FOR CAUSE AND COMRADES
Why Men Fought in the Civil War.
By James M. McPherson.
237 pp. New York:
Oxford University Press. $25.
Civil WAR soldiers, North and South, it is commonly said, did not often fight out of political and ideological motives. Volunteer soldiers generally enlisted because economic and social pressures pushed them into the armies. Then their loyalty to their units and friends impelled them to fight. As the war went on, soldiers embittered by suffering and witnessing the horrors of battle simply persevered to get the war over with.
Such assertions, nourished by the experience of 20th-century conflicts, have become practically the conventional wisdom about Civil War soldiers' motivations. Thus, in his pioneering and now classic studies of rank-and-file soldiers, ''The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy'' (1943) and ''The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union'' (1952), Bell Irvin Wiley contended that men enlisted largely out of economic need and because their communities pressured them, and that they stayed and fought largely for the sake of their friends. And in ''Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War'' (1987), Gerald F. Linderman argued that combat disillusioned the soldiers, causing them to lose any purpose beyond ending the war and going home. But in ''For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War,'' the distinguished Civil War historian James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History at Princeton University, challenges these views.
He had already laid the groundwork for this book in an earlier one, ''What They Fought For, 1861-1865'' (1994). There Mr. McPherson concluded that the Union and Confederate soldiers possessed deeply held political and ideological convictions, which were the major reasons they enlisted, remained in the ranks and fought. In this new work, Mr. McPherson reinforces his ideas about political and ideological motivations but he goes further. He repeats his contention that Confederate soldiers acted largely out of the conviction that they were defending rights and liberty, and that Union soldiers believed that self-government everywhere -- and their own freedom in particular -- depended upon upholding the Republic against division and anarchy. However, beyond politics and ideology were the repeated stress and peril of battle, and in ''For Cause and Comrades,'' Mr. McPherson looks at why the soldiers were willing to endure the rigors of combat. He emphasizes the obligations of duty and honor: duty, a moral need to fight for principle; honor, a masculine dedication to preserving reputation and pride. Duty, he says, was slightly more prevalent as a motivator in the North than in the South; honor was slightly more prevalent in the South than in the North.Continue reading the main story
Mr. McPherson's method is to study the letters and diaries of 1,076 soldiers, 647 Union and 429 Confederate. Overwhelmingly the documents he scrutinized came from the volunteers of 1861 and 1862, rather than from the draftees, near-draftees and bounty hunters who were numerous in the later years of the war. Still, he strove to make his sample as representative as possible.
Of course, soldiers well enough educated to be articulate writers are necessarily overrepresented, as, therefore, are officers. Moreover, the soldiers in Mr. McPherson's sample suffered disproportionately high casualty rates: 17 percent of his Union soldiers and 29 percent of his Confederates were killed, compared with 5 percent of all Union soldiers and 11 or 12 percent of all Confederates. Yet high casualty rates signify a willingness to fight, and since Mr. McPherson is interested in combat motivation, his sample seems an appropriate one.
Mr. McPherson does not reject completely the arguments of Bell Irvin Wiley and Gerald Linderman. His letters and diaries reveal a wide variety of motivations in addition to duty and honor, including those economic and social pressures that our 20th-century sensibilities have prepared us to expect. Among the other influences Mr. McPherson discusses are the fury of battle (that rush of adrenaline that comes in the excitement of combat), the sometimes surprisingly venomous impulses of revenge, and religious principle, never to be ignored when examining the culture of mid-19th-century America. Yet always his letters and diaries direct him back to duty and honor, and particularly to duty to a political and ideological cause, and honor beyond personal reputation and in defense of the cause.
In the South, the cause candidly included the defense of slavery and white supremacy. In the North, it increasingly encompassed emancipation, even among those who at first rejected Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. And as the acceptance of emancipation grew among Union soldiers, dedication on both sides expanded rather than waned in intensity.
That is, the harsh experience of battle did not in general dilute idealistic motives. Instead it enhanced the soldiers' determination to see their purposes fulfilled. Unlike so many combatants in this century's conflicts, Civil War soldiers did not come to regard the very words ''duty,'' ''honor,'' ''cause,'' ''comradeship'' and ''glory'' with disdain.
Mr. McPherson is an instructive guide in all of this. Perceptions common to the 20th century, he cogently argues, do not serve well toward understanding the combat motivations of 1861-65. Americans of that era differed so profoundly from most of us that we must marvel when, visiting Fredericksburg, we envisage the Union charge up Marye's Heights on Dec. 13, 1862. Or when, at Gettysburg, we recall the Confederate march across the shallow valley from Seminary to Cemetery Ridge. How could so many thousands bring themselves to do such things? Clearly, the world of combat that Mr. McPherson leads us through is very different from our own. And so, in the background of his study, there always lurks the troubling question whether our generation, or any foreseeable generation, could dedicate itself to any cause whatever with the willingness that the Civil War generation displayed.Continue reading the main story