More polemical than historical
I am about 40 pages into the book and doubt I can go on. I am no 'Southern Apologist' but victors write the history, and I think the schoolboy version of the Civil War (Civil War was fought to end slavery, Lincoln freed the slaves) is woefully short of the mark.
Many of Manning's assertions are made in the absence of facts to support them, and I am deeply suspicious that she knew her assertions before she ever put finger to keyboard. The entire narrative about Southern honor, family life, and the meaning of Southern manhood is too convenient, and the good/bad duality of the opposing sides can't be fully true.
I find the premise that the reason for the war can be explained by those who fought it to lack validity. As we have had the sad opportunity to again have a volunteer army fight an elective war, we can use what contemporary soldiers have to say about Iraq as a test for the utility of that research concept. I have heard contemporary soldiers say they are fighting for our freedom, to get Saddam because he was behind 9-11, to bring democracy to Iraq, and so on. My opinion is that it is none of these things. A historian using today's soldiers as a way of understanding what Iraq is about would come up with the wrong view of the reason for the war. A historian could also find 100 emails to support almost any thesis for why the war was fought.
I was also taken aback by the discussion of the embrace by the soldiers of President Lincoln. Manning describes the love of the soldiers for Lincoln as being based in their shared knowledge of the importance of ridding the US of slavery, in advance of the rest of the Union population. For me this argument was excessive, as the soldiers' loyalty and affection can also be described more simply as the affection of any individual for a strong yet caring leader. Reading other histories it is clear that Lincoln cried for every loss, and that the army knew it.
Any more investment of my time in this book is not warranted, because frankly, I have grown to dislike the author's writing style.
Another far-reaching thesis without sufficient sampling
This is just another thesis presented without sufficient sampling. Many authors go through maybe a few hundred letters and then declare they know what every person thought and felt almost 150 years ago. This, of course, would not pass our standards for polling data today, so why do we eat it up when so-called "historians" do it? It is academically dishonest and intellectually lazy.
Manning, and authors like her, have admitted before that the samplings are not actually representative of the armies themselves. Most people writing the letters were educated and came from better backgrounds -- white collar upbringing as opposed to poor farmers' sons. Officers are more likely to be represented than enlisted men. This means you are more likely to see Union soldiers (educated) waxing poetic about issues, but you are also more likely to see Confederate soldiers supporting slavery (slaveholders' sons). This does not present a fair picture.
Now, is Manning entirely wrong? We have no way of knowing for sure. It is doubtful that there will ever be enough letters found from enough individuals to provide a truly clear picture of the day. There are cases on both sides that would directly contradict Manning and similar authors, but they simply ignore such findings. This, again, is academically dishonest and intellectually lazy. A historian's job is to present the best possible picture based on what is available, but you should never claim to have a definitive picture when you clearly don't.
Manning has written articles for various Civil War magazines where she seems to assume every possible issue is race- and slavery-related when a Southern person wrote it. If they said they are fighting for their homes, they really meant to say to protect their homes from slaves. If they didn't own slaves, they really fought to have the chance to own slaves. If they said they wanted to protect their families, they really meant to say they were worried their wives and children would be raped by slaves. Of course, this is academically dishonest and intellectually lazy (detecting a pattern?). You cannot automatically assign perceived intent to someone from 150 years ago because of your own bias against them. Manning does this, however, and is not questioned.
I have ancestors that fought on both sides of the war. My Union ancestors were from a state that passed a law barring free blacks from entering the state for more than 15 days and also reserved the right to sell black people w/o proper papers into indentured servitude (slavery by another name) -- Illinois. My Confederate ancestors never owned any slaves, and their French families had been in Louisiana before there was a United States, much else a Confederate States.
Am I supposed to believe my Union ancestors fought and sometimes even died out of a need to free the blacks when their own state hated the black race as official policy?
Am I supposed to believe my Confederate ancestors fought and sometimes even died to protect an institution they took no part in?
Manning is free to present her thesis, but she crosses the line when she tries to present her work as definitive as she has done in numerous articles. Her sampling is relatively minuscule, a tiny drop of rain on a vast ocean of knowledge. She can in no honest way claim to know what the majority of men thought on either side.
Academically dishonest and intellectually lazy.
Looking at the Civil War with new perspective
I had a history professor who challenged us to look at WWII from the perspective of WWI, not from the perspective of today and the hindsight that offers. The challenge made history more real and understandable.
