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  • A Battle Cry of Freedom—But for Whom?
  • Mark Grimsley (bio)
Gary W. Gallagher . The Union War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 215 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95.
Chandra Manning . What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 350 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $26.95.

The two works under review are creatively at odds with one another. Chandra Manning argues that when Civil War soldiers thought about the issue at the core of the conflict, they thought about slavery: not states' rights and the defense of home, as one might expect from those who wore gray; or the preservation of the Union, as one might expect from those who wore blue. Gary W. Gallagher is, to say the least, impatient with the latter part of the argument. He seeks to reaffirm that Union soldiers fought primarily for, well, the Union.

Gallagher's view was once quite literally engraved in stone. In 1911, art critic Royal Cortissoz was asked by Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, to compose a suitable inscription for the edifice. Cortissoz offered: "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." The memorial committee embraced this magisterial declaration, a declaration further underscored by the thirty-six Doric columns that grace the edifice: one for each American state in 1865, including the eleven that tried to leave the Union.

And yet beneath this affirmation lay another that comes much closer to Manning's viewpoint, one that Cortissoz considered and rejected. The inscription might instead have highlighted Lincoln's status as "the Great Emancipator" and, in the process, implicitly shifted the meaning of the conflict. But as Cortissoz explained to Bacon, "By emphasizing his saving the union you appeal to both [North and South]. By saying nothing about slavery you avoid the rubbing of old sores."1 The eventual forty-one-page congressional report of the memorial commission further underscored the emphasis on Union as a way to hide the politically problematic issue of emancipation. Twenty times it extolled Lincoln as "the man who saved the Union." Lincoln as "emancipator" appeared just once—in a passage dealing with rejected designs. [End Page 77]

The historiography of the early twentieth century also placed the salvation of the Union at center stage, treating the destruction of slavery as a happy but incidental side effect. But just as in succeeding decades civil rights activists persistently nudged the meaning of the Lincoln Memorial in the direction of black freedom, so too did academic historians eventually move emancipation to a place of central significance in the Civil War era.

Even so, historians continued to assume that Northern soldiers fought to preserve the Union and that they viewed the destruction of slavery as, at best, a necessary means to achieve that end. Historians also assumed that while the preservation of slavery may have been a significant factor in the decision to secede, it was not a significant motivation for Confederate soldiers, who instead were thought to have fought for states' rights or for home and hearth.

In the 1990s, James M. McPherson argued persuasively that the preservation of slavery was in fact a significant motivator of Confederate troops, but that they viewed slavery as a bulwark of political liberty, as Southerners understood the concept, rather than an object of protection in its own right. Still, his findings confirmed the central place of Union in the minds of Northern soldiers and their gradual acceptance of the idea that the preservation of " the best government on God's footstool" required the elimination of slavery.2

In What This Cruel War Was Over, Chandra Manning challenges this interpretation, albeit in a slightly oblique way. She doesn't reject the idea that Union and Confederate soldiers were motivated by factors other than the destruction or preservation of slavery. But she argues that, whatever their motivation to enlist and fight, soldiers on both sides regarded the peculiar institution as the central issue at stake in the contest—whether they liked it or not. "The problem, as both sides saw it...

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