Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Thomas Jefferson thought that the empire for liberty he had bought from Napoleon was sufficient to absorb a hundred generations of America’s population growth. By 1850, two generations later, Americans were not only filling up this empire but were spilling over into a new one on the Pacific coast. A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France.

Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 1860, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total. This was the highest rate of urbanization in American history.

The core of republicanism was liberty, a precious but precarious birthright constantly threatened by corrupt manipulations of power.

Many of them endorsed the temperance crusade, which sobered up the American population to the extent of reducing the per capita adult consumption of liquor from the equivalent of seven gallons of 200-proof alcohol annually in the 1820s to less than two gallons by the 1850s. During the same years the per capita consumption of coffee and tea doubled.

Same.

The Butternut areas were positively correlated with the production of corn, sweet potatoes, and whiskey, with anti-bank and anti-black sentiments, illiteracy, and Baptist churches. Needless to say the Butternut districts were overwhelmingly Democratic while the Yankee counties voted Whig and after 1854 Republican.

The poverty, religion, and cultural alienation of the Irish made them triple outsiders. Anti-Catholic and ethnic riots occurred in several northeastern cities during the 1830s and 1840s.

On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.

As he died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free.

Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman’s comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it.

A North Carolina politician with the implausible name of Romulus M. Saunders, the minister knew no language but English “& even this he sometimes murders,” commented Secretary of State Buchanan.

William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution on the Fourth of July while thousands breathed Amen to his denunciation of this document as a covenant with death.

That was why they did not mention the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution, but referred only to “persons held to service.” “Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution,” said Lincoln, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

Competing with free blacks at the bottom of the social order, Irish Americans were intensely anti-Negro and frequently rioted against black people in northern cities.

Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one’s own neighborhood.

Still true

It became a common saying in the South during the secession winter that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed.”7

Anderson and his men became in northern eyes the defenders of a modern Thermopylae.

“The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers,” commented a disgusted New York lawyer.

The “time before Sumter” was like another century, wrote a New York woman. “It seems as if we never were alive till now; never had a country till now.”

Pre 9/11

Virginia brought crucial resources to the Confederacy. Her population was the South’s largest. Her industrial capacity was nearly as great as that of the seven original Confederate states combined. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the only plant in the South capable of manufacturing heavy ordnance. Virginia’s heritage from the generation of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison gave her immense prestige that was expected to attract the rest of the upper South to the Confederacy. And as events turned out, perhaps the greatest asset that Virginia brought to the cause of southern independence was Robert E. Lee.

Significantly, however, the voters of mountainous east Tennessee cast 70 percent of their ballots against secession.

Little wonder that Lincoln was reported to have said that while he hoped to have God on his side, he must have Kentucky.

For decades the plebeian mountaineers, underrepresented in a legislature dominated by slaveholders, had nursed grievances against the “tidewater aristocrats” who governed the state.

Many other east Tennesseeans made individual and group escapes to join the Union army. 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.

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.

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?”

For reasons of their own 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 United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War.

The idea that one Southron could lick ten Yankees—or at least three—really did exist in 1861.

Volunteer companies, following the venerable militia tradition, elected their own officers (captain and lieutenants). State governors officially appointed regimental officers (colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major), but in many regiments these officers were actually elected either by the men of the whole regiment or by the officers of all the companies.

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.

Cotton was the principal weapon of southern foreign policy. Britain imported three-quarters of its cotton from the American South. The textile industry dominated the British economy. “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” asked James Hammond of South Carolina in his famous King Cotton speech of 1858. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South.”

On May 13 Britain therefore declared her neutrality in a proclamation issued by the Queen. This would seem to have been unexceptionable—except that it automatically recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent power. Other European nations followed the British lead. Status as a belligerent gave Confederates the right under international law to contract loans and purchase arms in neutral nations, and to commission cruisers on the high seas with the power of search and seizure.

One reason for the success of these offensives lay in the harmonious teamwork of the navy and army commanders at Cairo: the God-fearing, teetotaling, antislavery Connecticut Yankee Flag-Officer Andrew H. Foote; and Brigadier-General Ulysses S. Grant, who may have feared God but was indifferent toward slavery and not noted for abstinence.

These instructions anticipated a pattern in Grant’s generalship: he always thought more about what he planned to do to the enemy than what his enemy might do to him. This offensive-mindedness eventually won the war, but it also brought near disaster to Grant’s forces more than once.

Although Beauregard talked of resuming the offensive, Davis had enough of his Napoleonic plans and Lilliputian execution. When Beauregard took an unauthorized leave of absence to recuperate his broken health, Davis seized the opportunity and replaced him with Braxton Bragg.

He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.

Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.

Shortages of high-quality paper and skilled engravers in the South meant that these as well as the Confederate notes were crudely printed and easily counterfeited. Some counterfeit notes could be detected because of their superior quality to the real thing.

Jefferson Davis himself stated that the “gigantic evil” of speculation had “seduced citizens of all classes from a determined prosecution of the war to a sordid effort to amass money.” The Richmond Examiner lamented in July 1862 that “native Southern merchants have outdone Yankees and Jews. . . . The whole South stinks with the lust of extortion.”

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted “the blueprint for modern America.”

In this as in other tasks assigned to the cavalry—screening the army from enemy horsemen, patrolling front and flanks to prevent surprise attacks, raiding enemy supply lines, and pursuing defeated enemy infantry—the rebel troopers were superior to their adversaries at this stage of the war. Having grown up in the saddle, sons of the Virginia gentry quite literally rode circles around the neophyte Yankee horsemen.

One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys.

The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks. Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon,

The failure of McClellan’s Peninsula campaign was not alone a military failure; it represented also the downfall of the limited war for limited ends that McClellan favored. From now on the North would fight not to preserve the old Union but to destroy it and build a new one on the ashes.

These groups rioted against the draft while carrying banners proclaiming “The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was” and “We won’t fight to free the nigger.”

“Do you remember that old theological book containing this: ‘Chapter One—Hell; Chapter Two—Hell Continued.’

This psychological state produced a sort of fighting madness in many men, a superadrenalized fury that turned them into mindless killing machines heedless of the normal instinct of self-preservation. This frenzy seems to have prevailed at Antietam on a greater scale than in any previous Civil War battle. “The men are loading and firing with demonaical fury and shouting and laughing hysterically,” wrote a Union officer in the present tense a quarter-century later as if that moment of red-sky madness lived in him yet.43

Liverpool was a center of pro-southern sentiment. The city “was made by the slave trade,” observed a caustic American diplomat,

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.

“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.”