HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by…
Loading...

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (original 1988; edition 2003)

by James M. McPherson (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
5,341761,968 (4.44)283
Very good, comprehensive, history of the American Civil War. Not just the battles, but the financials and diplomatic angles. ( )
  charlie68 | Mar 16, 2020 |
English (75)  Dutch (1)  All languages (76)
Showing 1-25 of 75 (next | show all)
After having managed, barely, to get halfway through James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, I put the book aside in wonder. And, unfortunately, I don’t mean that in a favorable way.
Neither eloquent nor impartial, lacking any new hypotheses and perspectives, this work falls abysmally short of what one should expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
A dry read that is laced with sanctimonious regurgitation of political agendas that were made with hindsight many decades after the Civil War. McPherson portrays – if he does at all - the characters of the era (leading men and lower ranks alike) like long dried-up gingerbread men and to add insult to injury the majority of such characters are related to the Union. There is also noticeable “cherry-picking” involved in his scheme. Clearly, in such instances when he writes about notables that fought for the South, he selects the most infamous ones, and then spends his mediocre literary talent expanding - even carefully trotting out their most damning character flaws and recorded actions - of which there were many.
A less than sophisticated writing style one can forgive but should not a writer of a serious work of any history abstain from such subterfuge?

Most readers don’t seem to care and neither does the association awarding the Pulitzer Prize. At least, they did not in 1989. Well, the reasons completely elude me.
This is even more puzzling as there are infinitely better works out there like Shelby Foote’s equally eloquent and exhaustive Narrative of the Civil War though offering a somewhat narrower perspective does include intriguing new perspectives. Also much more neutral in tone is Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac by Stephen Sears. I get it, the writer is an educated, smart man but in this here case - who wrote this here book then? ( )
  nitrolpost | Mar 19, 2024 |
Simply one of the finest books I have ever read. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
This narrative history of the civil war both entertained and educated me about probably the most significant events in our national history. The war was both inevitable and foundation for many of the current political and social conflicts of today. I cannot emphasize how important and good this single volume history is. ( )
  wvlibrarydude | Jan 14, 2024 |
I thought then, and think now, that this is the finest one volume history of The Civil War. I might be persuaded to go further and say it's the finest history of The Civil War, period. Great book, incredible story, and written as such as opposed to a dry recitation of facts. Gifted writer. ( )
  rpnrch | Oct 22, 2023 |
This is a reread, and it is still my opinion that you will be hard pressed to find a better single-volume history of the American Civil War. ( )
  everettroberts | Oct 20, 2023 |
recommended on AP US history listserv

and by Rich
  pollycallahan | Jul 1, 2023 |
for students
  sumaira4 | Sep 8, 2022 |
A very educational and interesting detail of the events leading up to the American Civil War and the war itself. The beginning was very interesting, detailing the state of the country and politics before the war started. The book gets bogged down in the later parts, where it focuses on events on the war. The author tells all the necessary information, which is a lot, so it becomes tedious to read. It was very worth the read though and I highly recommend it. ( )
  renbedell | Jul 7, 2022 |
Battle Cry of Freedom is a comprehensive history of the Civil War, from causes to results. I haven't found another book that compresses so much information into a single volume. McPherson's excellent writing adds much to a book about such a complex subject. I both listened to and read this book; this hybrid method enhances my learning. ( )
  brewbooks | Jun 26, 2022 |
Very much to my surprise, this 900+ page history of the civil war turned out to be a page-turner. One reason for this is the author's choice of using a narrative history focusing on the events within short blocks of time. A significant amount of the book is spent describing the key battles of the war. He does this superbly, making the battles understandable in ways that most other war books fail to do. Unfortunately, the maps in the Kindle edition are difficult to read. ( )
  M_Clark | Jun 13, 2022 |
A little too sympathetic to Confederacy’s cause - he does ultimately say it was about slavery, but could have done a lot more explaining how fundamentally it was also about racism point blank. Reading secession documents makes clear slavery is The major concern, but social mixing between the races (and interracial relationships being the worst) was also a huge fear for the white men, and they were concerned about increasing rights for free African Americans in addition to abolition.

