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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