Another Kind of War

There were eight times as many American civilians as soldiers during the Civil War, yet only recently has this “forgotten majority,” as Daniel Sutherland calls it, begun to receive the scholarly attention it merits. ¹ Accounts of battlefield carnage still dominate Civil War booklists, of course. But attempts to understand the scope and character of such conflict—to answer the question of how “total” or “modern” it really was—have inevitably led historians to explore the pain, suffering, and even death the war brought not only to Billy Yank and Johnny Reb but to noncombatants, especially Southern civilians. Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War and Stephen V. Ash’s When the Yankees Came represent two splendid and complementary examples of this trend.

The title of Grimsley’s book comes from William Tecumseh Sherman’s observation in 1864 that federal forces were “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” ² This policy of “total war,” some say, represented a sharp break from the past and pointed the way toward Dresden, Hiroshima, and My Lai. Grimsley, however, offers a more sophisticated analysis of the North’s military policy toward Southern civilians and their property, one that both accounts for the triumph of “hard war” doctrines and examines their limits.

In keeping with most Civil War chroniclers, Grimsley argues that President Lincoln and his leading generals embraced a policy of hard war only quite late in the conflict, after earlier attempts at conciliation and “pragmatic destruction” had failed. Conciliation, though renounced from the outset by many Northern civilians and foot soldiers, quickly won the support of most Union policy makers and remained “the dominant posture toward Southern civilians until the summer of 1862” (p. 3). Power, as one federal judge succinctly put it, should be exercised so as “to leave no doubt of the ability to crush, yet there should be no crushing done” (p. 209). It was the belief of those who advocated such a strategy that given time and gentle handling, Southern Unionism would reassert itself and the seceded states return to the nest. Not just Winfield Scott and George B. McClellan, but such daring commanders as Ulysses Grant and Sherman at first strove to limit civilian suffering and to wage “civilized warfare” in which armies fought only armies. Pillage and plunder, such men believed, not only earned the enmity of Southern homefolk but demoralized the troops who engaged in such acts. In May 1862 Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton authorized the hanging of soldiers found guilty of sacking or torching civilian homes; in July General Sherman established a daily cavalry patrol with orders to “fire upon any party engaged in robbery and pillage.” Unless such plunder ceased, he said, “the country will rise on us and justly shoot us down like dogs and wild beasts.” ³ Even the burning of fence rails for camp fires and the killing of pigs was for a time frowned upon.

Following McClellan’s failed Peninsula Campaign, however, and in good measure because of it, conciliation lost most of its charm. This was especially true, Grimsley notes, in the West. There border state feuds and logistical needs led very early to a pragmatic strategy that protected friends but punished enemies, civilians included. Among other things, this meant the destruction of slavery once the military utility of such a step became apparent. Such pragmatism, or “war in earnest” as Grimsley calls it, had become the Union’s “primary policy” toward Southern civilians by mid-summer 1862 and remained in place until sometime early in 1864. Thereafter federal forces generally pursued harsh warfare designed not only to defeat gray armies but to...