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 experiences helped bring about a more explicitly abolitionist point of view among many. Without oversimplifying Northern white attitudes toward slavery, McPherson argues that the course of the war itself, by exposing white Northerners to Southern institutions and acquainting them with black fellow soldiers, caused a gradual, limited embrace of the cause of black liberty.
As the war progressed, Northerners’ firsthand exposure to slavery tended to reinforce existing abolitionist sympathies or even to spark newfound abolitionism. A Pennsylvania private observed, “I thought I hated slavery as much as possible before I came here, but here, where I can see some of its workings, I am more than ever convinced of the cruelty and inhumanity of the system.” Sometimes, simply being exposed to on-the-ground realities was enough to jar people’s thinking. Newly-kindled abolitionism didn’t always stem from a belief in human equality, however. When Union soldiers described Southern slavery as a “blight” that “withered all it touched,” they were often commenting on the economic and cultural backwardness they believed that a slave-dependent system helped to foster—not necessarily on the cruelty and dehumanization of slavery. An Indiana colonel wrote, “I am no abolitionist […] But the more I see of slavery […] the more I am satisfied that it is a curse […] Outside the towns in the South the people are a century behind the free states.” Such observers believed that slavery “deadened all enterprise and prosperity.” Even in such cases, witnessing lived realities was a factor in shifting views.
Racist attitudes were undoubtedly present among Union ranks—many pro-Unionists opposed early measures toward abolition and greater equality—yet first-hand experience gradually softened their opposition. By 1862, increasing numbers of Northerners believed that eliminating slavery was a key to preserving the Union, yet that didn’t mean they felt sympathy for slave emancipation. There was even a marked backlash in the period preceding the Emancipation Proclamation, with such commentary as “If emancipation is to be the policy of this war […] I do not care how quick the country goes to pot.” After the Proclamation was issued in 1863, remarks became even more barbed: “I don’t want to fire another shot for the negroes and I wish that all the abolitionists were in hell,” a Northerner insisted. Some felt, in other words, that there had been a bait and switch—they’d enlisted for a cause that was now transforming, against their will, into another.
These racist sentiments weren’t universal, however, and they began to fade into a minority during the last years of the war. One formerly anti-emancipation lieutenant tried to persuade his fiancée that the Southern aristocracy and its enabling system of slavery were corrupt: “God intends that it and slavery[,] its reliance and support[,] must go down together […] We did not think so one year ago and you will think differently too a year hence.” Statements like these illustrate that views changed even during the course of the war, largely because of what formerly hostile solders witnessed firsthand. Similarly, many initially resisted and disdained the formation of black Union regiments, yet exposure to the bravery and effectiveness of these units tended to change people’s minds. A naval officer said, for example, “I never [would] have believed that a common plantation negro could be brought to [fight] 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.” Not only were soldiers exposed to the harmful system of slavery, but they got an opportunity to see that black soldiers could fight as well as white soldiers. After years of battle themselves, even skeptical soldiers found such evidence compelling.
It’s difficult to trace the perspectives of black soldiers themselves—including freed slaves who fought for both sides—simply because far fewer letters and diaries survive from these soldiers. (Years of enslavement and oppression meant that illiteracy rates were much higher among black soldiers than among white soldiers.) However, evidence does suggest that white sentiment shifted significantly from the beginning of the Civil War to its end. Lincoln’s overwhelming reelection in 1864, after a much more openly abolitionist campaign and earning 80 percent of the Union soldier vote, is ample evidence of this. As an artilleryman wrote in celebration of the reelection, “I can cheerfully bear all the discomforts of a soldier’s life for the overthrow of that monster evil,” slavery.
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Slavery, Equality, and Abolition Quotes in For Cause and Comrades
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?”
“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.”
“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.”
