Battle Cry of Freedom Reviews http://www.allreaders.com/topics/info_30845.asp (plot summary - two themes) USE THIS ONE http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/mcpherson-freedom.html (pdf file - EDIT THIS) http://www.handfulofsand.com/blog/archives/006610.html (2009 blog - not best military history) http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/dp/019516895X (Amazon.com reader reviews - use picture/screenshot instead) USE THIS WITH SCREENSHOT http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/product-reviews/019516895X/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addTwoStar (Criticisms of bias) USE THIS ONE http://www.notnews.org/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000020.html (short but good on bias) 15 year anniversary fluff piece http://old.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200311120815.asp Publisher website bias http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/CivilWarReconstruction/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTE2ODk1Mg== too much/deep for the students http://www.epinions.com/review/Battle_Cry_of_Freedom_The_Civil_War_Era_by_James_M_McPherson/content_135767232132 too simple blog http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=79 http://www.allreaders.com/topics/info_30845.asp Plot Summary of Battle Cry of Freedom "Perhaps more than any other event in American history, the Civil War is subjected again and again to the historian's microscope and pen; yet for the mountains of words it has engendered, consensus, clarity, and conciseness are hard to find. The reasons are obvious: the war that divided the country in the mid nineteenth century still drives a wedge between some; the war, its causes, and effects were numerous and complex and affected nearly every aspect of American society; and it seems that the bloodier, more divisive, more complex the event, the more words we use to describe, justify, or mollify its events and effects. James McPherson tackles each of these problems in his one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. Through a narrative telling of the Civil War, McPherson is able to focus on two major themes, which he carries throughout the book. These themes appear consistently, and act as a thesis, if one is to be defined. The first is to examine “the multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war” (viii). For all of his discussion of politics, economics, the military, and society, we cannot escape McPherson's constant reminders that slavery (and its opposite, freedom) is central to the story. By using a narrative style, McPherson traces the development of the role of slavery, emancipation, and freedom throughout the period. A second theme is that of contingency. He is critical of previous literature that he says “lack the dimension of contingency—the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently” (858). His narrative style allows him to point out such critical moments that a thematic or topical organization would have glossed over. Without venturing into the dangers of counter-factual history, McPherson is careful to identify instances where another outcome was possible, or even probable. By allowing for contingency and not eschewing complexity, McPherson's treatment of both sides in the war is, for the most part, evenhanded. " Jackie Whitt, Resident Scholar http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/mcpherson-freedom.html THE BLOODIEST OF WARS Date: February 14, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk Byline: By HUGH BROGAN; Hugh Brogan is the author of ''The Longman History of the United States of America.'' Lead: LEAD: BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM The Civil War Era. By James M. McPherson. Illustrated. 904 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $30; after July 1, $35. Text: BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM The Civil War Era. By James M. McPherson. Illustrated. 904 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $30; after July 1, $35. No doubt someone in the Library of Congress knows exactly how many books have been published on the Civil War, but everyone knows, without counting, why a new one is to be greeted somewhat warily. The Civil War is the most worked-over topic in United States history, one of the most written about in the history of the world. It is therefore a particular pleasure to report that ''Battle Cry of Freedom'' easily overwhelms all such doubts. It is the best one-volume treatment of its subject I have ever come across. It may actually be the best ever published. It is comprehensive yet succinct, scholarly without being pedantic, eloquent but unrhetorical. It is compellingly readable. I was swept away, feeling as if I had never heard the saga before. It is most welcome. I am conscientiously bound to report that it is not quite perfect. The maps are accurate and intelligent, but they are printed on a gray ground that makes the gray lines and arrows of the Southern forces hard to see. ''These defenders of the South doth protest too much'' is a horrible solecism. And there never was such a place as the ''Kingdom of Palermo.'' I can think of nothing else to complain about. It is easier work to summarize James M. McPherson's many merits as a historian. Of these the greatest is surely his literary skill. It shows in little things and great. For instance, he knows how to use precise details to bring the past, even the overfamiliar past, to vivid life again. I was aware that the Army of the Potomac suffered shocking ill health (largely from bad sanitation) until Gen. George McClellan took it in hand, but I had never heard that in 1861, in the western Virginia theater of war, the Confederates suffered as badly because their farm-boy recruits went down with measles and mumps, to which they had never before been exposed. Unfairly (these children's complaints are killers for adults), ''measles and mumps'' has a slightly ludicrous ring; precisely because of that I shall never again forget how Robert E. Lee was dealt his first defeat, and how West Virginia got its statehood. Mr. McPherson is wonderfully lucid. Again and again, hopelessly knotty subjects (for