Civil War Summary

McPherson regards the Civil war as a much more ideological struggle and he discusses the ideological factors that motivated men to enlist, stay enlisted, fight and risk death in battle. He argued that the powerful motivating sources for soldiers to join the army were duty, honor, and patriotism (McPherson, 5). According to a book review by George Rable, he stated that its true that duty and honor were dominant values for those soldiers in the nineteenth century, however this posed a jaded view from the twentieth-century readers.
McPherson stresses the importance of slavery as one of the principal ideological considerations as to why men fought. A major instigator of this change was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which included a provision

He believed that without a firm foundation of support in the homes from where they came from, their morale would be easily crumbled. These soldiers were highly dependent on the support they received from home because it gave them sense of appreciation when they received encouraging letters from their families.
McPherson’s informed his audience that his approaches were not truly scientific and accurate sampling data. He also clearly stated that certain groups were overrepresented or underrepresented which allowed readers to apply caution in accepting his analysis; therefore, McPherson’s argument about the ideological motivation for soldiers would likely to hold up truth. McPherson stood by his research and he definitely was closer than any other scholar on explaining the civil War soldiers’ actions because he allowed the men to speak for

McPherson’s representation with respect to age, branch of service, marital status, and geographical distribution were fairly distributed; however, his samples were skewed toward those who did the real fighting and as a result, there was a bias in the sample toward native- born soldiers from middle and upper class who enlisted in 1861-1862. The reason why these groups are overrepresented were because they did a disproportionate amount of fighting, suffered high casualty rates, and were more likely to write letters or keep diaries. Is there something wrong with this? What about those percentage of soldiers that were not represented? Was their opinion did not matter? Are we to assume that the thirty five percent of the Union army not represented in the sample did no fighting at all, or that their presence was unnecessary to the final victory? His decision on focusing a little