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.