Slavery and Freedom Theme Analysis

Throughout the book, Shaara portrays a range of motivations for the Civil War, and neither side is monolithic in outlook. Many characters offer their opinions as to “what the war is really about”—such as the desire for freedom from a “foreign” government, defense of “states’ rights,” and the desire to crush the Southern aristocracy—yet the central conflict inevitably turns around the question of slavery and freedom. While not every character primarily fights for or against slavery, Shaara argues that it is the inescapable moral issue of the war.

The Union’s clarity of purpose, as portrayed by Chamberlain, is contrasted with Confederate vagueness and denial regarding slavery. For instance, Confederate officers Sorrel and Kemper are furious when English observer Fremantle explains England’s view that slavery is what the war is about; they cannot rest until they attempt to set him straight. Later, Tom Chamberlain is bemused by Confederate prisoners’ assertion that they are fighting for some vague “rights,” which they don’t associate with slavery.

Faced with a crowd of mutineers, Chamberlain asks himself, “How do you force a man to fight—for freedom?” He quickly rejects sentimentalized notions of national pride (“Nobody ever died for apple pie”) and appeals instead to the dignity of man, something distinct from a bloody European past and a transplanted Southern aristocracy. Inherent human value must be the motivating factor of the Northerners’ cause, not the American land itself.

When Chamberlain’s regiment meets the former slave who has been shot, the question of freedom is brought home to him in an even starker way. “What could the black man know of what was happening?” he wonders. “What could this man know of borders and states’ rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? […] And yet he was truly what it was all about. It simplified to that. Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear.” Chamberlain realizes that his stirring rhetoric has its place, but it conveys far less than the suffering of this displaced and friendless man.

In the midst of this encounter, Tom describes his conversation with some Rebel prisoners, who claim to be fighting for their rights. On further questioning, one of them says he doesn’t know which of his rights have been offended, “but he must have some rights he didn’t know nothin’ about.” The juxtaposition of “freedoms” is jarring, as the newly freed man longs to return home but likely cannot, while the prisoners are willing to die for vaguely defined rights they cannot even articulate.

Ironically, outsiders (Fremantle) and skeptics (Longstreet) are portrayed as having a clearer grasp on the nature of the war than those who argue about “freedom” most vociferously. Longstreet finds one of his men regaling Fremantle about the war: “You must tell [England], and make it plain, that what we are fighting for is our freedom from the rule of what is to us a foreign government […] that’s what this war is about,” Kemper insists, not slavery. George Pickett offers the analogy of a gentleman’s club “sticking their noses into our private lives, and then we up and resigned, and then they tell us we don’t have the right to resign.” What both men ignore, however, is that the so-called foreign intervention centrally concerns Southern “freedom” to preserve a system that’s dependent on human enslavement.

Talking with Longstreet later, Armistead speaks disdainfully of England’s refusal to support the Confederacy: “[Fremantle] said the problem was slavery […] He says that’s what most of Europe thinks the war is all about. Now, what are we supposed to do about that?” Longstreet declines to respond, thinking, “The war was about slavery all right. That was not why [he] fought but that was what the war was about, and there was no point in talking about it, never had been.” Once again, Longstreet is more perceptive than his fellow Confederates at to the true nature of the war. While he claims not to be personally invested in the question of slavery, he also finds it obvious that the conflict reduces to this matter, no matter how others try to erect elaborate justifications claiming otherwise.

In a way, both sides’ rhetorical debates about freedom and “why we fight” serve to obscure the burning issue of slavery. However, Shaara makes slavery an unavoidable subject in the story. Union soldiers ask questions about it, foreign observers make judgments about it, and a formerly enslaved man literally wanders into the middle of the debate. The Confederate officers’ denials about slavery, meanwhile, make the issue all the more conspicuous. With characteristic clear-sightedness, Longstreet acknowledges that the war is about slavery, though he stays reticent on the subject. The book’s conclusion from Chamberlain’s perspective foreshadows the issue’s final resolution, hinting—on the eve of Independence Day—that Gettysburg has sounded a major death knell for slavery and its apologists.