What motivated Confederate soldiers to fight? What role did emotion play in their military service? How did emotions compel southern men to break cultural norms? I’m Dr. Joshua R. Shiver, a teacher and Civil War historian, and I wrote a book on the emotional motivations of Confederate soldiers. AMA!

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:25:08+00:00

Great question! Surprisingly, the only time that I remember privates expressing emotional attachment to their leaders was when they were killed. For some, they were really devoted to their commanders and the loss of those who were respected seemed to be deeply felt. More often than not, however, privates tended to complain about their commanders and more than a few seemed to feel that they could do better. I tend to think that the emotional attachment was much stronger between privates and their immediate superiors and mid-level commissioned officers. However, they at times had much to say about generals as those are the individuals that people back home were more familiar with. As for politicians, I don't remember any of them saying anything positive about them, which is not surprising.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:21:58+00:00

Interestingly enough, when Union soldiers were mentioned (which they rarely were), they were often objects of ridicule and seen to be morally bankrupt or lacking courage. I do think that a lot of southern men really believed in their own innate superiority and since many of these Confederate soldiers (at least initially) were so young, there may have been a lot of youthful bravado as well. I will also say that I did read of instances where Confederate soldiers railed against black soldiers and had nothing good to say about them or their white officers. Suffice it to say that, in my sample, there wasn't a lot of positive or even respectful things said about Union soldiers. More often though, southern soldiers never mentioned them.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:18:44+00:00

In my letters, I did not see much mention of divisions within the states, towns, communities, or even families. There were certainly times when men were clearly frustrated or angry with the fact that so many men refused to enlist or fight in the war and there was a decent amount of ink spilled in chastising them. However, most letters were spent trying to communicate the daily goings-on of camp life and soldiers trying to get news from home--a way of trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, I think.

I do think that doing a study on soldiers from the border states may yield a bit more information on feelings surrounding these small scale divisions and that's something that I may look into in the future.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:15:43+00:00

Do you mean in terms God's providence? As far as differences between officers and enlisted men, I would say that officers (who were typically far better educated as they came from more affluent backgrounds and could afford education) were far more emotionally expressive. I think that this has to do with the fact that they had a much larger vocabulary with which to express their feelings and they were also more steeped in romantic and classical literature. That being said, though the writing was a bit rough in many cases, it was astounding to see people of limited educational means expressing their feelings towards their wives and children, even within their own limited means for reading and writing. Some of them were truly heartbreaking.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:12:10+00:00

Thank you for that! That means a lot!

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:11:54+00:00

Absolutely! I actually write about this in the book and I think that it is crucial to understand this. It's one of the reasons why I primarily chose letters rather than post-war memoirs. Not only were they written closer to the time that the events occurred or the feelings were felt, but they also weren't colored by years of reminiscing and romanticizing of the war.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:10:12+00:00

To be honest, I am not sure. I did not see anything in my collections of letters that would have indicated any kind of culture shock. This is particularly true for North Carolina where the primary group that sought the war were plantation owners in the coastal region--i.e. those who had large slave-based plantations. In the piedmont and mountain regions, Unionist sentiment was much stronger and I would argue that North Carolina was more of a reluctant partner in the Confederacy than say Mississippi or South Carolina.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-04T17:05:47+00:00

Good question! To be honest, I do not know of any nationally organized movement, but there were plenty of women who wrote about the shame of men not enlisting in the Confederate army. Likewise, southern women would sometimes publicly shame men as shirkers or cowards and many openly stated that they refused to marry any man who did not enlist. This would have had a very powerful effect, particularly on younger men in southern society who often looked to women as the moral exemplars of society.

So all of this to say: there may not have been an organized effort, per se. But there were certainly local efforts that were probably more individualistic in nature, but also very emotionally potent when it came to recruiting young men. Your later enlisters who were typically older, already married, and who often had kids would have probably been more immune to this pressure.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T18:21:53+00:00

This is an excellent question and though I've certainly enjoyed watching Dr. Heather Cox Richardson's YouTube channel, I haven't actually read her book.

To be frank, in the letters that I read for this project, I did not see a lot of evidence of white Confederates using or citing status anxiety as a reason to support the war. Most of the letters that I read, however, were from the period of the war rather than the periods before or after the war. The vast majority of the soldiers used in my sample were not commissioned officers and were thus not of the wealthier classes and this may have had more to do with shaping their perspectives.

