Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Summary
This book examines what soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and the Civil War. Manning argues, on both sides of the war – union and confederate – soldiers “recognized slavery as the reason for the war.” This book places slavery as the center of soldiers’ ideas about the war and compares and contrast the experiences of Union and Confederate soldiers and how, when, and why their ideas about the war changed. Confederate soldiers, even those non-slaveholding, forged a patriotism based on white men’s perceptions of the best material and ideological interests of their loved ones, which they assumed to depend on the survival of slavery. Slavery was closely connected to Southern notions of manhood. “A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks as well as over women and children.” (12) Southerners feared that emancipation of slaves would lead to the murder and the sexual violation for white women. Union Soldiers, on the other hand, fought because they believed the war was about the survival of ideals like liberty, equality, and self-government for all humanity (millennialist overtones of improving society). Manning argues that the enlisted men in the Union Army forged a link between the slaves and policy makers. “Slaves themselves did force emancipation onto the Union agenda” but one of the most important was converting Union Soldiers, who developed into emancipation advocates in 1861 and 1862 and expected their view to influence the prosecution of the war. Union soldiers came to examine and redress how their own racial attitudes made them complicit in slavery. Wartime experiences convinced union soldiers that slavery needed to be destroyed in order to win the war and redeem the American republic. And, finally, black Americas, those that joined the Union fight, grasped from the beginning that the war was about slavery, and interpreted their involvement as a struggle for black freedom, equality, and inclusion within the promises of the American Revolution. On each side, slavery was the central motivating factor for fighting in the Civil War.

Example: The length of the war – especially the battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg – as well as the performances of black union soldiers forced white union soldiers to further confront their racial attitudes. Manning writes: “The events of the summer of 1863 urged many white members of the Union Army to look critically at themselves and their own society, and to act on the impression that they had not yet please God by calling for an expansion in the reach of founding ideals like equality beyond the racial limits that had once seemed fixed and intractable.” (125)

See also: James Oakes, Eric Foner,