James McPherson

James McPherson is one the world's great historians of the American Civil War. Currently he is a professor emeritus at Princeton, holding the George Henry Davis Chair. His writing is so well known and well done that his most famous book, Battle Cry of Freedom, won the Pulitzer Prize. He is widely understood to have increased the public's understanding of the importance and meaning of the American Civil War.

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought the Civil War is not one of McPherson's most well-known works, partly because of its narrow scope. It seeks not to give a grand narrative of the war, to tell of its heroes, but instead to answer a very specific question: Why did the Civil War soldiers fight the Civil War with such ferocious tenacity?

McPherson is not a character in the book, but he does insert his own thoughts and...