Why Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in Civil War Virginia (review)

Sheehan-Dean's well researched study of Virginia Confederate soldiers adds to the growing scholarship that examines the personal motivations of ordinary men who fought the Civil War. Sheehan-Dean found that states rights in and of itself could never have been the sole motive for fighting but that the language of states' rights combined with the possible loss of personal economic and political liberties provided strong motivations to propel Virginia into secession and helped commit 90% of white men in Confederate controlled areas of the state to a Confederate nation. Using a chronological and geographic approach, Sheehan-Dean shows that Confederate "Virginians developed a sophisticated and compelling set of motivations, developed out of their lived experiences, for enlisting and remaining committed to the war and to southern independence.

Like James McPherson's What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (1994), Sheehan-Dean refutes Bell Irvin Wiley's assertion in The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1998[1943]) that the majority of Confederate soldiers neither understood nor cared about the constitutional issues of the war (McPherson 2). Sheehan-Dean expands on McPherson's findings that Confederate soldiers, particularly those who enlisted prior to the draft, did so for patriotic or nationalistic reasons. In Virginia, Sheehan-Dean argues that nationalism was a motive for enlistment and continued commitment to the war because protection of the state and the Confederate nation gave white men the ability to protect their families and their slave-based economy. According to Sheehan-Dean, soldiers' motives overlapped, evolved and were redefined as the war progressed. Non-slaveholding Virginians supported the Confederate nation because it offered protection for their recently won political liberties and economic success that was grounded in a slave-based economy. By 1864 these motives were reinforced by the hard-war policy of the Union, the religious faith of soldiers who faced death or its possibility regularly, and the federal issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. For Confederate Virginia soldiers, the Union's hard-war policy made its defeat a matter of honor and laid the foundation for the animosity and hatred black Virginians would suffer during and after Reconstruction. In essence, according to Sheehan-Dean, the Civil War was sustained by Confederate soldiers' ability to adapt and transform their sense of purpose (187).

In Why Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in Civil War Virginia, Sheehan-Dean provides a tightly written and well supported argument that non-slaveholding Confederate Virginia soldiers understood why they were fighting and that those motives were personal, not ones imposed on them by the elite. I question his assertion that "very few Virginia soldiers took any satisfaction from the killing they had to perform" . . . (82) but on the whole his treatment is very balanced. His appendix gives a detailed explanation of his statistical methodology. The end matter is extensive and includes annotated endnotes and a substantial bibliography which includes almost 300 manuscript sources from twelve collections, almost forty published narratives and an impressive survey of books and articles. This work should appeal to casual readers and professional historians of the era and the state.