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 most seasoned soldiers—they just learned how to deal with it more effectively. Soldiers required both external and internal resources to help them deal with fear and remain committed to the principles that initially motivated them to fight. McPherson argues that, externally, trusted leadership was a major key to morale, and internally, soldiers’ religiosity was critical to enduring in the face of suffering and death.
Fear was pervasive among Civil War soldiers, whether they admitted that it was or not. In soldiers’ writings, they were frank about the toll of battle, both during and in the aftermath. One New York artillery officer reflected that the activity of battle was so all-absorbing that he wasn’t conscious of any fear: “Could there be a stronger proof that courage is merely a nonrealization of the danger one is in owing to excitement, responsibility, or something of the sort?” In other words, fear isn’t necessarily absent in battle, but the pressing tasks of survival can effectively mask fear in the midst of crisis. After the Battle of Gettysburg, another officer wrote that, following several days of adrenaline-fueled elation, “one realizes what has been going on […] sees the wounded, hears their groans […] Such scenes completely unman me.” Even where fear can be masked or its effects delayed for a time, the reality of what has happened will catch up with a soldier eventually. Although historians of combat have sometimes suggested that soldiers become more reckless in battle as they became hardened by ongoing violence, McPherson argues that this isn’t necessarily the case. One example is a Confederate soldier who wrote after Gettysburg, “I believe that soldiers generally do not fear death less because of their repeated escape from its jaws. For, in every battle they see […] so many frightful and novel kinds of mutilation […] that their dread of incurring the like fearful perils unnerves them.” Fear only intensifies, in other words, as soldiers witness more and more of war’s impact and become increasingly conscious of their own vulnerability.
Externally speaking, trusted leadership was one key to combating fear by strengthening morale. On one hand, volunteer soldiers weren’t renowned for their discipline and deference to authority. McPherson argues that “American white males were the most individualistic, democratic people on the face of the earth in 1861.” They elected many of their military officers and they didn’t “take kindly to authority, discipline, [and] obedience.” A North Carolina lieutenant observed that, while France’s Napoleon may have been right to say that a man must become a “machine” in order to be a good soldier, “a degree of manly, personal independence […] adds greatly to the virtues & essentials of a Soldier.” In other words, a distinctly American military character—one marked by both “independence” and discipline—was better for morale than overbearing leadership. Likewise, homegrown leadership had to respect American democratic norms in order to effectively strengthen morale. American soldiers had the most respect for a leader who would do whatever he asked his men to do. For example, a New York soldier writes that “our colonel […] is a regular old N.Y. farmer […] if you were here you would see him with 2 men on his horse & him [on foot] carrying a knapsack and a gun.” Another lieutenant points out, “the men think themselves as good as their officers” and they won’t put up with an officer’s pretensions to the contrary. Men’s morale was kept up by leaders who respected their independence, shared their loads, and led them into battle instead of just ordering them.
Internally, religion (overwhelmingly Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic) was a tremendous factor for maintaining troops’ morale. What McPherson describes as “Christian fatalism,” while seemingly pessimistic, was actually an emboldening force that helped men fight. As a soldier whose brother had just died wrote to his family, “He was due to die, and if he hadn’t been killed in the battlefield he might have died in the hospital […] I think our time is all set […] and it makes no difference where we are.” McPherson argues that such attitudes tended to strengthen soldiers’ morale more than it hindered it, as soldiers believed that their ultimate fate rested in God’s hands, so it was their job to fulfill their duties bravely in the meantime. Similarly, soldiers did not necessarily pray to be spared from death, seeing such a request as presumptuous: “I do not think that I have any right to pray for exemption from physical harm,” one man wrote, but for “protection from moral wrong and that I may always be prepared to die, come what may.” The emboldening sense of commitment to a larger, God-ordained cause—even to the extent of being ready to die for it—was common on both sides of the war, even though Union and Confederate soldiers construed that “cause” in very different terms.
Although military leadership and religious belief are very different phenomena, both these things provided soldiers with effective forms of structure. Military discipline under trusted leadership helped soldiers to perform their duties without giving way to fear on the battlefield. Religion exerted its own interior “discipline” by providing a structure whereupon most soldiers organized their understanding of the moral meaning of the war and their own place in the war effort, while also giving them the strength to keep fighting despite the likelihood of death.
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Morale and Endurance ThemeTracker
Morale and Endurance Quotes in For Cause and Comrades
“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.
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.
Some soldiers […] were wary of theological unsoundness if they implored God for protection. That was up to Him. The purpose of prayer was to cleanse the soul, not to shield the body. “I do not think that I have any right to pray for exemption from physical harm in the discharge of my duty as a soldier,” wrote a Maryland Confederate, “but only [for] protection from moral wrong and that I may always be prepared to die, come what may.” […] A soldier in the 5th Iowa informed his wife that several men in the regiment had formed a Prayer Group—a common occurrence. They prayed for grace and forgiveness of sins, he wrote five months before he was killed at the battle of Iuka, because death could come at any time “and therefore I realize the importance of being ‘always ready.’”
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.”
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?”
[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.”
