James M Mcpherson for Cause and Comrades Book Review
CHAPTER ONEFor Cause and Comrades
Why Men Fought in the Civil War
By JAMES M. MCPHERSON
Oxford University Press
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THIS War IS A
CRUSADEThe origins of this book become dorsum many years. In the spring of 1976 I took several Princeton students to Gettysburg for the first of what became many tours of that memorable battlefield. On this occasion, equally on subsequent visits, we finished the day past walking the basis over which "Pickets'due south charge" took place at the climax of the battle. As we strolled across the open fields in peaceful twilight, knowing that those thirteen,000 Confederate soldiers had come under arms and then burglarize burn most every stride of the way, students asked in awe: What fabricated these men do it? What motivated them to advance into that wall of fire? What caused them to become forward despite the loftier odds against coming out safely? I found that I could not give my students a satisfactory answer. Just the question planted the seed of a book.
Another experience later that same bicentennial yr of 1976 watered the seed. The solar day after Thanksgiving my cousin and I visited the four Civil War battlefields most Fredericksburg, Virginia. As nosotros stood at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania on that crisp fall afternoon, with no other living creature in sight except a hawk soaring high overhead, the dissimilarity between this pastoral scene and what happened on the aforementioned spot 112 years earlier struck me with a painful intesity. Wave afterwards wave of Marriage attacks against entrenched Confederates during xviii hours of ferocious fighting in the pelting on May 12, 1864, had left thousands of killed and wounded men trampled into the mud and muck. Soldiers on both sides had leaped on the parapets and fired down at the enemy with bayoneted rifles handed up from comrades beneath, hurling each empty gun like a spear before firing the adjacent one until they were shot downwardly or bayoneted themselves. "I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania," wrote a Marriage officer, "because I should be loath to believe it myself" had he not been there.(one) As I recounted this story to my cousin, he asked in wonder: What possessed those men? How could they sacrifice themselves in that way? Again I was not satisfied with my reply. My determination to find an reply deepened.
With that cousin I share a peachy-great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War. This man, Jesse Beecher, emigrated from England in 1857 and became a prosperous wheelwright in an upstate New York village. In 1862, at the age of thirty-seven and with 8 children, he enlisted in the 112th New York. What moved him to do so? His obituary and family tradition testify to a sense of duty and gratitude to the state that had given him opportunity. Another clue is provided by the proper noun he bestowed on his first kid born in the Us: Henry Ward Beecher, afterwards the famous antislavery clergyman. Jesse Beecher fought in South Carolina, Virginia, and N Carolina. After his regiment bankrupt through Confederate defenses in the successful assail at Fort Fisher on January 15, 1865, he died in Wilmington, N Carolina, and is cached there in the national military cemetery. What motivated him to give the last full measure of devotion for his adopted country? Unfortunately, none of his letters has survived to help resolve this question. But many letters from other soldiers like him suggest possible answers.
My initial grappling with the question of Civil War soldiers' motivation occurred during the backwash of the Vietnam War. Others too probed this puzzle at the time. A veteran who became a student of the Civil State of war after his bout in Vietnam was awestruck by the dedication of soldiers in that earlier conflict. In all his Vietnam experience he had met merely one American "who had the same 'belief structure' equally the Civil War soldiers." In Vietnam "the soldier fought for his own survival, not a cause. The prevailing attitude was: do your fourth dimension ... keep your caput down, stay out of trouble, become out alive." How different was the willingness of Civil State of war soldiers to court decease in a disharmonize whose prey charge per unit was several times greater than for American soldiers in Vietnam. "I observe that kind of devotion ... mystifying." When General John A. Wickham, who commanded the famous 101st Airborne Sectionalisation in the 1970s and subsequently rose to Army Chief of Staff, visited Antietam battleground in the 1980s he gazed at Bloody Lane where several Union assaults had been repulsed before finally breaking through. "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an set on like that," he marveled.(2)
Why not? That is probably the wrong question. The right question is. Why did Civil War soldiers do it? It was not because their lives were somehow less precious to them than ours to us. Nor was it because they lived in a more violent culture that took fighting and dying for granted more than we practise. And it was non because they were professional soldiers or coerced conscripts; almost Union and Confederate soldiers were neither long-term regulars nor draftees, but wartime volunteers from civilian life whose values remained rooted in the homes and communities from which they sprang to arms and to which they longed to return. They did not fight for money. The pay was poor and unreliable; the large enlistment bounties received by some Marriage soldiers late in the war were exceptional; about volunteers and their families made economic sacrifices when they enlisted. What prompted them to give upwards several of the best years of their lives--indeed, to give up life itself in this war that killed almost as many American soldiers as all the remainder of the wars this country has fought combined? What enabled them to overcome that near basic of human instincts--self-preservation?
