We talked at the end of last class about the maximal explanation vs. the minimal explanation. Manning, like all good American historians, did an extraordinary amount of document sifting to excellent maximal answer to the motivations of soldiers in both armies with regards to slavery. What I found best about Manning’s analysis was not the change-over-time aspect (which was great) but how she provided a much broader view of what slavery meant to the soldiers. For men in both armies, slavery represented the core of the society that needed to be changed or upheld. Thus you didn’t need a personal connection to slavery to fight for it, only a connection to your Northern or Southern society.
Manning puts forth a sweeping statement regarding Confederates’ motives:
“For the men who filled the Confederate ranks, secessions, the Confederacy, and the war were not about state sovereignty…[they] were about securing a government that would do what government was supposed to do: promote white liberty, advance white families’ best interests, and protect slavery.”
After reading the book, I believe that all three of these desires really boil down into one point – to preserve white social interests at the expense of black slaves. Manning points out that “White equality was fragile in an antebellum South” and that the concept (maybe not practice) of slavery represented the American dream of getting ahead. The most detailed argument that Manning presents is that slavery was central to the Southern man’s concept of society and manhood. She gives examples in which white men rallied against the “fanatical marauders” of the North whose abolition would make “the daughters of honest white yeomen… helpless against the sexual advances of black men. “ (p. 36) Manning’s argument, essentially boils down to the psychological argument that Southern men needed the institution of slavery as an extension of their self-worth. They were fighting to keep a system in which –even if one did not own slaves – one could feel manly by one’s assumed duty of protecting white women and degrading the black man. Her argument is too psychological for my taste without comprehensive written proof.
On the flip side, Manning provides strong arguments for why soldiers in the Union fought for abolition despite harboring their own racist prejudices. Without digressing into the debates within the Union Army about abolition or the various swings of soldiers’ opinion towards slavery in response to the fortunes of war, I found Manning’s strongest argument to be that Union soldiers fought for abolition because of how slavery affected the Southern white population.
“Enlisted Union soldiers came to the conclusion that winning the war would require the destruction of slavery partly because soldiers’ personal observation of the South led many to decide that slavery blighted everything it touched.”
This is a powerful statement that encompasses a lot of the moral judgments Union soldiers laid upon the South. They believed slavery made Southerners lazy and immoral. Slavery, insinuated the soldiers, made respectable white men “indulge their lustful passions by exploiting female slaves, who were in turn robbed of their chastity. Manning also talks about the revolution in the soldiers’ attitudes towards slavery in 1862-63 and the push towards total abolition. Her argument is interesting because she explains that the push towards abolition was in part due to the horrors of slavery seen by soldiers, but also an introspective look. In a roundabout way, Manning argues that soldiers wished to emancipate slaves, not because slaves deserved equal rights (one soldier wrote ‘What is a white who forgets that he stands above the African?’ P 96), but because slavery was a moral stain on their beloved nation, the “city upon a hill” that was to project the best possible ideals to the world.