Reluctant Rebels
The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5704682 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John D Browning (Appalachian State University, corresponding author), J Browning |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1125-1126 |
| Publication date | 2011-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaq111 |
| OpenAlex | W2314788026 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Many scholars have written about what motivated men to fight in the Civil War. The model is James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades (1997), which emphasizes duty, honor, and ideological attachments to nationalism and liberty as primary motivational factors for those who volunteered in 1861. Kenneth W. Noe attempts to fill a large void in the literature by analyzing the motivations of those who joined after the war's first year. This is an important work, though one rife with dangers, which Noe freely acknowledges. The first and most obvious problem is his sample size, which he confesses is 20 percent smaller than he originally sought. He samples 320 men to represent the nearly 180,000 Confederates who volunteered after 1861 (plus another 120,000 conscripts and substitutes), and the quality of the sources is uneven; some soldiers wrote hundreds of letters, while others left behind only one. Noe emulates McPherson's study, but differs from him in significant ways; he names the soldiers he quotes and is far more transparent when identifying the numbers of his sample who felt a certain way
Duty · Honor · Ideology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sample (material · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Computer Science · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2025 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |