Questions of why the Confederate soldiers fought for a government that supported slavery and why the Union soldiers fought in spite of not necessarily believing in racial equality are thoroughly explored in What This Cruel War Was Over by Chandra Manning. In her book, Manning places the focus of Civil War ideology on the written records of soldiers both from the Union and from the Confederacy. Manning attempts to answer the question of whether these soldiers were fighting for something other than the orders of commanders, and if so, what exactly that was. The book operates in a vacuum of sorts in this sense, utilizing soldier-produced documents almost exclusively for the bulk of the text, and although it provides thought-provoking answers, I am not sure that it sells me on its argument. While Manning discusses a gradual acceptance of blacks by Union soldiers, she largely ignores changes in Confederate soldiers showing doubts about slavery. These doubts, though part of a very small minority, show that Confederate soldiers fought for the protection of their homes and families rather than simply to uphold their “masculine identity” or the establishment of slavery (65). The problems that brought these men into the Civil War may not have been at the forefront of the Confederate soldiers’ minds by the end of it.

Manning characterizes the Union soldiers as being ignorant of the horrors of slavery yet not necessarily interested in equality for the races. Over time she claims that “wartime experiences convinced them that slavery must be destroyed in order to win the war” (14). While the discussion of their racism does create a nuanced conception of how Union soldiers were not guilt-free, pure saviors of America, Manning still paints a surprisingly rigid duality of each side that fought in the Civil War.  By the end of the war, as she describes it, the Union soldiers “found reasons to discard old views,” contemplating ideas of “racial equality” that they never had before, and the Confederate soldiers remained as unchanged, “otherwise good and ordinary men” that embraced slavery without doubt in order to protect their families and society (221). Although she gives examples of Confederate soldiers who “began very cautiously to regard the institution of slavery more critically,” Manning concludes that “neither of them could imagine a South without slavery” because they felt uncomfortable sharing these radical thoughts outside of their diaries (171).

Within the framework of her argument, the Union soldiers originally fought for Revolutionary ideals and, after arriving in the South, became invested in the movement for slavery. Confederate soldiers, on the other hand, remained focused on protecting their old way of life in any way possible, even if that meant upholding the institution of slavery. This dichotomy shows little give for a grey area between Confederacy and Union, yet perhaps this strict categorization is necessary in order to arrive at the most complete answer for why the Civil War was fought.

It is certainly baffling that non-slaveholders in the South would fight for the Confederacy, but Manning does seem to make a good case for why the poor, white Southern man would go to war to protect an institution he didn’t have a direct stake in. However, what was more interesting about Manning’s discussion of the thoughts and motivations of Confederate soldiers was their ideas in the later years of the war, and how much changed over time from the very beginning of the war to the year 1864, after the Emancipation Proclamation had ensured that a successful Union would mean an end to slavery in the South.

Confederates were, at first, very patriotic; mostly because the Confederacy promised white Southern men everything they could ever want. Manning quotes “Georgia soldier Josiah Patterson” as saying that he went to war to ensure that his sons “grew up under a government that would facilitate their ‘hopes of becoming great and good men.’” (30) Southern men went to war because they “believed that their personal interests were best served and their families best protected by fighting for a Confederacy more attuned to white Southerner’s individuals needs.” (31) The Confederacy was simply the best choice for the Southern man, with a new government formed with the intention of protecting the white man’s interest first and foremost. Of course, the issue of slavery was still a reason these men went to war, even if they didn’t own slaves. “Slavery undergirded white Southerner’s convictions of their own superior moral orthodoxy.” (32) It was the presence of slaves that gave white Southerners a sense of equality, for they were “equal in not being slaves” (33) Even if a southern man didn’t own slaves himself, slavery was still a major part of his life in the South, so much so that it was worth fighting for.

However, later in the war Confederate soldier’s views of their government began to crumble, with good reason. Of course, as early as 1862 there were reasons to doubt the Confederacy; in fact, “the Confederacy’s particular variety of patriotism” was one of the only things holding together the government after “divisions like localism and class fissures” threatened to end it. But by 1864, Confederate troops were having a harder time believing in their government’s earlier promises. Originally Confederate soldiers would have “never dreamed that the authorities” would fail to protect their families, but by March 1864 one Pvt. Peter Cross’s wife “was so desperate that Cross had to ask his parents to plead with the North Carolina state government for money to buy a little salt and grain.” (167) The Confederacy also began requiring the reenlistment of soldiers when their terms were due to expire, a move that caused white Southern men to feel as though it “robbed them of control over their own actions, a key attribute of white manhood.”(167) Some Confederate soldiers, like Pvt. Noble Brooks, began to question slavery, but were too “worried that publicly criticizing slavery might lead to trouble” (171) for their families. The Confederacy had gone from being a government built to support the white man to an almost oppressive force in the minds of some Confederate soldiers, failing to support their families and even going so far as to strip them of the very freedom and superiority they had hoped for initially. Even in the light of these changes, however, white Southern men were still determined to fight for the Confederacy, if only because they could not “imagine a South without slavery” (171). Confederate troops did not believe that their families “could be safe in the absence of slavery” (172), and therefore clung on to their original views of slavery and the South, even in the face of “high prices, food shortages, social unrest, and ‘desolation and ruin’” (172), because they simply could not accept any other way of life. So, even as late as 1864, and even as Confederate troops’ patriotism began to crumble, the continuation of slavery was one of the reasons white men still went to war for the South.

