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 ways: “Confederates professed to fight for liberty and independence from a tyrannical government; Unionists said they fought to preserve the nation conceived in liberty from dismemberment and destruction.” McPherson argues that both Union and Confederate soldiers employed the language of the American founding in expressing their motivations for fighting—Northerners, in fact, were initially motivated by the issue of union more than by slavery, whereas Southerners, ironically, were motivated by resistance of supposed “slavery” to Northern “subjugation.”
While early Union volunteers did not tend to mention slavery as one of the major issues motivating their enlistment, many spoke in terms of preserving the Union for which their forebears died. This reverence for the Union, though abstract, appealed to both common and upper-class soldiers because of its rootedness in the American founding. An Illinois farm boy wrote, “Should We the youngest and brightest nation of all the earth bow to [traitors] and forsake the graves of our Fathers?” In other words, the memory of the founding was fresh enough to inspire pride and a sense of obligation to guard its legacy. A New Jersey captain wrote home, “I would rather live a soldier for life […] than that our Republic should be divided into little nothings by an inglorious and shameful peace.” He means that if Southerners are permitted to maintain a way of life that is an offense to the American founding, the country as a whole will effectively be lost. If they lost the war, many Union soldiers “believed that they would no longer have a country worthy of the name.”
Confederates did often name slavery as a motive—that is, resisting “enslavement” by the North. Confederates, like their Northern counterparts, invoked the Founding Fathers. The founders “severed the bonds of oppression once […] now [we] for the second time throw off the yoke,” wrote a South Carolina soldier. Only now, according to the Confederate view, the “yoke” was the Union’s attempt to destroy the Southern way of life. Confederate soldiers tended to use the words “slavery” and “subjugation” often, using them in the same sense that 1776 patriots described Britain’s tyranny over them. A Missouri Confederate wrote, for example, that he saw himself “fighting gloriously for the undying principles of Constitutional liberty and self government”—including Southern states’ ability to govern themselves by maintaining slavery. McPherson argues that American Revolution-era slaveholders sometimes expressed discomfort with the conflict between fighting for liberty while keeping others in bondage. Confederate soldiers, on the other hand, saw slaveholding ideology as a key to the “freedom” for which they fought. Because Confederates used the terminology of “slavery” to describe so-called Northern tyranny, they tended to speak euphemistically of fighting for “our own social institutions” or “the institutions of the South” (including slaveholding). This sense of Northern “tyranny” further strengthened Confederate motivations by allowing them to cast themselves as fighting for “home” against “invaders.” A Virginian wrote, “the insolent invader [must be driven] from the soil polluted by their footsteps.” The Confederate use of the language of the U.S.’s founding, in sum, was an especially powerful ideological motivation because of the way it allowed Southerners to see themselves as distinct and resistant to Northern “aggression” while maintaining slavery themselves.
McPherson believes that these motivations, rather than fading into disillusionment, tended to intensify and harden over the course of the war. Even as late as 1864, considered to be the most grueling and bloody year of the conflict, ideological expressions like these weren’t unusual on either side. For instance, even as a Pennsylvania private recovered in the hospital, he wrote his wife that he’d fight the war all over again, 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.” Later in the book, McPherson demonstrates how early pro-Union sentiments matured into the stronger abolitionism expressed here.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Northern vs. Southern Ideology ThemeTracker
Northern vs. Southern Ideology 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.
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.”
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.”
These soldiers were using the word slavery in the same way that Americans in 1776 had used it to describe their subordination to Britain. Unlike many slaveholders in the age of Thomas Jefferson, Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their own liberty while holding other people in slavery. Indeed, white supremacy and the right of property in slaves were at the core of the ideology for which Confederate soldiers fought. “We are fighting for our liberty,” wrote a young Kentucky Confederate, “against tyrants of the North […] who are determined to destroy slavery.” A South Carolina planter in the Army of Northern Virginia declared a willingness to give his life “battling for liberty and independence” but was exasperated when his supposedly faithful body servant ran away to the Yankees. “It is very singular and I cant account for it.”
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?”
“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.”