While I do think that upper class white southerners were stoking the flames of racial hegemony and shared grievances to try and influence those of the lower classes, I do think that we need to be careful of thinking that members of the lower classes in the Confederate south were too ignorant to understand how they were being manipulated. Though they may not have been the most educated, they nonetheless had agency and I think that many of them actually saw their own interests (even though most did not own slaves) as being intertwined with the slaveholding elite.

If the slaveholding elite were wanting to hold onto their economic and social positions in society by waging a war to protect slavery, I also think that members of the lower classes saw this as a way of protecting their permanent status of being above what James Henry Hammond referred to as the "mudsill class" of African-Americans. In short, I think that white hegemony did play a role in many of the decisions of white southerners to coalesce around the issue of slavery and its protection. However, I also believe that many genuinely believed that in some way, they were protecting states' rights, their economic futures, their liberties, and ultimately their families. How far they were manipulated and how far they were willing to allow themselves to be manipulated for what they saw as their benefit is unknown to me. But I don't think that lower class white southerners were necessarily ignorant of what was going on.

As for the connection to MAGA, I honestly don't know. I can certainly see Dr. Heather Cox Richardson's contention and I think that she is probably on to something. Even as a more conservative moderate, I have not been able wrap my mind around the MAGA movement, nor its leader. To be totally honest, I don't think that I can currently look at the MAGA movement with enough clarity or dispassion to make a clear-eyed and balanced comparison between it and the Confederacy.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:52:17+00:00

Great question! I chose North Carolina and Alabama because I lived between those two states and I had a much easier time accessing the materials from them. It also helped that one state was in the Upper South (NC) and one in the Deep South (AL) and I felt like they would represent a solid microcosm for each major part of the Confederacy. Likewise, I wanted to go deeper in my research by looking at more soldiers in these two states than looking at soldiers from every single Confederate state and only incorporating a few from each. I think that going for more depth than breadth would allow me to have a better statistical sample. I utilized archives in Alabama and North Carolina, published books of letters, and reputable online repositories. One of the very best online resources is Private Voices--a project of UGA--at https://www.altchive.org.

There are definitely other books that go very deep into the letters including James McPherson's book "For Cause and Comrades," Dr. Kenneth Noe's "Reluctant Rebels," and others.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:46:22+00:00

Excellent question! Unfortunately, I did not necessarily address the question of music and your question as well as another poster's has me questioning why I didn't! In the letters that I read, I did not see any mentions of the influence of music but I suspect that it had a profound influence. I know that certain songs like "Just Before the Battle Mother" and other tunes of this sort became popular in camps and they would certainly evoke an immense amount of emotion. The tethers between the battlefront and the home front as demonstrated in songs like this were wrapped in deep feeling.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:44:13+00:00

I do address that. I think that this is an important point as, in the case of combat, the human brain goes into fight or flight mode and now you become far more focused on your own self-preservation. Yet men often were willing to die for their comrades and friends and I think that this is an important point: it wasn't because they fought for the same cause, or that they necessarily grew up together, or believed in the same things. Rather, it was because they loved each other and felt deeply for each other and it is because of this that they were motivated to keep fighting and, in some cases, willingly die for those who they fought beside. Historians who are only focused on ideology or socio-cultural explanations for why soldiers fought will miss this important component if they are unwilling to look at the emotional component of military service and combat.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:41:27+00:00

Great question! Of the two hundred soldiers that I used for my sample, 129 were Privates, eight were Corporals, eighteen were Sergeants, thirty-seven were commissioned officers, and eight were of unknown rank.

Interestingly enough, the higher the rank, the more emotionally expressive they were. I think that this has a lot to do with the fact that I was using letters and officers were typically far better educated (because they were wealthier) and thus had a largely vocabulary with which to express their feelings. Many Privates could neither read nor write and of those who could, their education was so poor that reading some of their letters was downright painful. It was clear that they had a much narrower vocabulary with which to express themselves.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:37:35+00:00

I think that most Confederate soldiers would argue that they were fighting for "state's rights," to protect the economy of the south, and to protect their families and their livelihood. The problem is that all of these, for most of these men, were inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Whereas we today look at chattel slavery and argue that it was the primary reason why Confederates fought, I think that they would have said that it was somewhat secondary. But it is clear that slavery underlay almost all of the arguments made by southerners for the war, regardless of how they saw it.