Juri rightly, in my mind, points out that Union soldiers did not begin fighting the war to end slavery but that, by the end of the war, there had been a definitive shift in their reasons for fighting due to their experiences in the war. Union soldiers may have started out ambivalent about slavery and fought for more abstract ideals such as liberty and a free nation, but, by the end of the war, the vast majority of Union troops were as committed to abolishing slavery as they were to winning the war. Soldiers’ experiences during the war, particularly their interactions with and perceptions of women, were hugely influential in changing these attitudes. As Manning states,

“Yet more influential than Union soldiers’ preexisting notions, or even their firsthand observations of the South, were their interactions with actual slaves, which led many to view slavery as a dehumanizing and evil institution that corroded the moral virtue necessary for a population to govern itself.” (49)

At the beginning of the war, when Union soldiers set foot in the South—some for the first time—they were shocked by the treatment and position of women in Southern society. According to Manning, women were the moral barometer by which a society could be measured, and perceptions of women and women’s behavior during the Civil War, greatly affected the Union’s understandings of Southern society and, ultimately, their views on slavery. At the time, civilized women were expected to remain confined to the indoors, and when Union soldiers saw women—even slaves—in the fields hoeing and plowing, they were shocked. (72) Interactions with white women, as well as incidents such as those in New Orleans, further solidified Northern soldiers’ convictions that slavery was corrupting Southern society. While soldiers were becoming increasingly convinced that slavery was a significant cause of the war and a problem that would have be to be dealt with at the war’s end, they were still ambivalent about how best to respond to slavery.

Nearly four years later, in the time following Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, though, attitudes towards slavery were much more solidified. By this time, the Emancipation Proclamation had been in effect for over a year and Union soldiers had witnessed the bravery of black troops. The seemingly miraculous success of the Union in battles such as Vicksburg and Gettysburg had convinced soldiers not only that slavery was an evil that must end but that blacks deserved some, if not all, of the equal rights afforded white men, such as suffrage, equal pay, and legal equality. (219) Thus, soldiers’ thinking during the war regarding slavery and African Americans had shifted from one in which slavery was seen as an evil corrupting society to the belief that blacks should not just be free, but that they should enjoy civil rights. While this was not the belief held by everyone, Manning says

“A critical mass of white Union troops supported expanded rights for African Americans, and believed that the U.S. government had a duty to work toward equality for black citizens.” (193)

While there was still a century’s worth of work to be done before complete equality was fully realized between blacks and whites, Manning’s book shows the dramatic shift that did take place in soldiers’ attitudes towards slavery and African Americans from the beginning of the war in 1861 to its conclusion in 1865.

In What This Cruel War Was Over, Chandra Manning acknowledges the need to understand why white non-slaveholding men believed that the preservation of the institution of slavery justified war as imperative to understanding the Civil War. Answering this question, Manning carefully articulates the relationship that many Southerners linked between slavery and manhood as the primary reason why white non-slaveholding men believed that the preservation of slavery justified secession and war. Manning notes that slavery “anchored the individual identity of white southern men as men in a firm conception of their rights, duties, and social roles, and it intertwined with the southern notion of honor” (32). Furthermore, Manning alleges that Confederate soldiers’ willingness to fight for slavery “grew from white southern men’s gut-level conviction that survival–of themselves, their families, and the social order–depended on slavery’s continued existence” (32). Thus, Manning argues that Southerners conviction in maintaining the social hierarchy and fear of slave brutality compelled many non-slaveholding men to serve the Confederacy. Throughout the book, Manning cites letters from different Confederate soldiers, indicating the prominent role slavery had in instigating the war for non-slaveholding men. For example, Manning lists the lyrics of a song written by a Texas soldier that states “the blacks to mad revolt to murder and to char / With conflagration every home beneath the Southern Star”. Thus, for Confederate soldiers, emancipation amounted to a direct attack on southern society and no white family was safe (107). Manning concludes that Confederate soldiers accepted “abolition meant disaster because it would destroy the social order, undermine men’s very identities, and unleash race war on unprotected families” (80).

The role that slavery played in why Union soldiers fought evolved throughout the course of the Civil War. In 1861, many Union soldiers believed that secession undermined the notion of popular government and “Confederates had repudiated the principles of self-government by rejecting not just any undesirable election result; they had specifically rejected an outcome that did not favor the expansion of slavery” (43). Thus, Union soldiers believed that Southern secession over the issue of slavery was an affront to democracy and the ideals of the United States. Furthermore, a large number of Union soldiers believed that a war endangering the well-being of the Union and all that it stood for had come about because of slavery (43). Manning also lists the importance of religion in driving Union soldiers to fight for emancipation. Manning writes that many Union soldiers believed that the war was God’s punishment for “complicity in the sin of slavery through the widespread racial attitudes that enabled the existence of the institution” (114). Thus, for some Union soldiers, the war presented an opportunity for the United States to purge itself of the vile institution of slavery and that eliminating slavery would ensure that the United States truly lived up to its ideals. The determination and performance of black soldiers and soldiers’ experiences in the South helped to change the minds of some Union soldiers who initially objected abolition (96). For example, Manning cites the example of Pvt. Chauncey Cooke who “experienced an epiphany when a fair-skinned slave woman whose children had been fathered and sold by her master told the young Wisconsin boy that her children looked like him” (120). Meeting slaves who looked just like them and had been abused by their masters’ revolted Union soldiers and helped promote support for emancipation and the war effort.

Manning’s novel does a terrific job answering the questions of why Union and non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers fought.

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