Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

On May 11, Stuart made a stand at Yellow Tavern, only six miles north of Richmond. Outnumbering the rebels by two to one and outgunning them with rapid-fire carbines, the blue troopers rolled over the once-invincible southern cavalry and dispersed them in two directions. A grim bonus of this Union victory was the mortal wounding of Stuart—a blow to Confederate leadership next only to the death of Jackson a year and a day earlier.

Hand-to-hand fighting like this usually ended quickly when one side broke and ran; but today neither line broke and few men ran. It became an atavistic territorial battle.

These two armies had previously fought several big set-piece battles followed by the retreat of one or the other behind the nearest river, after which both sides rested and recuperated before going at it again. Since the beginning of this campaign, however, the armies had never been out of contact with each other.

Grant’s purpose was not a war of attrition—though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to maneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by skillfully matching Grant’s moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn.

And indeed, despite its horrendous losses the Army of the Potomac had inflicted a similar percentage of casualties (at least 35,000) on Lee’s smaller army, had driven them south eighty miles, cut part of Lee’s communications with the rest of the South, pinned him down in defense of Richmond and Petersburg, and smothered the famed mobility of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Atlanta was indeed a great prize. Its population had doubled to 20,000 during the war as foundries, factories, munitions plants, and supply depots sprang up at this strategic railroad hub. The fall of Atlanta, said Jefferson Davis, would “open the way for the Federal Army to the Gulf on the one hand, and to Charleston on the other, and close up those rich granaries from which Lee’s armies are supplied. It would give them control of our network of rail-ways and thus paralyze our efforts.”1 Because the South invested so much effort in defending the city, Atlanta also became a symbol of resistance and nationality second only to Richmond.

The commander of the division designated to lead the assault (chosen by drawing straws!), James H. Ledlie, had a mediocre record and an alcohol problem. During the assault he stayed behind in the trenches drinking rum cadged from the surgeon. With no preparation and without leadership, his men attacked in disordered fashion.

The impact of this event cannot be exaggerated. Cannons boomed 100-gun salutes in northern cities. Newspapers that had bedeviled Sherman for years now praised him as the greatest general since Napoleon. In retrospect the victory at Mobile Bay suddenly took on new importance as the first blow of a lethal one-two punch. “Sherman and Farragut,” exulted Secretary of State Seward, “have knocked the bottom out of the Chicago platform.”

But McClellan’s “Eastern friends"—War Democrats including the banker August Belmont, chairman of the Democratic National Committee—convinced him that if once stopped, the war could not be started again; an armistice without conditions would mean surrender of the Union. After Atlanta such a proposal would stultify his candidacy. So McClellan’s letter released on September 8 repudiated the “four years of failure” plank.

Peace Democrats fumed that McClellan had betrayed them. They held hurried meetings to consider nominating another candidate. But nobody seemed to want this dubious honor, and the revolt subsided.

The president was now a victorious leader instead of a discredited loser. Only John C. Frémont’s splinter candidacy stood in the way of a united party. Behind the scenes, radicals negotiated Frémont’s withdrawal on September 22 in return for Montgomery Blair’s resignation from the cabinet.

Having followed Early almost to the death, Sheridan proceeded to carry out the second part of Grant’s instructions: to turn “the Shenandoah Valley [into] a barren waste . . . so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.”9 Besides serving as an avenue for invasion of the North, the Valley had supplied much of the food for Confederate armies in Virginia. Destroying its crops would put an end to both functions. Sheridan was the man for this job.

Within a few hours Sheridan had converted the battle of Cedar Creek from a humiliating defeat into one of the more decisive Union victories of the war.

Whatever his deficiencies as a battlefield commander, Butler demonstrated anew—as he had done in Baltimore and New Orleans—his ability to cow potential civilian rioters. “This election has been quiet beyond precedent,” wrote a surprised resident of New York.

The guerrilla fighting in Missouri produced a form of terrorism that exceeded anything else in the war. Jayhawking Kansans and bushwhacking Missourians took no prisoners, killed in cold blood, plundered and pillaged and burned (but almost never raped) without stint. Jayhawkers initiated a scorched-earth policy against rebel sympathizers three years before Sheridan practiced it in the Shenandoah Valley. Guerrilla chieftains, especially the infamous William Clarke Quantrill, initiated the slaughter of unarmed soldiers as well as civilians, whites as well as blacks, long before Confederate troops began murdering captured black soldiers elsewhere. Guerrilla bands in Missouri provided a training ground for outlaw gangs that emerged after the war—most notably the James and Younger brothers.

