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"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...
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.
Mitchell's book may be considered academically rewarding overall, if not for his copious offering of firsthand sources about this turbulent epoch in American history. The one drawback about the book and about his sources, however, is that the author himself concedes that they do not represent at least 35% of the Union army (McPherson 1997, IX), who may have been illiterate or foreign born soldiers. That fact detracts somewhat from the author's findings, which still revealed much about the sample of the population chosen for this literary work.
References
McPherson, James. 1997. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.
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