Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

“It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor,” wrote a newspaper reporter, “or generals to manifest less judgment.”

Lions and donkeys

Artillery carriages sank to their axles, men sank to their knees, mules sank to their ears. Confederate pickets across the river watched this with amusement and held up signs pointing “This Way to Richmond.”

A prevalent theme in complaints about Grant concerned his drinking. According to one story, Lincoln deflected such charges with humor, telling a delegation of congressmen that he would like to know Grant’s brand of whiskey so he could send some to his other generals.

All wars produce refugees; these homeless people generally suffer more than the rest of the civilian population; in the American Civil War this suffering was confined almost entirely to the South.

Most civilians in conquered areas, of course, stayed home to live under their new rulers. And in the material if not the spiritual realm, they lived better than their compatriots who fled southward. The Yankee occupation, indeed, presented lucrative opportunities to interested parties on both sides of the line.

Both governments officially banned trade with the enemy. But when the price of a pound of cotton leapt from ten cents to a dollar in the North while the price of a sack of salt jumped from $1.25 to $60 in parts of the South, venturesome men would find a way to trade cotton for salt.

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.

It was a magnificent mile-wide spectacle, a picture-book view of war that participants on both sides remembered with awe until their dying moment—which for many came within the next hour.

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

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.

Much of the North’s apparent superiority in numbers thus dissolved during 1864. “The men we have been getting in this way nearly all desert,” Grant complained in September, “and out of five reported North as having enlisted we don’t get more than one effective soldier.”

By this stage of the war the spade had become almost as important for defense as the rifle.

So intense was the firing that at one point just behind the southern lines an oak tree nearly two feet thick was cut down by minié balls.18

In the long run, to be sure, Lee and the South could not withstand a siege. But in the short run—three or four months—time was on the Confederacy’s side, for the northern presidential election was approaching.

Sherman refused to oblige him. Despite his ferocious reputation, “Uncle Billy” (as his men called him) had little taste for slam-bang combat: “Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families.”

At another ford, blue horsemen waded dismounted through neck-deep water with their Spencer carbines. “As the rebel bullets began to splash around pretty thick,” recalled a Union officer, northern soldiers discovered that they could pump the waterproof metal cartridges into the Spencer’s chamber underwater; “hence, all along the line you could see the men bring their guns up, let the water run from the muzzle a moment, then take quick aim, fire his piece and pop down again.”

“War is war, and not popularity-seeking,” wrote Sherman in pursuance of his career as Georgia’s most unpopular visitor.

had sent a million men over the past three years. Despite warnings, President Lincoln repeatedly stood to peer over the parapet as sharpshooters’ bullets whizzed nearby. Out of the corner of his eye a 6th Corps captain—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—noticed this ungainly civilian popping up. Without recognizing him, Holmes shouted “get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!” Amused by this irreverent command, Lincoln got down and stayed down.

ventilation problems had limited all previous military tunnels in history to less than 400 feet.

130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union:

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

After becoming general in chief, Grant confirmed this hard line. “No distinction whatever will be made in the exchange between white and colored prisoners,” he ordered on April 17, 1864.

Contemporaries interpreted the election of 1864 as a triumph for Lincoln’s policy of compelling the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. “I am astonished,” wrote the American correspondent of the London Daily News, at “the extent and depth of [this] determination . . . to fight to the last. . . . [The northern people] are in earnest in a way the like of which the world never saw before, silently, calmly, but desperately in earnest.”70

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.”

Wilmington was cut off from the sea, and Lee’s soldiers in the trenches at Petersburg would have to tighten further their belts whose buckles were already scraping their backbones.

Even more important, perhaps, than the destructive vengeance of Sherman’s army in spreading this demoralization was its stunning logistical achievements. Sherman himself later rated the march through the Carolinas as ten times more important in winning the war than the march from Atlanta to the sea. It was also ten times more difficult.

“When I learned that Sherman’s army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day,” said Joseph Johnston, “I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.”

The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the founding fathers—a government of limited powers that protected the rights of property and whose constituency comprised an independent gentry and yeomanry of the white race undisturbed by large cities, heartless factories, restless free workers, and class conflict. The accession to power of the Republican party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the northern majority had turned irrevocably toward this frightening, revolutionary future.