“To many Americans, human bondage seemed incompatible with the founding ideals of the republic. If all men were created equal and endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights including liberty and the pursuit of happiness, what could justify the enslavement of several millions of these men (and women)?”

One recurring point throughout Battle Cry of Freedom is the problem of contradictions in political and social thought and the struggle to define liberty while accepting certain economic and social realities. Clearly, race-based enslavement contradicted the American Constitution’s concept of innate and universal rights.

“Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism […] Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty.”

At the same time, the wage economy developing in the northern United States raised its own contradiction. This became one way Southerners made enslavement compatible with their own concepts of liberty and republicanism, as they often framed working for wages as a new form of enslavement.

“Man’s sphere was the bustling, competitive, dynamic world of business, politics, affairs of state. Woman’s world was the home and family; her role was to bear and nurture children and to make the home a haven to which the husband returned from work each day to find love and warmth at the hearth.”

Gender roles in the 19th century were rigid and they became more so as industrial capitalism led men to leave the home for employment in factories and offices. This trend would be challenged as women became involved in charitable activities or found employment as nurses and in other roles as “part of the mobilization of resources for total war in 1862” (480), reflecting The Legacy of the Civil War in American Society.

“In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of its backward institution.”

There were crucial differences between the South and the North socially, culturally, and economically that fed into the regional conflict that would erupt into the Civil War. Even so, many, if not all, of such differences were tied to enslavement in some way.

“On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.”

Both the North and South had competing and incompatible definitions of liberty and republicanism. This would become more pronounced in the course of the war, especially in accusations within the Confederacy against the “‘despotism’” (435) of the Davis administration. The tensions over the Fugitive State Law once more gesture towards The Central Role of Enslavement in the Pre-War American Economy and Regional Conflict.

“Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman’s comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it.”

A powerful force leading into the war and during it was not only how the North and the South perceived each other, but how they perceived themselves. The two types of perception were intertwined and self-reinforcing. In this case, the South defined itself as the true practitioners of constitutional principles of freedom.

“Once again, victories by the ‘slave power’ had produced a backlash that strengthened its deadliest enemies in the North.”

McPherson’s thesis on the causes of the Civil War is that enslavement and the political problems and controversies it generated were what ultimately sparked the Civil War. A major part of this is how the actions of Southern politicians, which they saw as preempting the threat posed by Northern abolitionists, only further radicalized their Northern enemies.

“So [secessionists] undertook a campaign to convince non-slaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy.”

Rather than the Civil War being driven by material causes like the economic benefits of enslavement, McPherson sees ideas as also having a major influence. Racism is one such force. Besides being a way of rallying support for the Confederacy, it was also one of the rhetorical tools for the Democrats in opposing abolitionist arguments.

“[S]ecession fit the mode of ‘pre-emptive counterrevolution’ developed by historian Arno Mayer. Rather than trying to restore the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize.”

Given Lincoln’s willingness to compromise with the South on the issue of enslavement, McPherson characterizes the Southern response to Lincoln’s election as “mass hysteria” (229). Still, as McPherson explains, the secessionists were not so much responding to the rise of Lincoln himself, but the threat they saw in not only the abolitionist rhetoric in the North, but the threat posed by the North’s different economic and social institutions.

“The flag, the Union, the Constitution, and democracy—all were symbols or abstractions, but nonetheless powerful enough to evoke a willingness to fight and die for them. Southerners also fought for abstractions—state sovereignty, the right of secession, the Constitution as they interpreted it, the concept of a southern ‘nation’ different from the American nation whose values had been corrupted by Yankees.”

This passage does not contradict McPherson’s own view of The Central Role of Enslavement in the Pre-War American Economy and Regional Conflict. The reasons why the war began and the reasons why rank-and-file soldiers fought in the war are separate issues. Still, the reasons listed here for Southerners’ willingness to fight, such as having distinct “values” from the North and the political issue of state sovereignty, were connected to enslavement.

“The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies. Therefore political leadership and public opinion weighed heavily in the formation of strategy.”

One of the ways that reflects The Civil War as a Total and Modern War was in the role of public opinion, something encouraged by the democratic nature of politics in both the Union and the Confederacy and by the technologies that enabled faster communications and a large newspaper press. In practice, this was why the generals in the war made strategic decisions like Lee’s decision to launch a campaign into Pennsylvania to both weaken Northern morale and bolster the Peace Democrats (647).

