What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
Starred Review.For this impressively researched Civil War social history, Georgetown  assistant history professor Manning visited more than two dozen states to comb  though archives and libraries for primary source material, mostly diaries and  letters of men who fought on both sides in the Civil War, along with more than  100 regimental newspapers. The result is an engagingly written, convincingly  argued social history with a point—that those who did the fighting in the  Union and Confederate armies "plainly identified slavery as the root of the  Civil War." Manning backs up her contention with hundreds of first-person  testimonies written at the time, rather than often-unreliable after-the-fact  memoirs. While most Civil War narratives lean heavily on officers, Easterners  and men who fought in Virginia, Manning casts a much broader net. She includes  immigrants, African-Americans and western fighters, in order, she says, "to  approximate cross sections of the actual Union and Confederate ranks." Based on  the author's dissertation, the book is free of academese and appeals to a  general audience, though Manning's harsh condemnation of white Southerners'  feelings about slavery and her unstinting praise of Union soldiers' "commitment  to emancipation" take a step beyond scholarly objectivity. Photos.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.