All that I've seen of it suggests a strong yankee bias combined with shoddy consideration of the facts. I am familiar with some of McPherson's other works in greater detail than that particular book and each has a strong tilt toward the North. It is also undeniable that McPherson is a political leftist with strong anti-southern political beliefs of his own. Therefore based on the bias in what I have seen of Battle Cry of Freedom as well as the known northern bias of McPherson's other books and his politics in general, I believe it is safe to call Battle Cry of Freedom a biased and unbalanced book.
He bends over backwards to be fair.
No, not really.
Show that, then.
You can start with this:
"Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a "dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the states...at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution."
In reply Jefferson Davis donned the mantle of Hamilton. The Confederate Constitution, he pointed out to Brown, gave Congress the power "to raise and support armies" and to "provide for the common defense." It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Brown had denied the constitutionality of conscription because the Constitution did not specifically authorize it. This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, sanctified by generations of southern strict constructionists. But in Hamiltonian language, Davis insisted that the "necessary and proper" clause legitimized conscription. No one could doubt the necessity "when our very existance is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers." Therefore "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended and calculated to carry out the object...if the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional."
--Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson P.433
Just because Davis sounds as if he might be reading directly from the 1819 Supreme Court decision McCullough v. Maryland doesn't mean it is Dr. McPherson's fault that it makes Davis sound like a lying cretin when he posited an entirely different interpretation in his memoirs.
Walt