Customer Reviews

What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Vintage)

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What this Cruel War is Over, is Chandra Manning's first book. The book is about what ordinary soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and the Civil War. Manning's book picks up where historians like Bell Wiley, Reid Mitchell, and James McPherson left off. The main idea of the book is that both the Union and Confederate soldiers understood that the "only" cause of the Civil War was slavery. Manning argues that the way each side responded to that fact shaped the outcome of the war. Union soldiers broad definition of Republican government as a great global experiment, and understanding of liberty as something moral and universal, created a less selfish soldier who was able to put the Union and emancipation first. Manning also argues that northern soldiers had clearer war goals that were more in line with the war aims of the government, and were less likely to be disillusioned than their southern counterparts. Manning makes the case that southern soldiers were more focused on individual and personal concerns rather than on central war aims outlined by a centralized Confederate government that was often unable to take care of its soldiers and citizens. The one universally accepted given by southerners was that slavery was better than anything the Union had to offer, and that emancipating the slave meant enslaving the white man. The book is a very good start for Manning, and is sure to be studied by historians and students of history hoping to gain a more complete understanding of the common Civil War soldier's experience.

As a Southerner (from Kentucky) and descendent of slave-owners, Confederates, and Yankees as well, I have to state that this book thoroughly clears up the erroneous facts concerning why both Northern and Southern men fought in the American Civil War.

Living in the South especially, and currently living in Georgia, I've seen the general public inundated with such propaganda that the American Civil War was over "states' rights" and/or "Northern economic interests", etc...

But this book clears up the rhetoric and explains why both sides fought, using extensive research on original soldiers' letters and diaries.

Of special note is that the book is extremely well written, with excellent usage of the English language throughout, as well as focused and logical arguments to support the author's facts.

In summary, this is one of the top 5 books I've read on the American Civil War.

(just a lagniappe...the author - Chandra Manning, a professor at Georgetown University - is originally from Ireland.)

It is my opinion that this book is the beginning of the end for the claim that the predominant cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery. Slavery was the primary single issue and it was the issue that energized most of the other issues that contributed to the war. Having stated that, I intend simply to summarize how she did her research and some of her conclusions.

Manning's book is the beginning of the end for other causal explanations because she relies on the testimonies that should bear the most weight, i.e., the wartime letters home of the men in blue and gray who fought at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Shiloh and all the other horrific battles of the war.
Her research is pretty amazing and should first be assessed by looking at her list of Primary Sources in the back of the book which is organized by state. She traveled to every state that was involved in the Civil War and roamed through 45 local libraries and historical societies. She went through larger collections like those of Military History Institute of the U.S. Army and the Library of Congress. She read published collections of Civil War letters and innumerable state documents relating to the War.
Her focus was on the enlisted man and on letters actually written during the war rather than memoirs that were written in the postwar years. She gathered biographical data of the various correspondents whose letters she collected and noted their place of origin, their occupation, educational attainments, etc. She then selected 477 Confederate soldiers and 657 Union soldiers to focus on because their collected backgrounds were representative of the armies as a whole.
She also uncovered some 100+ regimental papers (largely published by enlisted men) and used them as well. She then organized this body of material by date. Not surprisingly, she found that opinions shifted with the fortunes of the war.
Finally, for any one opinion to be considered dominant, it had to be expressed by at least a three to one ratio (p.11). By the way, all this is explained in the first twenty pages, so any reviewer who claims she used a different research strategy or that she can't back up any of her claims with "facts" hasn't read the book.

Her presentation of what she learned is very well written and easy to follow. She largely organized her presentation around the timeline of the war. She then covers what was being discussed in the letters of the Confederate Army and the Union Army both white and black.
I think she has three hermeneutics that she deploys on the material. First is the vast ornate interplay of slavery and racism within American culture at the time. Manning is very clear about the racist attitudes of many of the Union soldiers throughout the war and is clear about the way the black soldiers were mistreated, especially initially, by the higher command of that Army. But she believes that their letters show that during the course of the War, that enlisted white Union soldiers went through several shifts in their attitudes toward slavery and toward black Americans. Those shifts she sees as largely progressive and in advance of the chain of command and Northern public opinion as a whole. The War radicalized the soldiers. Most of them had never seen Southern slave society at work and they didn't much cotton to it. Their own racism took longer to be impacted. But for many Union soldiers, watching black Americans in battle was a revelation and a catalyst to personal change. There was backsliding during changes in the momentum of the War, there was frustration by the white soldiers at how much they were sacrificing and some of the soldiers left their service as racist as they entered it. But Manning is clear that there was a enormous change in the opinion of the white enlisted man as a whole and in the higher command. At the end of the war, the black Union soldier received equal pay and could become an officer. This was unthinkable four years earlier.

