Scholars began to find that ideology motivated Union and southern soldiers. Reid Mitchell insists that "whatever caused the Civil War, it was fought in the name of freedom. Hess argues strongly that ideology motivated northerners. The myth of the lost cause, he insists, romanticized what the North destroyed and "sapped the war for the Union of its moralistic implications. His recent book, The Hard Hand of War , sees an evolution in soldiers' thinking as the war progressed. Instead of shedding their initial ideology, as Linderman claims, Grimsley's soldiers became more ideological.
Union troops became more willing to inflict "hard war" on southern civilians. Jimerson writes that the North understood the war as a "holy crusade," fought to the tune of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic.
As McPherson points out, his book comes in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War made some understandings of the Civil War experience untenable. Before Vietnam, southern boys asked their fathers if it was true the United States had never lost a war. We did lose one war, they explained, but it took four Yankees to beat one Confederate.
Unquestionably, the North had a tremendous advantage over the South. Only a quarter of the soldiers mobilized for the Civil War fought in grey uniforms. All of this once seemed sufficient to explain the outcome of the Civil War. But the Vietnam War changed that calculus, teaching that massive military advantage does not guarantee victory.
The lesson could be generalized: soldiers with a cause won wars. It is part of the genius of For Cause and Comrades that McPherson does not only argue that Civil War soldiers "knew what they were fighting for.
McPherson knows soldiers thought many things; the immense variety of soldiers' experiences is evident in his book. He utilizes his first chapters to acknowledge the experiences that northern and southern Civil War soldiers shared with each other and with all warriors. In the first months of war, soldiers North and South exuded a patriotic furor. Each side used the founding fathers to justify going to war with the other.
Confederates talked of their honor, but so did northern soldiers. The initial taste of combat winnowed many regiments, with some soldiers drifting to the rear in search of noncombatant duties. Some sneaks avoided battle: "Straggling is the rule," one officer wrote In at least one instance, this problem became so serious that General William T. Sherman threatened to station artillery loaded with grapeshot behind the front line to ensure his soldiers did not run during the next battle.
Civil War officers learned what leaders in all wars discover: To earn the respect of their men, they had to appear brave. The Civil War, like every other war, made soldiers into fatalists. Many became religious, and McPherson concludes that "it may not be an exaggeration" to say that religion prolonged the war by bucking up Confederate morale Another characteristic that Union and Confederate soldiers shared with soldiers in all wars was dedication to something called primary group cohesion.
Soldiers become very close to their comrades in the same squad or platoon. Sometimes they put loyalty to such primary groups ahead of loyalty to nation or patriotic cause. McPherson finds many letters and diaries in which Civil War soldiers wrote of their brotherly feelings toward fellow privates. The first six chapters of For Cause and Comrades echo old arguments. The Wiley school emphasized such universals as characteristic of all combat soldiers. But Civil War soldiers possessed unique characteristics.
Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Civil War battles can see that Civil War soldiers did not think like modern soldiers. For twenty years, McPherson has been taking students to Gettysburg to trod the ground where 13, Confederate Page [End Page 93] soldiers ran a mile through artillery and withering rifle fire in a hopeless attack against Union forces protected by a stone wall.
His students cannot imagine obeying a command to make such a charge. Teachers today must explain to children and students just how soldiers in the Civil War could do such things. Michael Bar-ton has argued that a Victorian ethic of self-discipline and self-control made soldiers of the nineteenth-century strikingly different from the products of our culture of narcissism.
The heart of McPherson's book begins in chapter 7. His chapters on the initial impulse to fight, soldiers' first combat, officers' need to appear brave, religion, and primary group cohesion all show how Civil War soldiers shared universal attributes with all soldiers, at all times, in any war. Chapter 7 makes the argument that despite such universals, Civil War soldiers fought for ideological motives.
In making this argument he takes on Wiley and Linderman, insisting that "ideological motifs almost leap from many pages" of soldiers' diaries and letters Soldiers eagerly read newspapers, organized debates on political issues, and voted. As the war progressed, their commitment to ideology became stronger, not weaker. For the researcher, whether McPherson is right depends in part on which soldier's words are encountered. This collection is designed to demonstrate the following historical understandings:.
Ideas such as liberty, self-government, honor, duty, and manhood governed the decision-making of Civil War soldiers. Young boys under 18 sometimes worked as drummer boys. Some, cadets at Southern military academies like the Virginia Military Institute, used their skills as drillmasters to train raw recruits. The VMI cadets even fought in one engagement at the Battle of New Market , May 15, , under the leadership of one of their professors. More than half the Confederate soldiers were farmers, although only a very small percentage of them owned slaves.
The others came from many different types of jobs: carpenters, clerks, blacksmiths, students, etc. As in the Northern army, the Southern soldiers had educational backgrounds that ranged from university degrees to illiteracy. Cavalry and artillery regiments attracted wealthier and more highly educated men than infantry units in the South, and a Confederate foot soldier was more likely to be illiterate than his Union counterpart.
Foreigners—men not born in America—also fought for the South. Texas also contributed Mexican troops. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands.
High, but not nearly as high as the Union figure. To be sure, the men of both sides balked at the regimentation and discipline required of them by army life.
Yet, one could not have witnessed the dressing of the lines under fire at Gettysburg during Pickett's and Pettigrew's assault on the third day, for instance, without understanding the amount of preparation for battle, both mental and physical, these men had undergone. And these were the notoriously independent-minded Confederates.
But, on a larger scale, McPherson's arguments make sense, as does his organization. He wants to know the Civil War soldier's initial motivation for enlisting, what sustained them or kept them in the army, and what impelled them to face combat.
As one might expect, he finds a variety of factors at work, whether in determining motivation for enlistment or for battle. Some of the author's conclusions will be self-evident. Obviously, those individuals who desired to experience combat before actually doing so, quickly found such feelings satiated by the reality of the battlefield, prompting them to be considerably more circumspect when asked to repeat the experience.
Even so, many did, and McPherson offers interesting insights into why they did. Perhaps surprising to some will be the author's observation that only 20 percent of the Confederate soldiers in the book's sample "explicitly voiced proslavery convictions p.
More widely understood, and reflected in the sample here, was the mix of emotions expressed by Federals over the issues of race and war.
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