http://www.abolitionseminar.org/how-did-americans-react-to-emancipation/
Civil War Americans had multiple responses to emancipation in and beyond the 1860s. At the start of the war, instances of black freedom scared many white unionists, who had long been fearful of southern emancipation.
Thus, fugitive slaves arriving in Pennsylvania and New York in 1861 and 1862 were not always greeted with open arms. During the middle of the war, as union fortunes sagged, military commanders, politicians and many members of the body politic shifted course. Agreeing with black and white abolitionists,
they supported emancipation as a wartime policy that would destroy the Confederacy. Even northerners skeptical of the Emancipation Proclamation returned Lincoln to office in 1864. Though this had much to do with Union military successes in the deep South, recent scholarship has shown that many white northern soldiers favored wartime emancipation by 1864 and 1865. By the end of the war, in fact, a solid contingent of white Northerners believed that emancipation rationalized the bloodiest conflict in American history. Agreeing with Lincoln that emancipation was just repayment for the sin of slavery, many Americans entered reconstruction with a nearly millennial belief in Civil War abolition. Like a providential offering, emancipation allowed Civil War Americans, including some southerners, to believe the sectional battle had produced a great good in the country.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/12/perry.browne.civil.war/index.html
The critical linkage of northern industrialization and southern slavery, while generally ignored or downplayed in the past, has been drawing increasing attention from historians, as brought out at a conference on slavery and the U.S. economy this past week, organized by Seth Rockman of Brown University and Sven Beckert of Harvard University.
No one profited more handsomely from the cotton trade and the textile industry than New York's financial and maritime interests. Yet Wood was not in the pocket of big business; he was a populist supported by the city's working-class immigrants. New York's laborers, bolstered by waves of Irish and other immigrants, were just as dependent for their modest wages on King Cotton, and like other ordinary northerners, they knew it.
This leads us to the second answer: Racism. The North had seen slave-owning slowly fade away, and had grudgingly passed emancipation laws to gradually eliminate slavery over generations. Yet even as northern slavery was dying out -- indeed, precisely because it was -- free blacks in the North were increasingly ill-treated.
Draconian laws tightly controlled the lives and employment of free blacks, and black families were being driven out of northern towns by being deemed poor or disorderly or simply through armed attack. Finally, as the North began to erase responsibility for two centuries of slave-owning from its collective memory, an ideology of black racial inferiority arose to justify the impoverished conditions and harsh treatment of a free black population.
In the same vein, wealthy northern business interests had little regard for enslaved people in the South on whose labor their profits depended. And the working class viewed southern slaves not with sympathy, but as economic competition whose working conditions -- they mistakenly thought -- were no worse than those of northern "wage slaves." This is why New York City's working class, rioting against the Union draft in 1863, would turn to lynching free black men, women and children in the streets.
Abolition was a radical cause embraced by only a minority in the North. Northerners would march to war in vast numbers not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union.
Sam Watkins was a Confederate soldier from Tennessee. His only mention of slavery in his book was in Chapter Three, "Corinth." Here he writes: "A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of 'rich man's war, poor man's fight.'"
That's it. It seems as if they were fighting over slavery he would have mentioned it much more than just that one entry in his book.
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
By James M. McPherson
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
James McPherson, Princeton University’s George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History Emeritus, is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, but also noteworthy is For Cause and Comrades, one of the most significant contributions to the study of Civil War soldiers in recent years. Based on an extensive survey of soldier letters and diaries, McPherson’s study explores what motivated the fighting men in blue and gray to enlist and what sustained them through the terror and tedium of war, concluding that the majority of Civil War combatants were sincerely motivated by the political and ideological principles of their opposing causes.
For Cause and Comrades represents one of the most extensive Civil War soldier studies, based on a sample of 1,076 soldiers, 647 Union and 429 Confederate. McPherson discusses this sample and his methodology with both sophistication and clarity. His sample is remarkably representative of Civil War soldier demographics as whole, he submits, comparing proportions of men from different states, occupations, and serving in different military branches. Overrepresented in the sample are officers (who tended to be better educated and well-to-do), slaveholders (in Confederate cases), as well as men killed in action or who otherwise succumbed to wounds or illness. This last sobering imbalance, he reminds us, actually benefits his work, since it ostensibly privileges soldiers from fighting units over those assigned mostly to non-combat duties (viii-ix). In considering soldiers’ ideology, he also makes excellent use of military historian John A. Lynn’s concepts of initial motivation (“why men enlisted”), sustaining motivation, and combat motivation (12).
