Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Sherman's successor, Don Carlos Buell, reluctantly yielded to administration pressure and ordered Thomas to renew his advance. A Union-loyal Virginian, large and imposing in appearance, methodical and deliberate in his movements, Thomas led his 4,000-man army over almost nonexistent mountain roads in winter rains and sleet. On January 19, 1862, a Confederate army of equal size attacked Thomas at Logan's Cross Roads near Mill Springs, Kentucky, but was repulsed and then routed by a Union counterattack. Despite his victory, Thomas could advance no farther in the harsh mountain winter. By spring, Union advances in western and central Tennessee would divert all efforts to that quarter. Ironically, while northern armies "liberated" the Confederate portion of Tennessee they left the unionist portion to fend for itself—to Lincoln's chagrin.

  Without northern help, east Tennessee unionists suffered grievously for their loyalty. Confederate troops cracked down after the bridge burnings in November. They declared martial law, executed five bridge-burners, arrested Brownlow and turned his printing office into an arms factory, and imprisoned hundreds of unionists—a much more thorough suppression of dissent than northern forces had carried out in Maryland. Brownlow's genius for self-dramatization turned him into a martyr and an embarrassment to the Confederates, who therefore released and escorted him to Union lines in March 1862.

  Many other east Tennesseeans made individual and group escapes to join the Union army. Even though that army did not occupy east Tennessee until September 1863, more than halfway through the war, 30,000 white Tennesseeans fought for the North—more than from any other Confederate state.

  V

  The actions of the eight upper South states in 1861 had an important but equivocal impact on the outcome of the war. One can begin to measure that impact by noting the possible consequences of what did not happen. If all eight states (or all but Delaware) had seceded, the South might well have won its independence. If all eight had remained in the Union, the Confederacy surely could not have survived as long as it did. As it was, the balance of military manpower from these states favored the South. The estimated 425,000 soldiers they furnished to southern armies comprised half of the total who fought for the Confederacy. These same states furnished some 235,000 white soldiers and eventually 85,000 blacks to the Union armies—together amounting to only 15 percent of the men who fought for the Union.41 Nevertheless,

  41. Data on the number of men who served in the Civil War armies can be no better than estimates. Few reliable records of Confederate enlistments survived the destruction and loss of Confederete archives at the end of the war. Estimates of the number of men who fought for the Confederacy are therefore based on fragmentary evidence. These estimates range from a low of 600,000 men to a high of 1,400,000. The fullest discussion of this matter can be found in Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America 1861–1865 (Boston, 1901), 1–63. After extraordinarily complex calculations, Livermore estimated the number of Confederate soldiers at something over one million. But Livermore was a Union army veteran, with a tendency to overstate the numbers of the enemy he had faced, and some of the assumptions on which he based his calculations are dubious. Perhaps the most balanced discussion of the matter is Edward Channing, A History of the United States, Vol. 6, The War for Southern Independence (New York, 1925), 430–44. Channing estimated that 800,000 men fought for the Confederacy. Another respected Civil War scholar, E. B. Long, has offered an estimate of 750,000 (Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p. 705). Perhaps the firmest evidence on this question is the number of surviving veterans of the Union and Confederate armies counted by the census of 1890. The number of Confederate veterans at that date totaled 42 percent of the number of living Union veterans. Applying this ratio to the generally accepted estimate of 2,100,000 Union soldiers and sailors gives a total of 882,000 Confederate soldiers and sailors. Since a higher proportion of southerners were killed in the war, the actual total may have been higher. In any case, it seems safe to estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 850,000 to 900,000 men fought for the Confederacy. The proportion of these from the upper South was derived from a variety of primary and secondary sources for those states, and on extrapolation from the number of white men of military age in these states counted by the 1860 census.

  Data for the number of Union soldiers cited in this paragraph and elsewhere in this book are based on the full records for each state maintained by the War Department. Nevertheless, the figures for white Union soldiers must also be estimates. The War Department kept records of enlistments, which must be adjusted downward to avoid double (sometimes even triple) counting of men who re-enlisted. This adjustment is not necessary for black soldiers, who were not permitted to enlist before late 1862, so their three-year terms did not expire before the end of the war.

  the ability of the North to mobilize this much manpower from slave states gave an important impetus to the Union war effort. And the strategic importance of the rivers, railroads, and mountains of the border states (including West Virginia) can hardly be exaggerated. On the other hand, guerrilla warfare and the problems of administering sizable regions with populations of doubtful loyalty tied down large numbers of Union troops in the border states.