The epilogue is great if you want the big view analysis! If you enjoy canons and military tactics you’ll enjoy the rest of the book too. ( )
  Sennie_V | Mar 22, 2022 |
Widely acclaimed as the best single-volume history of the Civil War around, this is another entry in the Oxford History of the United States, which I am enjoying immensely. The preface had an interesting observation: though this book covers the shortest span of all the books in the series (albeit with some significant overlap), it's one of the longest books in the series. The Civil War is the most-written about period in American history simply because there's so much history in it, as it did more to turn a bunch of squabbling states into the United States than anything since 1789. McPherson doesn't even get to recounting the actual war until over a third of the way into the book as the country splits and splinters and tries and fails to resolve a vast number of contradictory pressures and choices about its future, and the Federalists' nightmares about factions turned into reality: Northerners vs. Southerns, those who wanted to settle the West vs. those who wanted to preserve the existing balance of the states, wets vs. dries, immigrants vs. nativists, Catholics vs. Protestants, tariff supporters vs. free traders, developers favoring Hamiltonian projects vs. laissez faire adherents, plantation owners vs. industrialists, rural folk vs. urban dwellers, Democrats vs. Whigs, Democrats vs. Know-Nothings, Democrats vs. Republicans, war hawks vs. doves, but most of all, slavery supporters vs. abolitionists.

It's a truism that in elementary school you learn that the Civil War was about slavery, in high school you learn that it was about states' rights, and that in college you learn that actually it was still really about slavery. McPherson completely demolishes the idea that it could have possibly been about anything other than the South's "peculiar institution" - slavery was the bedrock of the South's economy, the keystone of its social structure, and the altar on which they convinced themselves that they were the highest, most advanced civilization on Earth. McPherson somehow works that discussion smoothly into the book among a million other things, from advanced demographic analysis (like his eye-opening mythbusting of the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" canard), to the background political scheming that Lincoln had to overcome, to the shockingly large tolls that disease and poor sanitation took on each army, to the massive economic chasm opening between the modernizing North and the magnolia-tinged South, and most especially, to the battles. You can't really be interested in this greatest of all American wars if you're not fascinated by the senseless, bloody, magnificent meetings between two of the mightiest armies of the 19th century, and McPherson seemingly covers every cavalry raid and clash of picket lines. It's an impressive feat, well-worthy of its 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and though it's rare to describe a book as being the last word on a subject, surely even rarer is the reader who finishes this masterwork unsatisfied. ( )
1 vote aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
It stresses the tetheredness military, political and social histories of the antebellum states and of the war with clarity and without much confusion. Easy to read, and strikes the perfect balance between being concise and comprehensive. ( )
  poirotketchup | Mar 18, 2021 |
As best I can tell, Battle Cry of Freedom is the most well-regarded one volume, generalist account of the Civil War era. Beginning at the end of the Mexican-American war, the first third of the book navigates the escalating political crisis around the expansion of slavery during the 1850s. Roughly the final two-thirds of the book deal with the war itself: military campaigns, political developments, social transformation, diplomacy. It is silly to think that one book could cover such a complex era in anywhere near sufficient detail (most histories of the period are in the 3 to 7 volume range) but Battle Cry of Freedom tries, and mostly succeeds. It synthesizes the famously enormous and contested secondary literature on the Civil War into a compelling narrative. As someone who knew little about the Civil War before starting this book, this is a gift.

Surprisingly (to me anyway) my favorite portion of the book was the build-up to the war, not the war itself. The 1850s saw the American political system grind to a halt over disagreement about slavery’s expansion into the western territories. There had been talk of secession in the south for decades, but only after Lincoln’s election to the presidency by a severely geographically polarized electorate, with a mandate to limit the expansion of slavery with an eye toward its inevitable demise, did the south finally make good on its promises. But war, however inevitable it may seem in retrospect, was not fated. It is to McPherson’s credit that the events preceding secession, the Mexican-American war, the compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, the death of the Whigs and the birth of the Republicans, Bleeding Kansas, and John Brown’s raid, are not presented as mere prelude to the bloodletting to come, but historical turning points that could have swung things in a different direction.

