From the beginning, men on both sides regarded it as the reason they were fighting, says an impressive history.
"What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War"
By Chandra Manning
Knopf. 368 pp. $26.95
Reviewed by Chuck Leddy for The Philadelphia Inquirer
It wasn't until later in the Civil War, in the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural speech, that Abraham Lincoln began describing the horrific sacrifices of the war as this nation's necessary atonement for the sins of slavery. But in doing so Lincoln was simply, albeit with breathtaking eloquence, reflecting views that Union soldiers had already developed, according to historian Chandra Manning. "Ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers recognized slavery as the reason for the war" right from the beginning, says Manning, despite Lincoln's initial wartime rhetoric about "preserving the Union."
A history professor at Georgetown University, Manning began this exhaustive study of how soldiers on both sides viewed slavery as a Harvard doctoral dissertation. She spent years sifting through archives of letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers in order to develop a "bottom up" historical understanding of how Civil War soldiers regarded slavery.
What This Cruel War Was Over is unique for its breathtaking depth of research (Manning's footnotes and research notes cover 110 pages) and for the author's impressive objectivity in analyzing the attitudes toward slavery on both sides.
Manning illustrates how Union troops could hold antislavery views while simultaneously being racists to the core: "White Union soldiers," Manning says, "strove mightily to keep the issues of slavery and black rights separate.
" 'I have a good degree of sympathy for the slave,' one private admitted, 'but I like the Negro the farther off the better.' " While this coexistence of antislavery and racist views may seem contradictory to modern sensibilities, it was not uncommon among Union soldiers, many of whom were immigrants wary of economic competition from blacks.
A larger question is why Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves would risk everything fighting to protect slavery. And here is where Manning's study is at its scholarly best. She meticulously explores the differing conceptions of "liberty" and "manhood" on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, concluding that even poor, non-slaveholding Confederate soldiers viewed slavery as essential to their way of life.
Non-slaveholding whites lived in a Southern "biracial society, which they assumed would explode in race war without slavery," writes Manning. Fear of miscegenation and black equality completely undermined their conceptions of themselves, their families, and their world. They "regarded black slavery as vital to the protection of their families, interests, and very identities as men, and they relied on it to prevent race war." What most united the Confederacy and its soldiers, Manning says repeatedly, was their hatred of Northern-imposed abolitionism.
Meanwhile, Union soldiers witnessing slavery for the first time grew disgusted with the institution as promoting brutality, laziness, and adultery. Union troops saw slave children forcibly separated from their mothers, slave babies obviously fathered by white masters, and the everyday violence of the slave system.
Manning writes of a Pennsylvania regiment that captured a white slave-catcher in South Carolina and gleefully sent him through their ranks: "First one soldier and then another lifted his foot and gave a kick on the posterior and so on till he passed beyond the line of the regiment."
When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, he justified it as a military necessity, a means to weaken the Confederacy by denying it human resources for fighting the war. Union soldiers generally supported Lincoln's proclamation as a practical wartime measure, though some questioned its legality. "One Pennsylvania corporal," notes Manning, "personally opposed slavery, but worried that the proclamation violated constitutional guarantees for the institution, which mattered in a war fought in defense of the Constitution." Lincoln obviously agreed, because he later tirelessly lobbied for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery. For Confederate soldiers, the proclamation simply hardened their determination to fight on.
While support for emancipation among Union troops changed over time - cresting after the victory at Gettysburg - the belief (on both sides) that slavery was the central issue of the war never did. The tragedy, of course (one Manning fully recognizes), was that emancipation unleashed larger aspirations on the part of freed blacks - for voting rights, equal treatment in public accommodations, and equal education. These would be dashed soon after Lincoln's assassination (and for the next century). Manning's final words rightfully bemoan "how the United States could in the crucible of war create such vast potential for change and then, in the end, fail to fulfill it." Despite its sometimes academic narrative style, Manning's book makes an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery and the Civil War.
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Chuck Leddy is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and writes frequently about the Civil War.
Would the Southern "Slave Power" Enslave Free Northern Whites?
Why Northern Whites Had Reason to Fear the South
Anti-slavery activists were quick to point out that slavery endangered poor white Northern laborers. If Northerners were made slaves to Southern political power, then the next logical step would be the actual enslavement of free white people, especially those of the laboring class who were poor and vulnerable. Republican literature of the antebellum period constantly warns against "white slavery," and the South's barely hidden wish to eventually take over the entire country and expand the slave system to include Northern white laborers.
Many Northerners strongly believed that figurative white slavery would lead ultimately to literal white slavery for the free states. The proof of this was not only Southern political power at the federal level but the proved willingness of the Slave Power to put the sanctity of slave "property" above ties of race and kinship.
