Can Soldiers Tell Us Anything about Lincoln?

I would like to thank Chandra M. Manning for offering an article to my site SoldierStudies.org. Chandra is a Georgetown University Assistant Professor of History and received the 2008 Lincoln Prize Honorable Mention and a $10,000 prize for her book What this Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. I started SoldierStudies.org with the simple hope to create a free online database that was dynamic and offered researchers and educators a real and viable resource. (I hired a PHP programmer and he did a great job!) I have received testimony and feedback from some of the biggest names in Civil War scholarship and am truly humbled. Thanks to everyone. So, here is the intro to her piece and a link to my site where you can read her’s and other excellent articles (by professional historians) about Civil War soldiers.

In this bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, it is easy to feel a little overwhelmed by the deluge of books, articles, and newspaper columns on the sixteenth president, and to begin to wonder if there could possibly be anything left to say. Yet for all of what a later age might call “exposure” –for all that we can find books on Lincoln’s friends, marriage, summer home, speeches, and more besides—stubborn mysteries persist. One of them is, how did a man who genuinely hated slavery but who was also worried about the legality and aftereffects of its sudden destruction, become a President willing to wield federal power to achieve the immediate destruction of slavery? It is very easy, in trying to answer that question, to get trapped into a tiresome and uninspiring debate about whether Lincoln was a near-mythic superhero, singlehandedly saving the nation and ridding it of evil in a single bound, or a hypocritical racist forced by circumstances beyond his control to take actions that he would preferred not to have taken, but at least cheered by the opportunity to wield power, which pleased his tyrannical side. Neither caricature really tells us very much about Lincoln, or about emancipation. Yet if we widen our angle of inquiry to look at Lincoln and emancipation in a broader frame that also includes Union soldiers, we might see new possibilities. It would be too much to claim that soldiers convinced Lincoln to end slavery, but the war in which both Lincoln and soldiers were swept up changed all of them in similar and related ways. In short, Union soldiers’ firsthand observations of slavery, interactions with slaves, and experience of a war far more terrible than they expected convinced them that the only way to win the war and save the Union was to end slavery. The length and ferocity of the war later convinced many of them that the end of slavery had to be for principled rather than simply utilitarian reasons, because the whole nation, and not just the South, was implicated in slavery. Lincoln’s own observations of slaves and freedpeople in the nation’s capital, the changing attitudes of Union soldiers, and the profound and pervasive loss brought by a terrible war propelled Lincoln along a path from sincere dislike of slavery and an abstract desire for it to end someday to a willingness to use federal power to emancipate immediately. His path also went from a pragmatic stage to a principled one. One of his greatest accomplishments as leader was to recognize that soldiers and slaves had blazed that path, and then to bring the nation as a whole along it, too.…To read more