For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

By the last year of the war, both armies are exhausted. Many of the men suffer from what we would call PTSD today: they have fought daily for months, marched hundreds of miles, and eaten and slept little. In some cases, soldiers are so tired they refuse to fight. Others desert out of mental and physical exhaustion. McPherson writes:

[A] major in the 11th Georgia defined courage in 1863 as not merely bravery in battle but also ‘the nerve to endure rain, and snow, and sleet, and the privations of Winter, and the scorching sun of Summer […] to undergo extreme fatigue, to subdue the pains of hunger […] to do battle with sickness and despondency and gloom as with the Country’s enemies’ (164).

As he does in the rest of the book, McPherson asks here what keeps these men going. Certainly some deserted, and certainly some lose their sense of duty. But, McPherson says, for the most part, the soldiers who are still fighting at the end held the same beliefs as those who fought at the beginning, with their sense of duty and honor and courage sustaining them:

For the fighting soldiers who enlisted in 1861 and 1862 the values of duty and honor remained a crucial component of their sustaining motivation to the end. Their rhetoric about these values was the same in the war’s last year as in its first. In a letter of January 12, 1865, summarizing his three and a half years in the army, a young Illinois cavalryman used the word ‘duty’ five times in a single sentence (168).

For the Confederacy, honor means being free from Northern “vassalage” to the Yankees (170). Many Confederates speak of their own freedom, though not of the freedom of slaves, except when, late in the war, the Confederate Congress narrowly passes a measure that will allow slaves to fight for the Confederacy with the implication they will then be freed. Like the Confederate Congress, Confederate soldiers are divided on the issue, though many see that slavery, win or lose, may have seen its last days.

Northern honor demands that the Union stay intact. Most Northern soldiers believe they are fighting for the nation. Almost 80% vote for Lincoln, who runs on a platform of complete victory in the war. His victory, combined with Lee’s surrender, “decided for all time to come that Republicans are not a failure” (178), as one Northern colonel put it.