What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
By Chandra Manning
Knopf, 350 pages, $26.95
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered what many consider his greatest speech. The Second Inaugural Address was less memorable than Gettysburg, but even more beautifully written and probably as important as a window into his thinking about the war and its meaning. Discussing the soon-to-be freedpeople, he said:
“These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
That “somehow” has been a mystery for historians to solve. It may have reflected Lincoln’s uncertainty about how the war came, but he probably meant that slavery meant different things to different people: Abolitionists opposed it on moral grounds, others because they believed workers had the right to profit from their own labor, while still others believed in a slave power conspiring to take over the country and spread slavery everywhere. In the South, whether the reason for secession was political, economic, or societal, slavery was at the heart of it.
The missing link in the chain of people and events central to the Civil War was the soldiers themselves. Why did they fight? Since the war ended, historians have spilled almost as much ink as soldiers spilled blood, parsing the war’s causes and effects, including what motivated soldiers to wage a war that killed 600,000 of them and culminated in freeing 4 million slaves. Loyalty to their government and republican ideals could explain it, but that notion seemed too abstract to move them to dedicate four years of their lives to danger and drudgery. Loyalty to their comrades clearly mattered, but that leaves open the question of why they joined those comrades at war in the first place.
If Chandra Manning has not offered a definitive solution, she has come as close as we may ever get. “What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War” provides a deceptively simple answer: Slavery was, somehow, the cause of those who fought the war.
To reach this conclusion, Manning, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, pored over letters by hundreds of soldiers and about 100 regimental newspapers they published. Then she traced their views chronologically, gracefully melding political and military developments with the soldiers’ lives to determine how their views evolved as the war unfolded.
“These soldiers plainly identified slavery as the root of the Civil War,” she writes. “Just as plainly, by ‘slavery,’ they did not mean some abstract concept or a detached philosophical metaphor for ideas about freedom, but rather the actual enslavement of human beings in the United States based on race.” Obviously, Northern and Southern soldiers thought differently about slavery. Most Northerners had little exposure to its realities, so whom and what they saw in the South dramatically shaped their thinking, convincing them “that the immoral and blighting institution of slavery was antithetical to republican government, and that any republican government that tried to accommodate slavery was doomed to eventual failure.” Union soldiers concluded that if slavery survived, they would just have to fight again. Manning makes clear that Northerners serving in the South increasingly hated slavery and sympathized with the slaves themselves, but they varied in the degree to which they could or would accept the concept of racial equality.
For Southerners, that concept was out of the question. From the beginning, they saw Lincoln’s election as a threat to slavery and emancipation as “a direct attack on every aspect of white southern society.” Most Confederate soldiers neither owned slaves nor had any real hope of doing so. To them, slavery meant social order. Without it, they would no longer control their families and their lives.
But fighting for their definition of order bred disorder. The Confederate government was “supposed to protect the race and gender hierarchy that white southern men relied on to define their identities as men,” but instead soldiers found their wives put in new positions, slaves behaving with far more freedom than ever before and themselves deprived of what they considered basic liberties. They eventually deemed their government even more onerous than the Republican government that threatened slavery, but most of the rebels kept fighting; to them, the prospect of slavery ending was even worse.
Manning also links these views to the revivals that swept the U.S. during the Second Great Awakening earlier in the 19th Century. Northerners sought to perfect themselves and society, prompting a wave of reform movements such as abolitionism, and the war provided a similar opportunity for moral regeneration.
By contrast, Southerners emphasized personal conversion and salvation, and viewed Northern reform movements as loosening morals and creating social disorder. The black Union soldiers whose views Manning also studies understood that the war would promote “recognition of both the masculinity of black adult males and the full humanity of all African Americans” — attitudes remarkably similar to how Northern and Southern white males saw the war affecting themselves.Manning also leaves room for the soldiers to speak for themselves, and they speak well. The upheaval in the Southern social order comes into sharp relief when she quotes New York Pvt. Constant Hanks’ response to Virginia women insulting Union soldiers: ” ‘They give a fellow invitations to kiss them in localities that I never thought of applying that token of affection’ ” — behavior that would have been taboo with their husbands at home. The continued racism but progress in Northern thinking is apparent in Ohio Pvt. Chauncey Welton’s disgust with African-Americans in general and the Emancipation Proclamation in particular, and his request that his family vote for Lincoln, whose re-election platform included support for the slavery-banning 13th Amendment.
Their writing, whether graceful or semiliterate, raises important questions: Can the number of letters Manning examined settle the issue of what soldiers believed? What about the soldiers whose stories have been largely lost to history through illiteracy or their own reticence, or even the possibility that some letters are lost?
Generations have found that a war happens inside a soldier and sometimes never comes out, or they never discuss it with those to whom they are closest because it is beyond the comprehension of those who were not there. That these soldiers fought for or against slavery is clear, and the depth of Manning’s research is impressive. But Manning cannot offer the final word, not only because the final word never is written, but also because the words may be lacking to craft it.
Nonetheless, Manning has crafted an engrossing study of Civil War soldiers being introduced to a new way of life and alternately welcoming and shying away from it. By breathing life into them, she breathes life into debates over why the war came and how it was waged — questions usually associated with great policymakers, and questions that still vex us.
This makes all the more haunting the words of the Illinois soldier who wrote early in 1863, ” ‘Any country that allows the curse of Slavery and Amalgamation as this has done, should be cursed, . . . and I believe in my soul that God allowed this war for the very purpose of clearing out the evil and punishing us as a nation for allowing it.’ “
Thanks to Manning, now we know better than ever before that Lincoln said it more eloquently, but soldiers said it first — and said it well too.
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Michael S. Green is a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada and the author of “Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War.”
