I once found a great excerpt about how horrified Northern soldiers were by the brutality of the South and how they were more than happy to raze the entire place. I can't find it now.
Does anyone have any books or documents they can recommend?
I once found a great excerpt about how horrified Northern soldiers were by the brutality of the South and how they were more than happy to raze the entire place. I can't find it now.
Does anyone have any books or documents they can recommend?
There's a collection of articles and letters written by Marx and Engels on the Civil War that's really good at analyzing the conflict called the Civil War in the United States that gets really into the composition of the Union and the latent class character of the war.
One of the most interesting things it gets into is the resistance that existed within the South against the Slavocracy. Specifically in regions where slavery wasn't the primary mode of production (see Appalachia and the larger urban centers).
There's also good bits from the worker organizations within the Union and their internationalist views.
The overall conclusion from Marx and Engels is that the war was absolutely about slavery, but within that greater conflict of abolition, there was another conflict between the workers and the new capitalist class over how the country would be organized after the end of the slave based mode of production.
At the same time you also get a big look at the resistance of British workers to their government taking the side of the Confederacy to shore up the profits of the textile industries. How the employment crisis in that industry was used by the industrial capitalists within Britain to try and convince the workers to support slavery within America. Something that British workers vocally and directly resisted.
libcom link
I don't think this is exactly what I'm looking for, but sounds fantastic nonetheless.
It's a very good read, and it highly sourced meaning you can follow those sources to find something closer to what you're looking for.
These articles and letters were focused on the bigger picture, but there are dozens of speeches and declarations from internationalist working class organizations that are referenced. Many of them containing more personal language about the war and the overall aims of the working class seeking to abolish the institution of slavery as well as the institution of wage labor.
These organizations tended to provide the largest amounts of troops to the Unionist movement and we're in direct opposition to the Unionist leadership (something that was so poor that Engels was worried they'd just scuttle the war due to negligence and incompetence). In the end it was these groups that secured a victory against slavery.