Chandra Manning

Chandra Manning's brief, brilliant book starts with a simple question: "What motivated the rank-and-file soldiers who fought the American Civil War?" In just over 220 pages of text, she provides a clear, compelling, and impeccably documented answer.

Confederate soldiers, from first moments of the war, fought to defend slavery. They saw the "peculiar institution" as intrinsic not only to just to the Southern economy but to the structure of Southern society and to their understanding of the show more privileged place that they, as white men, occupied in that society. If the North won, and slavery was abolished, the world as they knew it would literally be dissolved around them. Their belief in the Confederacy as an institution flagged as the war went on, Manning shows, but not their belief in the centrality of slavery.

Union soldiers, again from the first moments of the war, fought to eradicate slavery. They saw it as a cancer on the Union that had split it outright in 1861 and divided it for more than a decade prior. If the Confederacy were defeated without slavery being eradicated in the process, they concluded, the old divisions would soon bubble to the surface, and the war would have to be re-fought. Their beliefs, Manning shows, only intensified as the war went on, and, pressing deeper into Confederate territory, they came face-to-face with African Americans (often for the first time) and saw firsthand the realities of slavery and its consequences.

Manning roots her conclusions in wide, deep reading of soldiers' letters, journals, and unit newspapers. Using the soldiers' own words, penned as the war was going on, she demonstrates that, although there were dissenting voices on both sides, they were few in number and often fiercely censured by their uniformed peers. This is "history from the bottom up," written with jewel-like clarity.

The conclusions that Manning draws throw a very large rock into the unquiet pond of popular Civil War historiography. The tattered remnants of the canard that "it wasn't about slavery" (shredded by the southern states' own declarations of secession) get coolly and comprehensively pulped. Garry Wills' thesis that the moral basis of the Union cause shifted with Lincoln's Gettysburg address gets summarily vaporized. Yet, Manning doesn't engage with any of that, or comment about the ways in which (now, more than ever) her conclusions matter. She's content to let them speak for themselves, and trust the reader to work out the consequences.

I've been in the history business for close to 50 years. This is one of the best history books I've ever read. show less

A wonderful read. Manning presents writings from the soldiers themselves in order to belie the common misconception that The Civil War was fought over anything other than slavery. While the soldiers' attitudes toward blacks did wax and wane through the war, Manning documents that this corresponded more with success on the battlefield, than the actions of the Lincolns Administration: units that succeeded more in combat remained most sympathetic to blacks, and vice versa.

4361. What This Cruel War Was Over Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, by Chandra Manning (read 18 Sep 2007) This book's thesis is that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and that soldiers largely saw it as the cause. This thesis is supported by much research in soldiers' letters and soldiers' newspapers, to an extent which became less interesting as the book proceeded. I applaud the research but it did not make for a riveting book and I was convinced of the truth of the thesis long show more before I finished the book--if I did not believe it before, as I did. show less