Beyond Simple Civil War Narratives: States, Soldiers, Slavery and Union
The Civil War cannot be understood by assigning one motive to millions of people. Original records show governments, states, soldiers and families entering and experiencing the conflict for different reasons—and changing their positions as the war unfolded. Part 6 and the concluding installment of Whittier 360’s Lincoln Memorial series. WASHINGTON — My June 28, 2026, visit to the Lincoln Memorial began as a walk through the rain while I waited for media credentials for the Great American State Fair.
The visit eventually produced an entire series.
I photographed Lincoln’s statue, his speeches, the newly opened museum beneath the memorial, historic copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment, and exhibits examining the memorial’s role as a place of public expression.
Researching those subjects repeatedly led back to the Civil War—and to a serious problem with the way that war is sometimes discussed today.
Simple explanations are attractive. They are also often inadequate.
The Library of Congress summarizes the motives of Civil War soldiers as varied: adventure, duty, steady pay, pressure from friends, draft obligations, preservation of the Union, Southern independence, protection of slavery and abolition of slavery all appear in the surviving record.
People and states experienced and entered the same war for different reasons.
That does not mean every explanation is equally supported in every case. It means the appropriate evidence depends on the question being asked.
One war, several different questions
Why did the sectional political crisis develop?
Why did a particular state secede?
Why did an individual soldier enlist?
Why did someone remain in an army after the war changed?
Why did a civilian support one government over another?
Those questions overlap, but they are not identical.
A government’s constitution tells us something about the institutions it agreed to protect. It does not tell us what motivated every soldier serving under that government. Nor does it tell us why every single state that joined the Confederacy did so.
A soldier's letter may tell us exactly why that individual fought. It does not automatically tell us why his state seceded.
An event occurring after a war began may explain why someone later enlisted without explaining what originally caused the war.
Historical analysis becomes distorted when these different levels are collapsed into one another.
Slavery divided both sides
Slavery was a major sectional issue before and during the Civil War. But the political divide over slavery did not correspond perfectly with the military boundary between Union and Confederacy.
There were Unionists who defended slavery. Kentucky provides perhaps the clearest example. It remained in the Union while slavery remained legal there. The National Park Service describes a substantial political tradition of pro-slavery Unionism in the state. Kentucky's legislature opposed federal emancipation policies and rejected the proposed Thirteenth Amendment in February 1865.
There were also White Southerners who opposed slavery. North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper directed his 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South specifically toward nonslaveholding White Southerners and argued that slavery damaged their economic interests. His existence alone does not tell us how widespread that position was, but it establishes that Southern society was not completely unanimous on the institution before the war.
During the war, disagreement also appeared within Confederate military leadership.
In January 1864, Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne proposed enlisting enslaved men and giving freedom to those who served. Their argument was driven largely by military necessity, but it also challenged the idea that slavery had to remain untouched regardless of the Confederacy's circumstances.
Robert E. Lee went farther during the final months of the war, eventually supporting freedom for Black recruits and advocating a broader plan of gradual emancipation.
Other Confederates strongly opposed those ideas.
The result was not a Confederacy that had abandoned slavery. It was a Confederacy increasingly divided over what sacrifices its survival might require.
The Union likewise evolved. Some soldiers became more hostile to slavery after encountering it personally, while others reacted negatively when emancipation became an explicit federal war policy. The Library of Congress preserves examples of both reactions. Neither army was ideologically uniform.
Accepting a constitution is not the same as proving a motive
The Confederate Constitution protected slavery in several important ways. Those provisions were genuine governmental commitments. But there is an evidentiary difference between saying:
A state joined a government whose constitution protected slavery.
and:
The protection of slavery was that state's primary reason for joining.
The first can be established from the document itself. The second requires examining the state's convention proceedings, political correspondence, military circumstances and public debate. This is something that must be done state by state, not by having some states stand in for others.
A constitution describes what a government agrees to uphold. It does not automatically rank every reason that brought each member into the political arrangement.
That distinction is especially important when comparing the states that left the Union before Fort Sumter with those that changed course after the war became a shooting conflict. There is sharp dividing line in the Confederacy between pre Fort Sumter members and post Fort Sumter members. The ones who joined pre Fort Sumter did so explicitly to defend slavery. Those who joined after did so only to defend their own homes and their own people.
Virginia changed course after the shooting started
Virginia illustrates the danger of assuming all Confederate states followed the same path. Its convention rejected secession 90–45 on April 4, 1861.
After Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter and Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion, the convention reversed itself and voted 88–55 for secession on April 17.
Opposition to federal coercion, attachment to Virginia and reluctance to participate in military operations against other Southern states all became important parts of the debate.
Those concerns should not automatically be dismissed as invented excuses. Nor should they be treated as proof that slavery had no importance in Virginia politics. The point is that Virginia's immediate path into the Confederacy was different from the path followed by South Carolina, Mississippi or Georgia. Military circumstances had changed dramatically.
Family, home and state loyalty mattered
Robert E. Lee's own April 20, 1861, correspondence provides unusually direct evidence.
Explaining his resignation from the United States Army to his sister, Lee wrote that despite his devotion to the Union, he could not bring himself to raise his hand against:
“my relatives, my children, my home.”
He similarly told General Winfield Scott that he hoped never again to draw his sword except in defense of Virginia. Those statements do not prove every Virginian thought like Lee. His own family demonstrates otherwise. His sister remained a Unionist, and other relatives remained in United States service. But Lee's letters establish that family, home and state allegiance were real motives for at least some people and should not automatically be rewritten into a different motivation because another political issue was also important.
Culture and ancestry likewise mattered without determining everyone's allegiance.
Families that had lived in Virginia for generations often had relatives who had migrated into Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas. Kinship networks crossed state lines.
At the same time, shared ancestry did not necessarily guarantee the same political decision. Families found themselves divided. The Civil War was literally fought between relatives in some households.
Immigrant heritage also shaped the armies
Family culture was not limited to old Southern families. Large numbers of Union soldiers came from immigrant families, while immigrants also served the Confederacy.
Patrick Cleburne, one of the Confederacy's most prominent advocates for freeing enslaved men who entered military service, was himself born in Ireland.
The existence of different family origins does not mean those people had nothing in common as Americans. It does mean that being born within the same national borders did not automatically give people identical ancestry, historical memory or household culture. Those backgrounds could influence how people understood loyalty, nationhood, state authority and military obligation.
They were factors to investigate rather than assumptions that can simply be read from a census category.
Confederate soldiers did not all belong to the planter class
Slaveholders were politically and economically powerful within the Confederacy, but personally owning enslaved people was not the experience of most Confederate soldiers. Historian Joseph Glatthaar's study of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia estimated that approximately 13 percent of soldiers personally owned enslaved people, while roughly 44 percent came from slaveholding households. That means slaveholding families were substantially represented, but soldiers who personally owned enslaved people remained a minority.
This distinction matters because class tensions developed inside the Confederacy.
Conscription laws and exemptions associated with large plantations helped produce resentment summarized in the phrase “rich man's war, poor man's fight.” Both the Union and Confederacy also allowed wealthy men to obtain substitutes, illustrating how military burdens could fall unequally.
However, resentment toward wealthy slaveholders did not automatically make someone an abolitionist. A nonslaveholder might oppose slavery, tolerate it, hope someday to own enslaved people, resent planter political influence without opposing the institution, or simply rank other concerns above it.
Those positions must be distinguished rather than combined into one category.
Confederate soldiers also described invasion and defense
Soldiers' letters provide evidence that official declarations cannot.
On May 8, 1861, Confederate soldier Cornelius McLaurin wrote his sister from Virginia that the general expectation among those around him was that Lincoln intended to invade the state and kill everyone in it. He described preparations to defend positions around Norfolk against an anticipated attack.
That does not mean every Confederate military operation was defensive.
Confederate forces had already fired on Fort Sumter, and Confederate armies later carried campaigns into Union territory. The Confederacy was the aggressor.
But McLaurin's letter tells us how one Confederate soldier understood his immediate circumstances: he expected invasion and was preparing to resist it. That evidence should be allowed to say what it says, not rewritten to support modern propaganda or revisionist historical narratives. A soldier can perceive himself as defending his position even while serving a government that conducts offensive operations elsewhere.
Union soldiers also fought for different reasons
Union soldiers likewise cannot be reduced to a single abolitionist motive.
Sullivan Ballou's famous July 14, 1861, letter to his wife describes his willingness to die in terms of preserving the United States government and honoring the sacrifices of the Revolutionary generation. He wrote about maintaining the government, not about an immediate war to abolish slavery.
Other Union soldiers became increasingly antislavery through their wartime experiences.
The Library of Congress preserves the August 1862 letter of John P. Jones, who wrote that seeing slavery firsthand had changed his views and made him relieved that military policy no longer forced him to return freedom seekers to enslavers.
Some reacted in the opposite direction when emancipation became part of federal war policy and deserted the Union army.
The Union Army therefore contained committed abolitionists, people who became abolitionists during the war, people primarily committed to preserving the country, and people who strongly opposed emancipation.
Black military service also contained different experiences
Black service should not be treated as though every Black soldier necessarily entered with an identical personal history.
Many formerly enslaved men understandably connected military service directly to freedom. Spotswood Rice provides an especially powerful example. He entered Union service while his daughters remained enslaved in Missouri and later wrote demanding their release. For him, the war was not an abstract political argument about slavery.
It involved his own children.
Free-born Black soldiers could approach the conflict differently. Corporal James Henry Gooding of the 54th Massachusetts protested discriminatory military pay while describing his unit's service in defense of the Union and democracy. His letter joined patriotism, racial equality and military dignity rather than reducing his service to one motive.
Different Black experiences deserve the same individual treatment given to White soldiers rather than assuming race by itself tells us everything a person believed.
Missouri was a civil war inside the Civil War
Missouri complicates almost every simple narrative.
Voters had elected Claiborne Fox Jackson governor. But they had also elected delegates to a convention that ultimately rejected secession. The political conflict then became intertwined with military confrontation.
After negotiations with Union commander Nathaniel Lyon collapsed in June 1861, Lyon advanced into Missouri and Jackson's administration fled Jefferson City. Thomas L. Snead later attributed extraordinary language to Lyon during the Planters' House negotiations, recalling Lyon as saying he would see every man, woman and child in Missouri dead if they refused to submit to harsh military rule. Snead's account reflects how extreme the confrontation had become.
The elected state convention subsequently declared Jackson and other elected officials removed and created a provisional government headed by Hamilton Gamble who was not elected to the office.
The convention had itself been elected, but its authority to remove other elected officials without a new statewide gubernatorial vote was challenged by delegates at the time because it violated the state and federal constitutions which made it a coup or illegal overthrow a democratically elected government.
Jackson's departure from Jefferson City did not amount to a resignation. He was still the constitutionally elected governor of the state. Yet Jackson then committed a different constitutional violation of his own. Despite the convention's earlier rejection of secession, he claimed authority to declare Missouri independent of the United States without a statewide ratification vote but with a simple executive order. His supporters later adopted a secession measure at Neosho, whose legitimacy and quorum remain disputed.
The result was two competing governments, both claiming to represent Missouri.
One side's questionable assertion of power did not automatically validate the other's.
Missouri also demonstrates that slavery and allegiance were not identical
Missouri remained outside the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet its Unionist constitutional convention abolished slavery on January 11, 1865, with only four delegates voting against the ordinance. That action came from the self appointed Unionist government, not the elected government Confederate government-in-exile claiming Missouri.
It nevertheless demonstrates that the politics of slavery did change during the war.
Someone's position in 1861 cannot automatically be projected unchanged onto 1865. At the start of the war, Lincoln said slavery was not the main cause of the war but by the end, he had started saying it was a central reason for it.
The Union did not always treat Black Americans as friends or equals
Union victory eventually did not destroy slavery throughout the United States.
Nor did the Union Army always treat Black people humanely or equally. In fact it did not.
At Camp Nelson in Kentucky, the United States Army benefited from forced labor performed by enslaved Black people before later recruiting Black soldiers.
On November 23, 1864, more than 400 Black refugees—mostly women and children associated with Black Union soldiers—were forcibly expelled from the camp during a winter storm. Their shelters were destroyed to prevent their return.
Of approximately 250 who eventually made it back, at least 102 died during the following weeks and months. The fate of approximately 150 others who did not return is unknown.
Union authorities subsequently reversed the policy and established protections for refugees.
Both facts belong in the history. The outrage does not disappear because officials later corrected it. It does not disappear because the perpertrators were progressive and liberal. Nor does the correction disappear because the original action was brutal.
Union forces also committed violence against civilians
The burning of Darien, Georgia, provides another documented case.
In June 1863, Union forces burned the town even though it was undefended and lacked strategic or commercial importance at the time. Sexual violence by Union personnel has also been documented by historians.
These subjects should be investigated carefully, distinguishing allegations, testimony, prosecutions and established incidents. Recognizing Union misconduct does not require romanticizing the Confederacy. It simply means victory does not retroactively make every action just. True history does not take sides, it remains neutral and let's both sides speak for themselves instead of speaking for or silencing one side or the other.
