Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Although Lincoln justified the prolonged detention of these men on grounds of “tangible and unmistakable evidence” of their “substantial and unmistakable complicity with those in armed rebellion,” the government never revealed the evidence or brought any of the prisoners to trial. Some of them, probably including Mayor Brown, were guilty of little more than southern sympathies or lukewarm unionism. They were victims of the obsessive quest for security that arises in time of war, especially civil war.

Lyon became the North’s first war hero. With little outside help he had organized, equipped, and trained an army, won the first significant Union victories of the war, and gained control of most of Missouri. But he had stirred up a hornets’ nest. Although guerrilla bands would have infested Missouri in any case, the polarization of the state by Lyon’s and Blair’s actions helped turn large areas into a no-man’s land of hit-and-run raids, arson, ambush, and murder.

More than any other state, Missouri suffered the horrors of internecine warfare and the resulting hatreds which persisted for decades after Appomattox.

Kentucky was the birthplace of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Heir to the nationalism of Henry Clay, Kentucky was also drawn to the South by ties of kinship and culture. Three slave states and three free states touched its borders. Precisely because Kentucky was so evenly divided in sentiment and geography, its people were loath to choose sides.

Lincoln’s forbearance toward Kentucky paid off. Unionists became more outspoken, and fence-sitters jumped down onto the Union side. The legacy of Henry Clay began to assert itself. Unionist “home guard” regiments sprang up to counter the pro-southern “state guard” militia organized by Governor Magoffin.

War had finally come to Kentucky. And here more than anywhere else it was literally a brothers’ war. Four grandsons of Henry Clay fought for the Confederacy and three others for the Union.

The Kentucky-born wife of the president of the United States had four brothers and three brothers-in-law fighting for the South—one of them a captain killed at Baton Rouge and another a general killed at Chickamauga.

The southern people expected great things of Lee. But this time he disappointed them. His complicated plan for a convergence of five separate columns against two Union positions was frustrated by the difficult terrain, the inexperience of his officers, the fatigue and sickness of his men—and by the weather.

Lee returned to Richmond at the end of October. He soon went to South Carolina to shore up Confederate coastal defenses, leaving behind a damaged reputation. In August, Richmond newspapers had predicted that he would drive the Yankees back to Ohio; in October they mocked him as “Granny Lee” and “Evacuating Lee.” The acerbic Richmond Examiner pronounced Lee “outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgeneraled.”

Johnson was the only U.S. senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union.

Without northern help, east Tennessee unionists suffered grievously for their loyalty. Confederate troops cracked down after the bridge burnings in November. They declared martial law, executed five bridge-burners, arrested Brownlow and turned his printing office into an arms factory, and imprisoned hundreds of unionists—a much more thorough suppression of dissent than northern forces had carried out in Maryland.

Even though that army did not occupy east Tennessee until September 1863, more than halfway through the war, 30,000 white Tennesseeans fought for the North—more than from any other Confederate state.

One can begin to measure that impact by noting the possible consequences of what did not happen. If all eight states (or all but Delaware) had seceded, the South might well have won its independence. If all eight had remained in the Union, the Confederacy surely could not have survived as long as it did. As it was, the balance of military manpower from these states favored the South.

War fever during the months after Sumter overrode sober reflections on the purpose of the fighting. Most people on both sides took for granted the purpose and justice of their cause. Yankees believed that they battled for flag and country.

The Chicago Journal proclaimed that the South had “outraged the Constitution, set at defiance all law, and trampled under foot that flag which has been the glorious and consecrated symbol of American Liberty.” Nor did northern Democratic editors fall behind their Republican rivals in patriotism. “We were born and bred under the stars and stripes,” wrote a Pittsburgh Democrat. Although the South may have had just grievances against Republicans, “when the South becomes an enemy to the American system of government . . . and fires upon the flag . . . our influence goes for that flag, no matter whether a Republican or a Democrat holds it.”

Southerners also fought for abstractions —state sovereignty, the right of secession, the Constitution as they interpreted it, the concept of a southern “nation” different from the American nation whose values had been corrupted by Yankees.

Jefferson Davis said repeatedly that the South was fighting for the same “sacred right of self-government” that the revolutionary fathers had fought for. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Sumter, Davis proclaimed that the Confederacy would “seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone.”5 Both sides believed they were fighting to preserve the heritage of republican liberty;

Regarding Union soldiers as vandals bent on plundering the South and liberating the slaves, many southerners literally believed they were fighting to defend home, hearth, wives, and sisters.

For this soldier, as for many other southerners, the war was not about slavery. But without slavery there would have been no Black Republicans to threaten the South’s way of life, no special southern civilization to defend against Yankee invasion. This paradox plagued southern efforts to define their war aims. In particular, slavery handicapped Confederate foreign policy.

southern commissioners to Britain reported in May 1861 that “the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery.

