Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The price of commutation amounted to almost a year’s wages for an unskilled laborer. “The rich are exempt!” proclaimed an Iowa editor. "Did you ever know aristocratic legislation to so directly point out the poor man as inferior to the rich?” On the face of it, the privileges of commutation and substitution did seem to make the conscription act, in the words of a modern historian, “one of the worst pieces of class legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”24

With shouts of “Down with the rich” and “There goes a $300 man” they attacked well-dressed men who were incautious enough to show themselves on the streets. These hints of class warfare were amplified by assaults on the property of reputed anti-labor employers and the destruction of street-sweeping machines and grain-loading elevators that had automated the jobs of some of the unskilled workers who made up the bulk of the rioters.

Lee seemed unusually excited by the supposed success of the past two days. At the same time, however, he was weakened by a bout with diarrhea and irritated by Stuart’s prolonged absence (Jeb’s tired troopers had finally rejoined the army during the day). In any case, Lee’s judgment was not at its best.

Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.

Lincoln appeared at a White House balcony to tell a crowd of serenaders that this “gigantic Rebellion” whose purpose was to “overthrow the principle that all men are created equal” had been dealt a crippling blow.

Though the war was destined to continue for almost two more bloody years, Gettysburg and Vicksburg proved to have been its crucial turning point.

The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers. “Through the cannon smoke of that dark night,” declared the Atlantic Monthly, “the manhood of the colored race shines before many eyes that would not see.”

“You say you will not fight to free negroes,” continued Lincoln. “Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.” When this war was won, concluded the president, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”27 Lincoln’s letter set the tone for Republicans in the 1863 campaign. Many of them had previously felt defensive about emancipation; now they could put Democrats on the defensive. Opposition to emancipation became opposition to northern victory.

Unhappily for Jefferson Davis, elections for the Confederate Congress took place in the fall of 1863 when southern morale was at low ebb. The Davis administration suffered a more severe rebuke from voters than the Lincoln administration had sustained the previous year in a similar situation.

Worsening inflation and shortages heaped fuel on the fires of political opposition. In

In this atmosphere the congressional elections took place. They produced an increase of openly anti-administration representatives from 26 to 41 (of 106). Twelve of the twenty-six senators in the next Congress were identified with the opposition.

the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission, and many

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.

The Republican party contained several men who in 1860 had considered themselves better qualified for the presidency than the man who won it. In 1864 at least one of them had not changed his opinion: Salmon P. Chase.

The only real contest at the convention was generated by the vice-presidential nomination. The colorless incumbent Hannibal Hamlin would add no strength to the ticket. The attempt to project a Union party image seemed to require the nomination of a War Democrat from a southern state. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee best fitted this bill.

Even staunch Republicans condemned Lincoln’s “blunder” of making emancipation “a fundamental article,” for it “has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief.”

At the same time Lincoln was well aware of a move among some Republicans to call a new convention and nominate another candidate. The motive force of this drive was a belief that Lincoln was a sure loser; but many of its participants were radicals who considered his reconstruction and amnesty policy too soft toward rebels.

These crosscutting pressures during August made Lincoln’s life a hell; no wonder his photographs from this time show an increasing sadness of countenance; no wonder he could never escape that “tired spot” at the center of his being.

“I am going to be beaten,” he told an army officer, “and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” On August 23 he wrote his famous “blind memorandum” and asked cabinet members to endorse it sight unseen: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”

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

A similar process occurred in the Republican party. The news from Atlanta dissolved the movement for a new convention to replace Lincoln. The president was now a victorious leader instead of a discredited loser.

After the war a Union military commission tried and executed its commandant, Henry Wirz, for war crimes—the only such trial to result from the Civil 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.19

The South was losing the war, said Cleburne, because it lacked the North’s manpower and because “slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.” The Emancipation Proclamation had given the enemy a moral cause to justify his drive for conquest, Cleburne continued, had made the slaves his allies, undermined the South’s domestic security, and turned European nations against the Confederacy.

Let us recruit an army of slaves, concluded Cleburne, and “guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy.”

Cleburne’s arguments cut to the heart of a fundamental ambiguity in the Confederacy’s raison d’être. Had secession been a means to the end of preserving slavery? Or was slavery one of the means for preserving the Confederacy, to be sacrificed if it no longer served that purpose?

“We are reduced,” said Davis in February 1865, “to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for or against us.”

The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”

Many southerners apparently preferred to lose the war than to win it with the help of black men. “Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves,” said a Mississippi congressman. It would mean “the poor man . . . reduced to the level of a nigger,”

The Court had been virtually reconstructed by Lincoln’s appointment of five new justices including Chase. The transition from Roger Taney to Chase as leader of the Court was itself the most sweeping judicial metamorphosis in American history.24

it remained to be seen how Court, Congress, and Executive would deal with the consequences of Sherman’s Order No. 15. The army did not wait, however. During the next several months General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist who commanded the Union occupation forces on the South Carolina sea islands, supervised the settlement of 40,000 freed-men on land designated in Sherman’s order. The

Lincoln’s visit to Richmond produced the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war. With an escort of only ten sailors, the president walked the streets while Porter peered nervously at every window for would-be assassins. But the Emancipator was soon surrounded by an impenetrable cordon of black people shouting “Glory to God! Glory! Glory! Glory!” “Bless the Lord! The great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He’s been in my heart four long years. Come to free his children from bondage. Glory, Hallelujah!” Several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real. “I know I am free,” shouted an old woman, “for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.” Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.”33 Among the reporters from northern newspapers who described these events was one whose presence was a potent symbol of the revolution. He was T. Morris Chester, who sat at a desk in the Confederate Capitol drafting his dispatch to the Philadelphia Press. “Richmond has never before presented such a spectacle of jubilee,” he wrote. “What a wonderful change has come over the spirit of Southern dreams.”34 Chester was a black man.

To help bring those former rebels back into the Union, Grant sent three days’ rations for 25,000 men across the lines. This perhaps did something to ease the psychological as well as physical pain of Lee’s soldiers.

Wilson’s words embodied themes that would help reconcile generations of southerners to defeat: their glorious forebears had fought courageously for what they believed was right; perhaps they deserved to win; but in the long run it was a good thing they lost. This Lost Cause mentality took on the proportions of a heroic legend,

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.

After the war a century passed before a resident of an ex-Confederate state was elected president.

Positive liberty in the form of the power of Union armies became the newly dominant American understanding of liberty. Liberty and power were no longer in conflict. As commander in chief of an army of a million men in 1864, Lincoln the shepherd needed every bit of that power to protect the freedom of the black sheep from the slave-holding wolf. 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.

Lincoln understood that secession and war had launched a revolution that changed America forever. Eternal vigilance against the tyrannical power of government remains the price of our negative liberties, to be sure. But it is equally true that the instruments of government power remain necessary to defend the equal justice under law of positive liberty.