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Leadership and Division
James McPherson’s book Battle Cry of Freedom and Donald’s essays collection Why the
North Won the Civil War are seminal works in the historiography of the American Civil War.
James McPherson ultimately argues that Northern victory was not inevitable and that it was
contingent on several turning points. McPherson’s “contingency theory” is a very different
argument than the inevitability argument presented in the earlier Donald’s essays. Of the two
conflicting arguments, the inevitability argument presented by the Donald’s essays is more
convincing, especially when examining the Williams essay.
McPherson’s argument hinges on his idea of contingency. McPherson argues that the end
of the American Civil War was not a foregone conclusion from the start. “Most attempts to
explain Southern defeat or Northern victory lack the dimension of contingency–the recognition
that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently.”1
Essentially he says that if certain events during the war had gone differently, then the war could
have ended with a Southern victory. Aside from the fact that the contingency theory is playing
“what if” with history, a problematic approach anyway, the idea that one changed event could
have changed the entire course of the war is not very convincing. For example, McPherson
argues that the battles at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga were among these “critical
points” that he referred to. If the South had managed to win these battles, then perhaps they
could have won the war.2 The problem with this line of reasoning is that the South won a lot of
individual battles, but it did not win them the war in the long run. It is unlikely that two or three
additional victories would have changed the entire result of the war. The other critical points
1 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 857-8.
2 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 858.

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suffer from the same problem. The contingency argument, then, ultimately fails to explain the
American Civil War adequately.
In addition to presenting his contingency theory in the epilogue, McPherson also explains
the failure of various pieces of the inevitability argument. One element of the inevitability
argument is that the North had superior military leadership, which ultimately provided them the
edge in the war. McPherson argues that the South had excellent military leadership, too, like Lee
and “Stonewall” Jackson. Additionally, he says that the North had bad military leadership, just as
the South did. 3 The issue with McPherson’s argument here is that Lee, arguably the
Confederacy’s greatest military commander, was in the Virginia theatre the entire war. Thus, it is
not surprising that the Virginia theatre featured a stronger Southern resistance to Union forces. In
the western theatre, where the Union had Sherman and Grant, the Union enjoyed a considerable
amount of success. McPherson’s argument against the inevitability of Northern victory because
of military leadership does not have the weight that Williams’s essay explaining why the Union’s
superior military leadership ensured Northern victory does.
Williams’s essay focusing on the military leadership of the North and South presents the
vital flaw in McPherson’s argument about leadership in the war. Whereas McPherson argues that
the North and South both had good and bad generalship, Williams points out the flaws in the
good Southern generals. Williams’s examination of Lee presents these flaws. Lee had a
“restricted view [that] constituted a tragic command limitation in a modern war.”4 Furthermore,
“[t]he most striking lack of modernity in Lee was his failure to grasp the vital relationship
3 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 857.
4 T. Harry Williams, “The Military Leadership of North and South,” in Why the North Won the Civil War: Six
Authoritative Viewson the Economic, Military, Diplomatic,Social,and Political Reasons Behind the Confederacy’s
Defeat ed. by David Herbert Donald, (New York: Simon & SchusterPaperbacks, 1960), 52.

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between war and statecraft.”5 Essentially, Lee was a very traditional general who was fighting in
a modern war. Certainly, the Union also had very traditional generals, too, the prime example
being McClellan. These men all subscribed to Jominian principles of war. Jomini had been an
officer who served with Napoleon, and his writings strongly influenced many of the generals
who served in the war. The difference between the military leadership of the North and South is
that the North changed as the war went on. “Lee and the other Confederate commanders were
pretty much the same men in 1865 that they had been in 1861,”6 whereas “[t]he North… finally
brought forward generals who were able to grow and who could employ new ways of war.”7 The
Confederate generalship remained mostly static over the course of the war, but the North brought
forth generals such as Grant and Sherman, who were able to fight a modern war. Grant was the
first to show that he knew there was a vital relationship between war and politics. This
distinguishes him among other the other generals who served in the war. Furthermore, unlike
Lee, whose strategy was limited to one theatre at a time, Grant was able to employ a grand
design, which ultimately won the war. Sherman, too, exhibited skills of a modern general
through his usage of psychological and economic warfare. Thus, while the South maintained
traditional styles of warfare throughout the entirety of the war, the North changed and adapted to
the modern war that the American Civil War had become.8 This is ultimately why Williams’s
argument about military leadership is more convincing. McPherson does not take into account
the essential differences in how Grant and Sherman fought the war to how Lee and the other
Confederates did.
5 Williams, “Military Leadership,” 52.
6 Williams, “Military Leadership,” 53.
7 Williams, “Military Leadership,” 53.
8 Williams, “Military Leadership,” 42-3, 48-9, 51-7.

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Williams’s argument about the North’s military leadership being a factor in the inevitable
victory of the North is much more convincing than McPherson’s contingency argument. The
contingency argument itself is flawed, as has been shown. Furthermore, McPherson’s logic when
debunking why the military leadership of the war provided the North’s victory is missing the
essential components of how different the generals on each side were. Because of these flaws,
Why the North Won the Civil War ultimately has a more convincing argument than Battle Cry of
Freedom.

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Bibliography
McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Williams, T. Harry. "The Military Leadership of North and South." In Why the North Won the
Civil War: Six Authoritative Views on the Economic, Military, Diplomatic, Social, and
Political Reasons behind the Confederacy's Defeat, edited by David Herbert Donald, 38-
57. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1960.