Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (172 page)

Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision. Until 1861, however, it was the North that was out of the mainstream, not the South. Of course the northern states, along with Britain and a few countries in northwestern Europe, were cutting a new channel in world history that would doubtless have become the mainstream even if the American Civil War had not happened. Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861 to complete the dissolution of this ancient institution of bound labor in Europe. But for Americans the Civil War marked the turning point. A Louisiana planter who returned home sadly after the war wrote in 1865: "Society has been completely changed by the war. The [French] revolution of '89 did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Régime' than this has in our social life." And four years later George Ticknor, a retired Harvard professor, concluded that the Civil War had created a "great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born."
⁹
From the war sprang the great flood that caused

7
.
New Orleans Daily Delta
, Nov. 3, 1860; Steven A. Channing,
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina
(New York, 1970), 287.

8
.
DeBow's Review
, 33 (1862), 44; Rowland, Davis, VI, 357.

9
. Richard Taylor to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Dec. 13, 1865, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; Ticknor quoted in Morton Keller,
Affairs of State: Public Lifein Late Nineteenth Century America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 2.

the stream of American history to surge into a new channel and transferred the burden of exceptionalism from North to South.

What would be the place of freed slaves and their descendants in this new order? In 1865 a black soldier who recognized his former master among a group of Confederate prisoners he was guarding called out a greeting: "Hello, massa; bottom rail on top dis time!"
¹⁰
Would this new arrangement of rails last? That is a question for subsequent volumes in this series to ponder.

10
. Leon F. Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York, 1979), 102

Afterword

Re-reading a book that I wrote more than fifteen years ago is a humbling experience. I see small things that could have been improved at the time and more substantial elements that I could make better if I were writing it now. The large quantity and high quality of Civil War scholarship during the past fifteen years has deepened and broadened our knowledge of many of the era's events. If I were writing the book today I could incorporate the findings of this scholarship to enrich my own narrative and interpretation.

But as the novelist Thomas Wolfe said, "you can't go home again." A book is the unique product of the time and circumstances in which an author wrote it. To revisit the book two decades later and attempt to revise the product of a particular cultural environment would be a mistake. Besides, my ego continues to be flattered by letters and other communications from strangers who tell me that
Battle Cry
has stimulated in them an insatiable interest in the Civil War era and is the best single volume on the subject they have read. The book continues to be assigned in many college and advanced placement high school courses.

A year after the initial publication of
Battle Cry
, the historian Maris Vinovskis published an article with the double-entendre title "Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?"
¹
Social history had been the

1
. "Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,"
Journal of American History
76 (June 1989), 34–58.

most active and innovative field of American historiography since the 1960s, but so far, said Vinovskis, social historians had given little attention to the Civil War, which remained the province of military and political historians. Since 1989, social historians have found the Civil War and they may even wind up winning it.

Because the number of books and articles published on Civil War social history as well as other themes in the past fifteen years is so large, to cite only the few titles for which there is room here would be invidious.
²
What I can say is that work on the experiences of civilians on the home front, especially women and even children, has been a rich field of inquiry. Gender history has become an important field of Civil War scholarship, and this includes a new emphasis on ideas of masculinity among soldiers. The social backgrounds and ideologies of soldiers have also been the subjects of numerous books. The several hundred women who dressed as men and managed to enlist as soldiers have received a great deal of attention. Even the narratives of military campaigns and battles, which still constitute a large proportion of Civil War studies, now focus much more on the backgrounds and experiences of men in the ranks than earlier studies. Civil War prisons and prisoners have finally begun to get the attention they have so long needed. Historians are finally beginning to investigate the importance of religion to the Civil War generation. The experiences of slaves during a war that enabled them to win freedom had been the subject of many studies before 1988, but have become the focus of even more scholarship since then.

Nor have traditional subjects been neglected during the past decade and a half. New books about Abraham Lincoln appear virtually every year, and three major biographies of Jefferson Davis have been published. Several new biographies of Ulysses S. Grant have offered a long-overdue positive reappraisal of his generalship and even his presidency. By contrast, several books critical of the once-untouchable icon Robert E. Lee have come out since 1988 and have been answered by a legion of Lee defenders. New books on William Tecumseh Sherman have almost equaled the number of Grant or Lee biographies during that period, while books and articles about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain have become something of a cottage industry.

