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For Union, For Confederacy, For Slavery : Motivation For Enlisting & Serving Among Kentucky's Civil War Soldiers., James F. Osborne 1987-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beginning with Bell Irvin Wiley's 1943 The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, historians have produced many works describing the motivations for soldiers to enlist and serve during the Civil War. However, because they often set up an artificial North-South divide, while suggesting the North and South were homogenous units, the motivations of border state soldiers are not well represented in these works. This thesis starts to mend this oversight and it explores the motivations of white Kentuckians to join both sides of the conflict and remain at arms. This thesis also argues that slavery played …