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 men volunteered for their service. Part of his answer lies in the fact that 1860s America was also a Victorian-era society in which concepts of duty, honor, and masculinity weighed heavily in the minds of fighting-age men. By considering soldiers’ statements about duty against their Victorian historical backdrop, McPherson argues that duty, honor, and masculinity combined to create a powerful motive for fighting—not just by inspiring individuals to enlist, but by reinforcing a brotherly sense of unity and camaraderie.
Duty was a pervasive and socially-reinforced concept in the Victorian era. At this time, duty was understood to be “a binding moral obligation involving reciprocity.” For a Union soldier, this might manifest in a sense of duty to the American flag under which one enjoys the privileges of freedom. In such a case, duty was construed as a matter of individual conscience. Confederate soldiers cared about duty, too, but they were more likely to describe “duty” in terms of “honor,” which had more of a public dimension—i.e., one’s reputation in the eyes of one’s peers. In other words, “To shirk duty is a violation of conscience; to suffer dishonor is to be disgraced by public shame.” Both of these factors—fidelity to one’s conscience and the dread of dishonor—motivated soldiers to enter the war and remain committed in battle.
In Victorian society, honor and masculinity were also linked to a man’s sense of duty. Whether Union or Confederate, soldiers’ letters are filled with the desire to “prove one’s self a man” by fulfilling one’s duties honorably. Two versions of manhood were especially common in Victorian America: “the hard-drinking, gambling, whoring” man who shirked obligations, and the “sober, responsible, dutiful son or husband.” In other words, real manhood was seen as upholding one’s obligations for the sake of others, even at personal cost; self-indulgence, by contrast, was a deficient version of manhood that had to be overcome for honor’s sake. Becoming a soldier helped a man prove, both to himself and others, that he was truly a man. Sometimes, war service helped a man transform from one version of masculinity to the other. For example, a wild young man from Baltimore “determined to enlist in the hope that I should […] have an end put to my worthless and disgraceful career” of drinking and fighting, and he indeed found that the war “made a man of me.” The demands of war, in other words, could unearth or refine “manly” characteristics that were not otherwise evident.
For both Union and Confederate soldiers, honor and masculinity were inevitably tied to a powerful sense of unity. Reinforcing the fear of dishonor—of facing public disgrace—was the fact that volunteer companies typically included men who’d enlisted from the same community, leading to mutually-reinforced peer pressure. No one wanted to be the subject of a letter calling out a “skulker,” as one soldier wrote home: “I am sorry to say that Norman Hart is a D—n coward” who ran from battle. Undoubtedly, Norman Hart’s family and neighbors were expected to see that letter, meaning that his shame wouldn’t be confined to the battlefield. Conversely, pride in one’s unit reinforced one’s individual sense of pride and honor and the knitting together of “a true band of brothers.” Group and individual, then, are mutually interdependent: the group exerts peer pressure which fortifies the individual against displays of cowardice, and the individual’s honor or shame reflects on his unit, his state, or even the army as a whole. An Alabama corporal wrote, “A soldier is always nearly crazy to get away from the army on furloughs […] but as a general thing they are more anxious to get back. There is a feeling of love […] for those with whom one has shared common dangers, that is never felt for any one else.” An individual man’s honor, in other words, was most evident in relation to that of his “brothers.”
McPherson adds that although modern historians tend to view concepts of duty, honor, and masculinity with cynicism and to dismiss them as mere romanticism, this isn’t how soldiers thought at the time. Undoubtedly, romantic views of war did circulate: for example, a planter’s son from South Carolina wrote, “I am blessing old [novelist] Sir Walter Scott daily […] for teaching me, when young, how to rate [knightly] honour[.]” But these romanticized views often didn’t survive the realities of the battlefield. A New Jersey soldier warned his mother that his younger brother shouldn’t enlist, because “If he expects fun and excitement (which between us is at the bottom of all his patriotism) he will be most emphatically mistaken.” In the rest of the book, McPherson considers how duty partnered with an enduring “patriotism” to sustain soldiers throughout the war.
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Duty, Honor, and Masculinity Quotes in For Cause and Comrades
During the post-battle letdown, fears banished during the heat of combat often returned with redoubled intensity. “A battle seems more dangerous in thinking it over afterwards than it does right in the midst of it,” wrote an Illinois officer to his wife after Perryville. “The mind can discover dangers while thinking back over it that were not apparent while the fight was on.” […] A New York officer likewise reported after the Gettysburg campaign that “the glorious excitement” had borne him up for several days, but “after the fight is over, then one realizes what has been going on. Then he sees the wounded, hears their groans…Such scenes completely unman me. I can stand up and fight, but cannot endure the sight of suffering, particularly of our own men.”
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.
At least one of the several hundred women who managed to enlist as soldiers in the Civil War expressed similar sentiments. Having passed as Lyons Wakeman to join the 153rd New York in 1862, Sarah Rosetta Wakeman wrote to her parents the following year when she expected to go into battle: “I don't dread it at all….If it is [God’s] will for me to be killed here, it is my will to die.” She survived the only battle in which she fought, Pleasant Hill in April 1864, but died two months later of chronic diarrhea.
Most of the men in a volunteer company had enlisted from the same community or county. Many of them had known each other from childhood. They retained close ties to that community through letters home, articles in local newspapers, and occasional visits by family members to the regiment's camp. Because of this close relationship between community and company, the pressure of the peer group against cowardice was reinforced by the community. […] The soldier who proved a sneak in battle could not hold up his head again in his company or at home. […] “I am sorry to say that Norman Hart is a D—n coward,” wrote a private in the l0th Wisconsin after Stones River.
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.”
Tennesseeans and Louisianians who saw large parts of their states including the principal cities fall to the "insolent invader" in the spring of 1862 felt a redoubled commitment to the Cause. A captain in the l6th Tennessee wrote after the surrender of Fort Donelson that his men were “now more fully determined than ever before to sacrifice their lives, if need be, for the invaded soil of their bleeding Country….The chivalrous Volunteer State will not be allowed to pass under Lincoln rule without…the fall of a far greater number of his hireling horde than have yet been slain at the hands of those who are striking for their liberties, homes, firesides, wives and children.” Rather grandiloquent prose, but it was echoed in plainer terms by a private in the 9th Tennessee who was incensed to think of his mother “being left there and Exposed to there insults […] I feel a stronger Determination never to [quit] the field untill they are driven from that beautiful land.”
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.”
[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.
