Even with more than 150 years passing between the start of the Civil War and now, it is hard to pick the point where the first version of the American experiment failed. One wonders while reading about jayhawkers and copperheads, Free Soilers and nativists, Dred Scott and John Brown, if the people caught up in these events had a sense that the center could no longer hold. McPherson, now an emeritus professor from Princeton, starts the story at midcentury with the Mexican War and westward expansion, when the virus of America’s original sin - slavery - began the fever that would result in unimaginable bloodshed. If you know the key players, events and consequences, the reading pleasure is in the journey. Published in 1988, the book was written for the Oxford History of the United States series and was an attempt to compile an authoritative single volume on events that can span many more. So nostalgia, probably more than intellectual curiosity, is what led me to start reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. I think of the soft violin sounds in “Ashokan Farewell,” the theme to the Ken Burns series, which often wafted from my father’s television set.

I think of humid Fourth of July nights, when my family would go down the street from our Maryland home to watch fireworks from the roof of a mansion where Union General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. I think of childhood trips with dappled sunlight on Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam and the cool touch of Devil’s Den boulders at Gettysburg. It’s summer when I think about the Civil War.

Mcpherson battle cry of freedom