# Beyond The Book
The profound irony of the Civil War was that Confederate
and Union soldiers ... interpreted the heritage of 1776 in
opposite ways. Confederates fought for liberty and
independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical
government; Unionists fought to preserve the nation
created by the founders from dismemberment and
destruction.
        - James McPherson, "What They Fought For"


I see a three-stage process in the origins of the Civil
War. The first stage is a growing diversity between the
economic and social systems of the North and the South.
When the country was founded, all states had the
institution of slavery and all were overwhelmingly rural
and agricultural in character. But slavery was relatively
marginal in the Northern states, and during and after the
Revolution, they abolished it. Their economy began to
develop in the direction of a more diversified, free-
labor, commercial and industrial as well as agricultural
economy, while the cotton boom in the South fastened
slavery more firmly than ever on that section and kept the
South overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly agricultural,
and primarily dependent in its economy on slave-grown
agricultural crops. The paths of development increasingly
diverged over the first half of the nineteenth century
and, in the process, generated increasingly polarized
ideologies about what kind of society and what kind of
nation the United States ought to be. And that focused on
the institution of slavery, which by the 1830s was being
increasingly attacked by the Northern abolitionists as
contrary to the ideals of liberty that the country had
been founded on, and as contrary to the ideals of the
Declaration of Independence; while the South grew
increasingly defensive and turned aggressive in its
defensiveness, defending slavery as a positive good and as
the basis for a far superior society to what they
increasingly portrayed as a chaotic, disorganized, unjust,
exploitative, free-labor society in the North.
National political debates focused on the question of
whether slavery ought to continue to expand, as it had
expanded from the admission of Kentucky and Tennessee in
the 1790s right on through the annexation of Texas in
1845. With the acquisition of a huge amount of new
territory in the Mexican War in 1848, the debate about
whether slavery should be allowed in any more territories
sharpened to a mortal conflict. You had Northern and
Southern congressmen drawing weapons on each other or
threatening to do so on the floor of Congress, and South
Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beating unconscious
Senator Charles Sumner in 1856; and the rise of a new
major party, the Republican Party, out of the earlier Free
Soil Party, whose platform stated that there should be no
more slave territories.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 on that
platform, without the vote of a single slave state,
Southern leaders saw the handwriting on the wall. They saw
that they had lost control of the national government--
which they had enjoyed most of the time before 1860s owing
to their leverage in the Democratic Party--and probably
would never be able to regain it. And they decided that
the fate of their society, their institution, their
economy, their way of life-to use the phrase that was
often used at the time-was in jeopardy under a United
States government completely in the hands of people who
opposed the expansion of slavery and whose leaders branded
slavery a moral wrong that must eventually disappear from
American society. So they seceded. These are the first two
stages: the increasingly divergent Northern and Southern
societies, and the institution of slavery as the focal
point of that divergence.
The third and final stage is the nationalism of the
Northern people, or a majority of them. They held the
conviction that if any one or any group of states could
secede from the United States in response to the election
of somebody they didn't like as President of the United
States, the United States would in fact cease to exist,
that a constitutional republic based on majority rule and
on free elections could not survive under a system where a
state could secede when it didn't like the outcome of that
constitutional process. Lincoln expressed his
determination and was supported by the majority of the
Northern people not to recognize the legitimacy of
secession.
The trigger point was Fort Sumter, where Confederate
leaders claimed they could not tolerate a foreign fort in
the harbor of one of their principal ports, Charleston,
South Carolina. The Lincoln Administration was determined
to hang on to Fort Sumter as a symbol of what it
considered to be federal sovereignty. When the
Confederates decided to attack the fort and seize it
before the ships sent to resupply the garrison could get
there, that was the spark that set off the war.
        - James McPherson, interviewed in Humanities Mag


