On American History

Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Natalie J. Ring revises historical debates about the national understanding of the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Ring, David Blight and others argue that “the powerful forces of sectional reunion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” redeemed the tumultuous Civil War and failed Reconstruction years.[1] Ring contends that the period was instead characterized by a widespread understanding of the region as problematic for the building up of a modern nation-state. As a result, the “Problem South” became the subject of social science-inspired efforts at reform and uplift. For Ring’s sources, including northern philanthropists, associations of southern liberals, and the federal government, the American South remained a region caught in a web of paradoxical relationships between nationalism, progress, regionalism, and poverty.

Ring’s postcolonial interpretation of this historical process is one to be wrestled with. She concedes that postcolonial and colonial studies become somewhat muddled in the context of the American South, a region that was both “the colonizer and the colonized.”[2] Using these frameworks with careful measure, Ring reveals that her sources socially mapped the region in such a way that the historian can situate it in the broader story of American imperialism. Her arguments are rooted in the sources’ understanding of the South as a parallel of other foreign geographical spaces. Their understanding is revealed by similar reform efforts in the south and in colonial countries.

The framework of post colonialism perhaps limits Ring’s story to certain historical sources and movements. Ring, however, might contend that her sources dictated the postcolonial interpretation. The fact remains that large elements of early twentieth-century American culture are left out of The Problem South. For instance, Ring focuses little on religion. She argues, “both northerners and liberal southerners viewed and referred to themselves as missionaries seeking to modernize the South and uplift poor whites and poor blacks.”[3] Although she is discussing social reformers and political groups, Ring’s language is reminiscent of the religious nature of imperialism and reform. It would be interesting, then, to know if religious movements or ministries in the American South resembled those of missionaries in colonial regions.[4]

In the same vein, Ring neglects the history of American eugenics as a slight of the postcolonial interpretation. Although she fleetingly mentions prominent eugenic figures and ideas, Ring’s work only touches on the early-twentieth-century movement (that cost over 63,000 Americans their reproductive rights) on three pages. Before settling in on this criticism, I reflected one two questions (mostly to assure myself that I was not harping on something merely of personal interest): Does the omission change the story and would the inclusion of American eugenics change Ring’s argument? While the inclusion might not change the overarching arguments of Ring’s work, or her intervention in the selected historiographical debates, it might have weakened her postcolonial interpretation. American eugenics spread throughout the United States – North, South, white, and black. One common factor linked most of its victims: poverty. For this reason, Ring’s fourth chapter, “The Poor White Problem as the ‘New Race Question’” is particularly unsatisfying given its focus. In this chapter, Ring does note that the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor “stood ready to offer the expert advice of eugenics reformers to South Africans concerned about the possibility of degeneration among poor whites.”[5] This frail connection between the South African poor white problem and the congruent issue in the American South fails to present evidence of eugenic solutions in both regions. Perhaps then, the postcolonial interpretation of the American South as a region sharing the problems and solutions of race suicide and degeneration with colonial geographies breaks down when presented with the eugenic movement.

For a groundbreaking work in the revision of early twentieth-century southern, American, and global history, these criticisms are small cautions. Ring’s work in The Problem South has obviously been well reviewed and accepted as a scholarly addition in the field. Her work also does not claim that the mythical, romantic vision of the American South in the early-twentieth century did not exist on the ground. Taken as a work on specific groups and reform efforts, The Problem South pushes on our interpretation of one of history’s most complicated regions at a very compelling time.

Adam Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Adam Rothman’s very recent work, Beyond Freedom’s Reach, uses a micro historical approach to articulate the complexities of the Emancipation Proclamation’s effectiveness, the toll of slavery on interpersonal relationships in the American South, and the struggle over child custody experienced by enslaved people and their owners. Beyond Freedom’s Reach explores the kidnapping of Rose Herera’s three children to Cuba during the Civil War by their stand-in mistress, Mary DeHart. As Rothman explains, micro histories are like “viewing a hurricane through a pinhole,” but serve as indicators of wider circumstances.[1] In Herera’s case, the historian can learn much about the kidnapping endemic to the Atlantic slave trade. According to Rothman, enslaved people perceived even their sale and movement across state or regional lines as “a form of organized kidnapping.”[2] Rothman’s work internationalizes American slavery with the Cuban connection, reveals the particularly vulnerable character of enslaved children, the weakness of freedom after emancipation, and the intense political processes necessary for black Americans to obtain their rights (or even their children).