example, Lincoln's relations with the radical Republicans) are painlessly made clear. Above all, everything is in a living relationship with everything else. This is magic. Accounts of the Civil War usually sacrifice either detail (often important detail) to narrative flow, or narrative to detail. Mr. McPherson does neither. Omitting nothing important, whether military, political or economic, he yet manages to make everything he touches (say, Union finances or the prisoner-of-war camps) drive his narrative forward. And though no one could write less like those ostentatious Civil War buffs (Bruce Catton springs to mind) whose prose is unrelentingly oratorical, at times he adds to the reader's pleasure either by quiet touches of humor or by literary contrivances so bold as to force themselves on our attention. The supreme example is his omission of Lincoln's assassination. One moment the President is making a speech, with John Wilkes Booth snarling in the crowd (''Now, by God, I'll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make''). In the next sentence a new chapter begins; Good Friday, 1865, is already in the past and Mr. McPherson is pressing on to describe the very last incidents of the war. It is breathtaking, almost insolent; but it is right. Everybody knows the story of the murder. Lincoln's sudden disappearance from the book gives us something of the shock that his contemporaries felt when he died - and the author has no space at his disposal for redundant details. The book is opened with equal, though less obtrusive, skill. This is not only an account of the Civil War, it is a volume in the Oxford History of the United States, and so it begins with a masterly description of the republic at midcentury - a divided society, certainly, and a violent one, but not one in which so appalling a phenomenon as civil war is likely. So it must have seemed to most Americans at the time. Slowly, slowly the remote possibility became horrible actuality; and Mr. McPherson sees to it that it steals up on his readers in the same way. This is historical writing of the highest order, conveying perhaps the most important lesson of all: that we are not always masters of our fate, even when we most need to be. It is for this and similar reasons that the Civil War must still be accounted a great and necessary theme, mattering more to citizens of the United States than any other in their past. In the right hands, it teaches inescapably the dreadful truth that it is possible for no more than ordinarily sinful men and women, and for politicians of conspicuous ability and patriotism, and for a country enjoying unrivaled prosperity and freedom, to make deadly and irretrievable blunders. Americans did it to themselves. Nobody else can be blamed. Unless every generation receives the lessons of the Civil War in all humility they may commit such blunders again (as indeed the war in Vietnam showed). But the story has often been perverted to teach other lessons (the wickedness of capitalists or damyankees, the righteousness of the Southern cause) or to teach no lessons at all, to be an entertainment for drum-and-trumpet hobbyists. Worst of all, it has been pridefully asserted that, since it belongs to a world now remote, it is unimportant and irrelevant. It is a very good thing that ''Battle Cry of Freedom'' is now available to refute all such heresies. I do not think that this epic of doom, this tale of a disaster perhaps implicit in the failure of the Founding Fathers to put slavery into the way of extinction, can be fully conveyed except in narrative form. Mr. McPherson argues that narration is the only mode by which what he calls the contingent factor in the Civil War can be made clear. For he does not think Northern victory was inevitable. The Confederacy had the simpler war aim - to survive until the Union gave up in despair. The Northern will to go on fighting was thus the essential precondition of victory, and if Antietam, or the Gettysburg campaign, or the election of 1864 had gone the other way, as they easily might have done, that will might have cracked. Only after the fall of Atlanta and Sheridan's defeat of Jubal Early had insured Republican victory in 1864 did the defeat of the South become certain, or so Mr. McPherson thinks; and by his narrative he argues his readers into thinking so too. Events, he reminds us, are frequently unpredictable, and frequently they master men. The lesson is not new, but he handles it freshly, and so rebukes a generation of historians infatuated with theory, structure, numbers and the mere accumulation of data. On only one matter of importance did I feel inclined to take issue with Mr. McPherson. His seventh chapter bears the title, ''The Revolution of 1860,'' by which he refers to the election of Abraham Lincoln. Chapter Eight, which deals with secession, is called ''The Counterrevolution of 1861.'' Here, I think, he lets his vocabulary run away with him. ''Revolution'' is a much abused word. In politics it must surely mean something more than a victory in a regular election. No one can deny that the Republicans stood for something new in American history, but the forces they represented - liberalism, urbanism, industrial capitalism, nationalism - had been steadily gaining ground for decades, and some of the groups that gave them victory at the polls, especially the Western farmers, had been around for longer than the Republic. True, these forces had been held in check for a few years by Southern obstruction, but in 1860 all they actually did in revenge was to elect Lincoln, and they were much assisted by the collapse of the Democratic Party. They were not given time to attempt more, for their vic-tory was immediately followed by the real revolution of 1860 -the planters' revolution - the secession of South Carolina and her sister states, which were as committed to breaking up a long-established Government as the Bolsheviks were in 1917, and more so than the French revolutionaries of 1789. They could only be defeated by war and the emancipation revolution (or counterrevolution); as Lincoln said, ''We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.'' The work of dismantling racial segregation in the North was begun; the national