Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2008)

Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2008)

This book uses letters, diaries, and even regimental newsletters from Civil War soldiers. With sources from both North and South, black and white, the book covers what soldiers believed the war to be about. Using sources from throughout the war, she discovers that slowly more and more came to view the war to be about slavery.

Chandra Manning

Manning, Chan. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. Vintage. 2008.

2008

Book

In the East, Confederates enjoyed springtime victories in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, but federal movements elsewhere in the Old Dominion gave cause for alarm. The Union General George McClellan's elaborately planned Peninsula Campaign involved sailing the Army of the Potomac to Fortress Monroe at the tip of the peninsula between the York and James Rivers, and then moving it up toward the Confederate capital. After taking Yorktown and Williamsburg, Union forces steadily progressed, arriving withing six miles of Richmond by the end of May. Aided by the weather and a new leader, Gen. Robert E. Lee. Confederates stopped the Union advance and saved the capital in a series of battles (culminating in the Seven Days battles) that resulted in even more casualties than Shiloh. Through it all, the intensity of the fighting mounted ferociously. "Manassas ... was mere child's play compared with those [battles] in which we have been lately engaged,' explained one South Carolinian after Seven Days. Some confederates responded to the escalation with increased hatred toward the enemy. Hoping to push Union troops out of Arkansas and Missouri, Texas cavalryman John Wall desired to see "the edges of the we[s]thern states be paved with the yankey's and duches [foreign-born soldiers] bons and drenched with ther blud."

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