Contemporary Americans already had standards for military conduct
We also do not always need modern law to determine whether people at the time understood certain conduct to be wrong.
The United States Army adopted the Lieber Code in 1863. It prohibited rape, robbery, pillage and wanton violence while attempting to define the boundaries of military necessity. That means some behavior can be evaluated not merely by twenty-first-century standards but against rules the United States military had already adopted during the war. The Confederacy had similar rules. But in both cases there were serious violations by individual soldiers and units.
Historical context does not have to mean suspending moral judgment. But it should be contextual. It should mean using the standards, evidence and alternatives actually available at the time. History should never be judged by modern standards but only according to the standards that existed at the time.
The war also affected Native nations differently
Native nations should not be folded into a simple Union-versus-Confederate racial narrative. In fact the Native tribes participation, primarily on the side of the Confederacy, proves that the civil war and Confederacy were simple racial narratives.
Different nations—and factions within them—made different choices. Some allied with the Confederacy. Others supported the Union. Some communities divided internally.
At Sand Creek in November 1864, Colorado volunteer troops attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment and killed civilians after falsely accusing them of being supporters of the Confederacy.
Captain Silas Soule refused to participate and subsequently described what happened. His conduct demonstrates again that people serving in the same military did not necessarily share the same values or decisions. Postwar treaties also imposed major consequences on Native nations, including territorial cessions tied partly to wartime allegiances. Most of the land taken from Native American tribes during this time was justified by accusing them of being proslavery and proConfederate.
Those histories require tribal specificity rather than treating Native Americans as one political bloc.
West Virginia shows how regional identity could fracture a state
The creation of West Virginia likewise cannot be understood through one variable.
Western and eastern Virginia had longstanding disputes over representation, taxation, political power and transportation.Their settlement histories and economic structures also differed.
Slavery was intertwined with only some of those conflicts because enslaved property affected taxation, wealth and political influence. But culture, geography and regional political identity were also major factors that can't just be swept under the rug or put in second place.
The split demonstrates again that even within one state, people could possess different ideas about where their strongest loyalties belonged.
There was no ideologically pure Union or Confederacy
Perhaps the most important conclusion from the surviving records is that neither side consisted of people with identical beliefs. There were pro-slavery Unionists. There were antislavery Confederates.
There were Confederate soldiers who did not own enslaved people and Union soldiers who strongly opposed emancipation.
There were Black soldiers who had been enslaved and Black soldiers who had been born free. There were Southern Unionists and Northern supporters of slavery, opponents of the war, immigrant soldiers, long-established families and Native nations all with their own political interests.
There were also people whose views changed dramatically between 1861 and 1865.
Political coalitions are rarely as internally uniform as later memory makes them appear.
What might have happened to slavery in an independent Confederacy?
This is where historical evidence ends and counterfactual analysis begins.
The Confederate government had not abolished slavery when it collapsed.
Powerful people remained committed to the institution. People more powerful than Lee.
But by the closing years of the war, internal pressures had begun producing open disagreement. Cleburne proposed sacrificing slavery rather than Confederate independence. Today's far left activists refuse to acknowledge even this, insisting instead on racially caricaturing and demonizing anyone associated with the Confederacy.
Lee eventually supported immediate freedom for enslaved soldiers, future freedom for their families and a broader gradual-emancipation plan. His position by the end of the war was literally the most liberal in the Confederacy. Yet today he is demonized as being a hardcore pro slavery racist when the facts do not suppor that portrayal.
Nonslaveholding soldiers also greatly outnumbered soldiers who personally owned enslaved people, while Confederate conscription and planter exemptions had intensified class resentment. There was some resentment in the ranks between those who owned slaves and those who did not. It's time to stop pretending this did not exist.
Had the Confederacy survived, these unresolved tensions would almost certainly have continued politically. It is plausible that veterans, nonslaveholding farmers, antislavery Southerners and military leaders who had already begun questioning slavery might have pressured the institution. In fact the reality is that they had already begun doing so at a few months before the war ended.
It is equally likely that powerful slaveholding interests would have resisted them successfully for a considerable period. Especially through use of violence against fellow Confederates. History offers examples of military emancipation accelerating broader abolition, but the Confederacy disappeared before its own debate could develop far enough to reveal an outcome.
We therefore cannot say that an independent Confederacy definitely would never have abolished slavery. We also cannot say with certainty that its political attitudes toward slavery would have remained permanently frozen in 1861.
