As I read What This Cruel War was Over, my mind traveled back to my fourth grade social studies class and our preparation for Virginia standardized tests, the SOLs. One of the practice exams for the Virginia/US history test featured part of a letter from a Confederate soldier to his family. While I do not remember what the letter said, the question asked what we could infer from the letter, and the answer was “That the Confederates were fighting bravely for their homes and families.” This question struck my teacher as both inaccurate and offensive—she was appalled that the state standardized tests would have a question about the Civil War without mentioning slavery. Yet as Manning showed in her book the question was only partially inaccurate. Yes, the question should have mentioned slavery’s role in the Civil War, but for Confederate soldiers it would have been impossible to think about fighting a war to preserve slavery without thinking about the preservation of their homes and families. Indeed, even as Union soldiers’ motivations for fighting the Civil War changed and developed, Confederate soldiers remained steadfast in their belief that the war was about protecting their families by defending the institution of slavery.
When the Civil War began in 1861, most southern soldiers joined the Confederate army with the goal of “securing a government that would do what government was supposed to do: promote white liberty, advance white families’ best interests, and protect slavery” (Kindle Edition, Locations 566-79). Additionally, Confederates “warned that abolition would obliterate the rights and duties of white manhood, chief among them the protection of white women’s virtue” (Kindle, Locations 689-702). Confederates thus fought to protect their families and their way of life. Manning argues that all of these arguments came back to slavery, and although she is correct in this assertion, she places too much emphasis on slavery. She notes “it is patronizing and insulting to confederate soldiers to pretend that they did not understand the war as a battle for slavery when they so plainly described it as exactly that” (Kindle, 620-32). Yet I would argue that it is patronizing for her to make the jump from quotes where Confederate soldiers “could rally to the ‘watch word of ‘Our Mothers, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, Our God and our country’” to analysis that stated “most of all, losing to the Union was unthinkable…because it would mean abolition” (Kindle, 1231-45). Slavery was important and slavery was tied to Southerner’s definition of family, but quotes like this one focus more on the importance of protecting white womanhood from the Union than on protecting slavery. These thoughts may even have been so connected that protection from the Union meant protection from abolition, but it is overly simplistic to think that the family always meant slavery—sometimes the family meant that white Southerners were appalled that their wives were starving, or had been forced to keep their opinions to themselves thanks to Butler’s Women Order.
By the end of the war Confederate soldiers’ motivations to stop fighting were nearly identical for their reasons to begin fighting. Manning notes that to Confederates, “Most obviously, the belief that an independent Confederacy would do a better job of furthering the interests of white southern families looked tragically ridiculous by the fourth year of the war, when men…regularly received letters from hungry families” (Kindle, 3913-26). Confederates were willing to surrender (and for many soldiers, desert) because if their families were suffering, then it was time to stop fighting and go back home to protect them. They left home to protect their families, and returned home to do the same. Throughout the war, their families were a constant motivation, and of course, protecting them from the end of slavery was part of that motivation.
However, it is important to note that Southerners did not know a world without slavery: it was inextricably linked to their way of life. Although this proves Manning’s point that slavery was key to the war, she focuses so much on slavery that attributes southern passion for family as passion for slavery. At times, they were the same passion (and sometimes the passion for slavery was stronger), but at times, the family was the motivator for Southerners to fight, and simply because they had never known the family without slavery does not mean that they only fought for the family because of slavery.