Conclusion: Why Didst Thou Leave Thy Body Here?

When we have come full circle through both CSA and USA soldier’s letters and diaries we realize that slavery was one thing that both sides had fought for. It is simply irrefutable. The Civil War veterans’ later “consensus, which some voiced openly: Confederates soldiers had not fought for slavery; Union soldiers had not fought for its abolition” (68) is curious, but it is only curious as a study in the psychology of either denial or amnesia. The veterans’ own words, letters, and diaries, written in the heat of battle, preclude their later attempts to minimize slavery and demonstrated without question that black slavery was an issue for which both sides had fought and died. That is not to say it was the only reason, or that every soldier shared it, or that it was constant across times or location, or that written affidavits could be secured on every day of the war with Union soldiers vowing that they were fighting against slavery and Confederates vowing that they were fighting for it. Still, as much as there was any reason to fight, slavery was a reason. For some it was bigger, for some it was less, for some it grew, for some it shrank. But at the end of the day, at the end of the fight, and at the end of the war any honest grave digger on a blood stained field of that most terrible conflict would have told you plainly and truly that the men he now interred hadn’t come here because then liked brass buttons. He’d tell you they hadn’t been trained to kill, and done it, because they thought it was because they liked the sight of blood sodden ground and half crushed humans. And he would tell you that their crumpled rotting corpses weren’t laying in the sun today because they hadn’t stopped to think about the reasons why they fought. No, that grave digger, that most necessary tiller of the soil, could have looked into your eyes and told you that these dead men had reasons that brought then here to leave their bodies. He could have told, and he would have, that the reasons were many, and complex, and different from time to time. But he also could have told you that slavery was a reason why they fought, for these dead men had, through their letters, said so themselves. And as McPherson has shown, that grave digger, that veiler of human life, would have been right.