Battle Cry of Freedom

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's [slave's] two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

-- Abraham Lincoln (March 4, 1865 at his second Inauguration)

Review by Michael Bertrand

Reared on community and family pieties about the Civil War, I was shocked when an iconoclastic high school teacher proclaimed that the war was not about slavery at all. It was all economic, something about tariffs, had nothing to do with deep principle. So Great-Grandfather John Hidinger, loyal veteran of Company I of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry and prisoner of war at Belle Isle and Libby prisons, was a fool who sacrificed himself for nothing. Later reading revealed that the North was soaked in racism and that Lincoln himself was far from clean, various unfortunate references in evidence in his voluminous collected works. In the 1850s Lincoln was a proponent of removing the slaves back to Africa, as if the nation had not been built on their backs, more American by lineage and contribution than all but a very few. The Republican platform of 1860 looks excessively moderate in hindsight, balancing opposition to slavery's extension with special insistence on "the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgement exclusively".

McPherson confesses an evolution in his thinking towards Lincoln as his studies progressed, away from an early awareness of those limitations towards increasing appreciation for the man's moral and political stature. The real story is the evolution of the North from 1850 on into a slavery-destroying juggernaut under the leadership of the newly minted Republican Party and the aptly named Abraham Lincoln. That year saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring the federal government to capture and return escaped slaves, proving conclusively to many in the North both the hollowness of the South's States' rights doctrine and the sureness of their grip on the machinery of government. The tragic story unfolds majestically in McPherson's narrative account, Battle Cry of Freedom, taking fully one third of the book to lay the groundwork, most appropriately, since slavery and the regional differences it spawned became central to the American political system as early as the Compromise of 1820. His essays in Drawn with the Sword nicely complement the narrative with penetrating observations. This subject seems to bring out the highest order of historical writing (think of Carl Sandburg or Bruce Catton), and Professor McPherson is up to the task.

The two regions became increasingly out of balance as the 19th century progressed. About equal at the time of the Revolution, they began to diverge as the South staked its future on cotton and slavery, the North on industry based on small-holding agriculture: "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" according to one of the day's battle cries. The South developed a violence-laden system of "honor" common to slave societies: every white citizen must be ready at all times to defend the racial system. Many early abolitionists were Southerners driven from the region by violence. One early incident causing a sensation in the North was the murder of abolitionist editor Eli Lovejoy in southern Illinois in 1837 just across the river from slave-holding Missouri. Lovejoy had been warned off many times and had his presses destroyed twice before being murdered.

Early Republicans saw these disputes above all as free speech issues: the characteristic American method of solution was being routinely subverted by violence and ultimatums. Consider John Quincy Adams' prescient battle in the House of Representatives, after his presidency, for the House merely to accept petitions against slavery from Massachusetts citizens in accordance with the First Amendment's right to petition. Many Southerners considered the existence of such a petition on the table of the national legislature an affront. There can be no questioning of the South's racial adjustment, and herein lies the nub of their States Rights philosophy. South Carolinian John Calhoun practiced this art for years, threatening to secede as early as 1832, when fellow South Carolinian Andrew Jackson backed him and his associates down (see McPherson's essay "The War of Southern Aggression"). The trend reached an apex when South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, incensed by Massachusetts' Senator Charles Sumner's anti-slavery stance and imputations against his cousin, assaulted Sumner on the Senate floor, nearly beating him to death. "This is how we treat slaves; stand in favor of the slave and we will treat you the same" was the clear message. Brooks was lionized throughout the South.

North and South developed diametrically opposed economies and labor systems, the Peculiar Institution forming the central axis of the Southern system. The Northern Free Soil movement, a founding stream of the Republican Party, held slavery to be antithetical to white labor. The slave system devalued manual labor by relegating it to slaves. The Southern grandes built a society with hardly a place for the independent small farmer or mechanic, virtually a feudal aristocracy where a few large planters dominated political as well as economic life. White labor feared the competition of slavery, a powerful incentive for blocking its expansion and one not necessarily exclusive of racist attitudes. Nativist sentiment was strong among nascent Republicans, but ultimately the North accommodated the waves of new immigrants who swelled the population and helped build the economy. Not so the South, where large slave plantations dominated agriculture and even town craft workers were often slaves.

The South still aspired to control the country in the 1850s as if by birthright, proud heirs of the great Virginia political aristocracy of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison (from Drawn with the Sword, p 64):

From 1789 to 1861 a Southern slaveholder was president of the United States two-thirds of the time, and two- thirds of the speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had also been Southerners. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices appointed during that half century were Southerners.

Half the Senate was guaranteed to the South by a series of arduously crafted compromises going back to 1820, designed to balance free and slave states. And they were over- represented in the House because of the Constitution's three- fifths rule (three-fifths of the slaves were counted for purposes of representation). Southerners artfully deployed their political power, exercised through the Democratic Party, in defense of the cherished institution, but having exhausted untold western lands with destructive cotton agriculture by the 1850s, they needed to expand slavery into the new territories: grow or die. But this time the North, many times larger than the South in population and economy, refused to yield to the "Slave Power". The Democratic party fractured, their progressive "Barnburners" joining the new Republicans together with most Whigs and Free Soil men, leading to Lincoln's election in 1860.

This the South could not countenance, and secession followed throughout the winter of 1860-61, four long months before Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the time prescribed under the old Constitution. Lincoln waited still longer, not unlike Roosevelt in 1941, maneuvering the South into firing the first shot on April 12 at Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. The results too were similar to Pearl Harbor, an electric current of released tension and rage erupting throughout the North, as whole communities spontaneously organized military units. Neither side was ready for war or had any inkling of the bloodbath to follow, one exception being William Tecumseh Sherman, later the energetic avenging destroyer, who at first descended into debilitating hopeless despair.

