means to a Colonel of the North and why he feels he is fighting in the war. We also get knowledge of what the Southerners feel they are fighting for.The Colonel was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and when the narrator is introducing him we learn that he is an ideal northerner who grew up believing in America and that this was a land where no one had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. He felt he was fighting for the dignity of man, if men were all equal in America, all these former Poles, English, Czechs, and blacks, then they were equal too. He felt Americans fought for mankind, for freedom; for the people not the land (Page 27). Those were the type of ideas that motivated the men from the North to fight, it was for freedom and equality for all.The South on the other had was fighting because they felt the North had deprived them of their rights. They actually thought it was a shame that so many people felt the war was about slavery, when it was really about a question of the Constitution. Southerners were fighting for their pride, a Major General, George Pickett gives what he feels is a fair analogy of what they’re fighting for. He says: “we all joined a gentleman’s club, and then the members of the club started sticking their noses into our private lives, and then we up and resigned, and then they tell us we don’t have the right to resign” (Page 66). With those two pieces from the novel we get an idea of what the mentalities were during the war. By 1865 the Confederate forces were truly beaten and now the Reconstruction Period was on its way. This was going to allow the South back into the Union and reconstruct American society on new lines. This reconstruction business was going to be no easy matter. The southerners were not tot...