  The divided allegiance of the upper South complicated the efforts by both sides to define their war aims and to find a strategy for achieving these aims. For while the Union and Confederate governments were contending for the upper South, they were also mobilizing their armed forces and deciding how to use them.

  10

  Amateurs Go to War

  I

  War fever during the months after Sumter overrode sober reflections on the purpose of the fighting. Most people on both sides took for granted the purpose and justice of their cause. Yankees believed that they battled for flag and country. "We must fight now, not because we want to subjugate the South . . . but because we must," declared a Republican newspaper in Indianapolis. "The Nation has been defied. The National Government has been assailed. If either can be done with impunity . . . we are not a Nation, and our Government is a sham." The Chicago Journal proclaimed that the South had "outraged the Constitution, set at defiance all law, and trampled under foot that flag which has been the glorious and consecrated symbol of American Liberty." Nor did northern Democratic editors fall behind their Republican rivals in patriotism. "We were born and bred under the stars and stripes," wrote a Pittsburgh Democrat. Although the South may have had just grievances against Republicans, "when the South becomes an enemy to the American system of government . . . and fires upon the flag . . . our influence goes for that flag, no matter whether a Republican or a Democrat holds it."1

  1. Indianapolis Daily Journal, April 27, 1861, Chicago Daily Journal, April 17, 1861, Pittsburgh Post, April 15, 1861, all quoted from Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 2 vols. (New York, 1942), 814, 808, 739.

  Scholars who have examined thousands of letters and diaries written by Union soldiers found them expressing similar motives; "fighting to maintain the best government on earth" was a common phrase. It was a "grate strugle for the Union, Constitution, and law," wrote a New Jersey soldier. "Our glorious institutions are likely to be destroyed. . . . We will be held responsible before God if we don't do our part in helping to transmit this boon of civil & religious liberty down to succeeding generations." A midwestern recruit enlisted as "a duty I owe to my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government as I shudder to think what is ahead for them if this government should be overthrown." Americans of 1861 felt responsible to their forebears as well as to God and posterity. "I know . . . how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution," wrote a New England private to his wife on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run (Manassas). "I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt."2

  One of Lincoln's qualities of greatness a
s president was his ability to articulate these war aims in pithy prose. "Our popular government has often been called an experiment," Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861. "Two points in it, our people have already settled—the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. . . . This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy . . . can or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes."3

  The flag, the Union, the Constitution, and democracy—all were symbols or abstractions, but nonetheless powerful enough to evoke a willingness to fight and die for them. Southerners also fought for abstractions

  2. Wiley, Billy Yank, 40; New Jersey and midwestern soldiers quoted in Randall Clair Jimerson, "A People Divided: The Civil War Interpreted by Participants," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, pp. 38–39; New England soldier quoted in William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run (Garden City, 1977), 91–92. Two other studies contain numerous quotations from soldiers' letters making the same point: Reid Mitchell, "The Civil War Soldier: Ideology and Experience," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1985; and Earl J. Hess, "Liberty and Self-Control: Republican Values in the Civil War North," Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 1986.

  3. CWL, IV, 439, 426.

  —state sovereignty, the right of secession, the Constitution as they interpreted it, the concept of a southern "nation" different from the American nation whose values had been corrupted by Yankees. "Thank God! we have a country at last," said Mississippian L. Q. C. Lamar in June 1861, a country "to live for, to pray for, to fight for, and if necessary, to die for." "Submission to the yoke of depotism," agreed army recruits from North Carolina and Georgia, would mean "servile subjugation and ruin." Another North Carolinian was "willing to give up my life in defence of my Home and Kindred. I had rather be dead than see the Yanks rule this country." He got his wish—at Gettysburg.4

  Although southerners later bridled at the official northern name for the conflict—"The War of the Rebellion"—many of them proudly wore the label of rebel during the war itself. A New Orleans poet wrote these words a month after Sumter:

  Yes, call them rebels! 'tis the name

  Their patriot fathers bore,

  And by such deeds they'll hallow it,

  As they have done before.

