# Book review Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
★★★★☆
I was looking for a single volume academic — yet excitingly written! — overview of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Many historians recommended this Pulitzer Prize winning classic from 1988 as the ideal starting point.
The first 8 chapters covers the growing conflict between abolitionist movements and the slave owners in the South which lead to the secession of the 11 confederate states. Chapter 8 to 28 is a (mostly) chronological narrative of the military campaigns. Some themes like the northern and southern economy, the naval blockade, logistics and military technology. The chapters with military campaigns felt somewhat tedious and repetitive since it requires a lot of geographical knowledge to be able to follow.
The book’s main strength’s are how it explains the stepwise buildup to the conflict due to the unsolvable conflict that slavery posed. McPherson provides an through debunking of the “Lost cause” narrative claiming that the South fought for a “just cause” unrelated to slavery.
Kindle highlights
“Wage slave” was a contradiction in terms, said Lincoln. “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” If a man “continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” The “free labor system,” concluded Lincoln, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” It was precisely the lack of this hope, energy, and progress in the slave South that made the United States a House Divided.
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The continual expansion of the plantation economy to new frontiers uprooted many slaves who left behind family members as they trekked westward. Recent studies of slave marriages have found that about one-fourth of them were broken by owners or heirs who sold or moved husband or wife apart from the other.44 The sale of young children apart from parents, while not the normal pattern, also occurred with alarming frequency.
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People on both sides began pointing with pride or alarm to certain quantitative differences between North and South. From 1800 to 1860 the proportion of the northern labor force in agriculture had dropped from 70 to 40 percent while the southern proportion had remained constant at 80 percent. Only one-tenth of southerners lived in what the census classified as urban areas, compared with one-fourth of northerners. Seven-eighths of the immigrants settled in free states. Among antebellum men prominent enough to be later chronicled in the Dictionary of American Biography, the military profession claimed twice the percentage of southerners as northerners, while the ratio was reversed for men distinguished in literature, art, medicine, and education. In business the proportion of Yankees was three times as great, and among engineers and inventors it was six times as large.47 Nearly twice the percentage of northern youth attended school. Almost half of the southern people (including slaves) were illiterate, compared to 6 percent of residents of free states.
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James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any other president in American history. During his one-term administration the country expanded by two-thirds with the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the seizure of all Mexican provinces north of 31
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Like the war, Manifest Destiny was mainly a Democratic doctrine. Since the day when Thomas Jefferson overcame Federalist opposition to the purchase of Louisiana, Democrats had pressed for the expansion of American institutions across the whole of North America whether the residents—Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians—wanted them or not. When God crowned American arms with success in the Revolution, vouchsafed a Democratic congressman in 1845, He had not “designed that the original States should be the only abode of liberty on earth. On the contrary, He only designed them as the great center from which civilization, religion, and liberty should radiate and radiate until the whole continent shall bask in their blessing.” “Yes, more, more, more!” echoed John L. O’Sullivan, inventor of the phrase Manifest Destiny. “More . . . till our national destiny is fulfilled and . . . the whole boundless continent is ours.”
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Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a “slave power conspiracy” to expand the peculiar institution. Was not President Polk a slaveholder? Had he not been elected on a platform of enlarging slave territory by annexing Texas?
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The trickle of migrants to California during the previous decade became a flood in the great gold rush of ‘49, soon chronicled in song and story and ultimately transmuted into miles of Hollywood celluloid. Some eighty thousand of these Forty-niners actually reached California during that first year. Thousands of others died on the way, many from a cholera epidemic. A few of the Forty-niners struck it rich; but toil, hardship, and disappointment became the lot of most. Yet still they came, until by the census year of 1850 California had a larger population than Delaware or Florida. The territory’s quest to become the thirty-first state sparked a renewed sectional crisis back East.
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On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress. This irony resulted from the Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842).
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After running serially in an antislavery newspaper for nine months, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out as a book in the spring of 1852. Within a year it sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone—comparable to at least three million today. The novel enjoyed equal popularity in Britain and was translated into several foreign languages. Within a decade it had sold more than two million copies in the United States, making it the best seller of all time in proportion to population.
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During the previous decade, population growth had been 20 percent greater in the free states than in the slave states. Lack of economic opportunity seemed to account for this ominous fact. Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa, while seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were available and competition with slave labor nonexistent. The North appeared to be racing ahead of the South in crucial indices of economic development. In 1850 only 14 percent of the canal mileage ran through slave states. In 1840 the South had possessed 44 percent of the country’s railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of northern construction had dropped the southern share to 26 percent.25 Worse still were data on industrial production. With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840. More alarming, nearly half of this industrial capital was located in the four border states whose commitment to southern rights was shaky.
