Men Fought in the Civil

¶ … Men Fought in the Civil War -- James M. McPherson

Reasons for War

James McPherson's non-fictional account of the Civil War, for Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, provides a fascinating degree of insight into the principle reasons why young men from the same country would willingly, and in some instances wantonly, engage in armed conflict with one another. The author's primary purpose in writing this manuscript was to explore the motivation and the internal impetus that served these soldiers in battle. His aim of determining what the various causes were that allowed these combatants to wage war for the better part of four years is explored in a non-partisan, objective perspective which is open to a number of sources and interpretations of the information which he has uncovered. By striving to figure out why the participants in the Civil War fought with one another, the author ends up revealing some of the most fundamental issues at the forefront of the United States of America in the midst of the 19th century.

In gathering said information, the author employs a highly selective methodology that attempts to strive for unadulterated information from principle sources: which primarily take the form of written correspondence from participants on both sides of the war, the Confederacy and the Union. Prudently, McPherson chooses to eschew letters, diaries and journal entries that have previously been published or written at what he deems to be too great a distance (both literally and figuratively) from the actual encounter. According to the author, such sources "lack the immediacy of the experience" (McPherson 1997, 100). Instead, the author chooses to focus on non-published sources from the Civil War era that "were not looking back from years later through a haze of memory and myth about the Civil War" (McPherson 1997, 100).

What a careful examination of such sources has revealed, according to the author, is that there were strong ideological reasons for the contesting of the Civil War, that were inherently mixed with a social identity that relied upon the approval of one's peer groups. "Yet for Civil War soldiers, the group cohesion and peer pressure that were powerful factors in combat motivation were not unrelated to the complex mixture of patriotism, ideology, concept of duty, honor and manhood, and community or peer pressure that prompted them to enlist in the first place" (McPherson 1997, 13). The ideologies that both sides embraced, therefore, were notions of patriotism (even for the Confederacy, which considered itself its own nation at the time of the belligerence), honor, and duty as a man. Interestingly enough this viewpoint is considerably at variance with that of the traditional opinion of the motivation for the combatants in the Civil War, which holds that there were no strong ideological perspectives relevant to combat entry. Moreover, the issue of slavery played a relatively minor part in this ideology, since only 20% of the 429 combatants from the Confederacy were deemed to have "explicitly voiced proslavery convictions" (McPherson 1997, 110). However, the ideological conception of liberty was broadened "to include black people" by 1864.