Government was greatly strengthened to meet the needs of war; and the complete Republican economic program was passed into law. It was indeed the second American Revolution; but it would not have happened nearly so fast, even under so astute and patient a President as Lincoln, if the South had remained in the Union. In short, to my mind the election of 1860 was only a step on the way to revolution (just as the election of 1932 was), not a revolution itself. To be sure, Jefferson Davis said it was an abuse of language to call secession a revolution. He and his followers had left the Union ''to save ourselves from a revolution,'' an assault on property in slaves. But Davis was not a very wise man or an accurate reasoner. He had helped launch an onslaught on the old American political structure, which had sheltered slavery so comfortably; it is hardly surprising that others - abolitionists, Republicans, blacks - for their own purposes enlarged the gap thus opened. As Davis contemplated the ruined postwar South, he should have acknowledged his responsibility. But I don't think he ever did. Disagreements on points of emphasis do not deserve much emphasis themselves. ''Battle Cry of Freedom'' is in every respect a deeply satisfying book. Its illustrations are particularly good. The scholarship is as up-to-date and complete as anyone could reasonably wish. If at various places it is surprising not to find reference to a particular scholar or treatise, it is on the whole much more surprising to see how much reading and reflection Mr. McPherson has been able to cram into a life of no more, presumably, than the usual number of hours per day. The notes at the bottom of the page (hooray!) will help explain to scholars why Mr. McPherson is so often able to make fresh sense of old puzzles. The bibliographical note at the end will provide the novice with an excellent guide to further reading. And at only $30 until July, the book is even cheap, or at least wonderful value for the money. LINCOLN: THE RIGHT IDEAS, THE RIGHT GENERALS James M. McPherson, the author of ''Battle Cry of Freedom,'' has a different explanation of the outcome of the Civil War. The North's victory, he said, ''is often attributed to its superior resources. But the greatest population doesn't always win - after all, Vietnam won. In certain campaigns, the South was outgeneraled. For example, at Gettysburg it wasn't only Southern mistakes that resulted in the Confederate defeat but Union leadership.'' In a telephone interview, he said that the President as Commander in Chief as well as political leader played a strong role during the war. ''Lincoln held the North together, picked the right generals and, finally, moved in the direction of defeating slavery under his war powers,'' Mr. McPherson said. All along, he believed slavery was morally wrong. Union victory insured that the Northern vision would become the American vision.'' Mr. McPherson, who is a professor of history at Princeton University, has a family connection to the Civil War, although none that he knows of to James B. McPherson, a Union general who was killed when he inadvertently rode behind Confederate lines and then refused to surrender. The ancestors he knows about were somewhat less exalted. ''One remained a private and the other took an examination when he was 19 and became a lieutenant in the 22d U.S. Colored Troops. He ended up a captain. That's how a lot of young soldiers were commissioned - as white officers of black regiments.'' ''Battle Cry of Freedom,'' which is part of the Oxford History of the United States being written under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward, covers the era from the Mexican-American War to Appomattox, but it is the slavery issue that compelled Mr. McPherson's interest. His first book, published 22 years ago, was about the abolitionists and blacks. He is now in San Marino, Calif., doing research at the Huntington Library for his next book, titled ''Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution.'' HERBERT MITGANG http://www.handfulofsand.com/blog/archives/006610.html Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson No historical event can rival the American Civil War for volume of inspired literature except, perhaps, the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Every year, every month even, sees the publication of further works on the causes, the consequences, the battles, the generals, and so on. For the Civil War-obsessed, and there are certainly plenty among us, this is delightful. But for those of us whose interest is at present more restrained, it is daunting. Those seeking a single volume are often directed to James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom as the place to start (and perhaps finish) an exploration of America's bloodiest conflict. McPherson's effort, which is subtitled "The Civil War Era," opens with an overview of mid-19th century America, covering the social, religious and political realms of the antebellum era. It then turns to the Mexican-American War and the discovery of gold in California, and does not reach the fateful shots at Fort Sumter for nearly 300 pages. McPherson considers these events, and the resulting westward expansion of U.S. territory and settlement, as pivotal in forcing the issue of slavery back to the forefront after nearly three decades of cease-fire following the Missouri Compromise: This triumph of Manifest Destiny may have reminded some Americans of Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophecy that "the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." He was right. The poison was slavery. Jefferson's Empire for Liberty had become mostly an empire for slavery. Territorial acquisitions since the Revolution had added the slave states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas to the republic, while only Iowa, just admitted in 1846, had increased the ranks of free states. Many northerners feared a similar future for this new southwestern empire. They condemned the war as part of a "slave power conspiracy" to expand the peculiar institution. This fear provoked even non-abolitionists, like young Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who did not