On the other side, guerrilla outlaws such as the James brothers have been celebrated in myth, by Hollywood films, and by some scholars as Robin-Hood types or “primitive rebels” who defended small farmers by attacking the agencies of Yankee capitalism—the Union army during the war, banks and railroads afterwards. But in reality, as a recent study has shown, the guerrillas tended to be the sons of farmers and planters of southern heritage who were three times more likely to own slaves and possessed twice as much wealth as the average Missourian. To the extent that ideology motivated their depredations, they fought for slavery and Confederate independence.

Without any ties to the South or to slavery, he chose the Confederacy apparently because in Missouri this allowed him to attack all symbols of authority. He attracted to his gang some of the most psychopathic killers in American history. In kaleidoscopic fashion, groups of these men would split off to form their own bands and then come together again for larger raids.

After crossing the Kansas line they kidnapped ten farmers to guide them toward Lawrence and murdered each one after his usefulness was over. Approaching the town at dawn on August 21, Quantrill ordered his followers: “Kill every male and burn every house.” They almost did. The first to die was a United Brethren clergyman, shot through the head while he sat milking his cow. During the next three hours Quantrill’s band murdered another 182 men and boys and burned 185 buildings in Lawrence.

Having gained votes in 1862 by tarring Republicans with the brush of racial equality, Democrats expected to do the same in 1864. The vulgarity of their tactics almost surpasses belief.

the New York World, McClellan’s most powerful newspaper, coined a new word with their anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races. Pretending to be Republicans, the authors recommended “miscegenation” as a solution of the race problem. This fusion, the pamphlet declared, would particularly “be of infinite service to the Irish.” If the Republicans were re-elected they would prosecute the war to “its final fruit, to the blending of the white and the black.”

Democrats nevertheless exploited the miscegenation issue ad nauseam. The Emancipation Proclamation became the Miscegenation Proclamation. A pamphlet entitled Miscegenation Indorsed by the Republican Party circulated far and wide. Numerous cartoons showed thick-lipped, grinning, coarse black men kissing apple-cheeked girls “with snow-white bosoms” or dancing with them at the “Miscegenation Ball” to follow Lincoln’s re-election.

Campaign pamphlets and newspapers reported that “a great many squint-eyed yellow babies” had been born in New Orleans since Benjamin Butler was there; that New England schoolmarms teaching freedpeople on the South Carolina sea islands had produced numerous mulatto children; and that five thousand mulatto babies had been born in Washington since 1861.

"Abraham Africanus the First” was of course the chief target of the tar brush. “Passing the question as to his taint of negro blood,” commented a Catholic weekly, “Abe Lincoln . . . is brutal in all his habits. . . . He is obscene. . . . He is an animal. . . . Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President’s levees.”29 Lincoln was “Abe the Widowmaker” who had sent half a million white men to their graves in this insane war to free the slaves because he “loves his country less, and the negro more.”

For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans. If anything, racism may have boomeranged against the Democrats this time, for after Sherman’s and Sheridan’s victories many northern voters began to congratulate themselves on the selflessness of their sacrifices in this glorious war for Union and freedom.

The South’s actual treatment of black prisoners is hard to ascertain. Even the number of Negro captives is unknown, for in refusing to acknowledge them as legitimate prisoners the Confederates kept few records. Many black captives never made it to prison camp.

Black prisoners who survived the initial rage of their captors sometimes found themselves returned as slaves to their old masters or, occasionally, sold to a new one. While awaiting this fate they were often placed at hard labor on Confederate fortifications.

During some weeks in the summer of 1864 more than a hundred prisoners died every day in Andersonville. Altogether 13,000 of the 45,000 men imprisoned there died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition.47

tried and executed its commandant, Henry Wirz, for war crimes—the only such trial to result from the Civil War. Whether Wirz was actually guilty of anything worse than bad temper and inefficiency remains controversial today.

Few if any historians would now contend that the Confederacy deliberately mistreated prisoners. Rather, they would concur with contemporary opinions—held by some northerners as well as southerners—that a deficiency of resources and the deterioration of the southern economy were mainly responsible for the sufferings of Union prisoners. The South could not feed its own soldiers and civilians; how could it feed enemy prisoners?

Although the South had plenty of cotton, it did not have the industrial capacity to turn enough of that cotton into tent canvas. The South had plenty of wood to build barracks, but there was a shortage of nails at Andersonville and no one thought to order them far enough in advance. Not enough sawmills existed in that part of Georgia to make boards, and the sawmills that did exist were working day and night for railroads whose ties and rolling stock the Yankees kept burning.

The state of Georgia has placed two historical markers near Andersonville declaring that wartime shortages caused the suffering there, which thus cannot be blamed on anybody, and that “deaths among the prison guards were as high as among the prisoners.” In 1909 the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to Henry Wirz (which still stands in the village of Andersonville) proclaiming that this “hero-martyr” was “judicially murdered” by Yankees whose general in chief prevented the exchange of prisoners.