When the fighting does arrive, the narrative slows down, sometimes tracking daily developments, so great were the speed and magnitude of the changes underway. There is an overwhelming focus on military affairs. Reams of pages are dedicated to advances in weaponry, tactics, battlefield play-by-play narration, the character of individual officers. Unless you are specifically interested in the above, there is little to be learned from this approach. The series editor (the book is a part of the multivolume Oxford History of the United States) claims that the attention to military history is justified because the outcomes of individual battles directly affected the political questions the war was fought to settle. In a limited sense, this is true. In historical writing there is always a balance between the contingent behavior of individual actors and the more diffuse influence of larger social forces. At least in terms of the fighting of the war itself, Battle Cry of Freedom leans way too heavily into the contingent. While it was interesting, in a vacuum, to learn, say, about the way rifled muskets created a revolution in military tactics still predicated on Napoleonic-era technology, or the double-envelopment strategy employed by the Union at Gettysburg (and amusing foibles such as the use of wooden cannons to give the appearance of strength, or of Stonewall Jackson falling asleep during battle), such things have no place in a 10,000-foot history of the period. McPherson repeatedly uses phrases such as “Lee’s choice not to attack that day has echoed down through the ages.” This kind of formulation, while attractive, distorts our ability to properly weight different kinds of historical developments. Since Battle Cry was written, Civil War historiography (and the historical inquiry in general) has moved away from military history in favor of other approaches, in recognition of its limited usefulness in resolving larger historical questions. Were Battle Cry written today, it would look very different.

Still, knowing the stakes of the war—the freedom of tens of millions of Black Americans and the continued existence of the United States—makes it easier to sit through granular analysis of some cavalry campaign or siege blow-by-blow. It also renders comprehensible the horrendous scale of the bloodshed. Clear ideological commitments on both sides (preservation of the union and the continuance of slave society, respectively), modern technology that outpaced pre-modern tactics, and rampant disease among the ranks ensured that the casualty count would be high. In every battlefield strewn with thousands of maimed fighters and disfigured corpses lies evidence of a nation that could not purge its violence without more violence.

Given our own current political polarization, people are given to speculate about the outbreak of a second Civil War. This is partially what drove me to this book, so now I’m going to talk about it. After reading Battle Cry, I find this outcome unlikely, mostly because there is no single issue like slavery that galvanizes such intense, sectional disagreement. Plus, politicians on both sides of the aisle, totally owned by various sectors of capital, have absolutely no incentive to disrupt the flow of money in the most important consumer economy on earth, in contrast to Southern politicians willing to secede to protect the source of their wealth. In addition, though Americans as a whole are armed to the hilt, there is less of a civilian connection to the military than ever. And, despite the heightening political tensions, ask yourself: will Americans trained to be passive consumers get off the couch, en masse, and enlist to fight and die for some cause more abstract than the continuance or abolition of slavery? The answer is no; how many of us have even the willpower to stop Netflix before it automatically plays the next episode? All of this is not to say that political violence won’t break out on a large scale, it just won’t look like it did in 1860. In fact, such violence is already here, but we are inured to it (remember the Las Vegas shooting?). I think fantasies of a second Civil War have more to do with the desire for some kind of catharsis, a single moment when one’s political opponents will be punished and politics will be made functional as a result. The first Civil War was something like a reckoning, the idea goes, and we’re ready for another. We feel this way because we cannot imagine the kind of sustained political struggle from below that might effect actual improvement over time. Movies do not tell this story. It is telling that this fantasy has begun to take the form of a second Civil War, rather than, say, a Sorkin-esque debate or trial, or a moment when the scales fall from the eyes of the opposition and they admit their wrongdoing. To be sure, these other fantasies, no more realistic than another Civil War, still exist, typified these days on the left by the figure of the principled Republican who would stand up to Trump (still waiting) and on the right by the deep state operative Q fighting secret leftist pedophiles. The proliferation of such bedtime stories is an index of how little democratic control the average politics-following American feels they have over their nation’s affairs. The more rational response to this situation would be to tune out of politics altogether, as many have done. It is those still paying attention that have these ridiculous fantasies of retributive violence. The sad truth is that the most likely outcome is not a second Gettysburg in which dueling visions of the nation’s future battle it out on some guy’s farm in Pennsylvania, but a slow and steady decline in which inequality and living standards get worse over the course of decades, an increasing number of people cease to believe that a better future is possible, and violence sporadically breaks out among those still invested, with increasing state repression in response. The even sadder truth is that the first Civil War was not even the reckoning we imagine it to be. The abuses of slavery did not end at Appomattox, but continue to this day under other names, in other guises.
  trotta | Mar 4, 2021 |
A fantastic, in depth telling of the lead up and progress of the civil war told in a narrative fashion that never gets dull. Its a rare author that can weave political, military, and social history into a seamless whole but McPherson more than accomplishes this here. ( )
  andrem55 | Jul 31, 2020 |
I first read James McPherson's classic history of the Civil War era when I was in high school. At the time I had a pretty callow understanding of history; because of this, while I took a lot from McPherson's book, many of his arguments and details went largely unappreciated. In the years that followed his book remained on my shelf as a valued resource that I drew from, even as I moved on to more focused studies about the period. Recently, however, a friend's request brought me back to the book for my first cover-to-cover reading of it in decades. This proved an extremely interesting experience, for several reasons.

