Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in For Cause and Comrades, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Duty, Honor, and Masculinity
Northern vs. Southern Ideology
Slavery, Equality, and Abolition
Morale and Endurance
Summary
Analysis
McPherson got the idea for For Cause and Comrades in 1976, when he took several Princeton students on a tour of Gettysburg battlefield. The group walked across the ground over which Pickett’s charge—including 13,000 Confederate soldiers—took place on the climactic day of the battle. The students marveled, asking what could have motivated those soldiers to make such a desperate, deadly charge. McPherson didn’t know how to answer that question, but it eventually led to this book.
McPherson’s book was prompted by the curiosity of students who wanted to understand the lived experience of Civil War soldiers. Pickett’s charge, in particular, was a failed, last-ditch Confederate push that arguably turned the tide of the war in the Union’s favor. Such events involved real people with real motivations, not just abstract figures.
Themes
McPherson also grappled with soldier motivations in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Very few Vietnam veterans seemed to possess the same outlook as their Civil War forebears—their focus was on individual survival, not a larger cause. A Vietnam general observed that today’s American soldiers would never throw themselves into 18 hours of fierce fighting like the Union soldiers who threw themselves into one attack after another at Spotsylvania, for example.
McPherson’s career as a historian was getting underway during the Vietnam War era in the 1960s and ‘70s, so it makes sense that he would think about soldier motivation against that backdrop, observing a sharp divergence between the passions of the Civil War and the low morale that characterized many Vietnam soldiers.
Themes
McPherson realized that the right question wasn’t, “Why not?” but “Why did Civil War soldiers do it?” It wasn’t, he believed, because Civil War soldiers cared any less for their lives than modern soldiers do, or that they lived in a more violent culture. And they certainly weren’t forced to fight—most soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were poorly-paid civilian volunteers.
McPherson decided to look at the question of why some soldiers fight more fiercely in a positive way, by trying to understand exactly what motivated soldiers during the Civil War. The question is especially interesting given that, unlike the draft-reliant Vietnam War, most Civil War soldiers chose to enlist, with little obvious prospect for reward.
Themes
McPherson observes that one can find in Abraham Lincoln, Joshua Chamberlain, and the letters of a poor farmer’s son very similar themes. Most did believe they were fighting for their country, for duty, and for honor. At the same time, it was common knowledge that about half the men in a given regiment did the bulk of the fighting; others (known as skulkers) found ways of avoiding the fray, whether by deserting, finding “bombproof” jobs behind the lines, or simply disappearing when fighting grew intense.
Remarkably, both famous orators (like President Lincoln and the highly articulate Union officer Chamberlain) and “ordinary” soldiers express similar motivations. However, not all soldiers were equally committed to the cause in their actions.
Themes
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Many of the most disdainful remarks one finds about skulkers and stragglers come from upper- and middle-class soldiers. These were early volunteers who believed they’d enlisted out of motives such as duty, honor, and patriotism. These men observed that bullies, street fighters, and other stereotypical tough guys generally made the poorest soldiers, whereas those with a timid reputation often displayed the most courage in battle.
Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between early enlistees and those who expressed the loftiest motivations for fighting. These soldiers saw the war as primarily a matter of ideals, not simply a desire to fight, which explains the lack of correlation between having a tough reputation and being a good soldier.
Themes
Men who were drafted into battle, served as replacements, or (in the Union) enlisted because of bounties after mid-1863 were looked down upon by those who’d volunteered in 1861 and 1862. Such men were derided as “without patriotism or honor,” having “no interest in the cause.” Yet many early enlistees, even those who grumbled in their letters home or who were injured multiple times during the war, persevered to the end. Why did these men “fight like bulldogs?”
Similarly, enlistees who claimed to be motivated by ideals didn’t have much respect for those who didn’t appear to share their outlook. And these same men generally seemed to follow up their expressed opinions with their behavior, enduring throughout the entire war—and prompting McPherson to examine what motivated them.
Themes
To answer this question, McPherson goes through the writings of those men who did most of the fighting. There is an abundance of such sources, including war memoirs published in the later 19th century, regimental histories, published letters, and published diaries. However, all such published works contain “constructed […] narratives with a public audience in mind,” and potentially faulty memories. While valuable, they are not adequate sources to answer the questions McPherson poses.
To understand motivations, McPherson tries to get as close as possible to the thoughts of soldiers themselves. There is no shortage of primary documents related to the Civil War, but generally those which were prepared for publication, or those written some years after the war, have the disadvantage of being excessively polished or containing faded recollections.
Themes
Thankfully, many unpublished letters and unrevised diaries also exist. Civil War armies were the most literate armies in history up to that time—at least 90 percent of white Union and 80 percent of Confederate soldiers could read and most of these men wrote home during the war. McPherson has read 25,000 letters and 249 diaries and he is convinced that they are the best available surviving evidence for the questions he poses. These letters, unlike those from later wars, are also uncensored.
Though of course personal letters, too, were written with an audience in mind, McPherson believes that they nevertheless tended to be more candid and immediate than writings intended for publication. The lack of censorship allows insight into things like troop morale, battle details, and politics that isn’t found as easily in modern letters.
Themes
McPherson adapts the conceptual framework of French Revolution historian John A. Lynn to help him interpret his material, looking at three categories: initial motivation (why men enlisted), sustaining motivation (what kept them fighting), and combat motivation (what “nerved them to face extreme danger”). McPherson will argue for a closer relationship between these categories than scholars have typically observed.
McPherson won’t examine these three categories sequentially but he will consider them while looking at different stages of the war and at certain themes. An example of “conventional” scholarship on wartime motivations is that scholars of World War II, for instance, have argued that patriotic motivations for enlistment often didn’t last, and that combat motivation had more to do with group camaraderie than with ideology. McPherson will challenge some of these assumptions.
Themes
