For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. By James M. McPherson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 237. $25.00.)

In 1994, James M. McPherson published a slender volume entitled What They Fought For, 1861-1865, in which he concluded that political and ideological issues were important to Civil War soldiers. His new book not only reinforces that argument, it also delves deeper into soldier motivation by asking why men fought and how they maintained their will to combat. In a monumental research project, McPherson has sought answers to these questions in some 25,000 soldiers' letters and 249 diaries. The fruits of his research have provided him with a sample group of 1,076 soldiers, 647 (60 percent) Federals and 429 (40 percent) Confederates.

Although his sample betrays a proportional imbalance of Confederate soldiers, who counted for only 29 percent of the three million men who fought in both armies, McPherson believes it is representative of the average Civil War soldier with respect to age, marital status, geographical distribution, and branch of service. On the other hand, he acknowledges that both African Americans and white-collar occupations are underrepresented in the Union sample and that nonslaveholders are underrepresented in the Confederate sample. Officers of both armies are vastly overrepresented.

McPherson's conclusions run something like this. Distinguishing first between those impulses that prompted men to enlist and those factors that kept them...