Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860.

A Republican committee raised funds to subsidize an abridged edition in 1859 to be scattered far and wide as a campaign document. The abridgers ensured a spirited southern reaction by adding such captions as “The Stupid Masses of the South” and “Revolution—Peacefully if we can, Violently if we must.”

Most congressmen came armed to the sessions; the sole exception seemed to be a former New England clergyman who finally gave in and bought a pistol for self-defense.

Reaction in the South to Brown’s raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage.

Perhaps the words of Lafayette quoted at a commemoration meeting in Boston got to the crux of the matter: “I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was helping to found a nation of slaves.”

“We regard every man,” declared an Atlanta newspaper, “who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing” as “an enemy to the institutions of the South.”

Douglas’s supporters were as determined to block a slave-code plank as southerners were to adopt one. There was thus an “irrepressible conflict” in the party, wrote the brilliant young journalist from Cincinnati Murat Halstead, whose reports provide the best account of the convention. “The South will not yield a jot of its position. . . . The Northern Democracy . . . are unwilling to submit themselves to assassination or to commit suicide.”

After two days of bitter parliamentary wrangling, Douglas men pushed through their platform by a vote of 165 to 138 (free states 154 to 30, slave states 11 to 108). Fifty delegates from the lower South thereupon walked out. Everything that followed was anticlimax. Douglas could not muster the two-thirds majority required for nomination.

The bolters quickly organized their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the current vice president) for president on a slave-code platform. The dispirited loyalists nominated Douglas and returned home with renewed bitterness in their hearts toward the rebels who had all but ensured the election of a Black Republican president.

The election of 1860 was unique in the history of American politics. The campaign resolved itself into two separate contests: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North; Breckinridge vs. Bell in the South. Republicans did not even have a ticket in ten southern states, where their speakers would have been greeted with a coat of tar and feathers—or worse—if they had dared to appear. In the remaining five slave states—all in the upper South—Lincoln received 4 percent of the popular votes, mostly from antislavery Germans in St. Louis and vicinity. Breckinridge fared a little better in the North, where he won 5 percent of the popular votes, enough to deny California and Oregon to Douglas. Lincoln carried these states by a plurality and all other free states except New Jersey by a majority of the popular vote.

all other party leaders great and small took to the stump and delivered an estimated 50,000 speeches.

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. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckin-ridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up “false-hoods and sensation tales” to “arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement.”54 But this accusation must have been wrong. No less a personage than R. S. Holt, a wealthy Mississippi planter and brother of the U.S. postmaster general, reported that “we have constantly a foretaste of what Northern brother-hood means, in almost daily conflagrations & in discovery of poison, knives & pistols distributed among our slaves by emissaries sent out for that purpose. . . . There cannot be found in all the planting States a territory ten miles square in which the foot prints of one or more of these miscreants have not been discovered.” Fortunately, Holt added, “Miracles & Providence” had prevented the accomplishment of their “hellish” designs. But Congressman Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina was not willing to trust to Providence. “I see poison in the wells in Texas—and fire for the houses in Alabama,” he wrote. “How can we stand it? . . . It is enoug...

“What is it I could say which would quiet alarm?” he asked in October. “Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness.”

Douglas did speak out. On his first foray into the South he told crowds in North Carolina that he would “hang every man higher than Haman who would attempt . . . to break up the Union by resistance to its laws.”

Douglas said to his private secretary: “Mr. Lincoln is the next President. We must try to save the Union. I will go South.”

Though Lincoln won only 40 percent of the national popular vote (54 percent in the North), his 180 electoral votes gave him a comfortable cushion over the necessary minimum of 152. Even if the opposition had combined against him in every free state he would have lost only New Jersey, California, and Oregon, and still would have won the presidency with 169 electoral votes.

Three-quarters of the Republican congressmen and senators in the next Congress would represent this “Yankee” and antislavery portion of the free states. These facts were “full of portentous significance,” declared the New Orleans Crescent. “The idle canvass prattle about Northern conservatism may now be dismissed,” agreed the Richmond Examiner. “A party founded on the single sentiment . . . of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power.”

The second Continental Congress had deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776. To produce the United States Constitution and put the new government into operation required nearly two years. In contrast, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election.

the convention by a vote of 169–0 enacted on December 20 an “ordinance” dissolving “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States.”