The Mexican War had two major kinds of influence. It
reopened the question of the expansion of slavery that had
already been opened by the annexation of Texas in 1845.
The situation led to the divisive debates that underlay
the eventual Compromise of 1850, and then also played a
part in reopening those debates in the middle 1850s over
whether or not slavery should be expanded into the
territories. This issue increasingly drove the free states
and the slave states farther and farther apart and helped
to bring on the war.
The Mexican War also influenced the manner in which the
Civil War was fought. Most of the men who became generals
on both sides in the Civil War had been junior officers in
the Mexican War. The Americans had won every battle in the
Mexican War. They had won it by daring offensive tactics,
by assaults that overran defensive positions, by tactical
aggressiveness, and, indeed, by strategic aggressiveness.
Invasions deep into enemy territory influenced commanders
on both sides even long into the Civil War at a time when
the technology had changed between 1847 and 1861 to favor
the defensive. The development of the rifle musket, which
gave defenders an advantage against attacking troops, the
expanded use of railroads and telegraphs and steam-powered
warships and other benefits of modern technology meant
that the tactics and even some of the strategic lessons
carried into the Civil War by those men who had fought in
the Mexican War would have to be changed. But generals are
always fighting the last war. It takes a long time for
them to realize that conditions have changed. I think some
of the heavy casualties from frontal assaults, even flank
attacks such as those at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg
or Chickamauga in the Civil War were in part the
consequence of the wrong lessons learned by the commanders
in the Mexican War.
        - James McPherson, interviewed in Humanities Mag


Opposition to the government's war policies was a
significant factor in both North and South. In the South,
most of the people who opposed the war effort were those
people who lived in regions where slavery was not an
important part of their society and the economy: Western
Virginia, which actually detached itself from the rest of
Virginia and became the new state of West Virginia in the
middle of the war; eastern Tennessee, which was mostly
small farmers without slaves; western North Carolina, the
Ozark plateau in Arkansas, and other parts of the South.
These areas, if not Unionist, were for the most part
reluctant supporters of the Confederacy. There was
opposition to the draft and to other measures in these
regions, and a lot of Unionism that manifested itself in
overt antiwar acts-sabotage, resistance, and so on.
In the North, a large portion of the Democratic Party,
which had been allied politically with the South before
the Civil War, became increasingly alienated from the
Lincoln Administration's concept of total victory as a way
to restore the Union. These became known as the Peace
Democrats or, more pejoratively, the Copperheads. Northern
Republicans likened them to the poisonous copperhead snake
that struck in the dark to undermine the Northern effort
to win this war and preserve the nation. These Copperheads
or Peace Democrats were not necessarily disloyal in the
sense that they supported Confederate victory in the war.
Rather, they opposed the effort to restore the Union by
military victory and called for some armistice and peace
negotiations. But, any kind of armistice or peace
negotiations would be tantamount to a de facto recognition
of the Confederate states of America as a legitimate
government and contrary to what the North was fighting
for.
The Peace Democrats were probably a more powerful factor
in weakening the Northern war effort than were the antiwar
faction in the South. I happen to think that the people in
the eleven states that formed the Confederacy were
probably more united and more determined in support of
their government's war efforts than were the people in the
North in support of the Lincoln Administration's efforts.
        - James McPherson, interviewed in Humanities Mag


The occurrence of a presidential election in the midst of
war has not been unique in American history, Six times the
quadrennial date for balloting has arrived during a war.
On four of these occasions (1812, 1864, 1944, and 1972)
the war policies of an incumbent President seeking re-
election have been important campaign issues; in each case
the incumbent won. In the other two elections (1952 and
1968) voters overturned the party in power partly because
of the unpopularity of its war policies — and indeed, of
the war itself. But despite the centrality of war issues
during these elections, in only one of them did voters
perceive the survival of the US to be at stake: in 1864.
That election was seen as a referendum on whether the
Union should continue fighting the Civil War to
unconditional victory. The result of this political
campaign did as much to determine the outcome of the war
as did events on the battlefield. But military campaigns,
in turn, decisively influenced the election.
Optimism prevailed in the North in the spring of 1864. The
victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga the
previous year had sent the Confederacy reeling... Grant
and Sherman intended by a series of flanking movements to
threaten Confederate communications and force the southern
commanders Lee and Johnson into open-field combat, where
superior Union numbers and firepower could be sued to
greatest advantage. The southern strategy, by contrast,
was to block the Union's flanking movements and force
northern armies instead to assault defenses entrenched on
high ground or behind rivers, where fortifications and
natural obstacles would more than neutralize superior
numbers...
In order to 'win' on their terms, the Confederates, like
Americans in the Revolution or North Vietnam in the 1960s,
needed only to hold out long enough to inflict sufficient
punishment on the enemy to force him to give up his effort
to annihilate resistance. This was a strategy of political
and psychological attrition — of wearing down the other
side's will to continue fighting. Many historians have
mistakenly argued that Grant pursued a military strategy
of attrition in 1864 — of using the North's greater
numbers and resources to grind down the South's ability to
resist. It turned out that way, but not because Grant
initially intended it. Rather, the near success of the
southern strategy of psychological attrition forced the
North into a campaign of military attrition. The crucial
turning point of both strategies was the Union
presidential election of 1864. Confederate strategy sought
to influence the outcome of that election... They sought
ways to promote a Democratic victory in the Union
election. Southern military leaders planned their
operations around the objective of holding out until
November.
        - James McPherson, "War and Politics" essay