A historian of gender in the American South may find Rothman’s work to be void of gender analysis. The question to ask before criticizing the absence of gender analysis in Beyond Freedom’s Reach is whether or not the story would be different, or reveal different conclusions, if subjected to such a category. Herera and DeHart, the main actors in Beyond Freedom’s Reach, are women engaged in a custody battle over three children biologically belonging to Herera, but enslaved by the DeHart family. The struggle over the Herera children is one that exemplifies an enslaved woman’s struggle to attain her identity as a mother in light of her mistress’s ability to manipulate enslaved children. Historians might question, then, Rothman’s choice to treat Herera and DeHart as gender-neutral in many ways. By including George Herera, Rose’s free black husband and father of her children, in the story, Rothman explains how gender conventions broke down in American slavery. The story doesn’t necessarily focus on Rose’s limitations as an enslaved woman per say, but rather on the system’s effect on parental authority and identity. In this way, George suffers under the system as well. Even as a free black man, he couldn’t claim any right to custody, as his children were being taken to Cuba and up to his subsequent death. Rothman reveals how the system had a horrific effect on parents in general when one or more of their family members were enslaved. This finding speaks to the pervasiveness of the racial system, even after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

The treatment of Rose and George as victims of slavery follows Rothman’s pattern of discussing enslaved people and free people of color with lives conditioned by slavery, rather than reduced to enslavement. It is the interaction of an enslaved woman with free people in her community that solidifies this perception of lives circumscribed by the system but not simplified by it. The evidence of that interaction is also telling of New Orleans during the antebellum and Civil War years, when an intricately connected community of free people of color and enslaved people presented anything but a class dichotomy.

Overall, Rothman’s work is extremely useful as not only a popular micro history, but as an indicator of the complexities of American slavery, the Atlantic trade, and the elements of those entities unique to New Orleans. Beyond Freedom’s Reach is a great teaching tool for helping students understand the breakdown of slavery, along with the melding racial, class, and gender systems during the Civil War.

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Thavolia Glymph examines the power relations between black and white women within the plantation household over the antebellum years, throughout wartime, and into the postbellum era. Her work takes a sometimes dizzying, hybrid approach to violence in the plantation household that combines gender and race as analytical categories. Such an approach achieves one of Glymph’s goals to revise the feminist historiography of the American South, albeit in a way that forces the reader (at times) to trudge through the mud to understand arguments that are, in reality, disguisedly simplistic. These extremely influential arguments are at a basic level: white women held power as slave-owners; they operated in a public sphere, even in their own homes; they experienced a struggle between the southern perception of lady hood and their need for slaves to help them achieve that ideal; the transformation of the plantation household was a major step in black women’s fight for freedom; and black women used what power they had after emancipation to create change in plantation households.

Most of my questions and commentary on Glymph’s work come from the early chapters of Out of the House of Bondage, mirroring my interest in the lives of both enslaved women and mistresses in the antebellum period. Glymph’s use of a mixture of analytical tools, specifically race and gender, should be considered with care in light of her desire to catalyze change in the feminist historiography of the American South. She avoids the use of only gender as an analytical category to create a more even-handed interpretation of the struggle between women in the plantation household: “Unfortunately, gender wielded as a primary category of historical analysis often obscures as much as it reveals of the nature of social relations between free and enslaved, white and black women, in the plantation household.”[1] To alleviate the inherently narrowed lens Glymph identifies in choosing gender as a primary analytical category, she turns to race. While this approach tells a story of power relations between white and black women in the American South, it doesn’t necessarily revise the feminist scholarship in the field. Perhaps Glymph doesn’t intend to reinvent the use of gender as a primary analytical category, but her inclusion of a historiographical essay on its use (Chapter 1: The Gender of Violence) indicates that she does, indeed, seek to change the trajectory of the field. Her solution to the ills of using gender as a primary category of analysis, then, is to not use the category primarily at all.

