What This Cruel War Was Over

What This Cruel War Was Over is a 2007 non-fiction book by the American historian Chandra Manning. It collects letters and other documents from the Civil War era to capture what everyday society from the North and South felt about the bloody conflict.

Manning’s key thesis argues that, despite revisionist takes suggesting that the Civil War was as much about "states' rights" as anything else, even the soldiers with the lowest education understood keenly that the war was about slavery, first and foremost. The country had been debating slavery for the previous forty years, she writes, and the election of Abraham Lincoln with his policies of abolition and emancipation was the spark that lit the wildfire of the Civil War.

Using primarily letters as her source material, Manning shows that it didn't matter whether the soldier was from the North or the South, was white or black, was an officer or not; all of them believed they were fighting over slavery. She also discusses the rapid spread of the abolitionist movement during the war and the months leading up to it. At first, she writes, abolitionists and slaves were the biggest proponents of ending slavery, unsurprisingly. What's more interesting, however, is the way black enlisted soldiers spread the gospel of emancipation to white enlisted soldiers. Not until this happened did the goal of ending slavery really take hold among military officers. The shared struggle of enlisted soldiers, white and black, allowed the white soldiers to empathize greatly with the black soldiers' pleas to end slavery, this suggests.



Manning describes the significant role played by the Second Great Religious Revival in America in shaping enlisted men's views on slavery. From that point on, slavery was viewed not only as a policy they with which disagreed, but an outright sin that went against God and the Christian world. Rather than viewing the war as a necessary means for ending slavery, they viewed it as punishment from a vengeful God, angry at how his creations had mistreated one another. God also played a role in Southern soldiers' perspective on slavery, albeit a far different role. In the South, enlisted men believed that because societies had been structured around slavery since antiquity, God must favor it and favor their army in turn. "God was certain to favor the side fighting to preserve a divinely ordained way of structuring society," Manning writes, paraphrasing the sentiment of many a Southern enlisted soldier.

While soldiers from the North largely agreed with Lincoln's views on slavery and even predated his feelings on the subject in many ways, Manning notes that being against slavery was not the same as being against racism. To make this point, she cites the 1864 Battle of the Crater. After Union soldiers failed to defeat the Confederate Army, many blamed the regiments full of black soldiers, without cause.

Speaking of racism, Manning makes points that still resonate today, particularly in view of the country's nationwide discussion of white privilege. While the war was largely fought by the Confederacy to protect the property of rich slaveholders, even poor non-slaveholding Southerners believed that if slavery were abolished, it would threaten their social status, if not their economic status. Feeling strongly about their sense of white manhood, they would—and did—fight to the death to protect it.



The concept of freedom and the goals of the American Revolution were central to both sides' beliefs during the war. However, while the North fought for the right of all Americans to have freedom, the Southerners fought for the freedom to keep freedom away from others, however hypocritical that sounds.

In the end, What This Cruel War Was Over is both a helpful corrective on the false notion that Civil War soldiers were less political than the politicians behind the war, and a startling sign that perhaps, mid-nineteenth-century Americans understood a lot more about racism than Americans today.