Two simple stories should be resisted
One simplified story portrays the Confederacy as a purely defensive society whose people were united only in protecting their homes and constitutional rights. That cannot account for slavery's legal protection, explicitly pro-slavery secession arguments, Fort Sumter or Confederate military offensives into Union territory.
Another simplified story transforms every Confederate soldier into a planter fighting principally to preserve slavery while portraying the Union as an abolitionist army consistently defending Black freedom. That cannot account for pro-slavery Unionism, anti-emancipation Union soldiers, Confederate nonslaveholders, Southern antislavery voices, divided states, Camp Nelson or institutional discrimination inside the Union military.
Neither simplification is adequate. History does not become more accurate by replacing one mythology with another. The statements that the war was about slavery and that the war was about slavery are both true simultaneously.
What the Lincoln Memorial asks visitors to remember
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address remains particularly appropriate because it refuses an easy celebration of one side's righteousness. Lincoln discussed slavery's role in the catastrophe while also acknowledging that both sections had participated in the institution's history. This is something modern activists fail to realize and understand.
Lincoln then turned toward the problem of what came next. Reconciliation did not require pretending nothing had happened. Nor did accountability require permanent hatred as exists today from both sides.
That tension still matters when Americans argue about the Civil War.
We can recognize slavery's enormous historical importance without assigning it as the primary motive of every soldier.
We can recognize the Union's actions did not destroy slavery and that Union forces were not always humane.
We can document abuses without making them excuses for abuses committed by the other side. Nor can they be used as justification for anything happening today.
Returning to the memorial
Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, the Civil War can seem settled.
The Union survived and the Confederacy ended. Lincoln's words were carved into stone.
But the people who lived through the conflict did not experience it as a completed chapter whose ending they already knew. They made decisions with incomplete information, competing loyalties, family obligations, political beliefs, fears and experiences that varied widely from one person and community to another.
The purpose of examining those differences is not to give every side an equal share of innocence or guilt.
It is to understand more precisely who did what, why they said they did it, and what consequences followed.
The farther I went into the original records, the less useful the simplest present day narratives about the reasons for the war became.
That may be the most important lesson I brought home from the Lincoln Memorial.
Learn More
Soldier motives and changing attitudes
Library of Congress — The Civil War in America, including primary sources illustrating soldiers' varied motivations and changing reactions to slavery and emancipation. Library of Congress
National Park Service — Sullivan Ballou's July 14, 1861, letter explaining his commitment to preserving the United States government. National Park Service
University of Virginia, Letters Home — Cornelius M. McLaurin's May 8, 1861, Confederate letter describing preparations against an anticipated federal invasion of Virginia. Virginia Community
Slavery within both political coalitions
National Park Service, Camp Nelson — “Union Forever and Slavery,” documenting pro-slavery Unionism in Kentucky and resistance to federal emancipation. National Park Service
Library of Congress — Hinton Rowan Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, addressed to nonslaveholding White Southerners. Library of Congress
American Battlefield Trust — Patrick Cleburne's January 1864 proposal to recruit enslaved Black soldiers and grant freedom in exchange for service. American Battlefield Trust
Virginia, Lee and divided loyalties
National Park Service — Robert E. Lee's April 20, 1861, resignation letters discussing Virginia, family, home and his decision to leave the United States Army. National Park Service
Missouri
Missouri State Archives — Missouri's competing wartime governments and the January 11, 1865, ordinance abolishing slavery. Missouri Secretary of State
John McElroy, The Struggle for Missouri — later accounts of the Planters' House confrontation involving Nathaniel Lyon, Claiborne Jackson and Sterling Price.
Black military service and Union contradictions
National Park Service — Camp Nelson's use of enslaved labor, recruitment of Black soldiers and the November 23, 1864, expulsion of more than 400 Black refugees. National Park Service
Civilian and Native experiences
New Georgia Encyclopedia — The burning of Darien, Georgia, by Union forces in June 1863. Georgia Encyclopedia
National Park Service — Sand Creek historical overview, including Silas Soule's opposition to the attack. National Park Service
Confederate class tensions and the draft
Library of Congress — Civil War conscription and substitution policies in both the Union and Confederacy.
The Citadel Archives & Museum — Letter from Ellison Capers to his wife Lottie, September 16, 1864. Includes the two-page manuscript and an accompanying transcription. Ellison Capers Collection, A1961.1, Box 3, Folder 32.
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