Reflection on The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson

            The Battle Cry of Freedom is about as good an introduction to the Civil War as I’ve ever seen. I read it as I watched the Ken Burns documentary and I think that it’s one of the most interesting events in American history. The Civil War is so captivating because of the buildup to it over the years after the revolution, the moral component of the end of slavery, the political test of whether a democracy could exist on such a massive scale, the personalities of the characters involved like General Lee, President Lincoln, and the various officers and generals such as JEP Stuart, Longstreet, Grant, McClellan, and more, and finally because of the abundance of material available to scholars. This includes letters, newspapers, photographs, diary entries, and more that give life to the people caught up in a world-shaking event. Every American who lived through the war would have agreed that it changed the country profoundly, especially for the slaves who gained their freedom. I’m going to try to answer four questions about the causes of the war, the various advantages and disadvantages each side had before and during the war, and the results of the war.

What caused the Civil War?

               The direct cause of the Civil War was the question of whether or not to add new states to the Union as free or slave states. From the birth of the United States, it had always expanded westwards. From independence onwards, the primary economic and political divide in the country was the geographical divide between the slaveholding Southern states and the free Northern states. As the country expanded westward, states were added in such a way to maintain that balance. This worked until the United States won the Mexican War and hit the Atlantic Ocean. These “southern” states such as New Mexico and Arizona were unfit for plantation farming and therefore would not host many slaves. California was admitted as a free state in exchange for the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced Northerners to help Southern slaveowners to catch their “property.” Southerners felt that if they did not expand slavery, they would lose political power. There were calls to annex countries in the Caribbean and Central America to annex into the slave empire. Violence broke out in Kansas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the states’ residents to vote on whether to have slavery or not. People moved their and fought between North and South. With the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, South Carolina seceded, refusing to accept a Northern President, even though he had promised not to interfere with slavery. They were soon joined by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

Going into the war, what were the relative advantages and disadvantages the Union and Confederacy had?

               The South had two main advantages before the war started. The first was the initiative. Southerners wanted to secede and made it happen, pushing with unity to defend slavery and the states’ rights top slavery. They felt the North encroaching on their political power and they already felt the North dominant over them economically, which gave them a unity of feeling paranoid about Northern power. In the North on the other hand, there was not so much unity. The Northeast/New England was divided from the Old Northwest culturally and filled with immigrants. Perhaps this is why the Republicans were able to coexist with a smaller Democratic party during the war, largely filled with Westerners and Catholic immigrants. This meant that early in the war, despite having a lower population, the South was able to mobilize an equivalent force to the Union, which would slowly but surely dwarf the Southern numbers of soldiers. The second advantage was that the South didn’t need to conquer any territory. All that Jefferson Davis needed was for the North to feel that conquering the South was pointless and too difficult so that they would enter into negotiations. At the beginning of secession, some Southerners didn’t even think that there would be a war.

The North had crucial advantages over the South before the war started. The first and by far the most important was a powerful, diversified economy. “Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—more than twice that region's proportion of the free population,” writes author James McPherson. The North counted on more factories, more railroad lines, more educated people, and more industrial capacity.  The Confederacy had 1/9 the industrial capacity of the Union. The North in 1860 was producing 97 percent of the country’s firearms, 94 percent of the cloth, 93 percent of pig iron, and 90 percent of boots and shoes. Meanwhile, the South relied on cotton exports, which mainly went to Northern states and Europe, but were almost completely blocked off during the war, crippling the Southern economy. The South was also at a disadvantage when it came to the slavery issue, as only a very small proportion of the people were slaveowners. The North’s more egalitarian society would help to motivate troops. Finally, the North had more people. Northern white men outnumbered southern white men 3 to 1. Southerners felt confident that one Southerner could beat ten Yankees, but they quickly learned that the Yankees were just as tough as them.

During the war, what advantages and disadvantages did each side have?

               The South had four advantages, mainly evident in the early days of the war, until the defeat at Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg on July 4^th, 1863. They were better generals, a slow and equivocal Northern response, a political advantage in recruiting states to secede, and the fact that Europe wanted to see the Union split. All of these served the South well, especially as the war dragged on into 1863. The South’s superior generals had successfully held off Union attacks in the West and began to advance into Union territory in the East, their military advantage overcoming a weaker economy and fewer people. The slow and confused Northern response gave the states more time to prepare and gave power to those in the North who wanted to appease the South or make peace. Similarly, the North was still attempting to bring the South back in peacefully as well as trying to ensure that more states didn’t secede, especially Maryland and Kentucky, both of which the Union retained. Finally, Louis Napoleon III and the government of Great Britain hoped that the Union would fail, as the United States was becoming a giant country. However, things hit a turning point with Union military successes in the summer of 1863 that allowed the Union to keep the faith and utilize its more long-term advantages.

