In chapter one of What They Fought For, I learned about the letters and diaries of the Confederate soldiers. The themes of the letters were home-sickness, lack of peace, and the defense of home against their invading enemy. The thought of soldiers fighting for their homes and being threatened by invaders, made them stronger when facing adversity. Many men expressed that they would rather die fighting for a cause, than dying without trying and this commitment showed patriotism. Throughout the letters, soldiers claimed their reason for fighting, was for the principles of Constitutional liberty and self-government. There was a comparison between the Civil War and Revolutionary war that the Confederate Armies discussed in their diaries. The Confederate
However, within McPherson’s book, he supports the idea that soldiers motives within the Civil War may have been influenced by social pressure, companionship, “masculinity; concepts of duty, honor, and courage” (McPherson pg. 1). Men who did not fight for this reason fought for their country as many believed that if “Our Fathers made this country, we, their children are to save it”
She argues that the white Union men who enlisted disliked slavery from the beginning, even though they viewed blacks as inferior. She argues that over the course of the war, the Union armies saw firsthand the brutality of what slavery had done. For instance, Manning includes accounts of Unionist seeing slaves with “great welts, and callous stripes … [and] great scars” (77). She also has narratives of Unionist who saw slaves that were almost as white as they were and the anger that they felt towards the sexual abuse that slave women went through at the hands of white men (77-78). On the other hand, she argues that the Confederates wanted to preserve slavery because it was the backbone to the southern economy and that there would be dangers to society if the slaves became free.
The men, mostly “horse thieves, highway robbers, and evil-minded, lawless vagabonds” (Johansson, p.223), joined for the main reason that they wanted adventure. It got better as the Confederate army paid them and gave them food. The groups were lawless, and even “Confederate leaders found the partisan groups difficult to control” (Johansson, p.181), attacking supply lines and attacking farms and towns looking for food. The Guerrilla groups even clothed themselves in uniforms stole from fallen soldiers or murdered prisoners (Johansson, p.200). The attackers road horses, waiting in thick bushes for their victims, the springing out to attack them and then escape as quickly as they could.
As a farmer, James Kelso may not have known much about the savagery that was associated with war, however he would soon learn. After signing up to fight for the Union cause, Kelso recruited men from Cumberland County as well as neighboring areas, to form Company D of the 130th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Bravery may have seemed like something that was running rampant throughout the countryside considering the number of men that signed up to join both the Union and Confederacy, however war has a way of turning the bravest of men into cowards. The fact that Kelso rallied his town to join the Union provides valuable insight into the close knit nature of the town of Shippensburg.
In this article, the intent was to show us the Civil War from a confederate’s perspective and I think it did a great job at that. Showing that the army officers interacted during the war even unearthing the Native American skeletons and gathering them up to see what their ancestors looked like. This article did not concentrate much on the war which I think was a good thing since a lot of people today usually view the confederates as bad people since they were fighting to keep slavery. There is one flaw that I found in this article.
James M. McPherson’s For Cause & Comrades analyzes and discusses the different reasons why men fought and died in the Civil War. McPherson uses the journals and letters of 1076 soldiers, 647 from the Union army and 429 from the Confederacy. Using these first-hand accounts of the war, McPherson aims to answer the question of how and why soldiers participated in the war. McPherson’s thesis contends that “Duty and honor were indeed powerful motivating forces.
In “Nathan Bedford Forrest; A Biography” by Jack Hurst, there are many occurrences of literary and historical contrast. One main occurrences are the contrast of the North and South's’ beliefs of slavery. The other is the contrast of General Nathan Bedford Forrest and General William Tecumseh Sherman and how they chose to fight the war. To begin, a major contrast is obviously the beliefs of both the North and the South. In the biography, the ideas and actions of both sides is equally shown.
The individual reasons were numerous, but three main ones stuck out. In The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, the three reasons that men fought were homeland, ideal, and glory. Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Battle of Gettysburg, fought the bloody battle for his homeland. When reading about Lee in the forward, it states, “He loves Virginia above all, the mystic dirt of home”
While the popular image of the Confederacy, and indeed the Secessionist Southern States as a whole, are looked at as containing white populations uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause, the reality is more complex. As portrayed in Victims: A True Story of the Civil War and Free State of Jones there existed sizable pockets of dissent among the populace whom the Confederate government failed to convert to the cause. In places like the mountains of western North Carolina and southeastern Mississippi this led to desertion, passive resistance, and even outright armed rebellion which sapped Confederate resources that were needed to continue to fight the Union. Though this anti-Confederate feeling would often translate into support for the Union, this was not based on some inherent loyalty to the Federal government. As shown in Victims and Free State of Jones the disunity within the Confederacy stemmed from the failure of the Confederate government to get their non-slave holding lower classes to buy into the pro-slavery ideology of the nation, which was compounded by the lower classes bearing many of the harsh measures of the war including the draft and the
COMPANY AYTCH BOOK REVIEW In today’s society our history books are often written by the victors of our battles and wars. We have a tendency to sugar coat what really happened and to, in a way, glorify war. It is very uncommon to come across a book that details what life was like on the losing end, even more so, one that was written twenty years after a war took place. Company Aytch: Or A Side Show of the Big Show was written by a man by the name of Samuel Rush Watkins.
The Civil War sparked an era of depression for all Texans, and America as a whole. In the period of the Civil War, over 70,000 Texans fought in the Civil War. In the early 1820’s, the United States was expanding its territorial grasp, however many of the states wished to join the union with legalized slavery. All of the slave states in the union led to the secession of eleven states, the Confederacy, and the Civil War. With the high likelihood of suffering a tragic death in the war, the question is brought up, why did Texans fight in the Civil War?
“Enlisted the United States Service August 16th, 1862, at Mound City, Kansas.” (Wing, 1), “On January 22nd 1862 we left Camp Siegel, Milwaukee Wisconsin on train for Chicago and arrived at Chicago the same evening.” (Christ, 21). These are not just words from someone’s diary, these are two real separate documents from the life of an average american soldier. Soldiers who fought on the same side for one of the most gruesome wars that America has ever witnessed, The Civil War.
There are numerous similarities and differences between the American Revolutionary War and The American Civil War. Both wars were waged in the name of unity, the Revolutionary War was to bring together the colonies of America and the Civil war was to bring together and preserve the Union. In both wars Americans did fight other Americans, in the Revolutionary War those who supported the American way fought against those who who supported the crown along side of the British. In the Civil War the North fought the South. Both wars were relatively short, both lasting less than ten years each; and the outcome of both wars was the unity of the nation.
In the beginning of the book, Manning explains that soldiers on both sides of the war both fought because of slavery. This was shown by Manning on both sides. While quoting a union solider from the third Wisconsin, “‘the rebellion is abolotionizing the whole army.’ Time in the south forced troop ‘to face this sum of all evils, and cause of the war,’ slavery (45).” By quoting this union solider, she proves that the Union became an “abolitionist army” of sorts, with the goal of eventually eradicating slavery from the United States.
Although society has been brought to believe that soldiers in the Civil War, both North and South, were mere illiterate followers, not knowing what the war was about or who they what they were fighting for, James McPherson argues otherwise; contradicting popular belief. Throughout the use of primary sources, the author emphasizes the moral and ideological factors in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Inside these primary sources, the reader can look through the mind of the soldier and discover their real motives of fighting in the war through the medium of the letters exchanged to friends and family. For the duration of the second chapter, McPherson focuses on the underlying reasons as to why the Union soldiers fought with great force and determination through the course of the Civil War. The Unionists believed in conserving the democracy our founding fathers had established hundreds of years ago.