Foremost among them was the opportunity to learn the things I had missed the first time around. I credit this to my maturity, as I have a far greater range of interests than my 17-year-old self ever did. This helped give me a deeper appreciation for McPherson's book, as I saw the balance and nuance he displayed on the numerous topics he addressed. I also found myself admiring even more so the fluidity of McPherson's presentation of the era and his ability to range from topic to topic in a way that never weakened my engagement with the text.

Yet for all of the book's strengths and my increased admiration for them, I also saw flaws that I missed the first time through. Foremost among them is McPherson's scope, for as brilliantly as he covers the lead up to the Civil War and the war itself, this remains his predominant focus. Other subjects relevant to the era, such as cultural developments, are ignored so long as they are irrelevant to his focus on the war and the events leading up to it, making his book less comprehensive than some of the others in the series. Another is the increasingly dated nature of the text. Unlike Robert Middlekauf with his volume on the Revolutionary era, McPherson has stated that he has little interest in updating his work. Though his decision is understandable in some respects, the absence of the considerable amount of Civil War historiography that has been published over the past three decades erodes its value and will continue to do so as time went along.

Because of this, I finished McPherson's book with an appreciation both renewed and more tempered than before. While it remains the single best book on its subject, it is one that is showing its age. I expect that I will turn to it again in the years to come, but when I do it will be an awareness that it no longer can serve as the solitary go-to source for understanding this pivotal era of American history. ( )
  MacDad | Mar 27, 2020 |
Very good, comprehensive, history of the American Civil War. Not just the battles, but the financials and diplomatic angles. ( )
  charlie68 | Mar 16, 2020 |
I learned so much about political parties and the time period. I loved every minute of it. ( )
  LindaLeeJacobs | Feb 15, 2020 |
If you had to choose to read one book on the Civil War, this is the one. Clearly narrated, this book covers more than just the battles -- much of the work focuses on the social, technological and diplomatic implications of this great conflict. I was surprised to learn just how close Abraham Lincoln came to not being re-elected President in 1864; but for the fall of Atlanta, the history of the country would have been vastly different. This work is an excellent overview of the United States during this turbulence period. It won the Pulizter Prize for History in 1989. ( )
  Terrencee | May 8, 2019 |
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

Battle Cry of Freedom was lauded as the best single volume history of the American Civil War available. Having now completed it, I think this an accurate summary. While I lack the depth of knowledge vis-a-vis my father (A Civil War aficionado), the amount I picked up about the war via osmosis is decent. Battle Cry of Freedom does an excellent job of synthesizing the political and military aspects of the war. As a result, it leads to a much better understanding of how some battles, like the first Bull Run, were not terribly important militarily but hugely important politically to the war. This timing piece, as it related to the political mood is important. I had not fully grasped how Lincoln had expected to be denied reelection in 1864 and how much military success made a difference to his reelection chances. Similarly, while the battle of Gettysburg is easy to understand as a military success, the combination of that battle with the simultaneous fall of Vicksburg, both on July 4, marked a major turning point in the war especially in terms of morale. Battle Cry of Freedom presents the war as one long narrative of a struggle over slavery and puts all of the aspects of the conflict into context with one another.

I have a few complaints but they are minor particularly in terms of the scope and purpose of the book. 1) It is a long book - 850 pages of fairly dense prose and 2) the heroics of the First Minnesota get little more than a paragraph. See? Contradictory complaints that parts of the book weren't detailed enough while complaining about length. It is a comprehensive history of a critical time and thus some things are necessarily truncated to cover other issues. No author can meet both prongs as one necessarily excludes the other.