McPherson’s thesis that Civil War soldiers were and continued to be ideologically motivated and maintained their society’s beliefs in bravery, duty, and honor rejects the arguments of Bell I. Wiley (dean of Civil War soldier studies), who supposed they were politically disinterested and driven instead by senses of adventure and peer pressure, and Gerald Linderman, whose Vietnam Syndrome-tinged work claimed the shock of combat left them disillusioned and their ideals shattered. Although he finds some evidence for these positions, McPherson is convinced by sheer weight of evidence that the majority of Civil War soldiers were indeed fundamentally motivated by patriotic or ideological ideals, finding that between Union and Confederate combatants 66 to 68 percent affirmed “assertion of patriotic motivations for fighting” (100-01). The majority of Union soldiers, he concludes, earnestly fought for the Union cause, deprecating the sins of treason and rebellion and fearing the consequences if they allowed the “Slave Power” to destroy the government bequeathed to them by the Founders. Few enlisted primarily to defeat slavery, though in a separate chapter McPherson discusses how a majority of Union soldiers came to espouse emancipation, especially as an effective war measure and punishment for secession. Confederates similarly invoked the American Revolution, seeing themselves as fighting for independence and against subjugation. In addition to fighting for hearth and home, “most Southern volunteers believed they were fighting for liberty as well as slavery” (often citing both in the same breath), and many actively feared the effects of “Black Republicanism” loosed on their Herrenvolk democracy (20-22).
Besides their respective causes, McPherson considers other factors that influenced Civil War soldier mentalité. Military discipline and command authority (forces soldiers blue and gray never fully accepted) significantly sustained combat motivation, especially the personal bravery of officers. Also essential was the group cohesion and “band of brothers” solidarity forged by the shared experience of combat. Soldiers usually lost their eagerness for battle after first “seeing the elephant,” but contrary to the Linderman thesis, McPherson finds that “the motivating power of soldiers’ ideals of manhood and honor seemed to increase rather than decrease during the last terrible year of the war” (82). In a chapter devoted to religious motivation, he finds that a Pennsylvania soldier spoke for many when he wrote that “religion is what makes brave soldiers.” Christian faith not only sustained soldiers’ belief in the righteousness of their opposing causes but also helped steal them to risk their lives in battle, lending itself to either fatalism or optimism regarding their fates in combat. McPherson also considers how change over time influenced soldier motivation. Many men retained their commitment in spite of despondent letters from home encouraging them to leave the fighting by fair means or foul. As Union victory became more probable, Northern soldiers were increasingly buoyed by military success, while Confederate soldiers’ resolve hardened out of a sense of honor and hopes of defending their homes from encroaching Yankee armies.
James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades must rightly be considered one of the finest and most important contributions to our understanding of Civil War soldiers. His work stands out for its extensive scholarship and wonderfully clear prose, as well the author’s bold willingness to reject modern assumptions and cynicism about the past. McPherson convincingly establishes the patriotic and ideological commitment of the majority of the Civil War’s fighting men, possessing a level of devotion a former 101st Airborne commander described to McPherson as simply “mystifying” (5).
Jonathan Steplyk
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. By James McPherson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, Pp. xv, 237.
James McPherson’s enjoyable work For Cause and Comrades addresses the motivations of Civil War officers and soldiers on both sides of the war. Relying upon letters home written largely from front-line units, he delved into initial motivation for war, sustaining motivation, and combat motivation. Using this method, McPherson challenged many existing concepts regarding these three motivations, as well as factors which weakened the motivation. He presents a war where morale exerted a primary force upon the soldiers, arguing that the South lost because it soldiers no longer had the will to fight.