As for the comparison of Andersonville with Johnson’s Island, the mortality of southern prisoners at the latter was 2 percent—and at Andersonville, 29 percent. This percentage of deaths among inmates at Andersonville was in fact five or six times higher than among guards.

The best estimate based on existing records finds that 30,218 (15.5 percent) of the 194,743 northern inmates of southern prisons died there, compared with 25,976 (12 percent) of 214,865 southerners who died in northern prisons.

Twelve of the states allowing absentee voting provided for the separate tabulation of soldier ballots. Lincoln received 119,754 of them to McClellan’s 34,291, a majority of 78 percent for the president compared with 53 percent of the civilian vote in those states.

This glorious prospect may have pumped new life into flagging southern spirits. But when Grant read of Davis’s speeches he snorted: “Who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?”

And the psychological effect of such a campaign might be greater even than its material impact. “If we can march a well-appointed army right through [Jefferson Davis’s] territory, it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist. . . . I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!"4 Sherman persuaded Grant, who in turn persuaded a still skeptical Lincoln.

Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist

No enemy stood between Sherman’s army and Savannah 285 miles away except several thousand Georgia militia and 3,500 rebel cavalry commanded by Joseph Wheeler.

Thomas had indeed weighed in with an achievement equalling Sherman’s—the virtual destruction of Hood’s Army of Tennessee. Hood’s activities after Sherman left Atlanta seemed to have been scripted in never-never land. Although he faced Union forces under Thomas totaling more than 60,000 men with only 40,000 of his own—one-fourth of them wearing shoes so rotten that by December they would march barefoot—Hood hoped to drive through Tennessee into Kentucky, where he expected to pick up 20,000 recruits and smash Thomas.

The news of Hood’s “irretrievable disaster” and of Savannah’s surrender to Sherman spread dejection through the South. This was “one of the gloomiest [days] in our struggle,” wrote Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas on December 19. “The darkest and most dismal day . . . a crisis such as not been experienced before,”

With 671 warships the navy was the largest in the world. With a million men in uniform the army was larger and better equipped than ever. And despite the deaths of over 300,000 soldiers, immigration and natural increase had more than made up the loss.

Iron production in the Union states was 29 percent higher in 1864 than for the whole country in the previous record year of 1856; coal production in the North during the four war years was 21 percent greater than in the highest four peacetime years for both North and South. The North built more merchant ship tonnage during the war than the whole country had built in any comparable peacetime period despite the crippling of the transatlantic merchant marine by southern commerce raiders and the competing demands of the navy on shipbuilding capacity.

Despite a drastic decline of 72 percent in the North’s leading industry, cotton textiles, the overall manufacturing index stood 13 percent higher in 1864 for the Union states alone than for the entire country in 1860.

North had to import hundreds of thousands of rifles in the first year or two of the war; by 1864 the firearms industry was turning out more than enough rifles and artillery for the large Union army.

Despite the food needs of the army and the civilian population, the United States actually doubled its exports of wheat, corn, pork, and beef during the war

The North had enough manpower and energy left over from the war effort to continue the process of westward expansion. As Lincoln noted in his 1864 message, a hundred miles of the eastern end of the transcontinental railroad had been surveyed and twenty miles of tracks already laid on the other end in California.

Western growth had its dark side, of course: many of the new settlers were draft dodgers from states east of the Mississippi; the politics of federal aid to railroad construction were none too scrupulous; and worst of all, the extinguishment of Indian titles to the land proceeded ruthlessly, accompanied by bloody fighting in Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere during the war.

But Yankee invasions and raids sooner or later destroyed most of this new industry, along with anything else of economic value within reach, so that by war’s end much of the South was an economic desert. The war not only killed one-quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age. It also killed two-fifths of southern livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery, ruined thousands of miles of railroad, left scores of thousands of farms and plantations in weeds and disrepair, and destroyed the principal labor system on which southern productivity had been based.

The wreckage of the southern economy caused the 1860s to become the decade of least economic growth in American history before the 1930s. It also produced a wrenching redistribution of wealth and income between North and South. As measured by the census, southern agricultural and manufacturing capital declined by 46 percent between 1860 and 1870, while northern capital increased by 50 percent.21 In 1860 the southern states had contained 30 percent of the national wealth; in 1870, only 12 percent. Per capita commodity output (including agriculture) was almost equal in North and South in 1860; by 1870 the North’s per capita output was 56 percent greater.

Wilmington itself soon fell, and most of coastal North Carolina was in Yankee hands. Desertions from Lee’s army, especially of North Carolina troops, rose to disastrous levels.