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12 - Motives and Morale

from Part II - Social Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Paul A. Cimbala
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

For both the United States and the Confederacy, motivation’s essence was a patriotic commitment to defend the liberty bequeathed to Americans by the nation’s founding generation. Exactly what defending liberty meant, however, depended upon sectional understandings of the critical elements of a good society and a just government. One thing was clear to Northerners: there could be no liberty outside of the protection of the old Constitution and the union it had created. Patriots living in the fledgling Confederacy, however, defended secession as a conservative necessity in the face of Northern ideological innovation that challenged their very way of life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 242 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Frank, Lisa Tenrich. The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Gallagher, Gary W. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could not Stave off Defeat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrade: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).Google Scholar
Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).Google Scholar
Phillips, Jason. Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Rubin, Anne Sarah. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolna Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Sodergren, Steven E. The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–1865 (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Woodward, Colin Edward. Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).Google Scholar

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