By August 1864 the crucial question was not what policy to
pursue toward the South once the war was won, but whether
it could be won at all... The President came under
enormous pressure to drop emancipation as a condition of
peace negotiations. Lincoln bent but did not break under
this pressure. His Emancipation Proclamation had promised
freedom, "and the promise being made, must be kept." "I
should be damned in time & in eternity," said Lincoln, if
I were "to return to slavery the black warriors" who had
fought for the Union. "The world shall know that I will
keep faith to friends & enemies, come what will."
...With their presidential nomination the Democrats
revealed their own party rift. The nominee was George B.
McClellan, removed by Lincoln from command of the Army of
the Potomac two years earlier and now seeking vindication
via politics. But McClellan was a War Democrat. He
recognized that an armistice and negotiations without
prior conditions would constitute a Confederate victory,
making restoration of the Union impossible. Thus in his
letter accepting the nomination McClellan constructed his
own platform specifying re-union (but not emancipation)
"as the one condition of peace". Though the Democrats
seemed to be sending a muddled message — a war candidate
on a peace platform — jubilant southerners celebrated
McClellan's nomination. The Democratic nominee's election
on this platform "must lead to peace and our
independence," declared the Charleston Mercury, if "for
the next two months we hold our own and prevent military
success by our foes."
It didn't go that way. Three days after the Democrats
adjourned, telegraph wires brought news of Sherman's
capture of Atlanta and electrified the North... For
Lincoln and the Republicans, military triumphs transformed
electoral prospects from darkest midnight to bright
noonday. A gray, ominous twilight settled over the
South... By October, the political signs pointed to a
Republican landslide. The most remarkable part of this
phenomenon was the soldier vote. Having won the military
victories that turned the war around, these citizens in
uniform prepared to give Lincoln a thumping endorsement at
the polls.
...For most soldiers, their honor as fighting men was at
stake. They had gone to war for flag and country, and they
meant to bring home the flag of a united country with all
of its 35 stars in place. To vote Democratic, to admit
that the war was a failure and their sacrifices had been
in vain, to march home with a flag shorn of 11 stars would
plunge their country and its manhood to the depths of
shame. "We want peace too," wrote an Ohio officer, a
former Democrat turned Republican, "honorable peace, won
in the full light of day at the bayonet's point, with our
grand old flag flying over us as we negotiate it, instead
of cowardly peace purchased at the price of national
dishonor."
These were the convictions that reelected Lincoln by a
margin of 212 to 21 in the electoral college... It was a
powerful endorsement of Lincoln's iron-willed
determination to fight on an unconditional victory. The
election demonstrated to a British war correspondent that
the North was "silently, calmly but desperately in
earnest... in a way the like of which the world never saw
before... I am astonished the more I see and hear of the
extent and depth of determination... to fight to the
last."
        - James McPherson, "War and Politics" essay


So, my message to you today is: Take heart. These are
perhaps not the best of times to graduate. But neither are
they the worst of times. Most of your student days have
been lived in the shadow of 9/11. But from that experience
you have gained the perspective to endure both the good
and the bad times that will come in the future. Twenty
years after the American Civil War Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr., who was wounded three times in that conflict and went
on to become one of our greatest Supreme Court justices,
said in a Memorial Day address: "The generation that
carried on the war has been set apart by its experience.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts
were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the
outset that life is a profound and passionate thing." I
would certainly not go so far as to describe 9/11 as your
"great good fortune." But it did touch your hearts with
fire and teach you that life is a profound and passionate
thing. Generations that have gone before have been
similarly touched. They responded to the challenges with
courage and creativity. I am confident that you will do
the same.
        - James McPherson, 2004 Princeton Baccalaureate