The Union and Confederacy, McPherson writes, both used the vocabulary of the country’s founding to paper over the conflict’s broken heart. But reading Battle Cry, in an age where the mental gymnastics of contrarianism are often celebrated for the exercise alone, is refreshing on another score: the war’s cause. Historians, including one as talented as McPherson, will probably never be done debating that. Senate with a walking cane? Was it far earlier, when the ink first dried on the Constitution’s clause deeming blacks as only three-fifths of a person? on April 12, 1861, when the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter? Was it five years earlier, when Preston Brooks attacked Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Even with more than 150 years passing between the start of the Civil War and now, it is hard to pick the point where the first version of the American experiment failed.
Battle cry of freedom book review free#
One wonders while reading about jayhawkers and copperheads, Free Soilers and nativists, Dred Scott and John Brown, if the people caught up in these events had a sense that the center could no longer hold. McPherson, now an emeritus professor from Princeton, starts the story at midcentury with the Mexican War and westward expansion, when the virus of America’s original sin - slavery - began the fever that would result in unimaginable bloodshed. If you know the key players, events and consequences, the reading pleasure is in the journey.
Battle cry of freedom book review series#
Published in 1988, the book was written for the Oxford History of the United States series and was an attempt to compile an authoritative single volume on events that can span many more. So nostalgia, probably more than intellectual curiosity, is what led me to start reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.
I think of the soft violin sounds in “Ashokan Farewell,” the theme to the Ken Burns series, which often wafted from my father’s television set.
I think of humid Fourth of July nights, when my family would go down the street from our Maryland home to watch fireworks from the roof of a mansion where Union General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. I think of childhood trips with dappled sunlight on Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam and the cool touch of Devil’s Den boulders at Gettysburg. And enough quotes and excerpts from letters and diary entries to personalize those affected by the war, North and South.It’s summer when I think about the Civil War. Enough battle facts to satisfy you if you aren't studying military tactics. There is enough storytelling to bring characters like Grant, Jackson, Johnston, McClellan, and Sherman alive. If you're interested in the history of the time but have American primary and secondary school knowledge, this is a great book. I did not understand the significance of the Whig party and its relationship to the Republican Party. The Mexican-American war the role of Manifest Destiny in the expansion or curtailment of slavery is made clear. Now I understand the tension created by the Missouri Compromise that led to the Pottawatomie Massacre that led to the Lawrence Massacre. Before this, the war, in my limited knowledge, started with Dredd Scott and Harper's Ferry. The appeal of this narrative is that it paints a cohesive picture of the United States in the preceding decades before the war that helps to explain its causes.
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