McPherson, James M. (1997). For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. (click preceding link for information on purchasing from Amazon) New York: Oxford U. P.

Excerpts permanently located on a Library of Social Science Website here.

5—Most Union & Confederate soldiers were neither long-term regulars nor draftees, but wartime volunteers from civilian life. What prompted them to give up several of the best years of their lives—indeed, to give up lit itself? What enabled them to overcome that most basic of human instincts—self-preservation?

This is a vital question in all wars, for without such sacrificial behavior by soldiers, armies could not fight. Two psychiatrists who studied American G.I.s  in World War II put it this way: “What is the force that compels a man to risk his life day after day, to endure constant tension, the fear of death…the steady loss of friend?” What can possess a rational man to make him act so irrationally?

Eight years earlier the novelist and Civil War veteran John W. DeForest asked the same question and offered an implicit answer. “Self-preservation is the first law of nature,” he wrote in summing up his combat experience. “The man who does not dread to die or to be mutilated is a lunatic. The man who, dreading these things, still faces them for the sake of duty and honor is a hero.”

Richard Koenigsberg: The "hero" is one who can overcome the "law of nature" (self-preservation, survival of the species). What is the nature of this force that overcomes the law of nature. It is the idea or mental representation of a "country." What is the nature of a "country" that enables human beings to overcome a force of nature?  

20—“The vandals of the North are determined to destroy slavery. We must fight, and I choose to fight for southern rights and southern liberty.” This pairing of slavery and liberty as the twin goals for which Confederates fought appeared in many volunteers’ letters. As Lincoln sarcastically put it, “the perfect liberty they sigh for” is “the liberty of making slaves of other people.” Samuel Johnson had asked in 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

But most Southern volunteers believed they were fighting for liberty as well as slavery. “Our cause,” wrote on in words repeated almost verbatim by many, “is the sacred one of Liberty, and God is on our side.” A farmer who enlisted in the 26^th Tennessee insisted that “life, liberty and property (i. e., slaves) are at stake” and therefore “any man in the South would rather die battling for civil and political liberty, than submit to the base usurpations of a northern tyrant.”

RAK: It would appear that Southern volunteers are motivated by a struggle against submission. The Southerners don’t wish to submit to the “northern tyrants”—who wish to impose their ideology upon them.

21—Southern recruits waxed more eloquent about their intention to fight against slavery than for it—that is, against their own enslavement by the North. “Sooner than submit to Northern slavery, I prefer death,” (RAK: “Better dead than red).” Better dead than submission to the North wrote a slave owning officer in the 10th South Carolina. The son of a  planter dashed off a letter to his father as he rushed to enlist: “No alternative is left but war or slavery.” Subjugation was the favorite word of Confederate recruits to describe their fate if the South remained in the Union or was forced back in to it.

RAK: Paradoxically, the Southern recruits who defend the institution of slavery, fear being compelled to adopt a posture of slavery in relationship to the North.

“If we should suffer ourselves to be subjugated by the tyrannical government of the North” wrote a private in the 56th Virginia to his wife, “our property would all be confiscated & our people reduced to the most abject bondage and utter degradation.” Thus “every Southern heart” must “respond to the language of the great Patrick Henry in the days of ’76 and say give me Liberty or give me death.” He met death at Gettysburg.

This invocation of the Founding Fathers was as common among Confederate volunteers as among their Union counterparts—for an opposite purpose. Just as the American Patriots of 1776 had seceded from the tyrannical British empire, so the Southern Patriots of 1861 seceded from the tyrannical Yankee empire. Our Fathers “severed the bonds of oppression once,” wrote a twenty-year-old South Carolina recruit, “now (we) for the second time throw off the yoke and be freemen still.”

The American Revolution established “Liberty and freedom in this western world,” wrote a Texas cavalryman in 1861, and we are “now enlisted in ‘The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence’ again.”

RAK Conclusion: a central motivation for the willingness of some Southerners to fight was their desire to avoid having a foreign ideology imposed upon them. The imposition of this ideology (by the North) was experienced as a profound form of oppression—taking away their freedom.