Is Glymph’s method the only way to avoid the missteps of using primary categories of historical analysis? The reality of white women’s experiences in the patriarchal America South, which are acknowledged by Glymph, indicate that it might be possible to use gender as a primary category of analysis. Much of Glymph’s criticism of historians that do use gender as their lens for understanding the antebellum American South is that overall “white women’s agency has been profoundly underestimated.”[2] While this may be true, the use of gender as an analytical category may not be the root of such shortsightedness. Glymph defends her arguments about women’s power as slaveholders well, but these arguments only consider in part the brutalizing effect of American slavery on white women in the South. Glymph considers the plight of those women – their husbands’ sexual exploitation of enslaved women, frivolous spending habits, and recklessness, along with the conflict between their expectations as Southern ladies and the realities of plantation household management – but does so in spite of an overarching sentiment that their violence was a result of their power and identity as slave-owners.  As Nell Painter reveals in her article “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward A Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” scholars can write entire works before considering the effects of patriarchy and slavery on the master class. On page twenty-two of twenty-five, Painter concedes that “[s]o far in this discussion, only slaves have figured as the victims of physical and psychological abuse. But the ideals of slavery affected families quite apart from the toll they exacted from the bodies and psyches of blacks.”[3] Painter encourages historians to be wary of “the gorgeous surface that cultured slave owners presented to the world,” advice Glymph’s work exemplifies. However, Painter includes the abuse of white women in the factors contributing to soul murder throughout the American South. If white women had unique experiences of slavery because of their womanhood, their subjection to patriarchy, and their vulnerability to soul murder, then the use of gender as an analytical category is not one that must be combined with other categories if historians want to avoid a shortsighted interpretation that is overly sympathetic to the master class.

Stephen David Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).

Stephen David Kantrowitz presents a unique periodization of the nineteenth century to explain the legacy of black activists in attempting to form a positive understanding of citizenship. He traces their efforts to break down restricting racism from the emergence of such activists in the early 1930s through the Civil-War era and into the post-Reconstruction years. Such racism, he argues, limited colored citizens’ ability to realize inclusive, heart-felt citizenship in nineteenth-century America. Kantrowitz creates a holistic understanding of the antislavery movement as a part of a larger movement for a positive understanding of black citizenship. The “colored citizens” Kantrowitz focuses on aimed to change the meaning of the word “citizen” from a legal term to a ticket for inclusion and brotherhood within the “white republic.” Their efforts, according to Kantrowitz, were not successful in remaking the nation into one of tolerance and inclusion, but did however leave the nation forever changed.

The strongest and arguably the most interesting theme of More Than Freedom for scholars interested in the United States’ long history of inequality is Kantrowitz’s musing on the definition of citizenship adopted by black activists. In biographical vignettes, Kantrowitz considers black activist’s vision of citizenship in continuous conflict with the United States’ legal framework for citizenship. His geographical focus on Boston, Massachusetts reveals the discrepancy between the legal understanding of citizenship as a category that afforded Americans (including free blacks) the benefits of inclusion in a liberal democratic republic and the lived experience of America’s free colored population. Black activists, however, sought more than the equality supposedly owed them as a result of their ill-defined citizenship. Kantrowitz argues that they wanted also to be accepted as brothers of their white counterparts. Because of their goal to attain benefits likened to the French understanding of fraternity through citizenship, abolition in 1865 was not considered the end of their struggle. As Kantrowitz explains, “‘Abolition,’ essential but insufficient, was too small a box to contain their aspirations.”[1] He brings up a question that we can and should examine in our present, but also in historical studies of other eras and places: What is the relationship between rights and belonging?

