Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
In Battle Cry Of Freedom,  James M. McPherson presented a fascinating, concise  general history of the defining American conflict.  With What They Fought For, he  focuses his considerable talents on what motivated  the individual soldier to fight. In an exceptional  and highly original Civil War analysis, McPherson  draws on the letters and diaries of nearly one  thousand Union and Confederate soldiers, giving voice  to the very men who risked their lives in the  conflict. His conclusion that most of them felt a keen  sense of patriotic and ideological commitment  counters the prevailing belief that Civil War soldiers  had little or no idea of what they were lighting  for. In their letters home and their diaries --  neither of which were subject to censorship -- these  men were able to comment, in writing, on a wide  variety of issues connected with their war  experience. Their insights show how deeply felt and  strongly held their convictions were and reveal far more  careful thought on the ideological issues of the  war than has previously been thought to be true.  Living only eighty years after the signing of the  Declaration of Independence, Civil War soldiers felt  the legacy and responsibility entrusted to them by  the Founding Fathers to to preserve fragile  democracy -- be it through secession or union -- as  something worth dying for. In What They  Fought For, McPherson takes individual voices  and places them in the great and terrible choir of  a country divided against itself. The result is  both an impressive scholarly tour de force and a  lively, highly accessible account of the sentiments  of both Northern and Southern soldiers during the  national trauma of the Civil War.

Rating : - A skinny book with a provocative thesis
James McPherson is an eminent historian, who has written some classics, such as "Battle Cry of Freedom." This is a slender volume (part of a larger research project and the basis for a lecture) that is based on an interesting thesis: that soldiers, both north and south, fought to a considerable extent for ideology, and not solely as brothers in arms with other troops, for ideals of manhood, for the notions of honor and duty, and so on..

He used as his "data base" hundreds of letters and diaries written by soldiers, from both the Union and Confederate ranks.

In his Introduction, he observes that there were a range of motivations among soldiers, but that one emerged that surprised him--(pages 1-2) "This theme [the role of ideology] has emerged to greater importance r=than I expected when I began the project." He notes this thesis in juxtaposition to one common perspective, namely, that many soldiers had little or no idea what they were fighting for.

Among the "causes" that soldiers said they were fighting for in their writings: liberty and independence (both Yankees and Rebs), to preserve what the Founding Fathers stated in 1776 (the Declaration of Independence) and what they fought for in the Revolution, and slavery (many Confederate troops in favor of the peculiar institution and many Union troops opposed to it--far more, apparently, than one might have guessed).

All in all, given its brevity, a good little book. Those who attended this lecture series surely got their monies' worth! For an interesting effort to understand what the soliders, blue and gray fought for, this is a nice volume.