Union Term Analysis

“l am sick of war,” wrote a Confederate officer to his wife in 1863, and of “the separation from the dearest objects of life,”—his family. But “were the contest again just commenced I would willingly undergo it again for the sake of our country’s independence and [our children's] liberty.” At about the same time a Pennsylvania officer wrote to his wife that he had to fight it out to the end because, “sick as I am of this war and bloodshed [and] as much oh how much I want to be home with my dear wife and children…every day I have a more religious feeling, that this war is a crusade for the good of mankind…I [cannot] bear to think of what my children would be if we were to permit this hell-begotten conspiracy to destroy this country.” These convictions had caused the two men, and thousands of others, to volunteer and fight against each other in 1861. They remained more powerful than coercion and discipline as the glue that held the armies together in 1864.

Union volunteers invoked the legacy of the Founding Fathers. They had inherited a nation sanctified by the blood and sacrifice of that heroic generation of 1776. If disunion destroyed this nation, the generation of 186l would prove unworthy of the heritage of republican liberty. “Our fathers made this country we their children are to save it,” wrote a young lawyer to his wife who had opposed his enlistment in the l2th Ohio, leaving her and two small children behind. If “our institutions prove a failure and our Country be numbered among the things that were but are not…of what value will be house, family, and friends?” Civil war “is a calamity to any country,” wrote a recruit in the 10th Wisconsin, but “this second war I consider equally as holy as the first…by which we gained those liberties and privileges” now threatened by “this monstrous rebellion.”

This invocation of the Founding Fathers was as common among Confederate volunteers as among their Union counterparts—for an opposite purpose. Just as the American Patriots of 1776 had seceded from the tyrannical British empire, so the Southern Patriots of 186l seceded from the tyrannical Yankee empire. Our Fathers “severed the bonds of oppression once,” wrote a twenty-year-old South Carolina recruit, “now [we] for the second time throw off the yoke and be freemen still.” The American Revolution established “Liberty and freedom in this western world,” wrote a Texas cavalryman in 1861, and we are “now enlisted in 'The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence' again.”

The old adage, “You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink,” has some relevance to Civil War soldiers. The institutional structure of the army could train and discipline them (after a fashion), could station cavalry or a provost guard in their rear, and could (sometimes) furnish courageous leaders. But these were not British redcoats or the professional soldiers of Frederick the Great. […] The cultural values of Victorian America held each individual rather than society mainly responsible for that individual's achievements or failures. What really counted were not social institutions, but one's own virtue, will, convictions of duty and honor, religious faith—in a word, one’s character. […] Training, discipline, and leadership could teach them how to fight and might help them overcome fear and the instinct of self-preservation. But the deeper sources of their combat motivation had to come from inside themselves.

Perhaps the best description of the powerful mystique associated with the colors comes from a noncombatant. In December 1862 Walt Whitman visited his brother George, a lieutenant in the 5lst New York, after he had been wounded at Fredericksburg. Finding his wartime vocation, Walt Whitman stayed in Washington as a volunteer nurse, learning as much about soldiers as anyone outside that fraternity could learn. In April 1864 he described to his mother a regimental flag he had received from a wounded soldier he tended. “It was taken by the secesh in a cavalry fight, and rescued by our men in a bloody little skirmish. It cost three men's lives, just to get one little flag, four by three. Our men rescued it, and tore it from the breast of a dead Rebel—all that just for the name of getting their little banner back again….There isn't a reg't…that wouldn't do the same.”

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.”

[Certain] letters had a baneful impact on morale. An unmarried officer in the l03rd Illinois described two married captains in the regiment who “each gets five letters a week [from his wife] and looks a little sicker after each letter.” The colonel of the 15th Wisconsin, a renowned Norwegian-American regiment, lamented that several of his married soldiers received letters filled with “complaints, and whinings, asking him to ‘come home’ etc., [which] has more to do with creating discouragement and finally sickness and disease than the hardships he has to endure.” In an effort to arrest this demoralizing process, the lieutenant colonel of the crack 5th Wisconsin of the Iron Brigade gave a speech at home during a furlough in March 1863: “If you wish success, write encouraging letters to your soldiers. Do not fill the ears of your soldiers with tales of troubles and privations at home, caused by their absence.”

[Additional] themes emerged in soldiers’ letters to wives trying to justify their absence in the army. The first was an appeal to women's own patriotic duty, their heritage of “republican motherhood” from the Founding Mothers who had labored to give birth to the nation by sustaining the Founding Fathers. “Be a woman,” wrote a lieutenant in the 28th Mississippi to his wife who had expressed her loneliness and anxiety. “Think of the noble women of ancient and modern times—Think of our Revolutionary mothers daily.”

When one of the Army of the Potomac’s most celebrated soldiers, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, proposed to return to the army after partial recovery from a wound once thought to be fatal, his mother pleaded with him to reconsider: “Surely you have done & suffered & won laurels enough in this war.” He replied in February 1865 that “I am not scared or hurt enough yet to be willing to face the rear, when other men are marching to the front.” To return was the only course “which honor and manliness prompt.” Surviving another life-threatening wound at White Oak Road on March 31, he fought through the campaign to Appomattox where Grant designated him to receive the formal surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.

“There is nothing pleasant” about soldiering, wrote a corporal in the 105th Ohio, but “I can endure its privations…for there is a big idea which is at stake . . the principles of Liberty, Justice, and of the Righteousness which exalteth a Nation.” A few months before he was killed at Fort Fisher, a sergeant in the 9th New York reproved his brother that “this is no time to carp at things which, compared with the success and reestablishment of the Republic, are insignificant.” And in letters to his mother, an Irish-born sergeant in the 2nd New Jersey declared that neither the “horrors of the battlefield [nor] the blind acts of unqualified generals” had “chilled my patriotism in the least.” “We are still engaged in the same holy cause,” he wrote on the third anniversary of his enlistment, “we have yet the same Country to fight for.”

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.”