The abolitionist press played up the issue of white persons being kidnaped, and with good reason. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 provided for no protection against false identification. There was no formal hearing, no due process of any kind. The accused "slave" had no time to summon witnesses to vouch for his or her identity. In the case of a child claimed as a slave, this helplessness was even greater. Add to this the outrageous fact that the commissioner charged with determining the identity of the accused fugitive received double his fee if he found in favor of the slave-catcher. Bribery was built into the law. In response, Northern states passed a series of "personal liberty" laws to provide due process to accused slaves and nullify the effects of the federal law. Pro-slavery forces reacted with outrage to this assertion of "states' rights."
It is amazing to discover how much the issue of "white slaves" and "white slavery" were part of the antebellum political agenda. It is rarely mentioned today. Tenzer quotes from historian Russel B. Nye:
If slavery was a positive good, and the superior political, economic and social system that the South claimed it to be, it seemed reasonable to expect that the next step would be an attempt to impose it upon the nation at large for the nation's own good...It was easy, said the abolitionists, to take one more step, to show that if slavery were the best system for inferior races, it was also the best for inferior classes, regardless of race.
In 1858, Congressman Philemon Bliss of Ohio predicted the enslavement of free "white" labor if the South could not be checked:
The more honest advocates of slavery have already repudiated the idea that it should be the sole condition of any race, and many of them would impose it upon all hand laborers. Free labor would have to compete with slave labor and could not survive.
Editorials like this one from the 1856 Marshall Statesman (Michigan) were common:
The doctrine of white slavery is now openly broached South of the Potomac. This is no more than could be expected, because the difference in color, especially in Virginia, is so slight that sometimes it is absolutely impossible to tell whether an individual has any African blood in his veins or not....hence rises this new doctrine ...SLAVERY BLACK OR WHITE, IS RIGHT AND NECESSARY.
In 1856 The Anti-Slavery Bugle predicted the eventual enslavement of "white" immigrant labor:
What security have the Germans and Irish that their children will not, within a hundred years, be reduced to slavery in this land of their adoption?...Is color any protection? No indeed.
It is relevant here to report an incident from another book, Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest by Donald S. Frazier because it perfectly exemplifies the proslavery contempt for labor, free society and "social inferiors." In 1856, Philemon T. Herbert, a Democratic Congressman from Texas, shot and killed the Irish headwaiter at Willard's Hotel in Washington, D.C. for refusing to serve him breakfast after the posted time. This incident was widely publicized during that election year as evidence of Southern or proslavery contempt for all working people - white or otherwise. In the South itself, Herbert was hailed as a hero who acted exactly as a Southern gentleman should. He avenged an "insult" to his "honor" and put an "inferior" in his place. Add to this incident the even more infamous 1856 case of antislavery champion Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts being almost clubbed to death in the Senate chamber by South Carolina Congressman Preston S. Brooks (another matter of Southern "honor") and you can see how the North came to increasingly view the Southern "Slave Power" as fanatical and contemptuous of the rights of others - even "whites."
In 1862 The Iron Platform, a New York workingman's paper, knew what was really at stake during the Civil War.
There is one truth which should be clearly understood by every workingman in the Union. The slavery of the black man leads to the slavery of the white man...If the doctrine of treason is true, that Capital should own labor, then their logical conclusion is correct, and all laborers, whether white or black, are and ought to be slaves.
Was the North Paranoid About White Slavery? Was the Threat to Northern Whites Real?
The North has good reason to fear the kidnaping of "whites" into slavery. The average "white" Southerner was quite poor. Hundreds of thousands of families lived on less than $100 per year. Even skilled laborers averaged no more than $600 or $700 a year. Consider then that the average price of a slave in 1850 was $400, more money than many ordinary people would earn in a year. The 1850s saw a rapid growth in slave prices, with many slaves being worth well over $1,000 or even $2,000. How many men would not be tempted to make a little kidnaping expedition to the North? And, if you found a person who looked like the "light mulatto" slave you were chasing, would you really care whether the suspect was indeed the fugitive or even a "pure" white when you have so much money to gain?
We must also consider the fact, that contrary to the neo-confederate view that the "War Between the States" was fought to free Southern states from the "tyranny" of the federal government, the antebellum period was characterized by Northern states asserting their rights and sovereignty against a proslavery federal tyranny. In addition to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the North felt the power of the South and the tyranny of proslavery forces in these ways:
From 1836 to 1844 pro-slavery forces in the House of Representatives passed and implemented the so-called "gag rule," a nullification of the First Amendment right of free speech whereby antislavery petitions to Congress were no longer heard.
From the 1830s until the Civil War, the Southern pro-slavery forces censored the United States mail. Postmasters were forbidden to deliver antislavery literature into the slave states.
In 1845 Texas was annexed as a slave state.
In 1846 the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery from the territories acquired in the Mexican-American War was defeated by proslavery forces in Congress.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 negated the Missouri Compromise and made slavery possible in any of the territories. New states that came from the territories could easily become slave states, thereby increasing Southern power.
A proslavery U.S. Supreme Court existed from the 1840s until the Civil War.
Who could doubt that the South had the political power and will to eventually nationalize slavery and augment its slave population with the laboring classes of the free states?
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