The moral elements of Lightner's religious jab at the North are echoed in many other accounts. In a letter to his mother, John Cochran's colourful account of what he believed the future would bring is saturated with accusations of Northern immorality. He writes “…Then will this fair land be polluted with the presence of hoards of yankees and other such like vermin…sooner would I see this fair land dreanched in the blood of contending brothers than to see such a fate.”
Indeed, religion was so entwined with morality that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two. In one such example, the Staunton Spectator explains that “The Consecrated remains of Gen. Washington have been removed from Mr. Vernon to Lexington, to prevent them from being desecrated by the hyena-like Vandals of the North.”Religion and morality allowed the Confederacy to demonize its opponents in its rhetoric, stirring up even more zeal for war.
Historian Samuel Watson refers to the strength of religion in the South and argues it was an integral part of the Southern soldier's reason to fight:
Religious belief permeated the entire matrix of Confederate combat motivation. Faith was intimately connected with the national cause at all levels and times, from enlistment to the aftermath of battle. It could hardly be otherwise, since the evangelical worldview pervaded Southern society.
Watson's account, thus, places a very high value upon religion in inciting Southern men to volunteer for service. When combined with patriotism, the value of religion to the Confederate struggle was immense, leading Ayers to declare that “[t]he secret of the Civil War was that many Americans wanted it to come, wanted to prove their patriotism and demonstrate that they held God's favor.” Zinn agrees, arguing that the “psychology of patriotism, the lure of adventure, [and] the aura of moral crusade” combined to create an atmosphere of support for war in the South. Motivated and unified by such compelling forces, Southerners supported the war with intense enthusiasm when it broke out.
So far, all of the reasons I have posited to explain Confederate popular support for the war - the politics and economics of slavery, the unsophisticated, emotional concept of defence, the magnifying power of patriotism, and the reinforcing roles of Revolutionary myth and Southern religion - have been applicable to both men and women caught up in the conflict. While men rushed to volunteer, women expressed their enthusiasm in important supporting roles, such as Mary Smiley's report of “Brownsburg ladies” making tents for the troops. Writing to her brother, Mary Smiley expresses her affection for him and asks if he could “get away” from the army, but makes sure to qualify her request by adding that he must only try if he could do it “honorably.”
In effect, she may just as well have told him to stay at war, and that she placed honour above mere affection. Hidden in these examples is a central force behind male enlistment: gender-based assumptions of masculinity and male honour were vital components of many men's motivation to fight. Together, men and women took on the separate roles expected of their gender in order to support the war, and though their duties were distinct from men's, women were nonetheless influential in the male sphere. Many women, indeed, played their part in thrusting brothers, husbands, or sons into battle. Ayers refers to many young women who “resented local boys and men who shirked their duty, whatever the cause.”
Of course, many men felt the masculine pull of honour without needing women to remind them. In an 1862 letter in the Spectator, a soldier affirms that he “would rather fill a soldier's honorable grave and sleep peacefully” than get out of the military on questionable grounds. Many contemporary witnesses linked displays of honour in the Civil War to the heroic deeds of mythic masculine figures from ages long past. Augustan Captain O. Grinnan, the Staunton Spectator reported, “fought like a Trojan” at the Battle of Falling Waters.
So effective was this type of expression that many modern observers still appeal to it. In his analysis of the Confederate as a fighting man, for example, Donald writes that “[t]he Confederate soldier was, in most important respects, not materially different from one of Xenophon's hoplites or Caesar's legionnaires.”Likened to ancient warriors that in many ways epitomized the concept of masculinity, Augustan men were burdened with the need to fulfill a timeless conception of masculinity. By volunteering in record numbers to fight the North, they took the first step in meeting this demand and taking on a distinctly masculine role.
