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.

99—It is perhaps true that Northern nationalism was more “abstract & intangible than its Southern counterpart. But it was nonetheless just as real & as deeply felt. “If we lose in this war, the country is lost and if we win it is saved,” wrote a New York captain in 1863. “There is no middle ground.”

Another captain, in the 12^th New Jersey, spelled out this idea in more detail in a letter to his brother & sister in January 1863: “I would rather live a soldier for life than see this country made a might sepulcher in which should be buried our institutions, our nationality, our flag, and every American that today lives, than that our Republic should be divided into little nothings by an inglorious & shameful peace.”

Again & again one finds similar phrases in the letters of Northern soldiers: “Home is sweet & friends are dear, but what would they all be to let the country go to ruin.” “I do not want to live if our free Nation is to die or be broken by the foul hand of treason.” “Far better would it be if the war should continue until every home should be made desolate than to surrender to those miserable despots who are trying to destroy our country.”

Sometimes the Victorian idioms in which soldiers expressed their patriotism became almost cloying. One wonders what the mother of a Pennsylvania cavalry corporal thought of a letter from her son in 1863 that listed his duties in the following order: “First my God, second my country, third my mother. Oh my country, how my heart bleeds for your welfare. If this poor life of mine could save you, how willingly would I make the sacrifice.”

Enlisted men in two renowned regiments, the 1^st Minnesota & the 5^th Iowa, used phrases that by 1862 had become clichés: “Thousands of precious lives will have to be sacrificed” to “support the best Government on God’s footstool…the best Government every made.”

A fifty-four-year-old captain in the 85^th New York, a farmer from the dairy belt, wrote his wife in 1863 that “if I never get home you will not say my life has been thrown away for naught. My country, glorious country, if we have only made it truly the land of the free…I count not my life dear unto me if only I can help that glorious cause along.”

100--Glorious cause. Lives sacrificed on the country’s altar. Hearts bleeding for the country’s welfare. Some modern readers of these letters may feel they are drowning in bathos. In this post-Freudian age these phrases strike many as mawkish posturing, romantic sentimentalism, hollow platitudes. We do not speak or write like that any more.

Most people have not done so since WWI which, as Ernest Hemingway & Paul Fussell have noted, made such words as glory, honor, courage, sacrifice, valor, and sacred vaguely embarrassing if no mock-heroic. We would justly mock them if we heard them today. But these words were written in the 1860s, not today. They were written not for public consumption but in private letters to families & friends. These soldiers, at some level at least, meant what they said about sacrificing their lives for their country.

What seems like bathos or platitudes to us were real pathos & convictions to them. Perhaps readers will take another look at the expressions by soldiers quoted two paragraphs above when they learn that all four of them were subsequently killed in action. They were not posturing for public show. They were not looking back from years later through a haze of memory & myth about the Civil War.

They were writing during the immediacy of their experiences to explain & justify their beliefs to family members & friends who shared—or in some cases questioned—these beliefs. AND HOW SMUGLY CAN WE SNEER AT THEIR EXPRESSIONS OF A WILLINGNESS TO DIE FOR THOSE BELIEFS WHEN WE KNOW THAT THEY DID PRECISELY THAT?

104—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 & Southerners alike believed themselves custodians of the legacy of 1776.

The crisis of 1861 was the great test of their worthiness of that heritage. On their shoulders rode the fate of the great experiment of republican government launched in 1776. Both Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis appealed to this intense consciousness of parallels between 1776 & 1861.

That is why Lincoln began his great evocation of Union war aims with the words: “Four score & seven years ago our fathers brought forth a new government, conceived in Liberty & dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Likewise, Davis urged his people to “renew such sacrifices as our father made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.

The profound irony of the Civil War was that, like Davis & Lincoln, Confederate & Union soldiers interpreted the heritage of 1776 in opposite ways. Confederates professed to fight for liberty & independence from a tyrannical government. Unionists said they fought to preserve the nation conceived in liberty from dismemberment & destruction. These conflicting impulses which had propelled many volunteers into the armies at the war’s beginning, became more intense as the fighting escalated.

106—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.”

108—A New York corporal wrote: “I know enough of the southern spirit that I think they will fight for the institution of slavery even to extermination.”

RAK: The civil war as love of slaves. Why did people in the South love their slaves so deeply?