted for food and shelter. Many contrabands, understandably, could see little difference between this system of “free” labor and the bondage they had endured all their lives.

Lincoln decided to veto the bill. Since Congress had passed it at the end of the session, he needed only to withhold his signature to prevent it from becoming law (the so-called pocket veto). This he did, but he also issued a statement explaining why he had done so. Lincoln denied the right of Congress to abolish slavery by statute. To assert such a right would “make the fatal admission” that these states were out of the Union and that secession was therefore legitimate. The pending Thirteenth Amendment, said the president, was the only constitutional way to abolish slavery.

Lincoln’s renomination and re-election were by no means assured, despite folk wisdom about the danger of swapping horses in midstream. No incumbent president had been renominated since 1840, and none had been re-elected since 1832.

The Republican party contained several men who in 1860 had considered themselves better qualified for the presidency than the man who won it. In 1864 at least one of them had not changed his opinion: Salmon P. Chase.

Chase had no doubts about his qualifications for the job; as his friend Benjamin Wade said of him, “Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.”45 Chase used Treasury Department patronage to build a political machine for his nomination in 1864. The emergence of dissatisfaction with Lincoln’s reconstruction policy strengthened his cause.

Although most Republicans climbed aboard the Lincoln bandwagon, some of them did so with reluctance. As the reconstruction issue drove its wedge deeper into party unity, several radicals continued to hope that the bandwagon could be stopped. Horace Greeley futilely urged postponement of the national convention from June until September in a Micawber-like hope that something might turn up.

Frémont like McClellan had been “awaiting orders” since 1862. Indeed, these two disgruntled generals represented the foremost political dangers to Lincoln. Of the two, McClellan posed the greater threat because he seemed likely to become the Democratic nominee later in the summer. In the meantime Frémont attracted a coalition of abolitionists and radical German-Americans into a third party.

But the sparsely attended convention that met in Cleveland on May 31 to nominate Frémont contained not a single influential Republican. The most prominent supporter of this nomination was Wendell Phillips, whose letter to the convention proclaimed that Lincoln’s reconstruction policy “makes the freedom of the negro a sham, and perpetuates slavery under a softer name.”

But there were flaws in the Union sword and hidden strengths in the Confederate shield. Northern success paradoxically created military weakness. Union armies had to detach many divisions as occupation forces to police 100,000 square miles of conquered territory. Other divisions had similar responsibilities in the border slave states. Invading armies also had to drop off large numbers of troops to guard their supply lines against cavalry and guerrilla raids. In Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta in 1864 the number of men protecting his rail communications 450 miles back to Louisville nearly equaled the number of front-line soldiers he could bring against the enemy.

Most of the Confederate soldiers were veterans. Many of the veterans in the Union army were due to go home in 1864 when their three-year enlistments were up. If this happened, the South might well seize victory from the jaws of defeat.

If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence.

But the leg-holders bungled their jobs. The first to fail was Banks. The administration shared responsibility for this outcome, for it diverted Banks from the attack on Mobile to a drive up the Red River in Louisiana to seize cotton and expand the area of Union political control in the state.

If Bulter had moved quickly to cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond he might have smashed into the capital against little opposition. Lee could have done nothing to prevent this, for he was otherwise engaged with the Army of the Potomac sixty miles to the north. But the squint-eyed Union commander fumbled his chance. Instead of striking fast with overwhelming force, he advanced cautiously with detached units, which managed to tear up only a few miles of track while fending off rebel skirmishers.

With Longstreet’s wounding the steam went out of this southern assault.

Grant soon showed that he meant what he said. Both flanks had been badly bruised, and his 17,500 casualties in two days exceeded the Confederate total by at least 7,000. Under such circumstances previous Union commanders in Virginia had withdrawn behind the nearest river. Men in the ranks expected the same thing to happen again. But Grant had told Lincoln that “whatever happens, there will be no turning back.”

Sheridan’s cavalry had thus far contributed little to the campaign. Their bandy-legged leader was eager to take on Jeb Stuart’s fabled troopers. Grant obliged Sheridan by sending him on a raid to cut Lee’s communications in the rear while Grant tried to pry him out of his defenses in front.