David's Bookclub: Battle Cry of Freedom

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David's Bookclub: Battle Cry of Freedom

by David Frum May 23, 2013 2:02 PM EDT
Of course the Civil War was about slavery
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In October 1864, Robert E. Lee sent a proposition to Ulysses Grant.
In May and June of that year, Grant had chased Lee across Virginia in the murderous Overland Campaign. Union forces had suffered about 50,000 casualties; the Confederates, about 32,000. Yet that smaller Confederate total represented a higher proportion of Confederate strength, 46%.
Now, Lee's force were besieged inside the Richmond-Petersburg fortifications. Lee needed every man he could get to defend the lines, and he didn't have enough. He proposed to Grant that the two armies resume the prisoner exchanges that had ceased in the first half of 1863.
Despite his reputation as a ruthless practitioner of attrition warfare, Grant was amenable to Lee's request. By the fall of 1864, word of the horrific conditions at Southern prisoner of war camps - especially Georgia's Andersonville - had spread through the North. More than 100,000 men were held in camps on both sides, but more in the South than in the North. A presidential election was approaching, and anything that could be done for the benefit of the soldiers would redound to the benefit of the administration party. Grant imposed only one condition: black soldiers must be exchanged on the same terms as whites.
Lee refused. "[N]egroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition."
This refusal ended the negotiations, for (as Grant wrote), the United States "is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due as soldiers."
From time to time, we hear denials of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War. That's apologetics, not history. Slavery was always, always there: the war's fundamental cause, the war's shaping reality.
James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is now, incredibly, 25 years old. The anniversary moved me to download the book in audio format and re-ingest it after the long lapse of time. What struck me most, on this rediscovery, is how brilliantly apt is McPherson's title. Both sides of the terrible conflict insisted that the war was a war for freedom. But what did "freedom" mean?
Jefferson Davis' message to [the Confederate] Congress on January 12, 1863, proclaimed the Emancipation Proclamation 'the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man.' Davis promised to turn over captured Union officers to state governments for punishment as 'criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection.' The punishment for this crime, of course, was death.
(p. 566.)

For the rest: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/23/david-s-bookclub-battle-cry-of-freedom.html
 
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