What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning

Chandra Manning investigates what “ordinary soldiers thought about the  relationship between slavery and the Civil War”. But in one of the most important recent books on the Civil War—it draws from the letters and diaries of over 1,100 Civil War soldiers, both U.S. and Confederate, and the regimental newspapers these soldiers edited—Manning shows us how slavery mattered in ways that have previously eluded scholars.