McPherson's work helps greatly in understanding the military aspects of the war, interminably discussed down through the ages. The South's task was defensive in every respect, to maintain their new government, while the North's job was to destroy it. Happily for Southern military fortunes, the region produced one of the great defensemen of all time, Robert E. Lee, more than a match for the pathetic McClellans and McDowells sent against him early in the war (McPherson argues provokingly that Lee's military genius ultimately worked against the South, whose ante- bellum institutions were annihilated in direct proportion to the war's length). The South was all guts, their economy collapsing the day the war started. They were proud, the true Americans, inheritors of a great polity and martial tradition, defenders of liberty now led into battle by "fire-eating" Southern patriots.

The North got a slow start born of irresolution and poor generalship. Only the South's limited offensive capability saved Washington from capture, Jubal Early's cavalry sending bullets over Abe's head on the city's outskirts quite late in the war. While stalemate developed in the East, the remarkable Ulysses S. Grant rose in the West. Even the name conjures up images of ancient Cincinnatus and his legions of citizen warriors, steadfast in republican discipline. McPherson's lovely essay, "Grant's Final Victory", recounts the General's composure in writing his memoirs at the very end, in great pain, to save his family from economic ruin. Grant wrote as he fought, a latter day Caesar, though only a man who "knew what was in my mind, and ... wished to express it clearly, so that there could be no mistaking it" in his own words. Think of the scene the first night at Shiloh where Grant, who was caught off guard by the battle, sits propped up under a tree in the rain, in pain from an injury, rather than shelter in a nearby field hospital, "the sight ... more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire." This during a respite from the carnage, producing fields of dead that could be walked across without touching the ground, blue and gray entwined in death, an image of hell to jar an atheist. The rebels' master of defense was matched by this Northern wizard of offensive warfare, always doing the unexpected, relentlessly driving for the enemy's jugular, usually prevailing. Grant was so instinctively an offensive strategist that most of his errors derived from forgetting that, on occasion, the enemy might attack him.

The South hoped to wear down the North's resolve and came near doing so on several occasions. Once was in the summer of 1864 when Lincoln, beset by "Copperheads" (peace Democrats, literally poisonous snakes), despaired of winning the fall presidential and congressional elections. Northern backbone was stiffened that time by the valiance of the 54th Massachusetts, the black unit whose attack on Fort Wagner was portrayed in the movie Glory. The attack failed militarily, but succeeded in shaming the racist Copperheads into silence and helped turn the political tide (McPherson has a great account of all this, and an essay on Glory as well).

Though the war did not begin as a war against slavery as such, it became one. The South could mobilize nearly all of its military-age male population to fight because the slaves were available to do the work at home. So Lincoln conceived, then promulgated, the Emancipation Proclamation as a measure to deny this resource, slave labor, to the enemy. Far from abolishing slavery, slaves in Union states like Kentucky were left in chains. But the process thus unleashed led inexorably to full emancipation, as former slaves became the Union's ally, hundreds of thousands not only fleeing their Southern masters but joining the Union army. By war's end, many Union partisans felt a debt of honor to black allies, so that by 1865 Lincoln was demanding of states formerly in rebellion that they pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery as a condition for readmission to the Union (the alternative being continued military occupation and federal control).

Such an amendment would have been inconceivable only four years before, the term "Abolitionist" being akin to the latter-day "Communist", even throughout the North. The cauldron of war caused this change, long years of bitterness and death hardening resolve. McPherson writes of the advent of total war against the South as she refused to submit, not the wholesale massacres of the Mongols or Nazis (better examples of that being the mass executions of captured black soldiers condoned by official Confederate policy), but mass destruction of property to break the will to continue waging war. Like any modern war, political aspects and the contention of wills plays a large part. Perhaps the valiant George Pickett, who led the rebel charge at Gettysburg, best explained the Southern defeat: "I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it."

The Civil War continues to haunt Americans because so many were involved over issues so momentous: our continued existence as a union, and slavery, which touched every aspect of American economic, political, and civil life. It is impossible to exaggerate the extent of the disaster for the South, both its central institution and special place at the head of American civilization destroyed forever. She remained defiant, head unbowed in defeat, but marked by the memory of failure and a siege mentality. The Civil War amendments were subverted as if John Calhoun had nullified them, even slavery halfway restored through a system of total economic domination known as peonage. Deprived of Lincoln's consummate political skill, Reconstruction was an uphill battle, violently overthrown after the removal of federal troops in 1877. The one- party model was adopted to rule out any possibility of normal competitive bidding for black political support, saddling not only the region but the entire nation with the results. The three-fifths rule was abolished, only to have all blacks counted for representation throughout the South in spite of their total disfranchisement and powerlessness there. The cycle of self- destructive racism, the proudest and dearest legacy it sometimes seems, continued fully a century before a new abolitionist movement arose to finally push through the maximum program of full equality under the law, fittingly supported and turned into legislation by the first truly Southern president since ante-bellum days, Lyndon Johnson.

A true revolution unfolded during this period, deeper in some ways than 1776 and a fulfillment of it -- certainly Lincoln viewed it that way by Gettysburg. The great prophet, perhaps the finest political leader this country has produced, was cut down midway in his work, seven weeks into his second term. "Now he belongs to the ages", Secretary of War Stanton said at his death. Would that he belonged to us just a little longer.

-- June 27, 1998