               The North had several advantages that generally tended to manifest themselves over a longer period of time than the Southern advantages. First, the North had many more people and would eventually be able to call up more men to military service. They ran into problems initially because they called men for only ninety days at first and then had to do so for three years afterwards. Then after three years they had to extend even further. Additionally, the Northern naval blockade was crucial. Even though 5 of every 6 blockade runners escaped through the Northern lines, the blockade discouraged shipping and resulted in huge losses the Confederate economy. By 1863, Southern money had only 1/7 of its prewar value, reaching 9,000 percent inflation by the end of the war. While 8,000 trips were made through the blockade during the war, this was not half of the 20,000 that left Southern ports during prewar years. Prices of cotton and other goods skyrocketed so that Southerners suffered much more greatly than Northerners during the war. By April 1862, every Southern port except for Charleston and Wilmington, North Carolina was in Union hands or closed. Also, Lincoln was a better war leader than Jefferson Davis. Davis played politics with his generals and based many decisions on personal feelings and pride, while Lincoln was much more willing to name generals to posts for winning battles and unafraid to fire them. Additionally, the very structure of the Confederacy was bankrupt. The confederation model caused the South to be unable to act as a coherent unit, instead acting as several competing states with little cooperation. Finally, Lincoln’s decision to emancipate the slaves gave the North the tremendous advantage of moral truth. It motivated Norther soldiers and made England and France unable politically to join the South, now that it would mean fighting for slavery. In addition it led to the creation of black regiments, increasing the Northern labor pool and strength of Northern forces.

What were the results of the war?

               At the war’s end, one quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age were dead. Two fifths of Southern livestock were gone with half of the farm machinery, thousands of miles of railroad, thousands of farms, and the system of slavery, upon which the entire Southern economy was based. Two-thirds of Southern wealth “vanished” in the war. While in 1860, the South had contained 30% of the country’s wealth, by 1870, it had just 12%. The South’s economy was destroyed for a generation. Politically as well, another President who was a resident of the old Confederacy would not be elected until 1964, when Lyndon Baines Johnson won the presidency, 99 years after the war’s end. It was truly devastating for Southern economic and political power.

               The war resulted in a massive expansion of the powers of the federal government. While the federal government had rarely touched citizens’ lives before the war, after the war it would do so plenty. The federal government created an internal revenue bureau to manage the new income tax, printed a national currency, formed a national banking system, drafted men into the army, and created the Freedmen’s Bureau, the first national agency for social welfare. While eleven of the first twelve amendments limited the federal government’s power, six of the next seven expanded it.

               The most important result of the Civil War was the emancipation of the enslaved people all over the defeated Confederacy (nearly four million people). Made voting citizens, black men began to participate in the political process in great numbers and there was a migration from the South to the North, though many chose to stay where they had grown up. The struggle was not over however. Former slaves and their descendants, despite major achievements in arts and sciences, continued to face hatred and discrimination in both North and South and continued to remain one of the poorest groups of Americans, largely thanks to Jim Crow policies that kept their neighborhoods poor, their police White, and their schools in bad condition. These problems continue to this day and show us that the Civil War contained conflicts that still remain unresolved in American history.

Conclusion

The author writes at one point that, “The South had no just cause. The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority.” It is important to remember that in a democracy, you can’t just leave because you don’t like the result of an election. It’s also important to remember that this war and this conflict continues to affect us today. After all when you look at the map of Electoral College votes, you can still see that the Confederacy often votes as a block. The war may be over but the cultural conflict is not. Before the war, people used to refer to the United States as a plural noun, like these United States, but today, we’ve become one country: The United States of America.

In the end of this book I have no sympathy for the Southern elites and politicians but a lot of sympathy for the Southern people, who faced starvation and poverty and an invading army that killed huge numbers of their people. I have even more sympathy for the slaves who suffered never knowing what freedom meant. I am glad the North won. I like the image of the beaten General Lee, scion of one of the great old Virginia houses, wearing his full-dress uniform with his jeweled sword, surrendering to General Grant, who wore a private’s uniform (his headquarters wagon had fallen behind) and muddy boots, the son of a poor tanner in Ohio.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Before 1815, the cost of transporting a ton of goods thirty miles inland was thee same as shipping that same ton across the Atlantic Ocean.
• Train transport cut the travel time from New York to Chicago from three weeks to two days.
• The New England textile industry increased its production from 4 million yards of cotton cloth per year in 1817 to 308 million in 1837.
• About one quarter of slave marriages ended due to being split up by their owner.
• Cotton from the American South made up three-fourths of the world supply.
• James K. Polk presided over the acquisition of more territory than any US President. He was responsible in just one term for the annexation of Texas, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the seizure of Mexican provinces in the Mexican-American War.
• James Buchanan was a massive coward and advocated that the North, as Southern states left his Union, stop criticizing slavery and allow the acquisition of Cuba as a slave state.
• Congress passed a Thirteenth Amendment that would have protected slavery but secession made it impossible for the states to ratify it.
• To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called "shoddy." This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general.
• The concept of clothing “sizes” came from the Union Quartermaster Bureau, which needed to standardize clothing production in a way never done before in modern history.
• The steamboat Sultana had a loss of life equal to the Titanic when it sunk on the Mississippi carrying liberated Union prisoners of war.

James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom (Kindle Locations 531-533). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.