South Carolina's Civil War: A Narrative History Book

I love Manning's style: blunt but not preachy, detailed but not bogged down in minutia. That slavery was the cause of the war is only doubted by Neo-Confederates and older folks who grew up in the days when some called it The War Between the States. Question is how did the soldiers interact with slavery?

The way soldiers saw slavery is complicated. Union soldiers were conflicted less on emancipation than on what it meant. Black soldiers were conflicted about serving a government that was often dismissive. Yet, her comments on Confederates are the most original. She contends that their goals were selfish, that is to protect home, family, and the racial order that protected both. As the war hurt their families, and the Confederacy failed to live up to its ideals (unobtrusive government) and to protect family and slavery, the soldiers lost faith. Yet, the men fought on because they could not conceive a world without slavery. This is the cruelest testament I have yet read to the importance of imagination and creativity in politics. If one cannot conceive of a different world then the nightmare of the Confederacy is inevitable.

The conclusion, however subtle, is that the difference between North and South went deeper than slavery. Religion, politics, and the nature of society were wholly different in each section. The case can be overstated. Certainly localism was a strong current in the North. The war gave birth to renewed ideas on liberty and justice, but also nationalism. The degree to which the North fought for union and nation and its relation to slavery is now being justly debated while questions of Confederate nationalism continue to be argued. I ultimately think nationalism was a strong current in both armies, but with limits. Southerners worried more about family and Northerners were never quite the radical reformers of some fevered Neo-abolitionist minds. Both agreed that whatever nation would arise would be one for white men, and that explains why Reconstruction failed and segregation was allowed to happen. The real mystery is not that racial justice had its limits but that historians keep pondering its possibilities despite a mountain of evidence about the North's racist attitudes. To be fair though, racial equality was at a low ebb throughout the world in the Victorian era. The American Civil War was among the last great liberation moments of that period.

The subtext of the book is, or at least the conclusion I drew, was that America is still a nation divided. The South is the home of political conservatism, racial prejudice, and a narrow, individualistic philosophy where government exists to allow access to wealth for white men. The North is the home of progressivism but also one with hard limits on change. As Manning notes, the soldiers came to universally embrace emancipation, but not equality. All in all, the Civil War becomes less a revolutionary moment and more a transformation, bloody and catastrophic, but a largely unfinished one-hundred years later. We are still picking up the pieces from "that cruel war." I might say nothing is finished, that we are still picking up the pieces from the fall of Rome, but there is with the Civil War an immediacy. We feel it in our bones that is not over and the coming years I fear may bear some bitter fruit.