Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
In my wanderings, I recently went to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and picked up a few books on the Civil War. One of them was “Battle Cry of Freedom”, which is held to be to the best single-volume book on the American Civil War.
It’s a very thorough book. You can tell because in a 850 page book on the Civil War, the war doesn’t actually start until page 250 or so. But that’s just as well, because the causes for the Civil War were complicated. Everyone says slavery caused the war, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The North and the South had different economic systems, different political visions, and different social structures.
Both sides fought for freedom, but they had differing visions of freedom. The South fought for the freedom of property, the freedom to be left alone from an intrusive central government – which unfortunately included the right to own one’s slaves without harassment from the government. The North’s vision of freedom was a more commercial one, where people could work to better and enrich themselves (but mostly to enrich themselves) without hindrance from the antiquated and retrograde system of slave labor.
McPherson spends many pages covering the political, economic, and social background to the various battles of the war. One of the common complains about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is that politicians use every setback or success as a way to score political points. But during the Civil War, people did this all the freaking time. After every battle, McPherson has numerous quotes from various newspaper editorials and political figures arguing that the latest battle proved that the North or the South would finally be triumphant, or that the Yankees or the rebels were finally whipped. And many of the battles had political objectives as well. Most of General Lee’s strategies in 1863 and 1864 were designed to hold off the enemy long enough for pro-peace politicians to win elections in the North.
One of the interesting things about Civil War books written by Americans is that the author is very often in favor of one side or another, and rarely neutral. Whether the North was either struggling for freedom and to preserve the nation, while the South was fighting for slavery, or the North was brutally trying to impose its economic system on the South, while the South fought for self-defense and limited government depends upon the author writing the book. (General Sherman* is a good litmus test; depending on the author, he was either a strategic genius who grasped the “total war” nature of the conflict, or a war criminal who pushed the war into a new and dark direction, setting a precedent for the World Wars.) McPherson, I suspect, favors the North. Nevertheless, he is even-handed in his examination of both sides. North and South both come in for ample criticism, and if he criticizes Southern generals more, well – the South did lose the war.
All in all, a very good book, written well enough to be accessible to the general reader, and with enough footnotes and a long enough bibliography to please the scholar.
-JM
*Sherman, whether genius or barbarian, was smart. In an 1860 letter to a friend, he pretty much accurately predicted how the Civil War would go:
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
Of course, he went on to make his own prediction come true, so perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.