39 pages • 1 hour read
James M. McphersonFor Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “We Were in Earnest”
Chapter 2 delves into the reasons soldiers on both sides enlisted in the war. McPherson opens by calling the Civil War “The Brothers’ War.” He explains, through several letters between different sets of brothers, the opposing beliefs of each. James and John Welsh enlist on opposite sides, James for the Union and John for the Confederacy. James claims John is destroying the country. He says “Jeff Davis and his crew of pirates” had committed “treason and nothing more or less” (14). John claims James is betraying his homeland and family: he was “very much pained to find […] that I have a brother who would advocate sending men here to butcher his own friends and relations” (14).
These beliefs exemplify the divided country. As war comes closer, a patriotic furor sweeps the nation, one that sends thousands of men to enlist. Some do so out of a sense of duty to their country; these men believe they must protect the Union, and the rule of law. Others enlist for their honor, and defense of their way of life. Some young men enlist for the adventure. Some Northerners enlist to stop slavery, while Southerners enlist to preserve it. Both sides speak of shame, and liberty, though, like the issue of war, they approach it from opposite sides, with Northerners believing they should be shamed if they do not protect their country, and Southerners feeling they should be shamed if they do not protect their honor. It is Southerners’ duty to protect their liberty, else they be slaves to Northern aggression. This sense of duty and honor, McPherson says, is bound in masculinity. It is also caught up in the romance of war, with some young men enlisting for the adventure, and the belief they can find glory on the battlefield. McPherson ends with this contradiction: did they enlist for duty or glory? He concludes that one does not necessarily rule out the other.
Chapter 2 Analysis
As McPherson points out, the Civil War divided the country in every way. He calls it the “Brothers’ War,” but also echoes Lincoln’s words that America had become a “house divided” (14). The chapter points out the different ways the North and South look at the war. Northerners see Southerners as those who have betrayed the ideas of the Union: James’s letter to his brother, John, gives a clear example of how Northerners viewed the secession. Southerners believe the North is trying to enslave them by destroying their way of life; John’s letter to his brother claims that he “has always opposed secession but I shall vote for it today because I don’t intend to submit to black Republican rule” (14). John’s view here, and the South’s view of protecting the institution of slavery, show that they do not see African-Americans as people, and therefore not worth defending.
McPherson also outlines the difference between duty and honor. Though he points out that many Northerners spoke of honor, and many Southerners of duty, for the most part these ideologies were as divided as the country, the South believing in its honor and the North in its duty. He shows the patriotic furor that swept over the nation, each side enlisting for its own ends, and he quotes numerous letters as examples of soldiers professing their duty or honor, though he questions this belief, finally concluding that a soldier could enlist for honor and glory. The unspoken idea here is that the soldiers themselves often do not know their motivation. The South claims it’s fighting for liberty, but that liberty comes at the price of slavery. The North claims it’s saving the country by taking up arms against an entire region of the country they claim to be saving. These contradictions exemplify why one brother could see the world one way, and the other in a different light.
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By James M. Mcpherson
