Battle Cry of Freedom

A few weeks ago I decided to donate some of our books to the local library's spring book sale. It's part of a pre-move thinning process that is proving both interesting and difficult, as we try to decide which books we simply must keep.  One of the books slated for donation was James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, his history of the Civil War era that forms part of the Oxford History of the United States. It's a big book, which I read very quickly when it was published in 1988. Back then we were still new to northern Virginia, and were deeply engaged in learning about the local history of the Civil War, visiting battlefields and local museums from Richmond to Gettysburg.

Since then, our initial interest has cooled somewhat, partly I suspect the result of multiple viewings of Ken Burns' Civil War series, which began back in September of 1990. But with the approaching 150th anniversary of the war, I found myself hesitating over donating McPherson's book, and decided to take another look. I'm glad I did. It's been an education I didn't expect on the bitterness of corrosive politics and the dangers of deep ideological divides. Whereas the first time around I skipped over all those introductory chapters to get to the parts about the war, the battles, and the generals, this time I've been reading carefully McPherson's discussion of the deep political divisions that festered for years before the actual war broke out.

The best part about the early chapters of the book is the way McPherson describes the politics and personalities of some of the historical figures we used to study in school, but who are now I suspect nearly unknown to most younger Americans: John C. Calhoun from South Carolina, Henry Clay from Kentucky, and Daniel Webster from Massachusetts; but also William Seward from New York, and Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, as well as others like Salmon P. Chase,  Martin Van Buren, and Alexander Stephens who figured in the political give and take that led to the Great Compromise of 1850 and the desperate efforts to stave off sectional conflict.

During that decade or so prior to the actual beginning of the war, the divisive atmosphere in the country grew worse, the political parties began to lose definition, and the nation teetered on the brink in ways that are uncomfortably familiar now 150 years later. Some of the causes of those conflicts are still with us, religious and racial politics that simmer just beneath the surface of current political debate. But the remarkable thing is that one of the root causes for the political conflict, now as then, is the perennial argument over the role of the national, or federal, government as opposed to that of the individual states.

This argument has been the root of nearly all significant American political discussion since the founding, and McPherson does a really good job of describing the way it was playing out in the 1840s and 1850s. The divisions over slavery were certainly central, but so were the strong feelings over American intervention in foreign wars, the proper seat of political power, the influence of commerce in political affairs, the strong currents of religion in American politics. I'm glad I decided to hold on to this book a little longer and read it again. It's a more sobering experience this time than it was when I first looked at it.