Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and the Battle Cry of Freedom

Claire Water, Wisconsin—In the farm towns and county seats of rural western Wisconsin, some of the first memorials to the fallen of the Civil War and the heroic fight to end the original sin of the American experiment were erected by returning veterans and the families of those who did not return. Statues, plaques, and markers placed by the Grand Army of the Republic still stand today, a testament to the region’s pride in embracing the fight not only to save the Union, but also to overthrow the cruel systems of government that had allowed human slavery.

This isn’t just Wisconsin’s story. Across the Mississippi, in rural southeastern Minnesota that Tim Walz once represented in Congress, Civil War monuments stand just as tall and memories run just as deep. So when Walz first ran for governor of Minnesota in 2018, he delivered a stirring call to action that championed a broad vision of the state’s potential. While some politicians talked of cutting programs, lowering expectations and embracing despair and division, Walz declared, “If Washington won’t lead, we will. In this state, we don’t fear the future. We create the future. And when we unite, we win.” To prove his point, the former high school social studies teacher invoked the state’s history: “Our blood saved the Union at Gettysburg. Our iron forged the tanks that liberated Europe. Our farmers ignited a green revolution that fed the world. Our imagination transformed medicine. What many describe as the Minnesota miracle is exactly what we do here.”

That reference to the Union rescue at Gettysburg was not hyperbole. Walz was talking about the First Minnesota Volunteers, who, on the second day of fighting at Gettysburg, stopped Confederate forces threatening to break through the Union line at Cemetery Ridge. Outnumbered five to one, the First Minnesota Volunteers charged the enemy troops. Although they suffered horrific losses, the Minnesotans held their line until reinforcements arrived. Military historians recall that “of the 262 members of the regiment present for duty that morning, only 47 responded to muster that evening. The regiment suffered the highest casualty rate of any unit in the Civil War.” Union Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who ordered the attack, reported, “The superb valor of these men saved our line from being broken.” Without the first Minnesota, the most sacred victory of the war, the one that, in the immortal words of President Abraham Lincoln, renewed the promise of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would never have occurred.

A little more than 160 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, the Democratic ticket of Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris rallied 12,000 Wisconsinites and Minnesotans on the edge of a farm field near Eau Claire. History met them there, too; this region of western Wisconsin is dotted with monuments to the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry and their mascot, an eagle known as “Old Abe,” who soared over battlefields as the screeching “Yankee Buzzard” that terrorized Confederates during the four-year Civil War.

References to the Civil War used to be common at political rallies in the Upper Midwest, where radical abolitionists formed the Republican Party to oppose the expansion of slavery. Now, supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump show up at his rallies with Confederate flags, and Trump himself describes the symbols of the Confederate states’ treasonous uprising against the Republic as “part of a great American heritage.”

These days, it’s up to Democrats to look honestly through the lens of history. Perhaps that explains the remarkably apt recognition of the Civil War at the Harris-Walz rally outside Eau Claire.

Justin Vernon, the frontman of the Grammy Award-winning band Bon Iver, performed at the rally. That’s no surprise. Vernon is originally from Eau Claire and still lives in the area, and he and the band Bon Iver have often appeared on behalf of progressive candidates, such as former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. At Wednesday’s rally, Vernon was his usual modest self, telling the crowd, “We’re here for the right reasons, and we all know what we’re here for. We’re going to do our part, we’re going to make this music, and we’re going to make room for the people that we need to listen to.” But the set ended with a song that spoke to the moment with surprising clarity. “We’re going to close out here with a good old patriotic song that’s been in my head these last few months,” Vernon said, before he and the band performed a chilling version of the most visionary and radical of Civil War-era songs, the abolitionist anthem, “The Battle Cry of Freedom.”

Written in 1862 by George Frederick Root, at a time when the Union cause was in trouble, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” was a call to arms that identified the rebels’ treachery (“Down with the traitors, up with the stars”) and called for the formation of an army of Northern abolitionists and Unionists, along with former black slaves from the South, to defeat the Confederacy (“We will take into our numbers the loyal, the true, and the brave, who shout the battle cry of freedom! And though he may be poor, he will never be a slave, who shouts the battle cry of freedom.”)

Harris has made freedom a rallying cry for her campaign against the authoritarian threat posed by Trump and his running mate, right-wing Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. To that end, she has used Beyoncé’s “Freedom” as her rallying tune. On Wednesday, however, it was an older, but no less timely, call to freedom that echoed through the farm fields of the Upper Midwest. “Oh, we’re gonna rally around the flag, boys, we’re gonna rally around again“Crying the battle cry of freedom,” Vernon sang. “And we’ll rally from the hill, we’ll rally from the plain, Crying the battle cry of freedom.”