A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War by D. H. Dilbeck (review)

Historians continue to debate the true nature of warfare during the Civil War, with the literature divided into two opposing views. First, there are those who argue that the War of the Rebellion was a destructive war that saw unprecedented violence and carnage on a scale that foreshadowed the huge conflicts of the twentieth century. From this perspective, the Civil War was the first modern war, and the authors who take it emphasize the number of casualties, recount the ways in which the conflict involved civilians, and include the destruction of property and environment in calculating the horror it wrought. Second, there are scholars who contend that the war was limited and the violence restricted to certain instances (usually against African Americans) and thus it was not nearly as destructive as it might have been. Scholars on this side of the debate insist that the amount of violence perpetrated against soldiers and civilians was directly related to whether the targets were perceived as being fully in support of the opposing cause (e.g., South Carolinians who supposedly led the rebellion were treated ruthlessly by Union soldiers, while African Americans who took up arms against their former masters were sometimes massacred by Confederates). Otherwise, they argue that violence during the Civil War was limited and restricted by the shared bonds of race, culture, and nationality. But neither side of this debate has delved into the question of whether those who actually fought the war understood it to be a just war, one that was legally legitimate and morally justified. Into this gap in the literature steps D. H. Dilbeck with an intriguing and insightful study of the way that the Union laid claim to fighting a just war in suppressing the rebellion.¹

Dilbeck, an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma Baptist University, continues recent trends in approaching the Civil War from an intellectual history perspective. In this case, he turns especially to the ideas of General Henry Halleck and Professor Francis Lieber to see how legal scholars at the time justified the Union cause and way of war. But this is not simply a history of ideas, as Dilbeck grounds the thinking of these men and others in the context of the times and the events that occurred during the rebellion. He begins by showing how the question of whether one could wage a just war was raised by guerrilla activity and by the hostility of the rebel civilians. Writing deftly and clearly on a subject that could easily take the reader into the weeds of philosophy, theology, and the law, Dilbeck shows how Union theorists took a view of a just war being one fought for legitimate, moral reasons and carried out in a “hard yet humane” fashion (9). Civil War generals and legal scholars believed that war could accomplish positive goals and bring progress, but that to do so it needed to be won quickly. To achieve a short conflict, it was best to “vigorously prosecute” the fighting in what has come to be called a “hard war” (4).

At the same time, nineteenth-century thinkers believed that they were a civilized (Christian) people and had to be humane in the conduct of a war. They believed that they were morally responsible to God for their actions and this meant that they could not completely abandon Christian principles in the course of the fighting. No matter how uncivilized the other side might be, they must adhere to their righteous standards. Adding further to this impulse toward a limitation of violence was a desire to restore the Union and bring the southern states back into the nation. This underlying principle of a hard yet humane war served as the foundation for the Union effort. To be sure, there were those who disagreed. Some officers, for example, wanted to punish the rebels and pay them in kind for...