Battle Cry of Freedom Read online

  Battle Cry of Freedom

  "McPherson handles all . . . with a beautifully organized, compelling narrative and prose whose occasional leap into modern ebullience SHOULD CAPTIVATE A NEW GENERATION OF CIVIL WAR READERS."

  Chicago Tribune

  "THIS IS AN EPIC STORY TOLD IN EPIC STYLE, written in clear, luminous prose. . . . a zesty, meaty intellectual feast that will nourish and satisfy the reader."

  The Houston Post

  "Exhaustively researched, written with skill and assurance. . . . THIS BOOK MAY NOT BE SUPERSEDED IN OUR TIME."

  Newsday

  "ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON [THE] SUBJECT. . . . McPherson combines fine scholarship with a clear writing style and a sense for dramatic narrative."

  The Grand Rapids Press

  "BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO WHAT IT ALL MEANS. . . . McPherson weaves together a story that makes the legends and the ideologies seem like fresh material, worthy of fresh thinking."

  Richmond Times-Dispatch

  Other books by James M. McPherson

  The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction

  The Negro's Civil War

  Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War

  Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (with others)

  The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP

  Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (coeditor)

  Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction

  BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

  The Civil War Era

  JAMES M. McPHERSON

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  Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press

  First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1988

  First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2003

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  www.oup.com

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McPherson, James M.

  Battle cry freedom.

  (The Oxford history of the United States; v. 6)

  Bibliography: p. Includes index

  ISBN: 978-0-19-503863-7 / 978-0-19-516895-2 pbk

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.

  2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865.

  I. Title.

  II. Series.

  E173.094 vol. 6 [E470]

  973.7'3 87-11045

  9 8

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Vann and Willie

  and to the

  memory of

  Glenn and Bill

  Who introduced me to the world

  of history and academia in the

  good old days at Hopkins

  BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

  The original words and music of this sprightly song were written in the summer of 1862 by George F. Root, one of the North's leading Civil War composers. So catchy was the tune that southern composer H. L. Schreiner and lyricist W. H. Barnes adapted it for the Confederacy. The different versions became popular on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Reproduced here are Verse 3 and the Chorus of each version.

  Preface

  Both sides in the American Civil War professed to be fighting for freedom. The South, said Jefferson Davis in 1863, was "forced to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and State sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires." But if the Confederacy succeeded in this endeavor, insisted Abraham Lincoln, it would destroy the Union "conceived in Liberty" by those revolutionary sires as "the last, best hope" for the preservation of republican freedoms in the world. "We must settle this question now," said Lincoln in 1861, "whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose."

  Northern publicists ridiculed the Confederacy's claim to fight for freedom. "Their motto," declared poet and editor William Cullen Bryant, "is not liberty, but slavery." But the North did not at first fight to free the slaves. "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists," said Lincoln early in the conflict. The Union Congress overwhelmingly endorsed this position in July 1861. Within a year, however, both Lincoln and Congress decided to make emancipation of slaves in Confederate states a Union war policy. By the time of the Gettysburg Address, in November 1863, the North was fighting for a "new birth of freedom" to transform the Constitution written by the founding fathers, under which the United States had become the world's largest slaveholding country, into a charter of emancipation for a republic where, as the northern version of "The Battle Cry of Freedom" put it, "Not a man shall be a slave."

  The multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war, constitute a central theme of this book. That same crucible fused the several states bound loosely in a federal Union under a weak central government into a new Nation forged by the fires of a war in which more Americans lost their lives than in all of the country's other wars combined.

  Americans of the Civil War generation lived through an experience in which time and consciousness took on new dimensions. "These are fearfully critical, anxious days, in which the destinies of the continent for centuries will be decided," wrote one contemporary in a sentence typical of countless others that occur in Civil War diaries and letters. "The excitement of the war, & interest in its incidents, have absorbed everything else. We think and talk of nothing else," wrote Virginia's fire-eater Edmund Ruffin in August 1861, a remark echoed three days later by the Yankee sage Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The war . . . has assumed such huge proportions that it threatens to engulf us all—no preoccupation can exclude it, & no hermitage hide us." The conflict "crowded into a few years the emotions of a lifetime," wrote a northern civilian in 1865. After Gettysburg, General George Meade told his wife that during the past ten days "I have lived as much as in the last thirty years." From faraway London, where he served his father as a private secretary at the American legation, young Henry Adams wondered "whether any of us will ever be able to live contented in times of peace and laziness. Our generation has been stirred up from its lowest layers and there is that in its history which will stamp every member of it until we are all in our graves. We cannot be commonplace. . . . One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life." In 1882 Samuel Clemens found that the Civil War remained at the center of southern consciousness: it was "what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it." This was scarcely surprising, wrote Twain, for the war had "uprooted institutions that were centuries old . . . transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations."

