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Slavery: Everyone’s Problem

Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War was Over furthers the argument that slavery was indeed at the core of the sectional conflict and Civil War; so naturally she presents various arguments to explain why Southerners would fight to uphold the institution whether they owned slaves or not, as well as why Northerners would fight for the explicit abolition of slavery, regardless of their views on racial equality. What’s more, she supports each of her arguments with multiple quotes from the soldiers themselves.

Manning argues that slavery was deeply ingrained into the social order and ideals of the South. She writes that white Southern men had a “gut-level conviction that survival – of themselves, their families, and the social order – depended on slavery’s continued existence” (page 32). She claims that white Southerners had a different view of liberty than their Northern counterparts, viewing liberty as the prerogative of the white man to maintain equality with other white men and better the situation of his family. Slavery was a crucial part of this promise, as its existence guaranteed that no matter how bad things got, a white man could never reach the lowest rung on the social ladder: that of the slave. In addition, however difficult it may be, a white man always had the possibility to eventually own slaves. “Especially for the economically insecure, the hope of slave ownership staked a claim to white equality in a competitive world that offered few guarantees,” Channing writes (page 34). This hope, and the knowledge of their equality with other whites and supposed superiority over blacks, helped satisfy white Southerners and unite them in a society which otherwise was quite stratified.

Union soldiers also had manifold reasons for enlisting, but many of them related directly to slavery. Some soldiers feared that a powerful slave oligarchy of old money was seeking to control the nation, and reacting treasonously when it did not get its way. This was simply unacceptable, as it broke the rules of democracy and therefore cast doubt on if a republican government could survive after all. Regardless of how they felt about black Americans, many Union soldiers believed that slavery was like a poison in the South, damaging the virtue of the region and threatening that of the entire nation. As one of many examples, Channing reports that “a Vermont soldier claimed that the moral ‘stigma’ of slavery brought ‘animosities and wranglings’ down on the nation and threatened its very existence” (page 43). Whether or not these soldiers felt any empathy towards the plight of slaves themselves, they often believed that the only way to ultimately save the Union was to end slavery once and for all, or conflict was sure to spring up again. Channing quotes “a Missouri private [who] agreed that since ‘it was slavery that caused the war,’ it would take ‘the eternal overthrow of slavery’ to win it,” and a Wisconson soldier who assessed that “men of all parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permantly establish the Union, is to first wipe [out] the institution” of slavery (page 45).

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