Themes of the American Civil War

commands when they had lost a high proportion of officers, or when a respected commander was lost in the heat of battle. In such circumstances units seldom succumbed to complete disintegration, but the loss of a key leader often contributed to a loss of nerve that detracted from combat effectiveness. This was especially the case early in the war, and is perhaps exemplified in the Confederate collapse at the battle of Mill Springs when
General Felix Zollicoffer, who had been held in great esteem by his troops,
was killed. This was repeated at the battle of Shiloh although the impact of the death of Albert Sidney Johnston did not lead to a precipitate collapse,
many of his subordinates considered his death on the field to have been the turning point in the battle.
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Greater familiarity with combat dulled the impact of such events as the war went on. Indeed, one commander believed that familiarity with battle was the key to developing competent soldiers and effective armies. Put a plank six inches wide five feet above the ground and a thousand men will walk it easily Union General George Thomas remarked in the summer of. Raise it five hundred feet and one man out of a thousand will walk it safely. It is a question of nerve we have to solve, not dexterity Thomas believed that only through becoming accustomed to violence and battle could the Union create veteran soldiers, and suggested that this had been
George McClellan’s greatest failure during his period in command of the Army of the Potomac—“McClellan’s great error was in his avoidance of fighting . . . his troops came to have a mysterious fear of the enemy.”
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This is very close to the thesis proposed by Michael CC. Adams in Our
Masters the Rebels. Noting the widespread—and greatly exaggerated—belief among Northern volunteers that the South enjoyed a peculiarly martial tradition, Adams traces Northern fear of the cavalier southerners through the Army of the Potomac’s fortunes and misfortunes against the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia. Indeed, according to Adams, not until the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant from the western theatre were the soldiers and officers of the Army of the Potomac able to overcome their inferiority complex.
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For Adams the Army of Potomac lost its nerve almost before the conflict began, and certainly in the aftermath of the first battle of Bull Run. By contrast, Gerald Linderman contends that decline was gradual, and most volunteers suffered a loss of nerve—or rather, a loss of belief in the values which had brought them into the Union and Confederate armies—later in the war. Linderman’s thesis is based upon the premise that courage was the single, determining quality at the center of the male outlook in the 1860s,
the core value of the Civil War volunteer. Courage was the highest virtue of the Victorian male, and it formed the cornerstone of a cultural philosophy which lauded duty, honor, chivalry, and masculinity. Courage had underpinned the initial motivation of Civil War volunteers, and it was just as important in combat motivation. However, it quickly became clear that
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courage was not sufficient to ensure victory, or even to attain glory.
The volunteers saw that brave men were often killed or maimed as a result of their valor while the less courageous survived. Nor was it any safeguard against ignominious death through diseases such as dysentery or measles.
By 1863 the lustre of courage had become tarnished, or, in Linderman’s phrase, embattled and the volunteers had become disillusioned. The very nature of combat did not fit, and could not be made to fit, within the framework of soldier expectations The result was that men began to go to ground at every possible opportunity, the construction of entrenchments became commonplace, and it was no longer considered cowardly to use available cover. By the spring of 1864 the Civil War was being fought in a manner that would have appalled the volunteer of 1861, and the distinction between courage and cowardice had become blurred to the point of irrelevance.
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This is certainly a provocative thesis, but Linderman has been criticized on a number of points. James McPherson, for example, while finding much to recommend Embattled Courage, found that the concepts of duty, honor,
courage, and belief in the cause for which they were fighting persisted to the end of war. Michael CC. Adams confessed that he was not convinced that courage was the one overarching quality, the cement, holding together the white male’s philosophy of individual character and also pointed to
Linderman’s failure to offer a satisfactory analysis of Victorian social attitudes. Yet perhaps the most interesting idea in Linderman’s thesis is in his exploration of how motivation and tactics—why men fight and how men fight—become interwoven, how they act upon one another to alter the nature of conflict.
That the tactical nature of the war changed significantly between and 1864 is beyond dispute the battlefield became increasingly static and dominated by entrenchments or field fortifications sniping became widespread contact between opposing armies was extended from a day or two into weeks, exemplified in the Wilderness, Petersburg, and Atlanta campaigns.
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This was, however, as much to do with manpower resources,
strategy, and increasingly competent tactical thinking on the part of commanders like Sherman and Johnston as with the disillusionment of the men under their command. In the Confederate Army of Tennessee, for instance, there was a significant tactical change between the battle of
Missionary Ridge—which was essentially siege operating in much the same way as was the casein the eighteenth century—and the opening of the
Atlanta campaign. The tactical development experienced by that army was, however, due to a change in its commander and the lessons learned by its officers and men in the battles of late 1863 rather than the fall of the concept of courage. Moreover, despite an increase in desertion (particularly on the part of the Confederate army) the vast majority of Civil War soldiers
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did not leave the army in in fact, more than half of the Union volunteers whose term of service expired in 1864 reenlisted. Clearly, these men remained highly motivated even in The motivations which drew men into the army, and which sustained them in combat, also contributed to their morale, supporting them through long periods away from home and family, through the monotony of camp life, and through up to four years of warfare. These motives were augmented by the improved discipline of the soldiers, and by the pride they came to have in their units—although, in some cases, infusions of conscripts to replace the killed and wounded severely hampered unit pride and cohesion.
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They were also aided by the darker side of discipline, strict laws against desertion,
and frequent executions to deter potential offenders. For southerners there was the added incentive of defending their homes against increasingly destructive federal invasions, while many northerners expressed an intention to seethe job through to its completion. Indeed, many would have identified with sentiments expressed by a World War I officer almost seventy years later. At no time in the war Robert Graves recalled, did any of us allow ourselves to believe that hostilities could possibly continue more than nine months or a year more, so it seemed almost worth taking care.”
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On both sides men fought on in the hope of an imminent—but honorable—return to the homes and communities they had left behind. Perhaps the final differentiating factor between the Union and Confederate soldier, the thing that prompted southerners to desert in large numbers in the early months of 1865, was the prospect of success. In his study of the final Confederate campaign in the West, Wiley Sword has concluded that Hood’s army finally gave way to fear in the battle of Nashville and its immediate aftermath.
“Yet it was not the fear of fighting he asserts, but only a fear of wasting their lives, of too long being abused in the field and sacrificed to no sensible purpose.”
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As Richard Beringer and others pointed out in explaining Why

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