This is a vital question in all wars, for without such sacrificial beliefs by soldiers, armies could not fight. Two psychiatrists who studied American G.I.south in World War II put it this way: "What is the force that compels a man to take chances his life 24-hour interval after day, to suffer the constant tension, the fearfulness of decease ... the steady loss of friends? ... What can possess a rational man to make him act so irrationally?" Eighty years before the novelist and Civil War veteran John W. De Forest asked the same question and offered an implicit answer. "Cocky-preservation is the first constabulary of nature," he wrote in summing upwards his gainsay experience. "The man who does not dread to die or to exist mutilated is a lunatic. The man who, dreading these things, still faces them for the sake of duty and accolade is a hero."(3)
Duty and honor were indeed powerful motivating forces. They had to be, for some other traditional reasons that accept acquired men to fight in organized armies had niggling relevance in the Civil War. Religious fanaticism and ethnic hatreds played almost no role. Bailiwick was notoriously lax in Civil State of war volunteer regiments. Training was minimal by modern standards. The coercive power of the country was flaccid. Subordination and unquestioning obedience to orders were alien to this most democratic and individualistic of nineteenth-century societies. Withal the Union and Amalgamated armies mobilized 3 one thousand thousand men. How did they do information technology? What fabricated these men fight?
In the eye of the war none other than Abraham Lincoln enumerated several motives that might induce a man to enlist: "patriotism, political bii.e., political or ideological conviction], ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment." In 1864 a Union soldier less literate merely no less lucid than Lincoln compiled his list of motives in a letter to his father: "A soldier has merely one thing in view, and that is two fight the Battles of his country with onhonor], halve a likeing for all his Brothers in arms, and the Blessings of God and the prayers of his friends at home." Nearly half a century later 1 of the Civil War's genuine heroes, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who won the medal of honor for his defense of Niggling Round Top and earned immortality in Michael Shaara'southward novel The Killer Angels and Ted Turner's picture show Gettysburg, tried to explain the willingness of men to face bullets: "Simple manhood, force of field of study, pride, love, or bond of comradeship--'Hither is Neb; I volition go or stay where he does.' And the officeholder is and then absorbed by the sense of responsibility for his men, for his cause, or for the fight that the ... instinct to seek safety is overcome past the instinct of honor."(4)
Lincoln, Chamberlain, De Forest, and the soldier son of a dirt farmer each in his own way outlined the themes that will be analyzed in this book. Many soldiers did indeed fight bravely for land, duty, accolade, and the right. In retrospect virtually all soldiers on both sides believed that they had done so. But in practice, many had found means to avoid fighting when bullets began coming besides shut. During the war a consensus existed that in many regiments nearly half of the men did most of the existent fighting. The balance were known, in Civil State of war slang, equally skulkers, sneaks, beats, stragglers, or coffee-coolers. They "played off" (shirked) or played sick when battle loomed. They seemed to melt away when the lead started flying, to reappear next day with tight smiles and stories most having been separated from the regiment in the defoliation. Some deserted for good. Some actually were sick much of the time. Others got what combat soldiers called "bombproof" jobs a safe distance behind the lines--headquarters clerk, quartermaster sergeant, carriage-train guard, teamster, hospital bellboy, and the like.