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Competing with free blacks at the bottom of the social order, Irish Americans were intensely anti-Negro and frequently rioted against black people in northern cities. In 1846 a solid Irish vote had helped defeat a referendum to grant equal voting rights to blacks in New York state. “No other class of our citizens was so zealous, so unanimous in its hostility to Equal Suffrage without regard to color,” commented the New York Tribune bitterly. “ ‘Would you have your daughter marry a naygur?’ was their standing flout at the champions of democracy irrespective of race and color.”
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Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, “I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. 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.”
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One of Shannon’s first responsibilities was to enforce a slave code enacted by the legislature that imposed a fine and imprisonment for expressing opinions against slavery, authorized the death penalty for encouraging slave revolts or helping slaves to escape, required all voters to take an oath to uphold these laws, and retroactively legalized the border ruffian ballots by requiring no prior residence in Kansas in order to vote.6 Free-soil Kansans—who by the fall of 1855 outnumbered bona fide proslavery settlers—had no intention of obeying these laws or of recognizing the “bogus legislature” that had passed them. Northern settlers armed themselves with new Sharps breechloading rifles sent from New England. Free soilers organized politically and called a convention to meet at Topeka in October. They drew up a free-state constitution and called elections for a new legislature and governor. Proslavery voters of course boycotted these elections. By January 1856 Kansas had two territorial governments: the official one at Lecompton and an unofficial one at Topeka representing a majority of actual residents.
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Taney’s opinion took up first the question whether Dred Scott, as a black man, was a citizen with the right to sue in federal courts. Taney devoted more space to this matter than to anything else. Why he did so is puzzling, for in the public mind this was the least important issue in the case. But southern whites viewed free blacks as an anomaly and a threat to the stability of slavery; Taney’s own state of Maryland contained the largest free Negro population of any state. The chief justice’s apparent purpose in negating U.S. citizenship for blacks, wrote Fehrenbacher, was “to launch a sweeping counterattack on the antislavery movement and . . . to meet every threat to southern stability by separating the Negro race absolutely from the federal Constitution and all the rights that it bestowed.” To do so, however, he had to juggle history, law, and logic in “a gross perversion of the facts.”8 Negroes had not been part of the “sovereign people” who made the Constitution, Taney ruled; they were not included in the “all men” whom the Declaration of Independence proclaimed “created equal.” After all, the author of that Declaration and many of the signers owned slaves, and for them to have regarded members of the enslaved race as potential citizens would have been “utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted.” For that matter, wrote Taney, at the time the Constitution was adopted Negroes “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”
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The Fifth Amendment protected persons from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process; slavery was no different from other property, and a ban on slavery was therefore an unconstitutional deprivation of property.
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Most northern states had earlier granted slaveowners the right of transit or temporary sojourn with their slaves. But by the 1850s all except New Jersey and Illinois had laws on the books offering freedom to any slave brought by a master within their borders.
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The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860. During the effort to pass the homestead bill in 1859, Republicans tangled with Democrats over another measure that would also become an issue in 1860—the annexation of Cuba. Manifest Destiny was a cause that united most Democrats across sectional lines. Whatever they thought of slavery in Kansas, they agreed on the desirability of annexing Cuba with its 400,000 slaves.
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1859 At the same time they hoped to bring the homestead bill, already passed by the House, to a vote. Democrats refused to allow this unless Republicans permitted a vote on Cuba. The question, said the irreverent Ben Wade of Ohio, was “shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless?”
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A caste system as well as a form of labor, slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict. However poor and illiterate some whites may have been, they were still white. If the fear of “nigger equality” caused most of the northern working class to abhor Republicans even where blacks constituted only 2 or 3 percent of the population, this fear operated at much higher intensity where the proportion of blacks was tenfold greater.
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He had been born in a log cabin. In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln’s managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From then on, Lincoln the railsplitter became the symbol of frontier, farm, opportunity, hard work, rags to riches, and other components of the American dream embodied in the Republican self-image. Finally, Lincoln was from a state and region crucial to Republican chances, particularly if Douglas as expected became the nominee of northern Democrats.
