Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is amazing how ignorant one can be without knowing it. As a product of the American school system, and a veteran of all 11 and a half hours of Ken Burns’s iconic documentary, I thought that I was in for few surprises when I began this book. But because of deficiencies in either my education or my memory—probably a bit of both—I was constantly surprised throughout this telling of the war, and became absolutely riveted.
Though I am certainly not in a position to judge, I would venture to say that this book simply must be the best one-volume account of the war. It is a remarkable performance on every level. Despite the relatively limited amount of space that McPherson can devote to any one subject, the reader never feels that he is offering a superficial or a cursory account. On the contrary, as in the best overviews of historical events, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as each element in the story sheds light on every other.
McPherson shows himself to be a skilled and flexible author. Whether he is analyzing the Confederate economy, or examining the Northern political situation, or explaining the advances in naval technology, or narrating battles and troop movements, McPherson’s prose is steady, clear, and engaging. His grasp of the subject is so strong, and his vision so clear, that the chaos of politics and war plays out on the page with the orderliness of a Victorian novel. The simple act of taking such a huge mass of information and rendering it into something comprehensible—while remaining nuanced and enlightening—is, in my opinion, a great literary accomplishment.
As might be expected, the comforting notion that the war was somehow about states’ rights—and not slavery—does not hold up to even a moment of scrutiny. It is true that the Confederate states, in general, did place a high value on the autonomy of individual states. Yet these states’ support of the Fugitive Slave Act before the war—a huge extension of federal power, allowing the national government to overrule individual state laws to return escaped slaves—shows that slavery trumped this concern. In any case, whenever the states’ rights argument is made, it immediately leads to the question: their right to do what, exactly? (Answer: maintain slavery.)
As a final irony, after vociferously denouncing the use of black troops by the Union Army, and refusing to treat captured blacks as soldiers (either summarily executing them or selling them into slavery), in its final months, the Confederacy considered the use of slave soldiers. This idea was so totally contradictory to their stated values that it produced anger, shame, and confusion among the Confederates. Some preferred simply to give up to the North than to resort to this horrible betrayal of their values. Others admitted that, if blacks could make good soldiers, their entire way of life was based on a lie. Politicians wrangled with the implications of slave soldiers: If they were to fight, shouldn’t they be promised their freedom as a reward? In any case, this handwringing came to nothing, as the Confederacy collapsed before they could put this desperate—and hopelessly contradictory—idea into practice.
On a purely military level—admittedly, perhaps the most superficial way a war can be judged—the American Civil War is as thrilling and fascinating as any war in history. There were brilliant generals on the Union and Confederate sides whose campaigns are still studied today by would-be commanders. In McPherson’s telling, the main lesson of the war is the wisdom of an aggressive strategy. The first two years of the war, from 1861-63, are marked by defeat after Union defeat under generals (particularly McClellan) who shied away from confrontation, while Southern generals took the initiative. However, when Grant and Sherman—as aggressive as they come—finally took control on the Union side, the carnage of battle went from horrible to simply nauseating, and I began to have some sympathy for McClellan’s reluctance to subject his troops to such slaughter.
In many ways, the American Civil War seems to prefigure the terrible conflicts of the following century. By the end of the war, the basic tactics of the infantry resembled those of the First World War—massed troop attacks against entrenched positions, with predictably horrible casualty rates. The invention of iron-clad ships reminds one of the first tanks, while the Union use of a subterranean mine to break the enemy line in the siege of Petersburg prefigured what became a common strategy in the Great War. On the other hand, the horrible conditions of prisoners of war—particularly in the Confederate camp, Andersonville—are an unsettling forerunner of the German camps in World War II. The photographs of emaciated Union soldiers will look very familiar nowadays. And this is not to mention the millions of enslaved blacks forced to aide in the war effort of their enslavers, another omen of things to come.
And yet, there is a certain horror peculiar to civil wars. I am now, for example, making my way through interviews of civilians and soldiers who lived through the Second World War, and a common thread is how easy it was to hate and fight someone alien—someone who lives far away, speaks a different language, and maybe even looks different. But in a Civil War, neighbors fight neighbors, friends fight friends, and family fight family—not metaphorically, mind you, but literally. It is difficult to understand how a country could devolve to such a point that a boy from Maine is willing to stick a bayonet in the guts of a teenager from North Carolina.
What is even more remarkable, perhaps, is that the country was able to come together after such a vicious conflict. Though the hysterical and uncompromising tone of many of the politicians prior to the war now sound distressingly familiar, I suppose I should derive some hope from the fact that the country survived intact—indeed, became stronger than ever before—after this murderous episode.
Historians are averse to counterfactuals, and perhaps rightfully so. After all, how could you possibly know what might have happened in some imagined parallel timeline? However, I do think it worthwhile to consider these questions, even if precise answers elude us. What would have happened, then, if the South had successfully seceded? In a rapidly industrializing world, in which all of the major powers had abolished slavery or serfdom, how long would the “peculiar institution” have lasted in an independent Confederacy? As valuable as was their cotton, it is difficult for me to resist the idea that they would quickly have ended up an agricultural backwater, increasingly shunned by the rest of the world.
I am getting off track. This is a review of the book, not the war itself. But it is a mark of McPherson’s accomplishment that I cannot stop thinking about this defining conflict. Lately, I have even found myself watching long video tours of the great Civil War battlefields (either a great testament to the book’s value or to my own need to get a life). Of course, in any single-volume work of this kind, there will inevitably be omissions and shortcomings. I would have liked more on the experience of being a common soldier, for example. Yet such criticisms are easy to make, and seem very petty when compared to everything that McPherson has accomplished here. It is a great achievement.
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