Manning's other two hermeneutics are more controversial and are probably the source of most of the resistance to her reading of the evidence. Manning feels that she can discern differences in the patriotism of the Confederate soldier and that of the Union soldier. It is her claim that the average Southerner regarded government as justifiable only to the extent it served his needs and that of his family. To the extent that that government began to impinge on his paternal control of his own life and his family was to the extent that the Southerner rejected government. By the way, she sees a related dynamic in the ways that the North and the South responded to the Second Great Awakening and its aftermath in antebellum America. That religious movement created organized reform movements in the North that focused on societal issues (among others, abolition). In the South, the emphasis was on the personal reform of the individual.
When the Southern states succeeded, they created a new national government to which the white Southern man had few if any attachments. As the War went on, the Confederate government had to behave in ways that didn't fit in with Southern ideas on government. To that extent, the Confederate soldier felt less loyalty to that government. The difference with the Northern white soldier should be clear. Billy Yank had a history with his government. He regarded that government as part of his larger society that provided services and to which he owed allegiance.
This difference cuts across her third hermeneutic which deals with the nature of Southern versus Northern manhood. Manning feels that for the enlisted white Confederate, slavery created a social structure which gave him the space to express that paternalistic manhood. His service on slave patrols, his ability to discipline slaves who were not respectful and other rights that the poor white non-slaveholding man had compared with a slave gave him a sense of equality with the upper Southern masters. Obviously, this is the most controversial portion of Manning's reading of the Southern men's letters but she uses it to explain a lot.
Another aspect of Manning's version of Southern manhood was rooted in fear and violence. The South had been traumatized by actual and possible slave rebellions. In some parts of the South, the slaves outnumbered the whites. Race war seemed a real possibility if the slaves were ever to be successfully armed and encouraged. The War and the Union Army did just that. The Southern soldier believed that he was fighting for the physical safety of his own family and for his own farm. Manning feels he fought to preserve the world he knew and wherein he had his place.
This reading is how Manning confronts one of the common arguments against slavery being the main cause of the war. The fact is that the vast majority of Southern white men did not own slaves. Why would all these men choose to fight and die over something they had no stake in? Manning's answer is that the Southern man fought for the world he knew and loved and wanted to leave to his children. The Confederate soldier knew that world was built on slave labor.

As I implied earlier, I found Manning's book to be utterly convincing. I would offer one more reason for reading her book. She uses an enormous amount of quotes. I detest the way the way we men talk about violence among ourselves- the fight stories, the "then I said" type stories that are told to maintain whatever it is they maintain. But I find the letters that are written home by American soldiers in war to be a unique and compelling literary genre. They are often poorly spelled and grammar is frequently taken to the woodshed but they are frequently funny and have a bedrock humanity which is enormously appealing. Reading some of Manning's quotes will make you wish you knew the men writing and could converse with them. Just another reason to read this very strong contribution to American history.

Chandra Manning's first book, "What This Cruel War Was Over," squarely rebuts the popular belief that Civil War soldiers did not care about slavery. Manning places in the lap of the reader countless letters penned by soldiers to families and loved ones attesting to slavery's role in starting the war, stirring up morale, and being the ultimate reason to fight on. Instead of leaving the telling of history to speeches by great generals and politicians, Manning firmly directs our eyes to the very words of the rank and file who gave the war meaning.

Personally, I found the incredible degree of dissent within both the Union and Confederate camps to be most interesting. Some idealistic Union soldiers protested slavery to assure liberty and freedom for all, while other soldiers kept rigidly racist views of slaves but still demanded an end to slavery because they felt slavery would inevitably lead to more clashes between the North and South. Southern soldiers, frustrated by the growing power of the Confederate government to seize their family's assets for the war effort, often questioned their own motivation for defending a government as invasive as the North. Still, fearful of a world in which former slaves might come to own their land and intermarry with white women, Southern soldiers persisted on in battle for the Confederacy. Even yet, some Confederate soldiers thought serving in the war might be a foot in the door to someday owning slaves.

Of particular interest to the reader will be letters from African-American Union soldiers who labored in battle not only to end slavery but to earn equal pay and respect from the army. Despite their additional hardships, these soldiers came to be known as some of the bravest and most dedicated soldiers on the battlefield. Letters reveal that white soldiers often came away so impressed that many began to reconsider their previously held racist ideologies.

An enjoyable read! Guaranteed to change the national conversation about the Civil War and the end of slavery.

What were the causes of the Civil War? Some say slavery. Others that is was state's rights vs. preserving the union. But what about the soldiers, the enlisted men who fought the war, what did they think? Were they as racist as we now perceive? Were they fighting for their homes? For their country? Why did our country fight it's most horrific, most bloody war for four long years, amongst itself? What possibly could start and sustain such a conflict? Historians, history books, modern thinking have all created certain perceptions of the war, and, for the most part, tried to rewrite history to make it more comfortable to us.

