The Civil War Today: An Interview with James McPherson

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998. His latest book, just out this year, is This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War, from Oxford University Press (272 pages, $28), a collection of essays dealing with the most enduring questions of the war. (My thanks to Robert Bowmaster, whose research assistance helped me prepare for this interview.) I talked to him recently about some of the most enduring questions raised by the war.

One of my favorite chapters in This Mighty Scourge is on General Robert E. Lee’s goals in the Gettysburg campaign. You make the case that Lee did in fact achieve many of the goals he outlined in his pre- and post-campaign reports, such as drawing the Union army away from the Rappahannock River line and leading his army out of the war-ravaged Virginia area to provide it with food and supplies in Pennsylvania. What was Lee’s long-term goal? With such limited resources, what did he ultimately hope to achieve by invading Pennsylvania?

I think Lee had two major long-term goals in the invasion of Pennsylvania. The first was to gather food, forage, horses, and other supplies from that rich countryside to sustain his armies. He accomplished that pretty well during the three-plus weeks his army was in Pennsylvania, and he managed to send back to Virginia a great amount of such materiel. The second goal, I believe, was to bring the Army of the Potomac to battle at advantage and inflict another Chancellorsville-like defeat, which he hoped would so demoralize the Northern people as to force the Lincoln administration to consider peace negotiations. If he had succeeded, the mission of the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, to Washington that I write about in that chapter might have been the first step toward such negotiations. But with his defeat, everything fell through, and he was lucky to get his army back to Virginia.

It has been frequently pointed out that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves except in the states in rebellion, and as you write in your final chapter, the proclamation “would cease to have any legal or military force when the war ended.” But do you feel that Lincoln’s commitment to abolishing slavery was, at least by the end of the war, total, and that had he lived, he would have finished the work of abolishing slavery?

Yes. By 1865 Lincoln was thoroughly committed to the complete abolition of slavery as a goal of the war, and he refused to consider any kind of negotiations with Confederate leaders without their prior commitment to the “abandonment of slavery,” as well as restoration of the Union, as a condition for such negotiations. He also supported the adoption of a constitutional amendment (the Thirteenth Amendment) to abolish slavery everywhere and forever. The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864; Lincoln ran for reelection on a platform committing his administration to the amendment; the House passed it in January 1865, and Lincoln immediately began using all of his political leverage to get ratification by a sufficient number of states. He was assassinated before the amendment became part of the Constitution, but if he had lived he definitely would have seen it through to success.

A great deal has been made in recent years of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, a fact that was often ignored or glossed over by earlier Lincoln biographers. How would you sum up Lincoln’s actions in regard to civil liberties?

Lincoln was the first President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus by executive order. Chief Justice Roger Taney challenged his constitutional right to do so, claiming in an opinion filed in circuit court (not the Supreme Court) that only Congress had the power to do that, because the constitutional clause permitting suspension in case of rebellion or invasion is located in Article I of the Constitution, which specifies the powers of Congress. Lincoln insisted that suspension was an emergency power designed for use in wartime, and such power logically belonged to the Commander in Chief. The Supreme Court itself never resolved this question, and most constitutional scholars now think Lincoln was right.

Some of the people arrested and imprisoned in preventive detention under Lincoln’s suspension of the writ were probably not a real danger to the Union war effort, but most of them probably were. Most of the arrests took place in the border states, which were in an active war zone, and those arrested were in many cases a genuine threat. Others were not, and there probably were some unnecessary violations of civil liberties under Lincoln. But I would argue that arrests under the sedition act in World War I and the internment of Japanese-Americans (under executive order) in World War II were far greater violations of civil liberties than anything that took place under Lincoln. And of course the threat to American security in the Civil War was much greater than in World Wars I and II and, for that matter, in the war on terror today. What impresses me is Lincoln’s restraint.

In your chapter on Antietam, you argue that the battle was the reverse of the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War; in effect, it ended the hopes of the Confederacy for foreign intervention. It’s customary to call Gettysburg the most important battle of the Civil War—Pickett’s Charge was the “high-water mark of the Confederacy”—while some, Shelby Foote, for instance, have argued that Vicksburg was at least as and maybe even more important.

I would place Antietam above both Vicksburg and Gettysburg in importance. In fact, I wrote an entire book arguing that point, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, published in 2002. I argued there, as I do in the essay in This Mighty Scourge, that the failure of Lee’s invasion of Maryland caused the British to back away from the French proposal for joint intervention to broker a peace on the basis of Confederate independence and to recognize the Confederacy as a nation if the Lincoln administration refused the British-French offer of mediation. Also, Antietam blunted what appeared to be irresistible Confederate momentum that had been building since the Seven Days battles in June, and it reversed a disastrous slide in Northern morale that seemed to predict a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in the fall elections of 1862. The Republicans retained control by a narrow but safe margin. Finally, Antietam provided Lincoln with the military victory, limited though it was, that he had been waiting for to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. No other battle in the war had such multiple consequences; that’s why I rank it higher in importance than Gettysburg or Vicksburg.

In high school in Alabama I was given The Youth’s Confederate Primer, which reminded us that the Civil War was primarily fought not over the issue of slavery but over “states’ rights.” Is the claim that the war was fought to defend states’ rights a mostly modern invention? And what, in your study of the letters and journals of the average soldiers, motivated the men in the Confederate ranks? What stake did they feel they had in the war when they owned no slaves in the first place?

The argument that the war was fought over states’ rights goes back to the immediate postwar period, when Confederate leaders who in 1861 had openly avowed the defense of slavery against the perceived threat to the institution posed by Lincoln’s election changed their tune when slavery was a dead and discredited institution. For example both the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and his vice president, Alexander Stephens, had made widely publicized speeches in 1861 maintaining that slavery was the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate States of America and an institution essential to the Southern way of life, worth fighting to preserve. After the war, both men wrote memoirs in which they insisted, to the contrary, that slavery was only an “incident,” and that defense of states’ rights (the main right, of course, was the right of property in slaves, but they kept silent about that after 1865) was the real cause of secession and war. To have fought a war that cost 620,000 lives to defend the institution of human bondage did not look very honorable after 1865, so part of the Lost Cause mentality that honored the Confederacy found another reason for having fought. The majority of Confederate soldiers who did not belong to slaveholding families or households (about 60 percent of them) nevertheless had a stake in slavery as the basis of the Southern racial order and economy in which they shared, and many Confederate soldiers made this point in their letters.

There’s been much debate over the years about which name best characterizes the war—the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression, or the War of Secession. All have their advocates. Which term do you feel is most appropriate?

The name the Civil War is by far the most appropriate. That is what people on both sides called it during the war itself. In the North during the war it was also called the Rebellion; in the South it was called the War for Independence. Most of the other phrases by Southerners to describe the war—War Between the States and War of Northern Aggression—came into use after the war, as part of the retroactive effort to honor the Lost Cause. In reality, the War of Southern Aggression would be more accurate, since the Confederacy started it, by firing on U.S. soldiers and a U.S. fort on April 12, 1861.