Common Soldiers and Slavery

I am a big fan of Chandra Manning’s book What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. She was recently interviewed by Peter S. Carmichael for the Civil War Times in their August 2008, Vol. 47, Issue number four. Here’s a sample of that interview:

In your book you say the war was about slavery. Why is that difficult for so many people to embrace?

Well, I didn’t start out thinking slavery was so central. The focus on slavery surprised me, and I suspect that’s part of why it surprises others. I was interested in enlisted men — most of whom were non-slaveholders — and it was not immediately apparent why somebody who didn’t own slaves would care about slavery. Their war must have been about something different, and my job was going to be to figure out what that was. I thought that the war for them was going to be this process of discovering that they had been hoodwinked into a war over slavery, that they would have gradually begun to withdraw loyalty from the cause because of that. That’s what I went looking for when I started with Confederates.

With Union soldiers, why would an ordinary Wisconsin farmer or Massachusetts shoemaker care about slavery? This seems counterintuitive to us today — that ordinary folks would care very much one way or another about it. I think that’s one major reason why it’s difficult to accept that slavery was as central as it actually was.

I think we also had a habit of reading Civil War soldiers backward — we had present-day assumptions about soldiers who did what they were told and didn’t think too much about it, particularly where slavery was concerned.