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The Civil War was the most deadly and devastating war in American history. For four long and grueling years, men from both the Union and Confederate armies experienced the brutality of combat and suffered the hardships of vigorous campaigning. Under these bitter circumstances millions of ordinary men, most of them volunteers, encountered indescribable affliction. Faced with death, mutilation, disease and separation from home, these men valiantly fought and continued to give up their lives throughout the war. Much of the fascination behind the legacy of the Civil War comes from this willingness of common Union and Confederate soldiers to fight a war that was so ferocious and horrible that today's Americans cannot imagine engaging in such a struggle. Many have often asked, "What prompted these men to give up their lives in this war that killed almost as many American soldiers as the rest of the wars this country has fought combined?" It is this question-Why did they fight?-that inspired one of America's preeminent Civil War historians, James M. McPherson, to examine what it was that motivated Civil War soldiers to engage in such a horribly bloody and brutal conflict. The awe of his students as they walked over the fatal route of "Pickett's Charge" at Gettysburg, the wonder of he and his cousin as they stood at the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania, and the comment of a former Vietnam military leader that he found the devotion of Civil War soldiers to their cause "mystifying," were the experiences that "planted and watered the seeds" of McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. 1 Finding that he could not give a satisfactory answer to the question of what motivated Civil War soldiers to fight, McPherson set out in this well-researched and powerfully written book to learn and examine what inspired Union and Confederate soldiers to go forward despite the high odds against coming out alive. Pouring over more than 25,000 letters and 249 personal diaries of Civil War soldiers, McPherson undertook the daunting task of articulating the reasons why three million soldiers enlisted and fought in the Union and Confederate armies. He asks himself, "How does an historian discover and analyze the thoughts and feelings of three million people?" 2 Faced with this difficulty, McPherson compiled a representative portrait of the war's soldiers, explaining

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