Battle Cry of Freedom

unite States memoir i Battle Cry of license The polished state of warfare date by James M. McPherson Sandra Dunlap 4/16/2010 James M. McPherson was born October 11, 1936. He is considered to be an American Civil contend historian and he is a professor at Princeton University. He get the Pulitzer Prize for his book Battle Cry of Freedom and Wikipedia states this was his nearly celebrated book. He h archaics a Bachelor of Arts and a Ph. D. and teaches United States History at Princeton University. Battle Cry of Freedom The Civil War Era id a work of such vast scope necessarily emphasizes deductive reasoning at the expense of theme. If there is a unifying idea in the book, it is McPhersons acknowledged emphasis on the multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and meliorate into new patterns in the crucible of war. In spite of the existence of a growing class of urban workers and a burgeoning immigrant population, McPherson finds that the greatest da nger to American survival midcentury was neither class tension nor ethnic division.I feel it was sectional conflict between northmost and mho over the future of slavery. He dismisses the idea advanced by some historians that conflicts over tariff policy and states rights were more commutation to the political tensions of the 1850s than the Souths peculiar institution. McPherson emphasizes that by the 1850s Americans on twain sides of the line separating freedom from slavery came to emphasize more their differences than similarities. McPherson is life-sustaining of introductory literature that he says lack the dimension of contingency-the recognition that at numerous captious points during the war things might pretend gone altogether other than (857-858). The narrative style allows him to point out such critical moments that others would rescue missed or looked over. He carefully identifies instances where another outcome was possible, or even probable. His treatment of b oth sides in the war is evenhanded.The Compromise of 1850 was an try out to brace a political science ready to split apart with a few political two-by-fours It gave the South a deferred decision on the gesture of slavery in New Mexico and Utah in return for a stronger fugitive slave law and the admission of California to the union as a free state. Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act shattered this loathsome peace by repealing the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, which had banned slavery in the Federal territories, and substituting the deliberately ambiguous doctrine of touristed sovereignty, which left room for violent disagreement among the territorial settlers.The Kansas-Nebraska Act absolute the destruction of the divided Whig Party and gave rise to the new, entirely Yankee, Republican Party, whose verbalize objective was to prevent the spread of slavery. Although not all Republicans were motivated by sympathy for the Negroindeed many were deeply antipathetic towar d blacks and fence slavery only in the economic interest of working-class whitesand although the political party was pledged not to disturb slavery where it already existed, greyers regarded it as a threat.The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in the revolution of 1860 precipitated the counterrevolution of 1861, the secession of the press down South and, later the firing of shots at Fort Sumter, of the upper South as well. In stressing the formation of the Confederacy as a preventive counterrevolution, McPherson follows the model of historian Arno Meyer, who applied it to twentieth century Europe.Such a counterrevolution does not attempt to restore the old severalizes it strikes firstpreempts revolutionin order to protect the status quo before revolution can erupt. The secessionists magnified the authorization threat posed by Lincolns election, arguing that waiting for an overt bring against Confederate rights was comparable to waiting for a coiled rattlesnake to stri ke. The clipping to act was before the North decided to move against slavery, as the Southern radicals believed the Black Republicans ultimately would.McPhersons other important theme is that the Civil War was a political war, fought by citizens rather than by professional armies as a consequence, political leaders and public opinion directly bear on phalanx strategy, and events on the scrapfield reverberated on the home front and peculiarly in Washington, D. C. For this reason he chose a narrative rather than a thematic format, integrating political and military events to emphasize complex patterns of commence and effect. Thus, he emphasizes that the failure of the Army of the Potomac to reach Richmond during the Seven long time Battle in the spring of 1862 changed Union policy rom the bound goal of restoring the Union into one of total war to destroy the doddery South and consequently gave rise to the Copperhead faction of antiwar Democrats in the North. Antietam was a ma jor turning point not only because Lees Army of northern Virginia was driven back across the Potomac, but also because it ended confederate hopes for European recognition and military assistance, and gave Lincoln the military victory he had been waiting for as a backdrop for his liberty Proclamation.Especially in the North, where the two-part system clam up operated and the Republican position on slavery was still evolving and far from unified, Union military success or failure had far-reaching effects. The defeats at Bull Run and Balls Bluff led Congress to establish the phrase Committee on the Conduct of the War, and the Union failure at Fredericksburg gave writing table of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who aspired to replace Lincoln as the Republican campaigner in 1864, an opportunity to encourage a senatorial investigation of the cabinet.Public esprit de corps in the North rose after the victory at Stones River and temporarily blunted the Copperhead offensive against Lincol ns war policy it plummeted again after the Confederate triumph at Chancellorsville on May 2-3, 1863, and Lincoln