When exploring the question of what the United States was fighting for in Vietnam, we don’t get bogged down in the question of what motivated individual soldiers.
Thank you for the piece. It reminds me of a book that I’ve just just finished called Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, which explores what motivated “ordinary” Germans not in the regular army to support the violence against Jews in the Second World War: going along, peer pressure, fear, true believers? There’s no clear cut answer, just as there isn’t one for the motivations of soldiers in either side of the U.S. Civil War. In some ways I can emphasise with these German policeman, and yet, they supported the side of the Nazis and therefore … It’s these complications that make history and people so interesting.
It's a controversial book, but I think you are absolutely right that Browning's book opens up all kinds of questions regarding soldier motivation. Thanks.
Many states recruited regiments shortly after the South seceded in 1861, but assumed the war would be quick and decisive and could be managed with 90 day enlistments. Many states learned fairly quickly that 90 days was not enough time to raise a regiment, get it into a training camp and through a basic training and into the field within 90 days. Training camps could often only accommodate one regiment at a time and some states had less than a handful of training camps. A regiment consisted of roughly a thousand men divided into companies of 100. Often companies were raised entirely from half a dozen townships each in one or possibly two or three counties. Many of the companies were recruited by one or several local politicians who hoped to add the title of colonel or major or captain or lieutenant to a mostly political resume. The 27th Wisconsin, for instance, started recruiting midway through 1861, and didn't have the numbers to fill eight or ten companies and to negotiate which ten companies would comprise a numerable regiment until midway into 1862 and didn't secure a slot in a training camp until early 1863. They were commissioned and put in service just in time for the last three months of the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. Many of the men had signed up to serve six months or even a year prior to when their ideas of military service became actual. After Shiloh conscription became a means to considerably expedite the process of fielding an army. Married men with families who were necessary to the functioning of family farms at home were naturally the least inclined to abandon their responsibilities in favor of war fever. Settlers on the prairies of the upper midwest had a tendency to interpret the news that the country was at war as notice of an impending attack by hostile Indians who had been displaced from their native lands by a previous generation of plains settlers. War was conceivable for them in terms of the Blackhawk War. A civil war based on an institution defined by race was generally far removed from the lived experience of European immigrant farmers in the northern states who had crossed an ocean for the opportunity and the privilege to live on land they could say they owned. What they knew of war derived from their sense of fealty to aristocrats engaged in disputes over land with other aristocrats. Many of them came to America to escape the adverse effects of humoring disputatious aristocrats. The 9th Wisconsin was all German and organized by Germans who had fought as 90 day recruits alongside Franz Sigel in Missouri in 1861 in one of the first battles after Fort Sumter. The 9th went into service in early 1862 patrolling southwestern Missouri, southeastern Kansas, northwestern Arkansas and Fort Gibson on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the northeastern corner of the Indian Territory that was not yet Oklahoma. Colonel Wier was relieved of command of the 9th Wisconsin only a few months after the unit entered service as he was deemed too drunk to serve by his second in command, Colonel Frederick Salomon, the younger brother of Wisconsin's first German lieutenant Governor. Colonel Wier charged Salomon with insubordination and mutiny, but was discharged as unfit for service and Salomon was promoted to Brigadier General. He appointed his younger brother, Charles Salomon, to Colonel and placed him in command of the 9th Wisconsin where he remained for the duration of the war. This more or less coincided in time with the Battle of Shiloh when Governor Louis Harvey of Wisconsin went to Tennessee to review what was left of the Wisconsin regiments there. After visiting his troops Governor Harvey returned to the boat on which he'd arrived, but stumbled on the boarding plank, fell into the Tennessee River and drowned. His Lieutenant Governor, Edward Salomon, promptly became Acting Governor of Wisconsin for the remaining two years of Harvey's term as governor. Conscription became the order of the day while Salomon governed Wisconsin. A Prussian army officer before he came to Wisconsin, Salomon considered the draft ordered by the federal government in 1862, ill-advised, but implemented it as requested. Wisconsin's quota was 42,000 soldiers. Draft notices went out to 39,000 men in Wisconsin between the ages of 18 and 40, but less than 7,000 reported for duty as ordered. Salomon engaged in discussions with Edward Stanton and Lincoln concerning his quota and suggested that the Germans in Wisconsin needed something more than the threat of withheld citizenship and/or deportation. He proposed that the Germans in Wisconsin might be more likely to enlist were something meaningful offered them for which to fight, such as, for instance, the emancipation of southern slaves and a war of liberation. It proved to be far more successful as a means of meeting recruitment goals in Wisconsin.
