The Eagle? Or the Cross? Which Battle Cry, Which Freedom?
Written: Apr 05 '04
Product Rating:
Pros: The text is that of an admirable work
Cons: Bulky, inconveniently sized, and banally illustrated, with infuriating misprints
The Bottom Line: Professor McPherson’s text remains as it was: an admirable overview, though not without partisanship. The maps and photos add little, however, save unwieldiness and embarrassing misprints. Grudgingly recommended
mshawpyle's Full Review: James M. McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Ci...
After a lengthy delay – and one that would be unconscionable were it not for the private reasons that impelled it – I finally take pen – well, keyboard – in hand and address myself to a duty: that of reviewing the new, illustrated, coffee-table-sized edition of Professor McPherson’s Pulitzer-winning The Battle Cry of Freedom.
When it comes to the Late Unpleasantness, the blood once shed has long since been gathered unto God, but partisans of the Union and of the Confederacy alike continue to spill printer’s ink in sanguinary quantities. This often ‘needless effusion’ has resulted in an astonishing number of volumes on the subject, good, bad, and indifferent. Yet there remain a few works that stand well above the common run of such writings, and it may as well be said at once that James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is very much to be numbered amongst these.
Having said which, a reviewer is entitled to wonder what more there is to say.
Initially, one would reflect that the work is, surely, well enough known that the mere publication of an illustrated edition would not require a rehearsal of its textual merits; on the contrary, it strikes one, initially, as padding. More mature reflection, however, suffices to convince me, at least (and Shirley: see above), that there is little or no limit to public inattention, and that a reminder of just why this volume has deserved the praise it has garnered since its first edition, is merited.
Very well, then. James M. McPherson is a copiously qualified and credentialed academic historian. Despite this fact, he writes, by some miracle, in perfectly good English. (You have no idea what a rarity this makes him in these thin and piping times.) He is, in fact, that bane of all academe, a narrative historian, a man competent to tell a compelling story. David McCullough is wont to quote Ian Foster to the effect that, Stating that ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a sequence of events. But if I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of grief, that’s a story. I repeat: Professor McPherson recognizes, to the old-maidish horror of much of the professoriat, that history is story, and he tells the story.
He does so, moreover, in workmanlike prose, and sometimes prose a little better than workmanlike. He has a gift for exposition and an eye for the apposite quotation. He deals easily with political and military manœuvering alike, if not perhaps at quite the incisive level of a Waugh or a Gallagher or a Davis or a Tanner. He understands terrain and topography, if not perhaps so intimately as a Bud Robertson, a Krick, or a Pfanz. He even accounts for the cultural, spiritual, and religious influences that shape events, though he, like almost everyone save the late Henry Mayer, does not perhaps give these quite the attention they deserve.
He has, in short, an easy and effective, a quite sufficient, mastery of the conflict both as to incident and context, and that is a cause for celebration.
He is also, of course, a thorough-going Unionist, a staunch Lincoln man. There is nothing wrong with that, nor is this to be regarded as an insult or as the ascription of a failing. From the first memoirists after the War to the Golden Age of Catton and Dowdey and Southall Freeman, to our own day, American historians have universally gravitated to one or another side. Only the foreign writers have much chance of true neutrality, though one could as easily compile a list of non-US historians of the conflict whose sympathies are clearly engaged on one or the other side. McPherson strives for objectivity and largely preserves his intellectual honesty, and that is all, really, that one can ask.
I might pause to add that other works and other writings than The Battle Cry of Freedom are in my mind here, as well. When I say that Professor McPherson has banked all his capital in what Robert Penn Warren called ‘the Northern treasury of virtue,’ I am not being captious. Not in light of his emphases, elsewhere and since the volume to hand, on the purely economic and social, slave-holding motive causes of secession, say, or his resistance to the claim that there were any African-Americans in Confederate ranks in the common sense of that term. (I agree that the issue is vexed and uncertain, though I consider combat engineers such as the Valley Army’s ‘African Pioneers’ of 1862 to be line units, not press-ganged support elements; what sometimes takes me aback as regards Professor McPherson’s position is his really vehement denial of the possibility of any Black Confederates under arms. I agree that there are those with an axe to grind who inflate those claims; I agree there is no certainty either way. But that is not an absolute denial of its ever having happened, which is the position that seems to beckon Professor McPherson.)
