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

> I've seen estimates indicating that around 10% of Confederate soldiers actually owned slaves.

Actual ownership of slaves is a poor metric. After all, slave renters, slave patrols, overseers, and the wives and children of slave-holders did not necessarily hold legal title to any slaves, either. Yet it would be foolish to suggest that they were not intimately involved in the institution.

I suppose that if you're trying to quantify the connection between Confederate soldiers and slavery, you could do worse than looking at the number of Confederate soldiers who came from slave-holding families. Glatthaar, in General Lee's Army, estimates that 25% of Confederate soldiers volunteering in 1861 (before the draft, and before the extension of enlistments for the duration of the war) came from such families, making them "42 percent more likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves than the general population."

Of course, this quantification is all rather academic and irrelevant. As Christopher Graham at the American Civil War Museum explains, "[o]ne did not need to own slaves to commit to the broad Confederate national vision that was based on slavery, or to fear the outcome of slavery’s destruction." The Confederate South was, in its own mind, a Herrenvolk democracy in which every white man had an interest in the maintenance of a racial order defined by slavery and white supremacy, regardless of whether they owned slaves themselves.

> I tend to agree with Shelby Foote that the average Confederate soldier was fighting because the southern way of life, which clearly included an economy fueled by slave labor, was threatened, or, at least they perceived it to be under threat. So, there were a tapestry of reasons that can't just be distilled down to support for slavery or white supremacy (although, the vast majority clearly were both).

Sure. I agree.

> I think it's totally legitimate to discuss why the average Confederate soldier fought in the war because, without the formidable man power confronting the Union, there would have been no rebellion.

Of course it's legitimate. That's why prominent historians have been doing it for decades. But we have to draw a bright line of demarcation between talking about "the cause of the Civil War" and talking about "why the men fought." Those are two very different questions. Each has a distinct, if related, answer. Confusing the two is a common tactic of Lost Cause writers who either are not historians or are historians committing professional malpractice.

> Somehow, the cultural elites and the media were successful in mobilizing men to die for their individual states and /or the Confederacy itself.

This is exactly the sort of "incomplete picture" I talked about above. Seeing the Confederate story as one of common men mobilized by elites to fight a war removes moral and political agency from those common men. This is a dangerous oversimplification.

So I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll throw my two cents in for anyone who may see this. When I was younger, I too was horribly misinformed about the causes of the Civil War. Since then I have come to not only understand the complex origin of the conflict, but have also become pretty well versed in the present conflict over the causes of the war.

To start: most average Americans are misinformed in some way about the Civil War. The most common misconception is that the North didn't like slavery and wanted to end it, the South wanted to keep their slaves so they seceded from the Union. This is a gross oversimplification and it is the very misconception that "lost cause" proponents prey on. Abolition, that is the freeing of slaves, was not the cause of the war in that the Lincoln did not get elected and say "Ok, time to free the slaves." In fact, at the beginning of the war, Lincoln went through great lengths to make it clear that it was not a war of abolition, rather, a war to preserve the Union. So why is that? Well slavery was a very touchy subject even north of the Mason Dixon. There was a variety of opinions on the matter such as those who didn't care about slavery, those who opposed it on economic grounds, those who thought slaves were inferior to whites, those who thought they were equal and everything in between. Just like today's political climate, if you go back and time and ask 100 people in northern states about slavery, you'd get 100 different answers.

Now the group that was causing the biggest "stir," so to speak, in the countey the decade leading up to the war were the abolitionists. They were considered "radical" in their time for believing that slavery was a morally reprehensible institution and that slavery must be abolished. Some even went so far as to say the South should be punished for the sin of slavery as well. It's important to note here, that the idea of the moral problems of slavery had only really started to take root in the western world a century prior as evidenced by England beginning to enact restrictions against slave holding colonies in the 1750s(ish). At the beginning of the 19th century, abolishionism was still a very, very small movement in the United States that came out of the New England puritan tradition. It would begin to grow through the first half of the century and by the 1850s, while still a minority, they very vocal thanks to a number of abolitionist newspapers. Naturally the South didn't take too kindly to people saying they should punished for slavery and a lot of northerners still viewed abolishionists as political radicals.

The dominate political ideal among the newly formed Republican was "freesoilism." This was the dominate idea in the (old) Northwest (present day midwest) and was the political tradition that Lincoln came out of. Freesoilers sought to contain slavery in the states where it already existed and all new states to enter the union would be "free" states. Now whether freesoilers opposed slavery on moral or economic grounds would probably depend on the individual, but, from my reading, many of their arguments tended to be economic in nature. Again, Southern states didn't like this because it would throw off their balance of power in Congress. They already were a minority in the House of Representatives and not allowing slavery to expand into new states would also put their interests in the minority in the Senate. Remember, the south is scared stiff of the rhetoric coming out of the growing abolitionist movement. Losing power in the Senate would most likely be the beginning of the end of the institution on slavery.