What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government.

The question, agreed Jefferson Davis and a fellow Mississippian, was “ ‘Will you be slaves or will be independent?’ . . . Will you consent to be robbed of your property” or will you “strike bravely for liberty, property, honor and life?”16 Submission to Black Republicans would mean “the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having,” proclaimed a South Carolinian.

The election of Lincoln, declared an Alabama newspaper, “shows that the North [intends] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?” a Georgia secessionist asked non-slaveholders. If Georgia remained in a Union “ruled by Lincoln and his crew . . . in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.”21 “If you are tame enough to submit,” declaimed South Carolina’s Baptist clergyman James Furman, “Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” No! No! came an answering shout from Alabama. “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism.”

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were wrong if they meant to include Negroes among “all men,” said Alexander Stephens after he had become vice president of the Confederacy. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Therefore it was “an abuse of language” to call secession a revolution, said Jefferson Davis. We left the Union “to save ourselves from a revolution” that threatened to make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless.”

“If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government.”

The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority.

He first blamed the North in general and Republicans in particular for “the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question” which had now “produced its natural effects” by provoking disunion.

“We spit upon every plan to compromise,” wrote one secessionist. “No human power can save the Union, all the cotton states will go,” said Jefferson Davis, while Judah Benjamin agreed that “a settlement [is] totally out of our power to accomplish.”47 On December 13, before any compromises had been debated—indeed, before any states had actually seceded—more than two-thirds of the senators and representatives from seven southern states signed an address to their constituents: “The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. . . . The honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found in a Southern Confederacy.”48 Delegates from seven states who met in Montgomery on February 4, 1861, to organize a new nation paid no attention to the compromise efforts in Washington.

Therefore to Abraham Lincoln’s challenge, Shall it be Peace or War? Jefferson Davis replied, War. A fateful cabinet meeting in Montgomery on April 9 endorsed Davis’s order to Beauregard: reduce the fort before the relief fleet arrived, if possible.

This news galvanized the North. On April 15 Lincoln issued a proclamation calling 75,000 militiamen into national service for ninety days to put down an insurrection “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Such explanations for conversion to secession were undoubtedly sincere. But their censure of Lincoln had a certain self-serving quality. The claim that his call for troops was the cause of the upper South’s decision to secede is misleading. As the telegraph chattered reports of the attack on Sumter April 12 and its surrender next day, huge crowds poured into the streets of Richmond, Raleigh, Nashville, and other upper South cities to celebrate this victory over the Yankees. These crowds waved Confederate flags and cheered the glorious cause of southern independence. They demanded that their own states join the cause. Scores of such demonstrations took place from April 12 to 14, before Lincoln issued his call for troops. Many conditional unionists were swept along by this powerful tide of southern nationalism; others were cowed into silence. News of Sumter’s fall reached Richmond on the evening of April 13. A jubilant procession marched on the state capital where a battery fired a hundred-gun salute “in honor of the victory.” The crowd lowered the American flag from the capital building and ran up the Confederate stars and bars. Everyone “seemed to be perfectly frantic with delight, I never in all my life witnessed such excitement,” wrote a participant. “Everyone is in favor of secession.” Citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina, reacted to the news of Sumter with “the wildest excitement,” flew Confederate flags from public buildings, and fired salutes to them. In Goldsboro,...

For all practical purposes Virginia joined the Confederacy on April 17.

Although speeches and editorials in the upper South bristled with references to rights, liberty, state sovereignty, honor, resistance to coercion, and identity with southern brothers, such rhetoric could not conceal the fundamental issue of slavery. The following table shows the correlation between slaveholding and support for secession in the Virginia and Tennessee conventions.

The voters in 35 Virginia counties with a slave population of only 2.5 percent opposed secession by a margin of three to one, while voters in the remainder of the state, where slaves constituted 36 percent of the population, supported secession by more than ten to one. The thirty counties of east Tennessee that rejected secession by more than two to one contained a slave population of only 8 percent, while the rest of the state, with a slave population of 30 percent, voted for secession by a margin of seven to one. Similar though less dramatic correlations existed in Arkansas and North Carolina, where moderate delegates had a median slaveholding about half that of the all-out secessionists.12 The Nashville Patriot of April 24, 1861, was conscious of no irony when it cited the “community of interest existing in all the slaveholding States” as the reason why these states must unite to defend “justice and liberty.”13 The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.

