What They Fought For

[samgrant]

Not what the politicians or Generals or high officers fought for.

Rather, what the ordinary soldier fought for.

As you know, this topic has been argued and discussed in various disparate threads. I think this issue deserves it's own dedicated thread.

The common ideas:

The Northern boys fought only for Union and/or defense of the United States government, not for abolition.

The Southern boys fought for home and hearth, for their state, to resist the evil invader, not to defend slavery.

Is that a fair starting point?

If so lets discuss/argue this out here rather than within the "Slavery - The Cause" thread where it gets lost or those other threads.

[samgrant]

Just as a starter, there are a couple books I know of which attempt to address this issue:

"For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War" and "What They Fought For 1861-1865" both by James M. McPherson.

I'm sure there are others not by McPherson, for those of you who abhor the guy, I just couldn't find one specifically to the soldiers from a Southern point of view. (Maybe you can suggest some.)

Well, more food for discussion will shortly be available to us all with the publication of a new book titled "What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War"

These from Amazon:

"From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. For this impressively researched Civil War social history, Georgetown assistant history professor Manning visited more than two dozen states to comb though archives and libraries for primary source material, mostly diaries and letters of men who fought on both sides in the Civil War, along with more than 100 regimental newspapers. The result is an engagingly written, convincingly argued social history with a point—that those who did the fighting in the Union and Confederate armies "plainly identified slavery as the root of the Civil War." Manning backs up her contention with hundreds of first-person testimonies written at the time, rather than often-unreliable after-the-fact memoirs. While most Civil War narratives lean heavily on officers, Easterners and men who fought in Virginia, Manning casts a much broader net. She includes immigrants, African-Americans and western fighters, in order, she says, "to approximate cross sections of the actual Union and Confederate ranks." Based on the author's dissertation, the book is free of academese and appeals to a general audience, though Manning's harsh condemnation of white Southerners' feelings about slavery and her unstinting praise of Union soldiers' "commitment to emancipation" take a step beyond scholarly objectivity. Photos. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Manning's subject--slavery as the prime cause of the Civil War--is hardly unusual, but what makes this study unique, provocative, and immensely valuable is her approach. She utilizes the letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers, all written during the war, to glean the attitudes, hopes, and even the fears of soldiers toward the institution of slavery and emancipation. Unlike many previous works on the subject, Manning ignores the writings of elites and emphasizes the opinions of common soldiers, North and South, white and black. Some of her conclusions are striking and likely to generate intense debate. Although acknowledging that many Union soldiers enlisted to preserve the Union rather than to fight slavery, she asserts that both slavery and emancipation were constant topics of discussion as early as 1861. She disputes that nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers (who were the overwhelming majority) fought primarily to defend hearth and home from Yankee invaders. Rather, she maintains that the defense of slavery was intimately tied to their sense of manhood, honor, and their place in the Southern social structures. A well-argued examination. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
A vivid, unprecedented account of why Union and Confederate soldiers identified slavery as the root of the war, how the conflict changed troops’ ideas about slavery, and what those changing ideas meant for the war and the nation.

Using soldiers’ letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers, Chandra Manning allows us to accompany soldiers—black and white, northern and southern—into camps and hospitals and on marches and battlefields to better understand their thoughts about what they were doing and why. Manning’s work reveals that Union soldiers, though evincing little sympathy for abolitionism before the war, were calling for emancipation by the second half of 1861, ahead of civilians, political leaders, and officers, and a full year before the Emancipation Proclamation. She recognizes Confederate soldiers’ primary focus on their own families, and explores how their beliefs about abolition—that it would endanger their loved ones, erase the privileges of white manhood, and destroy the very fabric of southern society—motivated even non-slaveholding Confederates to fight and compelled them to persevere through military catastrophes like Gettysburg and Atlanta, long after they grew to despise the Confederate government and disdain the southern citizenry. She makes clear that while white Union troops viewed preservation of the Union as essential to the legacy of the Revolution, over the course of the war many also came to think that in order to gain God’s favor, they and other white northerners must confront the racial prejudices that made them complicit in the sin of slavery. We see how the eventual consideration of the enlistment of black soldiers by the Confederacy eliminated any reason for many Confederate soldiers to fight; how, by 1865, black Union soldiers believed the forward racial strides made during the war would continue; and how white Union troops’ commitment to racial change, fluctuating with the progress of the war, created undreamt-of potential for change but failed to fulfill it."


