Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

In an attempt to ensure that emancipation became part of reconstruction, therefore, the Wade-Davis bill33 passed by Congress on July 2 included a provision outlawing slavery in Confederate states as a condition of their return to the Union.

Here in a nutshell was the problem that would preoccupy the South for generations after the war. How “temporary” would this suggested system of apprenticeship turn out to be? What kind of education would freed slaves receive? How long would their status as a “laboring, landless, and homeless class” persist? These were questions that could not be fully resolved until after the war—if then. But they had already emerged in nascent form in the army’s administration of contraband affairs in the occupied South.

The quality of supervision of contraband labor by northern superintendents, Yankee lessees, and southern planters ranged from a benign to a brutal paternalism, prefiguring the spectrum of labor relations after the war.

Nevertheless a fear persisted among some Republicans that a residue of slavery might survive in any peace settlement negotiated by Lincoln, so they considered abolition by statute vital.

No Confederate state (except perhaps Tennessee) could meet these conditions; the real purpose of the Wade-Davis bill was to postpone reconstruction until the war was won. Lincoln by contrast wanted to initiate reconstruction immediately in order to convert lukewarm Confederates into unionists as a means of winning the war.42 Lincoln decided to veto the bill.

Lincoln denied the right of Congress to abolish slavery by statute.

The reconstruction issue had become tangled with intraparty political struggles in the Republican presidential campaign of 1864. The Wade-Davis manifesto was part of a movement to replace Lincoln with a candidate more satisfactory to the radical wing of the party.

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.”

If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence.

This “short, round-shouldered man” with “a slightly seedy look,” according to observers in Washington who saw Grant for the first time, nevertheless possessed “a clear blue eye” and “an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

But Grant did not share the belief in Lee’s superhuman qualities that seemed to paralyze so many eastern officers. “I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do,” Grant told the brigadier. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land on our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”

“Our spirits rose,” recalled one veteran who remembered this moment as a turning point in the war. Despite the terrors of the past three days and those to come, “we marched free. The men began to sing.” For the first time in a Virginia campaign the Army of the Potomac stayed on the offensive after its initial battle.

While the available manpower pool in the North was much larger, therefore, Lee could more readily replace his losses with veterans than Grant could during these crucial weeks of May and June.

Grant’s purpose was not a war of attrition—though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to maneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by skillfully matching Grant’s moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn. Although it galled Lee to yield the initiative to an opponent, his defensive strategy exacted two enemy casualties for every one of his own. This was a rate of attrition that might stun northern voters into denying Lincoln re-election and ending the war.

The horrors of this day, added to those of Spotsylvania, created something of a Cold Harbor syndrome in the Army of the Potomac.

To have lost Atlanta without a battle would have demoralized the South. And whatever else Hood’s appointment meant, it meant fight.

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

His peace terms remained Union and emancipation. The president fully anticipated defeat in November on this platform. “I am going to be beaten,” he told an army officer, “and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.”

Lincoln expected George B. McClellan to be the next president.

Sherman sent a jaunty wire to Washington: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” The impact of this event cannot be exaggerated. Cannons boomed 100-gun salutes in northern cities. Newspapers that had bedeviled Sherman for years now praised him as the greatest general since Napoleon.

The news from Atlanta dissolved the movement for a new convention to replace Lincoln.

Sheridan’s performance this day was the most notable example of personal battlefield leadership in the war. A veteran of the 6th Corps recalled: “Such a scene as his presence and such emotion as it awoke cannot be realized but once in a century.”

The war of raid and ambush in Missouri seemed often to have little relation to the larger conflict of which it was a part. But the hit-and-run tactics of the guerrillas, who numbered only a few thousand, tied down tens of thousands of Union soldiers and militia who might otherwise have fought elsewhere.

For all their stridency, Democrats appear to have profited little from the race issue in this election. For most undecided voters, the success or failure of the war was more salient than the possibility of blacks marrying their sisters. Republicans were far more successful in pinning the label of traitor on Democrats than the latter were in pinning the label of miscegenationist on Republicans.

The relatively few prisoners captured in 1861 imposed no great strain on either side.

As Lincoln sadly told Frederick Douglass, “if once begun, there was no telling where [retaliation] would end.” Execution of innocent southern prisoners—or even guilty ones—would produce Confederate retaliation against northern prisoners in a never-ending vicious cycle. In the final analysis, concluded the Union exchange commissioner, these cases “can only be effectually reached by a successful prosecution of the war.” After all, “the rebellion exists on a question connected with the right or power of the South to hold the colored race in slavery; and the South will only yield this right under military compulsion.” Thus “the loyal people of the United States [must] prosecute this war with all the energy that God has given them.”

Here was a bold experiment in democracy: allowing fighting men to vote in what amounted to a referendum on whether they should continue fighting.

Contemporaries interpreted the election of 1864 as a triumph for Lincoln’s policy of compelling the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy.

“If I turn back now, the whole effect of my campaign will be lost,” Sherman insisted. But if I “move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea . . . instead of being on the defensive, I would be on the offensive.”