Four grandsons of Henry Clay fought for the Confederacy and three others for the Union.

Scholars who have examined thousands of letters and diaries written by Union soldiers found them expressing similar motives; “fighting to maintain the best government on earth” was a common phrase. It was a “grate strugle for the Union, Constitution, and law,” wrote a New Jersey soldier. “Our glorious institutions are likely to be destroyed. . . . We will be held responsible before God if we don’t do our part in helping to transmit this boon of civil & religious liberty down to succeeding generations.” A midwestern recruit enlisted as “a duty I owe to my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government as I shudder to think what is ahead for them if this government should be overthrown.” Americans of 1861 felt responsible to their forebears as well as to God and posterity. “I know . . . how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution,” wrote a New England private to his wife on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run (Manassas). “I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

“Our men must prevail in combat, or lose their property, country, freedom, everything,” wrote a southern diarist.

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. The first 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. . . . The sincerity and universality of this feeling embarrass the Government in dealing with the question of our recognition.”8 In their explanations of war aims, therefore, Confederates rarely mentioned slavery except obliquely in reference to northern violations of southern rights.

On March 6 the Confederate Congress authorized an army of 100,000 volunteers for twelve months.

Before Sumter

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.

In both armies the proportion of officers killed in action was about 15 percent higher than the proportion of enlisted men killed. Generals suffered the highest combat casualties; their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates’.

A proud man sensitive of his honor, Davis could never forget a slight or forgive the man who committed it. Not for him was Lincoln’s willingness to hold the horse of a haughty general if he would only win victories.

On the day he wrote these words, January 10, 1862, the president dropped into Quartermaster General Meigs’s office. “General, what shall I do?” he asked despondently. “The people are impatient; Chase has no money; . . . the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”

Eight thousand trips were made through the blockade during four years of war,11 but more than twenty thousand vessels had cleared into or out of southern ports during the four prewar years.

The blockade reduced the South’s seaborne trade to less than a third of normal.

After the end of this embargo in 1862 the half-million bales shipped through the blockade during the last three years of war compared rather poorly with the ten million exported in the last three antebellum years.

and second, the huge cotton exports of 1857–60, instead of proving the potency of King Cotton, resulted in toppling his throne. Even working overtime, British mills had not been able to turn all of this cotton into cloth. Surplus stocks of raw cotton as well as of finished cloth piled up in Lancashire warehouses. The South’s embargo thus turned out to be a blessing in disguise for textile manufacturers in 1861. Although the mills went on short time during the winter of 1861–62, the real reason for this was not the shortage of cotton but the satiated market for cloth. Inventories of raw cotton in Britain and France were higher in December 1861 than any previous December. The cotton famine from which the South expected so much did not really take hold until the summer of 1862. By then the Confederacy had scuttled its embargo and was trying desperately to export cotton through the tightening blockade to pay for imported supplies. By then, too, the stimulus of high prices had brought about an increase of cotton acreage in Egypt and India, which supplied most of Europe’s cotton imports for the next three years.

During the first two years of the Civil War the Union states supplied nearly half of British grain imports, compared with less than a quarter before the war. Yankees exulted that King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton.

In April 1862, Union warships began seizing British merchant vessels plying between England and Nassau or Bermuda, on the grounds that their cargoes were destined ultimately for the Confederacy. The first ship so captured was the Bermuda, which was confiscated by a U. S. prize court. The navy bought her and put her to work as a blockade ship. This added insult to the injury that had already provoked a jingoistic response in Britain. But American diplomats cited British precedents for such seizures. During the Napoleonic wars the royal navy had seized American ships carrying cargoes to a neutral port with the intention of re-exporting them to France. British courts had established the doctrine of “continuous voyage” to justify confiscation of contraband destined ultimately for an enemy port even if the voyage was broken by landing at a neutral port. When this chicken came home to roost in 1862, Whitehall could hardly repudiate its own precedent.

Wow.

It turned out that the Missouri regiment, learning of the Yankee approach, had decamped. Grant suddenly realized that the enemy colonel “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot. . . . The lesson was valuable.”