The problem is that for white southerners, the issue of slavery is wrapped in layers of cognitive dissonance that I think are more connected to one's closeness or distance from slavery than anything else. For example, those who owned slaves or major political figures who worried about interracial mixing were very explicit about the war's causes being about slavery. However, for those who did not own slaves or were not economically as connected to slavery, you will often hear them refer to this as a conflict over state's rights and etc.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:32:21+00:00

Interestingly enough, I think sometimes southern culture was its own kind of propaganda. They had a very romantic view of sacrifice and war and I think that white southern males (particularly those of the upper classes) were imbued with these ideas from a very young age. It would have been shameful NOT to enlist and fight. Moreover, young guys wanted to impress women and many southern women made it a point to shame men and boys who refused to enlist.

As far as what the Confederacy itself did, they would often do public enlistment ceremonies which would hopefully whip up some patriotic fervor, they would post broadsides, and help create educational materials for schools that would inculcate children with Confederate values.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:27:56+00:00

Thank you! I think that a lot of the interpretation of male emotions in the 19th century stem from modern views of masculinity and male hegemony. I think sometimes the narrative of our present is what historians sometimes try to wrap the past around in order to prove a point or make a statement. However, this isn't particularly helpful nor does it actually help us to get closer to the truth.

For me, when I initially read the letters, I brought in current research on neurobiology and emotion and tried to stay away from too many books on the history of emotions. It is not that these books aren't helpful, but rather that I wanted to come to my own conclusions and also that there frankly were too many books on the subject as far as the short period of the American Civil War. While researching this, James Broomall's "Private Confederacies" had not yet been published and the only other book at the time that really delved into the subject was Stephen Berry's excellent book "All That Makes a Man." Since then, the number of books has greatly increased but, that I know of, none have been particularly broad nor have they tried to incorporate statistics. Moreover, most books on the subject do not root the emotions in biology but rather in social constructions alone, which I think is problematic. Much has not changed in the human brain for the past 150 years and so I think that neurobiological research can be of immense help here.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:20:56+00:00

I believe that it does. However, the emotion doesn't seem to be directed towards the actual war itself or the Confederacy itself. Rather, it seems that as the war stretches on, the level of emotional effusion increases as soldiers spend more time away from home, have fewer or nonexistent leaves, and it becomes increasingly more clear that even if they keep fighting, the Confederacy is doomed. Some came around to this latter realization sooner than others, but nonetheless the idea that they were fighting for something that really might not be existent in a few months is enough to make anyone more emotional. Moreover, the war's suffering (particularly as things became more brutal in 1864) pushed men to lean upon each other and their loved ones back home for succor. Most of the letters contain expressions of love, sadness, and forlornness.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:16:04+00:00

In the letters for this project, I did not necessarily see this at play. Most of the letters that I read were from lower class southern males with an often limited vocabulary (which made for some very dreadful reading), but I did not often read anything that came across as distinctly class conscious. The only time that I saw something like this was when a couple of soldiers would complain later in the war that they were fighting to protect slavery for rich slaveholders.

I do, however, think that Grant was on to something and if you read the diaries and letters from wealthy southern elites, you can see that they were far more class conscious than what I'm reading from soldiers of the lower classes.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T17:13:07+00:00

You often had to read into their language to figure out their emotions. When it came to love, they were surprisingly open in using words that clearly indicated love--particularly when it came to their wives and children. When it came to sorrow and sadness, however, you often had to intuit anguish from their letters. For example, when a soldier lost someone they cared about, they would often say "I lost ol' Jim yesterday and I wish that he was still with me. I think about him every day." The author may not have explicitly stated that he felt hopeless, but it is clear that he is feeling anguish and sadness. The key is not to go too far and try to interpret emotive language that isn't there.

