The Politics of Suffering: Civil War Scholarship

Chandra Manning, What this Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).

Civil War scholarship has changed definitively throughout the twentieth century. This trend can be attributed to the vast social changes around the world since the war’s end. The varying ways that historians have portrayed the conflict might remind their audiences of the many ways the Civil War was perceived by its participants. Elizabeth Varon argued in her work on the instability of Civil War political rhetoric that the language of disunion had at least five different faces.[1] Ultimately, historical accounts of the Civil War have settled on a consensus that slavery was the main cause of Southern secession and the war at large. Woods encouraged historians to investigate why slavery was so dividing and also why sectional compromise didn’t occur. For historians who have not accepted this consensus, and to push the field where Woods later suggested, Chandra Manning wrote What the Cruel War Was Over. To dispel any doubts about the role of slavery in the causation of the Civil War, Manning answers the question: Did soldiers place slavery at the center of the conflict?

While Manning’s research focus may seem to answer a narrow question about one specific group who experienced the Civil War, it answers the larger questions historians of the conflict have sought to answer throughout the twentieth century. Not only does Manning discuss the thoughts and lives of soldiers in both the Union and the Confederacy, but she also makes grander assertions about the relationship between the military, American society, and sectional/national politics during the 1860s. She follows the social history trend of the late twentieth century in focusing on the common soldier, which she is able to do by using camp newspapers and letters as sources. Manning argues that both Union and Confederate soldiers grasped that slavery was the centric issue of the Civil War. They believed that slavery had caused the war and must end with the war, and also that the outcome of the American Civil War mattered to all humanity. She encourages scholars of the Civil War era to depart from the idea that the southern man’s love of family and his love of slavery were inextricable, to accept that Northerners’ ideas about race did change during the war, and focus on the fact that the end of the Civil War presented a vast opportunity for social change that went unrealized during Reconstruction.

Manning explains that both Union and Confederate soldiers came to understand slavery as the cause of the war. She then explains that both sides came about this compromise in very different ways. In the Confederate ranks a distinctive sense of southern patriotism transcended, but didn’t eradicate, class division. This southern pride, according to Manning, was held together by a shared commitment to preserving slavery. She also argued that the Northern soldiers’ commitment to the United States government, which emerged from a generational concept of America’s role in the world: to promote liberty, self-government, and equality. Thus, slavery was an institution anti-ethical to the Northern soldier’s sense of purpose. Manning’s arguments about nationalism and patriotism as commitments bolstered by the peculiar institution point to the conversation David Potter began in his essay, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa.”[2] Potter called for a deeper focus on southern sectionalism and northern nationalism. Manning does just this in What this Cruel War Was Over.

Manning’s work fortunately does not take on the anti-war trend of the revisionist historians described by Yael A. Sternhell.[3] Such scholarship, as Steven Barry argues in the Journal of the Civil War Era’s forum on the future of Civil War studies, runs the risk of limiting the production of historically nuanced scholarship on wars.[4] In other words, anti-war approaches often assert that wars are never understandable, a stance Barry sees as inevitable in the coming generation of scholars. In contrast, What this Cruel War Was Over adequately understands the ups and downs of the Civil War and at its base seeks to understand American society through the lens of conflict.