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The election of 1860 was unique in the history of American politics. The campaign resolved itself into two separate contests: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North; Breckinridge vs. Bell in the South. Republicans did not even have a ticket in ten southern states, where their speakers would have been greeted with a coat of tar and feathers—or worse—if they had dared to appear. In the remaining five slave states—all in the upper South—Lincoln received 4 percent of the popular votes, mostly from antislavery Germans in St. Louis and vicinity. Breckinridge fared a little better in the North, where he won 5 percent of the popular votes, enough to deny California and Oregon to Douglas. Lincoln carried these states by a plurality and all other free states except New Jersey by a majority of the popular vote.
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Most southern whites could agree that “democratic liberty exists solely because we have black slaves” whose presence “promotes equality among the free.” Hence “freedom is not possible without slavery.”
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Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to pre-empt. This happened because most northerners refused to condone disunion. On that matter, if on little else, the outgoing and incoming presidents of the United States agreed.
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War had finally come to Kentucky. And here more than anywhere else it was literally a brothers’ war. Four grandsons of Henry Clay fought for the Confederacy and three others for the Union. One of Senator John J. Crittenden’s sons became a general in the Union army and the other a general in the Confederate army. The Kentucky-born wife of the president of the United States had four brothers and three brothers-in-law fighting for the South—one of them a captain killed at Baton Rouge and another a general killed at Chickamauga. Kentucky regiments fought each other on several battlefields; in the battle of Atlanta, a Kentucky Breckinridge fighting for the Yankees captured his rebel brother.
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A concern for northern unity underlay this decision to keep a low profile on the slavery issue. Lincoln had won less than half of the popular vote in the Union states (including the border states) in 1860. Some of those who had voted for him, as well as all who had voted for his opponents, would have refused to countenance an antislavery war in 1861. By the same token, an explicit avowal that the defense of slavery was a primary Confederate war aim might have proven more divisive than unifying in the South. Both sides, therefore, shoved slavery under the rug as they concentrated their energies on mobilizing eager citizen soldiers and devising strategies to use them.
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State governors officially appointed regimental officers (colonel, lieutenant colonel, and major), but in many regiments these officers were actually elected either by the men of the whole regiment or by the officers of all the companies. In practice, the election of officers was often a pro forma ratification of the role that a prominent planter, lawyer, or other individual had taken in recruiting a company or a regiment. Sometimes a wealthy man also paid for the uniforms and equipment of a unit he had recruited. Wade Hampton of South Carolina, reputed to be the richest planter in the South, enlisted a “legion” (a regiment-size combination of infantry, cavalry, and artillery) that he armed and equipped at his own expense—and of which, not coincidentally, he became colonel.
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The Quartermaster Bureau furnished clothing manufacturers with a series of graduated standard measurements for uniforms. This introduced a concept of “sizes” that was applied to men’s civilian clothing after the war.
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Lincoln was particularly concerned to nurture Democratic support for the war, so he commissioned a large number of prominent Democrats as generals—among them Benjamin F. Butler, Daniel E. Sickles, John A. McClernand, and John A. Logan.
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In both armies the proportion of officers killed in action was about 15 percent higher than the proportion of enlisted men killed. Generals suffered the highest combat casualties; their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates’.
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Instead of invading the South, Scott proposed to “envelop” it with a blockade by sea and a fleet of gunboats supported by soldiers along the Mississippi. Thus sealed off from the world, the rebels would suffocate and the government “could bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.”
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A rebellion sustained by slavery in defense of slavery could be suppressed only by moving against slavery. As Frederick Douglass expressed this conviction: “To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it. . . . Fire must be met with water. . . . War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”
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Northern newspapers picked up the contraband of war phrase and thereafter the slaves who came into Union lines were known as contrabands. The administration, after some hesitation, approved Butler’s policy. By July nearly a thousand contrabands had rejoined the Union at Fortress Monroe. Their legal status was ambiguous. Butler decided to clarify it by addressing pointed questions to the War Department. In a letter of July 30 which soon appeared in the newspapers, he asked Secretary of War Cameron: “Are these men, women, and children, slaves? Are they free? . . . What has been the effect of the rebellion and a state of war upon [their] status? . . . If property, do they not become the property of the salvors? But we, their salvors, do not need and will not hold such property . . . has not, therefore, all proprietary relation ceased?”
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By April 1862 every Atlantic coast harbor of importance except Charleston and Wilmington (N.C.) was in Union hands or closed to blockade runners. Because of this, and because of the increasing number of Union warships, the blockade tightened considerably during the first half of 1862.
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Eight thousand trips were made through the blockade during four years of war,11 but more than twenty thousand vessels had cleared into or out of southern ports during the four prewar years. The blockade runners were built for speed, not capacity, and when pursued they sometimes jettisoned part of their cargo. The blockade reduced the South’s seaborne trade to less than a third of normal. And of course the Confederacy’s needs for all kinds of supplies were much greater than the peacetime norm.
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Charleston was one of the principal ports for blockade runners because they were shut out of the other ports; and inflation so eroded the Confederate dollar that by March 1863 it required ten such dollars to buy what one had bought two years earlier. Indeed, the blockade was one of the causes of the ruinous inflation that reduced the Confederate dollar to one percent of its original value by the end of the war.
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Cotton was the principal weapon of southern foreign policy. Britain imported three-quarters of its cotton from the American South.
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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.
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The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks. Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon, because its accuracy and the reliability of shells at long range were poor, and the guns could no longer advance with the infantry toward enemy lines, for marksmen could pick off the cannoneers and especially the horses at distances up to half a mile. Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. Officers on both sides soon began to stay off horseback when possible and to wear a private’s uniform with only a sewn-on shoulder patch to designate their rank. The old-fashioned cavalry charge against infantry, already obsolescent, became obsolete in the face of rifles that could knock down horses long before their riders got within saber or pistol range. The Civil War hastened the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics in which the horse was mainly a means of transportation rather than a weapon in its own right.
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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.
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many of them contracted one of the three principal killer diseases of the war: diarrhea/dysentery, typhoid, or pneumonia. As they marched southward in summer campaigns, many of them caught the fourth most prevalent mortal disease: malaria. A good many Union occupation troops in southern cities as well as Confederate soldiers camped near other cities—especially Richmond—experienced another soldiers’ malady, venereal disease, of which there were about as many reported cases as of measles, mumps, and tonsilitis combined.
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could not foresee the profound irony of Lee’s achievement. If McClellan’s campaign had succeeded, the war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. 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.
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By the beginning of 1862 the impetus of war had evolved three shifting and overlapping Republican factions on the slavery question. The most dynamic and clearcut faction were the radicals, who accepted the abolitionist argument that emancipation could be achieved by exercise of the belligerent power to confiscate enemy property. On the other wing of the party a smaller number of conservatives hoped for the ultimate demise of bondage but preferred to see this happen by the voluntary action of slave states coupled with colonization abroad of the freed slaves. In the middle were the moderates, led by Lincoln, who shared the radicals’ moral aversion to slavery but feared the racial consequences of wholesale emancipation.
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While northern soldiers had no love for slavery, most of them had no love for slaves either. They fought for Union and against treason; only a minority in 1862 felt any interest in fighting for black freedom. Rare was the soldier who shared the sentiments of a Wisconsin private: “I have no heart in this war if the slaves cannot be free.” More common was the conviction of a New York soldier that “we must first conquer & then its time enough to talk about the dam’d niggers.” While some Yanks treated contrabands with a degree of equity or benevolence, the more typical response was indifference, contempt, or cruelty.
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Liverpool was a center of pro-southern sentiment. The city “was made by the slave trade,” observed a caustic American diplomat, “and the sons of those who acquired fortunes in the traffic, now instinctively side with the rebelling slave-drivers.”1 Liverpool shipyards built numerous blockade runners. In March 1862 the first warship that the southern agent James D. Bulloch had ordered was also nearing completion.
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In this view, 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.
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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. “The dissolution of the Union [means] that men now before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.”
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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.
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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.” A Democratic private in the Army of the Potomac whose previous letters had railed against abolitionists and blacks now expressed support for “putting away any institution if by so doing it will help put down the rebellion, for I hold that nothing should stand in the way of the Union—niggers, nor anything else.” General-in-Chief Halleck explained his position to Grant: “The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation. . . . We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”
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But Hooker proved a popular choice with the men. He took immediate steps to cashier corrupt quartermasters, improve the food, clean up the camps and hospitals, grant furloughs, and instill unit pride by creating insignia badges for each corps.
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Rather it was “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops [and] to encourage desertions. . . . He was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends.” The president than asked a rhetorical question that turned out to be the most powerful—and famous—part of his argument. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy.”