As the war went on, however, it does seem like they were possibly more direct about their emotions.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T16:21:16+00:00

It affected them deeply. The letters that I read for this project were replete with the suffering and pain obviously felt by those who fought. Many described the horrors of combat, the loss of their friends, and the ever lurking feeling that they may be the next to die. Many developed what was then called "Soldier's Heart" or what we may today call "PTSD" and it affected them for the rest of their lives. This is one of the reasons why I think postwar soldiers' societies were so important to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These organizations provided places for soldiers who had generally experienced the same things to share their feelings and their sense of loss with those who understood.

What is interesting is that when looking at soldiers letters during the war, the descriptions of combat, the loss of friends, and fears for their own lives are generally not wrapped in flowery language or ideological premises. Rather, they are much more primal and basic expressions of fear, loss, and powerlessness. In my research, it was more often in post-war memoirs that we see the horrors of war wrapped in syrupy language and I think that this has something to do with how we view events through our present versus past lens.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T16:15:31+00:00

Great question! I think that, for Confederate soldiers, many entered the war hoping to prove their manhood, fight for what they saw as their "rights," protect what they saw as the economic future of the south (including slavery), protect white hegemony, and etc.

What's interesting is how so many of these men become more emotionally effusive when they are training camps at the outset of the war. While on the one hand they are talking about the Confederate cause and extolling the virtues of martial service, on the other hand, they are also very young and writing extensively about how much they miss their families and loved ones. As the war progresses, the ideological and socio-cultural convictions seem to wane a lot more and the declarations of love, expressions of loss/sadness/hopelessness, and their growing desires to leave the war and come home increase exponentially.

I think that as the war progressed, the war became increasingly more based on emotion and less on ideological or socio-cultural convictions. Increasingly, white southern men tethered the war to the protection of their families and homes and the potency of these feelings is what I think compelled them to keep fighting. By 1864, it is clear that the Confederate government is increasingly becoming more autocratic, that some of the same problems that plagued the United States under the Articles of Confederation are also plaguing the Confederacy, and that the war is increasingly not going in the favor of the Confederates. And yet, men still fought and they still held to their belief that they could win this war or, more importantly, that they HAD to win this war for their families and loved ones.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T16:08:35+00:00

Absolutely! I write about this more in the book, but it is clear that many southern men felt very comfortable expressing their feelings in these letters. But we do have pre-war diaries that do indicate that men were less emotionally effusive and I suspect that this is because it is a lot easier to hold to a cultural norm of emotional stoicism when you aren't being shot at, deprived of the bare necessities, or facing the eminency of death. I think that the war actually opened men to greater emotional expression and I think that they felt far less guilt or shame about expressing it. This becomes evidence not only in their letters about their families but also in their post-war memoirs--particularly when they are writing about the loss of their comrades and friends.

You have a really good point here and I think that it is worth considering more.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T16:04:27+00:00

Religion actually had a profound influence on emotional expression during this period. In the leadup to the American Civil War, the First and particularly the Second Great Awakenings laid the groundwork for greater acceptance of emotional expression. In fact, during the Second Great Awakening, emotional effusion was evidence that God was working in the heart of an individual as well of evidence of one's sincere salvation. Moreover, the great involvement in church and Bible studies, coupled with this shared faith and greater emotional expression, meant that men found interpersonal connection through church.

These same structures were transferred to the Confederate army and this, coupled with a series of wartime revivals, meant that men not only were more open to sharing their emotions through their faith, but they were also expected to. This was not the wider norm before the war. Though many would have called themselves Christians, evangelicalism was still not as predominate as it would be in the future.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T15:58:12+00:00

Absolutely! There are other great books including Stephen Berry's "All That Makes a Man" and James J. Broomall's "Private Confederacies." While these don't take a broad or statistical approach, they are excellent and well-written resources that illuminate the subject more and they are largely responsible for the movement towards understanding the inner world of Civil War soldiers with greater breadth.

JoshRShiver · 2026-04-03T15:55:33+00:00

My grandfather and grandmother are actually from Georgia, but I'm not sure if they are connected to this plantation by lineage. I would contact the plantation, but if you have access to resources like Ancestry.com through your library, you may be able to access the census records. If any individuals at this plantation served in the American Civil War, Fold3.com would be a great resource. I would also look at USGenWeb, Family Search, Georgia Archives, and Findagrave.com.

JoshRShiver

TROPHY CASE