As I told my US and the World Wars class, "You know what you call someone who joined the NAZI Party not because they hated Jews, but because they wanted to make their friends happy, or for career advancement, or because their friends did? You call them NAZIS. No one f'ing cares WHY they did it." If you fight for an evil cause, you get painted by the same brush as the true believers. Saying you didn't REALLY mean it doesn't remove the stain.
I know. Subtle as a ton of bricks. But sometimes a little moral clarity is needed.
Kevin, I think your post expresses what bothers me about honoring soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Whether or not an individual owned slaves is irrelevant. If he served in any of the Confederate national forces or in state units, he fought to protect slavery. There is no way to get away from that fact.
That said I fully understand that all soldiers on both sides were individuals. There individual reasons for fighting were as varied as they were. We can’t lose sight of that fact as we struggle with understanding this component of our history. And I think we expend more energy analyzing this aspect of the Civil War because it was a Civil War.
I, for one, appreciate your bringing this back into the discussion, may be it never really left. I think understanding why these soldiers did what they did is one of the keys to our society finally coming to grips with our Civil War
Thanks for this, Michael. I think we have a responsibility to understand the ways in which our civil war consumed and shaped the lives of millions of Americans who fought through it and the countless others who were impacted in one way or another.
This essay contains so much thought that I read it twice.
Minor but not inconsequential stuff:
I was glad to see the essay acknowledge complexities, different from other wars, when it comes to "Placing the Question of 'Why They Fought?' in Perspective." It stipulates that "[c]itizen soldiers on both sides, who retained a deep independent streak ... made their voices heard in various ways through volunteering, reenlisting, and deserting the ranks."
"[I]n various ways."
Ira Berlin's _The Long Emancipation_ (p. 162) has a passage that incorporates recognition of the essay's observation that "by the middle of the war many [Union soldiers] had come to acknowledge that destroying [slavery] would bring the war to a speedier close," but that also tells the cause of yet another way in which they made their voices heard:
"Steadily, as opportunities arose, slaves risked all for freedom. By abandoning their owners, crossing into Union lines, and offering their labor and their lives to the federal cause, slaves forced federal soldiers at the lowest level to recognize their importance to the Union cause. That understanding traveled quickly up the chain of command, to the officers, to their civilian commanders, to elected officials in Congress, and to the presidential palace. In time, it became evident even to the most obtuse federal commanders that every slave who crossed into Union lines was a double gain: one subtracted from the Confederacy and one added to the Union. The slaves' resolute determination to secure their liberty converted many white Northern Americans--soldiers and civilians alike--to the view that the security of the Union depended upon the destruction of slavery. Eventually, this belief tipped in favor of freedom, even among Yankees who displayed little interest in the question of slavery and had no affection for black people."
Thanks for the positive feedback. This is is the self-emancipation interpretation in a nutshell and it's important to acknowledge when thinking about the various factors that led to emancipation and ultimately the end of slavery. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of African Americans remained enslaved in 1865. It took the military defeat of the Confederacy to seal the deal.
Yes, as I acknowledged before, in my business of advocating and monitoring the evolution of decent retrospective esteem for self-emancipation's hundreds of thousands, it's crucial to stipulate continually that legal emancipation's fundamental precondition was Union victory. (I also need to note regularly that I'm only an activist public-history advocate, not a historian.)
But I've spent two activist decades trying to grasp how the country could allow Virginia to so irresponsibly under-respect the newly retired Army post Fort Monroe at Point Comfort. That's not only where British North American slavery began in 1619, it's where legal emancipation's Civil War political evolution began a few weeks after Fort Sumter--thanks in the very first place to self-emancipators.
It's also important, in my view, to note that legal emancipation for multitudes isn't the same as what I've come to believe matters differently, and with grossly insufficient retrospective esteem: multitudes of individual self-emancipations.