In their explanations of war aims, therefore, Confederates rarely mentioned slavery except obliquely in reference to northern violations of southern rights. Rather, they portrayed the South as fighting for liberty and self-government—blithely unmindful of Samuel Johnson’s piquant question about an earlier generation of American rebels: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

most northerners initially agreed that the war had nothing to do with slavery. In his message to the special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln reaffirmed that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” The Constitution protected slavery in those states; the Lincoln administration fought the war on the theory that secession was unconstitutional and therefore the southern states still lived under the Constitution. Congress concurred.

A concern for northern unity underlay this decision to keep a low profile on the slavery issue. Lincoln had won less than half of the popular vote in the Union states (including the border states) in 1860. Some of those who had voted for him, as well as all who had voted for his opponents, would have refused to countenance an antislavery war in 1861. By the same token, an explicit avowal that the defense of slavery was a primary Confederate war aim might have proven more divisive than unifying in the South. Both sides, therefore, shoved slavery under the rug as they concentrated their energies on mobilizing eager citizen soldiers and devising strategies to use them.

The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War. The country was less ready for what proved to be its biggest war than for any other war in its history. In early 1861 most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered in seventy-nine frontier outposts west of the Mississippi. Nearly a third of its officers were resigning to go with the South.

Most of its clerks, as well as the four previous secretaries of war, had come from the South. All but one of the heads of the eight army bureaus had been in service since the War of 1812. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, seventy-four years old, suffered fr...

The army had nothing resembling a general staff, no strategic plans, no program for mobilization. Although the army did have a Bureau of Topographical Engineers, it possessed few accurate maps of the South.

Most of the arms in government arsenals (including the 159,000 muskets seized by Confederate states) were old smoothbores, many of them flintlocks of antique vintage.

The navy was little better prepared for war. Of the forty-two ships in commission when Lincoln became president, most were patrolling waters thousands of miles from the United States. Fewer than a dozen warships were available for immediate service along the American coast. But there were some bright spots in the naval outlook. Although 373 of the navy’s 1,554 officers and a few of its 7,600 seamen left to go with the South, the large merchant marine from which an expanded navy would draw experienced officers and sailors was overwhelmingly northern. Nearly all of the country’s shipbuilding capacity was in the North. And the Navy Department, unlike the War Department, was blessed with outstanding leadership. Gideon Welles, whose long gray beard and stern countenance led Lincoln to call him Father Neptune, proved to be a capable administrator.

Within weeks of Lincoln’s proclamation of a blockade against Confederate ports on April 19, the Union navy had bought or chartered scores of merchant ships, armed them, and dispatched them to blockade duty. By the end of 1861 more than 260 warships were on duty and 100 more (including three experimental ironclads) were under construction.

The Confederacy began life with no navy and few facilities for building one. The South possessed no adequate shipyards except the captured naval yard at Norfolk, and not a single machine shop capable of building an engine large enough to power a respectable warship. While lacking material resources, however, the Confederate navy possessed striking human resources, especially Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory and Commanders Raphael Semmes and James D. Bulloch.

Mallory proved equal to the task of creating a navy from scratch. He bought tugboats, revenue cutters, and river steamboats to be converted into gunboats for harbor patrol. Recognizing that he could never challenge the Union navy on its own terms, Mallory decided to concentrate on a few specialized tasks that would utilize the South’s limited assets to maximum advantage. He authorized the development of “torpedoes” (mines) to be planted at the mouths of harbors and rivers; by the end of the war such “infernal devices” had sunk or damaged forty-three Union warships. He encouraged the construction of “torpedo boats,” small half-submerged cigar-shaped vessels carrying a contact mine on a bow-spar for attacking blockade ships. It was only one step from this concept to that of a fully submerged torpedo boat. The Confederacy sent into action the world’s first combat submarine, the C.S.S. Hunley, which sank three times in trials, drowning the crew each time (including its inventor Horace Hunley) before sinking a blockade ship off Charleston in 1864 while going down itself for the fourth and last time.

Mallory authorized the rebuilding of the half-destroyed U.S.S. Merrimack as the Confederacy’s first ironclad, rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia. Although work proceeded slowly because of shortages, the South invested much hope in this secret weapon (which was no secret to the Federals, whose intelligence agents penetrated loose southern security).

Bulloch returned to England, where he continued his undercover efforts to build and buy warships. His activities prompted one enthusiastic historian to evaluate Bulloch’s contributions to the Confederacy as next only to those of Robert E. Lee.11

Refusing to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government, Lincoln on April 19, 1861, issued a proclamation threatening to treat captured privateer crews as pirates. By midsummer a number of such crews languished in northern jails awaiting trial.

The country was spared this eye-for-an-eye bloodbath when the Lincoln administration backed down. Its legal position was untenable, for in the same proclamation that had branded the privateers as pirates Lincoln had also imposed a blockade against the Confederacy. This had implicitly recognized the conflict as a war rather than merely a domestic insurrection. The Union government’s decision on February 3, 1862, to treat captured privateer crews as prisoners of war was another step in the same direction.

