Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat by Jonathan M. Steplyk (review)

Civil War soldiers worried a good deal about being targets of enemy fire in battle, but we tend to ignore that at least some of them were also concerned about their roles as killers. Jonathan M. Steplyk deserves credit for bringing this idea to our attention. He is not the first; several other Civil War historians have touched on the topic within the context of books on other subjects. But Steplyk is the first to write a dedicated study of killing in the Civil War. He was inspired by Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning How to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009). Steplyk set out to write a “killogy” of the Civil War. At heart, his book deals with Civil War soldiers and “explores their attitudes to and experiences of killing in combat.” A key component of his work is to “document the spectrum of these attitudes and experiences as recorded by the soldiers” (6).

Steplyk concludes that the great majority of Federals and Confederates “positively affirmed and accepted killing the enemy as part of their military duty and a necessity” (7). But he also finds that “a significant minority harbored doubts about or outright objected to killing in war.” (Even so most of the men who doubted the morality of killing even in wartime “tended to fight just as purposefully” despite their ambivalence [7].)

Generally seeing no difference between Union and Confederate soldiers, Steplyk nevertheless points out that the latter often cited defense of their homes and their hatred of seeing blacks in blue uniform as motivations for embracing the role of killer on the battlefield. Steplyk identifies ideology, religion, the gun culture of pre–Civil War America, and other influences as context to understand why most law-abiding citizens willingly learned how to kill. He recognizes that some soldiers easily adapted to the role of killer while others had a good deal of trouble, viewing the matter as a spectrum rather than a cut-and-dried concept.

Steplyk was greatly influenced by Grossman’s book, even though, as he notes, Grossman paid little attention to the Civil War, focusing mostly on twentieth-century wars. More importantly, Steplyk states that many of Grossman’s conclusions about the Civil War are erroneous.

This book is significant because it introduces an important topic in Civil War soldier studies, one that needed to be brought into the discussion about the combat experience of the war. But it has many limitations, the most important of which is that it rests too much on the surface and on the periphery of the topic. Several chapters are devoted to killing’s context without focusing on its psychology. For example, when Steplyk writes about hand-to-hand combat, or the presence of black troops on the battlefield, or informal truces, he simply writes about those topics rather than reminding the reader that his objective is to discuss the act of killing within these subjects. In short, context tends to dominate this book and overwhelm the central subject. One finishes his book feeling as if the heart of the topic has not been reached.

The idea of a “killogy” has wonderful potential for connecting with a range of other topics in Civil War studies, including the culture of death, the range at which combat normally took place, and Civil War memory, to name a few. While Steplyk often touches on these other themes, he does not fully explore the connections between them and his central subject. Most importantly, the subject of killing in war cries out for interdisciplinary research; the academic literature in psychology and social science would have something to say about it. I do not think the historian has all the concepts or training necessary to do the subject justice. Hopefully, someone will build on Steplyk’s work and try to...