Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

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 THIS BOOK MAY NOT BE SUPERSEDED IN OUR TIME."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
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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 half-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.