For Cause And Comrades Analysis

There were a great number of motivations, which contributed to each individual soldiers reasoning behind enlisting in either the Union, or Confederate armies in 1861. Common motivations that I found in For Cause and Comrades included duty, honor, religion, race, peers, family, and most importantly a sense of nationalism. While reading McPherson’s text these factors were so strongly described by the soldiers that they transcended the individual’s desire for safety and home and led these men to enlist.
The core reason, according to McPherson for soldier’s decisions to fight was the concepts of duty and honor. McPherson claims that both of these ideas were “powerful motivating sources” (McPherson pg.5). Furthermore, McPherson noticed that Union soldiers were more likely to speak of duty as a motivating factor while Confederate soldiers were more likely to speak of honor as a motivating factor. This geographical ideological divide was likely caused by the South’s “sense Southern honor”, while the North focused more on a sense of Northern conscience (McPherson pg.24). However, despite these observations made by McPherson he goes on to state that, neither the Confederate soldiers in the limited sample specifically mention honor or duty at all. Their letters were preoccupied with other matters concerning family and religion. Conversely, Union solider mentioned these concepts within their letters. In a letter to his parents, a new recruit from Nashville wrote that “nothing …show more content…
Both Union and Confederate soldiers used rhetoric and symbols of country, liberty, legacy and Constitution in explaining their motivations for volunteering for service (McPherson pg. 21). However, the South and the North used their own brand of rhetoric and reasoning for that rhetoric in different