Booknotes: War Fought and Felt

New Arrival:

• War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers by Joshua R. Shiver (LSU Press, 2025).

What factors motivated Union and Confederate soldiers first to enlist then to persevere has been a popular research topic among scholars for quite a while now. The resulting literature is firmly grounded in "sociocultural and ideological arguments." Joshua Shiver's War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers, however, takes a different approach that supplements existing work on the subject. It "advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers."

Shiver's core sample is "1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama," those selections being representative of individuals hailing from both the eastern theater Upper South and western theater Deep South. The study is also very multi-disciplinary. From the description: "Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die."

War Fought and Felt takes into account a broad range of social connections. More from the description: Shiver's study "examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself."

In Shiver's view, the significance of other motivations commonly faded as the war progressed while emotional factors rose in prominence as Confederate soldiers increasingly faced defeat and the prospects of personal ruin. More: "A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence."

In the end, "(b)y placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries."