For Honor's Sake Why Confederate Soldiers Chose to Fight Through the Siege of Petersburg

They were starving. Outnumbered. Holding a line that most of them knew, in the quiet hours before dawn, could not be held. And still they stayed. For Honor's Sake goes beyond the familiar story of Confederate defeat to ask a more unsettling question, not why so many men abandoned the Petersburg lines, but why so many did not. Drawing on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the soldiers themselves, it explores the forces that kept a broken army in the field through the brutal winter of 1864 and into the spring of 1865: an almost devotion to Robert E. Lee, rumors of salvation that refused to die, and a culture of honor so deeply rooted that surrender felt, to many, like a fate worse than death. But honor, this book reveals, was never the uncomplicated virtue that postwar Southern memory would make of it. The same code that produced extraordinary courage had been built, from the ground up, on the foundation of slavery, and the men who fought beneath it carried that contradiction with them into the trenches, into defeat, and into the long, unresolved memory of the war. The Siege of Petersburg was where the Confederacy made its last stand and where the myth of the Lost Cause was born. For the men who stayed until the end, it was never really about winning. It was about who they believed themselves to be.