How Civil War soldiers saw slavery
From the beginning, men on both sides regarded it as the reason they were fighting, says an impressive history.
Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
nolead begins By Chandra Manning
Knopf. 368 pp. $26.95
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Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
It wasn't until later in the Civil War, in the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural speech, that Abraham Lincoln began describing the horrific sacrifices of the war as this nation's necessary atonement for the sins of slavery. But in doing so Lincoln was simply, albeit with breathtaking eloquence, reflecting views that Union soldiers had already developed, according to historian Chandra Manning. "Ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers recognized slavery as the reason for the war" right from the beginning, says Manning, despite Lincoln's initial wartime rhetoric about "preserving the Union."
A history professor at Georgetown University, Manning began this exhaustive study of how soldiers on both sides viewed slavery as a Harvard doctoral dissertation. She spent years sifting through archives of letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers in order to develop a "bottom up" historical understanding of how Civil War soldiers regarded slavery.
What This Cruel War Was Over is unique for its breathtaking depth of research (Manning's footnotes and research notes cover 110 pages) and for the author's impressive objectivity in analyzing the attitudes toward slavery on both sides.
Manning illustrates how Union troops could hold antislavery views while simultaneously being racists to the core: "White Union soldiers," Manning says, "strove mightily to keep the issues of slavery and black rights separate.
" 'I have a good degree of sympathy for the slave,' one private admitted, 'but I like the Negro the farther off the better.' " While this coexistence of antislavery and racist views may seem contradictory to modern sensibilities, it was not uncommon among Union soldiers, many of whom were immigrants wary of economic competition from blacks.
A larger question is why Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves would risk everything fighting to protect slavery. And here is where Manning's study is at its scholarly best. She meticulously explores the differing conceptions of "liberty" and "manhood" on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, concluding that even poor, non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers viewed slavery as essential to their way of life.
Non-slaveholding whites lived in a Southern "biracial society, which they assumed would explode in race war without slavery," writes Manning. Fear of miscegenation and black equality completely undermined their conceptions of themselves, their families, and their world. They "regarded black slavery as vital to the protection of their families, interests, and very identities as men, and they relied on it to prevent race war." What most united the Confederacy and its soldiers, Manning says repeatedly, was their hatred of Northern-imposed abolitionism.
Meanwhile, Union soldiers witnessing slavery for the first time grew disgusted with the institution as promoting brutality, laziness, and adultery. Union troops saw slave children forcibly separated from their mothers, slave babies obviously fathered by white masters, and the everyday violence of the slave system.
Manning writes of a Pennsylvania regiment that captured a white slave-catcher in South Carolina and gleefully sent him through their ranks: "First one soldier and then another lifted his foot and gave a kick on the posterior and so on till he passed beyond the line of the regiment."
When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, he justified it as a military necessity, a means to weaken the Confederacy by denying it human resources for fighting the war. Union soldiers generally supported Lincoln's proclamation as a practical wartime measure, though some questioned its legality. "One Pennsylvania corporal," notes Manning, "personally opposed slavery, but worried that the proclamation violated constitutional guarantees for the institution, which mattered in a war fought in defense of the Constitution." Lincoln obviously agreed, because he later tirelessly lobbied for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery. For Confederate soldiers, the proclamation simply hardened their determination to fight on.
While support for emancipation among Union troops changed over time - cresting after the victory at Gettysburg - the belief (on both sides) that slavery was the central issue of the war never did. The tragedy, of course (one Manning fully recognizes), was that emancipation unleashed larger aspirations on the part of freed blacks - for voting rights, equal treatment in public accommodations, and equal education. These would be dashed soon after Lincoln's assassination (and for the next century). Manning's final words rightfully bemoan "how the United States could in the crucible of war create such vast potential for change and then, in the end, fail to fulfill it." Despite its sometimes academic narrative style, Manning's book makes an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery and the Civil War.