For Cause and Comrades: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Part of the Victorian code of honor was “revenge for insult and injury.” Often, this meant hatred. Hatred and the desire for revenge appear to have grown stronger as the Civil War went on. Among Confederate soldiers, such sentiments were stronger. McPherson says this is partly because of the persistence of the “code duello” and partly because the South suffered such devastation over the course of the war.

Though Southern perceptions of “Yankees” were bad even before the war got underway, the desire for vengeance became “almost an obsession” once fighting began in earnest. A Texas cavalry captain hoped for the death of “narrow-minded, bigoted […] nasal-twanged Yankees,” and a Georgia lieutenant told his wife to teach their children to bitterly despise and destroy Yankees.

The destruction of Southern property helped intensify the desire for revenge. A Georgia sergeant on his way to Gettysburg said that he loved to kill immoral “vandals.” Though Confederate General Lee officially prohibited plundering on the way into Pennsylvania in 1863, this order was broadly disregarded. After the battle of Fredericksburg, a Confederate artillery officer described his enjoyment of the sight of dead and mutilated Yankees, saying it “[did] my soul good.” Black Union soldiers and their white officers were especially despised by Confederates. Even black soldiers attempting to surrender were often killed.

Among Union soldiers, animosity toward “rebels” was strongest in border states and in East Tennessee (which was majority Unionist). It was fiercest among Confederate guerillas, as in West Virginia and in Missouri, who often held a “life or death” conviction of the need to killing secessionists. After Fort Pillow, some Union soldiers invading Georgia with Sherman’s army wanted to avenge their fallen fellow soldiers and  “cleanse the country.”

McPherson describes the “rhetoric of revenge” as a “dark underside” to the patriotism that was necessary to maintain soldiers’ morale. Morale also fluctuated with the armies’ respective victories and defeats, with political news, and with controversies like the one over Emancipation. For example, Union morale flagged in the aftermath of the appointment of Joseph Hooker in January 1863, but after Union victory at Gettysburg that summer, morale was quite reversed. Conversely, losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg brought Confederates almost to despair, and desertion grew more common.

By the time the Confederates surrendered at Appomattox, soldiers’ morale (especially in the Army of Northern Virginia) had withered. The South was economically battered and war-weary, whereas the North was coming off a string of victories and Lincoln’s reelection triumph. The Confederacy collapsed sooner than expected in the summer of 1865, yet its resilience up until this point was remarkable considering the unrelenting fighting of the past year.