Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Retrospective accounts of campaigns and battles by participants, first published in Scribner's Magazine two decades after the war and then gathered in four large volumes (available today in an inexpensive reprint edition) are Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1888, reprint ed. Secaucus, N.J., 1982). The official records of military operations, published a generation or more after the war by the U.S. government, are also accessible today in libraries, second-hand bookstores, and reprint editions: War of the Rebellion . . . Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901) and Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, 1894–1922). The Civil War took place at the dawn of the age of photography, and many thousand wet-plate photographs of soldiers, battlefields, political leaders, and other images of the war have survived and can be viewed in modern publications, most of which also include a fine narrative text to accompany the pictures. See especially Francis T. Miller, ed., The Photographic History of the Civil War, 10 vols. (New York, 1911, reprint ed., 1957); and William C. Davis, ed., The Image of War 1861–1865, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1981–84). Another visual aid to understanding Civil War campaigns and battles is maps; the best, with accompanying text, can be found in Vol. I of Vincent J. Esposito, ed., The West Point Atlas of American Wars (New York, 1959). An indispensable reference guide to military operations is E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day. An Almanac 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971). Two essential compilations of the strength, organization, and casualties of Civil War armies are: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Albany, 1880); and Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861–1865 (Boston, 1901).

  Of the many hundreds of excellent narratives of campaigns and battles, biographies of generals and of other military leaders, and studies of particular armies, space allows a listing here of only a few outstanding titles in the latter two categories. Brief biographies of all generals on both sides can be found in Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Gray (Baton Rouge, 1959) and Generals in Blue (Baton Rouge, 1964). One of the true classics of Civil War literature is Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35) which, along with Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1942–44), constitute an exhaustive history of the Army of Northern Virginia. Historian Thomas L. Connelly has been the chief critic of Lee for the limitation of his strategic vision to the Virginia theater and the chief chronicler of the Confederacy's principal western army; see Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York, 1977), Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge, 1967), Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1971), and, with Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge, 1973). A British army officer and historian, G. F. R. Henderson, has contributed an appreciative biography of Stonewall Jackson that is also a fine analysis of Confederate operations in Virginia until Jackson's death: Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1898).

  On the Union side both T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), and Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), are critical of McClellan and appreciative of Grant as strategic leaders. Bruce Catton's superb trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, Mr. Lincoln's Army; Glory Road; and A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1951–53), demonstrates the resilience of these Yankee soldiers despite incompetent leadership and defeat. Two books by a British military expert and historian also offer important insights on Grant's strategic prowess: J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (London, 1929), and Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (London, 1923). The best military biography of Grant is Bruce Catton's two volumes: Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960) and Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969). William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), is less enlightening on Grant's Civil War leadership. The general's activities can be followed in his own words in his superb Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1885); and in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 14 vols. (Carbondale, Ill., 1967–85). For important insights on Sherman, the best place to start is Basil H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (New York, 1929), a shrewd analysis by a British army officer; and Sherman's own Memoirs ofW. T. Sherman, 2 vols. (2nd ed., New York, 1887). For a fascinating modern analysis of Sherman's philosophy and practice of total war, see James Reston, Jr., Sherman and Vietnam (New York, 1985). Other memoirs by Civil War generals of interest for their intrinsic literary merits or their stance on controversial issues include: George B. McClellan, McClellan's Own Story (New York, 1886); Philip H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, 2 vols. (New York, 1888); Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations . . . during the Late War between the States (New York, 1874); James Long-street, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (rev. ed., 1903); and Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (New York, 1879).

  Numerous historians have implicitly or explicitly addressed the question of why the North won the war—or alternatively, why the South lost. Five different answers were forthcoming in an anthology edited by David Donald, Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1960). Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones cite superior northern management of logistical and other resources to explain in How the North Won (Urbana, Ill., 1983); a thesis anticipated by Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (New York, 1962). Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, Ala., 1982), attribute the South's offensive tactics, which bled Confederate armies to death, to cultural factors, while Michael C. C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), cites cultural factors to explain why Union armies almost lost the war in the Virginia theater before importing successful western commanders to apply their strategy in the East. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), are the most recent exponents of the loss of will thesis to explain Confederate defeat.

  Although the existing scholarship on conscription in both South and North is not adequate, good places to begin to study this subject are: Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924); and Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison, 1971). There is a large literature on black soldiers in the war. The pioneering work is Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army (New York, 1956). Mary Frances Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861–1868 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977), measures the impact of black military service on the enactment of postwar equal rights legislation. Robert Durden interweaves an account of the Confederate decision to arm blacks with illustrative documents, in The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 1972); while Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Black Military Experience, Series II of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1982) publishes a large number of documents from army records and provides excellent headnotes and introductions. Civil War prisons and the prisoner exchange question badly need a modern historian; William B. Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930) is the only comprehensive monograph, while Ovid L. Futch's History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville, Fla., 1968) is the most dispassionate study of that impassioned subject.

  Technological innovations produced to meet military needs during the war are the subjects of two studies full of fascinating information: Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Indianapolis, 1956); and M
ilton F. Perry, Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare (Baton Rouge, 1965). The role of railroads is the subject of: George E. Turner, Victory Rode the Rails (Indianapolis, 1953); Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War (New York, 1952); and Robert C. Black, The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1952). Civil War medicine is treated by: Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War (Springfield, Ill., 1968); George W. Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York, 1952); and Horace H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge, 1958). For a basic history of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, see William Q. Maxwell, Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York, 1956). Readers interested in a stimulating interpretation of the Sanitary Commission in the context of wartime transformations in northern attitudes toward other social and cultural issues should consult George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965).

