PETER: We’re back with “BackStory.” We’re the American history guys. I’m Peter Onuf, otherwise known as the 18th century guy.
ED: I’m Ed Ayers, “BackStory’s” 19th century guy.
BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh, representing the 20th century. Today on the show, we’re marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s beginnings by asking what motivated people on both sides of the conflict to take up arms. Before the break, we were looking at the Union cause. Now we’re going to shift to the Confederacy.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: You know the old saw is that the Civil War was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, and that actually turns out not to be accurate.
PETER: This is Aaron Sheehan-Dean, a historian at Louisiana State University. A few years ago, he published a book called Why Confederates Fight, a book that also answered the question of who those Confederates were.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: Wealthy men and wealthy counties send much higher proportions of men than do poorer places and the Army is also different in ways that we might not imagine. We would assume that this army would be composed of younger men, of unmarried men. In fact, a majority of the soldiers in the Confederate Army are married and they have families, so they’re deeply invested in protecting their families and in preserving the society as they know it in 1860 and 1861.
BRIAN: After spending a lot of time with letters that Virginia soldiers sent home to their families, Sheehan-Dean concluded that there were three main reasons why non-slaveholders felt that they, too, had something worth fighting for. The first was political—recent democratic reforms had given white men new voting rights that they worried could be undone by the Lincoln administration. The second was economic—they realized that the strength of the Southern economy depended on slavery, and in classic American fashion, many of them aspired to join the ranks of slaveholders one day. It was aspirational. But the third—well, that one’s a lot trickier. And so I asked Sheehan-Dean to explain himself. [music—banjo] So, I’m familiar with people fighting for political rights and their economic stake in society, but here’s one that really threw me for a loop, Aaron. Maybe you can help me out. Companionate marriage— I didn’t even know what term meant.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: Yeah, now we just call it love. [laughter]
BRIAN: I don’t know what that means either, Aaron.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: It’s the job of historians to muddy the waters. The notion of a companionate marriage, of a marriage built on love, though, is actually a pretty recent thing in the middle of the 19th century. We tend to assume that emotions are the same and that families are the same because they’re such bedrock parts of our lives but, in fact, the notion of how families are constituted and how people within them relate to one another was changing in the 18th and 19th centuries and we were moving from a period in which the model of the family was as a microcosm of the state in which the father was the king and you obeyed him because it was God’s law, to a model in which husbands and wives came together because they loved one another and they respected one another and even more importantly, that parenting absorbed the same ethos—that parents should love and respect their children and children should respect their parents because they love them. And this creates, I think, a much stronger and more intimate kind of bond within these families and so as the war grinds on and particularly in parts of the upper South like Virginia and Tennessee, as the North wages a hard war which imperils their loved ones and puts greater hardships on women and children at home, soldiers talk about the necessity of protecting their families because of their love for those families, and I think we’ve tended to talk about the motivation of soldiers in terms of hate and in terms of hating the Yankee but, in fact, what I saw in these letters over and over again was that many more men spoke about love and the love of their families as the primary reason that they were fighting.
BRIAN: One of the things you stress in your book is how the motivations for fighting change as the war drags on. Could you tell me how Lincoln’s Proclamation freeing the slaves changed things?
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: Yeah. Well, it fundamentally changes things because up to that point the Union Army had been quite inconsistent in terms of its policies on slavery and in some places under some commanders had returned slave and in other places, it emancipated them and the Emancipation Proclamation then makes quite clear that if the Confederates lose, whatever society they will return to will be completely different than the society that they’d left so it means now that particularly non-slaveholding men are going to be competing with enslaved men who are now freed. They will be competing with them at all levels and the fear and paranoia about what that represented is almost impossible for us to capture today, but it I think certainly inspired most of them to fight much harder because now there was no going back. There was no finding a peace that would allow them to have the Virginia they used to know if they failed.
BRIAN: And did those fears extend beyond the political economy? In other words, were these soldiers worried about this post-apocalyptic society with slavery ending in which there was actually social mixing among the races?