Those people were among the most American of all Americans, yet their place in national memory still involves an insufficiently examined and unjust assumption of passive fecklessness. For that I blame continuation of the same systemic racism that I think explained the general absence of slavery and emancipation as Civil War centennial topics when I was a kid in the 1960s.
I'm not advocating subtracting esteem for President Lincoln and Congress, and I'm certainly not trying to overlook it for the Union's fighting forces. Instead, I'm calling for decent recognition of enterprising, freedom-striving self-emancipators.
These are all important points. I certainly didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I think it bears stating that we are largely in agreement. Thanks again, Steven.
Have you read Anne Marshall's "Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State"? She talks about the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on support for the Union in Kentucky as many hoped to both preserve the Union AND preserve slavery.
I also hate the "my great-great Grandpa didn't own slaves, so he didn't fight for slavery" BS. I am pretty sure that if you asked those enslaved at the time, they would not appreciate the distinction.
"I am pretty sure that if you asked those enslaved at the time, they would not appreciate the distinction." Thanks. That calls to mind a related moronic failure to distinguish: "Slavery was widely accepted in those days." You hear that from people who are simply oblivious to the 4 million enslaved Americans, not stopping even to think of them at all.
My Mom's family came from Kentucky and Tennessee and supposedly (!) John Hunt Morgan was a "beau" of my great-great grandmother, and once some "Yankee soldiers" came to their plantation house (Clay Hill Farm in Taylor County FWIW) looking for him. When the family refused to say anything the soldiers tried to scare them by pinning the young woman to the wall with their bayonets, sticking them through her dress sleeves.
When I was a kid in the 1970s a cousin still owned the home and the bayonet hole was carefully preserved behind a glass frame. Alas, it's gone now. (The hole, not the house)
Of course, the story was passed down by my maternal grandmother, who also claimed we were related to Lee (we're not), and bragged about how many slaves her family owned, "100!". I checked the 1860 census, and (Thank God) while the family enslaved people, it was far less than 100. Now that I'm (mostly) retired, I hope to spend some time doing some research to try to find at least some of the names of those enslaved.
Thank you for the piece. It reminds me of a book that I’ve just just finished called Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, which explores what motivated “ordinary” Germans not in the regular army to support the violence against Jews in the Second World War: going along, peer pressure, fear, true believers? There’s no clear cut answer, just as there isn’t one for the motivations of soldiers in either side of the U.S. Civil War. In some ways I can emphasise with these German policeman, and yet, they supported the side of the Nazis and therefore … It’s these complications that make history and people so interesting.
Hi Amanda,
It's a controversial book, but I think you are absolutely right that Browning's book opens up all kinds of questions regarding soldier motivation. Thanks.
Many states recruited regiments shortly after the South seceded in 1861, but assumed the war would be quick and decisive and could be managed with 90 day enlistments. Many states learned fairly quickly that 90 days was not enough time to raise a regiment, get it into a training camp and through a basic training and into the field within 90 days. Training camps could often only accommodate one regiment at a time and some states had less than a handful of training camps. A regiment consisted of roughly a thousand men divided into companies of 100. Often companies were raised entirely from half a dozen townships each in one or possibly two or three counties. Many of the companies were recruited by one or several local politicians who hoped to add the title of colonel or major or captain or lieutenant to a mostly political resume. The 27th Wisconsin, for instance, started recruiting midway through 1861, and didn't have the numbers to fill eight or ten companies and to negotiate which ten companies would comprise a numerable regiment until midway into 1862 and didn't secure a slot in a training camp until early 1863. They were commissioned and put in service just in time for the last three months of the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. Many of the men had signed up to serve six months or even a year prior to when their ideas of military service became actual. After Shiloh conscription became a means to considerably expedite the process of fielding an army. Married men with families who were necessary to the functioning of family farms at home were naturally the least inclined to abandon their responsibilities in favor of war fever. Settlers on the prairies of the upper midwest had a tendency to interpret the news that the country was at war as notice of an impending