It should be enough for any historian to write a book of which people say, 'If you only ever read one book about the American Civil War it should be James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom'. But now McPherson has written a book of which people may very well add, 'and if you read another book on the Civil War it should be Drawn with the Sword.'
Battle Cry of Freedom is a brilliant narrative of the civil war which at the same time illuminates its underlying social and economic causes. Drawn with the Sword is very different. This is historical analysis rather than historical chronology, a look inside the workshop rather than sight of the finished work. Drawn with the Sword is a scholarly and fascinating read. However, readers will gain most from it if they have already read Battle Cry of Freedom.
The most substantial essays in this collection examine the causes and course of the war. The first piece looks at what it was that made the slave states of the American South different? McPherson's carefully argued reply is that it was the North which became 'different', for it was there that capitalism developed with unprecedented speed and intensity, making the South's plantations seem so 'different'. And it was this distinction, growing first into difference, then into division and finally into conflict which provides the objective background to the civil war.
McPherson then develops this analysis in a central section, 'Why the North Won'. He is careful not to conclude that Northern victory was inevitable. He agrees that the North had the overwhelming preponderance of industrial and, eventually, military might. But it needed this given its war aims. For the North to win it had to conquer the South. This meant invasion and suppression followed by wholesale social reconstruction. But for the South to win it merely needed to fend off invasion and secure the secession which was the war's most immediate cause.
As the British found to their cost in America in 1776, and the Americans to theirs in Vietnam 200 years later, invasion and subjection require much greater forces than a defensive war of resistance. McPherson's claim is that the strategic situation made the war a much more even contest than statistics of industrial capacity would lead us to expect.
His approach is valuable in drawing our attention not only to the economic underpinning of the war but also to the political strategy which its generals and politicians followed. The essays on Confederate General Robert E Lee, 'Lee Dissected', and his Union counterpart, Ulysses S Grant, weigh the impact of the two great civil war military strategists on the turn of events. The social dimension is never far from the surface, even when McPherson is dealing with the great leaders of the civil war. His study of Grant is a portrait from which any revolutionary could learn, showing that when the outcome of the war hung in the balance Grant made a decisive contribution.
Similarly, the section on 'The Enduring Lincoln' is a careful but highly readable analysis of the role of Lincoln's leadership in winning the war. McPherson challenges the contention of some historians writing from the 'history from below' perspective who insist that it was the slaves alone who were the authors of their own freedom. He argues that things are more complex and that it is wrong to dismiss Lincoln's role. A formidable social historian himself, McPherson is too aware of the balance to be struck between the subjective and objective factors in history to accept the more sweeping generalisations of even those social historians with whom he has most in common.
The power of this approach, and its commitment to a total history, is the great strength of this book. McPherson is not a Marxist, and Marxists might argue with some of his conclusions. But he is a historian who develops a materialist analysis and an understanding of how people's conscious struggles and their social circumstances interact in a way from which many would-be Marxists could learn.
The book also has some more incidental pleasures. An essay on the movie Glory, the story of one of the first black regiments in the Union army, is a model of cultural historical writing, as is the essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin. And 'What's the matter with History?' summarises McPherson's approach to history writing which he insists can be both popular and scholarly, both analytical and a narrative, both radical and not afraid to look at the top of society as well as the bottom.
For Cause and Comrades is a valuable, engrossing book, but a lesser achievement. Using hundreds of letters from Confederate and Union soldiers, McPherson has organised a mosaic of voices which attempts to let the soldiers themselves explain why they fought. His evident sympathy for the armies' rank and file, so many of whose letters home are followed by phrases such as, 'He did not get home; in July 1864 he was killed at Petersburg', shines through. This is no eulogy to war. The men who fought it, Confederate or Union, would have agreed with Grant's famous statement, 'War is all hell.'
Yet it is precisely because this was a most bloody war, in which America lost more casualties than in all the country's other wars combined, that the question of motivation is so central. McPherson's conclusion, although the structure of the book sometimes obscures it, is that there was a vital ideological difference between the reasons that Confederate and Union soldiers went to war and stayed fighting.
The early chapters deal with themes common to the letters of both Confederate and Union soldiers: some on both sides fought for 'patriotic reasons', for religion, for money or because of loyalty to their company, friends or regiment. But as the book goes on it becomes clear that one vital and unavoidable distinguishing factor was present for many Union soldiers but necessarily absent on the Confederate side: the motivation to crush slavery and the whole Southern system.
There were indeed many Northern soldiers who, though they did not begin to fight for this reason, nevertheless ended the war or lost their lives as abolitionists. As a lieutenant in the 2nd Minnesota wrote to his fiancée, who disapproved of his abolitionism, 'Slavery and aristocracy go hand in hand, it must be broken up it is rotten and corrupt slavery and its reliance and support must go down together. We did not think so one year ago and you will think differently too a year hence.'
It is in these later chapters that McPherson really fulfils the promise outlined in Drawn with the Sword: personal experience brought into proportion with the economic and social factors which determined the war long before many of these soldiers became conscious of those causes. Drawn with the Sword is too good a book for anyone to miss. And those who read it will want to read For Cause and Comrades as well.