Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

By the end of the war more than three thousand northern women had served as paid army nurses. In addition, several thousand women continued to work as volunteers and as salaried agents of the Sanitary Commission.

The Civil War marked a milestone in the transformation of nursing from a menial service to a genuine profession.

The Confederate medical service, like everything else in the southern war effort, did wonders with the resources available but did not have enough men, medicines, or ambulances to match the Union effort. This was one reason why about 18 percent of the wounded rebels died of their wounds compared with 14 percent of the wounded Yankees.

Soldiers dreaded hospitals and sometimes went to great lengths to conceal wounds or illnesses in order to avoid them.

Disease reduced the size of most regiments from their initial complement of a thousand men to about half that number before the regiment ever went into battle.

the three principal killer diseases of the war: diarrhea/dysentery, typhoid, or pneumonia.

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.

By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.

The “copperhead” faction of the northern Democratic party opposed the transformation of the Civil War into a total war—a war to destroy the old South instead of to restore the old Union.8 In Republican eyes, opposition to Republican war aims became opposition to the war itself. Opponents therefore became abettors of the rebellion and liable to military arrest. Most such arrests in 1861 had occurred in border states where pro-Confederate sentiment was rife. In 1862, many of the men arrested were northern Democrats whose disaffection from the war had been sparked by Republican adoption that year of emancipation as a war policy.

Peculiar circumstances have given to [abolitionist meetings] an importance that has hitherto not been theirs.”10 These peculiar circumstances were the growing Republican conviction that the fate of the nation could not be separated from the fate of slavery.

A unique combination of history and geography had given New England-born radicals extraordinary power in Congress, especially the Senate.

More important was a new article of war passed on March 13 forbidding army officers to return fugitive slaves to their masters.

While some Yanks treated contrabands with a degree of equity or benevolence, the more typical response was indifference, contempt, or cruelty.

Yet the confiscation act was important as a symbol of what the war was becoming—a war to overturn the southern social order as a means of reconstructing the Union.

Soldiers have pillaged civilian property since the beginning of time. But by midsummer 1862 some of the destruction of southern property had acquired a purposeful, even an ideological dimension. More and more Union soldiers were writing that it was time to take off the “kid gloves” in dealing with “traitors.”

He had decided that emancipation was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union.

The enlisted men did not subscribe to Republican criticisms of McClellan, and many of their officers did not share the Republican vision of an antislavery war. Because of this, Lincoln believed that he could not remove McClellan from command without risking demoralization in the army and a lethal Democratic backlash on the homefront.

Secretary of State Seward approved the proclamation but counseled its postponement “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Otherwise the world might view it “as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” The wisdom of this suggestion “struck me with very great force,” said the president later. He put his proclamation in a drawer to wait for a victory.

In 1862 a third element began to emerge: the Peace Democrats, or copperheads, who would come to stand for reunion through negotiations rather than victory—an impossible dream, and therefore in Republican eyes tantamount to treason because it played into Confederate hands. Southerners pinned great hopes on the copperhead faction, which they considered “large & strong enough, if left to operate constitutionally, to paralyze the war & majority party.”

To meet the racial fears that constituted the party’s Achilles’ heel, many Republicans turned to colonization.

He believed that support for colonization was the best way to defuse much of the anti-emancipation sentiment that might otherwise sink the Republicans in the 1862 elections.

Lincoln’s colonization activities in August 1862 represented one part of his indirect effort to prepare public opinion for emancipation.

“My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” wrote Lincoln in a masterpiece of concise expression. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”40 Here was something for all viewpoints: a reiteration that preservation of the Union remained the purpose of the war, but a hint that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary to accomplish that purpose.

These cavalry raids illustrated the South’s advantage in fighting on the defensive in their own territory. With 2,500 men Forrest and Morgan had immobilized an invading army of forty thousand.

The Yankees did not catch up with the rebels in this respect until 1863, when they finally began to give as good as they got in the war of cavalry raids.

The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, rundown, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.

Less than half of the Union army was engaged in this fighting, while a freak combination of wind and topography (known as acoustic shadow) prevented the right wing and Buell himself from hearing the battle a couple of miles away.

At the same time that Kirby Smith and Bragg moved north from Knoxville and Chattanooga, Jackson and Lee moved north from Richmond. Although the western invasions covered more territory, the eastern fighting as usual produced more casualties. These simultaneous Confederate northward thrusts represented the South’s boldest bid for victory.

