Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Since re-entering the army in June 1861, Grant had served an apprenticeship in command that had increased his self-confidence. He had discovered that his laconic, informal, commonsense manner inspired respect and obedience from his men. Unlike so many other commanders, Grant rarely clamored for reinforcements, rarely complained, rarely quarreled with associates, but went ahead and did the job with the resources at hand.

Although the battle of Belmont accomplished little in the larger scheme of war and could hardly be called a Union victory, it taught Grant more valuable lessons and demonstrated his coolness under pressure. Lincoln did not know it yet, but here was the general he had been looking for these past six months.

Not expecting any fighting that day “unless I brought it on myself,” Grant had told his division commanders merely to hold their positions until further notice.5 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.

Self-educated, with no previous military experience, Forrest became one of the South’s most innovative and hard-driving commanders. He developed combined mounted and dismounted tactics not mentioned in military textbooks—which he had never read—but ideal for the wooded terrain of western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. A large, powerful, and fearless man, Forrest possessed a killer instinct toward Yankees and toward blacks in any capacity other than slave.

Eight months earlier Grant had been an obscure ex-captain of dubious reputation; now his name was celebrated by every newspaper in the land.

Although each side suffered about 1,300 casualties, the battle of Pea Ridge was the most one-sided victory won by an outnumbered Union army during the war.

The 20,000 killed and wounded at Shiloh (about equally distributed between the two sides) were nearly double the 12,000 battle casualties at Manassas, Wilson’s Creek, Fort Donelson, and Pea Ridge combined. Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861.

Shiloh disabused Yankees of their notion of a quick Confederate collapse in the West.

Shiloh launched the country onto the floodtide of total war.

When a prominent Pennsylvania Republican went to Lincoln and said that Grant was incompetent, a drunkard, and a political liability to the administration, the president heard him out and replied: “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”

But in the end the Union armies won a strategic success of great importance at Shiloh. They turned back the Confederacy’s supreme bid to regain the initiative in the Mississippi Valley. From then on it was all downhill for the South in this crucial region.

The ram concept was a revival of naval tactics from the days of galleys, before the advent of gunpowder and sailing ships (which could rarely be maneuvered to ram another ship) had converted navies to broadside firepower. But the development of steam propulsion made ramming feasible again.

From February to May, Union forces conquered 50,000 square miles of territory, gained control of 1,000 miles of navigable rivers, captured two state capitals and the South’s largest city, and put 30,000 enemy soldiers out of action.

While Lincoln did not yet share the suspicion that as a Democrat McClellan was “soft” on the rebels and did not really want to smash them, he was not happy with McClellan’s concept of strategy. Like Grant, the president believed in attacking the enemy’s army rather than in maneuvering to capture places.

In the crisis atmosphere created by these setbacks during the spring of 1862, the southern Congress enacted conscription and martial law. Internal disaffection increased; the Confederate dollar plummeted. During these same months a confident Union government released political prisoners, suspended recruiting, and placed northern war finances on a sound footing. In contrapuntal fashion, developments on the homefront responded to the rhythm of events on the battlefield.

Despite its success in getting more men into the army, conscription was the most unpopular act of the Confederate government.

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

Davis therefore possessed the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for a total of only sixteen months. During most of that time he exercised this power more sparingly than did his counterpart in Washington. The rhetoric of southern libertarians about executive tyranny thus seems overblown. The Confederacy did not have the North’s problem of administering captured territory with its hostile population. Nor did the South have as large a disloyal population—sizable though it was—in its disaffected upland regions as the Union contained in the border states. These areas accounted for most of the Lincoln administration’s suspension of civil liberties.

The Confederate economy had started with two strikes against it. Most of the South’s capital was tied up in the nonliquid form of land and slaves.

During the first year of its existence the Confederate government obtained three-quarters of its revenues from the printing press, nearly a quarter from bonds (purchased in part with these same treasury notes), and less than 2 percent from taxes. Although the proportion of loans and taxes increased slightly in later years, the Confederacy financed itself primarily with a billion and a half paper dollars that depreciated from the moment they came into existence.

Under the pressures of blockade, invasion, and a flood of paper money, the South’s unbalanced agrarian economy simply could not produce both guns and butter without shortages and inflation.

Lincoln’s administration entered the war with at least two financial advantages over the Confederacy: an established Treasury and an assured source of revenue from the tariff.