Kantrowitz aptly argues that colored citizens’ involvement in labors beyond the political arena, including religious and fraternal organizations, proves their understanding throughout the Reconstruction years that obtaining important legal rights did not grant them the universal, sentimental “citizenship of the heart” they sought. Kantrowitz’s argument that their dreams of inclusion and brotherhood were squelched by the turn of the twentieth century is a necessary one, but not a new understanding of the failures of Reconstruction. He does make a seemingly creative argument that the end of slavery was not, for black activists and their white antislavery counterparts, the main goal. He reveals great agency in his subjects, who allegedly spurred the Civil War and abolition as a means to their end; a more emotional, shared understanding of being American. Kantrowitz places black activists, and at times, white antislavery advocates in a movement that goes beyond abolition, as read by Ted Maris-Wolf.[2] One interesting result of Kantrowitz’s aim in placing colored citizens at the center of the broader movement is that he reads certain events in American history understood by many scholars as demeaning for blacks in a new light. For instance, he understands the passage of the fugitive slave law as a galvanizing moment in the movement for citizenship of the heart.[3] This turn in understanding certain events is one that may seem troubling to historians interested in preserving the memory of American legislation as a marker of racial inequality and, often times, brutalizing for African-Americans.

Ultimately, the American perception of citizenship as a legal category persisted throughout the turmoil of the Civil War and for almost a century after. The prevalence of this understanding of citizenship brings up a question for the historian that Kantrowitz’s subjects faced in the nineteenth century: Can tolerance, belonging, or dignity be legislated? If not (as we see is the case in More Than Freedom’s pages), how can the hearts and minds of people in a country committed to a legal formation of society be won?

Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

“By making victimization the main story line of a struggle in which strikers actually inflicted more deaths than they suffered, historians have treated men, women, and children who demonstrated tremendous capacity for action as having been almost entirely acted upon.”[1] Thomas G. Andrews’s assertion in Killing For Coal is strikingly similar to arguments made against the work of Stanley L. Elkins, as reiterated by historian Nell Painter in a chapter titled “Soul Murder and Slavery.”[2]

While Elkins and Painter are best known as historians of race and slavery, Andrews has made his mark as a labor and environmental historian. In Killing For Coal, he provides a long view of the story leading up to the Colorado Coalfield War of 1914. He argues that the Coalfield War was not just an isolated outbreak of violence, but rather the boiling point of over a half-century struggle between mineworkers, capitalists, and the state. Andrews laments that scholars addressing the Coalfield War before him have skimmed over the event as an isolated example of Progressive Era Labor activism. Alan Dawley’s Changing the World (2003), Shelton Stromquist’s Reinventing “The People” (2006) and Maureen A. Flanagan’s America Reformed (2007), to name a few examples, miss the holistic approach Andrews calls for.[3] His argument, though made in reference to a different subfield than those aimed at the work of Elkins, is one that should be heeded by all historians. The historiographical isolation of events, power systems, and actors has a limiting effect on the retelling of the past.

Painter provides a glimpse of what Andrews’ holistic methodology looks like in the history of slavery. Stanley Elkins argued in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959) that the psychological damage inflicted on enslaved people in the American South permanently infantilized them.[4] He likened the results of slavery on people of African descent to the psychological damage experienced by victims of Nazi concentration camps. Elkins’ work received criticism very similar to that which Andrews dishes out to his peers: the total victimization of a people, whether they be slaves or mine workers, denies those people of their ability to act and relegates them to the position of being acted upon. As Painter points out, Elkins’ approach denies the slave “psychological personhood [and] impoverishes the study of everyone in slave-holding society.”[5] In Andrews subfield, studies as limited as Elkins’ distort “our ability to understand the tumultuous relationship between mineworkers, mine operators, and the state.”[6] Ultimately, Painter and Andrews are agreeing on the same alterations to history telling: a recasting of American labor history that gives the working classes some credit (or blame) for their actions. In the case of the Coalfield War, historians would be amiss to rest on the Coalfield War’s identity at a massacre rather than a battle fought by two parties. To do so would exclude yet another point made by historians of race as well as labor historians. As Michael J. Pfeifer argues in his 2011 work, The Roots of Rough Justice, the formation of American criminal justice occurred as a result of a combination of factors throughout the United States in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, Pfeifer points out Southern slavery and Western industrialization as factors that weakened due-process forces in those regions.[7] This fact is reiterated in Andrews’ telling of the years leading up to the Coalfield War, a period in which workers fought for their health and safety with no recourse. Finally, in 1914, their requests had been stifled too long and the workers took action. As Painter and Andrews both show, historians should avoid stealing the agency of historical actors who spurred change and experienced long-lasting damage in oppressive situations.