This brilliant, magnificently thorough book is an examination of the thoughts and attitudes of the enlisted soldiers of the Civil War, Union and Confederate, black and white, as represented in their letters, diaries, essays, newsletters, and other writings. Manning investigates their opinions on the causes and purposes of the war and slavery, which are one in the same. She brilliantly delves into how those opinions, thoughts, and attitudes were formed by the differing societies of the North and the South (particularly their religious beliefs, their societal demands, and class and gender roles), how this civil war would form a new definition of the United States.

The Civil War, in four horrific years, absolutely revolutionized thought and society in the United States. Our country fought it's most bloody, most horrific war, not only amongst itself, but due to racism. It is a shocking horror that racism can not only be that entrenched, but that motivating of a force. A force that can cause a Civil War between the ideals of equality and freedom and the personal desires for safety, success, and preservation of loved ones. This is a Civil War that rages in every person, in every society.

I have never read any Civil War (and, perhaps any historical nonfiction) book this engaging and fascinating. Every page is underlined and starred; the back cover is filled with notes. Everyone I know has gotten an ear-full of this book. Not only is this book everything that anyone interested in the Civil War could desire, with its brilliant and fascinating information and exploration of the psychology and sociology of the time (with its wonderful focus on the enlisted soldier), but it is something every American should read to understand how our society should work and how it once horrifically failed. Furthermore, it is a book that every human should read. Our country went through a Civil War that stands for the Civil War within every human being: that between the desires for the personal freedoms to provide for the self and family, and the desire to fight for greater ideals for a better society, the civil war between the personal and the societal. Grade: A++

A treasure trove of first person accounts, not of the usual suspects, but of the grunts who actually fought this war. Ms. Manning presents and analyzes the working man's evolving view of why we fought at every stage of the process. Especially insightful (though this point is not overtly made) is how the differing worldviews represented by North and South are still the source of our present political grievances. This book also leaves no reasonable doubt whatsoever as to why we fought, and to such exhaustion, so we can stop kidding ourselves or listening to latter day romanticism.

This is a book well worth reading because of all the quotes from the diaries and letters of soldiers (white and black, Union and Confederate) and from their military newsletters. The words of the men who fought this horrible war tell us what they were thinking and why they were fighting. Manning organizes her book by the year of conflict, one chapter per year. She titles each from a song popular at the time, a song that expressed the desires of the people. The organization serves the author's purpose (to show that the men fighting the war changed their thinking) and also makes for easier reader comprehension. The writing, however, is academic: long sentences with little variety, and long paragraphs, generally two per page, with little white space -- so while the content of this book is interesting and very worth reading, the reading itself is not an easy matter.

In Chandra Manning's work, What this Cruel War was Over, Manning utilizes a plethora of personal though of soldiers in the Civil War. This fresh perspective on the war gives new light to the most sought after topic in American history.
In this monograph one will not find an account of historical military, political or social events. However, this does provide what individual soldiers' feelings toward the lack of food and provisions in the Confederacy, or how they dealt with no shoes as the war went on, or even why they felt God was preventing their victory through their own indulgences.
Manning takes on a whole new level of individual social-history which is smartly written and quite through in its own respect. This is a great work to better understand public thought during the war rather than the political thought which ever other historian has already written on. I recommend this in compilation with any other political Civil War monograph to better understand the full picture of the war and era.

Chandra Manning's "What This Cruel War Was Over" argues that slavery was the cause of the Civil War and soldiers on both sides knew that was the reason they were fighting. She supports this statement by collecting newspaper data, letters home, camp newsletters etc to document how often that perspective was told. I read this book for a Civil War and Reconstruction course and I'm glad my Professor assigned it, I loved her use of primary sources to support her argument and it gave me ideas for my own study on a different subject. I also thought the way she outlined the events leading toward Emancipation was well written, the chronology of events was easy to follow and retain.

This is to be formal review on Chandra Manning's book What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and The Civil War asserts the idea that it was the soldiers who fought and won the soldiers. She uses various sources such as a photos, diaries, letters and other archival works that support her argument. However, it will be her 100 regimental newspapers that she personally searched and found, her book would be the first to analyze these lost archival newspapers. If you were to READ anything in this world about the American Civil War, Manning's book should be the first on your list of books, this year. The story of the Civil War are told through stories of the men who fought it, not the generals, the Presidents, or anyone of importance but the men who were on the front line. One of the most important details that this book is able to connect you as the reader is the fact 620,000 men died and millions fought for the sake of answering the statement, republic for which we stand and through the voices that statement was made by, THE REPUBLIC.