Battle Cry of Freedom Quotes

“His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: “I’m fighting because you’re down here.”7”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees.” wrote the correspondent of the London Times from Charleston. The enmity of Greek for Turk was child’s play “compared to the animosity evinced by the ‘gentry’ of South Carolina for the ‘rabble of the North.’ … The State of South Carolina was,’ I am”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The difficult we can do immediately; the impossible will take a little longer.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Lincoln too considered secession the “essence of anarchy.” He branded state sovereignty a “sophism.” “The Union is older than any of the States,” Lincoln asserted, “and, in fact, it created them as States.” The Declaration of Independence transformed the “United Colonies” into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any “free and independent States.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“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.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“And in the final reckoning, American lives lost in the Civil War exceed the total of those lost in all the other wars the country has fought added together, world wars included.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption. The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory. In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status. Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transformed them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers. The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“This was a transformation from what the late Isaiah Berlin described as “Negative Liberty” to “Positive Liberty.”4 The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar. It can be defined as the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. A law requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the freedom to go bareheaded if they wish. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom from. Positive liberty can best be understood as freedom to . It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty, but has a different focus or emphasis. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as a negative liberty—freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he chooses, not because some authority prevents him from doings so but because he cannot read or write anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty—freedom from—but of a positive liberty—freedom to read and write. The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“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.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“As a nation, we began by declaring that ’all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“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.”39”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people literally to dance in the streets. Their fierce gaiety anticipated the celebratory crowds that gathered along the Champs-Elysees and the Unter den Linden and at Pica-dilly Circus in that similarly innocent world of August 1914.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“In cities and factories, the vices of our nature are more fully displayed,” declared James Hammond of South Carolina in 1829, while rural life “promotes a generous hospitality, a high and perfect courtesy, a lofty spirit of independence . . . and all the nobler virtues and heroic traits.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“By the latter part of 1861 the War Department had taken over from the states the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and arming Union soldiers. But this process was marred by inefficiency, profiteering, and corruption. To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called “shoddy.” This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general on items necessary to equip an army of half a million men and to create its support services within a few short months.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Approaching White Oak Swamp from the north, he sent a crew to rebuild the bridge over the creek. When Union artillery and sharpshooters prevented this, Jackson lay down and took a nap.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The Civil War marked a milestone in the transformation of nursing from a menial service to a genuine profession.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North’s leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“A dismayed Robert E. Lee pronounced this law “highly disastrous”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“A prevalent theme in complaints about Grant concerned his drinking. According to one story, Lincoln deflected such charges with humor, telling a delegation of congressmen that he would like to know Grant’s brand of whiskey so he could send some to his other generals.33”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The wit of man,” said Democratic Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, “has never discovered a means by which paper currency can be kept at par value, except by its speedy, cheap, certain convertibility into gold and silver.” If this bill passed, “prices will be inflated . . . incomes will depreciate; the savings of the poor will vanish; the hoardings of the widow will melt away; bonds, mortgages, and notes—everything of fixed value—will lose their value.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Some employers banned drinking on the job and tried even to forbid their workers to drink off the job. For men who considered their thrice-daily tipple a right, this was another mark of slavery.”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863,”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“The Confederate States . . . A Financial and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War (New York, 1901), is”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“We are forced by the necessity of our condition,” they declared, “to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war.” The enemy was “stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. . . . It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us.” Indeed, “we can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor.” It was true, admitted the Jackson Mississippian, that “such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system” and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, “a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race.” But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for “Yankee success is death to the institution . . . so that it is a question of necessity—a question of a choice of evils. . . . We must . . . save ourselves from the rapacious North, WHATEVER THE COST.”2”
― James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era