Reddit reviews What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War

The majority absolutely recognized that they were being treated unfairly. I think it's probably easiest to see this by reading through any number of the slave narratives that are out there. Many of these were funded by Northern abolitionists/anti-slavery activists during the war.

During the war itself, thousands of enslaved people left the plantations and headed toward Union lines. Many ended up in contraband camps, and many of the men fought as part of the USCT. I don't think they would have put themselves and their families at risk if they believed what their captors believed to be true about them.

After the war, the Great Migration caused thousands to leave their homes for a better life in the North and in Canada. They knew that they would never have been able to make lives for themselves while still living in the South. They sent their young daughters north to cities like Washington, DC to become domestics and hopefully get education and live the American dream.

There are a lot of resources available if you want to learn more. The WPA narratives of the 1930s provide a lot of insight into what many people went through. I believe you can download most for free on iBooks (if you've got an Apple device). iBooks has a lot of other really interesting things for free, like testimonies from anti-slavery societies, etc. A great (and short) read is a book called Our Nig, which is a narrative written by a "free" woman living in New Hampshire during the antebellum period, who is virtually enslaved via indentured servitude. Another is called Aunt Sally: or, The Cross the Way of Freedom which is about a woman enslaved in the deep south who is eventually purchased by her son, some 20 years after she last saw him. There are, of course, thousands of scholarly books about this very subject. Chandra Manning wrote a fairly compelling book called What This Cruel War Was Over, which describes the Civil War and the feelings of average people (black and white) about the war and its causes.

Have you read any of the state's declarations of secession? Here's excerpts from Georgia's:

Opening lines: "The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

It literally cites the growth of a political party committed to abolition of slavery as the main reason to break away from the Union: "The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation."

The big problem, according to Georgia, is that the North has become increasingly anti-slavery. They also cite the argument (a straw man, given how racist most everyone was in 1861) that abolitionists favor racial equality in addition to abolition. "The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees it its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.

With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.

The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization."

"Slave" or "slavery" appear 35 times in the document. "Right" appears only 7. "Nullification" appears 0. I'd be interested to hear any historians' opinions you can offer on the Nullification Crisis, which occurred in Andrew Jackson's presidency, was the main cause for a war 30 years later. I studied history in undergrad and took a Civil War history course. Almost every historian we read, especially anyone writing after 1930, cited slavery as the primary cause for the war. I would recommend anyone curious about what individual soldiers felt to check out Manning's What This Cruel War Was Over, which combs through hundreds of primary source letters, memoirs, etc. from soldiers and officers from both sides. Amazon link here.

> is it not true that the soldiers of the South, mostly poor, non slave owners, were fighting more for Southern pride and less for Slavery?

Honestly, not really. The idea of "Southern pride" as a principal motivator is correct in the abstract, inasmuch as individuals talked about the slights to Southern dignity and identity posed by the Union, but it has been greatly exaggerated in the years post-Appomattox compared to what folks actually said and wrote during the sectional conflict. We tend to underestimate the degree to which soldiers were aware of the conflict around them or motivated by "bigger" concepts that personal security or honor; the truth is that many Confederate soldiers were explicitly aware that slavery was the source of the division between North and South, and in particular that preserving slavery against Northern attempts to diminish it was the reason the Confederacy had seceded in the first place. The seceding states all said as much explicitly in their declarations of secession, which were widely published and disseminated among the Confederate civilian and military population.

Southern whites had a strong vested interest in the perpetuation of slavery as a foundation of their culture, because it gave them a) an explicit position in the social hierarchy that was above blacks, and b) was a possibility to which they could aspire economically. Even if they didn't own slaves, they were still better than slaves because they were free, and they could still treat slaves more poorly than they could fellow whites because slaves lacked rights. This was commonly understood and fairly deeply ingrained throughout Southern culture, which is everyone from merchants (exploiting cheap labor without compensation) to politicians (benefiting from the additional 60% boost in federal representation for the slave population granted by the Constitution) to religious leaders (preaching the Biblical justifications of slavery) throughout the South supporting the institution.

The "common man" was often fighting out of patriotism (both Northern and Southern soldiers write often about the feeling of national pride that compelled them to enlist), but also because of conscription. In either case, though, it's important to remember what that patriotism was founded in, and what conscripted soldiers thought they were being conscripted for. In the North, soldiers generally felt at the beginning that preserving the Union was the major reason they should fight, but the North had been radicalizing toward abolition through the 1850s, and by the middle of the war emancipation was an explicitly accepted and agreed-with goal for most Northern troops. Conscripts would have understood these causes as well, because they would have read what their governments told them.

Southern patriotism wasn't concerned with "regional pride" in the abstract, but with what Southern culture was - namely, an apartheid state based in the subjugation of blacks as a race. If Southerners were fighting for pride, that was what they were proud of. There wasn't really a "trick" insofar as the centrality of slavery is concerned, although we can have a question about whether poor Southern whites weren't better off after emancipation anyway because it robbed the plantation barons of their primary source of wealth (which was re-constituted anyway under Jim Crow sharecropping).

I highly recommend the book What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning. From the book's description: "Manning ignores the writings of elites and emphasizes the opinions of common soldiers, North and South, white and black. [. . .] Although acknowledging that many Union soldiers enlisted to preserve the Union rather than to fight slavery, she asserts that both slavery and emancipation were constant topics of discussion as early as 1861. She disputes that nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers (who were the overwhelming majority) fought primarily to defend hearth and home from Yankee invaders. Rather, she maintains that the defense of slavery was intimately tied to their sense of manhood, honor, and their place in the Southern social structures." She pretty conclusively demonstrates that both North and South understood that they were fighting because of slavery, and that Southern soldiers believed that defending the slavery system was vital to their own self-interest.

As for the subject of respecting the soldiers who fought the war, I'm not particularly concerned. We can honor our ancestors without glorifying them, and monuments to Confederate soldiers end up implying that the cause of the conflict was worth honoring as much as the individuals. Bravery is cheap; when there are more monuments to Southern Unionists (of which there were many, almost never honored with monuments in the South today) or abolitionists (who risked everything for their ideals in a hostile region) or the slaves themselves (who are more deserving of honor than anyone), then perhaps it will be worth erecting a few for the Confederate soldiers who died fighting to preserve slavery.

https://www.amazon.com/What-This-Cruel-War-Over/dp/0307277321/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543587922&sr=8-1&keywords=What+This+Cruel+War+Was+Over%3A+Soldiers%2C+Slavery%2C+and+the+Civil+War

It's based entirely on written primary material if you're interested in the topic.

You're so sensitive.

This thread among historians may be interesting to read:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yoyys/your_opinion_how_accurate_is_it_to_say_the_civil/?sort=top

I like this comment:

>I like to say that, to someone who learned about the civil from high school, the civil war was about slavery. To someone who took civil war history as an undergrad the war was about conflicting economic systems, tariffs, regional cultural differences, or something else. And that to the grad student studying the war, it was about slavery.

I've also heard good things about this book:

http://www.amazon.com/What-This-Cruel-War-Over/dp/0307277321