  Five generations have passed, and that war is still with us. Hundreds of Civil War Round Tables and Lincoln Associations flourish today. Every year thousands of Americans dress up in blue or gray uniforms and take up their replica Springfield muskets to re-enact Civil War battles. A h
alf-dozen popular and professional history magazines continue to chronicle every conceivable aspect of the war. Hundreds of books about the conflict pour off the presses every year, adding to the more than 50,000 titles on the subject that make the Civil War by a large margin the most written-about event in American history. Some of these books—especially multi-volume series on the Civil War era—have achieved the status of classics: James Ford Rhodes's seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Compromise of 1877; Allan Nevins's four-volume Ordeal of the Union from 1847 to 1861, and four more on The War for the Union; David M. Potter's 600-page study The Impending Crisis 1848–1861; Bruce Catton's three volumes on the Army of the Potomac (Mr. Lincoln's Army; Glory Road; and A Stillness at Appomattox), his three additional volumes, The Centennial History of the Civil War, plus two volumes on Ulysses S. Grant's Civil War career; Douglas Southall Freeman's magnificent four-volume biography R.E. Lee and his additional three-volume Lee's Lieutenants; and Shelby Foote's The Civil War, three engrossing volumes totaling nearly three thousand pages.

  Alongside these monumental studies the present effort to compress the war and its causes into a single volume seems modest indeed. Nevertheless, I have tried to integrate the political and military events of this era with important social and economic developments to form a seamless web synthesizing up-to-date scholarship with my own research and interpretations. Except for Chapter 1, which traces the contours of American society and economy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, I have chosen a narrative framework to tell my story and point its moral. This choice proceeds not only from the overall design of the Oxford History but also from my own convictions about how best to write the history of these years of successive crises, rapid changes, dramatic events, and dynamic transformations. A topical or thematic approach could not do justice to this dynamism, this complex relationship of cause and effect, this intensity of experience, especially during the four years of war when developments in several spheres occurred almost simultaneously and impinged on each other so powerfully and immediately as to give participants the sense of living a lifetime in a year.

  As an example: the simultaneous Confederate invasions of Maryland and Kentucky in the late summer of 1862 occurred in the context of intense diplomatic activity leading toward possible European intervention in the war, of Lincoln's decision to issue an emancipation proclamation, of anti-black and anti-draft riots and martial law in the North, and of hopes by Peace Democrats to capture control of the Union Congress in the fall elections. Each of these events directly affected the others; none can be understood apart from the whole. A topical or thematic approach that treated military events, diplomacy, slavery and emancipation, anti-war dissent and civil liberties, and northern politics in separate chapters, instead of weaving them together as I have attempted to do here, would leave the reader uninformed about how and why the battle of Antietam was so crucial to the outcome of all these other developments.

  The importance of Antietam and of several other battles in deciding "the destinies of the continent for centuries" also justifies the space given to military campaigns in this book. Most of the things that we consider important in this era of American history—the fate of slavery, the structure of society in both North and South, the direction of the American economy, the destiny of competing nationalisms in North and South, the definition of freedom, the very survival of the United States—rested on the shoulders of those weary men in blue and gray who fought it out during four years of ferocity unmatched in the Western world between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.

  The most pleasant task in writing a book is the expression of gratitude to people and institutions that have helped the author. The resources of the Firestone Library at Princeton University and of the Henry E. Hun-tington Library in San Marino, California, provided most of the research material on which this book is based. A year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where part of this book was written, supplemented an earlier sabbatical year at the Huntington to give me the time and opportunity for reading, research, and writing about the Civil War era. These two rich and rewarding years in California were financed in part by Princeton University, in part by fellowships funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in part by the Huntington Library and the Behavioral Sciences Center. To all of them I am especially indebted for the support that made the writing of Battle Cry of Freedom possible. To Gardner Lindzey, Margaret Amara, and the staff of the Behavioral Sciences Center who helped me gain access to the riches of the Stanford and Berkeley libraries I also express my appreciation. The staff of the Manuscripts Collection of the Library of Congress, and Richard Sommers as Archivist-Historian at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, extended me every courtesy and assistance during research visits to these superb repositories. I also thank the staffs of the photographs and prints divisions at the libraries where I obtained photographs for the illustrations in this book. To Armstead Robinson I express belated thanks for permission to quote material from the manuscript of his forthcoming book Bitter Fruits of Bondage.

  George Fredrickson read an early draft of this book and offered valuable suggestions for improvement, as did my colleague Allan Kulikoff who kindly read Chapters 1 and 20. Sheldon Meyer, Senior Vice President of Oxford University Press, has been in on the project from the beginning and has shepherded it through to conclusion with an expert helping hand. Managing Editor Leona Capeless at Oxford refined the manuscript with her careful editing and cheerful encouragement. To Vann Woodward I owe more than I can express. Teacher, friend, scholar, editor, he has guided my growth as an historian for nearly thirty years, offered the highest example of craftmanship, and done more than anyone else to bring this book to fruition. To Willie Lee Rose also I owe much as a friend and fellow graduate student at Johns Hopkins who did more than anyone else except Vann to introduce me to the mysteries of the guild.

  Without the love and companionship of my wife Patricia this volume could never have come into existence. Not only did she help with some of the research and read early drafts with a sharp eye for confused or overblown rhetoric; she also joined me in the tiresome but essential task of correcting proofs, and suggested the title. Finally to Jenny, and to Dahlia and her friends, I express warm appreciation for helping me understand the potential as well as problems of Civil War cavalry.

  J. M. M.

  Princeton

  June 1987

  Contents

  Editor's Introduction

  Prologue: From the Halls of Montezuma

  1. The United States at Midcentury

  2. Mexico Will Poison Us

  3. An Empire for Slavery

  4. Slavery, Rum, and Romanism

  5. The Crime Against Kansas

  6. Mudsills and Greasy Mechanics for A. Lincoln

  7. The Revolution of 1860

  8. The Counterrevolution of 1861

  9. Facing Both Ways: The Upper South's Dilemma

  10. Amateurs Go to War

  11. Farewell to the Ninety Days' War

  12. Blockade and Beachhead: The Salt-Water War, 1861–1862

  13. The River War in 1862

  14. The Sinews of War

  15. Billy Yank's Chickahominy Blues

  16. We Must Free the Slaves or Be Ourselves Subdued

  17. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

  18. John Bull's Virginia Reel

  19. Three Rivers in Winter, 1862–1863

  20. Fire in the Rear

  21. Long Remember: The Summer of '63

  22. Johnny Reb's Chattanooga Blues

  23. When This Cruel War Is Over

  24. If It Takes All Summer

  25. After Four Years of Failure

  26. We Are Going To Be Wiped Off the Earth

  27. South Carolina Must Be Destroyed

  28. We Are All Americans

  Epilogue: To the Shoals of Victory

  Afterword
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  Abbreviated Titles

  Bibliographic Note

  Index

  Illustrations

  Maps

  The Southern Economy

  The Election of 1860 and Southern Secession

  The Battle of Bull Run (Manassas)

  The Kentucky-Tennessee Theater, Winter-Spring 1862

  The Battle of Shiloh, April 6–7, 1862

  Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May–June 1862

  The Peninsula Campaign, April–May 1862

  The Seven Days' Battles

  Confederate Raids and Invasions in the West, Summer—Fall 1862

  The Battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run)

  Antietam, September 17, 1862

  Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862

  Union Efforts to Get at Vicksburg, Winter 1862–63

  Stones River (Murfreesboro), Dec. 31, 1862–Jan. 2, 1863

  The Vicksburg Campaign, April–July 1863

  Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863

  Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863

  The Road to Chickamauga, June–Sept. 1863

  Chattanooga, Oct.–Nov. 1863

  The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5–12, 1864

  Spotsylvania to Petersburg

  The Campaign for Atlanta, May—Sept. 1864

  Hood's Tennessee Campaign, Oct.–Dec. 1864

  Editor's Introduction

  No period of American history makes greater demands on the historian than that of the Civil War. To meet this extraordinary challenge all the classic accounts have resorted to multivolume solutions. The one by Allan Nevins, for example, required eight large volumes, and another has used that many without attempting to be comprehensive. One of the remarkable aspects of the present achievement is that the author has been able to cover the period so completely and admirably within the covers of one volume. It is a large volume, to be sure, and will probably be the longest of the ten in The Oxford History of the United States. That it should, despite its size, cover the shortest period assigned calls for some comment on the part of the editor.