2
. For summaries of scholarship through 1998, see James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, eds.,
Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand
(Columbia, S.C., 1998).

If I were writing
Battle Cry
today, I would benefit richly from this scholarship. But I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that
Battle Cry
anticipated some of the newer findings and that many of my own interpretations stand up quite well in the light of subsequent scholarship. In re-reading my own words, however, I discovered that I left one of my principle themes unfinished. The book's title, the song that furnished that title, and the preface set forth the varied and contrasting themes of Freedom as the goals for which both Union and Confederacy fought in 1861 and the expanded goal of abolishing slavery that emerged as the slaves'—and ultimately the North's—war aim. But there is more to be said about this complicated question of Freedom, or Liberty.

As usual, Abraham Lincoln said it best. In April 1864 he returned to Baltimore for the first time since he had passed through the city secretly in the middle of the night three years earlier to foil a plot to assassinate him. This time he came in the full light of day and gave one of his few public speeches during the war. "The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one," said Lincoln on that occasion. "We all declare for liberty; but in using the same
word
we not all mean the same
thing
. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name —liberty." Lincoln went on to illustrate his point with a parable about animals. "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat," he said, "for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a
liberator
, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep is a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty."
³

The shepherd in this remarkable fable was, of course, Lincoln himself; the black sheep was a slave and the wolf was his owner. Lincoln

3
.
CWL
, VII, 301–2.

here prophesied the impending victory of the shepherd's and black sheep's version of liberty. But he did more than that—he signified a deeper transformation in the meaning of liberty accomplished by the Civil War. This was a transformation from what the late Isaiah Berlin described as "Negative Liberty" to "Positive Liberty."
⁴
The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar. It can be defined as the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. A law requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the freedom to go bareheaded if they wish. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom
from
. Positive liberty can best be understood as freedom
to
. It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty, but has a different focus or emphasis. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as a negative liberty—freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he chooses, not because some authority prevents him from doings so but because he cannot read or write anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty—freedom from—but of a positive liberty—freedom
to
read and write. The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write.

Another way of defining the distinction between these two concepts of liberty is to describe their relation to power. Negative liberty and power are at opposite poles; power is the enemy of liberty, especially power concentrated in the hands of a central government. That is the kind of power that many of the founding fathers feared most; that is why they fragmented power in the Constitution and the federal system; that is why they wrote a bill of rights to restrain the power of the national government to interfere with individual liberty. In the first ten amendments to the Constitution, usually called the Bill of Rights, the phrase "shall not" recurs again and again as a restraint on the power of the national government.

Throughout the antebellum era, southern defenders of slavery relied on this concept of negative liberty to deny the power of the national government to interfere with their right to own slaves and take them into the territories. "That
perfect
liberty they sigh for," said

4
. Isaiah Berlin,
Four Essays on Liberty
(New York, 1970), 118–72.

5
.
CWL
, II, 250.

Lincoln in 1854, is "the liberty of making slaves of other people."
⁵
Secession was the most extreme form of negative liberty, which therefore became treason in the eyes of most northerners, including Lincoln.

Positive liberty in the form of the
power
of Union armies became the newly dominant American understanding of liberty. Liberty and power were no longer in conflict. As commander in chief of an army of a million men in 1864, Lincoln the shepherd needed every bit of that power to protect the freedom of the black sheep from the slave-holding wolf. This new concept of positive liberty permanently transformed the U.S. Constitution, starting with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery and granted equal civil and political rights to the freed slaves. Instead of the "shall nots" of earlier constitutional amendments, these three contained the sentence: "Congress
shall have the power
to enforce this article." (Italics added) So did three of the next four constitutional amendments adopted after the 15th.

Even though for three generations after 1877 the nation reneged on its pledge of civil and political equality contained in the 14th and 15th Amendments, Supreme Court decisions and the civil rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century breathed new life into Lincoln's concept of positive liberty. The libertarians and southern conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s who wanted to revive the exclusively negative form of liberty that prevailed before the Civil War were right to make Lincoln a target of their intellectual artillery.
⁶
Unlike these one-dimensional philosophers of negative liberty, however, Lincoln understood that secession and war had launched a revolution that changed America forever. Eternal vigilance against the tyrannical power of government remains the price of our negative liberties, to be sure. But it is equally true that the instruments of government power remain necessary to defend the equal justice under law of positive liberty.