And this, as it happens, is where I was headed with what you doubtless thought was a digression. (I flanked you. The Stonewall Brigade strikes again.) Where I run afoul of Professor McPherson is in just these details, all-important as such details are. I do not think it unfair to suggest that, in his heart and thus on his sleeve, James M. McPherson regards the Confederate States as an ‘evil empire.’ To that proposition, in turn, he would doubtless adduce the uncontested fact that the states that seceded in the first wave couched their public debate very largely and unblushingly in terms of slavery and white supremacy, both of which, we can all acknowledge, are vicious evils. Similarly, throughout The Battle Cry of Freedom, it is evident that while, intellectually, Professor McPherson knows and acknowledges that the North’s war began as one for preserving the Union, he truly feels in his heart of hearts that all along it was a crusade, and a worthy crusade, in favor of abolition, even though this was not a Northern war aim until well into the struggle. He clearly agrees with General Grant that it was wondrous, and in a limited sense admirable, for the Confederate soldiers to fight so long and well for their cause, but that that cause was one of the worst for which men ever fought. But the question of whether that cause was their own perceived liberty – that is, the right to secede – or whether it was the preservation of slavery, Professor McPherson seems unsure of. (So, I add, did U. S. Grant: I am inclined to think that at Appomattox, when he first felt this sentiment, he regarded the tainted cause as being that of disunion, itself, while, by the time of his lapidary Memoirs, he found the taint in the cause to inhere at least as much in slavery as in mere disunion.)
Very well. My criticisms of these postulates are simple. Whatever the terms of public discourse and debate regarding secession in the Cotton South – and we need not even address the difference in interest between elites and the masses who filled the ranks, nor between either in the Deep South and their counterparts in, say, Virginia – it is a fallacy (in the informal sense) to believe in single and unmixed motives. The fallacy is so persistent as to be almost an occupational hazard of the historian, but a fallacy it remains: even in one individual’s daily life, much less in a people’s composite decisions about matters of great import, there are no unmixed motives. Likewise, the argument that a revolution or rebellion against central authority is inherently wrong, and that it becomes still more wicked if the rebels are in whole or in part slaveholders, any two of whom are motivated in part by fear of losing their chattel slaves, is an argument that has a sting in its tail. Intellectual honesty impels those who make such an argument to be little more in favor of the American Revolution or the breaking away of Texas from Mexico than they are of the failed Confederacy. There are historians, largely but not exclusively African-American historians, who would maintain precisely that proposition. (I imagine that my old classmate Ted Delaney has by now all but persuaded Holt Merchant of it.) After all, Washington owned slaves, Hancock had profited from the traffic, and had things not gone the Americans’s way, the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, who, like Lincoln, adopted as a war measure the acceptance and arming of escaped slaves, would today be recalled as the Great Emancipator.
Even with all the influence on the conflict of racial issues and hatreds and follies, in other words, the war was not so, ah, black and white as Professor McPherson seems sometimes to wish to believe.
So much being said, of course, the merits of the text far outweigh these caveats, and the work remains deserving of the plaudits and prizes it has received.
But what, then, of this new and illustrated edition?
Aye, there’s the rub. Unlike the all-text edition, it’s not very convenient for sheer reading. And there’s no little doubt about what the addition of bulk and unwieldiness has accomplished. The maps, which might so easily have justified this edition – I am notorious for always complaining of the need for more maps – are not, in fact, as useful to the lay reader as those in the old Bruce-Catton-inspired (and of late, James-M.-McPherson-edited, ahem) American Heritage New History of the Civil War. For the non-tyro, of course, they are still less utile (the West Point atlas is a far better bet, as are some other specialized works). The photographs are either all-too-familiar, or seem like outtakes from Ken Burn’s file cabinet.
And then, of course, there is the worst of it. I am certain that the ‘electronic revolution’ in publishing has improved the publisher’s profit margins, but I’ll be damned if it has improved the product. As I think most of us know to our cost, spell-check programmes are not sufficient substitutes for editors and proofreaders. And when the added photographs that are the justification for this new edition contain painful misprints, the result of trusting to machines and AI in place of actual proofreaders and editors armed with blue pencils, there is cause for concern, and, yes, for criticism. Especially when the publishing house guilty of these lapses is, God help us all, the Oxford University Press.
The result, really, as far as the new, illustrated edition goes, is satisfactory neither to the newbie nor the buff, and the new edition is equally unsatisfactory as an objet for the coffee-table and as an actual, by-God, something to read book.
You are far better served by purchasing the text-alone edition. The fact that this edition does contain Professor McPherson’s largely admirable text is the sole reason I grudgingly recommend, albeit with serious reservations, anyone’s purchase of this illustrated doorstop edition.
Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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