Battle Cry of Freedom

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:08 -0500

Summary

At 900pages in length the book not only covers the civil war but starts at a bird’s eye view of the birth of the United States zooming in closer and closer as we near the Civil War. Going fairly in depth on the US’ economic industry and its evolutions McPherson paints a picture of sprawling plantations and Yankee ingenuity. But in these developments cracks in the “United” States started to appear. The North and South started to develop in different directions. The North barreled forward (or downward? backward? depends on who you ask) into industrialized capitalism while the South who were largely agricultural stood firm in their conservative values and therefore abhorred the urbanization, automatization, that created crowded crime laden huge cities in the North. As an aside, you can get some of this sentiment playing Red Dead Redemption 2, ironically an explicitly anti-confederate game where the main characters act and view the world through a similar lens as the folks who created the Confederacy. Yet having this stance put you squarely against the march of “progress”, as such a widening gap between specialists in North and South started to appear. As such the South became more and more dependent on products from the North, whereas the North maintained only its dependence on the South’s cotton. The gap wasn’t just economic but also in ideas, most of the books, newspapers, inventors, and scientists came from the North. It was fairly common for rich Southerners to pay for their kids to go to school up north. This caused friction as the South began to feel inferiority or distrust towards the North. But even with these things, the central issue was slavery. There was a growing vocal movement of radical abolitionists, next to them was a less radical Free-Soil party who opposed the idea of expanding slavery into the new states of the west. This made southern slave owners uneasy, because for a quite some time slave owners were overrepresented in the government, but several new states with anti-slavery legislation had been added to the Union. This was starting to tip the scale of power away from the once dominant slave owners. This among other things, put these two competing ideologies on a collision course. McPherson then does a fantastic job of describing different factions and their mindsets. Just like any time in history, there was a lot going on and the stories we’re told often greatly oversimplify. He makes it very clear that you could be anti-slavery and racist at the same time. The North in general was anti-slavery but most did not view blacks as their equals. All this and the Civil War hasn’t even started.

Civil_war on George's Blog

Battle Cry of Freedom