McPherson, James M. (1997). For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. (click preceding link for information on purchasing from Amazon) New York: Oxford U. P.

Excerpts permanently located on a Library of Social Science Website here.

77—Civil War soldiers wrote much about courage, bravery, valor—the three words meant the same thing. The quality they described as the mark of honor. But soldiers wrote even more about cowardice—the mark of dishonor. Many soldiers lacked confidence in their courage. But most of them wanted to avoid the shame of being known as a coward—and that is what gave them courage.

Civil War soldiers went forward with their comrades into a hail of bullets because they were more afraid of “showing the white feather” than they were of death. The soldier who visibly skulked out of combat could never hold up his head again as a man against men. S. L. A Marshall wrote of soldiers in WW II: “Personal honor is the one thing valued more than life itself by the majority of men.” Civil War soldiers would have agreed. “Death before dishonor” is a phrase that occurs in their letters and diaries more times than one can count.

RAK: Better dead than be labelled a coward. Dying to prove that you are a man. How extraordinary. See my online publication, VIRILITY AND SLAUGHTER. 

85—Perhaps the only achievement that could eclipse the honor of taking enemy colors or retaking one’s own was to plant the national flag on a captured enemy position. Regimental rivalries to be the first do so help explain the reckless courage of many Civil War assaults. In 1864 an officer in the 12^th New York described a successful attack on Confederate lines defending the Weldon Railroad near Petersburg:

When the American flag appeared above the battle smoke on the enemy works, it is impossible to describe the feelings one experiences at such a moment. God, Country, Love, Home, pride, conscious strength & power, all crowd your swelling breast…proud, proud as a man can feel over this victory to our arms—if it were a man’s privilege to die when he wished, he should die at such a moment.

86—“For the key to what makes men fight,” wrote one modern student of combat motivation, “we must look hard at military groups & the bonds that link the men within them.” The answer, according to another analysis, lies in “the intense loyalty stimulated by close identification with the group. The men are now fighting for each other & develop guilty feelings if they let each other down. This spirit of self sacrifice, so characteristic of the combat personality, is at the heart of good morale.”

In WW II the soldier “became increasingly bound up with his tiny fraternity of comrades. In the last analysis, the soldier fought for them and them alone.” Or as William Manchester put it in his memoirs of service in the American Marine Corps during World War II: “Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than my friends had ever been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.”

Soldiers’ letters contain many references to the “band of brothers” theme—literal as well as metaphorical. “We feel like the kindest of brothers together” (10^th Virginia Cavalry). “You would not believe that men could be so attached to each other: we are all like brothers” (1^st Ohio Heavy Artillery). “We love each other like a band of brothers” 11^th Georgia). We all “seem almost like brothers. We have suffered hardships and dangers together and are bound together by more than ordinary ties (8^th Texas Cavalry).

RAK: One commentator wrote that men are never so good and loving—as when they are united with their brothers, fighting in battle. They are united by a sense of shared suffering; a sense of being in a life-or-death situation together where the tie to other men is what seems to keep them alive.

87—A corporal in the 9th Alabama returned to his regiment in October 1862 after convalescence at home from a wound in the battle of Glendale. “A soldier is always nearly crazy to get away from the army on furloughs,” he observed, “but as a general thing they are more anxious to get back. There is a feeling of love—a strong attachment for those with whom one has shared common dangers, that is never felt for any one else, or under any other circumstances.”

RAK: I’ve read things like this in many accounts of warfare: the longing to “get back into the battle;” to recover the feeling of comradeship, even with the possibility of death. Hitler considered his experience in battle during the First World War the “best days of his life.” And at the core of Nazism was the desire to replicate the “trench community:” many men united and fighting as if one body.

87—The experience of combat did more than strengthen existing bonds; it also dissolved the petty rivalries and factions that existed in some regiments and forged new ones among men who saw the elephant together. “Those who had stood shoulder to shoulder during the two terrible days of that bloody battle,” wrote an officer in the 54th Ohio after Shiloh, “were roped with steel, with bands stronger than steel.”

RAK: The essence of group psychology: people banded together as one block of steel.

After the 83rd Pennsylvania suffered 75% casualties in the Seven Days battles, a private commented that “It seems strange how much the rest of our company has become united since the battles. They are almost like brothers in one family now. We used to have the ‘aristocratic tent’ and ‘tent of the upper ten,’ but there is nothing of that kind now. We have all lost dear friends and common sorrow makes us all equal.”

RAK: Group psychology as shared suffering: people bound together in a single tent. Unity: the dream of nationalism.