  The foreign relations of both Union and Confederacy have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention; among the most useful studies are: David P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974); Frank L. Owsley and Harriet C. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959); Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925); Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80); and Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970).

  A long-influential study of northern politics during the war was T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, (Madison, 1941), which stressed ideological conflict within the Republican party. For the now-accepted modification of this view, see Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York, 1969), which emphasizes essential Republican agreement in the face of sharp differences with the Democrats. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), shows the shift of power from states to the national government to meet the demands of war. Leonard P. Curry's Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968) is a careful study of legislation that supplemented the war's revolutionary impact in transforming the United States from a decentralized agrarian republic to an industrial nation. For a study of some of the leaders who helped accomplish this result, see Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, 1981).

  The opposition, loyal and otherwise, is analyzed by: Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era (New York, 1977); Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats (Madison, N.J., 1975); Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), which tends to indict the Peace Democrats as disloyal; and in three books by Frank L. Klement, who sometimes protests too much in his attempt to exonerate the copperheads from all such calumnies: The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960); The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970); and Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984). For military arrests and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to squelch anti-war opposition in the North, see: Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (Boston, 1965); James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (rev. ed., Urbana, Ill., 1951); and Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York, 1973). The peace issue in 1864 is treated by Edward C. Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (New York, 1927); while the in-fighting within the Republican party during the initial stages of the election campaign that year is chronicled by William F. Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954). The best single place to go for the history and historiography of Lincoln's assassination is William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana, 1983).

  For the northern homefront, Emerson D. Fite's Social and Economic Conditions in the North (New York, 1910) is still valuable. It should be supplemented by George W. Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Life in the North During the Civil War (Albuquerque, 1966), which reprints numerous contemporary documents. Paul W. Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965), deals with both North and South; while the essays in Ralph Andreano, ed., The Economic Impact of the Civil War (2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1967) and in David Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, eds., Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Greenville, Del. 1965), focus mainly on the North; and Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, 1970), covers only the North.

  Two enlightening books on northern religion during the war are: James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (New Haven, 1978); and Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945). For the role of northern women both on the homefront and in military hospitals, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnett Brigades (New York, 1966); and Agatha Young, Women and the Crisis: Women of the North in the Civil War (New York, 1959). For northern labor, see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967). The class and ethnic tensions that flared into the New York draft riots are analyzed in: Basil L. Lee, Discontent in New York City, 1861–1865 (Washington, 1943); and Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington, Ky., 1974).

  Southern politics during the war have received a great deal of attention. For general histories of the Confederacy, see the volumes by E. Merton Coulter and Emory Thomas cited earlier. Wilfred B. Yearns, The Confederate Congress (Athens, Ga., 1960), provides a narrative history of that institution; while Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer's The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress (Nashville, 1972) offers a quantitative analysis. For the Confederate cabinet, see Rembert Patrick, Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet (Baton Rouge, 1944). Bell Irvin Wiley's The Road to Appomattox (Memphis, 1956) contains a caustic analysis of Jefferson Davis's leadership. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Bayonets, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), documents Davis's attempt to undermine the Lincoln administration. Frank L. Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago, 1925), expresses the theme that the Confederacy died of state's rights; but May S. Ringold, The Role of State Legislatures in the Confederacy (Athens, Ga., 1966) and W. Buck Yearns, ed., The Confederate Governors (Athens, 1984), emphasize the positive role that most legislatures and governors played in the war effort. For the two states in which opposition to the Davis administration was strongest, see John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1963); and T. Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens, 1953). Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith's Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi, 1863–1865 (New York, 1972), studies a region that became semi-autonomous after the fall of Vicksburg.

  Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (New York, 1972), documents anti-war activity and unionism among disaffected whites, especially in the upcountry. Paul D. Escort, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Southern Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978), maintains that the greatest failure of Confederate leadership was its inability to sustain the support of non-slaveholders who increasingly saw the southern cause as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. The theme of yeoman alienation and class tensions is also developed in: Philip S. Paludan, Victims: A True History of the Civil War (Knoxville, 1981); in several good articles published in recent years in the North Carolina Historical Review and the Journal of Southern History; and in many of the books on southern politics cited on pp. 868. A special category of unhappy southerners is treated in Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1964). Another group of "outsiders" is the subject of Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1940). The contribution of women to the southern war effort i
s documented by Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton, The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond, 1936).

  The basic study of the Confederate homefront is Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1944). John C. Schwab, The Confederate States . . . A Financial and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War (New York, 1901), is the encyclopedic treatment of this subject, while Richard C. Todd, Confederate Finance (Athens, Ga., 1954), is more readable. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), treats the hot-house industrialization forced on the South by the war, while Louise B. Hill, State Socialism in the Confederate States of America (Charlottesville, 1936), documents the role of state and Confederate governments in this process. Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (New York, 1933), and Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy (Columbia, S.C., 1952), document the efforts to cope with wartime shortages.

  The drive to make emancipation a northern war aim is chronicled by James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), which also focuses on abolitionist hopes for racial equality as a result of the war. The role of northern blacks in this effort is the subject of: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953); and James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), a collection of primary sources woven together by a narrative. The hostile responses of many northerners to emancipation are chronicled by: V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro in the Civil War (Chicago, 1967); and Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968). The attempts by Republicans to hammer out a reconstruction policy during the war are analyzed in three books by Herman Belz: Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (Ithaca, 1969); A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen's Rights, 1861–1866 (Westport, Conn., 1976); and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York, 1978). Louisiana became a showcase of wartime reconstruction efforts and also a historiographical focus on that subject; see especially Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978); and La Wanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia, S.C., 1981).