Well, that ought to get the discussion going, see you later.

Sam

[matthew mckeon]

I mentioned this before, but there is a nice article in the latest North and South magazine about German Americans and their attitudes, based on collections of letters recently translated.

There is a range of feelings. In the north, Protestants tended to be more pro war, pro Union and anti slavery than Catholics. The better educated and better off, also tended to be more prowar and Union. A specific German group, the "48ers" were more liberal and tended to support Lincoln(by liberal in this context, they didn't believe in monarchy and in Constitutional government).
Others were conscripts who were reluctant warriors, feeling they had no other options. Some expressed the feelings of many immigrants before and after: the US had "taken them in" and "given them everything" and now it was their turn to protect it. A couple were peeved by nativist attitudes and turned to the Democratic party as more welcoming.
Racist comments were muted in the letters quoted. Some approved of and admired black troops, and expressed satisfaction that slavery was being destroyed, others were indifferent, but only one actually used a racist term.

[trice]

Originally Posted by matthew mckeon

Others were conscripts who were reluctant warriors, feeling they had no other options.

Just to address this isolated piece of your post: only about 6% of the US Army was serving draftees during the war (most of these from mid-1864 on, and the percentage would have grown if the war continued. Granted, many men signed up for the volunteer bounties knowing men would be drafted if enough did not come forward.)

On the Confederate side, the government imposed conscription in 1862 when they found it impossible to keep the necessary numbers of white men under arms without this measure. The conscription law also was applied retroactively to all volunteers serving at that time, so that by the Seven Days, virtually all Confederate soldiers were conscripts.

I don't think either side handled this particularly well. Both sides seem to have many disgruntled men trying to avoid being forced to serve. But I think it would be easier to find large numbers of AWOL Confederate conscripts than AWOL Union draftees.

In any case, those men tended to be unhappy with being forced to serve. Many of the Confederates probably would have served anyway without the conscription laws -- but clearly not all and not enough.

Regards,
Tim

[unionblue]

samgrant,

I will post here from now on when concerning myself with this subject.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

[larry_cockerham]

My suspicion (I wasn't there, otherwise I'd have more answers, though I might be too weak to relay them.) is that many a Southern boy had to be told why he was fighting after the ruckus had commenced. The soldier and the folks running the war lived in decidely different worlds.

[cash]

Originally Posted by larry_cockerham

My suspicion (I wasn't there, otherwise I'd have more answers, though I might be too weak to relay them.) is that many a Southern boy had to be told why he was fighting after the ruckus had commenced. The soldier and the folks running the war lived in decidely different worlds.

Not really. They knew what the war was about.

http://www.worldtalkradio.com/archive.asp?aid=8959

Regards,
Cash

[johan_steele]

Do any of you know offhand the percentage of the CS Army that was concripted or forced to remain in the ranks when the CS switched enlistments to "Duration" enlistments?

[samgrant]

Originally Posted by cash

Not really. They knew what the war was about.

http://www.worldtalkradio.com/archive.asp?aid=8959

Regards,
Cash

And see my post #54 at http://civilwartalk.com/forums/showt...t=23621&page=6

[trice]

Originally Posted by johan_steele

Do any of you know offhand the percentage of the CS Army that was concripted or forced to remain in the ranks when the CS switched enlistments to "Duration" enlistments?

Essentially, I think it was all of them. Unless a man was able to get an exemption somehow, they were all included, and there were not that many exemptions. Call it 99%.

Regards,
Tim