Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln’s managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From then on, Lincoln the railsplitter became the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image.

The belief that Lincoln could carry the lower North and Seward could not was the most powerful Lincoln weapon.

None of the forty thousand people in and around the wigwam ever forgot that moment. All except the diehard Seward delegates were convinced that they had selected the strongest candidate. Few could know that they had also chosen the best man for the grim task that lay ahead.

The Republican platform was one of the most effective documents of its kind in American history.

One advantage the Republicans enjoyed over their opponents was party unity.

Republicans made a special effort headed by Carl Schurz to reduce the normal Democratic majority among German-Americans. They achieved some success among German Protestants—enough, perhaps, to make a difference in the close states of Illinois and Indiana—though the lingering perceptions of Republican dalliance with nativism and temperance kept the Catholic vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

And in the lower North generally, Republicans played down the moral issue of slavery while emphasizing other matters of regional concern. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey they talked about the tariff; from Ohio to California the Republicans portrayed themselves as a homestead party, an internal improvements party, a Pacific railroad party. This left Democrats with less opportunity to exploit the race issue.

The future would reveal that a good many Republican politicians were none too honest themselves. But in 1860 the party carried an unsullied banner of reform and freedom against the tired old corrupt proslavery Democrats.

To southerners the election’s most ominous feature was the magnitude of Republican victory north of the 41st parallel.

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.”

Carried away by an excess of Robespierrian zeal, a Georgia disunionist warned cooperationists that “we will go for revolution, and if you . . . oppose us . . .we will brand you as traitors, and chop off your heads.”

So they undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation. Georgia’s Governor Brown carried this message to his native uplands of north Georgia whose voters idolized him. Slavery “is the poor man’s best Government,” said Brown. “Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. . . . He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.” Thus yeoman farmers “will never consent to submit to abolition rule,” for they “know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves. . . . When it becomes necessary to defend our rights against so foul a domination, I would call upon the mountain boys as well as the people of the lowlands, and they would come down like an avalanche and swarm around the flag of Georgia.”

To defend their wives and daughters, presumably, yeoman whites therefore joined planters in “rallying to the standard of Liberty and Equality for white men” against “our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with negroes.” Most southern whites could agree that “democratic liberty exists solely because we have black slaves” whose presence “promotes equality among the free.” Hence “freedom is not possible without slavery.”

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.” In 1861 the Confederate secretary of state advised foreign governments that southern states had formed a new nation “to preserve their old institutions” from “a revolution [that] threatened to destroy their social system.”

In this regard, secession fit the model of “pre-emptive counterrevolution” developed by historian Arno Mayer. Rather than trying to restore the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize.

Secession as "pre-emptive counterrevolution"

Lincoln too considered secession the “essence of anarchy.”

The “central idea” of the Union cause, said Lincoln, “is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.”

Buchanan’s forceful denial of the legality of disunion ended with a lame confession of impotence to do anything about it. Although the Constitution gave no state the right to withdraw, said the president, it also gave the national government no power “to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw.”

Although few of the compromise proposals introduced in Congress went so far as Buchanan’s, they all shared the same feature: Republicans would have to make all the concessions. Republicans refused to succumb to what they considered blackmail.

To advise the North to let the disunionists go, therefore, became a way of deflecting compromise.

No compromise could undo the event that triggered disunion: Lincoln’s election by a solid North.

the New Mexico scheme had played a part in keeping the upper South in the Union.

Austere, able, experienced in government as a senator and former secretary of war, a Democrat and a secessionist but no fire-eater, Davis was the ideal candidate.

To console Georgia and strengthen the Confederacy’s moderate image, one-time Whig and more recently Douglas Democrat Alexander Stephens received the vice presidency.

With an aplomb unparalleled in American political history, the president-elect appointed his four main rivals for the nomination to cabinet posts.

There was no ambiguity about the peroration, revised and much improved from Seward’s draft. “I am loth to close,” said Lincoln. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Contemporaries read into the inaugural address what they wished or expected to see. Republicans were generally satisfied with its “firmness” and “moderation.” Confederates and their sympathizers branded it a “Declaration of War.”

Lincoln’s new conception of the resupply undertaking was a stroke of genius. In effect he was telling Jefferson Davis, “Heads I win, Tails you lose.” It was the first sign of the mastery that would mark Lincoln’s presidency.

In the eyes of southern unionists, this tragic war was mainly Lincoln’s fault. What the president described in his proclamation of April 15 calling out the militia as a necessary measure to “maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union” was transmuted south of the Potomac into an unconstitutional coercion of sovereign states.

The claim that his call for troops was the cause of the upper South’s decision to secede is misleading.

perhaps the greatest asset that Virginia brought to the cause of southern independence was Robert E. Lee.

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 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.

Setting a pattern for the feats of railroad construction that helped the North win the war, Butler’s troops and the 7th New York reopened the line over which thousands of northern soldiers poured into Washington.

As a means of avoiding a difficult choice, “neutrality” was a popular stance in the border states during the first weeks after Sumter.

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

Kentuckians took pride in their traditional role as mediator between North and South.

Lincoln’s forbearance toward Kentucky paid off. Unionists became more outspoken, and fence-sitters jumped down onto the Union side.

War had finally come to Kentucky. And here more than anywhere else it was literally a brothers’ war.

The Confederate legislature of Virginia would not consent to a separate state, of course, so the Wheeling convention formed its own “restored government” of Virginia. Branding the Confederate legislature in Richmond illegal, the convention declared all state offices vacant and on June 20 appointed new state officials, headed by Francis Pierpoint as governor. Lincoln recognized the Pierpoint administration as the de jure government of Virginia.

Ironically, while northern armies “liberated” the Confederate portion of Tennessee they left the unionist portion to fend for itself—to Lincoln’s chagrin. Without northern help, east Tennessee unionists suffered grievously for their loyalty.

The actions of the eight upper South states in 1861 had an important but equivocal impact on the outcome of the war.

The estimated 425,000 soldiers they furnished to southern armies comprised half of the total who fought for the Confederacy.

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.

One of Lincoln’s qualities of greatness as president was his ability to articulate these war aims in pithy prose.

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

Both sides believed they were fighting to preserve the heritage of republican liberty; but Davis’s last phrase (“all we ask is to be let alone”) specified the most immediate, tangible Confederate war aim: defense against invasion.

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.

On July 22 and 25 the House and Senate passed similar resolutions sponsored by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee affirming that the United States fought with no intention “of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of [the seceded] States” but only “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired.”