Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

== Summary ==
This
book examines what soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and
the Civil War. Manning argues, on both sides of the war – union and confederate
– soldiers “recognized slavery as the reason for the war.” This book places
slavery as the center of soldiers’ ideas about the war and compares and
contrast the experiences of Union and Confederate soldiers and how, when, and
why their ideas about the war changed. Confederate soldiers, even those
non-slaveholding, forged a patriotism based on white men’s perceptions of the
best material and ideological interests of their loved ones, which they assumed
to depend on the survival of slavery. Slavery was closely connected to Southern
notions of manhood. “A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for
white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks as
well as over women and children.” (12) Southerners feared that emancipation of
slaves would lead to the murder and the sexual violation for white women. Union
Soldiers, on the other hand, fought because they believed the war was about the
survival of ideals like liberty, equality, and self-government for all humanity
(millennialist overtones of improving society). Manning argues that the
enlisted men in the Union Army forged a link between the slaves and policy
makers. “Slaves themselves did force emancipation onto the Union agenda” but
one of the most important was converting Union Soldiers, who developed into
emancipation advocates in 1861 and 1862 and expected their view to influence
the prosecution of the war. Union soldiers came to examine and redress how
their own racial attitudes made them complicit in slavery. Wartime experiences
convinced union soldiers that slavery needed to be destroyed in order to win
the war and redeem the American republic. And, finally, black Americas, those
that joined the Union fight, grasped from the beginning that the war was about
slavery, and interpreted their involvement as a struggle for black freedom,
equality, and inclusion within the promises of the American Revolution. On each
side, slavery was the central motivating factor for fighting in the Civil War.  
Example: The
length of the war – especially the battles at Gettysburg and Vicksburg – as
well as the performances of black union soldiers forced white union soldiers to
further confront their racial attitudes. Manning writes: “The events of the
summer of 1863 urged many white members of the Union Army to look critically at
themselves and their own society, and to act on the impression that they had not
yet please God by calling for an expansion in the reach of founding ideals like
equality beyond the racial limits that had once seemed fixed and intractable.”
(125) 
See also: James Oakes, Eric Foner,