Chandra Manning offers readers the same challenge--look at the Civil War from the perspective of a nation born only a few decades before, rather than from today. When we inflict our hindsight judgment on history, we fail to give those who created it a fair shake.
Union soldiers' letters showed they entered the war from the idea of wanting to prove the republican self-government worked that was based on the Declaration of Independence less than a century earlier. The world was watching the new country, and the Union soldiers saw secession as egregious.
Confederate soldiers likened their revolution against the Union to the colonies' revolution against Great Britain. The new Confederate government was about promoting white liberty while protecting slavery and the Confederate way of life.
Slavery was hardly on the radar screen for most white Union soldiers. Their concern was the success of the new government. Eventually the Union soldier saw that slavery is what tore the Union apart. From that perspective, it's easy to see how the Union soldier could fight to eliminate the very thing that threatened the new government--slavery.
From Lincoln's election on, the North's position was to prohibit the expansion of slavery. The war was a necessity, in the South's view, if their homes and families were to remain safe.
Chandra Manning offers a chronological accounting of the war from the people who fought it. As you read, you can see how both the northern and southern soldiers' attitudes evolved. Slaveholders and non-slaveholders held similar beliefs on the war's beginnings and its impact on keeping the fight going.
Any Civil War or history buff will enjoy this book. It's well documented with 85 pages of notes and 22 pages of primary sources. You'll be hard pressed to find so much at your fingertips again.
Armchair Interviews says: Treat yourself to a walk forward through history. You see things from a different perspective.
The Neo-Confederate's Nightmare
This book is a "must-read" for anyone who has a friend/acquaintance who champions the "Old South's" cause.
This book puts a stake in the heart of the assertion that the war was not about slavery, but rather "states' rights." Not only does it reveal, in well-researched detail, the understanding among southern soldiers that the war was being fought to maintain white dominance over blacks (through slavery) but it also reveals the horror that gripped northern soldiers as they entered the south and saw the reality of human bondage.
The book is also revealing in presenting how the two sides differed in their application of the Christian teachings of the Second Great Awakening, earler that century.
Impressive Populist History
Chandra Manning has written a book that turns a bright new light on Civil War history. Her book is as exciting as it is well-researched. Manning is out to show what the actual soldiers felt who did the fighting and the dying. Her writing is clear and accessible to the lay reader and she organizes the text chronologically, in 6-month increments, to show how attitudes among northern and southern soldiers shifted with the progress of the war. She has studied extensive collections of documents, letters, diaries, journals and regimental newspapers in various collections in all the pertinent states, to show what individual soldiers said to loved ones and to one another. This is utterly fascinating and makes her book sympathetic and almost impossible to put down.
What I found most impressive was the documentation of attitudes, motives and inspiration for waging the conflict and how these changed over time. Initially, both sides believed they were champions of the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence, though each side had a different perspective on what those principles were. Southern soldiers were conflicted about the war because they fought for their roles as protectors of a way of life as a slave society - whether or not they were themselves slaveholders - and as farmers, husbands, sweethearts and fathers. Being absent from home in order to defend this way of life was paradoxical because defending the home as an abstract matter conflicted with the ability to perform that function where it mattered most - by actually being at home. Penetration of the southern heartland by northern armies left many southern soldiers anxious about the families, farms and homes they left behind, which were vulnerable to Union troops. As Manning observes, it is small wonder that southern desertion rates were very high. The values Confederates reportedly identified as prompting them to take and remain in the field (that is, to protect home and family as well as their roles as masters of the home and plantation) were very different from the more abstract concerns of Union troops (i.e., for the perpetuation of democracy and equality). Racist animosity, widespread among northern troops at the beginning of hostilities, gradually was supplanted by respect, then admiration for the valor of blacks who became, if not comrades in arms, then heroes in the cause. Religious sentiment also reflected these same values in a way that is startlingly familiar to readers acquainted with modern differences in how Americans feel about Christianity. Among Union soldiers, Christianity was perceived as a moral, activist faith, whereas for Confederates it was more a matter of seeking salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus.
Manning has dealt another lethal blow to the never-credible myth of the Confederacy as a "noble cause." She has also fleshed out precisely what causes the soldiers felt they were advancing, and dying for. This is a book that deserves to be widely read. I join those who eagerly await Ms. Manning's next volume.
(9 reviews)