The chief result of this battle of Cedar Mountain was to confirm the transfer of operations from the Peninsula to the Rappahannock River halfway between Richmond and Washington.

His greatest achievement had been the construction from green logs and saplings of a trestle 80 feet high and 400 feet long with unskilled soldier labor in less than two weeks. After looking at this bridge, Lincoln said: “I have seen the most remarkable structure that human eyes ever rested upon. That man, Haupt, has built a bridge . . . over which loaded trains are running every hour, and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.”

As an awed contraband put it, “the Yankees can build bridges quicker than the Rebs can burn them down.”

Less than a month earlier the main Union army had been only twenty miles from Richmond. With half as many troops as his two opponents (Pope and McClellan), Lee had shifted the scene to twenty miles from Washington, where the rebels seemed poised for the kill.

But while McClellan “had acted badly in this matter,” said the president, he “has the Army with him. . . . We must use what tools we have. There is no man in the Army who can lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he. . . . If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”

For political as well as military reasons, therefore, Lee started his army splashing across the Potomac fords thirty-five miles above Washington on September 4.

Antietam (called Sharpsburg by the South) was one of the few battles of the war in which both commanders deliberately chose the field and planned their tactics beforehand.

A northern soldier who fought at Antietam gave as good an explanation of behavior in battle as one is likely to find anywhere. “We heard all through the war that the army ‘was eager to be led against the enemy,’ “ he wrote with a nice sense of irony. “It must have been so, for truthful correspondents said so, and editors confirmed it. But when you came to hunt for this particular itch, it was always the next regiment that had it. The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.”

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.

History can at least record Antietam as a strategic Union success. Lee’s invasion of Maryland recoiled more quickly than Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. Nearly one-third of the rebels who marched into Maryland became casualties. When an unwary regimental band struck up “Maryland, My Maryland” after the retreat across the Potomac, men in the ranks hissed and groaned. Seeing the point, the musicians switched to “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” At Whitehall and the White House the battle of Antietam also went down as a northern victory. It frustrated Confederate hopes for British recognition and precipitated the Emancipation Proclamation. The slaughter at Sharpsburg therefore proved to have been one of the war’s great turning points.

The attitude of textile workers toward the American war has been something of a puzzle to historians as well as to contemporaries. Henry Hotze confessed frustration at his failure to win support from this class whose economic self-interest would seem to have favored the South.

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 rhetoric favoring the cause of the Union, according to these historians, was the work of radical intellectuals like Bright or Marx and did not represent the real sentiments of the unemployed operatives.

Much truth also adheres to the notion of British upper-class support for the South—or at least hostility to the North, which amounted to almost the same thing. Well-born Englishmen professed to dislike Yankees as much for their manners as for their dangerous democratic example to the lower orders. Many of the gentry expressed delight at the “immortal smash” of 1861 which demonstrated “the failure of republican institutions in time of pressure.” The Earl of Shrewsbury looked upon “the trial of Democracy and its failure” with pleasure.

One thing upon which Englishmen prided themselves was their role in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade and abolishing slavery in the West Indies. To support a rebellion in behalf of slavery would be un-British.

If the North wanted to succeed in “their struggle [for] the sympathies of Englishmen,” warned a radical newspaper, “they must abolish slavery.”

“Demandez au government anglais s’il ne croit pas le moment venu de reconnaitre le Sud.”

Antietam had, in Charles Francis Adams’s understatement, “done a good deal to restore our drooping credit here.”23 It had done more; by enabling Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation the battle also ensured that Britain would think twice about intervening against a government fighting for freedom as well as Union.

But such remarks missed the point and misunderstood the president’s prerogatives under the Constitution. Lincoln acted under his war powers to seize enemy resources; he had no constitutional power to act against slavery in areas loyal to the United States. The Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation after January 1—if they could win the war. And it also invited the slaves to help them win it. Most antislavery Americans and Britons recognized this.

After January 1, Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation. . . . The [old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas.”

Would the army fight for freedom? From an Indiana colonel came words that could have answered for most soldiers. Few of them were abolitionists, he wrote, but they nevertheless wanted “to destroy everything that in aught gives the rebels strength,” including slavery, so “this army will sustain the emancipation proclamation and enforce it with the bayonet.”

Democrats in Ohio and Illinois took similar ground. Branding the Emancipation Proclamation “another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy,” they asserted that if abolition was “the avowed purpose of the war, the South cannot be subdued and ought not to be subdued. . . . In the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism.”