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If a man’s name was drawn in this lottery, one of several things would happen to him next—the least likely of which was induction into the army. Of the men chosen in the four drafts, more than one-fifth (161,000 of 776,000) “failed to report”—fleeing instead to the West, to Canada, or to the woods. Of those who did report to the provost marshal’s office, one-eighth were sent home because of already filled quotas. Three-fifths of the remaining 522,000 were exempted for physical or mental disability or because they convinced the inducting officer that they were the sole means of support for a widow, an orphan sibling, a motherless child, or an indigent parent. Unlike the Confederate Congress, Union lawmakers allowed no occupational exemptions. But a draftee who passed the physical exam and could not claim any dependent relatives still had two options: he could hire a substitute, which exempted him from this and any future draft; or he could pay a commutation fee of $300, which exempted him from this draft but not necessarily the next one.21 Of the 207,000 men who were drafted, 87,000 paid the commutation fee and 74,000 furnished substitutes, leaving only 46,000 who went personally into the army. The pool of substitutes was furnished by eighteen- and nineteen-year olds and by immigrants who had not filed for citizenship, who were not liable to conscription.
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The price of commutation amounted to almost a year’s wages for an unskilled laborer. “The rich are exempt!” proclaimed an Iowa editor.
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Democratic newspapers hammered at the theme that the draft would force white working men to fight for the freedom of blacks who would come north and take away their jobs.
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The capture of Vicksburg was the most important northern strategic victory of the war, perhaps meriting Grant’s later assertion that “the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”
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The triumph at Chancellorsville, however, came at great cost. The Confederates suffered 13,000 casualties, 22 percent of their force (the Union figures were 17,000 and 15 percent). The most grievous loss was Jackson, who had done so much to make the victory possible. And the boost that the battle gave to southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.
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So Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. But Ewell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial “ifs” of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years.
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Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.
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In half an hour it was all over. Of the 14,000 Confederates who had gone forward, scarcely half returned. Pickett’s own division lost two-thirds of its men; his three brigadiers and all thirteen colonels were killed or wounded.
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Davis. “No one,” wrote Lee, “is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others?”
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This apotheosis of Shaw and his men took place just after Democratic rioters in New York had lynched black people and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum. Few Republican newspapers failed to point the moral: black men who fought for the Union deserved more respect than white men who fought against it.
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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. Linking abolition and Union, Republicans managed to blunt the edge of Democratic racism in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York (where legislative elections were held in 1863). The party carried two-thirds of the legislative districts in New York. In Ohio it buried Vallandigham under a victory margin of 100,000 votes, winning an unprecedented 61 percent of the ballots. Especially gratifying to Republicans was their 94 percent share of the absentee soldier vote. Efforts to persuade soldiers to “vote as they shot” paid off in a big way.
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Lincoln never deviated from the theory that secession was illegal and southern states therefore remained in the Union. Rebels had temporarily taken over their governments; the task of reconstruction was to return “loyal” officials to power. At one level all Republicans subscribed to this theory of indestructible states in an indissoluble Union; to believe otherwise would stultify their war aims. But at another level, no one could deny that the southern states had gone out of the Union and had formed a new government with all the attributes of a nation. A few radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens boldly insisted that they had therefore ceased to exist as legal states.
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Black men could vote in only six northern states, and the possibility of them doing so elsewhere was no more popular among many northern voters than the prospect of emancipation had been a year or two earlier.
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The best solution for this problem was a national constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. All Republicans including Lincoln united in favor of this in 1864. But the problem persisted. The Senate quickly mustered the necessary two-thirds majority for a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but Democratic gains in the 1862 congressional elections prevented similar success in the House, where a 93–65 vote for the Amendment on June 15 fell thirteen votes short of success.
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A Louisiana moderate probably spoke with accuracy when he said that scarcely one in twenty white men favored suffrage even for literate, cultured Creoles—much less for newly freed field hands.
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The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as the pursuit of political goals by other means. Confederate strategy in 1864 certainly conformed to this definition.
— location: 12083 ^ref-62960
Because the South invested so much effort in defending the city, Atlanta also became a symbol of resistance and nationality second only to Richmond. As the Petersburg front stabilized to trench warfare, concern in the Confederate capital shifted, to Georgia, where mobile warfare resumed as the rains ceased.
— location: 12567 ^ref-52959
“War is war, and not popularity-seeking,” wrote Sherman in pursuance of his career as Georgia’s most unpopular visitor.
— location: 12626 ^ref-54884
The northerners informally reiterated the same terms Lincoln had stated in his reconstruction proclamation the previous December: reunion, abolition, and amnesty. Davis scorned these terms. “Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals,” he declared. “We have committed no crime. . . . At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. . . . We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that, or extermination, we will have. . . . You may ‘emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”
— location: 12842 ^ref-14206
Lincoln was “Abe the Widowmaker” who had sent half a million white men to their graves in this insane war to free the slaves because he “loves his country less, and the negro more.”
— location: 13193 ^ref-6000
A stockade camp of sixteen acres designed for 10,000 prisoners, Andersonville soon became overcrowded with captives from Sherman’s army as well from the eastern theater. It was enlarged to twenty-six acres, in which 33,000 men were packed by August 1864—an average of thirty-four square feet per man—without shade in a Deep South summer and with no shelter except what they could rig from sticks, tent flies, blankets, and odd bits of cloth. (By way of comparison, the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, generally considered the worst northern prison, provided barracks for the maximum of 9,600 captives living inside a forty-acre enclosure—an average of 180 square feet per man.) During some weeks in the summer of 1864 more than a hundred prisoners died every day in Andersonville. Altogether 13,000 of the 45,000 men imprisoned there died of disease, exposure, or malnutrition.
— location: 13293 ^ref-58063
This position is untenable. Grant expressed his opinion more than a year after the exchange cartel had broken down over the Negro prisoner question. And an opinion was precisely what it was; Grant did not order exchanges prohibited for purposes of attrition, and the evidence indicates that if the Confederates had conceded on the issue of ex-slaves the exchanges would have resumed. In October 1864, General Lee proposed an informal exchange of prisoners captured in recent fighting on the Richmond-Petersburg front. Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged “the same as white soldiers.” If this had been done, it might have provided a precedent to break the impasse that had by then penned up more than a hundred thousand men in POW camps. But Lee replied that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Grant thereupon closed the correspondence with the words that because his “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers,” Lee’s refusal to grant such rights to former slaves “induces me to decline making the exchanges you ask.”
— location: 13350 ^ref-24808
Two-thirds of assessed southern wealth vanished in the war. The wreckage of the southern economy caused the 1860s to become the decade of least economic growth in American history before the 1930s. It also produced a wrenching redistribution of wealth and income between North and South. 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.21 In 1860 the southern states had contained 30 percent of the national wealth; in 1870, only 12 percent. Per capita commodity output (including agriculture) was almost equal in North and South in 1860; by 1870 the North’s per capita output was 56 percent greater. In 1860 the average per capita income of southerners including slaves was about two-thirds of the northern average; after the war southern income dropped to less than two-fifths of the northern average and did not rise above that level for the rest of the nineteenth century. Such were the economic consequences of the South’s bid for independence.
— location: 13641 ^ref-50349
The idea of freeing slaves who performed faithfully was based on the false assumption “that the condition of freedom is so much better for the slave than servitude, that it may be bestowed upon him as a reward.” This was “a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South . . . that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave.”
— location: 13884 ^ref-19558
In time even a good many southerners came to agree with the sentiments of Woodrow Wilson (a native of Virginia who lived four years of his childhood in wartime Georgia) expressed in 1880 when he was a law student at the University of Virginia: “Because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy. . . . Conceive of this Union divided into two separate and independent sovereignties! . . . Slavery was enervating our Southern society. . . . [Nevertheless] I recognize and pay loving tribute to the virtues of the leaders of secession . . . the righteousness of the cause which they thought they were promoting—and to the immortal courage of the soldiers of the Confederacy.”1 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.
— location: 14219 ^ref-58387
The North had a potential manpower superiority of more than three to one (counting only white men) and Union armed forces had an actual superiority of two to one during most of the war.
— location: 14232 ^ref-14347
To illustrate their argument that the South could have kept fighting for years longer if it had tried harder, four historians have cited the instructive example of Paraguay. That tiny country carried on a war for six years (1865–71) against an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay whose combined population outnumbered Paraguay’s by nearly thirty to one. Almost every male from twelve to sixty fought in the Paraguayan army; the country lost 56 percent of its total population and 80 percent of its men of military age in the war. Indeed, “the Confederate war effort seems feeble by comparison,” for a mere 5 percent of the South’s white people and 25 percent of the white males of military age were killed.
— location: 14246 ^ref-28210
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.
— location: 14310 ^ref-43562
Metadata
- Author: James M. McPherson
- ASIN: B002NXOQLQ
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQLQ
- Kindle link