Bottom line, this is a very good history that, surprisingly, is very current to many of our political discussions. But, even if it wasn't timely, Battle Cry of Freedom deserves to be read as a masterful history of a transformative period in American history. Highly recommended. ( )
1 vote Oberon | Dec 29, 2018 |
This was the first book for our Less Stupid Civil War Reading Group. The reading list suggested by Ta-Nehisi Coates. To be honest, I was a little (a lot) intimidated. I probably never would have gotten around to reading this had we not been inspired by the Coates article to start this group. But once I started, I actually loved it.

McPherson is a great author who clearly is deeply invested in and knowledgable about his subject matter, and isn't afraid to use his expansive vocabulary to full effect here. (A regular feature of our group chats was what new words we'd learned from reading this book.) We also really appreciated his transparency -- in many issues he would acknowledge that there were several varying opinions, give the reasons for each, and then give the reasons he favored his own interpretation.

This is a massive story about a long, chaotic, and heated period of our nation's history. McPherson does his best to bring in as much context as possible -- setting up the stage before the war, including other societal changes happening at the time, and of course explaining the battles, the politics, the economy, and the reactions of major world forces.

It seems like if you read these nine billion pages, you'd feel like you got the full scope of the period. But of course I came out of this book with a list of things I need to know more about. I guess it's a good thing that this is only the first book for our group. ( )
  greeniezona | Jun 24, 2018 |
I picked this up for context and found it to be a very engaging read, though lengthy. ( )
  picklefactory | Jan 16, 2018 |
This book is an amazing treat. There really isn't much more to say. It is a highly readable, fast paced journey through our Civil War years. This masterpiece should be required reading at the High School and College levels. As Shelby Foote said: "Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us." Highly recommended ( )
  Mitchell_Bergeson_Jr | Aug 6, 2017 |
History, they say, is written by the victors. The function of the modern historian, I would argue, is to present a more balanced view of history, working with all the evidence available to him/her at the time.

An supreme example of this approach is McPherson's one volume history of the American Civil war. Wide-ranging, easy to read and well balanced, he tells the tale of those violent, tragic fours years in prose that springs off the page. This is no dry history book.

McPherson sets the scene for the events of the Civil War by focussing on the political and social structures and events of the preceding decade. This is a vital part of the story as it shows the growing tensions in American society between those who see slavery as an abomination and those who see it as God's will and the best way to treat the "black man".

The old political order is indeed dead by the election of 1860 as the Whig party self destructs and the Republican Party rises to fill the void and provide America with one of its greatest Presidents - Abraham Lincoln. What McPherson shows though, is that Lincoln was considered the dark horse amongst the potential candidates and at first was not considered the right man to lead a country into war. What amazed me is that, given the current state of the Democrat and Republican parties, it was the Democrats who were the standard bearers for inequality and slavery. How times change.

But war changes not only men, but countries also. And that was the case with the Civil War. Throughout the book, told in narrative fashion, McPherson switches between battlefield successes and disasters and political developments that shaped the story of the War. He paints detailed pictures of the major players such as Jefferson Davis, Lincoln, Grant, Lee, McClellan, Sherman, Stonewall Jackson and more. Men who were shaped by war and who either rose to the challenge or were buckled by it. Throughout he keeps a balanced view, showing the motivations of both sides and the outcomes of the actions the generals took.

This is a difficult, complicated tale, full of loyalties to old values and sweeping change as society reshaped itself in the aftermath of the struggle. But McPherson is equal to the task and this is one of the best history books I have ever read. What becomes clear is that both sides thought they were fighting for what was "right". The difference is that one vision was clinging to an antiquated past, while the other became a vision for a new kind of nation. Before the war the term "United States" meant just that, a collection of individual states. After the war it came to mean the nation as a whole.

The Civil War shaped modern America. The seeds of its industrial and military dominance over the following century were sown in the blood and mud of the Southern heartlands. If you want to know how it happened, read this book. ( )
  David.Manns | Nov 28, 2016 |
Good epic book, but I do prefer Shelby Foote. ( )
  Gary_Power | Jul 10, 2016 |
Showing 1-25 of 75 (next | show all)

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (4.44)
0.5 1
1 5
1.5
2 12
2.5 1
3 54
3.5 9
4 199
4.5 47
5 399

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

Penguin Australia

An edition of this book was published by Penguin Australia.

» Publisher information page

Recorded Books

2 editions of this book were published by Recorded Books.

Editions: 1461813808, 1461813816

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,201,584 books! | Top bar: Always visible