“One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys.”

In a way, the Civil War marked a transition from older modes of warfare that focused on occupying strategic points and avoiding direct clashes with enemy armies, to one where armies sought to destroy the enemy through direct confrontations, destroying enemy infrastructure, and seeking total surrender.

“The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.”

One of the legacies of the Civil War was The Civil War as a Total and Modern War. This is why McPherson draws parallels between the Civil War and World War I. Both represented the effect the changes and new necessities that technology brought to war. The fact “[m]ost officers had learned little of strategic theory” (331) likely further made the Civil War in some ways a response to current technological and social realities rather than a “traditional” war.

“The courage and energy demonstrated by many women chipped away at the weaker-sex image.”

McPherson suggests that one part of The Legacy of the Civil War in American Society was the further emancipation of women, as the Civil War had the indirect effect of allowing women out of the private sphere and into the public sphere dominated by men. By this understanding of history, it was likely not a coincidence that the movement for women’s suffrage gained steam in the decades following the Civil War.

“In this view, the issues of the American Civil War mirrored the issues of class conflict in Britain. The Union stood for popular government, equal rights, and the dignity of labor; the Confederacy stood for aristocracy, privilege, and slavery.”

Not only did the South and the North represent different social, political, and economic values to themselves and each other, but in the international view as well. This also fits with McPherson’s view of the Civil War as a victory for the “future of industrial capitalism” (860) that would shape not just the history of the United States, but the history of the world as well.

“Even so, the organization of black regiments marked the transformation of a war to preserve the Union into a revolution to overthrow the old order.”

As the Civil War carried on, the emancipation of African Americans became a more acceptable goal of the war in the eyes of the Northern public and politicians. In no small part, this was because of the contributions of Black soldiers to the Union war effort. As McPherson notes, “Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to pre-empt” (246).

“The achievements and losses of this elite black regiment, much publicized by the abolitionist press, wrought a change in northern perceptions of black soldiers.”

Racism played a pivotal role in undermining the Lincoln administration and supporting the Confederate cause. However, the importance of public opinion in the Civil War worked another way, as the plight of Black soldiers increased public support of emancipation.

“The Negro suffrage issue was part of a larger debate over who constituted the ‘loyal’ population of a state for purposes of reconstruction.”

The Legacy of the Civil War in American Society also includes a number of unresolved political and social problems that will continue into later periods of US history. One of these was the question of African-American citizenship and full rights, which would remain unresolved until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and beyond.

“Men in the ranks had learned what European armies on the Western Front a half-century later would have to learn all over again about trench warfare.”

As part of the theme of The Civil War as a Total and Modern War, McPherson presents the US Civil War as part of the same global history of the mechanization of warfare. The development of trench warfare, a defensive response to rapid-fire weapons, is a major aspect of that history.

“In any event, the treatment of prisoners during the Civil War was something that neither side could be proud of.”

In the propaganda side of the Civil War, accusations of the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war was lobbed by both sides. It was also one measure of how the Civil War became more severe and how badly the “romantic, glamorous idea of war” (332) that Americans held at the beginning of the war disintegrated.

“The wreckage of the southern economy caused the 1860s to become the decade of least economic growth in American history before the 1930s. It also produced a wrenching redistribution of wealth and income between North and South.”

Part of The Legacy of the Civil War in American Society is how, rather than bridging the gap between the South and the North, it created new or perpetuated old economic and social differences. The poverty that resulted from the Southern economy’s dependency on enslavement became a consequence of the war. This was due in part because the “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision” (861).

“Had secession been a means to the end of preserving slavery? Or was slavery one of the means for preserving the Confederacy, to be sacrificed if it no longer served that purpose?”

As the war progressed, even fundamental ideas and attitudes changed. Similarly to how the North became much more open to the idea of Black emancipation, some Confederate leaders became willing to sacrifice enslavement in order to ensure the survival of the Confederacy. This dilemma also reflects the lingering effects of The Central Role of Enslavement in the Pre-War American Economy and Regional Conflict.

“Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were generally rendered as a plural noun: ‘the United States are a republic.’ The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.”

Similarly to how secession was a demonstration of Southern nationalism, the Union’s victory in the Civil War cemented the idea of American nationalism. Along with the triumph of industrial and the “free-labor system” (709) that came with the North winning the war, this is the part of The Legacy of the Civil War in American Society that McPherson highlights the most.