Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
America Against Itself
By Richard E. Beringer
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era general editor
by James M. McPherson, The Oxford History of the United States, Vol. VI, C. Vann Woodward
Oxford University Press, 904 pp., $35.00 thereafter
Writing on James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom during Easter week in 1988, one and a quarter centuries after the Civil War, one is struck by the contradiction between the war and the Christian tradition that almost all mid-nineteenth-century Americans, North and South, professed to embrace. This four-year war was the bloodiest of American wars. It claimed the lives of more than half a million soldiers and countless civilians, out of a population, white and black, that numbered only 31.5 million. The military casualties equaled those of all our other wars put together. The death rate was 5.2 times greater than that for World War II.
Review, 4815 words
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