Even the best regiments contained their quota of sneaks. "Foreign how many men nosotros accept on the rolls and how few we can become into a fight," wrote a captain in the 1st Connecticut Cavalry. "Twenty or thirty men in my company" were "miserable excuses ... for men" who "shirk all duty if they can." According to a corporal in the 33rd New York, past the end of the Vii Days battles "in our visitor of 60 men 11 were in line.... The residue of the brigade was nearly as bad as ours.... I tell yous these things to let you know what a large number of miserable beings in that location is in the army. In case of a boxing these stragglers are the very ones to start a panic." Afterwards the battle of Fredericksburg, a disgusted private in the 9th New York (who was later killed in action) wrote his brother that "the sneaks in the army are named Legion.... When you read of the number of men engaged on our side, strike out at to the lowest degree ane third every bit never having struck a blow."(5) The Confederate army had the same trouble. A private in the crack 21st Mississippi thought that in such a regiment "in that location should be no sloth nor sluggard, no whimperer nor complainer," merely regrettably the regiment independent "an admittedly fearful number of these creatures." The fighting was done by the truly dedicated soldiers (including himself of course) who had endured "privations and suffering like men without murmur or complaint ... & this class is sufficiently strong to acquit this war through to a glorious end but this good conduct can not efface the shameless acts of the other grade."(6)
Some soldiers admitted to seeking a bombproof position or to skulking. A quartermaster sergeant in the 149th New York told his sister that he could take been promoted to orderly sergeant (a combat post) "but I prefer staying where I am, besides you know, those Rebel bullets don't exactly suit my fancy." After his regiment distinguished itself at Spotter Mountain on November 24, 1863, he wrote habitation that "while the battle was going on I wished myself in the company" but "when the wounded began to come in, I congratulated myself that I was non compelled to be where the bullets flew so thick." The diary entries of a private in the 101st New York candidly described his behavior at the 2d battle of Bull Run. August 29, 1862: "Marched about three miles and fought all day they marched us up to Reb bombardment and we skidadled then I fell out and kept out all twenty-four hour period Laid in the wood all night with 5 or half dozen others." August 30: "Laid in the woods all day while the rest were fighting."(7)
Helping a wounded comrade to the rear was a favorite device to escape further fighting. A private in the 53rd Virginia narrated his actions during the boxing of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862: "It is an atrocious thing to exist in a battle where the assurance is flying every bit thick every bit hail," he wrote to his wife. "I saw dudley on the battlefield soon later on he was wounded and I started with him out we got to a place where they did non have such a practiced chance to hit u.s.a. and dudley stayed there I went a footling farther on and come to a ditch and information technology was crouded with men under the banks." Two months later the same soldier confessed that he was one of the thousands of Amalgamated stragglers who fell out of the ranks before the Ground forces of Northern Virginia fought at Sharpsburg. "I was not up with them the day of the boxing give thanks god I have escaped so far & I promise and trust I may come up out safe in the terminate." Non to be outdone by the Virginians, a North Carolina individual with Lee's army bodacious his wife in 1864 that "there is as adept a chance to keep out of the War here as there is there for if it Gets too hot here Nosotros can cantankerous the branch and proceed out of it."(8)
Many of the derogatory comments about sneaks and stragglers came from officers and men of upper- and middle-class background. They had enlisted early in the war from motives--in their own eyes at to the lowest degree--of duty, honor, and patriotism. They looked downward on the conscripts, substitutes, and bounty men who had been drafted or had enlisted for money. The soldier in the 21st Mississippi who denounced the sluggards and complainers in his regiment as "creatures raised a fiddling above the brutes" was a planter's son who had attended Princeton. The helm in the 1st Connecticut Cavalry who deplored the "miserable excuses ... for men" who "shirk all duty" was a prosperous farmer's son who had left Yale to enlist. With remarkable unanimity, fighting soldiers of middle-course origins commented in their letters home that "it isn't the brawling, fighting human being at home that stands the bullets whistle the best." "Roughs that are ever gear up for street fighting are cowards on the open battle field." "I don't know of a unmarried fist fighting bulley but what he makes a cowardly soldier." "As a full general thing those at home that are naturally timid are the ones here that have the least fearfulness. [Patrick Cronans a sort of street great as they term it at domicile.... He skulked out of the fight and later was court marshaled and sentenced to wear ... a wide board on the dorsum with the word coward.... Others that information technology was idea would not fight at all fought the best."(9)
The harvest of draftees, substitutes, and compensation men who came into the Marriage regular army afterwards mid-1863 had a especially poor reputation among the volunteers of 1861 and 1862. "The big compensation men are no men at all," wrote a Massachusetts private. "Most of them came out just to become the compensation, & play out as soon as they are able." The twice-wounded colonel of the 61st New York, who won the medal of laurels for his performance at Chancellorsville, was shocked by the quality of men he received after the first draft in 1863. "Nearly all that have been sent here are substitutes and are miserable surly crude fellows and are without patriotism or award," he wrote in August 1863. "They seem to have no involvement in the cause and you would be surprised to notice the difference betwixt them and the old veterans who have endured the hardships and borne the brunt of the battles for the last two years."(10)
Possibly these comments should exist discounted because of class or ethnic bias. The fighting reputation of the Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac and the Louisiana Tigers in the Army of Northern Virginia--both composed mainly of working-class Irish-Americans--should give 1 pause. At the same time, however, it is truthful that a disproportionate number of conscripts, substitutes, and (in the Union army) bounty men came from the ranks of modest farmers and unskilled laborers. Then did a disproportionate number of deserters in both armies. And studies of American soldiers in Earth War Two and Korea found combat performance to correlate positively with social class and teaching.(11) And so mayhap the similar observations of Civil War soldiers should non be entirely discounted.