attack by hostile Indians who had been displaced from their native lands by a previous generation of plains settlers. War was conceivable for them in terms of the Blackhawk War. A civil war based on an institution defined by race was generally far removed from the lived experience of European immigrant farmers in the northern states who had crossed an ocean for the opportunity and the privilege to live on land they could say they owned. What they knew of war derived from their sense of fealty to aristocrats engaged in disputes over land with other aristocrats. Many of them came to America to escape the adverse effects of humoring disputatious aristocrats. The 9th Wisconsin was all German and organized by Germans who had fought as 90 day recruits alongside Franz Sigel in Missouri in 1861 in one of the first battles after Fort Sumter. The 9th went into service in early 1862 patrolling southwestern Missouri, southeastern Kansas, northwestern Arkansas and Fort Gibson on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the northeastern corner of the Indian Territory that was not yet Oklahoma. Colonel Wier was relieved of command of the 9th Wisconsin only a few months after the unit entered service as he was deemed too drunk to serve by his second in command, Colonel Frederick Salomon, the younger brother of Wisconsin's first German lieutenant Governor. Colonel Wier charged Salomon with insubordination and mutiny, but was discharged as unfit for service and Salomon was promoted to Brigadier General. He appointed his younger brother, Charles Salomon, to Colonel and placed him in command of the 9th Wisconsin where he remained for the duration of the war. This more or less coincided in time with the Battle of Shiloh when Governor Louis Harvey of Wisconsin went to Tennessee to review what was left of the Wisconsin regiments there. After visiting his troops Governor Harvey returned to the boat on which he'd arrived, but stumbled on the boarding plank, fell into the Tennessee River and drowned. His Lieutenant Governor, Edward Salomon, promptly became Acting Governor of Wisconsin for the remaining two years of Harvey's term as governor. Conscription became the order of the day while Salomon governed Wisconsin. A Prussian army officer before he came to Wisconsin, Salomon considered the draft ordered by the federal government in 1862, ill-advised, but implemented it as requested. Wisconsin's quota was 42,000 soldiers. Draft notices went out to 39,000 men in Wisconsin between the ages of 18 and 40, but less than 7,000 reported for duty as ordered. Salomon engaged in discussions with Edward Stanton and Lincoln concerning his quota and suggested that the Germans in Wisconsin needed something more than the threat of withheld citizenship and/or deportation. He proposed that the Germans in Wisconsin might be more likely to enlist were something meaningful offered them for which to fight, such as, for instance, the emancipation of southern slaves and a war of liberation. It proved to be far more successful as a means of meeting recruitment goals in Wisconsin.
As I told my US and the World Wars class, "You know what you call someone who joined the NAZI Party not because they hated Jews, but because they wanted to make their friends happy, or for career advancement, or because their friends did? You call them NAZIS. No one f'ing cares WHY they did it." If you fight for an evil cause, you get painted by the same brush as the true believers. Saying you didn't REALLY mean it doesn't remove the stain.
I know. Subtle as a ton of bricks. But sometimes a little moral clarity is needed.
Kevin, I think your post expresses what bothers me about honoring soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Whether or not an individual owned slaves is irrelevant. If he served in any of the Confederate national forces or in state units, he fought to protect slavery. There is no way to get away from that fact.
That said I fully understand that all soldiers on both sides were individuals. There individual reasons for fighting were as varied as they were. We can’t lose sight of that fact as we struggle with understanding this component of our history. And I think we expend more energy analyzing this aspect of the Civil War because it was a Civil War.
I, for one, appreciate your bringing this back into the discussion, may be it never really left. I think understanding why these soldiers did what they did is one of the keys to our society finally coming to grips with our Civil War
Thanks for this, Michael. I think we have a responsibility to understand the ways in which our civil war consumed and shaped the lives of millions of Americans who fought through it and the countless others who were impacted in one way or another.
This essay contains so much thought that I read it twice.
Minor but not inconsequential stuff:
I was glad to see the essay acknowledge complexities, different from other wars, when it comes to "Placing the Question of 'Why They Fought?' in Perspective." It stipulates that "[c]itizen soldiers on both sides, who retained a deep independent streak ... made their voices heard in various ways through volunteering, reenlisting, and deserting the ranks."
"[I]n various ways."
