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

Chapter 8 focuses on the patriotism of Civil War soldiers, examining what ideological beliefs each side holds. What McPherson finds is that both sides hold similar beliefs—they often even use the same words, “liberty” and “slavery” being chief among them. They also focus on the same event: the Revolutionary War. Both sides believe they are upholding the values of the Founding Fathers: they are fighting for liberty and freedom from tyranny. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, McPherson points out, reference the Founding Fathers in speeches (104). 

The difference in the two sides is how they define liberty and freedom. The South sees the North as tyrannical aggressors, intent on destroying the South’s way of life (euphemistically called “institutions”). They believe they are fighting for freedom from oppression, freedom to their way of life, and freedom from government overrule: “‘If we was to lose,’ a Mississippi private wrote his wife in 1862, ‘we would be slaves to the Yanks and our children would have a yoke of bondage thrown around there [sic] neck’” (106).

The North sees something very similar, except that to the North, it’s the South bringing about the oppression. By seceding from the Union, the South is violating the Founding Fathers’ idea of ordered liberty under the rule of law. In the North’s view, the South is violating all that the Founding Fathers fought for; the North is trying to hold together “that more perfect union,” as the Constitution says: “An Illinois farm boy whose parents had opposed his enlistment in 1862 asked them tartly a year later: ‘Should We the youngest and brightest nation of all the earth bow to traters [sic] and forsake the graves of our Fathers?’” (110).

The South also fails to see the irony of their position. Since they do not see slaves as equal to them, they do not believe in equality. Even those who do not own slaves in the South do not want to see blacks as equal to whites: “Even though he was tired of the war, wrote a Louisiana artilleryman in 1862, ‘I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person’” (109).