Why the Civil War Was Fought, Really
A great many Americans still debate the origins of the Civil War in the same terms as a century or more ago. People say the war was not “about” slavery; it was about economics, or “states’ rights,” or elemental Southern nationalism. Those who insist that the war wasn’t about slavery tend to do so with the conviction that they are talking to naive and moralistic innocents. The historian Chandra Manning, who has met a lot of these people, has just published What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Knopf, 350 pages, $26.95), and in it she investigates what the men who actually fought the war believed they were about.
She has looked at a remarkable wealth of letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers, assembling data on what 657 Union soldiers and 477 Confederate soldiers thought they were doing over the four years of combat, rather than what some of them wrote in hazy, embittered, or sentimental retrospect. She is perfectly aware that soldiers do not all think the same thing; she knows that their views alter over time (she traces that evolution with great care and subtlety); and as a rule she does not count something as a representative view unless the soldiers who held it outnumbered dissenters by at least three to one.
Her conclusion is that the Americans who fought the Civil War overwhelmingly thought they were fighting about slavery, and that we should take their word for it.
It is perhaps not surprising that in 1864 the black men of the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery reminded one another that “upon your prowess, discipline, and character; depend the destinies of four millions of people.” It may be more surprising to find a white Union soldier writing in 1862 that “the fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun.” That same year a soldier on the other side, in Morgan’s Confederate Brigade, wrote that “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks . . . is either a fool or a liar.” Manning can and does multiply these examples, and she finds that they vastly outweigh the evidence for any other dominant motive among the combatants.
She freely concedes that there are paradoxes in Northern attitudes. Many Northerners initially combined a detestation of slavery with unpleasant views of their black countrymen. She suggests that a focus on the latter attitude has obscured awareness of the intensity and breadth of the former one, and she points out that closer acquaintance with slavery, a result of waging war on Confederate soil, only intensified soldiers’ loathing of it. Encounters with the sexual and child exploitation that slavery made possible were especially likely to produce this reaction. She quotes many eloquent examples. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, of the Fifth Iowa, after encountering a child about to be sold by her father and owner, vowed in his diary that “By G-d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.” Manning’s evidence is that such feelings, which grew stronger as the war continued, were already pretty strong when it started.
As for the other side, her work continues in the interpretive tradition of the historian James McPherson: The defense of slavery was as much the main motive for Confederate combatants as its destruction was for Union men. This, too, is something of a paradox for those who like to cite the fact that only one in three Confederate families owned slaves, and who describe the Rebel effort as a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Manning believes that the hope of owning slaves was a real motive for men who didn’t already possess them, and she argues most forcefully, and with strong evidence, that the fear that four million freed slaves might seek revenge after two and a half centuries of torment was also a strong impetus for defending the institution. She also believes that guaranteed social superiority on the grounds of pigmentation motivated poor whites. In her view, shared beliefs about the value of slavery were what held the Confederacy together, rather than a class issue that could ever have wedged it apart.
Why has the assumption that neither Union nor Confederate soldiers cared too much about slavery proved so durable, when the trend of historical research has long been moving in the opposite direction? Manning thinks we anachronistically project attitudes we think more recent and less ideological soldiers had (for instance during the Vietnam War) back onto an earlier and very different time. Having very carefully looked at the evidence for a large and apparently random sample of fighting men, she finds it patronizing and false to think that during the Civil War they were apolitical automatons. Her scrupulous scholarship to support this enlightening conclusion deserves a wide audience.