believe the federal government could interfere with slavery in the southern States but were adamant that it be kept out of the federal territories. It was, as they saw it, the Founding Fathers' intention to restrict slavery to its then-existing limits where it would die a gradual, natural death. This new effort at westward expansion threatened to extend the life of the peculiar institution. It wasn't the only effort, either, as some in the South saw the annexation of Cuba as a natural expansion that would further strengthen the slaveholders' position: Their champion was a handsome, charismatic Cuban soldier of fortune named Narciso Lopez who had fled to New York in 1848 after Spanish officials foiled his attempt to foment an uprising of Cuban planters. Lopez recruited an army of several hundred adventurers, Mexican War veterans, and Cuban exiles for an invasion of the island. He asked Jefferson Davis to lead the expedition. The senator demurred and recommend his friend Robert E. Lee, who considered it but politely declined. Lopez thereupon took command himself, but the Taylor administration got wind of the enterprise and sent a naval force to seize Lopez's ships and block his departure in September 1849. McPherson covers the expanding violence in Kansas, the fall of the Whigs and the rise of the Republicans, and the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry in Illinois. The election of Lincoln is itself enough to provoke secession by the most rebellious states in the Deep South, and the subsequent violence at Fort Sumter and mobilization of Northern troops sees Virginia leading the mid-South out of the Union as well. One of McPherson's best chapters is titled "Facing Both Ways: The Upper South's Dilemma" in which he discusses Virginia's secession and then looks at each of the four border states in turn: In the four border states the proportion of slaves and slaveowners was less than half what it was in the eleven states that seceded. But the triumph of unionism in these states was not easy and the outcome (except in Delaware) by no means certain. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri contained large and resolute secessionist minorities. A slight twist in the chain of events might have enabled this faction to prevail in any of these states. Much was at stake in this contest. The three states would have added 45 percent to the white population and military manpower of the Confederacy, 80 percent to its manufacturing capacity, and nearly 40 percent to its supply of horses and mules. Fort almost five hundred miles the Ohio river flows along the northern border of Kentucky, providing a defensive barrier or an avenue of invasion, depending on which side could control and fortify it. Two of the Ohio's navigable tributaries, the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, penetrate through Kentucky into the heart of Tennessee and northern Alabama. Little wonder that Lincoln was reported to have said that while he hoped to have God on his side, he must have Kentucky. Indeed, the North's early triumphs would all take place in the western theater, while the execrable George McClellan wasted a year and thousands of lives in his timid Virginia campaign. In his narrative of the war, McPherson touches on all the major military campaigns and battles, but never neglects to return his focus to the seats of power in Washington and Richmond. Of particular interest were the passages focus on Jefferson Davis' administration, such as the difficulties faced by the Confederacy in mobilizing a coherent, unified war effort after founding itself on a doctrine of state's rights: Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a "dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States... at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution." McPherson repeatedly demonstrates how the political sphere was often driven by failure or success in the field (e.g. the capture of Atlanta undermined the 1864 Democratic peace platform in the North), and yet on other occasions the efforts in the field were driven by political considerations (such as difficulty in removing a well-connected general). He also covers the evolution of Northern opinion on slavery, emancipation, and arming free blacks (unthinkable in 1861 but widely accepted by war's end) and the ongoing Southern efforts to gain recognition by Britain and France: [I]ssues of ideology and sentiment played a secondary role in determining Britain's foreign policy. A veteran of a half-century in British politics, Palmerston was an exponent of Realpolitik. When pro-southern members of Parliament launched a drive in the summer of 1862 for British recognition of the Confederacy, Palmerston profess not to see the point. The South, he wrote, would not be "a bit more independent for our saying so unless we followed up our Declaration by taking Part with them in the war." Few in Britain were ready for that. The book ends at the war's conclusion, prior to Reconstruction, the passage of the 14th Amendment, the readmission of the slave states, and so on. This was a conscious choice by McPherson and/or his editor, as Battle Cry of Freedom is but one entry in the gradually emerging Oxford History of the United States. McPherson explicitly leaves several issues for the subsequent volume in the series, which at this moment, twenty years later, is still neither published nor even announced. As advertised, this is surely the essential one-volume history of the war and its causes, covering in sufficient detail both the political and military aspects of the conflict. But it is just one volume, and the 600 pages devoted to the war itself pale in comparison to, say, the 3000 or so in Shelby Foote's three-volume epic. The analysis of the causes of the war, while efficient, is relatively cursory when compared to a full volume like David Potter's The Impending Crisis. Those seeking a detailed operational history of the battles will have to look elsewhere, as even the epic battle at Gettysburg is allotted fewer than a dozen pages. Better yet, read this book first to get a fresh sense of the whole scope of the war, then seek out Foote or Stephen Sears for a closer look at military operations. Gabriel | March 9, 2009 http://www.notnews.org/ubb/Forum4/HTML/000020.html Dave Thomer Guardian of Peace and Justice in the Galaxy posted 05-06-2001 12:15 AM Click Here to See the Profile for Dave Thomer Click Here to Email Dave Thomer Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era By James M. McPherson Paperback, Ballantine Books, 904 pages (Buy it at Amazon.com - $18) The Civil War is such a complex event that comprehensive treatments of it tend to be multi-volume affairs. How else can you capture the political tensions of the 1850s, the critical presidential election of 1860, the transformation of the economic and social systems of the Union and the Confederacy, the intricacies of tactics and strategies, and the horrible violence of the bloodiest war in American history? Battle Cry of Freedom nevertheless manages to cover all those themes over the course of its 900-page narrative, and its extensive footnotes and bibliography provide an excellent starting point for more detailed research on specific topics. One remarkable element of the book is that almost 275 pages pass before the Confederacy fires on Fort Sumter and the war officially begins. McPherson uses those pages to carefully establish the political and social context of the time and make his argument as to the central cause of the war. Here he pulls no punches - while issues such as states' rights and industrial expansion were bandied about, the fundamental, irreconcilable conflict between the North and South was the presence of slavery in the South and its expansion into the territories. Southern legislators were dominant in the 1850s, holding legislation such as the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad in check, and overturning the Missouri Compromise through the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision. Southern leaders had also been engaged in a continuous effort to conquer new territory to the south of the country and therefore extend the reach of slavery. The Republican Party was no immediate threat to any of the South's institutions, but the election of a president from a party whose platform explicitly opposed slavery was too much for Southerners to handle. Agitators in South Carolina and other states (known as fire-eaters) almost immediately called conventions to secede, and the road to Fort Sumter was paved. Once the shots are fired, Battle Cry of Freedom is primarily a military history, concerned with the tactics and strategy of the war, with a secondary but significant emphasis on the political maneuvering and events of the era. Here McPherson emphasizes the notion of contingency - that the course of the war was not determined by one particular advantage that the North held over the South, but instead on the outcome of particular battles that could just as easily have gone the other way. If George Meade had not effectively countered Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, the Confederate Army may have successfully invaded Philadelphia or Baltimore. If William Tecumseh Sherman had not conquered Atlanta in the fall of 1864, Lincoln may have lost his bid for re-election and the Democrats would likely have recognized the Confederacy. While there is a certain merit to this contingency-based approach, and the doubt about the outcome of the war that follows as a consequence makes McPherson's narrative that much more engaging to read, it is possible he takes it too far. The North had a tremendous advantage in industrial capacity that allowed it to turn out guns, uniforms, and other military supplies while still keeping the citizenry prosperous; the Southern army was desperate for shoes and other staples by the end of the war. The Union also held a considerable edge in population, so that it could afford to wage a war of attrition against the Confederacy and simply wear it down. This in fact became a major component of the Union strategy under Ulysses S. Grant toward the end of the war. At the same time, McPherson offers cogent arguments for his thesis, so even those who disagree would do well to grapple with them. It's hard to use a word like 'balanced' to describe a book that depicts pro-slavery Southerners as the aggressors and hails Lincoln as a great leader. However, McPherson does offer praise for many Confederates and criticism for many in the Union. (Union general and 1864 Democratic presidential candidate George McClellan, in particular, does not come off well.) His language and tone are measured and reasonable, and his claims are supported by extensive citations and evidence, including many quotations from the personal papers of the principals involved. 'Objective' is also a loaded word, and inappropriate for a text that takes a stand and proceeds to defend it. Battle Cry of Freedom is, however, fair and extremely informative, even to someone who is a relative novice in military terminology, and well worth the investment of time for anyone who seeks to understand this turning point in American history. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1990/2/1990_2_41.shtml A WAR THAT NEVER GOES AWAY More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861. by James M. McPherson Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year. More than forty thousand Civil War reenactors spend hundreds of dollars each on replica weapons, uniforms, and equipment; many of them travel thousands of miles to help restage Civil War battles. Another two hundred and fifty thousand Americans describe themselves as Civil War buffs or “hobbyists” and belong to one of the hundreds of Civil War round tables or societies, subscribe to at least one of the half-dozen magazines devoted to Civil War history, or buy and sell Civil War memorabilia. Above all, Americans buy books on the Civil War. This has always been true. More than fifty thousand separate books or pamphlets on the ^ war have been published since the guns ceased firing 125 years ago. In recent years some eight hundred titles, many of them reprints of out-of-print works, have come off the presses annually. Nearly every month a new Civil War book is offered by the History Book Club or the Book-of-the-Month Club, often as the main selection. Many bookstore owners echo the words of