Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. By James M. McPherson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 900. $35.00.) James M. McPherson has written a valuable one-volume synthesis of— and has offered an interesting thesis on—the American Civil War era. In this volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, he has composed a thrilling and exciting narrative account for both an educated popular audience and his peers in the historical profession. But to unite synthesis and thesis perhaps is more than his at times brilliant use of the evidence and his stylistic competence can deliver. The moving narrative mode is the book's major contribution. Because he describes a "dimension of contingency," or "the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently" (p. 858), Battle Cry of Freedom becomes a drama of missed opportunities and the relentless drive for conquest. This study of the war is organized around four episodes: the 1862 summer of the South's discontent; the North's rise to military ascendancy in the fall of 1862; the decisive turning point of summer and fall 1863; and the summer of 1864, which witnessed Southern success in delaying defeat, and then the ultimate crushing of the Southern armies and popular will after that long, hot summer. Within these episodes, the reader is led through a series of civilian and military activities which ultimately explain why the North had to prevail. Discounting many nonmilitary theories , McPherson maintains that the Confederates lost the war on the battlefield. Military accounts thus take up the majority of this work, exactly because of the author's abiding belief in their centrality to the entire period. The synthesis of many of the best recent works on the military struggle , which includes biography and military narrative, will please amateur and professional alike. His unraveling of the Lee legend through the use of Thomas L. Connelly's The Marble Man is almost worth the volume itself. The Confederate government's inability to find able generals to fight on so many fronts is also discussed carefully. If McPherson shortchanges Joseph E. Johnston's brilliant defensive maneuvers in his retreat beforeAtlanta, he does put blame for ultimate failure in the West on the foolhardiness of John Bell Hood. If he joins in the anti-Bragg chorus, he uses the best evidence to prove his point. If he does not know what to make of the brilliant P. G. T. Beauregard, he supports most BOOK REVIEWS345 scholars who have been unable to place him in the pantheon of great commanders. T. Harry Williams's seminal Lincoln and His GeneraL· is the driving force behind McPherson's reading of Lincoln's slow understanding of who could fight, and this should havebeen made clearer in thenarrative. McPherson rightly uses that still sprightly effort to push along his four sections on the drama of warfare. He does not, however, quite know what to do with the recent work on Sherman's evolution to total war theory, and therefore he juxtaposes Sherman's actions with comments on Northern intolerance of Southern guerrilla warfare and Southern civilian resistance to the Northern war effort. He cites Joseph Glatthaar's The March to the Sea and Beyond, but does not seem to grasp how Sherman had come to see civilians as extensions of the military. McPherson uses the best works on important, if often neglected, minor contributions to the war effort. With firm attention to detail, he demonstrates the coordination of land and sea operations. Students of naval warfare will learn much from his use of the sources. Too, McPherson links diplomacy to his four turning points, as heblends earlier scholarship with new research to add to our understanding of that complicated subject. The ability of each side to produce and to delivermateriel is studied in relationship to economic developments behind the lines. Use of Frank Vandiver's Ploughshares into Swords places supply and logistics into the thick of the fight. McPherson describes the military's failure to deliver supplies to Southern civilians and their subsequent starving time in stark and striking fashion. Through analysis of these subsidiary topics...