  Jefferson Davis said repeatedly that the South was fighting for the same "sacred right of self-government" that the revolutionary fathers had fought for. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Sumter, Davis proclaimed that the Confederacy would "seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone."5

  Both sides believed they were fighting to preserve the heritage of republican liberty; but Davis's last phrase ("all we ask is to be let alone") specified the most immediate, tangible Confederate war aim: defense against invasion. Regarding Union soldiers as vandals bent on plundering the South and liberating the slaves, many southerners literally believed they were fighting to defend home, hearth, wives, and sisters. "Our men must prevail in combat, or lose their property, country, freedom, everything," wrote a southern diarist. "On the other hand, the enemy, in yielding the contest, may retire into their own country, and possess everything they enjoyed before the war began." A young English immigrant to Arkansas enlisted in the army after he was swept off his

  4. Lamar quoted in E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861–1865; (Baton Rouge, 1950), 57; soldiers quoted in Jimerson, "A People Divided," 20, 23.

  5. Coulter, Confederate States, 60; Rowland, Davis, V, 84.

  feet by a recruitment meeting. He later wrote that his southern friends "said they would welcome a bloody grave rather than survive to see the proud foe violating their altars and their hearths." Southern women brought irresistible pressure on men to enlist. "If every man did not hasten to battle, they vowed they would themselves rush out and meet the Yankee vandals. In a land where women are worshipped by the men, such language made them war-mad."6 A Virginian was avid "to be in the front rank of the first brigade that marches against the invading foe who now pollute the sacred soil of my beloved native state with their unholy tread." A Confederate soldier captured early in the war put it more simply. His tattered homespun uniform and even more homespun speech made it clear that he was not a member of the planter class. His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: "I'm fighting because you're down here."7

  For this soldier, as for many other southerners, the war was not about slavery. But without slavery there would have been no Black Republicans to threaten the South's way of life, no special southern civilization to defend against Yankee invasion. This paradox plagued southern efforts to define their war aims. In particular, slavery handicapped Confederate foreign policy. The first southern commissioners to Britain reported in May 1861 that "the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery. . . . The sincerity and universality of this feeling embarrass the Government in dealing with the question of our recognition."8 In their explanations of war aims, therefore, Confederates rarely mentioned slavery except obliquely in reference to northern violations of southern rights. Rather, they portrayed the South as fighting for liberty and self-government—blithely unmindful of Samuel Johnson's piquant question about an earlier generation of American rebels: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

  For reasons of their own most northerners initially agreed that the war had nothing to do with slavery. In his message to the special session

  6. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 181; The Autobiography of Sir Henry M. Stanley, ed. Dorothy Stanley (Boston and London, 1909), 165.

  7. Thomas B. Webber to his mother, June 15, 1861, Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, United States Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.; Foote, Civil War, I, 65.

  8. William L. Yancey and A. Dudley Mann to Robert Toombs, May 21, 1861, in James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, 2 vols. (Nashville, 1906), II, 37.

  of Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln reaffirmed that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists." The Constitution protected slavery in those states; the Lincoln administration fought the war on the theory that secession was unconstitutional and therefore the southern states still lived under the Constitution. Congress concurred. On July 22 and 25 the House and Senate passed similar resolutions sponsored by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee affirming that the United States fought with no intention "of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of [the seceded] States" but only "to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired."9

  Republicans would soon change their minds about this. But in July 1861 even radicals who hoped that the war would destroy slavery voted for the Crittenden-Johnson resolutions (though three radicals voted No and two dozen abstained). Most abolitionists at first also refrained from open criticism of the government's neutral course toward slavery. Assuming that the "death-grapple with the Southern slave oligarchy" must eventually destroy slavery itself, William Lloyd Garrison advised fellow abolitionists in April 1861 to " 'stand still, and see the salvation of God' rather than attempt to add anything to the general commotion."10

  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.

  II

  The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War. The country

  9. CWL, IV, 263, 438–39; CG, 37 Cong., 1 Sess., 222–23, 258–62.

  10. Garrison to Oliver Johnson, April 19, 1861, William Lloyd Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library.

  was less ready for what proved to be its biggest war than for any other war in its history. In early 1861 most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered in seventy-nine frontier outposts west of the Mississippi. Nearly a third of its officers were resigning to go with the South. The War Department slumbered in ancient bureaucratic routine. Most of its clerks, as well as the four previous secretaries of war, had come from the South. All but one of the heads of the eight army bureaus had been in service since the War of 1812. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, seventy-four years old, suffered from dropsy and vertigo, and sometimes fell asleep during conferences. Many able young officers, frustrated by drab routine and cramped opportunities, had left the army for civilian careers. The "Winnebago Chief" reputation of Secretary of War Cameron did not augur well for his capacity to administer with efficiency and honesty the huge new war contracts in the offing.