Jim Lawson, general manager of the Book ‘N Card shop in Falls Church, Virginia. “For the last two years,” he said in 1988, “Civil War books have been flying out of here. It’s not [just] the buffs who buy; it’s the general public, from high school kids to retired people.” Although we are approaching the end of the 125th-anniversary commemorations of Civil War events, the boom shows no signs of fading. As a beneficiary of this popular interest in the Civil War, I am often asked to explain what accounts for it—in particular, to explain why my own recent contribution to the literature on the war and its causes, Battle Cry of Freedom, was on national best-seller lists for several months as a hardcover book in 1988 and again as a paperback in 1989. I have a few answers. First, for Americans, the human cost of the Civil War was by far the most devastating in our history. The 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who lost their lives almost equaled the 680,000 American soldiers who died in all the other wars this country has fought combined. When we add the unknown but probably substantial number of civilian deaths—from disease, malnutrition, exposure, or injury—among the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Confederacy, the toll of Civil War dead may exceed war deaths in all the rest of American history. Consider two sobering facts about the Battle of Antietam, America’s single bloodiest day. The 25,000 casualties there were nearly four times the number of American casualties on D-day, June 6, 1944. The 6,500 men killed and mortally wounded in one day near Sharpsburg were nearly double the number of Americans killed and mortally wounded in combat in all the rest of the country’s nineteenth-century wars combined—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. This ghastly toll gives the Civil War a kind of horrifying but hypnotic fascination. As Thomas Hardy once put it, “War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.” The sound of drum and trumpet, the call to arms, the clashing of armies have stirred the blood of nations throughout history. As the horrors and the seamy side of a war recede into the misty past, the romance and honor and glory forge into the foreground. Of no war has this been more true than of the Civil War, with its dashing cavaliers, its generals leading infantry charges, its diamond-stacked locomotives and paddle-wheeled steamboats, its larger-than-life figures like Lincoln, Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman, its heroic and romantic women like Clara Barton and “Mother” Bickerdyke and Rose O’Neal Greenhow, its countless real-life heroines and knaves and heroes capable of transmutation into a Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, or Ashley Wilkes. If romance is the other face of horror in our perception of the Civil War, the poignancy of a brothers’ war is the other face of the tragedy of a civil war. In hundreds of individual cases the war did pit brother against brother, cousin against cousin, even father against son. This was especially true in border states like Kentucky, where the war divided such famous families as the Clays, Crittendens, and Breckinridges and where seven brothers and brothers-in-law of the wife of the United States President fought for the Confederate States. But it was also true of states like Virginia, where Jeb Stuart’s father-in-law commanded Union cavalry, and even of South Carolina, where Thomas F. Drayton became a brigadier general in the Confederate army and fought against his brother Percival, a captain in the Union navy, at the Battle of Port Royal. Who can resist the painful human interest of stories like these—particularly when they are recounted in the letters and diaries of Civil War protagonists, preserved through generations and published for all to read as a part of the unending stream of Civil War books? The war did in fact pit brother against brother, cousin against cousin, even father against son. Indeed, the uncensored contemporary descriptions of that war by participants help explain its appeal to modern readers. There is nothing else in history to equal it. Civil War armies were the most literate that ever fought a war up to that time, and twentieth-century armies censored soldiers’ mail and discouraged diary keeping. Thus we have an unparalleled view of the Civil War by the people who experienced it. This has kept the image of the war alive in the families of millions of Americans whose ancestors fought in it. When speaking to audiences as diverse as Civil War buffs, Princeton students and alumni, and local literary clubs, I have sometimes asked how many of them are aware of forebears who fought in the Civil War. I have been surprised by the large response, which demonstrates not only a great number of such people but also their consciousness of events that happened so long ago yet seem part of their family lore today. This consciousness of the war, of the (past as part of the present, continues to be more intense in the South than elsewhere. William Faulkner said of his native section that the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. As any reader of Faulkner’s novels knows, the Civil War is central to that past that is present; it is the great watershed of Southern history; it is, as Mark Twain put it a century ago after a tour through the South, “what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.” The symbols of that past-in-present surround Southerners as they grow up, from the Robert E. Lee Elementary School or Jefferson Davis High School they attend and the Confederate battle flag that flies over their statehouse to the Confederate soldier enshrined in bronze or granite on the town square and the family folklore about victimization by Sherman’s bummers. Some of those symbols remain highly controversial and provoke as much passion today as in 1863: the song “Dixie,” for example, and the Confederate flag, which for many Southern whites continue to represent courage, honor, or defiance while to blacks they represent racism and oppression. This suggests the most important reason for the enduring fascination with the Civil War among professional historians as well as the general public: Great issues were at stake, issues about which Americans were willing to fight and die, issues whose resolution profoundly transformed and redefined the United States. The Civil War was a total war in three senses: It mobilized the total human and material resources of both sides; it ended not in a negotiated peace but in total victory by one side and unconditional surrender by the other; it destroyed the economy and social system of the loser and established those of the winner as the norm for the future. The Civil War was fought mainly by volunteer soldiers who joined the colors before conscription went into effect. In fact, the Union and Confederate armies mobilized as volunteers a larger percentage of their societies’ manpower than any other war in American history—probably in world history, with the possible exception of the French Revolution. And Civil War armies, like those of the French Revolution, were highly ideological in motivation. Most of the volunteers knew what they were fighting for, and why. What were they fighting for? If asked to define it in a single word, many soldiers on both sides would have answered: liberty. They fought for the heritage of freedom bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers. North and South alike wrapped themselves in the mantle of 1776. But the two sides interpreted that heritage in opposite ways, and at first neither side included the slaves in the vision of liberty for which it fought. The slaves did, however, and by the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863, the North also fought for “a new birth of freedom. …” These multiple meanings of freedom, and how they dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscopic patterns during the war, provide the central meaning of the war for the American experience. When the “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln won the Presidency in 1860 on a platform of excluding slavery from the territories, Southerners compared him to George HI and declared their independence from “oppressive Yankee rule.” “The same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled our Fathers to the separation from the British Government,” proclaimed secessionists, would impel the “liberty loving people of the South” to separation from the United States government. A Georgia secessionist declared that Southerners would be “either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it. ” Young men from Texas to Virginia rushed to enlist in this “Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence” and to raise “the standard of Liberty and Equality for white men” against “our Abolition enemies who are pledged to prostrate the white freemen of the South down to equality with negroes.” From “the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us,” declared Jefferson Davis at the outset of war, let us “renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.” Civil War soldiers were the most literate up to that time. Their diaries and letters have had a lasting appeal. But most Northerners ridiculed these Southern professions to be fighting for the ideals of 1776. That was “a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of ’76,” said the antislavery poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. The Founding Fathers had fought “to establish the rights of man … and principles of universal liberty.” The South, insisted Bryant, had seceded “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.” Northerners did not deny the right of revolution in principle; after all, the United States was founded on that right. But “the right of revolution,” wrote Lincoln in 1861, “is never a legal right. … At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” In Lincoln’s judgment secession was just such a wicked exercise. The event that precipitated it was Lincoln’s election by a constitutional majority. As Northerners saw it, the Southern states, having controlled the national government for most of the previous two generations through their domination of the Democratic party, now decided to leave the Union just because they had lost an election. For Lincoln and the Northern people, it was the Union that represented the ideals of 1776. The republic established by the Founding Fathers as a bulwark of liberty was a fragile experiment in a nineteenth-century world bestridden by kings, emperors, czars, and dictators. Most republics through history had eventually been overthrown. Some Americans still alive in 1861 had seen French republics succumb twice to emperors and once to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Republics in Latin America came and went with bewildering rapidity. The United States in 1861 represented, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope” for the survival of republican liberties in the world. Would that hope also collapse? “Our popular government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln told Congress on July 4,1861. But if the Confederacy succeeded in splitting the country in two, it would set a fatal precedent that would destroy the experiment. By invoking this precedent, a minority in the future might secede from the Union whenever it did not like what the majority stood for, until the United States fragmented into a multitude of petty, squabbling autocracies. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” said Lincoln, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.” Many soldiers who enlisted in the Union army felt the same way. A Missourian joined up as “a duty I owe my country and to my children to do what I can to preserve this government as I shudder to think what is ahead of them if this government should be overthrown.” A New England soldier wrote to his wife on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run: “I know … how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.” Freedom for the slaves was not part of the liberty for which the North fought in 1861. That was not because the Lincoln administration supported slavery; quite the contrary. Slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, to the white man … and to the State,” said Lincoln on many occasions in words that expressed the sentiments of a Northern majority. “The monstrous injustice of slavery … deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites. …” Yet in his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with … slavery in the States where it exists.” He reiterated this pledge in his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, when the Civil War was nearly three months old. What explains this apparent inconsistency? The answer lies in the Constitution and in the Northern polity of 1861. Lincoln was bound by a constitution that protected slavery in any state where citizens wanted it. The republic of liberty for whose preservation the North was fighting had been a republic in which slavery was legal everywhere in 1776. That was the great American paradox—a land of freedom based on slavery. Even in 1861 four states that remained loyal to the Union were slave states, and the Democratic minority in free states opposed any move to make the war for the Union a war against slavery. But as the war went on, the slaves themselves took the first step toward making it a war against slavery. Coming into Union lines by the thousands,they voted with their feet for freedom. As enemy property they could be confiscated by Union forces as “contraband of war.” This was the thin edge of the wedge that finally broke apart the American paradox. By 1863 a series of congressional acts plus Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had radically enlarged Union war aims. The North henceforth fought not just to restore the old Union, not just to ensure that the nation born in 1776 “shall not perish from the earth,” but to give that nation “a new birth of freedom.” Northern victory in the Civil War resolved two fundamental, festering issues left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776: whether this fragile republican experiment called the United States would survive and whether the house divided would continue to endure half slave and half free. Both these issues remained open questions until 1865. Many Americans doubted the Republic’s survival; many European conservatives predicted its demise; some Americans advocated the right of secession and periodically threatened to invoke it; eleven states did invoke it in 1860 and 1861. But since 1865 no state or region has seriously threatened secession, not even during the “massive resistance” to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. Before 1865 the United States, land of liberty, was the largest slaveholding country in the world. Since 1865 that particular “monstrous injustice” and “hypocrisy” has existed no more. Civil War armies mobilized a larger percentage of volunteer manpower than any other war in our history. In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861 the words United States were a plural noun: “The United States are a large country.” Since 1865 United States has been a singular noun. The North went to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. This transformation can be traced in Lincoln’s most important wartime addresses. The first inaugural address contained the word Union twenty times and the word nation not once. In Lincoln’s first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he used Union forty-nine times and nation only three times. In his famous public letter to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, concerning slavery and the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union nine times and the nation not at all. But in the Gettysburg Address fifteen months later, he did not refer to the Union at all but used the word nation five times. And in the second inaugural address, looking back over the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side’s seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other side’s accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation. The old decentralized Republic, in which the post office was the only agency of national government that touched the average citizen, was transformed by the crucible of war into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the Army, and created the Freedman’s Bureau as the first national agency for social welfare. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, starting with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, radically expanded those powers at the expense of the states. The first three of these amendments converted four million slaves into citizens and voters within five years, the most rapid and fundamental social transformation in American history—even if the nation did backslide on part of this commitment for three generations after 1877. From 1789 to 1861 a Southern slaveholder was President of the United States two-thirds of the time, and two-thirds of the Speakers of the House and presidents pro tern of the Senate had also been Southerners. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices during that period were from the South, which always had a majority on the Court before 1861. After the Civil War a century passed before another resident of a Southern state was elected President. For half a century after the war hardly any Southerners served as Speaker of the House or president pro tern of the Senate, and only nine of the thirty Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were Southerners. The institutions and ideology of a plantation society and a caste system that had dominated half of the country before 1861 and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in 1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor entrepreneurial capitalism. For better or for worse, the flames of Civil War forged the framework of modern America. So even if the veneer of romance and myth that has attracted so many of the current Civil War camp followers were stripped away, leaving only the trauma of violence and suffering, the Civil War would remain the most dramatic and crucial experience in American history. That fact will ensure the persistence of its popularity and its importance as a historical subject so long as there is a United States. James M. McPherson is the Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. His most recent book is Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford University Press).