May's Book: Battle Cry of Freedom

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

History (1988 - 867 pp.)

Battle Cry of Freedom, 32 years after its initial publication, is still widely considered the leading book on the American Civil War. For an academic text, it is gripping. For such a fast read, it is supremely well sourced, drawing from hundreds of primary sources and a wealth of secondary sources.

Fortunately for McPherson and his North American audience, the Civil War may be the best-documented event to ever have such a high percentage of its historiography written in English. It has been reviewed by so many leading professors of American history that I will not attempt to displace their scholarship. Instead, I will highlight a few of the major issues that may entice new readers, surprise old ones, and look at the book from the perspective of 2020. Due to the extensive nature of the material, which I am sadly unable to cover in full in such a short review (my apologies to Battle of Antietam enthusiasts), I am also taking the uncommon (for me) step of adding subheadings.

McPherson's Retelling, 1847-1861

Surprisingly for a book about the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom starts not at Fort Sumter or at the 1860 Presidential election, but in Mexico City in 1847. (3) Manifest Destiny, and with it the Mexican-American War, led to the United States's massive territorial expansion. This expansion brought a minor difficulty and a major difficulty; the minor difficulty was how to outfit and supply ports on the United States's new western coastal state of California,* (49) whereas the major difficulty was whether these new states would be free states or slave states. This major difficulty sets up McPherson's extensive discussion of the America of the 1850s, which is itself crucial to the book for two reasons. One reason is that it was arguably the most disastrous decade in American history, so full of sectarian divisions that civil war seemed inevitable by its end. The other reason is that Battle Cry of Freedom is part of a ten-book series covering all of American history; with so few volumes to cover so much ground, if McPherson had not written such a definitive history of 1850s America, one might not exist.

In the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's stunning 1860 election victory, and the Southern slave states' subsequent secessions,** it becomes easy to forget that those states more or less on the Mason-Dixon Line were in a uniquely poor position: they had enough slaves to be antagonized by abolitionism, but not enough to be willing to fight for the institution. (284) This was the heartland of John Bell's Constitutional Union party, which won Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee; Kentucky would remain in the Union, Tennessee would secede, and Virginia would be rent in two with the independence of West Virginia in 1863. No slave state voted for Lincoln, even the ones who would send troops to die for the Union.

A Long War

Like World War I half a century later, each side thought it would win quickly: "With such confidence in quick success, thoughts of strategy seemed superfluous." (333) In retrospect, that was the only outcome that might have favoured the South.^ David Farragut and Benjamin Butler's capture of New Orleans came early in 1862, Butler leading "unscathed troops" into the city, (420) leading diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who McPherson quotes extensively, to state: "New Orleans gone--and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two?" (422) Popular culture's relative emphasis on Robert E. Lee's march north to Pennsylvania understates just how devastating the Western Theater was to Southern interests, including (as Chesnut implied) cutting Texas off from the rest of the South. Later Southern incursions into Kentucky, for example, would find the local populace so indifferently resistant toward Braxton Bragg's invasion force to the point that he considered his brief military successes in that state pointless. (518) More decisively, occupied Louisiana and Tennessee were permitted to collect votes in the 1864 Presidential election; both states voted for Lincoln, which would have been unthinkable in 1860. Even Lee's laurels he carried into Gettysburg in 1863 were elusive, as his and James Longstreet's^^ defeat there quickly ended the ongoing mediation discussions to have a consortium of European Great Powers resolve the war. (664)

Everything from poor-quality uniforms to disease outbreaks ravaged both sides, but no one was ravaged worse than the Confederacy. The Confederate medical corps, for example, was full of capable people who lacked the resources to heal wounded troops. (485) Similarly, even in Lee's Virginia Theater the Southern soldiers frequently looked so bedraggled, such as during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, the local civilians were appalled at their appearances. Then there was General William Sherman, oft-cited as the inventor of modern total war, whose victory at Atlanta in 1864 and subsequent March to the Sea caused McPherson to note: "'War is war, and not popularity-seeking,' wrote Sherman in pursuance of his career as Georgia's most unwelcome visitor." (755) Philip Sheridan would bring a similar mindset to the Virginia Theater during his Burning of the Shenandoah Valley, as would Ulysses S. Grant in ordering the use of a ground mine in the assault on Petersburg, Virginia, "a tragic fiasco" that resulted in part of the Confederate line plummeting to death in a makeshift sinkhole. (758) Worst of all, perhaps, was the sack of Columbia, South Carolina, by Sherman: "Units from two of Sherman's corps occupied the capital on February 17; by next morning almost half of the city was rubble and ashes." (829)

The Book Itself

There are so many cities, rivers and other locations, with the only maps being extreme closeups focusing on individual hills or plains. Battle Cry of Freedom could have used more maps, especially zoomed-out maps of entire states or even the entire United States of America. Maps of the old South would have been especially useful considering how much of it was destroyed. Regarding one of the war's more prominent examples, Grant's capture of Vicksburg, (map on 632) I have never seen Vicksburg mentioned once outside of a Civil War context; a non-North American might not even realize that Vicksburg is in Mississippi.

Battle Cry of Freedom, already at almost 900 pages (a contender for longest book I've reviewed on here), could have used an expanded epilogue briefly introducing the Reconstruction. Although Battle Cry of Freedom is part of a series, so the Reconstruction is presumably covered in the following book, the end of the book does not even get as far as the infamous barn burning of John Wilkes Booth a mere seventeen days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The Ironclad Oath, first promulgated in 1863, does not appear in the book's index. For a book that starts with an overview of the Mexican-American War, it ends so suddenly the reader is flummoxed by the lack of explanation of what happened in the defining first few months of Reconstruction.

A frequent mention by McPherson, which I have seen echoed by other authors, is the frequent use of the word "conservative" to describe Southern Democrats. This raises the question: what, precisely, were Southern Democrats attempting to conserve? Although Jefferson Davis is quoted once as self-identifying as a conservative, both sides far more frequently referred to themselves as the heirs of the Revolutionary War generation. The comparison between the rapidly industrializing, navally dominant, abolitionist North and the United Kingdom was not lost on Southerners, who called Abraham Lincoln "his Majesty Abraham the First". Northern Democrats accused Lincoln of passing "aristocratic legislation" from which "The rich are exempt!" (italics in original, quoting Robert Sterling's 1974 PhD thesis on Midwestern Civil War draft resistance) for the commutation laws that allowed Northerners to pay a fixed sum of $300 to evade conscription. (602-603)

As always, I give credit to authors for teaching me new words where it is necessary. In the case of McPherson, it is enfilade, "a position of works, troops, etc., making them subject to a sweeping fire from along the length of a line of troops, a trench, a battery, etc." It is effectively the infantry version of a broadside.

The Civil War: A Conflict That Takes Time to Digest

By complete coincidence, I reviewed Ward Moore's 1953 alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee a month ago. It's been a Civil War-inspired spring. Perhaps this is due to my planned trip to Harpers Ferry, cancelled amid coronavirus concerns. Perhaps it is due to the fact that sheltering in place, with all the activities that entails, finally gave me the time necessary to read an 867-page academic tome. May this opportunity for more mountainous reading fare you well.

Ease of Reading: 4

Educational Content: 10




*In an otherwise thorough book, the establishment of the early US Pacific Fleet (Pacific Squadron until 1907) is completely unexplained despite the fleet's critical role in American expansion during this period. Prior to a railway to California or the Panama Canal, how did the US get the necessary manpower, supplies and infrastructure to the Pacific? Ideas from my general knowledge of 19th-century world history ricocheted through my synapses, from a perilous journey around Cape Horn to a purchase agreement with the Russian Empire. Thankfully, this is researchable. As early as 1821, when the Pacific Fleet was founded, some ships did go around Cape Horn, and at least some ships went all the way around the Cape of Good Hope.

**Among McPherson's gifts is a tendency toward being just literary enough to keep the reader interested without drawing too much attention to the form of his prose. I write this alliteration in that spirit.

^Any scenario in which the South wins the Civil War is pure speculation at this point. The most likely discussed scenario is Generals Joseph Johnston, Pierre Beauregard and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson leading a force north from the First Battle of Bull Run up to the poorly defended walls of Washington, D.C., where they could have induced Abraham Lincoln to sign a surrender document acknowledging the independence of the Confederacy. (344-349)

^^I fear I do not give Longstreet enough credit here, as he was one of the Confederacy's finest generals during the war. In Gettysburg in particular, he opposed the disastrous Pickett's Charge, only ordering it due to direct orders from Lee. (656, 662) After the war, Longstreet joined the Republican party, showing a willingness for at least some prominent Southerners to make the best of the restored Union. Nonetheless, if my great sin in discussing this book is not giving enough credit to Confederate generals, I can sleep soundly.