The grumbling and grousing of many soldiers should not exist dislocated with skulking. Soldiers' letters and diaries are filled with complaints about the hardships and suffering of life in the ground forces. A sergeant in the 89th New York sarcastically described to his married woman the celebrity of soldiering: "Laying effectually in the dirt and mud, living on hardtack, facing death in bullets and shells, swallow upwardly past woods-ticks and body-lice, cant hear from my Love and loved ones once a calendar month, cant go where or exercise as I am a heed ter." Still most of these complainers were determined and effective soldiers; many reenlisted when their terms expired. Griping has been the privilege of American soldiers in all wars; the biggest war of all was no exception. An Illinois soldier who complained of astute homesickness and almost died of diarrhea wrote to his fiancee that "a soldiers life is a dogs life at best.... I take a decided preference for the placidity pursuits of a citizens life to that of the excitement hardship and danger of a soldiers life." Yet he reenlisted in 1864, married his fiancee during his reenlistment furlough, lost an arm at the battle of Jonesboro, and returned to his regiment every bit a lieutenant after recovery to finish out the war. A corporal in the fourth Louisiana wrote in his diary in 1863 that he was "weary, so weary with this soldier's life" and "heartily sick and tired of the state of war, but I suppose that I must make upwards my mind to go through with it all"--which he did, to the bitter cease.(12) After a forced march of 50 miles in two and ane-half days, a soldier in the 72nd Pennsylvania wrote to his father: "O what deep heartfelt curses did I repeatedly hear heaped upon the generals, the war, the state, the rebels, and everything else." Yet this was one of the regiments that broke the back of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and broke through the Confederate mule-shoe salient at Spotsylvania. A Massachusetts officer warned the folks at home non to have such grousing at face up value, "for these same soldiers volition fight like balderdash dogs when it comes to the scratch, and it is a soldiers privilege to grumble."(13)
Why did so many of them fight like bulldogs? That is the question this book seeks to answer. It does so by going to the writings of the men who did the fighting. A great abundance of such sources exists. One could start with the hundreds of memoirs by soldiers who survived the war, including such classics as "Co. Aytch" past Confederate infantryman Sam Watkins and Hard Tack and Coffee by Union artilleryman John Billings. Near of these accounts were written in the concluding quarter of the nineteenth century by erstwhile soldiers looking back on the well-nigh intense experience of their lives. The memoirs shaded into another genre, regimental histories, nigh of which also appeared during those aforementioned decades and were usually written past a veteran of the regiment who drew freely on the reminiscences and letters of his comrades. Another category of first-mitt accounts consists of letters that many soldiers wrote for publication in their hometown newspapers during the war. Some of these have been reprinted in modernistic editions; two fine examples are Hard Marching Every Solar day by Wilbur Fisk of the 2d Vermont and On the Altar of Freedom by James Gooding, a black soldier in the 54th Massachusetts. Still another genre is the wartime diaries or journals that soldiers rewrote and "improved" for publication afterwards the state of war; two well-known examples are William Heartsill'due south Xiv Hundred and 91 Days in the Confederate Army and John Haley's The Insubordinate Yell and the Yankee Hurrah: The Ceremonious War Periodical of a Maine Volunteer.
Such sources offer valuable insights into the minds and experiences of Ceremonious War soldiers. Numerous scholars have drawn on them for penetrating accounts of the state of war from the perspective of the ranks. But these memoirs, regimental histories, newspaper letters, and rewritten diaries are not the sources for this book. They suffer from a critical defect: they were written for publication. Their authors consciously or subconsciously constructed their narratives with a public audience in heed. Accounts written afterwards the state of war present an additional problem of potential distortion by faulty memory or hindsight. In all such writings the temptation is powerful to put the best confront on i'due south motives and behavior, to highlight noble and courageous actions and to gloss over the ignoble and cowardly. That does not brand these sources worthless; if they were all we had we could subject them to critical standards to filter out some of the baloney and construct a partly credible interpretation of soldiers' motivations.
But these sources are not all we have. Indeed, nosotros have a great wealth of evidence that enables u.s. to get closer to what Ceremonious State of war soldiers really thought and experienced than for almost whatsoever other war. This evidence consists of the personal letters written by soldiers during the war to family members, sweethearts, and friends, and the unrevised diaries that some of them kept during their service. Literally thousands of collections of soldiers' letters or diaries are accessible in state and local historical societies, in university and research libraries, and in the possession of descendants who are willing to make them bachelor. Hundreds of alphabetic character collections or diaries have been published in books or land historical journals edited according to (more or less) critical standards.
