What This Cruel War Was Over book analysis essay
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an analysis essay on the book “What This Cruel War Was Over” by Chandra Manning.
Over the past few decades, historians have taken a closer look at the motivations that led soldiers to fight on both sides of the Civil War. Among those sources of
motivation, scholars have found that in their writings, Union and Confederate troops declared themselves to be waging a struggle for abstract (and contradictory)
principles like “equality,” “liberty,” or “self-government.” Chandra Manning’s book contributes to this scholarship by pointing out that beliefs about slavery and race
were central to the ways that ordinary men (North and South, black and white) understood those concepts.
Drawing on Manning’s book as well as relevant observations from the other course texts and discussions, write an essay that considers how the commitments soldiers made
during this war stemmed from (and also changed) their understandings of how slavery interacted with concepts of nationhood, masculinity, citizenship, and so forth.