The soldiers on both sides of the Civil War fought with similar motivations and ideals, except that the concepts did not mean the same. Both armies harkened to memory of 1776 and George Washington. Both sides believed they fought for liberty and freedom, just not the same idea of liberty or freedom. Both armies held personal honor as paramount to their personal and family identity, believing that cowardly acts would not only condemn themselves in the post-war era, but their families. Both armies fought with religious fervor for their cause.
Northern soldiers, for the most part, did not believe that they fought for abolition. Many reacted with disgust to the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, they fought to preserve the liberty won in the Revolutionary War, fighting against anarchy and treason. While personal contact with slavery turned many soldiers into opponents of slavery, many felt disgust after the Proclamation regarding the idea of fighting to free slaves. Only after they viewed the practical benefits (including freeing up rear-echelon and support soldiers for the battlefield as well as weakening Southern society) did many accept the necessity of the Proclamation.
Southern soldiers did not fight for slavery and many refused to even consider the concept as a reason for war. Instead, they fought for liberty and freedom, believing that they must fight to preserve Southern society, institutions, culture, and honor. More soldiers joined to defend the South from a perceived unwarranted invasion. Even in defeat, morale remained high due to the ideological motivations, which included duty and honor, as well as a religious belief in the righteousness of their cause. Only in the end, with Lee’s army defeat and Richmond fallen did morale finally dissipate, even in theatres as far away as Texas where the Rebels had not met with failure.
Soldiers from both armies received mail and newspapers daily, providing them with knowledge regarding other fronts of the war. McPherson showed how a victorious Union army in the West felt depressed from news of defeats in the East. Letters from home had a profound effect on soldier morale—depressed if not received, and sometimes depressed due to critical letters from the home-front. Mail and newspapers also served as conduit of information regarding politics back home, especially the Copperheads. The soldiers almost universally viewed these Peace Democrats as traitors, even soldiers who entered the war Democrats. Soldiers voted soundly for Lincoln, even those who of the Army of the Potomac.
Honor and duty hold a dominant place in this work. The soldiers who fought did so because they felt the profound obligation to continue until the end. Many wounded soldiers returned to the front even after the qualified for a medical discharge because they could not leave their duty to their brothers at the front. Ideology and patriotism also kept soldiers fighting even in extreme difficulty.
If this work suffers from any weakness, it suffers from the sources and the selections process. Letters home could represent the soldiers’ true feelings, but also the reflect desire to pacify the home audience, many of whom felt profound misgiving regarding the soldiers’ continued service in the war. McPherson relied on letters from just over a thousand soldiers, which may limit this work strength. These weaknesses are minor and the author presented his thesis with great skill.
Peter Pratt
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. By James McPherson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, Pp. xv, 237.
In the Civil War, what motivated men to enlist, to fight, and to keep on fighting? Borrowing a framework from John A. Lynn, a French Revolution historian, James McPherson attempts to answer these and other questions in For Cause and Comrades:Why Men Fought in the Civil War. By using the words of the soldiers as mush as possible, McPherson “challenges some of the conventional wisdom about the motives and mentalite of Civil War soldiers” (p. x).
McPherson begins by noting Lynn’s three categories: initial motivation—why men enlisted; sustaining motivation—what kept them enlisted; and combat motivation—what helped them face the danger of battle. The author divides initial motivation into: rage and patriotic fervor, duty and honor, and adventure. Attributing duty and “combat narcosis” to what sustained combat motivation, McPherson believes that ambition and loyalty to officers motivated the men to fight, while discipline through drill helped them maintain focus in battle. Commanders and provost guards kept the men from fleeing battle with the threat of shooting them in the back; and for those that this did not scare, court-martial and its ensuing public humiliation provided the incentive to keep the other men fighting. McPherson finds that religion did a great deal to sustain morale and support the troops at their lowest points. Group cohesion, peer pressure, and a desire to not let a brother down became other motivating factors; the color guard, which represented regimental and state honor, helped units to rally. The author identifies the defense of home, property, and “‘Herrenvolk’ democracy—the equality of all who belonged to the master race” as Confederate motivators (p. 109). Both the North and the South recalled the American Revolution as each side tried to tap into the Spirit of ’76. Ideology and the desire to show that a Republic can survive motivated a great many Northerners to take up the cause. McPherson finds that the soldier’s reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation proved that not all Northerners fought to free the slaves, but battled to reunite the nation, though they eventually approved of freeing the slaves once they saw how much it weakened the South. Both sides needed to know that their loved ones at home supported them and McPherson observes that this had an enormous negative or positive influence on morale. Vengeance, in the end, provoked a great number of soldiers to courageously or viciously act against their enemies. Looking at all of these factors, McPherson concludes by estimating their cumulative impact on the soldiers.