Although this policy of financing a democratic war by democratic means got off to a slow start, Cooke eventually achieved great success in selling $400 million of “five-twenties"—6 percent bonds redeemable in not less than five or more than twenty years—and nearly $800 million of “seven-thirties"—three-year notes at 7.30 percent.

new internal taxes levied in the North, beginning with the first federal income tax in American history enacted on August 5, 1861. This revolutionary measure grew from a need to assure the financial community that sufficient revenue would be raised to pay interest on bonds. The Republican architects of the 1861 income tax made it modestly progressive by imposing the 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800 only, thereby exempting most wage-earners.

With Lincoln’s signature on February 25, the Legal Tender Act became law. This act created a national currency and altered the monetary structure of the United States. It asserted national sovereignty to help win a war fought to preserve that sovereignty.

The Union ultimately raised half again as much war revenue from taxes as from the issuance of paper money—in sharp contrast with the Confederate experience.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed.

The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

Because women earned much less than men for the same or similar jobs, their expanded proportion of the wartime labor force kept down the average of wage increases.

Wartime activism and strikes, combined with labor’s pride in its contribution to northern victory, caused an increase of worker militancy and organization.

The success of the land-grant college movement was attested by the later development of first-class institutions in many states and world-famous universities at Ithaca, Urbana, Madison, Minneapolis, and Berkeley.

Although these railroads became a source of corruption and of corporate power in politics, most Americans in 1862 viewed government aid as an investment in national unity and economic growth that would benefit all groups in society. This was the philosophy that underlay all three of the land-grant laws of 1862.

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.”

By the 1890s the farmers of the West and South revolted against their “slavery” to an eastern “money power” that was allegedly squeezing their life blood from them.

Attired in an old army coat he had worn in the Mexican War and a broken-visored V.M.I, cadet cap, Jackson constantly sucked lemons to palliate his dyspepsia and refused to season his food with pepper because (he said) it made his left leg ache. A disciplinary martinet, Jackson had tarnished some of the fame won at Manassas by an aborted winter campaign into West Virginia that provoked a near mutiny by some of his troops. A devout Presbyterian, Jackson came across to some colleagues as a religious fanatic. Taciturn, humorless, and secretive, he rarely explained to subordinates the purpose of his orders. His rule of strategy—"always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy"—seemed to apply to his own officers as well.1 Before May 8, 1862, many of his soldiers considered him crazy and called him “Old Tom Fool.” Events during the next month, however, showed them that he was crazy like a fox.

Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell’s corps to chase Jackson was probably a strategic error—perhaps even the colossal blunder that McClellan considered it. But if Union commanders in the Valley had acted with half the energy displayed by Jackson they might well have trapped and crippled Jackson’s army. And even if McDowell’s corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter’s previous record offered little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to capture Richmond.

He was also a superb leader of cavalry, especially in gathering information about enemy positions and movements. 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.

Jackson was probably suffering from what today would be called stress fatigue. Intolerant of weakness in others, he refused to recognize it in himself or to do anything about it—except to collapse into unscheduled naps at crucial times during the Seven Days’ fighting.

The Seven Days’ established a pattern for harder fighting and greater casualties in battles between the Army of Northern Virginia and Army of the Potomac than between any other armies.

The western farm boys and out-doorsmen regarded themselves as tougher soldiers than the effete “paper-collar” soldiers from the Northeast. But in truth the “pasty-faced” clerks and mechanics of the East proved to be more immune to the diseases of camp life and more capable in combat of absorbing and inflicting punishment than western Union soldiers.

Lee probably deserves his reputation as the war’s best tactician, but his success came at great cost.

The incongruity between Lee’s private character as a humane, courteous, reserved, kindly man, the very model of a Christian gentleman, and his daring, aggressive, but costly tactics as a general is one of the most striking contrasts in the history of the war.

One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons.

In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enough to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This was the famous “minié ball” of Civil War rifles.

The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive.

Robbed by the rifle of some of its potency as an offensive weapon, the artillery functioned best on the defensive by firing at attacking infantry with grapeshot and canister (as at Malvern Hill) in the manner of a huge sawed-off shotgun.

Despite the occasional success of head-on tactical assaults such as the Confederate victories at Gaines’ Mill, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga or Union triumphs at Missionary Ridge and Cedar Creek, the defense usually prevailed against frontal attacks. Even when an assault succeeded, it did so at high cost in killed and wounded.

The quest of both sides for victory through tactical assaults in the old manner proved a chimera in the new age of the rifle. The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

The shock of the Seven Days’ and of subsequent battles in Virginia compelled the expansion and modernization of southern general hospitals.

“Sanitary inspectors” from the Commission instructed soldiers in proper camp drainage, placement of latrines, water supply, and cooking. Many soldiers paid little attention, and suffered the consequences. Others benefited by improved health from following this advice.