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When I returned to Virginia after my sophomore year of college, I went back to my high school to pose a question to my beloved U.S. history teacher: how, I wanted to know, had I grown up thinking that the Civil War was fought over the tariff? It took exactly one week in a college history class—a week in which I read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, which makes clear that it was not the tariff but rather the "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" that led to the creation of the Confederacy—to realize I had been led astray about the cause of the most important event in American history.
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Apparently, I was not alone. At the outset of her terrific first book, Georgetown historian Chandra Manning recounts a conversation she recently had at a wedding. Sitting next to her was a history buff, and soon the conversation turned to the Civil War. The buff held forth, "insisting … that slavery had nothing to do with the conflict."
The straightforward argument of What This Cruel War Was Over is that soldiers themselves—far from being ignorant patriots or naïve dupes—knew that the war was about slavery. Confederate soldiers understood this from the first. In the wake of Fort Sumter, for example, a group of Louisiana men who were studying at the University of North Carolina gathered to declare their commitment to defending "that Institution at once our pride and the source of all our wealth and prosperity." Most Union soldiers recognized the centrality of slavery to the conflict only slightly later, somewhat before much of the northern public accepted emancipation as a war aim. Indeed, it was often Union soldiers' contact with white Confederates and black slaves that got them thinking about slavery. They heard from white civilians that the Confederacy had gone to war because Lincoln's election had threatened slavery, and their interactions with slaves persuaded previously indifferent Billy Yanks, many of whom had never met a black person before the war, of the necessity of emancipation. One soldier from Iowa witnessed a slaveowner trying to sell off a slave who was also his daughter, and declared, "By G-d I'll fight till hell freezes over and then I'll cut the ice and fight on." Of course, this didn't mean that Union soldiers ceased to be racists. Like their president, many a man in blue was able to hold together a strong commitment to ending slavery with a strong distaste for the idea of black equality.
Manning's book ought to silence anyone who still wants to talk about the tariff, but beyond that, Manning makes important smaller claims. She reminds us that many southern unionists opposed secession not because they were any less invested in slavery, but because they believed that their leaving the Union would more seriously imperil slavery than their staying. In particular, secession would guarantee that white Southerners would have no role in determining how northern states treated fugitive slaves. As Georgian Benjamin Hill put it in November 1860, "the only real ground of difference now is: some of us think we can get redress in the Union, and others think we cannot."
Manning suggests that her discussion of soldiers may help solve the logjam over "who ended slavery." One answer to that question is the slaves themselves: in escaping to freedom behind Union lines, slaves forced the U.S. government to decide whether it would return these slaves to their owners or recognize their freedom; thus the slaves pushed the question of emancipation onto the war agenda, even as Lincoln was writing (in 1862), "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it." The other answer is that Lincoln freed the slaves: he may have dragged his feet, but he did eventually sign the Emancipation Proclamation (and, of course, it was Lincoln's opposition to the expansion of slavery that prompted secession in the first place). Manning intriguingly argues that this debate has overlooked "the crucial link between slaves and policy makers"—yes, slaves forced emancipation onto the political agenda, but one way they did so was by "converting enlisted Union soldiers … into emancipation advocates who expected their views to influence the prosecution of the war."
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