One must notice the great lengths that McPherson goes through to validate his sample of letters. His quantification and acknowledgement of potential complications of his sample stymie most would-be criticisms. The author notes the statistical variation and standard deviation that a sample of this size may make. His tables, in the appendix, portray the representative percentage of soldiers and compare them to the estimated percentages of soldiers to show the reader how close his sample comes to the actually representing the people the study represents. Unfortunately, not all of the author’s methodological discussion can be found in one place and this limits an in-depth analysis of his process. McPherson does use some of his sampling evaluations in his text to illustrate the exclusion of anomalies. The reader accepts McPherson’s conclusions because his sample epitomizes the soldiers he represents.
McPherson proves that many factors motivated a soldier during the Civil War and that these factors had a potential for change. The soldier’s experience much like the factors that inspired their experience differed from regiment to regiment and messmate-to-messmate. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War augments the notable contribution of Bell Irvin Wiley and gives subsequent historians a potential framework for further examination of the factors for motivating soldiers in this war or any war. Military and Civil War historians are greatly indebted to James M. McPherson for this study. As Muslims wage Jihad and kill in the name of God, McPherson’s chapter on religion will help everyone understand their indomitable spirit.
Brooks Sommer
* "The Life of Billy Yank" by Bell Irvin Wiley, here are a couple of snippets from his book:
"Some fought to free slaves, but a polling of the rank and file through their letters and diaries indicated that those whose primary object was the liberation of (sic) slaves comprised only a small part of the fighting forces. It seems doubtful that one soldier in ten at any time during the conflict had any real interest in emancipation per se. A considerable number originally indifferent or favorable to slavery eventually accepted emancipation as a necessary war measure, but in most cases their support appeared lukewarm. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation zealous advocates of (sic) African American freedom were exceptional" (p.40)
"In marked contrast to those whose primary interest was in freeing the slaves stood a larger group who wanted no part in a war of emancipation. A soldier newspaper published at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1862, which carried on its masthead the motto, "The Union Forever and Freedom to all", stated in its first issue: In construing this part of our outside heading let it be distinctly understood that 'white folks' are meant. We do not wish it even insinuated that we have any sympathy with abolitionism".
"Some Yanks opposed making slavery an issue of the war because they thought the effect would be to prolong the conflict at an unjustifiable cost in money and lives. Others objected on the score of the slaves ignorance and irresponsibility, while stills others shrank from the thought of hordes of freedmen settling in the North to compete with white laborers and to mix with them on terms of equality. The opposition of many seemed to have no other basis than an unreasoning hatred of people with black skins". (Pg. 42)
**The Confederate Constitution allowed for the admission of free states to the Confederacy, banned the overseas slave trade, and permitted Confederate states to abolish slavery if they so desired (it merely prohibited the national government from doing so). And perhaps it should also be mentioned that only about 10% of Southern citizens owned slaves and only 33% of Southern families included slaveholders. Additionally, there were nearly as many free blacks living in the South as there were in the North.
And on top of these facts, there is also the fact that four of the 11 Confederate states strongly rejected secession when it was based on slavery and the tariff; they seceded over coercion, not slavery. Indeed, many scholars have documented that Union sentiment was strong enough in the Upper South that those states would have stayed in the Union if Lincoln had simply evacuated Pickens and Sumter and had refrained from coercion against the Deep South.
Here's what leading abolitionist philosopher Lysander Spooner had to say about it all in 1870:
- “Notwithstanding all this, that we had learned, and known, and professed, for nearly a century, these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been such accomplices FOR A PURELY PECUNIARY CONSIDERATION, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slaveholders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the war). And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood-money, were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slaveholders in the future, for the same pecuniary considerations. But the slave-holders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price which these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future -- that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South -- that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, in order to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These -- and not any love of liberty or justice -- were the motives on which the money for the war was lent by the North. In short, the North said to the slave-holders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you; for the control of your markets we will have, whether the tools we use for that purpose be black or white, and be the cost, in blood and money, what it may.”
- And now these lenders of blood-money demand their pay; and the government, so called, becomes their tool, their servile, slavish, villainous tool, to extort it from the labor of the enslaved people both of the North and South. It is to be extorted by every form of direct, and indirect, and unequal taxation. Not only the nominal debt and interest -- enormous as the latter was -- are to be paid in full; but these holders of the debt are to be paid still further -- and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid -- by such tariffs on imports as will enable our home manufacturers to realize enormous prices for their commodities; also by such monopolies in banking as will enable them to keep control of, and thus enslave and plunder, the industry and trade of the great body of the Northern people themselves. In short, the industrial and commercial slavery of the great body of the people, North and South, black and white, is the price which these lenders of blood money demand, and insist upon, and are determined to secure, in return for the money lent for the war.
- This programme having been fully arranged and systematized, they put their sword into the hands of the chief murderer of the war (Union General and then recently elected President Grant), and charge him to carry their scheme into effect. And now he, speaking as their organ, says, "LET US HAVE PEACE.”
- The meaning of this is: Submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have "peace." But in case you resist, the same lenders of blood-money, who furnished the means to subdue the South, will furnish the means again to subdue you.
- The whole affair, on the part of those who furnished the money, has been, and now is, a deliberate scheme of robbery and murder; not merely to monopolize the markets of the South, but also to monopolize the currency, and thus control the industry and trade, and thus plunder and enslave the laborers, of both North and South. And Congress and the president are today the merest tools for these purposes. They are obliged to be, for they know that their own power, as rulers, so-called, is at an end, the moment their credit with the blood-money loan-mongers fails. They are like a bankrupt in the hands of an extortioner. They dare not say nay to any demand made upon them. And to hide at once, if possible, both their servility and crimes, they attempt to divert public attention, by crying out that they have "Abolished Slavery!" That they have "Saved the Country!" That they have "Preserved our Glorious Union!" and that, in now paying the "National Debt," as they call it (as if the people themselves, ALL OF THEM WHO ARE TO BE TAXED FOR ITS PAYMENT, had really and voluntarily joined in contracting it), they are simply "Maintaining the National Honor!"
- The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor." Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general -- not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white. And yet these imposters now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man -- although that was not the motive of the war -- as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference of principle -- but only of degree -- between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.
- If their object had really been to abolish slavery, or maintain liberty or justice generally, they had only to say: All, whether white or black, who want the protection of this government, shall have it; and all who do not want it, will be left in peace, so long as they leave us in peace. Had they said this, slavery would necessarily have been abolished at once; the war would have been saved; and a thousand times nobler union than we have ever had would have been the result. It would have been a voluntary union of free men; such a union as will one day exist among all men, the world over, if the several nations, so called, shall ever get rid of the usurpers, robbers, and murderers, called governments, that now plunder, enslave, and destroy them.
- Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, "a government of consent." The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this -- that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have got what is called "peace."
- Their pretenses that they have "Saved the Country," and "Preserved our Glorious Union," are frauds like all the rest of their pretenses. By them they mean simply that they have subjugated, and maintained their power over, an unwilling people.
- All these cries of having "abolished slavery," of having "saved the country," of having "preserved the union," of establishing "a government of consent," and of "maintaining the national honor," are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats -- so transparent that they ought to deceive no one -- when uttered as justifications for the war, or for the government that has succeeded the war, or for now compelling the people to pay the cost of the war, or for compelling anybody to support a government that he does not want.
- The lesson taught by all these facts is this: As long as mankind continue to pay "national debts," so-called -- that is, so long as they are such dupes and cowards as to pay for being cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered -- so long there will be enough to lend the money for those purposes; and with that money a plenty of tools, called soldiers, can be hired to keep them in subjection. But when they refuse any longer to pay for being thus cheated, plundered, enslaved, and murdered, they will cease to have cheats, and usurpers, and robbers, and murderers and blood-money loan-mongers for masters.
