Duty, Honor, and Masculinity
In For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, historian James McPherson seeks to understand the motives of the three million soldiers who fought in the Union and Confederate Armies during the American Civil War (1861–1865). To do so, he studies a “quasi-representative group of soldiers”—1,076 in total—"whose letters or diaries have survived.” Put simply, McPherson wants to know why they fought, especially in a markedly democratic society in which most…
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Northern vs. Southern Ideology
1776, the year of the United States’ independence, was not a distant memory for Americans of the 1860s. It’s hard to overstate the influence of this historical context on the Civil War, McPherson argues: “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.” The “profound irony” was that Confederate and Union soldiers interpreted their American heritage in conflicting…
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Slavery, Equality, and Abolition
At the beginning of the American Civil War, “few Union soldiers professed to fight for racial equality” or even for the cause of abolishing slavery. However, McPherson argues that Union attitudes—though hardly untouched by racism—changed significantly over the course of the Civil War. Over time, those who’d entered the war for the cause of preserving the Union became, at the very least, “convinced that this goal was unattainable without striking against slavery.” From there, firsthand…
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Morale and Endurance
Once a soldier’s romantic illusions are cleared away by the bloody experiences of the battlefield, how do his motives—such things as duty, honor, and patriotism—hold up, such that they continue to propel him into battle? In addressing this question, McPherson considers various resources that strengthened American Civil War soldiers’ morale and helped them endure the ongoing hardship and strain of war. He makes a case, first of all, that fear never really left even the…
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