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: They are. I mean, certainly the rhetoric of what would happen socially in the event of emancipation that had been used extensively by Southerners and Democrats in the years before the war then bloomed during the war and non-slaveholders as well as slaveholders imagine that black men once emancipated are going to be out to capture their wives and their daughters and there’s a long, long rhetoric of really vile kind of racialized, sexualized imagery about what black men are going to be doing to white women and that threat is a much more immediate social threat to a homefront that’s largely undefended in most parts of the upper South because the rates of enlistment were simply so high. Seventy, eighty percent of white men, eligible white men, would’ve been in the armies and serving away from their home communities so that’s really the immediate threat is what’s going to happen in the wake of emancipation and, you know, decades of hysteria and sort of fear mongering about that possibility then produce a great deal of anxiety among those soldiers who are now not at home.
BRIAN: Let me ask you about all of these causes. When we ask why did the Confederate soldier fight, you’ve now laid out a number of them. I’m just curious on the ground level, how did individuals integrate balance, deal with these competing motivations ranging from it’s my obligation to protect my wife who, by the way, wasn’t imposed on me, but I chose and I love, to states rights?
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: Yeah. Well, they struggle with them all the time and particularly when they come into tension when the collapse of slavery creates insecurity and fear that might compel them to go home and there’s a great letter from a soldier named John Jones whose wife has written to him. His wife’s name is Molly, saying you need to come home, we need protection here and he says to her, I’m going to stay in the Army. He says, this is the best place to protect you and it’s important that we strike now. He says, we need to get the Yankees now while they’re organizing. I’m afraid they might come home and get my boy. That is, what had been in the pre-war period would’ve been envisioned as a kind of a personal effort to repel, honor you. You’d use violence to protect your family becomes a corporate form during the war and a recognition that the Army is the best way to do this, but there’s this tension and they are basically arguing with and trying to convince their wives, in many cases, that this is in fact the best decision because a lot of the wives weren’t at all convinced.
BRIAN: Yeah. Now, you know I’m a 20th century guy. I think of the literature that comes out of World War II and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all this complaining about the boredom and bureaucracy. Do you come across a lot of that, too? I mean, in all of this emphasis on why they fought, do we sometimes kind of lose track of the fact that often they weren’t so keen on fighting?
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: No, they’re not keen at all. I mean, that’s in fact all the letters are are long complaints and I have to imagine, you know, they often—soldiers often complained to their wives—your last letter was three days late, why haven’t you written? And I think if I received your letters twice a week and it’s just three pages of complaints, I probably wouldn’t be eager to respond either after six months of that. [laughter] Soldiers had a great deal to complain about. I don’t begrudge them their complaints. You know, the food is both bad and scarce. Dysentery and diarrhea are rampant. Every man would’ve been infested with lice and had scabies and all sorts of sort of kind of routine physical problems that you 20th century guys don’t have to worry about, you know, we’ve got clothes and shoes and socks and a lot of these men marched barefoot up to Antietam in the fall of 1862.
BRIAN: Yeah, it’s incredible.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: And a lot of them felt like the Army was poorly run and poorly managed and poorly supplied and they complained bitterly and always and it’s not an expression of disloyalty. It’s an expression of frustration and anger over the fact that they aren’t being provisioned the way they need to be provisioned if they’re going to be able to do their jobs and they’ve signed a contract to fight for the Confederacy, the least the Confederacy can do is get them some rancid corn and mealy meat or something.
BRIAN: Yeah, and you mentioned loyalty which is so important. If I read your book correctly, that loyalty actually grows and deepens over the course of the war in spite of what we might call the complaining or that classic Civil War term, kvetching.
AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN: Yeah, and I think you’re absolutely right that it deepens which is surprising. We would anticipate and the traditional story gives us a story of sort of kind of waning morale. The morale deepens as the crisis of what failure, of what defeat looks like, looms larger for these men. They certainly wear down and they wear out in many cases and I think ultimately that’s what accounts for Confederate defeat is simply wearing out, but in the process, these men have committed themselves very very deeply to a Southern nation, to the Confederacy, but a Southern nation that lives on beyond the Confederacy. It’s the Confederate state that is destroyed by the Civil War but I think unfortunately not a very deep sense of sectional loyalty that presents enormous problems for post-war America, for reconciling these men. This is one of the classic problems of Civil War and one that Lincoln recognized, that the harder you fight and the more bitter and the longer the fight goes on, the more difficult that post-war reconciliation is going to be. [music—banjo]
ED: Thank you so much for joining us, Aaron.
BRIAN: Thanks, Brian. That was great. [music—banjo]
ED: Aaron Sheehan-Dean is an historian at Louisiana State University and author of the book Why Confederates Fought.