Abolition Term Analysis

The patriotism of Civil War soldiers existed in a specific historical context. Americans of the Civil War generation revered their Revolutionary forebears. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl knew how they had fought against the odds to forge a new republic conceived in liberty. Northerners and Southerners alike believed themselves custodians of the legacy of 1776. The crisis of 1861 was the great test of their worthiness of that heritage. […] That is why Lincoln began his great evocation of Union war aims with the words: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth…a new government, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Likewise, [Jefferson] Davis urged his people to “renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.”

Confederates who professed to fight for the same goals as their forebears of 1776 would have been surprised by the intense conviction of Northern soldiers that they were upholding the legacy of the Revolution. A sergeant in the lst Minnesota proudly told his parents that he fought for “the same glorious ensign that floated over Ticonderoga, [and] was carried triumphantly through the Revolution.” A schoolteacher with several children of his own, who had enlisted in the 20th Connecticut on his thirty-sixth birthday, celebrated his thirty-seventh by writing that he had never regretted his decision to fight for “those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution […] in order that they may be perpetuated to those who may come after.” An Illinois farm boy whose parents had opposed his enlistment in 1862 asked them tartly a year later: “Should We the youngest and brightest nation of all the earth bow to traters and forsake the graves of our Fathers?”

“Slavery and Aristocracy go hand in hand,” [a Minnesota lieutenant] told his fiancée, who did not agree with his new opinions. “An aristocracy brought on this war—that Aristocracy must be broken up…it is rotten and corrupt. God intends that it and slavery[,] its reliance & support[,] must go down together….We did not think so one year ago & you will think differently too a year hence.” […] A Kentucky lieutenant who had once threatened to resign his commission if Lincoln moved against slavery had executed an about-face by the summer of 1863. “The ‘inexorable logic of events’ is rapidly making practical abolitionists of every soldier,” he informed his sister. “I am afraid that [even] I am getting to be an Abolitionist. All right! better that than a Secessionist.”

At Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, and Fort Wagner black soldiers in 1863 proved their willingness and ability to fight. That began a process of converting many skeptics into true believers. A naval officer whose ship came into the Union base at Beaufort, North Carolina, for repairs was impressed by the black regiment there under the command of James Beecher, brother of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. “There is a firmness & determination in their looks & in the way in which they handle a musket that I like,” he wrote his wife. “It looks like fight & Port Hudson has proved that they will do so. I never [would] have believed that a common plantation negro could be brought to face a white man. I supposed that everything in the shape of spirit & self respect had been crushed out of them generations back, but am glad to find myself mistaken.”

The conviction of Northern soldiers that they fought to preserve the Union as a beacon of republican liberty throughout the world burned as brightly in the last year of the war as in the first. After marching up and down the Shenandoah Valley a couple of hundred miles in Sheridan's 1864 campaign, the last twenty-five miles barefooted, a private in the 54th Pennsylvania wrote to his wife from the hospital that he was ready to do it again if necessary for “I cannot believe Providence intends to destroy this Nation, this great asylum for the oppressed of all other nations and build a slave oligarchy on the ruins thereof.”