What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (review)

Chandra Manning wanted to discuss “what ordinary soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and the Civil War” and set out to do so by conducting extensive research at dozens of archival agencies (4). She compares Union and Confederate soldiers, attempts to find out how and when their views about slavery changed, and includes the thoughts of black soldiers as well. Manning avoided using postwar memoirs and attempted an “approximate cross section” of soldiers (8). She wound up studying 657 Union soldiers and 477 Confederate soldiers. In the end, she forthrightly asserts that slavery was the most important element in soldiers’ thinking about the war, on both sides of the battle line. As she puts it, her study “rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers’ mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it, and returns slavery to its rightful place at the center of soldiers’ views of the struggle” (11).

There is every reason to applaud Manning in her effort to highlight slavery as an important theme in the Civil War, as far as ordinary soldiers were concerned. Previous historians have noted this over the past twenty years, but as one of many themes that were important in making up the worldview of Civil War combatants. Manning’s contribution to the literature is to place slavery in the center of that worldview. She casts her net widely, discussing a range of topics in order to set a wide background for her study. In fact, the background is so wide that she tends to loosen her focus on the central theme, but she manages to weave commentary from her impressive primary research into this fabric to bring the reader back to target.

Most historians who have written on the Civil War soldier’s worldview would agree with Manning’s argument; lay readers often have difficulty, however, accepting slavery as an important motive for either side to fight. In that sense, it is well that her book is published by a major commercial press and that hers is a writing style that makes it accessible to a wide audience. It will undoubtedly receive large sales and wide readership, although one wonders if diehard Confederate patriots in the South will ever touch it.

The problem with such an aggressive positioning of slavery at the core of issues involved in the Civil War is that it shortchanges the views of those soldiers who did not see it as such, and, frankly, the overwhelming majority of men who wore the blue and the gray did not leave behind any letters or diary entries that would support Manning’s thesis. This is why a study that recognizes a multiplicity of issues as important to soldiers is more satisfying, for few things are more difficult to conjure than the world view of one, much less millions, of men. There is no doubt, in my mind, that slavery was the central issue of the sectional controversy and the Civil War that resulted from it, but it was not viewed that way by everyone involved in the war, and Manning does not adequately deal with this problem. Perhaps it is not amenable to solution anyway.

Without being too much of a curmudgeon, I admit to having come away from this book with a renewed respect for academic publishers. Commercial presses too often personalize the author’s approach to their craft, display jacket blurbs that present an inflated assessment of the book’s significance, and encourage the author to save space by cutting bibliographies. For example, Manning mentions the work of previous historians who have written about the Civil War soldier, but does not reference their books in her bibliography. Moreover, Knopf editors mistakenly identify Federal soldiers as Confederates in two photos they used as illustrations, one of them on the front of the paperback edition of the book (published by Vintage in 2008).

Despite these quibbles, Manning’s well-written...