Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
America's Holy War
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
by James M. McPherson
Oxford University Press, 237 pp., $25.00
James M. McPherson's For Cause and Comrades aims to resolve an enduring mystery about the Civil War. Why did the early volunteers, Northern and Southern, pick up arms in the spring of 1861 as eagerly as they did? In response to the fall of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln requisitioned troops from each of the still-loyal states to suppress the rebellion. The federal government asked for thirteen regiments from Ohio, but the governor wired back that he could scarcely call for less than twenty 'without seriously repressing the ardor of the people.' On the Confederate side, a London Times reporter observed in Goldsboro, North Carolina, a crowd 'with flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for 'Jeff Davis' and 'the Southern Confederacy,' so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with 'Dixie's Land.'' Like most other Rebel volunteers, a raw recruit in Nashville predicted a short war because 'the scum of the North cannot face the chivalric spirit of the South.'
Review, 4856 words
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