So we get to the election of 1860. Lincoln wins and the South is at a crossroads. Lincoln campaigned with freesoiler rhetoric, promising not to make any laws abolishing slavery. This was not good enough for Southerners. They were fearful that abolitionists would be whispering in Lincoln's ear. Remember, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry happened only a year prior. In the mind of Southern aristocrats, this is what abolishionism would lead to. So, they seceded from the Union. Their intention? Well for starters, you can't make laws abolition slavery in a seperate country. Also, in the fight for new territory they could seek to expand their interests westward. Now technically, according to the Confederate Constitution, new states would be able to vote whether they wanted to be free states or slave states. I'm sure in practice though, they would have ensured the vote would have fell the way they needed it too (see Bleeding Kansas). A few weeks later, Southern forces begin to bombard the Union occupied Fort Sumter located in Charleston harbor.

Things get tough real quick for Lincoln. He wants to preserve the Union, but he can't be seen as supporting the cause of abolishion out of fear he would lose support for the war in the north, especially in those slave holding states that remained in the Union, one of them being Maryland. If Maryland goes, DC is lost. So the issue of slavery is dodged and deflected. Remember what I said about lost cause proponents preying on misinformation? This is where it comes into play. There's a whole lot of quotes from Lincoln and others at the beginning of the war saying how this is not a war to free slaves. So to the uninformed this seems like pretty good evidence about the war not being a war about slavery. But slavery and abolition are not the same thing. The war had everything to do with slavery but, at least at the beginning, it was intentionally positioned as not being a war of abolition. What Lincoln's private thoughts on the matter were? I have no idea. But politically, his hands were tied. The public would not support sending soldiers to die over slaves. So the rallying cry was to preserve the Union.

So how do we get from "preserving the Union" to the 13th amendment? Well not long into the war a curious thing happens from the most unexpected source. A few slaves row a boat up to Union occupied Fort Monroe. This creates a catch 22 for Lincoln. Returning the slaves will anger abolitionists and divide the Republican Party, but not doing so could signal an intent to abolish slavery, also dividing the Party as well as what remained of the nation. But before Lincoln can make his decision, the general in charge of Fort Monroe, Benjamin Butler, makes a decision for him. He says slaves are considered property by their owners, so they will be confiscated like property as contrabands of war. Now Butler is the furthest thing from an abolitionist. Before the war he was a northern Democrat who actually nominated Jefferson Davis for the Democratic ticket in the 1860 election (he was a very fervent supporter of Davis' before the war actually). That decision will end up changing the face of the war. Word spreads and as Union forces move through the South, slaves begin fleeing to Union lines, self emancipating in mass, calling themselves "contraband." This is what paves the way for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which exempted slaveholding states still in the Union and certain Union occupied areas of the south (again, this is still a touchy political subject in the north).

One if the other amazing things that happens over the course of the war is the changing attitudes of Union soldiers towards slavery. Many of them had probably never seen a black person in their lives and would have never supported a war of abolition at the beginning. But once they witnessed the horrors of slavery first hand, many had striking changes of heart on the matter. I remember reading in James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades of one Union soldier who wrote to his dad back home stating very clearly that he wasn't an abolitionist (kind of like today saying "dad I promise I'm not a liberal," or "dad I promise I'm not a conservative"), but after seeing slavery first hand, he fully supported Lincoln's efforts to abolish slavery. And still there were those who, though they didn't consider themselves abolitionists, still thought that if Mr. Lincoln says this is what it wakes to win the war, then I'll support it.

As we all know, in the end, the war leads to abolition. But it is important to understand how we got there. It's a nuanced topic and I, by no means covered everything and there are a number if other issues we can talk about, such as the evolution of agrarianism and industrialization and the effects they had on the cuture of North and South, we can talk about the effects religious ideals and yes, we can talk about the role economic interests played on the war. The causes of the Civil War are not easily surmised in a sentence are two. But, while studying the Civil War, no matter where you turn, you cannot escape slavery and it's role in leading to the conflict. Slavery is always at the core of all of other issues. Still, it requires a bit of nuance to understand exactly how it lead to war and our nation's approach to this great atrocity evolved over the course of the war.

TL;DR: While the war did not begin as a war of abolition, slavery was the most pervasive and polemical political issue of it's day. It was the great millstone around our nation's neck and the Civil War was, in every sense, our moral reckoning with this awful institution.