exclaimed in despair My God my God What will the country say? McPherson gives military outcomes the central place in his expla domain of Northern victory and Southern defeat he is critical of theories that undervalue events on the battlefield.In his concluding chapter he reviews the various explanations that historians have advanced for the Souths ultimate defeat, analyzing the weaknesses in each. Although the North was superordinate word in manpower by two to one and had even greater economic resources, revisionist historians have denied that the South fought against odds so great as to make defeat inevitable they have pointed out the number of depleted countries that won independence against even greater odds, not the least of which was compound America against Great Britain.Such historians have argued instead that internal divisionsthe states rights governors who ref used to cooperate with the central government, the disaffection of non-slaveholders, libertarian resentment of conscription and the restriction of civil libertiesfatally small the Souths morale and destroyed its will to fight. McPherson discounts this argument, as well as the utility(a) interpretation that stresses the gradual development of superior Northern ilitary and political leadership that was evident by 1863, because both commit the fallacy of reversibility If the outcome had been reversed, the like factors could be cited to explain a Southern victory. He particularly faults the loss-of-morale thesis, for pose the cart before the horse defeat was the cause of Southern demoralisation and loss of will, McPherson argues, not the consequence. McPherson faults most explanations of Southern defeat for failing to run through into account the factor of contingency, the realization that at various turning points the war might have taken an entirely different turn.He identifies f our critical turning points that shaped the final outcome. The first was in the summer of 1862, when blockade Jackson and Lee in Virginia and Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby-Smith in the West launched counteroffensives that prevented the Union armies from claiming what had appeared to be certain victory. This rally by the South meant that the war would be lengthened and intensified, and Southern success seemed assured before each of three successive turning points toward Northern victory.First, Union triumphs at Antietam and Perryville in the fall of 1862 sour back Confederate invasions and killed the hope of European recognition for the Confederacy they whitethorn also have prevented a Democratic victory in the 1862 elections, which would have hampered the Lincoln governments ability to prosecute the war, and certainly permitted the president to make his Emancipation Proclamation from a position of political and military strength.The next critical time was during the summer of 18 63, when success at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga turned the North toward eventual military victory. The last one came in the summer of 1864, when huge Union casualties of the spring campaign in Virginiathree-fifths as many battle deaths as in the previous three years of fighting feature with the seeming lack of progress forced the North in the explosive charge of peace negotiations and nearly resulted in the election of a Democratic president.William Tecumseh Shermans engender of Atlanta and Philip Henry Sheridans destruction of Jubal Earlys army in the Shenandoah Valley make Union victory inevitable only then, after the military space became impossible, McPherson contends, did the South lose its will to fight. Several important long-term consequences of the Northern victory emerge in McPhersons analysis. Slavery and secession were killed forever, and the word United States became a singular instead of a plural oun the union of states, as in the United States are a rep ublic became a nation and an indivisible entity. Replacing the old federal government with which the average citizen seldom came in contact, except at the post office, was a new concentrate polity. This national government levied direct taxes and collected them through an internal tax service that it created itself, drafted citizens into a national army, imposed a national banking system, and instituted numerous other innovations.Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution, McPherson points out, had restricted the authority of the national government beginning in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, six of the next seven amendments greatly increased federal power at state expense. Finally, the balance of political power shifted from the South, which had controlled the presidency for two-thirds of the years since the founding of the republic, and had predominated in the selection of the family unit Speakers, presidents pro tem of the Senate, and Supreme Court justices.For fifty years after the Civil War no Southerner was elected to the presidency, none of the House Speakers or Senate presidents came from the old Confederacy, and only one-fifth of the Supreme Court justices were appointed from the South. McPherson contends that despite the Souths carriage of being different from the rest of the United States, the argument can well be made that until the Civil War it was actually the rapidly ever-changing North that was out of step with the rest of the world. Although slavery had been largely abolished, most societies had an un-free or only semi-free labor force.Most of the world was rural, agricultural, and traditional only the northern United States and a few countries in northwestern Europe were hasten toward industrial capitalism. Thus, Southerners were both sincere and correct when they claimed to be fighting to lay aside the republic of the founding fathers limited government that protected property rights and s erved an self-reliant gentry and white yeomanry in an agrarian society. The Souths preemptive counterrevolution attempted to maintain this tradition, but Union victory in the Civil War ensured the ascendence of the Northern vision of America.