Like Lincoln, he believed in a hard war and a soft peace. “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.” Until then, though, “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

In truth, nothing could stop the bluecoats’ relentless pace of a dozen miles a day. For most northern soldiers the march became a frolic, a moving feast in which they “foraged liberally on the country” and destroyed everything of conceivable military value—along with much else—that they did not consume. “This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned,” wrote one officer on the second day out of Atlanta.

Confederate deserters and stragglers from Wheeler’s cavalry were perhaps even worse. Southern newspapers complained of “the destructive lawlessness” of Wheeler’s troopers. “I do not think the Yankees are any worse than our own army,” said a southern soldier. They “steal and plunder indiscriminately regardless of sex.”

An Alabama-born major on Sherman’s staff censured the vandalism committed by bummers. But he recognized that only a thin line separated such plundering from the destruction of enemy resources and morale necessary to win the war.

In the contrasting impact of the war on the northern and southern economies could be read not only the final outcome of the war but also the future economic health of those regions.

As measured by the census, southern agricultural and manufacturing capital declined by 46 percent between 1860 and 1870, while northern capital increased by 50 percent.

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.

In any event, the Freedmen’s Bureau represented an unprecedented extension of the federal government into matters of social welfare and labor relations—to meet unprecedented problems produced by the emancipation of four million slaves and the building of a new society on the ashes of the old.

As Jefferson Davis worshipped at St. Paul’s Church in Richmond this balmy Sunday, a messenger tiptoed down the aisle and gave him a telegram. It was from Lee: Richmond must be given up. Turning pale, the president left the church without a word. But parishioners read the message on his face, and the news spread quickly through the city.

As he shook hands with Grant’s military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker’s dark features and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker responded, “We are all Americans.”

These enemies in many a bloody battle ended the war not with shame on one side and exultation on the other but with a soldier’s “mutual salutation and farewell.”

Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not formidable.

One critical distinction between Union and Confederacy was the institutionalization of obstruction in the Democratic party in the North, compelling the Republicans to close ranks in support of war policies to overcome and ultimately to discredit the opposition, while the South had no such institutionalized political structure to mobilize support and vanquish resistance.

Most attempts to explain southern defeat or northern victory lack the dimension of contingency—the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently. Four major turning points defined the eventual outcome. The first came in the summer of 1862, when the counter-offensives of Jackson and Lee in Virginia and Bragg and Kirby Smith in the West arrested the momentum of a seemingly imminent Union victory. This assured a prolongation and intensification of the conflict and created the potential for Confederate success, which appeared imminent before each of the next three turning points. The first of these occurred in the fall of 1862, when battles at Antietam and Perryville threw back Confederate invasions, forestalled European mediation and recognition of the Confederacy, perhaps prevented a Democratic victory in the northern elections of 1862 that might have inhibited the government’s ability to carry on the war, and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation which enlarged the scope and purpose of the conflict. The third critical point came in the summer and fall of 1863 when Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turned the tide toward ultimate northern victory. One more reversal of that tide seemed possible in the summer of 1864 when appalling Union casualties and apparent lack of progress especially in Virginia brought the North to the brink of peace negotiations and the election of a Democratic president. But the...

Northern victory and southern defeat in the war cannot be understood apart from the contingency that hung over every campaign, every battle, every election, every decision during the war. This phenomenon of contingency can best be presented in a narrative format—a format this book has tried to provide.

But certain large consequences of the war seem clear. Secession and slavery were killed, never to be revived during the century and a quarter since Appomattox. These results signified a broader transformation of American society and polity punctuated if not alone achieved by the war. Before 1861 the two words “United States” were generally rendered as a plural noun: “the United States are a republic.” The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun. The “Union” also became the nation, and Americans now rarely speak of their Union except in an historical sense. Lincoln’s wartime speeches betokened this transition.

The old federal republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average citizen except through the post-office gave way to a more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states.

This change in the federal balance paralleled a radical shift of political power from South to North. During the first seventy-two years of the republic down to 1861 a slaveholding resident of one of the states that joined the Confederacy had been President of the United States for forty-nine of those years—more than two-thirds of the time. In Congress, twenty-three of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty-four of the presidents pro tem of the Senate had been southerners. The Supreme Court always had a southern majority; twenty of the thirty-five justices to 1861 had been appointed from slave states. After the war a century passed before a resident of an ex-Confederate state was elected president. For half a century none of the speakers of the House or presidents pro tem of the Senate came from the South, and only five of the twenty-six Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were southerners.

the South remained bound by traditional values and networks of family, kinship, hierarchy, and patriarchy. The North—along with a few countries of northwestern Europe—hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861. Thus when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to protect their constitutional liberties against the perceived northern threat to overthrow them. 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. Indeed, the Black Republican party appeared to the eyes of many southerners as “essentially a revolutionary party” composed of “a motley throng of Sans culottes . . . Infidels and freelovers, interspers...

From the war sprang the great flood that caused the stream of American history to surge into a new channel and transferred the burden of exceptionalism from North to South.

This new concept of positive liberty permanently transformed the U.S. Constitution, starting with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery and granted equal civil and political rights to the freed slaves. Instead of the “shall nots” of earlier constitutional amendments, these three contained the sentence: “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article.”