So that's what I've done, and I've tried to put it together in a book. The letters were not subject to censorship during the Civil War, and so I think the best place to go to find out what these men really thought they were fighting for - the purposes of their volunteering to fight and risk their lives - is to go to their personal letters to parents, to wives, to sweethearts, brothers and sisters who were eager to hear about their experience as soldiers, and to go to their letters, which are amazingly frank, and find out what they thought they were fighting for. During the Civil War soldiers wrote an enormous amount of letters home. The mobilization to fight the Civil War was a kind of do-it-yourself mobilization from the bottom up - from localities, counties, communities, states. This was a non-coercive, democratic society. Most of them volunteered in the first year of the war. Eighty to 90 percent of the fighting soldiers in the Civil War were volunteers. JAMES McPHERSON, AUTHOR, "WHAT THEY FOUGHT FOR: 1861-1865": It's about what motivated volunteer soldiers in the Civil War to risk their lives, both Union and Confederate.
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