1998 Lincoln Prize Winner James McPherson for For Cause and Comrades:
Why Men Fought in the Civil War
Lincoln Prize Acceptance Speech
I am not often at a loss for words before an audience. But this is an unusually distinguished
audience and a very special occasion. It is thus hard to find the right words to express my gratitude for the
Lincoln Prize and my appreciation for the honor bestowed on the recipient of what has become the
foremost award in the field of nineteenth century American history. To the founders of the Lincoln Prize,
Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, to the Board of Trustees and its Chairman Gabor Boritt of the Lincoln
and Soldiers’ Institute at Gettysburg College, and to the Lincoln Prize jury, I extend my heartfelt thanks.
Many others too numerous to name have also helped me along the way to this climactic moment in
my career as an historian. But I must recognize the great contribution made by three special people: C.
Vann Woodward, my graduate school mentor, who provided a superb model and guide as teacher, scholar
and writer; Sheldon Meyer, who shepherded several of my books, including For Cause and Comrades, to
publication by Oxford University Press; and Patricia McPherson, a research assistant for this book whose
help was essential to its completion. I wrote in the acknowledgments of the book that she deserved to be
listed as co-author, and indeed she is co-editor with me of another book published in 1997, Lamson of the
Gettysburg: The Civil War Letters of Lieutenant Roswell H. Lamson, U.S. Navy. That book was also
submitted for the Lincoln Prize, and I like to think that it was the icing on the cake that helped sweeten For
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Cause and Comrades for the jury, and that Pat therefore deserves to stand up here with me to receive the
Lincoln Prize.
Two of the questions that I have been asked most often in the past ten years are: why is the Civil
War the most popular subject in American History; and how did I get interested in the Civil War? In some
ways, of course, these are related questions--I became interested in the Civil War for some of the same
reasons that millions of other people did. That war was the most profound and traumatic event
experienced by any generation of Americans. Two percent of the American population in the 1860's lost
their lives in the Civil War. If the same percentage of the population were to die in a war fought at the end
of the twentieth century, the number of American deaths would exceed five million. Such a massive loss
of life has echoed down the generations since 1865 and still affects us today.
Of even greater significance, perhaps, the Civil War did more to shape and reshape American
institutions than anything else in our history, even than the Revolution of 1776 that gave birth to the
nation. That Revolution left unresolved two questions that festered deep in the body politic for more than
half a century: could this radical experiment of republican government survive as one nation, indivisible;
and could the United States, founded on a charter of freedom, continue to endure half slave and half free?
Four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln answered both
questions, one in the affirmative, the other in the negative: the United States must have a new birth of
freedom to ensure that the nation would not perish from the earth. A decade later Mark Twain, who was to
American literature as Lincoln was to American statesmanship, measured the impact of the Civil War with
these words: it “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed
the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the
influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.” Five generations later we are still trying
to measure that influence.
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These are some of the reasons why so many people, including pretty much all of us in this room,
find the Civil War such an important and challenging historical subject. But my own path to becoming an
historian of the Civil War, especially of Civil War armies and navies, soldiers and sailors, has been
different from that of many of my friends and colleagues. Unlike some of you in this room, I did not have
a youthful fascination with the war. When I arrived in Baltimore for graduate work in history, I did not
know that the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction would become my field. Apart from a couple of
books by Bruce Catton, I had not read anything specially on the subject. I had not taken a college course
on the Civil War era because my college did not offer such a course. I had a vague and rather naive
interest in the history of the South, in part because, having been born in North Dakota and brought up in
Minnesota, the South seemed exotic and mysterious. My senior year in college was also the year that nine
black students integrated Central High School in Little Rock under the protection of the United States
Army. I was well enough acquainted with history and current events to know that the constitutional basis
for their presence at Central High School was the fourteenth Amendment, one of the most important results
of the Civil War. In retrospect, it seems clear that this awareness planted the seed of my professional
interest in the Civil War.
That seed germinated within days of my arrival at Johns Hopkins when, like other incoming
graduate students, I met with my potential advisor, Vann Woodward. My appointment had to be
postponed for a day because Vann had been called to Washington to testify before a congressional
committee about potential problems in Little Rock as a second year of school desegregation got under way.
Here was a revelation: an academic historian offering counsel on the most important domestic issue of the
time. And here also was a dramatic example of what our students ask for in history courses: relevance. If I
had not seen the connection between the Civil War and my own times before this experience, I certainly
discovered it then.
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That consciousness grew during my four years in Baltimore. The last two of these years were the
opening years of the commemoration of the Civil War centennial. But that made little impression on me at
the time and had nothing to do with my becoming a Civil War historian because these were also the years
of sit-ins and freedom rides in the South, of massive resistance to federal law by Southern political leaders,
of Martin Luther King trying to persuade President John F. Kennedy to issue a new Emancipation
Proclamation on the centennial anniversary of the original. If these parallels between the early 1960's and
the early 1860's were not enough to impress a young historian in search of a dissertation topic, my
experience as one of many students and their spouses at Hopkins, who with students at Morgan State
College, a black school in Baltimore, took part in sit-ins and picketing of segregated restaurants and
theaters in Baltimore, reinforced my feeling of historical déja vu. I remember one incident with particular
clarity. Several dozen students from Hopkins and Morgan State held a meeting in a church to plan strategy
for our picketing and sit-ins. It was customary on such occasions to sing a few songs to buck up our
resolve. I can still recall the goose pimples that broke out on my skin as we all joined hands and sang-what? Not “We Shall Overcome.” We sang that, to be sure, but that’s not what I remember so vividly. It
was the singing of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” that really brought the past and present together for me.
It may have been at that moment I decided on my dissertation topic, a study of the abolitionists during the
Civil War and Reconstruction.
The abolitionists were the civil rights activists of their day. My effort to tell their story was my
entrée into Civil War history. The dissertation became my first book; a spinoff from this research became
my second book, on the role of blacks--especially Northern blacks--in the war. And a sequel, carrying the
story of first, second and even third-generation abolitionists down to the founding of the NAACP in 1910,
became my third.
These projects had made me, by 1975, into an historian of emancipation, race relations and black
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education, but not really a Civil War historian. Then came an invitation to write a college textbook on the
Civil War and Reconstruction era. The timing was good, for I had developed a renewed interest in the War
as the focal point, the turning point, for all of the themes that had engaged my teaching and research. I
accepted the textbook invitation, and not long after that I accepted a further invitation from Vann
Woodward and Sheldon Meyer to write one of the volumes in the Oxford History of the United States.
These two projects, which took a dozen years to complete, reinforced my initial interest in the themes of
slavery, emancipation, and the civil rights and black-education dimensions of Reconstruction, and also
widened my perspective to include the political and military aspects of the War.
A frequent follow-up to the question of how I got interested in the Civil War is the question of
how I moved from the abolitionists to a focus on Lincoln, military operations, and soldiers--the principal
subjects of my writing during the past several years. Some questioners consider this a change of direction
in my interests. I don’t see it that way. It is an expansion of perspective, not a change of direction. As
Lincoln himself put it in his second inaugural address, after almost four years of war, “all else chiefly
depends [on] . . . the progress of our arms.” That “all else” included the abolition of slavery and the
Reconstruction of the Union on the basis of that new birth of freedom--the issues that engaged my interest
in the Civil War in the first place. The very core of our being as a people, the historical roots of our society
today, the issues at stake in the Civil War, including the definition of freedom, the very survival of the
United States--all rested on the shoulders of those three million weary men in blue and gray who fought it
out during four years of ferocity unmatched in the Western world between the Napoleonic Wars and World
War I. And the tread of those three million men over the battlefields of the Civil War echoed in the minds
of those weary commanders-in-chief in Washington and Richmond.
That is why my interests expanded--not shifted--from William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick
Douglass to include Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, from the Emancipation Proclamation and the
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fourteenth Amendment to include Antietam and Appomattox, from Wendell Phillips to include Johnny
Reb and Billy Yank. Most of those Rebs and Yanks were volunteers from civilian life. They came from
the world’s most democratic and politicized society. Most of them voted in the election of 1860 and in
various state and national elections during the War--not to mention voting for their company officers.
Most of them were literate and wrote uncensored letters home or kept diaries in which they tried to explain
their experiences and their motives for fighting. It was those experiences and motives that I tried to
recover in For Cause and Comrades.
After reading many thousands of their letters and more than 200 diaries, I came to the same
conclusion as that expressed by a captain in the 85th New York Volunteer Infantry in a letter to his wife
written in 1864, two months before he was killed in action: “Our soldiers are closer thinkers and reasoners
than the people at home. It is the soldiers who have educated the people to a just perception of their duties
in this contest. Every soldier knows he is fighting not only for his own liberty but even more for the liberty
of the human race for all time to come.”
This captain’s consciousness of the relationship between his actions and the future brings me full
circle back to the reason why I became interested in the Civil War: the relationship between that future,
which is my present, and the past, which was his present. That indissoluble bond between past and present
is why we study history. Without knowledge of where we have been, we cannot know who and what we
are. Of few periods of our history is that more true than of the Civil War. And of no participants in the
war is it more true than of the men who fought the war. That is why I became a Civil War historian and
why I tried to understand what made those men tick. I accept the Lincoln Prize with pride, but also with
the humility of knowing that my achievement does not even come close to matching theirs.
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