For Cause and Comrades: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Civil War patriotism “existed in a specific historical context,” McPherson explains. All Americans of that era idolized those who fought in the Revolutionary War and both Northerners and Southerners saw the events of 1861 as a test of their worthiness to uphold that legacy. Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis appealed to this idea in their speeches.

McPherson calls it a “profound irony” that Confederate and Union soldiers interpreted their 1776 heritage in such divergent ways. Confederates saw themselves as fighting for “liberty and independence from a tyrannical government.” Union soldiers saw themselves as fighting to preserve the nation “from dismemberment and destruction.” These differences deepened as the war went on.

An Alabama corporal who was captured at Gettysburg, for example, saw himself as fighting for “the same principles which fired the hearts of our ancestors in the revolutionary struggle.” McPherson describes this as a “folk memory of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat” which helped sustain Confederate morale. It encouraged them to reflect that those forebears’ struggle for liberty was harder, yet ultimately victorious. A Missouri Confederate, likewise, saw himself as “fighting gloriously for the undying principles of Constitutional liberty and self government.”

For the Confederates, the opposite of liberty was “slavery” or “subjugation.” Soldiers often spoke of the dread of the Yankee “yoke of bondage” if the South lost the war. A Texas cavalryman even described the war as between “subjugation, slavery, confiscation” or being “victorious, glorious, and free.” Their use of the word “slavery” echoed the usage of the 1776 patriots, who had described their relationship to Britain in that way.

McPherson notes that although slaveholders of Jefferson’s era sometimes acknowledged a paradox in their fight for liberty, Confederate slaveholders or those from slaveholding families did not acknowledge any such inconsistency. They even viewed slavery as being at the heart of their fight—for instance, a Kentucky Confederate wrote that the Southern troops were fighting for freedom against Northern “tyrants” who wanted to abolished slavery.

Before the war, many Southerners avoided using the word “slavery,” instead referring to “servants” and to “Southern institutions.” Occasionally, this terminology survives in soldiers’ letters. A North Carolina lieutenant, for example, wrote disparagingly of the “real Yankee style” of a Pennsylvania farming family who fed him a meal, because the wife and daughters (rather than slaves) did the work. This made the lieutenant even more convinced that “Southern institutions” were worth defending. Others wrote more plainly that without slave labor, the South would fall into ruin.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, some Confederates welcomed it for making plain the reasoning behind the war and the government’s intentions. Some Northerners even feared that the issuing of the Proclamation would only inspire Southerners to fight even harder for slavery’s sake. Indeed, in the months following the Proclamation, the North was so divided over it that Southern hopes for victory rallied, and some Confederates even wrote home to urge their families to invest in slaves.

Naturally, the soldiers who emphasized the centrality of slavery as a motivation for fighting tended to be from slaveholding families. However, non-slaveholding soldiers did, as McPherson puts it, emphasize the “property” of “their white skins, which put them on a plane of civil equality with slaveholders” and far above anyone who didn’t possess said “property.” Some said they were fighting to resist the notion of black people achieving equal status with white people or to ensure “a free white man’s government.” Overall, however, McPherson observes that only 20 percent of his sample of 429 Southern soldiers “explicitly voiced proslavery convictions.” He argues that one reason for this is that slavery wasn’t controversial—it was taken “for granted as one of the Southern ‘rights’ and institutions for which they fought” and so it wasn’t even up for debate.

Northerners, meanwhile, certainly believed that they, too, were fighting to uphold the legacy of 1776. They expressed that they were fighting for “the same glorious ensign [flag] that floated over Ticonderoga” or for “those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution.” An Ohioan called “our fathers in coldest winter” who suffered “that we might enjoy the blessings of a free government,” and another echoed that the “patriots in [Valley Forge]” didn’t complain when they had to march barefoot in a subzero winter.

When Union soldiers spoke of such revolutionary “institutions,” they referred to things like “the rights of property, liberty of action” and “that kind of government that shall assure life liberty & the pursuit of happiness.” Some argued that Southern secessionism was an anarchic offense to law and order which would lead only to dissolution and chaos. The Founding Fathers, in the Northerners’ view, fought for liberty under the rule of law, whereas the Confederates seceded after Lincoln was fairly elected by a majority.

Northern soldiers also spoke of the United States as “the last best hope for the survival of republican government.” European despots and aristocrats, they feared, would laugh if the American experiment failed. On the other hand, an Illinois private believed, American success might inspire “European struggles for liberty.” While many American-born soldiers expressed such sentiments, foreign-born soldiers (though underrepresented in the sample) certainly did as well—an English-born corporal writes that “if Liberty should be crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human Progress anywhere else?”

McPherson concludes that while the belief in liberty was clearly a sustaining motivation which kept men in the army, it’s arguably also an aspect of combat motivation which nerved men to go into battle for the sake of a higher cause. As one soldier wrote, he believed sacrificing his own personal safety was worth protecting “the mighty interests at stake.” Initially, these “mighty interests,” for most Northerners, didn’t have much to do with slavery one way or the other. But over the course of the war, that began to change.