For Cause and Comrades: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The Civil War has been called The Brothers’ War because of the way that families were sometimes forced to choose sides. For example, when James Welsh, born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, moved to Illinois and he became a Lincoln-voting Republican, he wrote home to his brother John criticizing “Jeff Davis and his crew of pirates” for their “treason.” John wrote back saying he grieved his brother’s support for “sending men here to butcher his own friends” and that John himself would never submit to “black Republican rule.” The two brothers enlisted in their respective sides and never spoke again; John was killed at Gettysburg.

During 1861, the first year of the Civil War, all those who enlisted, on both the Union and Confederate sides, chose to do so. The same was true for most in 1862. If it weren’t for these volunteers, the war would never have happened. McPherson attributes these early enlistments to an initial “patriotic furor” that swept the country following Fort Sumter. When explaining his decision to enlist, an Illinois farmer wrote to his fiancée describing his “indignation” at the “armed rebels and traitors to their country and their country’s flag.”

Even before Fort Sumter in April 1861, seven Southern states (in which cotton was a main crop) had seceded. Afterward, Lincoln’s call for Union troops ignited secessionism in the Upper South. Young men wrote of the frenzied excitement and the belief that the war would be brief, because “the scum of the North cannot face the chivalric spirit of the South.”

Initial patriotic fervor cooled down but it ebbed and flowed throughout the war, and enlistments with it. Most early recruits “professed patriotic motives” like those of the excited young Southern men. Northern enlistees often echoed Abraham Lincoln’s description of secession as “the essence of anarchy,” a defiance of the Constitution. A Philadelphia enlistee, for example, described the emerging conflict as “not the North against South,” but “government against anarchy.”

Such Union volunteers were “[invoking] the legacy of the Founding Fathers.” They believed that if their generation couldn’t hold the Union together, they would “prove unworthy of the heritage of republican liberty.” Few such men mentioned slavery explicitly, but those who did had strong feelings about cleansing America of what they saw as a shameful institution.

Some Confederate volunteers mentioned the preservation of slavery among their motivations for enlisting. A Virginia schoolteacher, for example, deemed the “horrors of war” far preferable to seeing their white daughters marry black men. Whereas Americans of the Founding Fathers’ generation sometimes acknowledged a paradox between the fight for liberty and the owning of slaves, Confederates often denied the paradox outright, even mocking the idea of fighting for so-called human rights.

Put more positively, most Confederate volunteers saw themselves as fighting for liberty, too, describing Lincoln as a “tyrant” and the institution of slavery as “a bond of union stronger” than the North could boast. They even described their fight as being against “Northern slavery” or “subjugation.” They evoked the Founding Fathers just as often, appropriating the Fathers’ rejection of British oppression as their own cause.

Both Union and Confederate volunteers appealed to symbols like country, flag, and the Revolutionary legacy; yet Confederates could appeal more concretely to the defense of home against invasion. Even in states like Virginia, where Union sentiments had lingered, Northern invasion sparked anger against those who the Southerners believed were “invading” their sacred homeland.

Another major motivation was duty—a prevalent concept in Victorian America. Duty was understood to be “a binding moral obligation involving reciprocity,” such as a duty to the flag under which one had known liberty and protection. Confederates more often spoke of “honor,” or one’s public reputation. Shirking duty would be seen as a violation of conscience, whereas suffering dishonor was viewed as a public disgrace. Sometimes duty and honor were mentioned in the same sentence, and there wasn’t a neat correspondence between Northerners with duty and Southerners with honor—rather, there was a general trend. And while honor tended to be more of an upper-class concept in the South, appeals to duty were more widespread in the North, including among immigrants who felt an obligation to their new nation.

Duty and honor were also linked to Victorian views of masculinity. War “separated men from boys.” Both Union and Confederate soldiers were eager to “prove themselves men” by enlisting. Two views of masculinity competed during this era—the “drinking, gambling, whoring” figure without obligations and the “sober, responsible, dutiful” son or husband. War was sometimes seen as a mechanism for transforming the first kind of man into the second.

Sometimes this desire to prove oneself a man was linked to romantic views of war and desires for adventure and glory—but such views didn’t tend to last very long on the battlefield. A 20-year-old North Carolina soldier described training camp as “a glorious time,” but he later wrote home that he would “give almost anything to have this abominable war ended.” A New Jersey soldier described it as “preposterous” to think that “fun and excitement” could be found in the service. In any case—no matter what the precise motivations that led them to enlist—all soldiers soon found that they had to stand up to the realities of combat.