Despite ingenuity and innovations, however, the Confederate navy could never overcome Union supremacy on the high seas or along the coasts and rivers of the South. The Confederacy’s main hopes rode with its army. A people proud of their martial prowess, southerners felt confident of their ability to whip the Yankees in a fair fight

The idea that one Southron could lick ten Yankees—or at least three—really did exist in 1861. “Just throw three or four shells among those blue-bellied Yankees,” said a North Carolinian in May 1861, “and they’ll scatter like sheep.” In southern eyes the North was a nation of shopkeepers.

Even though the Confederacy had to organize a War Department and an army from the ground up, the South got an earlier start on mobilization than the North. As each state seceded, it took steps to consolidate and expand militia companies into active regiments.

More important, perhaps, Jefferson Davis himself was a West Point graduate, a combat veteran of the Mexican War, and a former secretary of war in the U.S. government. Although Davis’s fussy supervision of Confederate military matters eventually led to conflict with some army officers, the president’s martial expertise helped speed southern mobilization in 1861.

By the time Lincoln called for 75,000 men after the fall of Sumter, the South’s do-it-yourself mobilization had already enrolled 60,000 men. But these soldiers were beginning to experience the problems of logistics and supply that would plague the southern war effort to the end. Even after the accession of four upper-South states, the Confederacy had only one-ninth the industrial capacity of the Union. Northern states had manufactured 97 percent of the country’s firearms in 1860, 94 percent of its cloth, 93 percent of its pig iron, and more than 90 percent of its boots and shoes. The Union had more than twice the density of railroads per square mile as the Confederacy, and several times the mileage of canals and macadamized roads. The South could produce enough food to feed itself, but the transport network, adequate at the beginning of the war to distribute this food, soon began to deteriorate because of a lack of replacement capacity. Nearly all of the rails had come from the North or from Britain; of 470 locomotives built in the United States during 1860, only nineteen had been made in the South.

Quartermaster General Abraham Myers could never supply the army with enough tents, uniforms, blankets, shoes, or horses and wagons. Consequently Johnny Reb often had to sleep in the open under a captured blanket, to wear a tattered homespun butternut uniform, and to march and fight barefoot unless he could liberate shoes from a dead or captured Yankee.

The du Pont plants in Delaware produced most of the country’s gunpowder; the South had manufactured almost none, and this heavy, bulky product would be difficult to smuggle through the tightening blockade. The principal ingredient of gunpowder, saltpeter (potassium nitrate, or “niter”), was also imported.

Gorgas, St. John, and Rains were unsung heroes of the Confederate war effort.15 The South suffered from deficiencies of everything else, but after the summer of 1862 it did not suffer seriously for want of ordnance—though the quality of Confederate artillery and shells was always a problem.

One reason for this shortage of arms was the hoarding by state governors of muskets seized from federal arsenals when the states seceded. Several governors insisted on retaining these weapons to arm regiments they kept at home (instead of sending them to the main fronts in Virginia or Tennessee) to defend state borders and guard against potential slave uprisings. This was an early manifestation of state’s-rights sentiment that handicapped centralized efforts. As such it was hardly the Richmond government’s fault, but soldiers in front-line armies wanted to blame somebody, and Secretary of War Walker was a natural scapegoat.

Walker—like his successors—was a victim of circumstances more than of his own ineptitude. The same could not be said of his counterpart in Washington. Although Simon Cameron was also swamped by the rapid buildup of an army that exceeded the capacity of the bureaucracy to equip it, he was more deserving of personal censure than Walker.

the actual Union manpower superiority was about 2.5 to 1. From 1862 onward the Union army enjoyed approximately this superiority in numbers. But because of its earlier start in creating an army, the Confederacy in June 1861 came closer to matching the Union in mobilized manpower than at any other time in the war.

The variety of uniforms in both Union and Confederate armies, and the similarity of some uniforms on opposite sides, caused tragic mixups in early battles when regiments mistook friends for enemies or enemies for friends. As fast as possible the northern government overcame this situation by clothing its soldiers in the standard light blue trousers and dark blue blouse of the regular army.

To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called “shoddy.” This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general on items necessary to equip an army of half a million men and to create its support services within a few short months. Railroads overcharged the government; some contractors sold muskets back to the army for $20 each that they had earlier bought as surplus arms at $3.50; sharp horse traders sold spavined animals to the army at outrageous prices. Simon Cameron became the target of just as well as unjust criticism of such transactions. He signed lucrative contracts without competitive bidding and gave a suspiciously large number of contracts to firms in his home state of Pennsylvania.

The new secretary of war was Edwin M. Stanton, a hard-working, gimlet-eyed lawyer from Ohio who had served briefly as attorney general in the Buchanan administration. A former Democrat with a low opinion of Lincoln, Stanton radically revised both his politics and his opinion after taking over the war office in January 1862. He also became famous for his incorruptible efficiency and brusque rudeness toward war contractors—and toward everyone else as well.

The army’s logistical apparatus had survived its shakedown trials and had even achieved a modicum of efficiency. The northern economy had geared up for war production on a scale that would make the Union army the best fed, most lavishly supplied army that had ever existed. Much of the credit for this belonged to Montgomery Meigs, who became quartermaster general of the army in June 1861.