These are rich and in some ways near unique sources. Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time. More 90 percent of white Matrimony soldiers and more than lxxx per centum of Confederate soldiers were literate, and most of them wrote frequent letters to families and friends. Many of them were away from dwelling for the start fourth dimension; their letters were the but style to depict thoughts, feelings, and experiences to loved ones. Of course, letters to a wife or parent or sibling were written for an "audition." Fifty-fifty a diary was ofttimes intended to be read by others. Although the soldier may therefore have been tempted to put the best face on his own motives and actions or to avoid mentioning unpleasant and awkward facts, these messages and diaries were nevertheless more candid and far closer to the immediacy of feel than anything the soldiers wrote for publication then or later. Having read at to the lowest degree 25,000 personal letters from soldiers and 249 diaries, I am convinced that these documents bring u.s.a. closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.
I stated that these messages and diaries were about unique. Not but are in that location vastly more than of them than for any previous war, but in contrast with twentieth-century wars, Civil State of war armies did not field of study soldiers' letters to censorship or discourage the keeping of diaries. Soldiers' letters were therefore uniquely blunt and detailed virtually important matters that probably would non pass a censor: morale, relations between officers and men, details of marches and battles, politics and ideology and war aims, and other matters. This candor enables the historian to peer farther into the minds and souls of Civil War soldiers than of those in whatever other war.
Ane caveat is in order, however. As in other wars, Civil State of war soldiers plant it difficult if not impossible to depict their combat feel to those who had not shared it. "I tin can't describe a battle to y'all," wrote a young officer in the 35th North Carolina to his female parent later on Antietam. "No one tin can imagine anything like it unless he has been in 1."(14) Union soldiers echoed this sentiment: "A battle is a horrid thing. You can have no conception of its horrors." "Those who have not had the feel of boxing cannot imagin what a sensation it does produce." "Of class I saw a nifty many hard sights the day of the fight but I volition non tell them e'er."(15)
But despite the difficulty of describing "my feelings while in battle," as a Massachusetts individual put it later his start battle, some soldiers tried anyhow.(16) And even more of them discussed a range of attitudes and emotions to explicate what motivated them to enlist, to stay in the regular army, and to fight. These are the themes explored in the chapters that follow. I have borrowed part of my conceptual framework from John A. Lynn, an historian of the armies of the French Revolution. Lynn posited 3 categories: initial motivation; sustaining motivation; and gainsay motivation. The get-go consists of the reasons why men enlisted; the second concerns the factors that kept them in the regular army and kept the army in existence over time; and the third focuses on what nerved them to confront extreme danger in battle.(17)
These categories are divide but interrelated. There may be a wide gulf between motives for enlistment in the first place and feelings when the bullets beginning flying, but an army could not fight if it did not be, and information technology could non be if it had non come into being in the first place. This volume will argue for a closer relationship amidst these three categories for Civil War soldiers than some scholarship on combat motivation posits for that and other wars. The exhaustive studies by social scientists of American soldiers in World State of war 2, for example, found little relationship betwixt the rather vague patriotism of many men when they enlisted (or were drafted) and the "primary group cohesion" that was their main sustenance in boxing. (See Chapter 7.) Yet for Civil War soldiers the grouping cohesion and peer pressure that were powerful factors in combat motivation were not unrelated to the complex mixture of patriotism, credo, concepts of duty, award, manhood, and community or peer force per unit area that prompted them to enlist in the first place. And while the coercive structures of regular army and state were key factors in sustaining the existence of the Spousal relationship and Confederate armies by 1864, these factors could not have operated without the consensual support of the soldiers themselves and the communities from which they came.
"I am sick of state of war," wrote a Confederate officer to his wife in 1863, and of "the separation from the honey objects of life"--his family. Merely "were the contest once more only commenced I would willingly undergo information technology again for the sake of ... our country'due south independence aour children'sberty." At about the same fourth dimension a Pennsylvania officer wrote to his married woman that he had to fight it out to the terminate because, "sick as I am of this war and bloodshand much oh how much I want to be home with my dear wife and children ... every solar day I have a more religious feeling, that this war is a cause for the good of mankind....cannot] carry to remember of what my children would exist if nosotros were to let this hell-begotten conspiracy to destroy this country."(xviii) These convictions had caused the two men, and thousands of others, to volunteer and fight against each other in 1861. They remained more powerful than coercion and subject as the glue that held the armies together in 1864.
(C) 1997 Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-nineteen-509023-3
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