What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers Slavery and the Civil War

About this book

A vivid unprecedented account of why Union and Confederate soldiers identified slavery as the root of the war how the conflict changed troops ideas about slavery and what those changing ideas meant for the war and the nation. Using soldiers letters diaries and regimental newspapers Chandra Manning allows us to accompany soldiersblack and white northern and southerninto camps and hospitals and on marches and battlefields to better understand their thoughts about what they were doing and why. Mannings work reveals that Union soldiers though evincing little sympathy for abolitionism before the war were calling for emancipation by the second half of 1861 ahead of civilians political leaders and officers and a full year before the Emancipation Proclamation. She recognizes Confederate soldiers primary focus on their own families and explores how their beliefs about abolitionthat it would endanger their loved ones erase the privileges of white manhood and destroy the very fabric of southern societymotivated even non-slaveholding Confederates to fight and compelled them to persevere through military catastrophes like Gettysburg and Atlanta long after they grew to despise the Confederate government and disdain the southern citizenry. She makes clear that while white Union troops viewed preservation of the Union as essential to the legacy of the Revolution over the course of the war many also came to think that in order to gain Gods favor they and other white northerners must confront the racial prejudices that made them complicit in the sin of slavery. We see how the eventual consideration of the enlistment of black soldiers by the Confederacy eliminated any reason for many Confederate soldiers to fight; how by 1865 black Union soldiers believed the forward racial strides made during the war would continue; and how white Union troops commitment to racial change fluctuating with the progress of the war created undreamt-of potential for change but failed to fulfill it. An important and eye-opening addition to our understanding of the Civil War.