Ira Berlin's _The Long Emancipation_ (p. 162) has a passage that incorporates recognition of the essay's observation that "by the middle of the war many [Union soldiers] had come to acknowledge that destroying [slavery] would bring the war to a speedier close," but that also tells the cause of yet another way in which they made their voices heard:
"Steadily, as opportunities arose, slaves risked all for freedom. By abandoning their owners, crossing into Union lines, and offering their labor and their lives to the federal cause, slaves forced federal soldiers at the lowest level to recognize their importance to the Union cause. That understanding traveled quickly up the chain of command, to the officers, to their civilian commanders, to elected officials in Congress, and to the presidential palace. In time, it became evident even to the most obtuse federal commanders that every slave who crossed into Union lines was a double gain: one subtracted from the Confederacy and one added to the Union. The slaves' resolute determination to secure their liberty converted many white Northern Americans--soldiers and civilians alike--to the view that the security of the Union depended upon the destruction of slavery. Eventually, this belief tipped in favor of freedom, even among Yankees who displayed little interest in the question of slavery and had no affection for black people."
Thanks for the positive feedback. This is is the self-emancipation interpretation in a nutshell and it's important to acknowledge when thinking about the various factors that led to emancipation and ultimately the end of slavery. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of African Americans remained enslaved in 1865. It took the military defeat of the Confederacy to seal the deal.
Yes, as I acknowledged before, in my business of advocating and monitoring the evolution of decent retrospective esteem for self-emancipation's hundreds of thousands, it's crucial to stipulate continually that legal emancipation's fundamental precondition was Union victory. (I also need to note regularly that I'm only an activist public-history advocate, not a historian.)
But I've spent two activist decades trying to grasp how the country could allow Virginia to so irresponsibly under-respect the newly retired Army post Fort Monroe at Point Comfort. That's not only where British North American slavery began in 1619, it's where legal emancipation's Civil War political evolution began a few weeks after Fort Sumter--thanks in the very first place to self-emancipators.
It's also important, in my view, to note that legal emancipation for multitudes isn't the same as what I've come to believe matters differently, and with grossly insufficient retrospective esteem: multitudes of individual self-emancipations.
Those people were among the most American of all Americans, yet their place in national memory still involves an insufficiently examined and unjust assumption of passive fecklessness. For that I blame continuation of the same systemic racism that I think explained the general absence of slavery and emancipation as Civil War centennial topics when I was a kid in the 1960s.
I'm not advocating subtracting esteem for President Lincoln and Congress, and I'm certainly not trying to overlook it for the Union's fighting forces. Instead, I'm calling for decent recognition of enterprising, freedom-striving self-emancipators.
These are all important points. I certainly didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I think it bears stating that we are largely in agreement. Thanks again, Steven.
Have you read Anne Marshall's "Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State"? She talks about the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on support for the Union in Kentucky as many hoped to both preserve the Union AND preserve slavery.
I also hate the "my great-great Grandpa didn't own slaves, so he didn't fight for slavery" BS. I am pretty sure that if you asked those enslaved at the time, they would not appreciate the distinction.
"I am pretty sure that if you asked those enslaved at the time, they would not appreciate the distinction." Thanks. That calls to mind a related moronic failure to distinguish: "Slavery was widely accepted in those days." You hear that from people who are simply oblivious to the 4 million enslaved Americans, not stopping even to think of them at all.
I have indeed. It's an excellent book. Thanks for sharing, Mark.
My Mom's family came from Kentucky and Tennessee and supposedly (!) John Hunt Morgan was a "beau" of my great-great grandmother, and once some "Yankee soldiers" came to their plantation house (Clay Hill Farm in Taylor County FWIW) looking for him. When the family refused to say anything the soldiers tried to scare them by pinning the young woman to the wall with their bayonets, sticking them through her dress sleeves.
When I was a kid in the 1970s a cousin still owned the home and the bayonet hole was carefully preserved behind a glass frame. Alas, it's gone now. (The hole, not the house)
Of course, the story was passed down by my maternal grandmother, who also claimed we were related to Lee (we're not), and bragged about how many slaves her family owned, "100!". I checked the 1860 census, and (Thank God) while the family enslaved people, it was far less than 100. Now that I'm (mostly) retired, I hope to spend some time doing some research to try to find at least some of the names of those enslaved.