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  • Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War
  • William A. Dobak
Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War. By George S. Burkhardt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2007.

During the Civil War, the federal government organized regiments of black enlisted men with white officers to help end the attempted secession of eleven southern states. Slaveholding secessionists at once issued death threats against the officers and men of these regiments, based, they said, on the seceded states' antebellum laws. On several occasions, they managed to kill scores of captured black soldiers and their white officers, but the circumstances surrounding the killing nearly always bore a closer resemblance to a post-war race riot than to the threatened judicial punishment. During the last year of the war, Confederates showed no quarter to white stragglers from Union armies ravaging Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Union soldiers themselves inflicted summary execution on suspected guerrillas.

This book is a catalog of slaughter. George S. Burkhardt has compiled an impressive bibliography of memoirs by men on both sides who claimed to have witnessed or taken part in the murder of captured or surrendered enemies. Although most of the sources fall in the category of Old Men Not Under Oath, the sheer volume of their reminiscences and the repeated expression of similar racial attitudes lends them a certain amount of credibility. And Burkhardt leaves almost no incident unmentioned.

Those underemphasized incidents involved the capture and survival of hundreds of black soldiers whose white officers surrendered entire units to the Confederates in northern Alabama and Georgia late in 1864. Surrender before hand-to-hand fighting occurred no doubt saved the lives of many black soldiers, most of whom spent the final months of the war working on the fortifications of Mobile, although many others among them, former slaves, found military captivity easy to escape and managed to return to their regiments before the end of the war. Such surrender and survival was only possible when officers on both sides "kept their men well in hand," as the military phrase went. Otherwise, Confederates exhibited the same tendencies that they displayed after the war, when they and their descendants used lynching as a means of social control throughout the South.

In the book's Introduction, Burkhardt asks whether battlefield fury or race hatred gave rise to this murderous violence. It was fury, he decides. This would seem to be a distinction without a difference. Surely the fury arose from Confederates' being confronted with soldiers of a race they hated. When black people lost their cash value, their lives became worth nothing to white Southerners, as the Union officer and Freedmen's Bureau agent John W. De Forest pointed out soon after the war. Burkhardt's failure to emphasize the cause of the fury detracts from his book's value and gives it a serial quality, with one episode of violence following another.

According to the dust jacket biographical note, the author spent twenty years researching and writing this book, yet he seems not entirely at home in the period: the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut appears as "Chestnut" throughout, and Ford's Theater becomes "the Ford Theater," where an "assassin's bullet crashed into [Lincoln's] brain." (A former newspaper editor, Burkhardt is not averse to vivid, even sanguinary, language.) And despite the bibliography's 35-page listing of primary sources, the names of David W. Blight, William W. Freehling, and George M. Fredrickson do not appear among the secondary [End Page 88] works. This book could have done with better grounding in the history of American race relations and less wandering from one battlefield atrocity to the next.

William A. Dobak
U.S. Army Center of Military History
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