For Cause and Comrades: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Many studies of World War II conclude that patriotic or ideological motivations were scarce among soldiers. The scholarly consensus is that most American and British soldiers were fighting too hard to stay alive to give thought to ideas like “helping to save democracy.” The same holds true in studies of Vietnam soldiers. While some scholars have even said that Civil War soldiers notably lacked any ideological convictions, McPherson contests this idea. The United States of the time, he explains, was “the world’s most politicized and democratic country,” and its male citizens typically enlisted for reasons that aligned with their voting patterns—“recruits did not stop being citizens and voters when they became soldiers.”

Many soldiers had access to daily and metropolitan newspapers in camp and spent much of their free time discussing and debating what they read. Some units even set up debating societies in their winter quarters, discussing such topics as how rebel leaders and states should be treated after the war, or questions like “Do the signs of the times indicate the downfall of our Republic?”

At the outset of the war, the Confederacy controlled a territory larger than any European nation except for Russia. Though some Southerners still held onto an American nationalism, a sense of “Southern distinctiveness” was decades old by this time and it did not take much to fan this regionalism into a distinct Confederate nationalism. Many soldiers described this in their letters as a willingness to sacrifices their lives for their country.

Though many soldiers felt conflicted about leaving family behind in order to fight, many saw their defense of the Confederacy as a defense of “home and hearth,” too. This became even more true when Union “invasions” of the South began in 1862. Southerners characterized the enemy as an “insolent invader” who’d provoked their wrath, even if they didn’t care much for the secession movement. Even Northern troops acknowledged that this motivation seemed to give Southern soldiers a fighting edge. This loyalty to one’s home and state—best defended through the defense of the Confederacy as a whole—fostered a sense of nationalism among Southerners.

It seems easier to understand the sources of Confederate patriotism and nationalism, yet 360,000 Northern soldiers were willing to die for their cause, too. While in a sense Northern sentiment was more “abstract and intangible,” it was very real, as soldiers believed that if they lost, “they would no longer have a country worthy of the name.” Others bemoaned the possibility of their free nation being broken up by “treason.”

McPherson calculates that two-thirds of both his Union and Confederate samples tended to express some sort of patriotic motivation in their letters and diaries, and that such expressions were most common among officers, slaveholders, and professional and middle-class men. This bias is especially strong among the Confederate soldiers, with sons of plantation families and slaveholding families expressing patriotic motivations at almost twice the rate of non-slaveholding ones. In the Union, there tended to be “a greater democratization” of such sentiments. However, in both North and South, such sentiments were rarer among draftees, substitutes, or men who enlisted after conscription went into effect.

There are also sometimes class tensions in soldiers’ letters—for example, poorer Southern farmers tended to express bitterness about a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” and they wished they were at home instead. Bitter and reluctant men—at least according to the letters of the more motivated volunteers—made up most of the deserters and skulkers. The soldiers who participated most eagerly in the thickest fighting also tended to be the most openly patriotic.