For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. - book review

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by David Brooks

On the second day of the battle of Gettysburg, three Confederate brigades launched an attack on a gap in the Union line on Cemetary Ridge. Union General Winfield Scott Hancock rode up to the spot and saw to his horror that the Southern soldiers would be able to pour right through and flood into the Union rear. He called upon the only Northern regiment at hand, the First Minnesota, to fill the soft spot in the line and hold off the enemy troops until more substantial reinforcements could be put in place. Hancock shouted over to the Minnesota commander William Colvill, and motioned to the Alabama flag advancing at the head of the Confederate force, "Colonel, do you see those colors? Take them."

Colvill had only 262 men at his command, but he and his men hurled themselves, bayonets fixed, into the center of 1,600 Alabamians. The Minnesotans did manage to delay the Confederate advance for a full 10 minutes, enough time for the reinforcements, but of the 262 who charged down that hill, only 41 men returned unharmed, a phenomenal casualty rate. Colvill was killed, along with all but three of his officers. It was a truly heroic charge, and to a man they must have known they were charging to their doom. So why were they so willing to sacrifice themselves?

These days we flatter ourselves as realists about such questions. We pooh-pooh Fourth of July rhetoric about duty to country, self-sacrifice in the name of freedom, and commitment to American ideals. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, and the experiences of World War I and Vietnam more generally, have taught us to regard words like "honor" and "duty" as hollow, used by old men to manipulate young men into fighting against their own true interests. In our day, as a number of writers have noted, the low is taken to be more real than the noble. So when asked to explain self-sacrifice, scholars tend to talk about the temporary passions of battle. Heroes, current theorists stress, are motivated by group cohesion - loyalty to one's buddies rather than to airy-fairy ideals. Most soldiers, the post-Vietnam thinking goes, try to keep their heads down, do their time, and go home safely.

But maybe we're too "realistic" - too gimlet-eyed in our estimations. Perhaps it's only pseudo-sophistication that leads us to see through the official rhetoric of sappy Memorial Day services. Perhaps there's more realism in the July Fourth invocations than in the hard-headed research of the historians.

James McPherson, the George Henry Davis Professor of American history at Princeton, whose Battle Cry of Freedom is widely regarded as the best one-volume history of the Civil War, has conducted a study of the letters and diaries of 1,076 Civil War soldiers, 647 from the North and 429 from the South (overall, 29 percent of Civil War soldiers were Confederates). And, in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War,(*) he describes the attitudes of the soldiers before, during, and after combat.

In the letters, he finds plenty of evidence to support our realist answers to the mystery of why men fight. Men were indeed motivated by loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and by a fear of public humiliation. But McPherson also finds much evidence of motivations that are nobler than the ones that get emphasized by skeptical realists.

In the first place, the letters suggest that both armies were acutely aware of the broader ideological implications of the war. Here McPherson is bucking the conventional wisdom among his colleagues. "American soldiers of the 1860s appear to have been about as little concerned with ideological issues as were those of the 1940s," wrote Bell Irwin Wiley, an influential historian of the Civil War. But McPherson finds that "ideological motifs almost leap from many pages" of the letters. Newspapers were much sought after items in camp. We "make comments on the news and express our opinions quite freely about the blood and thunder editorials in the Richmond papers, smoke again and go to bed," a Virginia lieutenant wrote in a typical letter home. The diary entries from an Ohio Cavalryman convey the political atmosphere in the longueurs between fighting. From September 12, 1864: "Politics is the principal topic of the day." September 13: "Spend a good portion of my time reading the news and arguing politics." September 21: "Politics keep up quite an excitement in our company." Several regiments set up debating societies, where they argued over such issues as, should the leaders of the opposing armies be executed after the war, or "Do the signs of the times indicate a downfall of our Republic?"

More importantly, the soldiers constantly appealed to abstract principles to explain why they were fighting, why they refused to desert, and why they reenlisted. A sergeant from Georgia wrote to his family, "If my heart ever sincerely desired any thing on earth ... it certainly is to be useful to my Country.... I will sacrifice my life upon the alter of my country." At Gettysburg he did.

If anything, the Union soldiers were even more committed to abstract principles like national ideals, because they were not fighting so clearly to preserve local institutions (like slavery) or to avenge invaders on their homeland. A veteran from New Jersey wrote to his brother and sister in 1863: "Though my prayer is for peace, 'tis for an honorable peace. I would rather live a soldier for life [and] see this country made a mighty 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 and shameful peace."