For Cause and Comrades: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

While duty, honor, and patriotism provided sustaining motivation for Civil War soldiers, and the desire for courage and group cohesion supported combat motivation, morale was often sustained by supporters back home. Letters from home helped comfort homesick soldiers and strengthen them for the fight. A Wisconsin private noted that nearly everyone in the North sympathized with the Union cause, and this support encouraged even cowardly men to fight courageously on the battlefield.

Because the Civil War’s fighting units were community-based, letters from home were especially critical, reassuring soldiers that their service was recognized and appreciated in their hometowns. On the other hand, letters from home pleading for husbands’ return tended to dampen morale.

Married soldiers had to contend with “competing ideals of manhood and honor.” On one hand, they’d pledged to protect and provide for their wives and families; on the other hand, they also had a duty to defend their country. Neglecting either of these ideals would be seen as dishonoring one’s manhood. For most soldiers, however heartbreaking it might be, the duty to country usually won out. Often, they reconciled the decision to fight by understanding the duty to country as also a duty to defend their families’ freedom. As a Virginia cavalryman wrote that a man who cares for his family is consequently motivated to fight against an “invader.”

Several other themes appears in soldiers’ letters as they tried to justify their long absence from their home and families. One was the appeal to women’s patriotism, as men urged their wives to recall the Revolution-era women who sacrificed for their country, many husbands exhorted. Another was the appeal to family honor, or the belief that it’s better to die honorably for one’s family than to bring disgrace on them through cowardice. If these were ineffective, the need to uphold one’s own manhood was always an option, too.

The matter of honor and manhood tended to be of most concern to officers, rather than enlisted men. Additionally, many more officers than enlisted men were married in McPherson’s sample. Those who enlisted for bounties or were draftees also expressed greater homesickness and they were more likely to desert than enlisted volunteers. Sometimes, especially in the South, a wife’s plea of impending starvation was enough to get a man to desert. Ultimately, though, there’s more evidence of wives’ complaints because of the nature of the documents. Most were likely encouraging and supportive but historians don’t have their letters to confirm this.

Studies reveal that there is often an estrangement between soldiers and the home front during wartime. This is partly because of the difficulty of explaining war to those who have never experienced combat. During the Civil War, brotherhood between men who’d fought together grew so pronounced that it occasionally expressed itself in hostility toward those (particularly “cowardly” men) who remained at home. But, unlike in studies of some later wars (such as World War I), there’s no evidence of a gulf between home front patriotism and frontline disillusionment during the Civil War. If anything, soldiers reserved their disdain for men who failed to live up to patriotic, “manly” values.

Union soldiers’ morale withered when, in the last two years of the war, drafted men were allowed to hire substitutes to fight for them. Men who did this were disdained, seen as shirking their duty. Even more hated were the Copperheads, or Peace Democrats. Their political fortunes at home caused even reluctant and demoralized soldiers to band together in solidarity. The Copperheads’ antiwar campaign was strongest in the winter and spring of 1863. Soldiers generally responded bitterly to news and editorials concerning Copperhead successes, and there was little dissent toward the opinion that such men were traitors.

In 1864, the presidential election became a referendum on the war. Peace Democrats had a brief uptick in popularity when Grant’s and Sherman’s campaigns suffered—but after their prospects improved, Lincoln won reelection, in part because 80 percent of soldiers supported him. Lincoln’s reelection was, says McPherson, “a final, decisive turning point in the mutually reinforcing morale of soldiers and civilians.” Northern determination solidified. However, although “positive cultural values” demonstrably played a big role in morale, “darker passions” were also present.