Alan M. Kraut, “Doing As Americans Do: The Post-Migration Negotiation of Identity in the United States” Journal of American History 101:3 (Dec. 2014): 707–725.

Political discourse about immigration in the United States marches on with great continuity. This historical trend reveals more about continuity than it does change, as Americans have been concerned with the process of immigrant assimilation since the nation’s conception. As Alan M. Kraut argues, historians often ask questions about the ways immigrants were assimilated in the past and how the relationship between “alien” and “American” has changed over time.  In asking these questions, they investigating a question also important to the general public: the relationship between identity and race.

The history writing of identity formation in the United States has arrived at a promising assumption: assimilation is a two-way street. Immigrants impact their communities in the United States with as much vigor as American culture impacts them. The historiography of assimilation has not, however, conceded this seemingly obvious conclusion. In the early years of the twentieth century cultural identity for immigrants was decidedly “old world” or “new world.” By the 1930s historians attempted to understand immigrants in their new homes, relinquishing some hold on the mutually exclusive “old” and “new” world identities. After World War Two, many historians struggled to understand how immigrants fit into the American mold, and what that mold was exactly, since it still excluded people of color. Finally, Richard Alba and Victor Nee presented the modern perception of assimilation as a double-paned window in 2003. Kraut’s analysis of historiography sparked an interest in a fresh approach to assimilation and immigrant identity formation.[1]

Kraut’s new perspective investigates the use of body modification to aid assimilation in immigrant communities, mostly during the years bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As he asserts, “the body of the immigrant is contested terrain where the process of identity negotiation occurs most visibly.”[2] Kraut proves in his investigation of voluntary cosmetic surgery by Asian or European immigrants that assimilation is not an automatic result of migration. The arguments of early twentieth-century thinkers aid in understanding why immigrants might have chosen a refurbished nose, or surgery to widen eyes that gave away their Asian roots. Anthropologist Franz Boaz argued (perhaps most convincingly to the modern reader) that the American environment changed appearance through changes in diet, exercise, and occupation. On the other hand, some physicians argued that differences in child rearing in immigrant communities contributed to the evolving physical appearance of children. This argument alluded to differences in the value placed on cultural elements such as sports, academics, or religion in different communities. As Kraut’s subjects were seeking surgical aids for physical assimilation, immigrant doctors were encouraging the physical assimilation of their patients into American society.

Kraut’s recognition of the practical malleability of racial identity brought on by twentieth-century cosmetic surgeries is reminiscent of Martha Hodes argument about the flexibility of racial systems writ large. As she follows a white, New England woman throughout her marriage to a West Indian mulatto man, Hodes explains the different identities assigned to both the white woman and her less-than-white husband as they cross the color line between the United States and the Caribbean. She argues that in the United States, any person of African descent could not be “white” by any means. In the Caribbean, on the other hand, a mulatto man could in fact be shaded whiter by means of class standing. Her argument mirrors on a more systemic level Kraut’s: racial systems are flexible and socially constructed. As Kraut shows, immigrants attempted to de-construct some of those racial systems with cosmetic surgery. Similarly, Paul A. Kramer defines race as a flexible category of identification. He argues that, in the case of the United States’ presence in the Philippines, race was used as a tool to assert power over those denied the rights of citizens of modern nation states. The American racial system, however, was not simply transplanted to the colony. Rather, a new racial system was formed, but identities were still defined in a racial context. Thus, race proves to be a flexible, but powerful, category of identity formation and negotiation.[3]

Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer lists Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune as a work of intellectual history contributing to the writing of capitalism’s history. As she aptly explains, the quantitative trend followed by historians of capitalism in recent years threatens to undermine more socio-cultural projects about capitalism’s development. Shermer makes these arguments in agreement with historian Louis Hyman, who argues that a heavy focus on finance in histories of capitalism underscores the larger questions historians should ask about everyday life and capitalism in the past. According to Shermer, “[h]istorians must begin reconciling the rich history done on risk, insurance, financial underwriting, and bailouts, for example, in the nineteenth century.”[1] Levy’s work is exactly the scholarship Shermer is pointing to.

Levy adds a well-researched and nuanced work to a growing amount of scholarship on insurance, finance, and risk in the history of capitalism. He extends the commodification of risk in capitalist, nineteenth-century America to the ideological underpinnings of American capitalism that we see at present, especially liberal individualism. Although the chapters of Freaks of Fortune are thematically organized appropriately, the anecdotal evidence used to frame them produces a sense of confusion as each new section begins. The chapters taken apart, however, are incredibly useful for examining how American thought evolved to understand and alleviate risk in the nineteenth century.

Levy discuses the financial tools used by Americans to manage risk as centrifugal to the concept of “double commodification.”[2] He understands this term as the way Americans came to understand commodities and the risk associated with them: there is value in both the commodity (or object being managed) and in the risk assigned to it. Both the owners of the object and the insurance firms assigned risks to commodities in a process of appraisal. This process, according to Levy, facilitated the acquisition of a sense of freedom. Ultimately, the freedom of the commodity owner, however, was merely perceived during the process of self-ownership. In actuality, the individual freedom of ownership simply transferred dependence to the financial system. Thus, the “freaks of fortune,” the ebbs and flows of the capitalist market, eventually controlled American life.

As Shermer argues, histories of capitalism rich with a socio-cultural perspective open up new questions in old subfields. Perhaps the most apparent subfield Levy’s work might spark inquisition in is the history of slavery. Historians who are considering the meaning of freedom in America during the nineteenth century could draw some conclusions, or at least direction, from Freaks of Fortune. One of the most salient anecdotes Levy provides is about the Creole uprising of 1841, when nineteen men overtook the crew of the ship carrying them as commodities to be traded in New Orleans. The incident, as Levy explains, made a case for legal dispute in the Louisiana courts about the connections between freedom, self-ownership, and risk.[3] Ultimately, Levy uses this case to argue that the attainment of freedom was also the acceptance of personal risk. Although this case is by far not the only interesting connection Levy provides between identity, commodification, and risk, it is one that I found particularly compelling. It is one example of how a history of capitalism might be useful to historians of another subfield. This case is an example of what Seth Rockman identifies as a trend in a “wave of new scholarship” on the history of capitalism: slavery is integral rather than oppositional to the capitalist system.[4] Both Rockman and Shermer contend that the history of capitalism, as shown in Levy’s work, “integrates a variety of subfields and methodologies [such as business, labor, economic, and political history] under one capacious heading.”[5]

Levy’s history of risk management in America extends into the progressive era, part of what Rockman calls “more specialized scholarship on U.S. Capitalism [that] rarely confines itself to the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”[6] Rockman argues that what Levy is contributing to is a re-periodization of U.S. History. This is, according to Rockman, particularly challenging for scholars of the early republic who previously held most ground in the history of capitalism. Rockman’s analysis of the new history of capitalism, however, questions the sustainability of such a field, which may be faddish. This leaves us with a question about the nature of historical subfields and the future for historians like Levy: Can a subfield dependent on its usefulness to other subfields of history sustain itself?

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.